Fwd: [re:] <nettime> BUSH ANNOUNCES US DEPT. OF ART & TECHNOLOGY panelkapcsolat
anna balint
epistolaris at freemail.hu
Sat Feb 2 01:31:11 CET 2002
------- Start of forwarded message -------
From: Wyndham Lewis <lewis_wyndham at yahoo.com>
To: Nettime <nettime-l at bbs.thing.net>
Reply-To: Wyndham Lewis <lewis_wyndham at yahoo.com>
Subject: [re:] <nettime> BUSH ANNOUNCES US DEPT. OF ART & TECHNOLOGY
Date: 11/29/01 7:36:36 PM
RANDALL M. PACKER, SECRETARY
US DEPARTMENT OF ART & TECHNOLOGY
Sir:
How little do you seem to know about me, but how
could I be surprised? I am partly communist and
partly fascist, with a distinct streak of monarchism
in my marxism, but at bottom an anarchist with a
healthy passion for order. Mainly, I detest
everything American - all that is obsessed with
technique, mindless change, the 'time-mind' which
withers away at individual reflectiveness. I wrote
about this clearly enough in the 1920s, but vacuous
American technological optimists like you just don't
ever seem to get it. Whacked over the head a hundred
times, you just want to keep coming back for more.
That Canadian catholic poseur mystagogue, McLuhan,
whom I got to know during my agonizing and none too
short years in Windsor, Canada, admittedly picked up a
few things from me, which seems to be about all you
and your sensation-loving American techno-artist kind
have noted from my many books. That claptrap about
the earth becoming a 'global village', for instance.
But Marshall missed my darker point, as do you all in
your vain and plainly misguided use of my name. The
fashionable artists and philosophers I denounced in my
time - Joyce, Pound, Bergson, Stein - were more
reflective of the capitalist-advertising-technological
juggernaut than comprehending of it. McLuhan was
always muddled-up on this point: wishful thinking, I
always thought, to imagine that advanced modernist art
works would or could ever be simplistically de-coded
as negative beacons of the future. An idiotic
fantasy.
The future these literary modernists "predicted" in
their works has occurred, no doubt, and you wretches
are living in it. I tried everything I could to stop
it. BAt least McLuhan, like me, was at bottom an
enemy of all innovation and change.
Rolling in my grave,
Wyndham Lewis
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