Posses and Protocols

Paul Guzzardo

Make a note. Next July 21st is a Thursday. If you’re in Toronto it will be the place to
party. Find yourself in Berlin? Try to make it to the Canadian Embassy. Canada did up a
Salon to mark it. Event planners are also busy in Brussels. But I don’t think the St. Louis
parade got scheduled. A street party never made it to the planning stage.

Thursday July 21st 2011 is a centennial. It’s the hundredth anniversary of the birth of
Marshall McLuhan. McLuhan is many things. But most of all McLuhan was one of three
big 20th century thinkers who showed us “how we know we don’t always know”. The
other two are said to be Sigmund Freud and Niels Bohr. And they had their “centennial
go” a while back.

This year Douglas Coupland _ the prolific pop “Generation X” author and more _ penned
a biography of McLuhan, a sort of 100th BD party-prep. It’s part of the Extraordinary
Canadian Biography series. Extraordinary can be traced to three McLuhan books. They
were “The Mechanical Bride”, “The Gutenberg Galaxy” and “Understanding Media”. The
first two have St. Louis fingerprints all over them. The Galaxy _ the wunderkind of the
three _ well could have, should have listed the St. Louis Jesuit Walter Ong as “mentor
with collar”.

Coupland is Canadian. But there’s no “maple leaf” chauvinism in his McLuhan. (This is
a sea change from the jingoistic tone of Canadian Richard Cavell’s McLuhan in Space: A
Cultural Geography.) Here’s a grab from Coupland’s book.

Forming a Posse
“Marshall applied to the Catholic Saint Louis University, where the head of the
literature department, William McCabe, was a Cambridge graduate and
surprisingly up to date on developments in the field.

St. Louis University was a good gig…Marshall quickly came to enjoy the city and
the company of his fellow faculty members, many of whom became lifelong
friends and collaborators. He had a posse of colleagues who could deal with him
on a high intellectual level and on the same theological plane. Along with Farther
William McCabe, there was Father Walter Ong, a young Jesuit whom Marshal
tutored. There was Bernard Muller-Thym, a philosophy instructor completing his
Ph.D. for the University of Toronto’s Pontifical Institute of Medieval Studies. And
there was Felix Giovanelli, a language instructor who would later collaborate with
Marshall. These men, along with his old Manitoba friend Tom Easterbrook were
the first members of Marshall’s personal proto -Warhol Factory, whose ideas
helped to codify and articulate the genesis of Media Theory that would explode in
1962.” (pp.78-80)

The St. Louis posse came out of the humanities. They were idea-artists. This proto -
Warhol 1940’s factory generated protocols (recipes) to map a path into tomorrow. Today
this 1940’s St. Louis “Factory” offers a platform to read how the humanities and the arts
fit (and or don’t) in this digital mesh / network we’re slapped hard against.

McLuhan anticipated his successors would be artists. And they would work out protocols
of what comes next. Here’s a couple from McLuhan’s Understanding Media:
 Art as radar acts as "an early alarm system," as it were, enabling us to discover
social and psychic targets in lots of time to prepare to cope with them.

The artist picks up the message of cultural and technological challenge decades
before its transforming impact occurs. He, then, builds models or Noah's arks for
facing the change that is at hand.

But it hasn’t turned out that way. The ark never quite launched. And the “Factory” has
been forgotten (or mislaid) in hometown St. Louis. And that’s a shame. But it probably
would not surprise Walter Ong. The Jesuit got wary early on. This is from his 1966 essay
Evolution, Myth and the Poetic Vision.

And yet, surveying the work of the creative human imagination today, one is
struck by the slightness of creative drive connected with an awareness of
evolution, cosmic or organic. It is not that the poets refuse to accept evolution.
They render lip service to it. But it does not haunt their poetic imaginations.

One feels that, in the last analysis, the poet and artist are not very much at home
in an evolutionary cosmos. The poet has always been ill at ease, to some
degree, in the world of actuality.

If there is a St. Louis successor to that McLuhan proto-Factory it’s not found in traditional
creative art practices. If the torch passed, it turned up in another place. And that’s New
Institutional Economics. The initiator is Washington University’s Douglass North. North is
a 1993 Nobel Prize winner.

This blog entry is far too slim to profile New Institutional Economics, and how the posse
landed there. But here’s a quick go. New Institutional Economics is part of the new social
sciences. It is amended and swayed by cognitive science research. It slices away at
choice sets, the role of human thought, emotion and behavior in making decisions. It
grapples with flux, the limits of knowledge, and bad maps. It’s how to slip by folly. Or
what to do when you’re center stage with a not-so-rational actor, us.

I recognize that this “post” is akin to a few flash cards, a McLuhan-like mosaic on lost
memory and art. I suspect the reader is still hungry. So here’s a link to a video short. It’s
Dystopic Kid Text. It’s a polemical blast. Maybe it helps explain why a 40’s posse that
drafted an early mapping protocol is important. And why we need to remember a hero
and a hometown team.