Out of School: Information Art and the Toronto School of Communication 9780228013082

Table of contents :
Cover
Out of School
Title
Copyright
Contents
Acknowledgments
Introduction
1 Bertram Brooker: Embodying Information
2 McLuhan’s Age of Information
3 N.E. Thing Co. Ltd: The Logic of Sensitivity
4 Vancouver Vortex: Robert Smithson and Wyndham Lewis
Coda
Notes
Bibliography
Index

Citation preview

Out of School

McGill-Queen’s/Beaverbrook Canadian Foundation Studies in Art History Martha Langford and Sandra Paikowsky, series editors Recognizing the need for a better understanding of Canada’s artistic culture both at home and abroad, the Beaverbrook Canadian Foundation, through its generous support, makes possible the publication of innovative books that advance our understanding of Canadian art and Canada’s visual and material culture. This series supports and stimulates such scholarship through the publication of original and rigorous peer-reviewed books that make significant contributions to the subject. We welcome submissions from Canadian and international scholars for book-length projects on historical and contemporary Canadian art and visual and material culture, including Native and Inuit art, architecture, photography, craft, design, and museum studies. Studies by Canadian scholars on non-Canadian themes will also be considered.

The Practice of Her Profession Florence Carlyle, Canadian Painter in the Age of Impressionism Susan Butlin Bringing Art to Life A Biography of Alan Jarvis Andrew Horrall Picturing the Land Narrating Territories in Canadian Landscape Art, 1500 to 1950 Marylin J. McKay The Cultural Work of Photography in Canada Edited by Carol Payne and Andrea Kunard Newfoundland Modern Architecture in the Smallwood Years, 1949–1972 Robert Mellin The Codex Canadensis and the Writings of Louis Nicolas The Natural History of the New World, Histoire Naturelle des Indes Occidentales Edited and with an Introduction by François-Marc Gagnon, Translation by Nancy Senior, Modernization by Réal Ouellet Museum Pieces Toward the Indigenization of Canadian Museums Ruth B. Phillips

The Allied Arts Architecture and Craft in Postwar Canada Sandra Alfoldy Rethinking Professionalism Essays on Women and Art in Canada, 1850–1970 Edited by Kristina Huneault and Janice Anderson The Official Picture The National Film Board of Canada’s Still Photography Division and the Image of Canada, 1941–1971 Carol Payne Paul-Émile Borduas A Critical Biography François-Marc Gagnon Translated by Peter Feldstein On Architecture Melvin Charney: A Critical Anthology Edited by Louis Martin Making Toronto Modern Architecture and Design, 1895–1975 Christopher Armstrong Negotiations in a Vacant Lot Studying the Visual in Canada Edited by Lynda Jessup, Erin Morton, and Kirsty Robertson

Visibly Canadian Imaging Collective Identities in the Canadas, 1820–1910 Karen Stanworth

What Was History Painting and What Is It Now? Edited by Mark Salber Phillips and Jordan Bear

Breaking and Entering The Contemporary House Cut, Spliced, and Haunted Edited by Bridget Elliott

Through Post-Atomic Eyes Edited by Claudette Lauzon and John O’Brian

Family Ties Living History in Canadian House Museums Andrea Terry Picturing Toronto Photography and the Making of a Modern City Sarah Bassnett Architecture on Ice A History of the Hockey Arena Howard Shubert For Folk’s Sake Art and Economy in Twentieth-Century Nova Scotia Erin Morton Spaces and Places for Art Making Art Institutions in Western Canada, 1912–1990 Anne Whitelaw Narratives Unfolding National Art Histories in an Unfinished World Edited by Martha Langford Canadian Painters in a Modern World, 1925–1955 Writings and Reconsiderations Lora Senechal Carney Sketches from an Unquiet Country Canadian Graphic Satire, 1840–1940 Edited by Dominic Hardy, Annie Gérin, and Lora Senechal Carney I’m Not Myself at All Women, Art, and Subjectivity in Canada Kristina Huneault The Global Flows of Early Scottish Photography Encounters in Scotland, Canada, and China Anthony W. Lee Tear Gas Epiphanies Protest, Culture, Museums Kirsty Robertson

Jean Paul Riopelle et le mouvement automatiste François-Marc Gagnon Jean Paul Riopelle and the Automatiste Movement François-Marc Gagnon Translated by Donald Winkler I Can Only Paint The Story of Battlefield Artist Mary Riter Hamilton Irene Gammel Object Lives and Global Histories in Northern North America Material Culture in Motion, c. 1780–1980 Edited by Beverly Lemire, Laura Peers, and Anne Whitelaw For the Temporary Accommodation of Settlers Architecture and Immigrant Reception in Canada, 1870–1930 David Monteyne Women at the Helm How Jean Sutherland Boggs, Hsio-yen Shih, and Shirley L. Thomson Changed the National Gallery of Canada Diana Nemiroff Voluntary Detours Small-Town and Rural Museums in Alberta Lianne McTavish Photogenic Montreal Activisms and Archives in a Post-industrial City Edited by Martha Langford and Johanne Sloan Wendat Women’s Arts Annette W. de Stecher Unsettling Canadian Art History Edited by Erin Morton Out of School Information Art and the Toronto School of Communication Adam Lauder

Out of School Information Art and the Toronto School of Communication

Adam Lauder

McGill-Queen’s University Press Montreal & Kingston • London • Chicago

© McGill-Queen’s University Press 2022 ISBN 978-0-2280-1086-9 (cloth) ISBN 978-0-2280-1308-2 (ePDF) Legal deposit second quarter 2022 Bibliothèque nationale du Québec Printed in Canada on acid-free paper that is 100% ancient forest free (100% postconsumer recycled), processed chlorine free This book has been published with the help of a grant from the Canadian Federation for the Humanities and Social Sciences, through the Awards to Scholarly Publications Program, using funds provided by the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada.

We acknowledge the support of the Canada Council for the Arts. Nous remercions le Conseil des arts du Canada de son soutien. Library and Archives Canada Cataloguing in Publication Title: Out of school : information art and the Toronto School of Communication / Adam Lauder. Names: Lauder, Adam, 1981– author. Series: McGill-Queen’s/Beaverbrook Canadian Foundation studies in art history. Description: Series statement: McGill-Queen’s/Beaverbrook Canadian Foundation studies in art history | Includes bibliographical references and index. Identifiers: Canadiana (print) 20210395885 | Canadiana (ebook) 20210395923 | ISBN 9780228010869 (cloth) | ISBN 9780228013082 (ePDF) Subjects: LCSH: Mass media and art – Canada – Case studies. | LCSH: Art and technology – Canada – Case studies. | LCSH: Information society – Canada – Case studies. | LCGFT: Case studies. Classification: LCC N72.M28 L38 2022 | DDC 701/.05 – dc23

This book was designed and typeset by Peggy & Co. Design in 10.5/13 Sabon.

Contents

Acknowledgments Introduction

ix

3

1

Bertram Brooker: Embodying Information

2

McLuhan’s Age of Information

3

N.E. Thing Co. Ltd: The Logic of Sensitivity

4

Vancouver Vortex: Robert Smithson and Wyndham Lewis 122 Coda Notes

162 201

Bibliography Index

275

241

24

67 95

Acknowledgments

This book is a substantially revised and expanded version of my 2016 dissertation, completed in the Department of Art History at the University of Toronto and funded by the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada. Many thanks are due to my supervisor, Elizabeth Legge, for her constant support and encouragement of this project through all stages of its development. I am grateful to my committee members, Jordan Bear and Barbara Fischer, as well as to my external readers, William Straw and SeungJung Kim, for their helpful insights and suggestions at all junctures. I want to thank my editor at McGill-Queen’s, Jonathan Crago, for his enthusiasm for the project as well as his support and guidance throughout the publication process, as well as the anonymous reviewers whose suggestions clarified and strengthened the final manuscript. My work on Bertram Brooker began many years ago as a paper for Dennis Reid. It was later expanded into an MA thesis under the supervision of Dr Juris Dilevko at the University of Toronto’s Faculty of Information, and subsequently reimagined as a touring exhibition organized by the Art Gallery of Windsor at the invitation of Cassandra Getty. My research on IAIN BAXTER& and the N.E. Thing Co. Ltd was substantially furthered with support from York University Libraries during my tenure as the inaugural W.P. Scott Chair for Research in e-Librarianship in 2010–13. I would also like to thank the librarians and archivists of the Archives of American Art and the University of Manitoba’s Archives and Special Collections for their assistance in accessing materials from the Robert Smithson and Nancy Holt papers and the Bertram Brooker

x

Acknowledgments

papers respectively. I am grateful to Amy Marshall Furness of the E.P. Taylor Research Library and Archives at the Art Gallery of Ontario for her assistance with the Iain Baxter& fonds. My dissertation research would not have been possible without the generosity and insights of John Brooker and the Brooker Estate as well as IAIN BAXTER& and Louise Chance Baxter&. Finally, I want to thank my patient wife, Kate Dumoulin, and my parents, Ken and Tina Lauder. I would like to dedicate this work to Lucienne and Iris. Earlier iterations of this research were published in the following texts: Adam Lauder, “Spiral and Vortex: Robert Smithson and the Cinematic Spaces of Wyndham Lewis and Marshall McLuhan,” Canadian Journal of Communication 43, no. 2 (2018), 315–38; Adam Lauder, “‘Celebration of the Body’: Marshall McLuhan and the Sensory Conceptualism of the N.E. Thing Co. Ltd,” Canadian Journal of Communication 40, no. 3 (2015), 447–70; Adam Lauder, “Temporality as Bergsonian Critique in the Advertising and Visual Art of Bertram Brooker,” Canadian Journal of Communication 39, no. 3 (2014): 469–96; Adam Lauder, “N.E. Thing Co. Ltd and the Institutional Politics of Information,” TOPIA 29 (2013): 9–53; Adam Lauder, “Letter to the Editor  – Oct. 18, 2013” C, no. 120 (2014): 9–11; Adam Lauder, “Bertram Brooker and the Toronto School of Communication,” TOPIA 26 (2012): 67–110; Adam Lauder, “‘An Educational Stance’: An Interview with IAIN BAXTER&,” Hunter and Cook 10 (2011): n. pag.; Adam Lauder, “IAIN BAXTER&: The Artist as Drop-In,” Journal of Canadian Art History 31, no. 2 (2010): 41–74; Adam Lauder, “Picturing Stress: Marian Dale Scott’s Endocrinology as Model and Remediation,” Hunter and Cook 7 (2010): 14–21; Adam Lauder, “‘Alien Qualities’: Hanne Darboven – Constructing Time,” Technoetic Arts 11, no. 2 (Fall 2013): 131–47.

I.2 Bertram Brooker, Space and Time, 1953. Oil on canvas, 61 × 76.2 cm, private collection. Image Courtesy of Waddington’s Auctioneers and Appraisers, Toronto.

1.1 Bertram Brooker, Figures in a Landscape, 1931. Oil on canvas, dimensions and whereabouts unknown.

1.4 Bertram Brooker, Green Movement, ca 1927. Oil on paperboard, 58.8 × 43.2 cm. Art Gallery of Ontario. Purchase with assistance from Wintario, 1978. 78/14. Photo © 2016 Art Gallery of Ontario.

1.10 Bertram Brooker, Sounds Assembling, 1928. Oil on canvas, 112.3 × 91.7 cm. Collection of the Winnipeg Art Gallery, L-80. Photographer: Ernest Mayer, courtesy of the Winnipeg Art Gallery.

1.11 Bertram Brooker, “Chart” for Jevon, 1925. Courtesy University of Manitoba Archives and Special Collections, Bertram Brooker fonds, box 3, folder 1.

2.8 Iain Baxter, Inflatable Wearable, 1968. Reproduced with the permission of IAIN BAXTER&.

3.3 N.E. Thing Co. Ltd, Eunuchversity, ca 1969–70. Button. Reproduced with the permission of IAIN BAXTER&.

3.7 Iain Baxter (photographer), Class project at Emily Carr, ca 1981–82. Reproduced with the permission of IAIN BAXTER&.

4.2 Robert Smithson, Yucatan Mirror Displacements, 1969. Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York. © 2021 Holt / Smithson Foundation / Licensed by VAGA at Artists Rights Society (ARS), NY.

4.3 Robert Smithson, Glue Pour, 1970. © 2021 Holt / Smithson Foundation / Licensed by VAGA at Artists Rights Society (ARS), NY.

4.5 Wyndham Lewis, Bagdad, 1927–28. Oil on wood, 183 × 79 cm, © Wyndham Lewis and the estate of Mrs G.A. Wyndham Lewis by kind permission of the Wyndham Lewis Memorial Trust (a registered charity). (Photo: Tate.)

C.2 Robert Smithson, Map of Broken Clear Glass (Atlantis), 1969. Princeton University Art Museum. © 2021 Holt / Smithson Foundation / Licensed by VAGA at Artists Rights Society (ARS), NY.

C.3 Robert Smithson, Spiral Jetty, 1970. Rozel Point, Great Salt Lake, Utah. Photograph: Charles Uibel/Great Salt Lake Photography © Holt / Smithson Foundation and Dia Art Foundation / Licensed by VAGA at Artists Rights Society (ARS), NY.

C.5 N.E. Thing Co. Ltd, Inactive Verbs, 1969. Reproduced with the permission of IAIN BAXTER&. Courtesy VOX – Centre de l’image contemporaine, Montreal.

C.6 General Idea, Orgasm Energy Chart, 1970. © General Idea, 1970/2021, courtesy Estate of General Idea, Toronto.

C.7 Michael Morris, Colour Bars in a Forest Landscape, 1972. Reproduced with the permission of Michael Morris.

Out of School

Introduction Je n’ai pas de système.1

Contingent concepts of information are a defining feature of art and aesthetic theory produced in Canada during both the modern and contemporary periods. Long before the recent computational turn in art practice and historiography,2 the global reception of Marshall McLuhan’s prophetic meditations on the emergent features of what he presciently termed an “information society” situated Canada at the vanguard of information art and information society discourse.3 Prior to art-and-technology projects such as Experiments in Art and Technology (E.A.T.), McLuhan was, moreover, busy exploring the new media as “art forms,” and he has himself been described as “an artist playing with percepts and affects.”4 Although his aesthetically and theologically motivated insights were looked upon with growing skepticism by academics following an initial period of celebrity and influence in the mid-1960s, recent years have seen renewed interest in McLuhan, accelerated by centennial celebrations of his birth in 2011. Yet McLuhan’s pervasive influence on the visual arts in Canada remains underexamined – notably, the relationship between his speculations on the immanent ontologies characteristic of an information society and the novel forms of information art produced by artists in Canada during the 1960s and 1970s. If anything, his purloined relationship to the visual arts is hiding in plain sight in recent studies of Conceptual art in Canada. The research of Kenneth Allan stands out for illuminating McLuhan’s theorization of the defamiliarizing “counterenvironment” brought into visibility by artists as a persuasive prototype for much installation and environmental art of the 1960s and 1970s in both Canada and the United States.5 Yet the specifically informatic

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dimensions of McLuhan’s writings are underdeveloped in Allan’s account, despite his insightful gloss on the eminently McLuhanite counterenvironment staged by MoMA curator Kynaston McShine for the era-defining exhibition INFORMATION in 1970.6 McShine’s choice of information as the organizing metaphor for his international survey of the conceptual tendency illuminates the porous character of information art – as well as what it is not. The heterodox practices assembled by McShine were products of a generative interface between Conceptual art and contemporaneous theoretical discourses on information that testifies to a transdisciplinary cross-pollination – if also creative misappropriation – of concepts and terminology during this period. Yet, with the prominent exception of the spectacular “Information Machine” loaned by Olivetti,7 INFORMATION was notable for its striking absence of both large-scale machines and computer art. None of the leading figures associated with early computer art – whether Leon Harmon and Kenneth Knowlton, Manfred Mohr, Vera Molnar, Frieder Nake, or A. Michael Noll  – were represented. This was no uninformed oversight. In the 1960s and 1970s, information art signified conceptual practices that freely, perhaps even recklessly, adapted methodologies and models derived from the interrelated but distinct fields of cybernetics, communications, information theory, library science, and office management. While not a study of conceptualism per se, this book seizes upon the initial interchangeability of the terms Conceptual art and information art to generate new readings of projects conventionally categorized as conceptual through insights gleaned from adjacent discourses on cybernetics, information theory, and media analysis.8 In common with other strands of conceptual discourse and practice, information art expressed period anxieties about the artwork’s historic construction as a discrete and commodifiable object. In the context of information art, this skepticism manifested itself through a strategic de-emphasis of the material infrastructures of computing.9 Indeed, information artists and the theorists upon whom they drew mounted a counterintuitive appeal to media and technology in order to project antimodern – if, as we shall see, simultaneously cosmopolitan – agendas.10 They thereby brought into focus a widespread “anti-computer sentiment” that coincided with criticisms of the military-industrial complex at the height of the American intervention in Vietnam.11 In the English Canadian context, this informatic turn retrieved the archaic futures imagined by earlier Futurist and Vorticist artists as an uneasy compromise between competing pressures of modernization and tradition.12

Introduction

5

I.1 N.E. Thing Co. Ltd, “Trans V.S.I.,” from the exhibition catalogue 955,000, 1970. Reproduced with the permission of IAIN BAXTER&.

Consequently, this book does not set out to write a history of computer art in Canada. In the 1960s and 1970s, Canada was also host to an impressive roster of practitioners, including Alexander Keewatin (“Kee”) Dewdney, Suzanne Duquet, Leslie Mezei, and Roger Vilder, who made significant contributions to the emergence of computer graphics as a medium of artistic expression and whose innovations still await full historical recovery.13 However, like their aforementioned international counterparts, similarly excluded from INFORMATION, these figures notably did not employ the strategies and terminology of either information art or McLuhan and his Toronto School of Communication peers. They therefore merit, and indeed require, consideration within a distinct material and theoretical trajectory of technical innovation, one asymptotic to the somatic and ontological discourse on information studied here. McLuhan notoriously resisted representations of information as a technical medium. As the McLuhan-inspired conceptual enterprise N.E. Thing Co. Ltd (NETCO) would later recognize, anything could be information. Nonetheless, McLuhan’s speculations on information are invariably invoked in the existing literature on information art in relation to networked technologies of data transmission, such as the telecopier machines loaned to NETCO by Xerox Corporation (Figure I.1),

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rather than in connection with the ontological and perceptual foci of the media analyst’s own writings. This book addresses this gap by attending to the specificities of McLuhan’s informatic ontology, which served as a primary source for artists such as Iain Baxter/NETCO, General Idea, and Robert Smithson. This book argues that media analysis operated as a proxy form of art theory for these and other artists of the conceptual generation working both within and beyond the geographic boundaries of Canada, but implicated, through their mutual reading of McLuhan and – albeit indirectly in most cases – interlocutors including Henri Bergson, George Berkeley, and Wyndham Lewis, in a shared “discourse network” centred in, but not limited to, English Canada. Adapted from Michel Foucault’s foundational studies of the disciplinary conditions of possibility for the emergence and reproduction of scientific discourses, this terminology is media theorist Friedrich Kittler’s coinage for the materialist preconditions of both aesthetic and scientific formations.14 A persistent exploration of the co-constitution of bodies, media, and perceptual orders broadly defines the discursive space associated with the Toronto School of Communication: a retrospective label for a cadre of communications thinkers and practitioners centred at, but by no means restricted to, the University of Toronto, including Harold Innis and McLuhan. This approach to the Toronto School of Communication as a discourse network to some extent echoes McLuhan and Edmund Carpenter’s own redescription of Innis’s representation of the American Revolution as “a clash between two networks of communication.”15 In turn, artists’ widespread engagements with McLuhan attest to the general currency of media analysis as a modality of art theory in Canada during the 1960s. Yet this book is also not a study “about” McLuhan. Although Chapters 2 and 3, in particular, are dominated by original, close readings of texts by the media analyst, it is McLuhan’s – and related theorists’ – specific claims about information that guide my investigation of the distinctive forms of information art that they inspired. This informatic dimension of his thought has been consistently undertheorized by art historians. McLuhan biographer W. Terrence Gordon helpfully distinguishes between McLuhan’s idiomatic usage of information and the technical meanings usually attached to that word: “When McLuhan speaks of the information that a medium transmits,” he writes, “he does not refer to facts or knowledge but to how our physical senses respond to the medium.”16 Kenneth Allan similarly associates McLuhan’s deployment of that word with a capacity for “raising … active awareness”

Introduction

7

synonymous with the artist’s ability to effect a mutation in habitual ways of seeing.17 Although axiomatic of the recurring concerns of information artists in English Canada, McLuhan’s sensorial and social claims about information as a medium of translation between the organs of perception and the environment by no means exhaust the conditions of possibility for the emergence of an informatic paradigm in Canada. Innis’s qualitative understanding of information as, in the words of John Bonnett, “a percept” is equally pertinent, albeit infrequently referenced by artists.18 In prioritizing artists’ reception of Toronto School theory, figures such as McLuhan’s collaborator Edmund Carpenter as well as the neuropsychologist Donald O. Hebb and the general systems theorist Ludwig von Bertalanffy recede from view. That they do not appear in this book does not imply that their contributions to an emergent digital culture in Canada were not significant, but merely that there is no compelling evidence connecting them to the network of artists and practices explored here. Instead, this book begins by investigating participants in what Paul Tiessen has termed a “pre-McLuhan body of Canadian media theory” of the interwar period.19 In particular, the far-reaching, if problematic, legacy of the Canadian-born British artist and author Wyndham Lewis is studied in relation to a subterranean, and also fraught, tradition of Bergsonism in Canada that, as Stephen Crocker has shown, was foundational to McLuhan’s media metaphysics.20 In a sense, Bergson and Lewis constitute the two faces of this Canadian Bergsonism; Lewis’s writings bring into visibility the dark potentiality of Bergson’s non-rational ontology. In some respects, Lewis’s resistant reading of Bergson anticipates the “revolutionary negativity” more recently excavated from the writings of the neo-Bergsonian Deleuze by Andrew Culp.21 In revisiting Lewis’s catalytic role in the emergence of the Toronto School of Communication and the innovative forms of information art that the school’s insights nourished during the “long” sixties, this study also troubles a growing literature devoted to what has been termed “Canadian Vorticism.”22 I argue that the antihumanist Lewis, whose writings on the effects of modernization on modalities of perception and social organization owe a disavowed debt to Bergson, was read by figures including Innis, McLuhan, and the multidisciplinary artist and proto-communications analyst Bertram Brooker as a source of information about the very Bergsonian concepts that were the targets of Lewis’s critique. Brooker’s exploration of census data and statistics in marketing writings published beginning in 1921 establishes a biopolitical context for reinterpreting the streamlined, composite bodies figured by his semi-abstract canvases of the mid-1920s, discussed in Chapter 1. These

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were displayed alongside his groundbreaking non-objective paintings as part of a 1927 exhibition at the Arts and Letters Club in Toronto, often cited as the first solo show of abstract art in Canada. In light of Brooker’s parallel work in advertising, these paintings can be read as products of a proto-informational vantage on subjectivity and the computational management of populations. Brooker’s understanding of data as a flux compatible with Bergson’s theses on virtuality – as a real but unactualized condition of perpetual becoming – is representative of the plastic condition attributed to information by the early twentiethcentury discourses upon which both NETCO and the American artist Robert Smithson were subsequently to draw.23 The informatic dimensions of Brooker’s practice underscore the longue durée of forces of informationalization addressed, albeit significantly reconceptualized in response to altered circumstances, by NETCO, Smithson, and General Idea alike in the postwar period. This reading of the information society as a product of intensified processes of modernization, rather than epistemic rupture, echoes the arguments of information society scholars such as Christopher May and Frank Webster.24 The entanglement of statistics and Bergsonian virtuality found in Brooker’s art and writings underscores the pre-digital origins of both informatic techniques and conceptual methodologies in Canada. Canadian artists’ early preference for the term information  – a nomenclature consistent with the writings of Innis and McLuhan on the media of communication – must be decisively distinguished from more recent vocabulary, including the “algorithmic” and “computational aesthetics,” deployed by Carolyn L. Kane and Zabet Patterson, among others, whose respective case studies are primarily American and focused on computer art.25 Notwithstanding Kane’s opposition between the “rational aesthetics” of postwar German computer art and the “ecological and humanistic approach to computing” embraced by American computer artists and computational thinkers in the 1960s, the latter figures were notably more reliant on technical media than their Canadian counterparts studied here. Moreover, Kane’s protagonists depended on the collaboration of professional engineers, as well as access to military-industrial centres of innovation such as Bell Labs.26 Information artists active in the Canadian context during the 1960s and 1970s faced the same challenge of “computing without computers” tackled by British contemporaries, who similarly lacked a robust military-industrial research infrastructure.27 Consequently, many examples of information art from this period recall the “symbolic machines” of an earlier generation of Dadaists, including Duchamp and Picabia, that were “not ‘about’ technology,” as Andreas Broeckmann

Introduction

9

observes.28 Whereas US-based computer artists resisted European traditions of experimental aesthetics that treated “color as number” in favour of “mystical and transcendental themes,”29 information artists operating in Canada were busy pursuing the somatic and qualitative modalities of media immanence theorized by the writings of Innis and McLuhan. In the Canadian context, information was conceived neither as a technical medium nor as a conduit for attaining transcendence, but rather, following the precepts of Toronto School media analysis, as an immanent measure of the artist’s capacity to transform the Real. This imagined transformational capacity was frequently understood in relational terms. The principal relation brought into representation by this operational conception of information was the spatiotemporal axes of perception. This relational view of information is ultimately traceable to Bergson’s conceptualization of life itself as proceeding by means of “dissociation and division,” and of intuition as a “method of division” congruent with the binary logic of ramification pursued by the élan vital.30 In Bergson’s view, evolution unfolds as an exercise of creative “selection” among the alternatives opened up by life’s perpetual self-differentiation.31 The distinctly ontological vector traced by these discourses on information is carried forward in the more recent scholarship of Sarah Cook. Like Cook, the artists and thinkers explored in this book asked “what information is,”32 rather than what it is about. At the same time, the relational ontologies brought into focus by information art produced in Canada during the 1960s and 1970s are specifically reflective of the transformational character of Toronto School theory. The transformative aspirations harboured by information artists engaged with the Toronto School reveal a marked affinity with the contemporaneous ambitions of Latin American conceptualists to effect an avant-garde transformation of everyday life. In the Latin American context, the Tucumán Arde movement epitomized “a collective endeavour that sought to actively transform reality.”33 Like their Latin American counterparts, information artists in Canada departed from the influential paradigm of “dematerialization” formalized by the American critics Lucy Lippard and John Chandler, with its de-emphasis of the visual properties and object status of the artwork.34 Like the Brazilian artists Lygia Clark and Hélio Oiticica, information artists in Canada instead approached “the body and the senses as materials for conceptual propositions.”35 This “inverted” dematerialization, as Mari Carmen Ramírez has aptly termed it, extended the Duchampian inheritance in a different direction than the disembodied, “telepathic fantasy” pursued by hegemonic (New York–based) conceptualists such as Robert Barry

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and Joseph Kosuth,36 namely toward a recognition of the sociality of the senses and their political potential. Latin American artists would pursue this perceptual project through infrastructural interventions such as the altered Coca-Cola bottles of Cildo Meireles’s Insertions into Ideological Contexts (1970), which “counter-circulate[d] information” within existing distribution systems in a manner resonant with the coeval telecopier and teletype transmissions of N.E. Thing Co. Ltd discussed in Chapters 2 and 3.37 However, it must be emphasized that NETCO did not share the anticapitalist agenda of its Latin American contemporaries. Somewhat perplexingly, then, the informatic episteme associated with the Toronto School of Communication substituted new ways of being and seeing for ways of knowing. These novel ontological and perceptual capacities were frequently imagined in collective and relational terms that – as discussed in Chapter 2 – we would now recognize as specifically posthumanist. The prophesized translation from an analogical ratio of the senses to a computational condition discussed by McLuhan in his 1960s writings  – a promised restoration of the “ultimate harmony of all being” – is representative of the kinds of claims made about information by figures implicated in the shared discourse network examined in this  book.38 Participating artists and thinkers proposed contextual, embodied, and qualitative alternatives to dominant, mathematical models of information championed by American theorists: from the statistical techniques of behaviourism popularized for industrial applications by John B. Watson, to the engineering model of communication developed by Claude E. Shannon and Warren Weaver, which schematized information transmission as a correspondence between messages sent and those received.39 Consequently, this book does not trace the diffusion of Shannon–Weaver-type information theory in Canada, but begins, rather, with artists’ own theorizations of information, working backward to their intellectual sources. In a departure from the mathematical bases of the Shannon–Weaver model, which defined information as a statistical measure of the relative “freedom of choice” between multiple possible message contents in a given transmission, leading artists and thinkers operating in Canada understood information as material yet non-numerical.40 As McLuhan wrote, “electronic technology does not need words any more than the digital computer needs numbers.”41 This approach was indebted to Henri Bergson’s influential theorization of a “continuous or qualitative multiplicity with no resemblance to number” that unfolds in time, which he opposed to the discrete magnitudes of quantitative multiplicities that can be juxtaposed in space.42 Nonetheless, a recurring theme of subsequent chapters will be how numeracy and calculation

Introduction

11

resurface in the practices of these same artists as something like a return of the repressed. To some extent, the sensorial condition attributed to information by artists and thinkers operating in Canada is consonant with the affective qualities explored by Eve Meltzer’s study of information artists, most obviously Robert Smithson. However, the structuralist sources mined by Meltzer’s other case studies  – Robert Morris and  Mary Kelly  – implicate their work within a different genealogy, and a different set of concerns and strategies, than the Berkeleian/Bergsonian/Lewisian/ McLuhanesque lineage within which information art produced in Canada, with its more ontological and classically empiricist conception of information, is properly situated. Likewise, the openly utopian currents circulating within information art produced in Canada during the 1960s and 1970s resist assimilation to the modes of “disaffection” catalogued by Meltzer’s survey of informational practices, with their emphasis on information as a sign of alienation.43 More than a symptom of epochal change, in the discourse network studied here information was specifically conceptualized as a form of immanence. Information conceived as immanence expressed artists’ rejection of formalist autonomy through a reinvention of historic avant-garde practices fusing art and everyday life. My analyses of the American artist Robert Smithson (who made repeated visits to Vancouver in late 1969 and early 1970) and, albeit to a lesser extent, the Canadian-born Wyndham Lewis (who spent a lengthy period of self-imposed exile in Canada during the Second World War, but was otherwise based for most of his life in Britain and Europe) complicate any reductive identification of the discourse network associated with the Toronto School of Communication with the arbitrary physical boundaries of the Canadian nation-state, or any essentialized, monolithic, or static concept of Canadianicity. NETCO’s frequent participation in international exhibitions and celebrated long-distance communication strategies evince a characteristically non-nationalist but situated perspective closer to Kenneth Frampton’s articulation of “critical regionalism.”44 A contingent product of competing historical forces, this regional discourse network is amenable to the framework of critical globalism proposed by Luis Camnitzer, Jane Farver, and Rachel Weiss to historicize the international conceptual tendency, “in which localities are linked in crucial ways but not subsumed into a homogenized set of circumstances.”45 As such, this network could be added to the “various points of origin” for the “multicentered map” of conceptual activity charted by the curators of the 1999 exhibition Global Conceptualism.46

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A comparative matrix emerges from Brooker’s critique of the mechanistic conception of the self and society, one that is reinforced by the behaviourist techniques championed by his American counterparts in the advertising industry, notably John B. Watson, the influential vice-president of J. Walter Thompson. Brooker’s articles for Marketing magazine also explored differential buying habits between American and Canadian consumers reflective of cultural difference, with particular sensitivity to language and religion as forces shaping the market in Quebec. Like the internally differentiated and porous notion of English Canada that I deploy in these pages, Brooker’s representations of Canada were consistently attentive to regional difference and to the polyvocal character of a state comprising multiple ethnicities, nations, and language groups, while always situating Canada in a relational, global context. As discussed in Chapter 1, this multiplicitous conception of Canadian identity was likely inflected by Brooker’s reading of Bergsonian theory, with its emphasis on the heterogeneity of the Real itself. Distinctions between artists’ responses to information concepts and media in Canada and the United States are less conspicuous in work produced during the 1960s and after, as reflected in the parallel concerns and strategies of the Vancouver-based NETCO and its American colleague Robert Smithson. The increasingly post-national outlook manifested by these artists’ practices registers the growing continentalism of Canadian cultural and economic policy under the Pearson and Trudeau governments, as the defensive nationalism of the Conservative administration of Diefenbaker  – affirmed by intellectuals such as the idealist philosopher George Grant – was succeeded by a regime of “technological liberalism” congruent with the priorities of American hegemony.47 Yet the sixties were a complex and contradictory period, one during which Grant’s nationalist writings were, improbably, embraced by a young generation of New Leftists, as renewed nationalist sentiments fuelled by centennial celebrations competed with, and resisted, intensified continentalist pressures against the backdrop of the Vietnam War.48 As my analyses in Chapters 2 to 4 demonstrate, residual signifiers of cultural difference persisted in the practices of artists implicated in a common discourse network. A vestigial Canada/US national binarism is legible in the divided reception of shared texts: NETCO’s socially engaged actions distinguish its sympathetic reading of collective, “corporate” themes articulated by McLuhan’s writings from Smithson’s Lewis-derived, neo-Berkeleian strategies of resistance through passivity and depotentialization. As discussed in Chapter 4, the greater political charge unleashed by Smithson’s tactics must be read against

Introduction

13

the backdrop of American imperialism and, in particular, of the US intervention in Vietnam. These distinctions are symptomatic of an enduring gap between the liberal ideology of individualism embedded in the American reception of structuralist and systems theories from the more corporate forms of sociality brought into representation by Canadian artists’ collectives and artist-run centres, which are traceable to the militant insularity of early colonial settlements, which Northrop Frye influentially theorized as a “garrison mentality.”49 The corporate matrix adopted by the N.E. Thing Co. Ltd and General Idea complexifies existing narratives of Canadian conceptual and information art, dominated as they are by Canada’s rich network of artist-run centres to the exclusion of commercial as well as university actors.50 In retrospect, the social ontologies manifested by corporate authors such as General Idea and NETCO can be recognized as heralding subsequent transformations in the economy associated with neoliberalism, including decentralization, networked subjectivity, and “sharing” as an economic model. However, information is primarily rendered by the artists and thinkers studied in these pages as a medium for challenging the pretentions to transcendence characteristic of classical Western aesthetics and metaphysics. In revealing the imprint of a Stoic physics, the theologically inflected writings of McLuhan themselves embody a materialist orientation that marks a significant departure from the neo-Kantian paradigm promoted by the American formalist critic Clement Greenberg during the same period.51 For McLuhan and his artistic respondents, information is the manifestation, rather, of a materialist aesthesis and of a univocal conception of being: it is a corporate enunciation of sense. Bergson’s critique of intelligence and language was decisive in shaping the immanent status that McLuhan attributed to information. This influence is evident in a crucial, and oft-cited, passage in Understanding Media (1964) in which he distinguishes between Bergson’s characterization of consciousness and language as effectuating an artificial separation of the senses, and the integral and preverbal character of emerging computational media: Language extends and amplifies man but it also divides his faculties … Bergson argues in Creative Evolution that even consciousness is an extension of man that dims the bliss of union in the collective unconsciousness. Speech acts to separate man from man, and man from the cosmic unconscious … Our new electric technology that extends our senses and nerves in a global embrace has large implications for the future of language. Electric technology does not need words any more than the

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digital computer needs numbers. Electricity points the way to an extension of the process of consciousness itself, on a world scale, and without any verbalization whatever … The computer, in short, promises by technology a Pentecostal condition of universal understanding and unity. The next logical step would seem to be, not to translate, but to by-pass languages in favor of a general cosmic consciousness which might be very like the collective unconscious dreamt of by Bergson.52 As in the writings of Bergson before him, McLuhan here transforms the Kantian categories of space and time into contingent and malleable products of the senses and society. Mark Antliff explains that in the Bergsonian conception of space advocated by the leading theorists of Puteaux Cubism, Albert Gleizes and Jean Metzinger, “space is no longer an absolute category of experience, but a relative one – relative to our sensory faculties, and secondarily, to a given culture’s accepted conventions of artistic representation.”53 The elasticity and multiplicity of Bergsonian durée marks a fundamental break with the “immutable form” of Kantian time as an a priori presentation.54 Bergson’s durational metaphysics is equally symptomatic of the changing percepts of space and time brought into representation by the modernist artists and writers studied by Stephen Kern, and, in the Canadian context, by Jody Berland and Richard Cavell.55 The non-dialectical dualism underpinning Bergson’s speculations on spatiotemporal relations was a significant motor for the emergence of “digital,” but not specifically computational or technological, ontologies articulated by English Canadian artists and theorists across the twentieth century: from the antinomies of space and time analyzed by Richard Cavell – memorably allegorized by Wyndham Lewis through the Zoroastrian figures of Ahriman and Ozman (Ahura Mazda) – to the binaries of sender and receiver, or “ones and zeroes,” mobilized by the N.E. Thing Co. Ltd and by Robert Smithson.56 This trajectory is coterminous with the larger transition “from energy to information” traced by twentieth-century artists as they shifted from thermodynamic to informatic frames of reference.57 This long history of non-computational digitalism can be traced back to Bergson’s presentation of intuition as a faculty for “the determination of differences of nature” by means of “making divisions.”58 As will be discussed in subsequent chapters, Norbert Wiener’s cybernetic remediation of information theory fused Bergson’s metaphysics of division and Shannon and Weaver’s definition of information as the measure of “selection” or “choice” between possible messages sent or

Introduction

15

received that would prove influential on a wide range of artistic practices during the postwar period.59 My approach to artistic and philosophical manifestations of dualism in Canada as varied iterations of non-computational digitalism is indebted to Alexander R. Galloway’s reading of François Laruelle’s critique of the “dyadic” infrastructure of Western philosophy  – that is, the functionally invariant tautologies that constitute what Laruelle terms the “Philosophical Decision.”60 “Digitality is much more capacious than the computer,” Galloway insists, “both historically, because there simply is no history without digitality, but also conceptually, because the digital is a basic ingredient within ontology, politics, and almost everything in between.”61 John Mullarkey notably situates Laruelle within a trajectory of immanent thought in which he also implicates the non-rational philosophy of Bergson. “Bergson, like Laruelle,” writes Mullarkey, “can be seen as a critic of the circularity of (intellectualist) philosophical systems and the ever larger circles in which they ‘enclose’ reality.”62 Yet the digital is only one of several competing manifestations of “information” encountered in this book. In keeping with the polysemous ontology of the broader conceptual tendency, information preserves a generative indefinition as it circulates in the creative practices of information artists during the 1960s and 1970s.63 The case studies gathered here highlight a persistent tension between empiricist conceptions of information as a continuous variation of singularities, be they demographic data or sensorial intensities, and a frustrated metaphysical yearning for the One, be it the divine One of Brooker’s Jevon or the corporate and informatic univocity pursued in parallel by McLuhan and NETCO. To some extent, this polarity can be attributed to distinctions between the quasi-associationist empiricism practised by Brooker and NETCO, whose aggregation of data hearkens back to the associationism of Hume, and the transcendental empiricism of Lewis and Smithson, who bring into visibility a Berkeleian “genesis of the sensible itself” as autopoietic activity – or ideological hallucination.64 Similarly, McLuhan upheld the artist’s creative process as a working model of transcendental empiricism, describing it as “the natural process of apprehension arrested and retraced.”65 As in the contemporaneous post-structuralist thought of Gilles Deleuze, which proposes that “univocal being is,” paradoxically, “related immediately and essentially to individuating factors,”66 the cultural history of information excavated here is concerned with the determination of singularities by means of a uniform, informatic matrix foreshadowing contemporary applications of biometrics in “identification practices” such as passports.67

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The Bergsonian image of time as embodied, non-rational duration – a shared point of departure for the artists and thinkers studied by this book – is rooted in traditions of British empiricism, which view temporal relations as a synthesis of habit.68 The priority that Deleuze accords to custom in his neo-Bergsonian reading of David Hume is emblematic of the pragmatic orientation of empiricist epistemologies: “knowledge,” cautions Deleuze, “is not the most important thing for empiricism, but only the means to some practical activity.”69 This utilitarian intelligence foreshadows the practical bias later attributed to the intellect by Bergson.70 Above all, empiricism is generative of an inventive subject responsive to concrete problems. Indeed, “fiction becomes a principle of human nature” in Hume’s philosophy, according to Deleuze71 – it is the imagination, not the given (as is often assumed in discussions of empiricism), which thereby gives shape to the world. The constitutive role of custom in valuations of taste and the mind’s inborn tendency to “delirium and madness” in empiricist frameworks trouble the false Kantianism haunting the historiography of Canadian art, not only in the guise of a lingering formalism, but also as a deceptively idealizing image of empiricism itself.72 Paradigmatically, Mark Cheetham’s exploration of English art theory restrains the empiricist excess of William Hogarth’s insistence on beauty’s basis in habit within a Kantian framework of legislative judgment: “Beauty is empirical,” Cheetham writes. “[Hogarth] strives to … reanimate [ancient sculpture] in line with valid contemporary judgement. Independent looking  – looking ‘in English’  – is revisionary, not radically iconoclastic.”73 Yet the labile spatiotemporal relations brought into representation by the artists and thinkers explored in these pages are recognizable products of the transcendental illusions, or states of collective delusion, described by Deleuze in his commentary on Hume. As it figures in information art and media theory produced in English Canada, information discovers a precedent in the “collection of ideas” coextensive with the imagination in Hume’s philosophy.74 Indeed, as a “collection without an album,” Hume’s faculty of imagination bears a striking functional resemblance to Lev Manovich’s description of the contemporary world as symbolically processed by the ubiquitous database form into “an endless and unstructured collection of images, texts and other data records.”75 Hume’s associationism, which would be taken up by early advertising psychologists, is premised on an atomism that notably recurs in early corpuscular abstractions by Brooker.76 The Humean imagination’s “flux of perceptions” clears a path, moreover, for the perceptual status, and reproductive mechanisms of translation, attributed to information by McLuhan and his artist respondents.77

Introduction

17

Deleuze underscores that in itself, the Humean mind is not identical with subjectivity. The subject is, rather, the mind transfigured by the principles of human nature – principles that are in turn embedded in the social. In contrast to Kant’s legislative morality, but anticipating Bergson, Hume views the social as constituted by creative solutions to shared utilitarian problems. If Kant’s moral law appears as “the pure form of universality,”78 Humean epistemology and ethics are creative products of collectivity. As a relation between the ideas of the imagination, Humean temporality is similarly subject to evolving social conventions. The impact of empiricism on the art of Robert Smithson, and its prior influence on Bergson and Lewis, is discussed in more detail in Chapter 4. The deep history of empiricist thought mined by information artists associated with the Toronto School marks a significant departure from the more recent “legacy of modernism’s empirical positivism” – particularly the logical positivism of Wittgenstein – that is active in American and European conceptualisms.79 Consequently, this book presents a non-standard history of modern and contemporary art produced in Canada, one that is propelled by a recovery of what Deleuze termed “philosoph[ies] of immanence” as a previously underappreciated stimulus to art and aesthetic theory.80 In particular, the long reception of Berkeley’s critical optics connects several of the case studies encountered in these pages. Berkeley’s discussion of visual perception in terms of optical data unbound by the geometrical frame imposed by rationalist philosophers (discussed in Chapter 4) was an influential precedent for the critical information discourse of McLuhan in particular. This trajectory traces an intellectual prehistory of contemporary digitality, one in which critical responses to transcendent abstractions and the instrumentalization of measure anticipate current debates, yet remain decisively pre-computational in a technical sense. In particular, artists’ concepts of informatic immanence anticipate our own era of big data, regarding which Antoinette Rouvroy and Thomas Berns argue that data are held to be “capable of reflecting the diversity of reality itself,” thereby dispensing with representation.81 Reflecting this empiricist heritage, time and space regularly appear in the discourses on information associated with the Toronto School of Communication as barometers of changing social habits. Innis’s late communications writings are representative in their thematization of the shifting “bias” of successive social formations through time relative to the historic dominance of particular media of communication – a genealogy culminating in the post–Second World War rise of what Innis prophetically termed the “information industries.”82 The

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Innisian antinomy of space and time was derived, in part, from the antiBergsonian criticism of Wyndham Lewis, both Bergson and Lewis having arrived at their theses on the variable, and socially constituted, condition of spatiotemporal relations from the same empiricist premises later excavated by Deleuze.83 In Bergson’s rendering, the malleability of space and time is also shaped by the evolutionary development of the organism’s perceptual capacities – non-rational access to concrete duration eventually promising to supplant the more limited spatial awareness of a geometricizing vision and intellect. Bergson’s critique of the intellectual abstraction imposed by rationalist spatial schemas took its cue from George Berkeley’s empiricist rebuttal to perspectival models of vision in his 1709 text “An Essay towards a New Theory of Vision,” to which the French thinker alludes in the opening pages of Matter and Memory (1896).84 Donald Theall drew attention to the influence that Berkeley’s text similarly exercised on McLuhan’s “theories about tactility and the interplay of the senses in the perception of space.”85 In The Gutenberg Galaxy (1962), McLuhan discusses the Berkeleian critique of Newtonian optics approvingly, asserting that “today artists and scientists alike concur in praising Berkeley.”86 One of the artists to whom McLuhan was undoubtedly alluding here was his mentor, Lewis, whose epic work of cultural critique, Time and Western Man (1927), championed a “philosophy of the eye” that explicitly built upon Berkeleian foundations to erect an ontology of “pure and absolute visibility” as a bulwark against the popular diffusion of nonvisual philosophies of time.87 Where McLuhan would subsequently take Berkeley’s speculations as a springboard for theorizing the dynamic interplay of the senses as a motor for generating somatic information, Lewis had derived his own anti-temporal polemic from Berkeley’s strict segregation of the senses – in the process ironically overlooking the shared Berkeleian bases of the philosophy of flux promoted by his chief intellectual adversary, Bergson.88 Berkeley’s discourse on the senses thus emerges as an enduring point of reference for the protagonists of English Canadian information art and aesthetic theory, albeit one that inspired conflicting approaches to common themes of abstraction, epistemology, and perception. A late canvas by Brooker, Space and Time (1953) (Figure I.2), brings into striking visibility these themes of the empiricist synthesis of space and time, and of the ongoing transformation of spatiotemporal perception through Bergsonian processes of creative evolution. The painting is dominated by interlocking biomorphic masses suggestive of tree trunks, the lower half of a human torso, and even a whale, set against a pale geometric backdrop reminiscent of earlier abstract canvases produced

Introduction

19

I.2 Bertram Brooker, Space and Time, 1953. Oil on canvas, 61 × 76.2 cm, private collection. Image Courtesy of Waddington’s Auctioneers and Appraisers, Toronto.

by the artist during the late 1920s, including the eminently Bergsonian Evolution (1929). The embryonic fluidity conveyed by these central forms is suggestive of the “indetermination” that is synonymous with the élan vital in Bergson’s account of creative evolution as a progressive, trans-species diversification – or proto-digital division – of a primordial vital impulse.89 The Bergsonian concerns visualized by Space and Time set the stage for the case studies that follow. Through a close reading of archival documents and a combination of previously unexplored primary and secondary sources, I historicize the distinctive discourse on information that developed in English Canada between the immediate pre–First World War period and the election of neoliberal governments beginning in the late 1970s. This approach is indebted to the methodologies of discourse analysis formulated by Michel Foucault and adapted to the study of socio-technical arrangements by the German media theorist

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Friedrich Kittler and, more recently and in an art historical context, by Caroline A. Jones.90 This study complements and extends Jones’s examination of the “bureaucratic” formation propagated by the late modernist criticism of Clement Greenberg by bringing into visibility intermedial projects that sprouted at the margins of Greenbergian rationality. Though fuelled by anti-Kantian ontologies, these informatic projects nonetheless inhabited and redeployed administrative and rationalist forms and vocabulary. Information was a shorthand for the anti-hierarchical and synaesthetic strategies inspired by the holistic ontologies of Bergson and McLuhan as well as the funhouse mirror-image of Bergsonian dualisms projected by the cool satire of Lewis. On the one hand, this book is informed by developments in the field of media archaeology, which guide the studies of specific informatic instrumentalities, including advertising, cartography, marketing statistics, and telecommunications technologies. Innis’s expansive and multimodal theorization of the information industries is a touchstone for my convergent application of an informatic lens to examine these media. Echoing Innis’s account of an informatic episteme, in Chapter 3 the university emerges as a central site of contest between competing visions of informationalization. In drawing attention to the frequently obscured techno-material bases of art practices and theories, this book simultaneously contributes to the emerging field of media art histories. Feminist and queer historiographies inform my framing of identity and sexual difference, particularly in the concluding Coda. In contrast to the symbolic difference mobilized by European peers, the figures studied here approached gender as performative particularity: suchness, thisness, or, in Brooker’s marketing vocabulary, niche. This orientation carried forward a Stoic inheritance, in which bodies, as Elizabeth Grosz writes, “cannot be considered generalizable or part of a class of universals,” but are, rather, understood to be contingent “effects”  of communicative acts.91 Postcolonial theory shapes my reassessment of Robert Smithson’s earth maps and conceptual travelogues in Chapter 4 as articulating a vision of post-national space derived from the earlier transnational geographies of Lewis, and a problematic appropriation of signifiers of Indigeneity. Smithson’s imagined geographies bring into visibility emergent global alternatives to the Westphalian nation-state as a “nomadic” space of mobility. My focus on commercial structures and systems in Chapter 1 to the Coda answers William Wood’s lament that “Toronto’s longstanding role as the national centre for English-language communications, marketing and financial and corporate administration has not been much explored in relation to artistic practice.”92 This emphasis on business models simultaneously complicates a long-standing scholarly

Introduction

21

emphasis on public arts initiatives in Canada, exemplified by the scholarship of Maria Tippett, as well as the anti-capitalist valence frequently attributed to conceptual projects.93 While conducting visual analyses of individual artworks, this book is also animated by a recognition that the discourses that are its objects of study were propelled by a Bergsonian conceptualization of the intellect itself as a form of visuality  – an “image of thought.”94 In particular, the shared visual orientation of NETCO and Smithson that emerges from this analysis constitutes a significant departure from established narratives of conceptualism’s “rigorous elimination of visuality.”95 At the same time, NETCO’s McLuhan-inspired critique of textuality  – another notable divergence from linguistic orthodoxy – simultaneously challenges the media analyst’s alignment of literacy with visuality. In effect, the Vancouver company performed an indirect recovery of the Lewisian – antihumanist and visual – sources of McLuhan’s sensorial media discourse. This Lewisian turn was an unconscious effect of Iain Baxter’s increasingly agonistic engagement with McLuhan’s thought rather than the product of a first-hand engagement with Lewis. Chapter 1 argues that Brooker’s career in advertising establishes a context for reassessing his abstract and semi-abstract canvases of the 1920s in terms of their visualization of Bergsonian themes that he was exploring concurrently in counter-hegemonic marketing texts for leading trade papers, including Marketing and Printers’ Ink. The physiological aesthetics of Vernon Lee are studied as a previously unexplored source for the immanent mode of address embodied by Brooker’s controversial nudes. Despite the aesthetic and qualitative orientation of Brooker’s media program, the Canadian artist-advertiser emerges from this re-evaluation as an early exponent of the very behaviourist techniques of statistical analysis that he later criticized so vocally. As such, he can be recognized today as a forerunner of the contemporary formation that Rouvroy and Berns term “algorithmic governmentality”: an “(a)political rationality founded on the automated collection, aggregation and analysis of big data so as to model, anticipate and pre-emptively affect possible behaviours.”96 Although Brooker’s initial efforts to define an average Canadian consumer utilizing a combination of census data and consumer buying habits were faithful to normative statistical constructs of the “average man,” by the 1920s he was developing a prescient theory of niche marketing inspired by Bergson’s theses on the multiplicity of the élan vital that foreshadowed the “a-normative objectivity” associated with contemporary techniques of algorithmic governmentality.97 Brooker’s multidisciplinary art and personal philosophy come into focus through this re-examination as largely overlooked

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precedents for the corporeal and informatic concerns of the Toronto School of Communication. Chapter 2 undertakes a significant reassessment of McLuhan’s thought in light of the McLuhan-inspired art of Sensitivity Information developed by the Vancouver-based conceptual company, N.E. Thing Co. Ltd. Applying McLuhan’s own strategy of gleaning epistemological insights into the dynamics of technological change through close readings of artistic texts, this chapter revisits the media analyst’s surprisingly understudied informatic ontology in light of NETCO’s satirical renderings of an emergent information society in Canada. In particular, the chapter explores typically underemphasized dialectic and neo-Stoic currents in McLuhan’s thought congruent with his former student Donald Theall’s portrait of a “virtual” McLuhan, whose digital cosmogony resembles, in often striking ways, the similarly neo-Scotist thought of his post-structuralist contemporary Gilles Deleuze. These philosophical parallels highlight a broader period reassessment of classical ontologies, via their medieval reception, as the basis for articulating posthuman subjectivities and ontologies of multiplicity on both sides of the Atlantic. Chapter 3 extends this focus on the N.E. Thing Co. Ltd, carefully studying the sources and political implications of the Vancouver company’s innovative model of corporate authorship as enacting a distinctly organizational “death of the author.”98 Through a series of vignettes, NETCO’s evolving organizational apparatus is plotted in relation to its original contexts of emergence: first, at Simon Fraser University’s (SFU) experimental Centre for Communication and the Arts  – where faculty including co-president Iain Baxter and the composer R. Murray Schafer attempted to adapt McLuhan’s theses on the multisensory character of information as a holistic approach to arts pedagogy – then through to the company’s subsequent secession from this McLuhanesque milieu. Following an early period of crisis at SFU, NETCO’s representations of information assume an increasingly satirical inflection, dramatizing the co-presidents’ growing skepticism of the Toronto School thinker’s claims and consequent turn back to an earlier interest in Western popularizations of the Zennist concept of the void. Chapter 4 revisits the Vancouver-area travels of the American multidisciplinary artist Robert Smithson, from late 1969 through early 1970, which coincided with his participation in the Lucy Lippard–curated survey exhibition of Conceptual art, 955,000 (1970), and preparations for the unrealized earthwork Island of Broken Glass. This brief but influential episode in Smithson’s career is foundational to histories of Vancouver photo-conceptualism, which position the American’s visits (along with

Introduction

23

the photo-essays of his compatriot, Dan Graham) at the head of newly semiotic currents amplified by artists in the West Coast city including Jeff Wall and Ian Wallace. Extending Lara Tomaszewska’s revisionist account of cross-border literary influences on contemporary Vancouver art predating Smithson’s visits, but shifting the focus toward visual continuities between the non-linguistic “scanning” methodologies developed independently by NETCO and Smithson, this re-evaluation argues that the American artist’s interventions are best understood as developing out of his participation in the same discourse network that nourished the Vancouver-based conceptual company.99 Through his reading of McLuhan and his Canadian-born mentor, Lewis, Smithson should be recognized as navigating the same conceptual coordinates as NETCO. But the greater impact of Lewis’s presentation of George Berkeley’s “passive” theorization of vision on Smithson simultaneously distinguishes the American’s depotentialized approach to the image from the socially operative orientation of his Canadian counterpart. While Smithson’s inclusion in this study troubles essentialized notions of Canadianicity, this gap also registers differing conceptions of the social, and of the social function of art, embedded in the respective American and Canadian contexts inhabited by Smithson and NETCO. The Coda summarizes and synthesizes the findings of the preceding chapters, evaluating continuities and transformations in the representation of information and informatic media by participants in a shared discourse network over the span of nearly a century. Projects presented by earlier chapters are revisited in light of contemporary discourses of identity and representation. Replying to recent attempts to recuperate the NETCO co-president’s administrative legacy as a form of “housework,”100 Ingrid Baxter’s contested role within the company is explored as a troubling of gendered ontologies of corporate personhood. The fraught racial politics informing the critical cartographies charted by Smithson’s earth maps are also investigated in relation to McLuhan’s “global village.”101 Finally, a condensed study of the Toronto-based collective General Idea demonstrates the potential generalizability of this book’s findings, while exposing fissures in the Toronto School paradigm as potential sites for the enactment of marginalized identities and oppositional politics.

1

Bertram Brooker: Embodying Information Truth is not above us – it is all about us …1

The multidisciplinary artist and advertising professional Bertram Brooker inaugurates a persistent, and remarkably stable, discourse in English Canada on informational media and techniques as both symptoms of the crisis of modernity and potential agents of socio-cultural regeneration. Writing in 1928, Brooker identified the appearance of “a school of advertising men which seeks to classify scientifically the elements of human character. By means of psychological investigations these men hope to chart the vagaries of instinctive reactions. They expect to ‘measure’ the strength of instincts and emotions as the reason-why fellows measure materials and ingredients.”2 Brooker’s prescient critique of the quantitative instruments deployed by the associationist and behaviourist psychologists who dominated early marketing theory continues to resound in the subsequent writings of Harold Innis, who drew attention to the emergence of monopolistic “information industries” in the aftermath of the Second World War.3 Brooker’s comments on the uses and abuses of statistics in the pages of Canada’s premier business magazine, Marketing and Business Management, which he owned and edited from 1924 to 1927, would have been influential on Innis and his self-proclaimed heir, McLuhan. Foreshadowing McLuhan’s observations on the growing ubiquity of the market researcher’s informatic “chart-image” in The Mechanical Bride (1951), in a 1925 article for Marketing’s American competitor, Printers’ Ink, Brooker jested that “even coffee has its chart.”4 Brooker’s critique of an embryonic information society was embedded in a broader project of corporeal and social reform. Clearing a

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path for what scholar Judith Stamps has termed the “sound-based paradigm” championed by Innis and McLuhan as an antidote to the spatial bias they associated with print-based information media and statistical methodologies in the social sciences at mid-century, Brooker’s writings and visual art explored auditory and time-based alternatives to the optical model of spectatorship that would dominate formalist criticism from Roger Fry to Michael Fried.5 Brooker’s rejoinders to hegemonic advertising are exemplary of the “animistic countertendencies” that Jackson Lears opposes to the managerial ethos of efficiency that increasingly shaped marketing discourse and, indeed, everyday life over the course of the twentieth century.6 To wit, Lears quotes Brooker, writing in the pages of Printers’ Ink in 1925 under the pseudonym Richard Surrey, as defending “the magical power of words to move human feelings.”7 However, Lears does not explore the Bergsonian ontology that Brooker formulated in his influential textbooks Layout Technique in Advertising (1929) and Copy Technique in Advertising (1930), which notably stands apart from the survivals of premodern carnivalesque iconography that dominate Lears’s own descriptions of a “vitalist countercurrent” in contemporary advertising discourse and practice.8 For their part, Mary Ann Gillies and Thomas Quirk have documented the widespread currency of Bergsonian philosophy in artistic circles in the United States during the first quarter of the twentieth century, but they are inattentive to its impact on popular culture.9 Brooker’s creative adaptation of Bergsonian metaphysics in his advertising writings, graphic designs, and visual art constitutes a significant departure from the carnivalesque pattern charted by Lears’s penetrating study of commercial culture in this period. His heterodox Bergsonian sympathies aside, Brooker nonetheless participated in a broader shift in advertising psychology around 1910 observed by Elspeth Brown, toward “a new conception of human nature based upon nonrational impulses.”10 Yet the Futurist designs produced by the Italian artist Fortunato Depero for periodicals like Movie Makers, Vanity Fair, and Vogue during his New York sojourn from 1928 to 1930 may constitute the only rival instances of Bergson-inflected commercial imagery produced in either Canada or the United States during the era studied by Lears. The Bergsonian turn in Brooker’s output of the 1920s reflects the Canadian’s discrepant situation at the crossroads of European avant-garde movements fuelled by the organic temporality of Bergson and the ascendant culture industry of the United States. Brooker’s paradoxical harnessing of Bergson’s critique of the instrumentalizing effects of the intellect and corrective

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ontology of “continuous creation” to sell commodities highlights unresolved tensions within the English Canadian’s response to the stresses of modernity.11 Brooker’s Bergsonism is properly situated within the ambivalent coordinates of a pervasive fin de siècle debate that Sanford Schwartz has termed “the vitalist controversy.”12 Originating among nineteenthcentury biologists, the quarrel was defined by competing mechanistic and organismic theories of life. In the years just before the First World War, this dispute was taken up and transformed by a range of thinkers and artists and, at its peak, by members of the public at large, who adopted vitalism’s ideology of “creativity” to legitimate social agendas spanning the political spectrum. “Bergson,” Schwartz argues, “offered vitalism as a coherent via media.”13 It was this ideological plasticity that fuelled both his massive appeal and his subsequent eclipse. If Wyndham Lewis and his future Vorticist peers initially welcomed the anti-positivism of the early Bergson as heralding a vitalism of the right (see Chapter 4), Bergson would ironically continue to define the very terms of their later anti-vitalist turn. Brooker’s Bergsonian “Becoming-as-Ethics” plainly situates him at the opposing pole of the vitalist controversy in which Lewis’s anti-Bergsonian texts of the 1920s intervened.14 Contrary to Gregory Betts’s claim that “Brooker was more like Lewis … than any other Canadian,”15 any resemblance to the British Vorticist was likely due to Brooker’s vitalist (and socialist) counter-reading of Time and Western Man. I have previously argued that a more accurate label for Brooker’s corpus than Betts’s proposed Canadian Vorticism would be “Canadian vitalist modernism,” a term sufficiently capacious to encompass the shared organicist concerns, and varied political commitments, of Brooker and peers, including LeMoine FitzGerald and Arthur Lismer as well as the later cosmopolitan Lewis of the Creation Myth series, produced during his Canadian sojourn in the Second World War.16 Making only passing references to Lewis and to Vorticism, Betts’s 2005 dissertation proposed a “mystical” interpretation derived from the prior scholarship of Ann Davis and Dennis Reid.17 But the diligent archival analyses of Joyce Zemans had long ago refuted Brooker’s alleged Theosophical sympathies: “Brooker’s approach to modernism, to the interrelatedness of the arts, to nationalism in art, and to Theosophy, differed radically from those [sic] of his colleagues,” Zemans observed in 1989. “Brooker felt no need for Theosophy or any other formal movement.”18 Zemans was also the first to interpret Brooker’s early abstractions as visualizations of “Bergsonian flow.”19

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Following Zemans’s lead, Carole Luff subsequently scrutinized Brooker’s annotations to Creative Evolution, hypothesizing a Vorticist source for Brooker’s abstractions. However, given that the Vorticist movement did not coalesce until after Brooker’s seminal 1910–11 return voyage to England (following his 1905 immigration to Canada), Luff understandably rejected this possibility as implausible. However, I later noted that “Blast included a Toronto imprint, and was therefore available to readers in [Canada].”20 I also explored the possibility that Brooker may have been familiar with the proto-Vorticist work of Rhythmist artists grouped around the British Bergsonist painter J.D. Fergusson and the Bergsonian little magazines edited by John Middleton Murry, Rhythm and The Blue Review.21 While emphasizing Murry’s importance to Brooker, Betts has notably downplayed Murry’s debt to Bergson.22 Contributors to Rhythm included the future Vorticist Jessica Dismorr, who went on to participate in Blast.23 Betts’s contention that “Brooker was not directly influenced by Henri Bergson” overlooks Brooker’s repeated discussions of Bergson both in published texts and in his unpublished manuscript The Brave Voices (ca 1952–55).24 Bergson’s biophilosophy was but the most influential in a sequence of evolutionary and neo-vitalist paradigms explored by Brooker, including the Lebensphilosophie of Hermann Keyserling and Oswald Spengler,25 the utilitarianism of Herbert Spencer,26 the vitalism of Ernst Haeckel and Friedrich Nietzsche,27 and early studies of human sexuality by Edward Carpenter and Havelock Ellis.28 By 1924, however, Bergsonism had emerged as the dominant lens through which Brooker resolved the multiple intellectual foci absorbing his attention. Despite the critical orientation of Brooker’s Bergsonian engagements with informatic media and techniques, his early application of statistical instruments and census data to marketing problems symptomatizes an emergent biopolitics, in which the disciplinary management of populations gives way to a new concern with what Michel Foucault would subsequently term “biopower,” which he defined as “the administration of bodies and the calculated management of life.”29 This biopolitical outlook is imaged by the generic bodies populating Brooker’s semi-abstract canvases of the mid-1920s, whose composite features and streamlined silhouettes give shape to the demographic concerns of his coeval advertising texts, though Brooker likely would have conceived of this composite identity as embodying, rather, Bergson’s theses on qualitative multiplicity. The biopolitical contours of Brooker’s data-driven bodies are consistent with Michael Cowan’s revisionist reading of the contemporaneous commissioned films of the

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Weimar avant-garde filmmaker Walter Ruttmann, discussed below. Like Ruttmann’s interdependent modernist and industrial commitments, Brooker’s multivalent career necessitates a reassessment of the “Great Divide” that has continued to haunt Canadian art historiography long after Andreas Huyssen’s influential critique of high modernism’s rhetoric of “autonomy.”30 At the same time, Brooker’s innovations confirm the Kittlerian priority of psychophysical discourses and techniques of informatic inscription within the genealogy of modernist technical arrangements and their theorization: his articles on statistics for Marketing from the early 1920s predate the radiophonic dream of synaesthesia propagated by his later writings and paintings.

Immanent Information Brooker’s writings and controversial nude paintings thematize a critique of transcendent metaphysics that would become an enduring leitmotif of Canadian information art and information society discourse. Brooker’s censored Figures in a Landscape (1931) (Figure 1.1), which was removed by organizers from the 1931 annual exhibition of the Ontario Society of Artists (OSA), has been the renewed focus of scholarship in recent years, as art historians have undertaken a re-evaluation of the gendered and racialized politics of Canada’s legacy of censored representations of the body. Anna Hudson locates Brooker’s offending canvas within a “transgressive” trajectory of the nude in Canada, while underscoring that the artist employs the genre to transform “personal lust into the emancipatory realm of the spiritual.”31 Pandora Syperek draws attention to the often unacknowledged “gendered grounds” upon which such modernist narratives of transgression and aesthetic sublimation depend.32 Though conforming to the accepted formula of Edwin Holgate’s nudes, which drew parallels between the female body and the Laurentian landscape imagery that served as its picturesque backdrop and symbolic support (a device that Brian Foss aptly terms the nude as “living landscape”), Syperek argues that it was the summary cropping of Brooker’s bodies, which lack faces and legs, that rendered them unacceptable in the eyes of Arthur Lismer.33 Then head of the Art Gallery of Toronto’s educational department, Lismer allegedly voiced concerns that “the picture might be detrimental to children.”34 Lacking context, Brooker’s nude torsos contravened the naturalization and spiritualization of female flesh that were deemed preconditions for its public consumption as art. Where Syperek analyzes Brooker’s reply to his critics in the 1931 essay “Nudes and Prudes,” which championed the educational value of

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1.1 Bertram Brooker, Figures in a Landscape, 1931. Oil on canvas, dimensions and whereabouts unknown.

the nude as an opportunity for “acquainting children with the organs and functions of the body in an atmosphere of candor and beauty,”35 I will turn now instead to another text that stages a belated working through of the OSA scandal, and of period tensions between immanent and transcendent values that it symptomatized. Readers familiar with Brooker’s The Tangled Miracle may initially be taken aback by the claim that the 1936 potboiler is an oblique commentary on debates sparked by the OSA incident. Brooker scholar Gregory Betts astutely argues that “The Tangled Miracle revolves around representation in the media and how it can affect and manipulate the opinions of the masses.”36 Notwithstanding his own mystical interpretation of Brooker’s art and writings, Betts is attentive to the novel’s self-conscious debunking of occultist ideology, a calculated suspension of mystical sufficiency echoing Brooker’s earlier Canadian Forum review of John Middleton Murry’s God: An Introduction to the Science of Metabiology (1929).37 But the text’s foregrounding of the nude body and

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its spectacular disappearance are not discussed by Betts as narrating an allegorical commentary on the OSA’s censorship of Figures in a Landscape and the media spectacle that it occasioned. Yet the novel can be read as dramatizing a conflict between Brooker’s own immanent conflation of aesthetic and sexual interest and the posture of transcendent disinterest adopted by his Group of Seven contemporaries, tensions that the OSA incident had brought into focus. The Tangled Miracle follows psychic detective Mortimer Hood as he investigates the disappearance of cult leader Agatha Weir, the spiritual figurehead of Assumptionism, the “latest and queerest of American cults.”38 While Weir’s disappearance from her bedroom sanctuary in the Assumptionist Temple is hailed by her followers as a long-awaited miracle effecting her bodily “translation” to heaven, Hood is called upon to rule out the possibility of foul play.39 Weir’s hyper-publicized disappearance – while sleeping naked beneath a purpose-built chimney with a skylight designed to facilitate her heavenly ascension – notably recalls the circumstances of Brooker’s censorship by the OSA and the sensational media coverage it set in motion. The doors to the cult leader’s boudoir, which feature a “strange modernistic design carved in the wood, representing scores of nude figures,” amplify the allusion to Brooker’s censored painting.40 Hood looks upon the beliefs of the Assumptionists, whom he pointedly classes with his “enemies, the Spiritualists,” with unwavering skepticism, ultimately unveiling Weir’s disappearance as homicide.41 Like Brooker himself, he nonetheless entertains the scientific plausibility of bodily translation: “To me it’s a scientific problem. There are a number of possible explanations. A physical body might conceivably pass from three dimensions into four – and consequently disappear. That’s one theory. Then, we must remember, that under certain conditions all solids can be turned into gases. It was thought for a long time that such a change took place only under certain conditions of terrific heat. I am beginning to wonder …” he smiled, as though pleased with himself, “I’m wondering if the story of the chariot of fire – in Elijah’s case – may be an ancient way of describing what we call ‘spontaneous combustion.’ A sudden burning up of the body.”42 Hood’s reference to Elijah connects the tensions between corporeality and transcendence staged by The Tangled Miracle to an earlier, limited-edition text illustrated by Brooker narrating the life of the Old

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Testament prophet through Bible quotations. Brooker’s Elijah (1930) culminates in a spectacular image of its protagonist’s ascension in a “whirlwind” (Figure  1.2).43 Strengthening this intertextual link, early in The Tangled Miracle the reader is informed that “the ‘translations’ of Enoch and Elijah are regarded [by Assumptionists] as a reward not beyond the expectations of any one who lives a pure life.”44 That Hood, a thinly veiled stand-in for Brooker himself – one in a long line of detective alter egos stretching back to the Sherlock Holmes–like Lambert Chase of Brooker’s scenarios for silent films produced by the Vitagraph Company of America in 1912–13  – does not reject the plausibility of ascension, but merely the spiritualist interpretation propounded by the Assumptionists, underscores the critical intent of the narrative as an immanent rejoinder to the transcendent values espoused by Brooker’s OSA censors. The backdrop of media distortion and manipulation highlighted by Betts points to what Innis would subsequently label the information industries as the arena within which these competing ontological claims on the body played out. But the allegory staged by The Tangled Miracle is not limited to an ideological critique of the media of communication. Rather, it reveals transcendence itself to be a “product” of mystic paradigms like those promoted by Brooker’s Group of Seven peers. As Betts acknowledges, Brooker’s non-fiction writings were critical of mystics, including one of his favourite authors, John Middleton Murry. Yet Betts ultimately fails to reconcile Brooker’s attempted “rationalization” of the spiritual experiences reported by Murry and the Canadian radical psychiatrist R.M. Bucke (renowned for his theorization of “cosmic consciousness”) with his own (Betts’s) mystical exegesis thereof.45 Indeed, Brooker’s insistence on a scientific, and specifically evolutionary, understanding of Murry’s theses on “metabiological unity” and Jesus as “a new ‘kind’ of man” is remarkably consistent with the Bergsonian sources of Murry’s thought, which Betts notably overlooks.46 That Brooker’s critique of spiritualist claims in The Tangled Miracle was intended as a rebuke to the mystically inspired ideology embraced by the Group of Seven is reinforced by the novel’s parallels with an earlier, unpublished manuscript that narrates the actions of another would-be prophet, the eponymous Jevon. While Brooker’s portrayal of Jevon and his reputed miracles is noticeably less skeptical in tone than his subsequent rendering of Weir, it is clear from his manuscript notes that the circle of mystics surrounding his Christ-like protagonist includes satirical portraits of the prominent Theosophists Lawren Harris and F.B. Housser, with whom, ironically, Brooker himself continues to be grouped by many commentators.47 In fact, Brooker pits the beliefs

1.2 Bertram Brooker, “And Elijah went up by a whirlwind into heaven,” from Elijah, 1930.

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espoused by his alter ego, Jevon, against the Theosophical dogma championed by the Harris-like Manchee: “Among the characters there must be a man who combats Manchee’s theosophical ideas of reincarnations and seven bodies and all that, with a theory like mine, based on physics, that all is One.”48 In Brooker’s notes for Jevon (1925), Manchee is explicitly modelled on Harris: Something like Harris, except in position and physical appearance. Under forty … Supremely confident of his art and rather self-centred, rather wanting to be courtiered, especially in his own studio. Suspicious of newcomers, cryptically sarcastic, tricking them into confessions or statements that he will not like, so that he can be quickly done with them … As a Canadian almost ferociously patriotic, with a great feeling for the country, which has been greatly bolstered by Whitman. Hesitating to go to Europe or even New York for fear of being seduced from his utterly native viewpoint … As a mystic he also believes that things are going to happen in this country, indeed are happening.49 In striking contrast to the transcendent beliefs espoused by Manchee and Dr Eyles (Housser’s counterpart in Brooker’s allegory), Jevon’s illuminations are positively “unmystical.”50 Jevon’s immanent theology affirms that “God is in everything.”51 Brooker distinguishes Jevon’s physicalist interpretation of divinity  – as an “overflow of energy”  – from “The Eyles-Manchee-Aubrey crowd [who] want to arrive at the infinite without passing through the finite, without love.”52 The specifically energetic interpretation of immanent theology that Brooker advances in Jevon foreshadows Mortimer Hood’s Bergson-inflected speculations on the fourth dimension as a time-based flux of “light waves” in The Tangled Miracle: If there is such a thing as eternity it must be a world where there is less matter – and more time. I wonder if I can make that clear. Our ideas of matter have changed a great deal in recent years. To-day scientists are leaning to the view that there is no such thing as “dead” matter – or what we used to call “substance.” Instead of thinking that force acts on matter – moving it or changing it – it is now generally recognized that matter and force are the same thing. It is all force. The only thing in the universe that isn’t force, so to speak, is time. Motion in time is what produces – for us – the illusion of matter … Force can be rarefied still further, until it becomes practically all motion – and

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one of our names for such a state – is light. One scientist declared not long ago that if he knew how to devise the tools he could break up all matter into light waves – there would be nothing but light – a universe of light. If such a state could be achieved, all motion would be at the same rate, and there would be no slower or faster movements to permit the measurement of time. Time would no longer be cut up. It would be all together in one endless moment – in short, eternity … When a person is converted he is said to have seen the light. Perhaps, after all, it may be more than a metaphor. It may be that a person who thus turns away from matter – from the material world – with all his soul and with all his strength – learns the secret of motion through matter into a world of light – which exists under and above our world, just as this pencil exists under and above the sheet of paper. In other words, this world of light may be something like the sea – fluid and continuous – whereas our world is like a solid net that is dragged through it.53 The Bergsonian oppositions mobilized by this astonishing passage (matter/temporality, measure/fluidity, simultaneity/motion) suggest analogies with the two-tiered structure of Marcel Duchamp’s summative statement on Bergsonian ontology and higher-dimensional geometry, The Bride Stripped Bare by Her Bachelors, Even (also known as The Large Glass) (1915–23). The latter was exhibited at the Brooklyn Museum in 1926, at a time when Brooker is known to have made regular trips to New York.54 The Large Glass employs Bergsonian oppositions to intervene within the gendered dynamics of heterosexual desire. Linda Henderson perceptively interprets the panels dividing the work into two distinct sections as cultivating a “pseudo-Bergsonian contrast … between the upper and lower halves of the Large Glass.”55 Bergson’s dualistic rhetoric set the geometric and mechanical characteristics of mensurated space against the continuous and fluid qualities of lived temporality, or what Bergson termed durée. This conceptual schema informed Duchamp’s partitioning of the mechanical bodies of the Malic Molds, representing the titular Bachelors who inhabit the three-dimensional lower space, from the gaseous Bride, occupying the upper, fourth-dimensional field.56 Notwithstanding the Bergsonian sources underpinning the dualistic structure of Duchamp’s Large Glass, Henderson argues persuasively that the Dada artist read the French thinker – whose ideas were embraced by the Puteaux circle of Cubists, with whom the young Duchamp had fraternized prior to their rejection of his now iconic Nude Descending a

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Staircase, No. 2 (1912) – very much against the grain. Duchamp perversely sided with the mechanical qualities that Bergson attributed to the comic in his influential essay Laughter (1900), rather than the intuitive and qualitative values that he ascribed to art – the latter predictably being vaunted by Duchamp’s Bergson-inspired, Cubist rivals.57 It was Laughter, Henderson notes, that likely prompted Duchamp’s sardonic recuperation of Bergson’s notion of the “ready-made,” which the artist decisively reconfigured through his appropriation of everyday objects as art, in pointed contravention of the Bergsonian virtues of creativity and intuition valorized by his Puteaux counterparts.58 Duchamp’s reading of Bergsonian oppositions against the grain establishes a precedent for the anti-Bergsonian manoeuvres of Wyndham Lewis and Robert Smithson explored in Chapter 4.59 Parallels with, but also divergences from, these latter artists’ practices and the Bergsonian allegory of Brooker’s Tangled Miracle are, however, more ambiguous. Recalling the absurd physicalism embodied by Duchamp’s fourdimensional Bride, whose “elevator of gravity” Henderson interprets as a reference to the Assumption of the Virgin Mary,60 Brooker’s alter ego, the psychic gumshoe Mortimer Hood, looks upon the Assumptionists’ claims with a combination of scientific skepticism and a lingering Bergsonian openness to the possibility of transcendence in immanence: ascension is reconceived by Hood and Brooker alike as a merger with the unbroken continuity of real duration. But Hood’s critical stance avoids the outright reversal of Bergsonian oppositions and cynical embrace of the comic as a substitute aesthetics and ontology that Henderson attributes to Duchamp’s allegorical reworking of the age-old “conflict between the finite and the infinite.”61 Brooker’s electromagnetic rendering of Bergsonian flux as a medium of transcendence within matter sets the stage, rather, for the influential meditations of McLuhan on electricity as a medium for attaining cosmic consciousness in the passage from Understanding Media quoted in the Introduction. Brooker’s use of scientific vocabulary to describe a monist ontology in Jevon also clears a path for the univocity of NETCO’s psychophysical discourse of Sensitivity Information, discussed in Chapters 2 and 3. For both Brooker and McLuhan, the information  industries represent the condition of possibility for the realization of immanent illumination. Information assumes a comparably ambivalent status in the writings of both Canadians, as the sign of a threatening instrumentality as well as a potential medium of ontological restoration and psychic redemption within matter. Where Hudson and Syperek productively read Brooker’s censored Figures in a Landscape as contravening gendered norms of decorum, the

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allegory of failed transcendence enacted by The Tangled Miracle suggests that it was a more profound violation of the transcendent ontology from which those norms drew their legitimacy that propelled Brooker’s missing bodies. The earlier manuscript Jevon, whose failed messiah anticipates the fate of Agnes Weir, reveals that Brooker’s break with the Theosophically inspired mysticism of Harris and Housser occurred prior to his disillusionment with Harris and Lismer in the wake of his ill-received 1927 Arts and Letters Club exhibition, which they had sponsored.62 As early as 1923–25, we find Brooker satirizing the narrow nationalism and mystical pretensions of Harris and Housser – themes to which he would return in his 1936 potboiler. The missing nude body of Agnes Weir that acts as the fulcrum of The Tangled Miracle’s allegory of false transcendence redirects the earlier satire of Jevon in light of the 1931 removal of Brooker’s Figures in a Landscape from the OSA. This reassessment has demonstrated that the sexualized body was central to Brooker’s critique of Theosophical transcendence, appearing in his work as the sensational content of a voyeuristic press as well as a potential site of immanent merger with Bergson’s durée.

Physiological Aesthetics As the French philosopher’s favoured metaphor for the non-rational phenomenology of duration, Bergson’s descriptions of “melody” represent a probable stimulus for Brooker’s experiments in synaesthetic advertising strategies and coeval exploration of “musical ‘shape’” in his abstract paintings of the 1920s.63 Writing in 1929 under the tongue-in-cheek pseudonym Mark E. Ting, Brooker reviewed his experiments in synaesthesia aimed at revitalizing print advertising under new competition from radio beginning in 1922, the year of Canada’s first commercial radio broadcasts. “I was much interested,” he wrote, “[in] the problem of translating appeals to senses other than the visual (taste, touch, smell, hearing) into the visual limitations of a printed advertisement.”64 An alternative Bergsonian figure for the processual qualities of duration is “the dancer,” whose graceful movements embody the “pure inner joy” of aesthetic experience.65 This joyous affect is communicated to audience members through “physical sympathy.”66 In the words of Bergson scholar Suzanne Guerlac, “the rhythm and the beat lead us to believe that we are the masters of these movements.”67 Allusions to Bergson’s metaphorical dancer, and to the interactive dynamics of Bergsonian sympathy, are legible in the stroboscopic montage of Brooker’s Fugue (ca 1929) (Figure 1.3), reproduced in his 1929 Yearbook of the Arts

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1.3 Bertram Brooker, “Fugue,” from Yearbook of the Arts in Canada, 1929.

in Canada.68 Its superimposed silhouettes recall the chronophotographs of Étienne-Jules Marey, whose multiple exposures generate a dynamic record of corporeal motion.69 The abstract flux of curves delineating the central figure in Brooker’s drawing evoke the sinuous contours of Bergson’s dancer, turned one hundred and eighty degrees to emphasize the transpersonal quality of the motion forms traced by her undulating body. Set against a geometric backdrop, the streamlined figure in this work on paper is analogous to the machinic chorus line of women’s legs found in the slightly earlier oil on board, Green Movement (ca 1927) (Figure 1.4). Both works can, in turn, be related to Duchamp’s controversial attempt to register the body in motion in his Futurist-inspired Nude Descending a Staircase, No. 2, with which Brooker may have been familiar as early as 1913 through exposure to news accounts of the Chicago presentation of the Armory Show.70 Brooker’s advertising writings explore techniques of sympathetic communication reminiscent of the interactive dynamics of Bergsonian aesthetics that complement his painted evocations of “rhythmic biomorphic energy and flow,” first noted by Zemans.71 In Copy Technique in Advertising, he analyzes a passage from Walter de la Mare’s Memoirs of

1.4 Bertram Brooker, Green Movement, ca 1927. Oil on paperboard, 58.8 × 43.2 cm. Art Gallery of Ontario. Purchase with assistance from Wintario, 1978. 78/14. Photo © 2016 Art Gallery of Ontario.

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a Midget (1921) as a model for what he elsewhere describes as “set[ting] the consumer in motion [through] e-motion, inner motion”:72 In one of the early chapters the midget discovers a dead mole. She speaks of stooping “with lips drawn back over my teeth,” while she surveyed “the white heaving nest of maggots in its belly.” When I read that passage I consciously and deliberately drew my own lips back over my teeth, to see what was meant. Try it yourself, and your nose will immediately wrinkle, and you will feel yourself actually confronted with some distasteful spectacle.73 Bergson’s aesthetics of sympathy had, in fact, served as a paradigm for a range of literary texts analyzed by Brooker’s marketing writings of the 1920s and early 1930s, which, in turn, attempted to substitute a neoBergsonian model of participatory communication for the unidirectional forms of address championed by his associationist- and behaviouristinfluenced peers in the advertising industry. Walter de la Mare belonged to a network of British writers, including Ford Madox Ford, Katherine Mansfield, and John Middleton Murry, who had contributed to Murry’s Bergson-inflected, Rhythmist journals Rhythm and The Blue Review prior to the First World War.74 One-time members of this Rhythmist circle are among the writers most frequently cited by Brooker in Copy Technique in Advertising, which Cavell describes as his “artistic credo.”75 It is noteworthy that Brooker himself published a substantial article in Murry’s journal The Adelphi in 1931.76 A previously unexplored source for Brooker’s model of empathetic spectatorship that departs from this Bergsonian trajectory is the aesthetic theorist Vernon Lee. In a 1929 article for Marketing, Brooker introduced Canadian readers to Lee’s physiological aesthetics utilizing rhythmic vocabulary that speaks to an attempted synthesis with Bergsonian precepts of sympathetic communication drawn from Murry: Vernon Lee, a less known but not less acute critic of writing than the others I have quoted, has a passage which brings this question of rhythm closer to the contact between writer and reader which is so much more important in advertising than in any other form of writing. She says: There are words which, owing to their extreme precision, make the reader think and feel, in a way make him live, slowly; and there are other words which make the reader think, feel and live quickly, and quickly and smoothly, or

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quickly and jerkily as the case may be. Above all, there are arrangements of words, combinations of action and reaction of word upon word, which, by opening up vistas or closing them, make the reader’s mind dawdle, hurry or bustle busily along … Two contrary kinds of action are being set up in our mind; because the fact related is forcing us to one sort of pace, indeed to what is even more important, one sort of rhythm, while the words relating that fact are forcing us to another pace, to another rhythm. Miss Lee makes clear here what Middleton Murry meant by the differentiation of rhythmic effects; that rhythms differ – or should differ – in accord with the nature of the subject (whether it is solemn, humorous, business-like, and so on), and also with the essential “pace” of the subject (whether it is a matter that can be decided quickly or one that requires deliberation).77 Brooker appropriates the literary insights of Lee and Murry to his own distinctive discourse on rhythm as a defining characteristic of effective advertising copy, a discourse that rehearses Bergson’s aesthetics of sympathy, in which rhythm is synonymous with the qualitative multiplicity of melody and the plasticity of temporal experience: notions propagated by Murry in the pages of Rhythm.78 Though sometimes deploying an analogous vocabulary of “rhythm” and “sympathy” to describe an interactive model of beholding, Lee dispensed with the Bergsonian metaphysics of intuition championed by Murry in favour of a physiological account of empathetic responsiveness that would, somewhat in tension with his own Bergsonian commitments, equally contribute to Brooker’s somatic outlook.79 Building on a series of small-scale experiments conducted in 1897 with her collaborator, research subject, and presumed object of unconsummated desire, the Scottish artist Clementina (“Kit”) Anstruther-Thomson, Lee reported on Anstruther-Thomson’s responses as she beheld a combination of nude models and paintings in various art galleries.80 Drawing on recent theorizations of Einfühlung, or “feeling-into” (influentially translated as “empathy” by the British psychologist Edward Titchener in 1909), by such German psychologists as Theodor Lipps, Lee redefined the process of aesthetic response as a participatory circuit in which the beholder imaginatively retraces the contours of the artwork.81 The physiological aesthetics theorized by Grant Allen, the Canadianborn popularizer of Darwin, and other early proponents of evolutionary theory, were equally formative influences on Lee’s relational aesthetics.82 Clearing a path for Brooker’s later adaptation of Bergson’s theses on

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creative evolution in canvases such as Space and Time, Shafquat Towheed writes that “Lee transposed the paradigms current in evolutionary science onto her investigation of the development of specific artistic forms and the development of aesthetics.”83 Brooker similarly invoked Allen’s writings on human evolution in a 1913 anti-censorship tract for The Photoplay Author, in which he defended his own scenarios for Vitagraph.84 Like Darwin before him, Allen proposed a purely physiological basis for aesthetic feeling. Darwin’s 1871 publication The Descent of Man had controversially posited sexual selection as the basis of aesthetic feeling in animals: “When we behold male birds elaborately displaying their plumes and splendid colours before the females, whilst other birds not thus decorated make no such display, it is impossible to doubt that the females admire the beauty of their male partners.”85 Jhoanna Infante traces the sources of Darwin’s biological account of aesthetics to pre-Kantian theories of taste that prioritized the sensual interests of the beholder. Edmund Burke’s A Philosophical Enquiry into the Origin of Our Ideas of the Sublime and Beautiful (1757) is exemplary of eighteenth-century articulations of “sensibility” that, in the British context, arose out of vernacular traditions of empiricism and Romanticism.86 Like Darwin, Burke described aesthetic experience as an immanent “delight” of the body rather than a cognitive exercise of judgment.87 It is within these evolutionary and physiological discourses that Lee’s aesthetics “from below” are properly located.88 In a paradigmatic diary entry on Titian’s Flora (ca 1517), Lee noted that “she is physically attractive … She attracts me.”89 It is important to underscore that Lee’s engagements with biology and psychology, like Brooker’s, were always creatively motivated and transformative.90 If Lee’s aesthetics of empathy are legible in Brooker’s discussions of rhythmic innervation as the unfolding of a sympathetic chain between image and beholder, her descriptions of the physiological mechanisms of aesthetic response likely influenced the Canadian artist-advertiser’s eroticized representations of the nude as well as the sexual ontology formulated by “Nudes and Prudes,” his response to the OSA censorship scandal: “Sex, which is to be found in all organisms, and is perhaps the principle on which all forms of life are founded – in short, the principle of issuance – may very well be the primary division of Being, the first mysterious step taken by the primal unity towards multiplicity.”91 Brooker’s neo-vitalist endorsement of “physical attraction” as an aesthetic framework in this text supports Anna Hudson’s contention that “during the 1920s, the modern nude rose from its nineteenth-century academic roots to manifest … the liberalization of sexual expression in an expanding bawdy culture.”92 Brooker articulates an even more explicitly

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sexualized and evolutionary version of his physiological aesthetics in the late, unpublished manuscript The Brave Voices. Reprising the arguments of Allen and Darwin, in a draft chapter titled “Love” Brooker likens the classical conception of nature as phusis to sexual intercourse: But here let us relate the idea of Phusis – upward striving – with sex impulse lately discussed. Itself an upward striving, an ascent – not only physically, but an ascent in the scale of sensation to a height or peak – highest ecstasy, what we would expect if we believe with Blake that “energy is eternal delight.” If it were not such a familiar act, we might see in it a clue, or almost a symbol, a parable, a prototype (literally, first type or model) – in short, it is in miniature the ascending urge and creative function of all nature.93 As in the passage from The Tangled Miracle quoted earlier, Brooker here describes immanence in specifically energetic terms. In another draft of this same section of The Brave Voices, Brooker relates the physiological release of orgasm to “the untranslatable flow of music,” which he describes in terms that strongly recall Bergson’s comparative analysis of “melody” and the oscillations of a pendulum in Time and Free Will (1889): The notes and staves, the sharps and flats, on a musical score are like an architect’s drawing, accurate, exact, the intervals measurable, the harmonies calculable. The vibrations of each note can be measured and related to the whole science of sound and its waves. But none of these calculations or these marks on paper could give a person born deaf any conception of what music is like to the ear … It has been remarked more than once that music of a certain type, arousing our feelings by a sense of urgency, suspense, acceleration and final culmination, almost duplicates our sensations during the sex experience. In this experience we come closest to a direct apprehension of the onwardness [sic] of life’s energy.94 Brooker’s exploration of musical metaphors and participatory, somatic modes of address in his late, speculative writings sheds new light on his earlier efforts to “Visualize Events – Not Things in Advertising Copy,”95 a renovation and dynamization of traditional print formats prompted,

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1.5 Henri Bergson, cone of memory, from Matter and Memory, 1896.

in part, by new competition for advertising dollars arising from the aural and time-based medium of radio. The latter project unfolded in parallel with Brooker’s investigation of auditory and synaesthetic motifs in his abstract and semi-abstract canvases of the mid-1920s. In both cases, his embodied and temporal approach took Bergson’s phenomenology of memory as its model, while simultaneously integrating seemingly incompatible elements drawn from Lee’s physiological aesthetics and its empiricist sources. The persistence of Brooker’s Bergsonian referent is evident from an alternative title for The Brave Voices, “Intuition and Reality: Essays Toward a Philosophy of Feeling,” as well as a draft chapter titled “Bergson.”96 In Matter and Memory, Bergson famously diagrams his ontology of memory as a cone contracted by the appeal of present perception, the latter represented by the cone’s intersection with the plane of matter (Figure 1.5). In one version of this figure, Bergson represents the multiplicity of accumulated recollections as a virtual coexistence of conic sections. A truly cosmological figure, Bergson’s cone represents the dynamics of individual memory as “a section of the universal becoming,” the “hyphen” constituted by subjectivity being but a “place of passage” between pure matter and an infinitely dilated universal memory, or la durée réelle.97

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It is probable that Bergson’s cone also informed Brooker’s early speculations on “gravitation.”98 In The Brave Voices, Brooker revisited this youthful theorization of physics in terms that bear a marked resemblance to Bergson’s conic figure: As a youth of nineteen the cause of gravitation excited my curiosity and became so urgent a problem that it kept me awake at nights. Finally I developed a theory, after reading a few popular works on astronomy, which at the time seemed like a reasonable explanation. I conceived a universe consisting of an infinite mass of energyunits congregated at one end of space. Their energy consisted simply and solely of a desire to reach a goal at the other end – a mere pin-point. Their motion could be charted by lines drawn from left to right; converging on the goal-point; the total shape of the mass movement resembling a cone.99 In a subsequent passage of the same draft manuscript, Brooker likens his own conic representation of gravitational force to the Russian mystic P.D. Ouspensky’s (likely also Bergson-inspired) diagram “in the shape of a cone, with lines ascending from a broad base and converging towards the apex, which was a pinpoint. The lines represented human beings approaching God through the emotion of love.”100 Although Brooker does not cite Bergson directly, his discussion of the Greek notion of phusis as “a desire for unity” repeats almost verbatim notes in another draft section of The Brave Voices, titled “Bergson,” in which he describes “Feeling” as “the force that makes the universe cohere in a perpetual coming together.”101 Significantly, the word “Gravitation” is scribbled in the margins of the latter passage. If Brooker’s notes for The Brave Voices connect his youthful interest in physics with the durational ontology of Bergson, his advertising writings demonstrate a counterintuitive and, indeed, perverse readiness to redeploy the philosopher’s redemptive vision of universal memory as a device for selling. For instance, a 1926 article for Marketing proposes a Bergsonian critique of the spatializing effects of language redolent of the French thinker’s arguments in Creative Evolution (1907). Describing conventional copy as “a string of words turned out by an underpaid copy-drudge who has been ordered to fill a certain number of square inches of space,” Brooker proposes an alternative approach that he represents in the form of a conic diagram, whose “vertical lines suggest the final unification in the finished copy of numerous ideas derived from each stratum of knowledge” (Figure 1.6).102 The conical shape and

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1.6 Bertram Brooker, chart depicting “six kinds of knowledge,” Marketing, 1926.

strata of Brooker’s figure point to Bergson’s cone of memory and its constituent sections as a likely prototype, while its vertical lines striving for unification suggest Ouspensky’s cone, or Brooker’s own youthful model of gravitation, as templates. Brooker’s Marketing diagram brings into visibility his fraught operationalization of Bergson’s critical ontology as an instrument of commerce. His advertising texts seize upon the potential for Bergsonian rhythm to act as a “memory-moulder” as part of a critical intervention within a hegemonic discourse on attention as a spatial faculty that nevertheless yoked the French thinker’s time-based alternative to instrumental reason in the service of a utilitarian agenda.103 Brooker’s experiments in musical visualization and participatory advertising anticipate McLuhan’s early prescriptions for a corrective “orchestration” of industrial society in The Mechanical Bride as well as Innis’s coeval appeals to a redemptive “oral tradition” in his late

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communications writings.104 But where McLuhan’s invocations of the auditory were intended to redress the perceived threat posed by commercial culture, Brooker’s simultaneous exploration of musical themes across high and low cultural forms exposes a more ambivalent program, one in which Bergson’s sound-based ontology was at times redeployed as an instrument of consumer persuasion. Notwithstanding the critical motivation behind his harnessing of Bergsonian time concepts in his marketing writings, Brooker comes to reflect Innis’s deploring portrait of Canadian artists as “reduced to the status of sandwich men.”105 At the same time, Innis’s critique of the threat posed by the “Printers’ ink” of neocolonial American publishers belies his probable, albeit unacknowledged, debt to Brooker’s criticisms of textual media and insights regarding the latent dialogism of radio as well as the potential orality of traditional print media.106 This intellectual osmosis may be dated to a period in the early 1930s when drawings, poetry, and works of short fiction by Brooker vied for space with articles on economic history by Innis in the pages of the socialist magazine The Canadian Forum, on whose editorial committee Brooker had earlier served, and to which Innis’s wife, the author Mary Quayle Innis, also regularly contributed during the same period.107 A 1931 article by Brooker published in The Sewanee Review  – a journal to which McLuhan would subsequently make multiple contributions – is strikingly anticipatory of Innis’s arguments in “The Strategy of Culture” on the cultural symptoms of mediatic compression accelerated by print journalism.108

Captivated by Number “O divine average!”109

Behaviourism Brooker’s Bergsonian sympathies, and cross-disciplinary traffic between marketing and modernist art forms, would initially appear to place him at odds with Wyndham Lewis, whose anti-advertising polemics nourished the media analyses of both Innis and McLuhan. However, Brooker’s and Lewis’s mutual criticisms of – yet simultaneous borrowings from – the discipline of behaviourism constitute a significant point of convergence between their respective projects that the Canadian Vorticist label proposed by Gregory Betts notably glosses over. John B. Watson, the American founder of behaviourism, is a target of Lewis’s

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cultural critique in both The Art of Being Ruled (1926) and Time and Western Man. “Behaviourism,” Lewis protests, “substitutes the body for the ‘mind.’ ” 110 For Lewis, Watson’s paradoxical psychology of “thought without consciousness” marks the perilous end point in a centuries-long dissolution of the European rationalist tradition within which Lewis situates his own ideology critique and, however improbably, his Vorticist aesthetic program.111 Foreshadowing the clinical discourses of Jonathan Crary and Michel Foucault, Lewis portrayed Watson as the harbinger of a new ideal type of “Tester,” whose subjects are products of “laboratory” conditions.112 Sounding very much like Crary more than sixty year later, Lewis wrote that in Watson’s science, “everything about a human being is directly and peripherally observable: and all the facts about the human machine can be stated ‘in terms of stimulus and response,’ or of ‘habit-formation.’”113 For Lewis, Watson and behaviourism were inseparable from broader forces of industrial rationalization then in the process of reshaping American society. Lewis’s 1932 novel Snooty Baronet mounts his most sustained, if also ambivalent, critique of behaviourism. Its behaviourist antihero, Michael Kell-Imrie, personifies Lewis’s satire of Watsonian dehumanization. Yet as Paul Scott Stanfield observes, Kell-Imrie simultaneously bears a striking and perplexing resemblance to Lewis’s own steely, hyperrationalist literary persona. Similarly, the modernist pyrotechnics of the novel’s prose noticeably echo the stylistic strategies deployed by Lewis’s earlier cultural criticism, even as they ironize the characteristic efficiency and impersonality of behaviourist texts.114 Stanfield notes that despite Lewis’s evident anxieties that the sovereignty of the rationalist ego at the centre of his personal aesthetic and philosophical project was imperilled by Watson’s machinic approach to psychology and social engineering, Lewis’s own method of “‘non-moral’ satire” nonetheless “ran closely parallel in some ways.”115 A proto-postmodern satire of genre fiction that constantly alludes to its own inhabitation of potboiler conventions, Snooty Baronet recounts the misadventures of the chronically unmindful Kell-Imrie, as his literary agent, Humphrey Cooper-Carter (or “Humph”), plots to boost sales of his next book by arranging for Kell-Imrie to be abducted by bandits while putatively conducting research on the modern-day survival of the ancient cult of Mithras in Persia. Assiduously deploying his behaviourist’s toolkit, Kell-Imrie sets about his “field-work” en route through the south of France with Val, his mantis-like companion, in tow.116 But even as Lewis lingers, in meticulous emulation of Watson’s impersonal

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methodology, on the “repertoire of acts” performed by Snooty’s “human specimens,” the text unwittingly betrays the manic discontents of its protagonist’s mental life, which, according to behaviourist tenets, elude observation.117 Kell-Imrie’s prosthetic physiology extends this Watsonian comedy: the behaviourist sports a wooden leg and a metal plate in his head that together lend his mechanical couplings with Val an aura of laboratory experimentation. Lewis’s comedic sexualization of Kell-Imrie’s prosthesis suggests a previously overlooked prototype for McLuhan’s wry description of technologically extended humanity as “the sex organs of the machine world.”118 In a pivotal scene, as Snooty contemplates a hatter’s dummy in a window display, he experiences a vertiginous loss of ego induced by the aporias of behaviourist psychology: Was not perhaps this fellow who had come up beside me a puppet too? I could not swear that he was not! I turned my eyes away from him, back to the smiling phantom in the window, with intense uneasiness. For I thought to myself as I caught sight of him in the glass, smiling away in response to our mechanical friend, certainly he is a puppet too! Of course he was, but dogging that was the brother-thought, but equally so am I!119 Snooty here ponders his own imminent transformation into a modern “Frankenstein,” a literary referent likewise mobilized by both Innis and McLuhan to discuss the potential dangers of technology.120 In particular, Snooty’s self-roboticization in this passage rehearses the equivocal dynamics of informationalization subsequently analyzed by McLuhan in Understanding Media, explored in the next chapter. The novel’s dénouement dramatizes an analogous confounding of identities that precipitates Humph’s – ostensibly accidental – shooting death at Kell-Imrie’s hands. Anxious that his literary proxy may be plotting to appropriate his celebrity, Snooty pre-emptively attacks his agent, all the while – true to his behaviourist principles – disavowing the very possibility that his actions could have an intentional basis. Prior to this ill-fated rendezvous with their bandit accomplices, Snooty laments that “in short, he had become Snooty. He had usurped my snootiness.” Finally, exasperated, he exclaims to Humph: “‘Listen! It is I who am snooty, not you! You keep to your rôle, and leave mine to me!’”121 This fateful confrontation between doppelgängers can be read as a modernist rendition of the Zoroastrian dualism personified by the twin divinities Ahriman and Ozman (Ahura Mazda): reputed offspring of the suggestively Bergsonian first principle Time, to whom Lewis

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makes reference in The Art of Being Ruled and, subsequently, in the third volume of The Human Age (1955).122 Snooty’s assassination of his double is simultaneously legible as a Humean critique of the stable and unique self as well as a proto-Benjaminian allegory of modernist intellectual and media ecologies predicated on techniques of mechanical reproduction. Anticipating McLuhan’s global village thesis, in a 1946 essay Lewis would go on to describe the role of technologies of reproducibility including “radio, cinematography, [and] rotary photogravure” in “unifying the nations in spite of themselves.”123 It is the “language machinery” of Lewis’s satirical prose – its “rattletrap verse” – that comes closest to ventriloquizing the very tenets that Snooty Baronet ostensibly sets out to critique. This seeming contradiction was first noted by McLuhan’s former student Hugh Kenner, who observed that “this fiction started by being satire, employing the strategy of appearing to know no more about the characters than a set of behaviourist’s Tests would reveal. Lewis gradually came to doubt if there were in fact any more to know.”124 The machine-like staccato and impersonal jargon of Lewis’s “mindless modernism” is legible as both a strategic inhabitation and travesty of Watson’s laboratory methodology and of behaviourism’s efficient and mechanical conception of human action and speech.125 Brooker’s marketing texts negotiate a similarly ambivalent relationship to Watson. Advertising historian Russell Johnston observes that “the foremost Canadian writer on the subject … Bertram Brooker took great pleasure in lampooning Watson’s adventures in advertising.”126 Brooker’s short story “Mrs. Legion’s Affection” recounts the collapse of a New York advertising agency after its bid to locate the living embodiment of “the perfect average of American womanhood” comically misfires.127 Brooker’s generic female consumer is a satirical personification of the contemporary reality that, in the words of Elspeth Brown, “as the purchasers of most products, women were the advertisers’ target audience.”128 At the same time, “Mrs. Legion’s Affection” travesties the democratic “average” idealized by Whitman and vaunted by Brooker’s own advertising writings.129 But even as Brooker proposed an aesthetic alternative to the mechanistic models and quantitative techniques associated with Watson, which he dubbed “humanics,”130 a number of his own writings and graphic designs nonetheless participated in the same proto-informatic, statistical project. Indeed, the streamlined bodies that populate Brooker’s semiabstract canvases of the mid-1920s such as Green Movement can be read, in part, as responding to Watson’s drive to bring demographically “average” subjects into representation for retailers.131 As Watson biographer

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Kerry W. Buckley notes, Watson’s behaviourist reforms were, from the start, bound up with commercial ambitions. Beginning around 1916, Watson worked as a consultant to industry, developing performance and personnel tests for corporate clients, and eventually also for the military following the United States’ entry into the First World War in 1917. Following a sexual misconduct scandal that resulted in his departure from Johns Hopkins University, in December 1920 Watson joined the New York advertising firm of J. Walter Thompson, where he was promoted to vice-president in 1924. Watson’s prior studies of conditioned reflexes in animals and infants, based on the research of Pavlov and Bechterev, would prove invaluable to J. Walter Thompson’s efforts to transform an emerging national market into a “society of consumers” by reinforcing the non-rational impulses of buyers.132 In Buckley’s words, “marketing of goods depended [in Watson’s view] not upon an appeal to reason but upon the stimulation of desire.”133 In tension with this non-rational paradigm, Watson’s tenure at J. Walter Thompson was defined by an intensification of demographic techniques pioneered by contemporaries such as Paul Cherrington, an early proponent of market research. Jackson Lears observes that “as the advertising business became more professional, its effort to mold the daily lives of millions was increasingly based on statistics. By the 1920s, market research was being hailed as a major achievement of the national advertising agencies.”134 Market surveys and quantitative studies of consumption patterns fed Watson’s behaviourist project of conditioning consumer reflexes through stimuli calculated to elicit predictable responses. Watson simultaneously promoted tests for marketing purposes originally developed in a laboratory context for assessing personnel and performance as part of a neo-Taylorist program of organizational reform aimed at maximizing efficiency. Though skeptical of behaviourist psychology, Brooker nonetheless experimented with quantitative techniques of linguistic analysis that recall the laboratory experiments carried out by Watson and associationist peers as well as the satirical language games deployed by Lewis to critique them. In a 1926 article for Printers’ Ink, Brooker proposed a system for rating the “use-frequency” of words developed by Columbia University professor of educational psychology Edward L. Thorndike in The Teacher’s Word Book (1921).135 A far cry from “the magical power of words to move human feelings” championed by Brooker in reaction to a rising tide of managerial rhetoric, and quoted by Lears (like a number of other advertising historians, without thereby recognizing Brooker as the authorial source of the pseudonymous pronouncement),136 Thorndike’s book is an alphabetical listing of the 10,000 most frequently occurring

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words in the English language; the product of an analysis of more than 4.5 million sampled words. Recalling the personnel tests devised by Watson, Brooker repurposes Thorndike’s tabulation as “a language test for advertising purposes.”137 He proceeds to perform a comparative analysis of Thorndike’s data against his own custom list of “100 thin words,”138 a catalogue of marketing superlatives and jargon published in an earlier feature for Printers’ Ink. In contrast to such “advertisingese,” as he terms it, Brooker advocates a proto-algorithmic combinatorics characterized by “the use of words, common in themselves, but arranged in unfamiliar combinations, so that their novelty possesses an edge which penetrates the mind.”139 This statistical methodology identifies Brooker as an important precursor of what Antoinette Rouvroy and Thomas Berns have characterized as the “generalized digital behaviourism” fuelling contemporary techniques of data-mining.140 In a counterintuitive leap, Brooker seizes upon the quantitative rationale motivating Thorndike’s list as an endorsement of his own prior advocacy of the literary “masters of language” – a canon including Shakespeare and Chekhov – as model copywriters.141 Brooker then proceeds to undertake an analysis of three texts drawn from his own shelves, applying Thorndike’s rating system as a cross-reference: Katherine Mansfield’s story “The Daughters of the Late Colonel,” Dorothy Wordsworth’s “Journals,” and an unnamed poem by John Donne. From these texts, Brooker excerpts paragraph-long passages, which he then dissects through double-spacing and by assigning numeric values drawn from Thorndike’s book (Figure 1.7). His tabular presentation encourages a form of close reading anticipatory of the techniques of New Criticism. Joshua Gang links the emergence of close reading in literary studies to Watson’s critique of structuralist psychology, noting that “by the 1920s, behaviorism’s objections to structuralist introspection were circulating globally and appearing in a number of different literary circles.”142 Gang identifies the New Criticism developed by I.A. Richards – one of McLuhan’s Cambridge mentors – as a product of Watson’s reforms.143 Gang portrays Thorndike as Watson’s “ally” in the turn away from introspective psychology.144 Consistent with Gang’s behaviourist genealogy of close reading, Brooker amplifies the effect of suspended attention generated by Thorndike’s principles by calling for multiple readings of his chosen excerpts. Doing so, he argues, will facilitate an awareness of the fact that “sharpness of effect” in writing “is not due to uncommon words, but to common words in uncommon sequence.”145 The contradictory dynamics of Brooker’s informationalization of language are particularly striking in the case of the Bergsonian Mansfield,

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1.7 Bertram Brooker, excerpt from Katherine Mansfield’s story “The Daughters of the Late Colonel,” with word-frequency rankings, Printers’ Ink, 1926.

an oft-quoted voice in his subsequent McGraw-Hill textbooks, given “the sharp appeal  … to the mind through the senses” elaborated by her quoted text.146 Brooker’s informatic rendering of the one-time Rhythmist’s prose as a succession of quantitative values corresponding to Thorndike’s scale of statistical frequency underscores the ambivalent stakes of the artist-advertiser’s concurrent participation in multiple discourses: he speculates on the dangers implicit in rationalization, all the while actively exploring the redemptive possibilities of Bergsonian alternatives dependent on statistical analysis.147

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If Thorndike’s behaviourist methodology served as the immediate prototype for the computational poetics sketched by Brooker for the readership of Printers’ Ink, Vernon Lee was another unlikely innovator in “reading-by-numbers.”148 Benjamin Morgan identifies Lee’s “quantification of language” as a technique of literary analysis as an alternative (if disavowed) model for Richards’s program of close reading. Morgan argues that Lee’s “characterization of words as ‘data’” was not in conflict with her better-known explorations of the physiological aesthetics of empathy.149 Lee’s informationalization of the text was, rather, grounded in a recognition that “the body [is] a site of linguistic meaning,” which complicates the mind/body dualism reinforced by the cognitive and formalist bias maintained by Richards and other New Critics.150 Lee’s fusion of somatic and quantitative modes of aesthetic analysis would have offered Brooker a working model for his own eroticized but disturbingly fragmented nudes: his geometrical decomposition of naked flesh recalls the dissection of language performed by Lee’s quantitative techniques of close reading. Morgan’s revised genealogy recontextualizes Brooker’s fusion of statistical and vitalist perspectives within a counter-tradition constituted by what Robert Michael Brain has termed “physiological formalisms.”151 In turn, Brooker’s Lee-inspired fusion of computational and physiological approaches to textual analysis emerges from this reassessment as an overlooked precedent for McLuhan’s simultaneously somatic and informatic reworking of New Critical methodologies conventionally traced to his Cambridge training with Richards and F.R. Leavis.

Psychophysics Lee’s “data-based” aesthetics are traceable to the quantification of physiological response performed by nineteenth-century psychophysicists.152 Inaugurated by the experimental psychologist Gustav Fechner, psychophysics built upon the earlier efforts of Ernst Heinrich Weber to establish “the smallest discernible distinction” between any two stimuli.153 Positing a parallelism between mental and physical events, Fechner’s psychophysics quantified stimulus/response ratios as a logarithmic progression from which psychological states of intensity could be inferred.154 The resulting Weber–Fechner law offered a mathematical description of perception that seemed to promise a fully quantitative, but non-deterministic, psychology.155 In effect, psychophysics transformed the “mind” described by introspective psychology into what media theorist Friedrich Kittler would later term a “psychic information

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system,” in which the interpretation of mental events is reduced to an inscription of asymbolic data.156 Fechner’s institution of “measurable units of sensation” based on the thresholds of perception determined by Weber supported the emergence of attention as a core problematic of scientific discourses and everyday experience under capitalist modernity. Crary has demonstrated that attention became “the fundamental condition of [psychological] knowledge” under the psychophysical regime initiated by Fechner.157 The medico-scientific discourses of attention excavated by Crary were equally integral to the earliest academic literature on advertising, which defined its purpose as – in the influential words of psychologist and marketing theorist Walter Dill Scott – “to attract attention.”158 Echoing the Second Law of Thermodynamics, Scott described attention as a finite and easily depleted resource: “Simple objects can not [sic] hold our attention for more than 3 or 4 seconds,” he claimed.159 Attention was also characterized as having a “focus and [a] margin.”160 Drawing on laboratory experiments, Scott placed equal emphasis on the potential suggestibility of objects appearing in the margins of the visual field as on the attention-grabbing properties of those appearing at its centre. Scott’s treatment of marginal perception as a legitimate object of scientific inquiry anticipates Zabet Patterson’s theorization of the “peripheral vision” generated by computational visualization systems today.161 Brooker’s neo-vitalist advertising writings self-consciously intervened in this psychophysical construction of an attentive subject and a correspondingly attentive consumer. “Advertising is growing less and less mysterious,” he wrote in Marketing in 1923. “There is a steadily increasing recognition of advertising as a force subject to demonstrable laws. Through years of experiment certain broad fundamentals of advertising practice have been established.”162 As this passage indicates, Brooker not only acknowledged but also actively embraced the “eye-trapping” and “attention-compelling” devices advocated by his associationist rivals, at least within such limited contexts as “small-space copy.”163 As Brooker clarifies in another text, his aesthetically motivated approach to marketing accepted the imperative of “arrest[ing] attention” for media that operate through a “metaphorical” substitution of one thing for another, but he set out to complement this associationist spatial logic with a Bergsonian emphasis on the auditory as what he dubbed “a memory-moulder.”164 In reality, the relationship between the spatial drive behind psychophysical constructions of attention and Brooker’s own Bergsonian conception of memory was less oppositional than his Marketing texts frequently imply. Although Bergson’s Time and Free Will attacks the

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psychophysical quantification of interior states, with special emphasis on the work of Fechner, Alexandra Hui emphasizes that “psychophysics as framed by Fechner was an aesthetic project from its very origin.”165 Emanating from a monist cosmology that he termed “panpsychism,”166 Fechner’s psychophysics was in fact a far cry from the “encroachment of scientific thought into the recesses of the soul” that the early Bergson of Time and Free Will perceived it to be.167 Fechner’s project is more accurately characterized as a form of “non-reductive materialism” that attempted to fuse the Romantic idealism of Naturphilosophie with logical empiricism.168 Embracing a non-dual model of body and mind anticipatory of Bergson’s own meditations on the mutual implication of matter and memory, Fechner’s research encompassed a range of aesthetic applications culminating in his 1876 book Vorschule der Aesthetik (Introduction to Aesthetics).169 The latter text outlined the project of an “experimental aesthetics ‘from below,’” whose clinical approach to aesthetic problems cleared a path for the quantitative studies of Lee and other exponents of physiological aesthetics subsequently embraced by the Bergsonian Brooker.170 Hui’s excavation of continuities between nineteenth-century laboratory studies of hearing and contemporaneous developments in musical composition, criticism, and theory undermines any easy distinction between attention and the psychophysical quantification of sensation that is the object of Bergson’s early critique and his own melodic, but equally attentive, alternative.171 Similarly, Kittler argues that the paradigm shift effected by psychophysics is legible in what he terms the “discourse network of 1900” inscribed by literary techniques of automatic writing.172 The latter were stimulated by the laboratory experiments of psychophysicists including Hugo Münsterberg  – in which Gertrude Stein notably participated as a student at Harvard – even as stream-of-consciousness writing was enthusiastically received in creative and critical contexts saturated by Bergsonian aesthetics.173 Kittler’s description of modernist literary practices as articulating an “aesthetics of applied physiology” is consistent with Hui’s analysis of contemporaneous musical forms as well as the physiological aesthetics articulated by Vernon Lee.174 Given the mixed genealogies of Bergson’s auditory paradigm and Lee’s quantitative aesthetics – both of which informed Brooker’s critical advertising practice – it is unsurprising to discover the Canadian artistadvertiser navigating the ambivalent terrain explored by “A Rating System for Words in Advertising Copy,” introduced earlier. Brooker’s experimentation with methods for quantifying the contents of perception reminiscent of Fechner’s psychophysics should not be mistaken for

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1.8 Harry L. Hollingworth, “Relative Attention Value of 50 Geometrical Forms,” from Advertising and Selling, 1920.

an unknowing contradiction of his Bergsonian critique of hegemonic advertising. Rather, these investigations bring to light the equivocal dynamics of contemporary debates on quantitative and vitalist epistemologies, whose stakes, as articulated by the apparent rivals Fechner and Bergson, were ultimately deeply interdependent. It is predictable, then, that we should find Brooker citing experimental psychologists, including the psychophysicist Münsterberg and the associationist advertising psychologist Harry L. Hollingworth, alongside Bergson and Bergsonian modernists like Mansfield.175 Ultimately, Hollingworth’s visual ranking of the “relative attention value of 50 geometrical forms” (Figure 1.8) in his 1920 advertising textbook Advertising and Selling – a

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scale of values that would have been determined in a laboratory context utilizing a tachistoscope – is not far removed from the epistemological assumptions informing Brooker’s quantitative analysis of Mansfield’s prose, even as the latter was part and parcel of a Bergsonian corrective to the prevailing, psychophysically inspired behaviourist paradigm exemplified by Hollingworth.176 Brooker would revisit the computational aesthetic of his innovative experiment in statistical textual analysis for Printers’ Ink in a series of graphic designs promoting regional newspapers published in Marketing between 1928 and 1930. Designs for The Family Herald and Weekly Star, The Halifax Herald, and The Saskatoon Star Phoenix visualize circulation gains addressed to potential advertisers as “pictorial statistics”  – film scholar Michael Cowan’s term for a modernist precursor to contemporary infographics.177 It is intriguing to consider the possibility that these early contributions to what we would now recognize as the field of “info-aesthetics” may have cleared a path for Harold Innis’s exploration of data visualization as a mode of “information compression.”178 Certainly, Brooker’s dynamic but instantly legible representations of data sets for Canada’s premier marketing journal exemplified the type of “extant formalisms from neighbouring disciplines” that the economist believed the social sciences should adopt to model increasingly complex social phenomena, according to John Bonnett.179 The same drive to quantification behind Brooker’s earlier application of Thorndike’s rating system is manifest in more visually adventurous form in a 1928 advertisement for Reliance Engravers. The ad’s punning headline, “Figure  Drawing” (Figure  1.9), is set against a backdrop of abstracted digits. In turn, the copy draws parallels between art and finance, suggestively hinting at the entanglement of physiological aesthetics and psychophysics propelling Brooker’s transdisciplinary explorations: “Many commercial artists make drawings of the figure; but many more are forced to make drawings to a figure.”180 McLuhan would reprise this eroticized view of the statistical curves of information visualization in The Mechanical Bride, speculating that “there is much more thrill value in Professor Kinsey’s abstract charts or the neutral itch-graph of Audience Research, Inc. than in the contours of the lubricious chick who says she goes ga-ga when Big Barnswell strolls by.”181 Brooker’s rhetorical embodiment of number simultaneously materializes Bergson’s discourse on qualitative multiplicity as an alternative to conventional mathematics based on the spatial distribution of discrete magnitudes. The chart-like contours of the multicolour “tubular forms” that dominate Brooker’s contemporaneous masterpiece Sounds Assembling (1928) (Figure 1.10) notably recall the info-graphics deployed by market

1.9 Reliance Engravers (Bertram Brooker, design and copy), “Figure Drawing,” Marketing, 1928. Advertisement.

1.10 Bertram Brooker, Sounds Assembling, 1928. Oil on canvas, 112.3 × 91.7 cm. Collection of the Winnipeg Art Gallery, L-80. Photographer: Ernest Mayer, courtesy of the Winnipeg Art Gallery.

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researchers and advertising psychologists.182 The painting’s restricted vocabulary of “geometric shapes” resembles, moreover, Hollingworth’s previously mentioned inventory of attention-compelling figures (“‘star,’ ‘crescent,’ ‘crown,’ etc.”).183 Brooker had explored the “attentioncompelling effect” of “‘wrong’ shapes” (“a circle, a star, a zig-zag”) in a 1923 Marketing article redolent of Hollingworth’s psychophysical methodology, thereby situating the Canadian’s early abstractions squarely within the same psychotechnical field as the laboratory investigations conducted by the American advertising psychologist.184 In effect, Sounds Assembling translates Brooker’s project of quantifying the attention-value of words, elaborated in the pages of Printers’ Ink in dialogue with Thorndike’s textual behaviourism, into a graphic schedule of forms objectifying acts of attention. As such, Sounds Assembling brings into visibility the nascent outlines of the contemporary attention economy subsequently theorized by economist Herbert A. Simon, while also anticipating the information aesthetics championed by Abraham Moles (discussed in Chapter 4) and contemporaries such as Max Bense.185 Charts that Brooker developed to map the interrelation of characters and plot elements in his unfinished play Jevon (Figure 1.11) constitute another previously overlooked prototype for the diagrammatic quality of Sounds Assembling. “More than ever I feel the need of charts to get balance of plot and character interest,” Brooker writes in a note, “and also what will be practically stage settings of the principal scenes.”186 In keeping with David Joselit’s characterization of the metaphorical diagrams of Dada artists like Francis Picabia as materializing a “model of polymorphous connectivity between discrete elements,” Brooker’s charts for Jevon prepare the way for the diagrammatic zigzags and star forms that populate Sounds Assembling,187 suggesting the intriguing possibility that this canvas may encode a latent narrative content. Brooker’s reduction of the dramatis personae of Jevon to data points in the relational abstraction of Sounds Assembling foreshadows the conditions of algorithmic governmentality that dominate contemporary social relations, which, as Rouvroy and Berns describe, increasingly consist of “correlations” between data mined from the digital footprints left by online consumers.188 Bergson’s description of the virtual “motor diagram” sketched by the motile subject in preparation for action was likely an additional inspiration for the zigzagging lines of this canvas.189 In its merger of the market researcher’s graph with Bergson’s kinaesthetic descriptions of virtual space, Sounds Assembling foreshadows McLuhan’s likening, in The Mechanical Bride, of the “chart-image” of listener habits generated by the Nielsen Audimeter to “cubist painting.”190 The implied motility of

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1.11 Bertram Brooker, “Chart” for Jevon, 1925. Courtesy University of Manitoba Archives and Special Collections, Bertram Brooker fonds, box 3, folder 1.

Brooker’s lattice of tubular forms in Sounds Assembling also foreshadows the mobile agency attributed to the ubiquitous figures of the network and networker under computational capitalism.191

Computing the Nation In virtual lockstep with Watson’s innovations at J. Walter Thompson in New York – innovations that were quickly adopted by the company’s Toronto office – Brooker explored the question of “how the census can help us sell” in the pages of Marketing magazine beginning in 1921.192 He even claimed credit for a significant revision to a statistical series produced by the Dominion Bureau of Statistics, which he purportedly proposed to the Dominion Statistician and Controller of Census R.H. Coats during a 1921 interview published by the trade paper.193 Brooker was intrigued by the possibility that statistics could define “a composite character, an average consumer.”194 At the same time, his writings disclose an atypical preoccupation with questions of contingency. “Certainly, people are eccentric, but even their idiosyncrasies are discoverable and measurable,” he proposed in 1925.195 Brooker’s most extended discussion of statistical methodologies is found in the 1924 article “A Statistical

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Picture of the Average Canadian Consumer.” While advocating the use of census data in particular, Brooker attends to the difficulties involved in “isolating and pinning down for investigation the normal person.”196 For instance, Brooker asks, “How is it possible to average the two sexes?”197 Innovative in the Canadian context, Brooker’s writings on statistical approaches to marketing problems thus attempted to articulate a via media between the extremes of Watsonian behaviourism and his own advocacy of “the methods of the novelist,” the latter mostly published under the pseudonym Richard Surrey.198 The advantages of this balanced approach are evident in the late Marketing text “Here Lies John Mass, Average Man” (1930), in which Brooker elaborates an astonishingly early version of niche marketing that repurposes Bergson’s metaphysics of multiplicity as an ontology of market segmentation.199 Rejecting the crude audience profiles all too often generated by market researchers, Brooker’s proposal that “mass appeal is splitting up because the mass itself is splitting up” reveals an acute awareness of “the multitude of overlapping audiences for different goods and services” that, according to Marchand, eluded so many contemporaries.200 Brooker’s nuanced approach to statistics hinges on a creative misreading of contemporary representations of “class” advertising. Reprising the Bergsonian rhetoric of creative evolution deployed by his 1926 article “Are statistics More Convincing Than Words or Pictures?,” Brooker proposes that “advertising, like everything else, is subject to the laws of evolution.”201 Recalling his earlier reworking of Bergson’s cone of memory to visualize factors that contribute to an effective appeal, Brooker now views the product of advertising’s ongoing evolution to be increasingly stratified “sections into which the mass can be divided.”202 “The desires and demands of the differentiated public grows [sic] yearly more diverse and idiosyncratic,” he writes. “Classes cut across classes. Buying habits within any one class are less and less dependable.”203 Brooker’s speculations in this text foreshadow contemporary economies of “mass customization” that have superseded Fordist production and consumption patterns under computational capitalism.204 The techniques of textual analysis explored by Brooker’s advertising writings, which anticipate contemporary methods of data-mining, are revealing symptoms of a then still emergent regime of governmentality aimed at bringing a newly statistical image of population into representation and under management. As an addition to the arsenal of “biopolitical” techniques calculated, in Foucault’s words, “to ensure, sustain, and multiply life,” Ian Hacking has argued that statistics constitute an intricate “part of the technology of power in a modern state.”205 In their conjugation of advertising media, statistical instruments, and

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collective bodies, Brooker’s marketing writings suggest parallels with the roughly contemporaneous “commissioned films” by the German avantgarde filmmaker Walter Ruttmann.206 Michael Cowan posits that the techniques of montage deployed by Ruttmann’s advertising films of the Weimar period “emulate[d] what statisticians had long termed the ‘law of large numbers,’ the idea that ‘social facts’ can only be visualized by comparing numerous individual instances.”207 Recalling the earlier composite images of sample populations generated by statisticians including Francis Galton and Adolphe Quetelet, the “statistical gaze” mobilized by Ruttmann’s commercial films accentuated regularity and sameness over difference and potential conflict.208 A similar logic of calculation is legible in the streamlined contours of the figures populating Brooker’s semi-abstract canvases of the mid-1920s. Paradigmatically, the alien chorus line of Green Movement recalls Brooker’s discussion of “identical women” consumers in a 1926 article for Marketing.209 In effect, Brooker’s idealized bodies enact a “statistical epistemology” comparable to that dramatized by Ruttmann’s commissioned films, one traceable, in Brooker’s case, to his meditations on the unique challenges associated with bringing an “average Canadian consumer” into representation.210 Paralleling Ruttmann’s cross-sectional use of montage “to superimpose the phenomena of the world in such a way that their contingent aspects cancel each other out,” Brooker’s composite subjects draw attention to statistical instruments such as the market survey as biopolitical techniques for “the administration of collective bodies.”211 The counter-hegemonic elements of Bergsonian philosophy that fuelled Brooker’s sophisticated intervention within the statistical forms of governmentality pioneered by J. Walter Thompson situate his writings and visual art within a genealogy of informational culture that comprehends the statistical patterns of a digital economy as fully compatible with the resistant dynamics of Bergsonian (and, subsequently, Deleuzian) virtuality.212 The labile contours of Bergsonian virtuality supersede the linear grid of Cartesian space in the “statistical optics” screened by the collective physiognomy of Brooker’s early semi-abstract canvases.213 At the same time, Brooker’s composite bodies anticipate the “statistical doubles” constructed through automated forms of data collection and analysis based on the online behaviours of consumers, which are rapidly superseding the private identities of individuals under the contemporary regime of algorithmic governmentality.214 Michael Cowan’s incisive reading of Walter Ruttmann’s “public hygiene” films dating from the final years of the Weimar period, which “conceive of the ‘population’ in national terms,” suggests a new path

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of approach to the entanglement of advertising, Bergsonian ontology, and statistics found in Brooker’s contemporaneous art and writings as articulating a biopolitical discourse on nationhood.215 Unlike the films produced under the National Socialist regime that followed, Ruttmann’s Weimar hygiene films “still addresse[d] its viewers as individuals.”216 A similar tension between individual and collective subjectivity animates Brooker’s explicitly nationalist framing of his ideal audience as “the average Canadian consumer.”217 Brooker’s advocacy of census data as a valuable source of information about this perennially elusive entity coloured his articles addressed to American peers on “selling conditions” in Canada, a theme echoed by other Marketing contributors in a string of texts on “Selling Canada” that appeared in the magazine’s pages throughout the 1920s.218 Taken together, these articles present an image of nationhood whose claims to being distinctively Canadian are rooted in the marketer’s statistical toolbox promoted by Brooker. Unlike the increasingly monolithic image of German identity projected by Ruttmann’s films, Brooker’s statistical tactics give shape to a national identity deeply in-formed by Bergsonian multiplicity. Contrary to Sherrill Grace’s claim that Brooker’s “ideal of Unity” obscured “the essential diversity of Canadian culture,” his writings in fact championed a combined internationalism and regionalism, paying special heed to linguistic difference and the distinct status of Quebec.219 “There can hardly be a Canadian art – a homogeneous thing,” he wrote. “And nobody really wants it. They simply want people living in various parts of Canada to react to their own environment. This would produce art native to certain sections of the country – and would be Canadian in the sense that it could not have been done anywhere else – but not Canadian in any uniform sense.”220 This sensitivity to the pluralistic character of Canadian identity as it emerges from statistical sources, including census data, was amplified in annual special features devoted to the Quebec market published by Marketing during Brooker’s tenure as editor. The latter incorporated innovative visualizations of demographic data, including maps, graphs, and tables, that may have shaped Innis’s contemporaneous “marginal” analyses of Canadian history and identity. If Ruttmann’s hygiene films were socially motivated and reformist in aim, a more nakedly capitalistic logic emerges from Brooker’s statistical representation of consumers in a prototypical example of “class” advertising that he designed for The Globe newspaper (Figure  1.12). Under the punning headline “Citizens of No Mean City,” the copy for this 1928 ad mobilizes demographic data to draw a “clear dividing line between above-the-average and below-the-average families” in the province of Ontario.221 Consistent with the widespread claims by

1.12 The Globe (Bertram Brooker, design and copy), “Citizens of No Mean City,” Marketing, 1928. Advertisement.

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media to be patronizing “a ‘quality’ audience” in this period, The Globe’s representation of its ideal readership as comprising “Ontario’s first 100,000 families” adheres to the “bifurcation of the nation’s consumers” into class and mass audiences noted by Roland Marchand in his study of contemporaneous American advertising.222 But Brooker’s copy stands apart from the techniques of class appeal discussed by Marchand, which frequently centred on the magnetic pull of a particular city. Instead, Brooker deploys demographic rhetoric to trouble the very premise that a single urban centre could coincide with the paper’s ideal market. “Globe readers do not live in a single city,” the ad insists. “If they did, you would have a city that has been the dream of economists for centuries, a city of prosperous, contented people.”223 Brooker here seizes on the potential for statistics to bring into visibility a utopian, and specifically Bergsonian, population irreducible to conventional spatial thinking, thereby conjuring an imagined and, indeed, properly virtual metropole – one dispersed across the province of Ontario and only accessible with recourse to the marketer’s statistical panoply. The biopolitical reduction of a target population to a statistical pattern performed by this ad looks forward to Marshall McLuhan’s subsequent, cybernetic representations of the “behavior patterns” of consumer society in early writings that prepared a path for the publication of his first monograph, The Mechanical Bride.224 The latter text echoes Brooker’s statistical vocabulary in the 1928 Globe ad in its analysis of how market researchers convert consumer populations – and citizens  – into “a number.”225 At the same time, The Mechanical Bride similarly sketches the outlines of a virtual metropole, or “world as one city,” in the process of being constituted by news media.226 The angular geometry of the abstract patterns flanking Brooker’s copy for The Globe ad  – drawn in the artist-advertiser’s distinctive hand – presents a striking visualization of the statistical logic informing the copy, which simultaneously invokes the emergent properties of Bergsonian virtuality as well as the symmetry of fourth-dimensional spatial models associated with figures like the Rochester-based architect Claude Bragdon, to whom Brooker makes reference in his notes for his unfinished play, Jevon.227 Significantly, these emblems of biopolitical rationality would have represented many Canadian readers’ first exposure to non-objective art – the earliest exhibitions of abstraction in Canada having been mounted but the year previously: the Art Gallery of Toronto’s presentation of the Société Anonyme, and Brooker’s own solo showing at the Arts and Letters Club in Toronto.228

2

McLuhan’s Age of Information The world is basically one very big ball of information.1

The Vancouver-based conceptual enterprise N.E. Thing Co. Ltd (NETCO) experimented with collective ways of being to cope with the novel stresses of an information society. The posthuman ontology of its corporate frame looked beyond the structuralist horizon explored by Anglo-American peers, setting the stage for more recent digital materialisms. NETCO proposed a different model, one that proceeded from the premise that we do not know what the corporation can do.2 Marking a significant departure from the critique of domination – or potestas, to employ the Spinozist argot of European contemporaries – undertaken by practitioners of ideology critique, the company’s resistant practice of everyday life articulated a micropolitics animated by a recognition of the potentia immanent in communication channels.3 Potentia emerges from this re-examination of its networked platform as a function of the corporate subject’s capacity to exercise informatic freedom of choice. The critical company’s troubled reception speaks to unresolved tensions within its utopian ambitions that demand renewed scrutiny in light of contemporary debates about gender, embodiment and difference under techno-capitalism. NETCO’s liberationist, but non-revolutionary business plan tests persistent assumptions about 1960s art and politics as primarily, if not exclusively, unfolding representational debates and strategies. The company’s failures, as much as its achievements, are enduring object lessons in the still unresolved legacies of that storied decade of disruptive change. Created by Iain Baxter in 1966 as an “umbrella” for the production of diverse bodies of work,4 the N.E. Baxter Thing Co. was re-branded

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in 1967 as the registered name N.E. Thing Co., and subsequently incorporated under the British Columbia Companies Act in January 1969, with the artist’s then wife, Ingrid Baxter (known as Elaine Baxter prior to the spring of 1971), initially acting as vice-president and, after July 1970, as co-president.5 With legal formalization, the company’s corporate internal decision (CID) structure superseded the metaphysical faculties of the neo-Kantian subject interpellated by formalist criticism. In his influential 1979 description of corporate ontology, Peter A. French proposed that “a Corporation’s Internal Decision Structure (its CID Structure) is the requisite redescription device that licenses the predication of corporate intentionality.”6 The resulting delegation of responsibilities previously vested in the personhood of the individual creator authorized the constitution of the company’s architecture of specialized “Departments” (ACT, ART, COP, etc.) and “subsidiaries” (ICOME, Sensinfodyn (Sensitivity Information Dynamics), SIDCO or Sydco and the Arrow Tent and Awning Company).7 NETCO thereby coalesced as an organizational “group subject” akin to IBM and other corporate entities.8 This reconfiguration of the author function paralleled the contemporaneous death of the author pronounced by European structuralist and post-structuralist thinkers, but registered the entry of the “artificial person” of the corporation within the established channels of art as a new set of responsibility relationships.9 The relationality materialized by NETCO’s organizational apparatus foreshadowed the forms of networked agency more recently theorized by Bruno Latour, who proposes that “delegation” effects a dedifferentiation between human and non-human agents.10 As French explained, When operative and properly activated, the CID Structure accomplishes a subordination and synthesis of the intentions and acts of various biological persons into a corporate decision. When viewed in another way, as already suggested, the CID Structure licenses the descriptive transformation of events, seen under another aspect as the acts of biological persons (those who occupy various stations on the organizational chart), to corporate acts by exposing the corporate character of those events.11 An influential prototype for NETCO’s experiments in corporate delegation would have been what Richard Cavell has termed McLuhan’s “de-authoriz[ation]” of his own collaboratively-written texts.12 In addition to the executive positions filled by Iain and Ingrid Baxter, NETCO’s corporate hierarchy included director of information Brian Dyson

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and director of special projects Paul Woodrow.13 Though not recognized with formal titles, other participants in the company included Duane Lunden, an early collaborator of Jeff Wall and Ian Wallace. Notwithstanding the significant, albeit still largely misunderstood, administrative gains achieved by Ingrid Baxter through the company’s progressive restructuring, her contested role in the corporation points to persistent asymmetries in power which continue to shadow the reception of NETCO’s prescient exercise in relational subjectivity. I explore these issues in greater detail in the Coda. Despite adopting an informatic vocabulary to describe its diversified activities and products, the company’s tactics were paradoxically pitted against the digital in ways that frequently anticipate more recent projects of resistance targeting what Alain Badiou terms the contemporary “empire of number.”14 NETCO’s micropolitical “probings of the why and how of visual things and their combinations,” as one early document read, were “efforts to discover distinct properties or effects and the means of putting them into operation.”15 This operational approach to media parallels Elena Lamberti’s description of McLuhan’s interest in the “intrinsic operational aspects [of media], their function.”16 The company’s experiments with Sensitivity Information involved “working directly with the earth and natural surroundings.”17 This non-technological and, indeed, perplexingly elemental conceptualization of information cleared a path for, and acquires renewed relevance in light of, what Lane Relyea terms “an organizational shift” associated with contemporary networked forms; a “managerial imaginary” that he carefully distinguishes from any particular medium or technology.18 NETCO’s innovative business ontology was, in part, an attempt to materialize McLuhan’s vision of “the ultimate harmony of all being” catalyzed by what Jacques Rancière would subsequently term the new “distribution of the sensible” associated with contemporary social transformations; in particular, by the transition from a manufacturing- to an information-based economy in the decades following the Second World War.19 The corporation emerges as a privileged site in McLuhan’s ontological account of these shifts, its decentralizing maneuvers under post-Fordism being viewed by the media thinker as functionally homologous to the decentering experienced by the subject as its nervous system is externalized and artificially “extended” by information media.20 In retrospect, McLuhan’s corporate redefinition of subjectivity can be recognized as a parallel manifestation of the historic transition noted by Orit Halpern, “from organizing data to producing organizations,” a shift forcefully dramatized by designers Charles and Ray Eames through

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their collaboration with IBM on the multi-screen “Information Machine” debuted at the 1964 New York World’s Fair, the same year that saw the publication of Understanding Media.21 In this first of two chapters devoted to NETCO, the Company’s art of Sensitivity Information will serve as a lens through which McLuhan’s speculations on the ontological transformations wrought by information will be revisited by means of the media analyst’s own methodology of reading aesthetic texts for insights into broader technological and epistemic transformations. NETCO’s alternately celebratory and satirical renderings of McLuhan’s percepts suggest a number of new approaches to the Toronto School thinker’s still misunderstood methodology and insights.

McLuhan’s Digital Materialism McLuhan’s writings seized upon the convergent potential of emergent information technologies to imagine a computational reconstruction of the “sensorium” theorized by the medieval Catholic theologian Thomas Aquinas as a multisensorial faculty of cognition, or sensus communis.22 Computational media’s capacity to support the formation of what German media thinker Friedrich Kittler would subsequently term a “complete media system” held distinctly ontological meanings for the Toronto School thinker.23 “By surpassing writing,” he speculated in the 1954 self-published pamphlet Counterblast, “we have regained our WHOLENESS.”24 McLuhan’s convergent conceptualization of information recalls the earlier synaesthetic media manoeuvres of the monist Brooker, analyzed in the previous chapter. By dispersing discrete sensory data across a shared surface – or, perhaps more accurately, by compressing them into a common channel – McLuhan’s meditations on information confirm the subterranean affinities with the univocal ontology of Duns Scotus, Aquinas’s near-contemporary and rival, noted by McLuhan’s one-time graduate student Donald Theall: Early on in his work he appears to have abandoned what he once considered to be the Thomistic balance of Aquinas, although apparently he never overtly recognized that he did so, for by following the modernists, particularly Joyce, he moved towards the monism of Scotus while believing, or at least asserting, that he was dedicated to the authorized neo-scholasticism of Aquinas.25 This mixed pedigree highlights competing trajectories within McLuhan’s discourse on information; that discourse articulates an unlikely “postdigital” world view while retaining traces of a disavowed dialectic,

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or, to employ Alexander Galloway’s recent terminology, “digitality.”26 Ironically, this dialectic can be traced to the very “duncical” tendencies satirized by McLuhan in his critique of conventional approaches to literacy and pedagogy. The Dunciad (1728–43), Alexander Pope’s Augustan satire of the unintended consequences of dialectical methods and print media for learning and the arts, whose title references Scotus and the muchmaligned teaching techniques promoted by his followers, is a central reference for McLuhan’s critique in The Gutenberg Galaxy of the “translation or reduction of diverse modes into a single mode of homogenized things” effected by the printing press. That process, he alleges, is recapitulated by contemporary technologies of digital computation.27 Yet the media thinker’s parallel commentary on the combinatory properties of information media is noticeably more ambivalent than Pope’s parody. In fact, McLuhan’s deliberately paradoxical pronouncements – his puzzling aphorisms, or “probes” – can be recognized as operating through a mode of strategic dualism reminiscent of Scotist and – as will become clear below – Stoic epistemologies.28 The constitutive bipolarity of Scotism manifests the irresolvable tensions obtaining between commonality and particularity in a univocal ontology, in which “being could be conceived as univocally common to God and creatures.”29 In the epistemology of Aquinas, by contrast, divinity cannot be accessed directly, but can only be known by means of analogy. In The Logic of Sense (1969), Gilles Deleuze identifies Stoic dialectics as the expression of a related dualistic cosmology: [The] Stoics used the paradox in a completely new manner – both as an instrument for the analysis of language and as a means of synthesizing events. Dialectics is precisely this science of incorporeal events as they are expressed in propositions, and of the connections between events as they are expressed in relations between propositions.30 In his perceptive study of his former teacher, Theall proposed that McLuhan’s writings deploy precisely such a Stoic dialectics of paradoxical “humour”:31 What McLuhan seems to require is some kind of paradoxical logic akin to that implicit in the way in which Hugh Kenner (one of McLuhan’s literary disciples) has suggested the Stoic Comedians (Flaubert, Joyce, Beckett) are supposed to have created their literary structures.32

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The art of “dynamic contrast” practised by Stoic dialecticians suggests an alternative, albeit complementary, genealogy to the Bergsonian influence on the Toronto School thinker’s dualistic apparatus, and NETCO’s comic reworking thereof, excavated by Kenneth Allan.33 McLuhan’s “binomial” renderings of an information environment repurposed this dialectic inheritance to imagine a neo-Stoic physis that Theall aptly termed “neo-Pythagorean digitalism.”34 A similarly materialist framework emerges from Iain Baxter’s visionary comments on an emergent “information ecology” in an August 1970 radio interview with KPFA-FM host Charles Amirkhanian: And some of our ideas are that you really got to look at information as a natural resource, like coal, or oil, or water, or anything else. It’s not just an affectation, it’s an actual really fantastic resource. And what happens then, and we’ve talked about this a number of times now, it has to … there has to be an ecology of information happening. So you’re going to have what I’ve … we’re proposing an organization developing [sic] called Information Ecology. So the same approaches are being approached through environment as we did with information [sic]. So we’re into that whole area of advising people on these kinds of concerns and so forth. So we’re really a think tank.35 Correspondence in 1967 between Theall and Iain Baxter regarding an unrealized book project on McLuhan documents one conduit through which Baxter may have refined his univocal perspective on the information ecology of the Toronto School thinker.36 Baxter would later nominate Theall as the representative for “English” in NETCO’s pedagogical subsidiary ICOME.37 A binomial substrate of zeros and ones supplants the continuous variation of analogue materialisms in McLuhan’s prescient renderings of the information age in his sixties texts.38 Poised between the early exploration of rhetorical structures in his dissertation on Thomas Nashe and the neo-Baconian grammar of the posthumous The Laws of Media,39 McLuhan’s Report on Project in Understanding New Media (1960) initiates a misunderstood dialectic phase in his thought consistent with the digital elements later identified by Theall. This digitalism often assumes the form of strategic dualisms or polarities reminiscent of the chronically divided argumentation of Wyndham Lewis, another point of departure for the Toronto School thinker’s computational cosmology that partly accounts for his Stoicism.40 “McLuhan has a technique,” wrote Theall, “by which he continually compares and

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contrasts opposites  – a quasi-philosophical polarization of reality.”41 Relatedly, Glenn Willmott has argued that McLuhan’s thought was shaped by a modality of dialectic derived from theories of montage formulated by the Russian formalist filmmakers Vsevolod Pudovkin and Sergei Eisenstein.42 As McLuhan himself wrote in his cybernetically inflected Report on Project in Understanding New Media, such dualisms were always provisional and iterative: “Chiasmus is indispensable to understanding media since all information flow is feed-back – that is by its effects – operates simultaneously in opposite modes.”43 The N.E. Thing Co.’s renderings of information frequently seized upon, and drew attention to, the neglected antagonism between dialectic and rhetoric within the media thinker’s discourse on the information age. In keeping with McLuhan’s corporeal inscriptions of information, NETCO’s representations of Sensitivity Information were always grounded in the noisy channels of the senses. But lest the company be categorized alongside McLuhan as manifesting a conservative “Catholic modernism,” its appropriation of pornographic imagery in the 1976 artist’s book and exhibition catalogue Celebration of the Body underscores that its allusions to the Toronto School thinker’s neo-Thomist renderings of informatic “innervation” as a form of illumination were equal parts satire and homage.44 The tacit monism of McLuhan’s eschatological representations of an emergent information society as a return to a Stoic metaphysics fusing matter and sense identifies his media explorations as parallel, but independent, manifestations of materialist currents in contemporaneous Continental thought  – pre-eminently, the neo-Stoicism and, to a lesser extent, Epicureanism of the early Deleuze.45 Similarly, the affective and somatic values attributed to the “things of all kinds” aggregated by NETCO “researchers,” and archived utilizing the company’s informatic taxonomy, resonate with the univocal “logic of sensation” later formulated by the French post-structuralist to describe the painting of Francis Bacon as, in Paul Crowther’s summation, the “body’s striving to escape from itself.”46 Although they were developed independently, I will invoke the ontological writings of Deleuze to illuminate these misunderstood neo-Stoic and neo-Scotist dimensions of McLuhan’s thought, as well as NETCO’s creative reworking thereof.47 NETCO’s dialectic cosmology emerges with comic clarity from such projects as VSI Formula #5 (1968), the company’s contribution to the index card catalogue for the Lucy Lippard–curated exhibition 955,000, whose title referenced the then current population of Vancouver, where it was held. The work records a ludicrous exercise in McLuhanesque translation in which an analogue intervention in the Seymour River,

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located adjacent to the company’s suburban “headquarters” in North Vancouver and appropriately pronounced “See More,”48 is transcribed as a cryptic formula resembling the machine-readable code, and rational order of operations, of information science: MS × [(PE)   + (PW)   + (PF)    + (PS)  ] = VSI MS – MIRROR SURFACES P – POSITIONS E – EARTH W – WATER F – FOLIAGE S – SKY   } MIRROR REFLECTION DIRECTION  VSI – VISUAL SENSITIVITY INFORMATION49 Contrary to what one might expect of the consummately McLuhanite company, NETCO’s “analogical mirrors” here reflect neither the grammatical structure of the Logos50 nor the metaphorical operations of the Thomist sensorium. “The world” reflected by NETCO’s mirrored surfaces is, truly, “one very big ball of information.”51 But this immanent, informatic cosmos frustrates the ecstasy of communication promised by McLuhan in “The Media as Translators” chapter of Understanding Media. Rather than unconstrained translation across media (water, mirror, photograph, formula), the blank glare of NETCO’s mirrors satirically reflects the “dulness” that, Theall reminds us, was the “blurring of the senses resulting from an over-strong emphasis on the scholastic” in medieval educational theory shaped by Scotism.52 As such, NETCO’s “hydro projects” dramatize the univocal media unconscious of Simon Fraser University (SFU) chancellor Gordon Shrum’s hydro/electric vision for education in BC, discussed in the next chapter: the narcotizing and noisy discontents of reformist pedagogy at the dawn of the computational era.53 Explicitly rejecting the “narrow view” imposed by the analytical frameworks embraced by New York–based peers, NETCO insisted that “it is better to have confusion then anything will fit [sic].”54 Recalling Theall’s likening of McLuhan to the “town fool of Vancouver,” Kim Foikus, NETCO’s clowning served a serious purpose, namely to underscore the potential erasure of the “prickly uniqueness” disclosed by direct perception in a technological milieu.55 The company’s informatic renderings of a “dialectic nature” are thus revealed to be partly strategic in orientation: a contemporary praise of folly

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revelatory of the disavowed scholasticism implicit in McLuhan’s own critique of the “scholastic-Puritan roots of the modern technologist.”56 NETCO embraced the immanence of McLuhan’s neo-Stoic discourse on information to challenge the transcendent aspirations of Greenbergian formalism, whose peak influence was felt in the years immediately preceding the company’s emergence on the North American scene and coinciding with Iain Baxter’s MFA studies in painting at Washington State University. The punning propositions of NETCO’s celebrated button works  – axiomatically, “Art is all over”  – seized upon the dialectical insights generated by McLuhan’s aphorisms to advance a critique of neo-Kantian rationality. Its ACTs and ARTs are thus incorrectly framed as the witty exercise of neo-Kantian “judgment” proposed by Thierry de Duve.57 Unleashing the nonsensical energies latent in McLuhan’s idiosyncratically Zennist brand of dialectic, NETCO’s ACTs and ARTs – certified judgments “claiming” or “rejecting” everyday phenomena and pop-cultural icons alike – recall, rather, the Futurist “transreason” animating the Stoic wordplay of Deleuze.58 In the Canadian context, Wyndham Lewis served as a primary conduit for the dissemination of Futurist strategies of transvaluation. The Zen-inspired “nondual[ism]” distinguishing the Vancouver company’s approach to McLuhan’s strategic digitalism echoed the historical avant-garde’s deployment of paradox to undo culturally ingrained binaries.59 McLuhan’s physiological aesthetics, in relation to which NETCO’s sensory conceptualism is properly situated, place the company’s information art at a considerable remove from the Romantic Conceptualism associated with such nonconforming European peers as Bas Jan Ader. In their astute assessments of the Dutch artist, both Jörg Heiser and Jan Verwoert discuss the currents of German Romanticism out of which Ader’s practice emerged.60 Unlike Ader’s poetics of fragmentation, grounded as it was in the idealist philosophy of Schelling and Schlegel, NETCO self-consciously courted the very commoditized representations of “kitsch of love and desire” from which Heiser and Verwoert are evidently at pains to distance Ader’s neo-Romanticism.61 Even where NETCO comes closest to the utopian iconography of Ader  – in the company’s appropriation of Yves Klein’s iconic performance Le Saut dans le vide (1960) in Celebration of the Body  – the effect is a travesty of the very “melancholy yearning” expressed by Ader’s referential leap into the void in his own series of Klein-inspired Fall films.62 Iain Baxter’s inclusive embrace of “non-art, and even anti-art” was capable of generating the beguiling mosaic of “Yoga, streakers, fitness experts, [and] body painting” collated by the unbound leaves of this raucous exhibition-cum-McLuhanesque “non-book.”63 Writing in 1969, Lippard

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rightly emphasized NETCO’s incorrigible tendency “to repel purists in any area.”64 The Vancouver company’s pedagogical orientation, discussed at greater length in the next chapter, does, however, suggest some parallels with Boris Groys’s qualification of Moscow Conceptualism as lacking the explicitly utopian and emancipatory impulse of the historical Russian avant-garde. Groys views the activities of Moscow Conceptualists as, instead, “looking on Soviet life as a spectacle.”65 Much as NETCO carved out a McLuhan- and Zen-inspired informatic void within which to explore the ordinarily invisible contours of everyday life as an “anti-environment,”66 Groys argues that “visual and linguistic gaps, paradoxes and poetic nonsense played the … role of creating the ruptures and empty spaces in the fabric of the Soviet life.”67 NETCO’s operative void can be traced, via McLuhan, to the still point at the eye of the media vortex hypothesized by Wyndham Lewis and Ezra Pound. With the notable exceptions of Donald Theall and Glenn Willmott, the literary bias of previous McLuhan commentators has obscured the dialectical undercurrents of his media analyses. Although explicitly argued “from a grammatical point of view,”68 McLuhan’s doctoral dissertation – putatively a study of the sixteenth-century pamphleteer Thomas Nashe, but in fact a sweeping history of humanistic traditions of learning and technologies of information dissemination, from classical times to the Reformation – is propelled by a recognition of the fundamental “complementarity of rhetoric, dialectic, and grammar, the three components of the trivium since classical antiquity.”69 McLuhan’s analyses trace the cyclical disequilibrium of the constituent arts of the trivium under successive pedagogical regimes, culminating in the Renaissance dispute between the so-called ancients and moderns, in which Nashe was implicated as the eloquent partisan of grammar amid an ascendant dialectic associated with the champions of book learning represented by his arch-rival, Richard Harvey. While the trivium could be viewed as embodying the mystic properties attributed to the number three by the Catholic McLuhan, his dissertation posits an eminently dialectic antagonism between the proponents of dialectic and rhetoric as the animus of pedagogical debates from the time of the Sophists and the Stoics to his own day.70 In a further complication of conventional portraits of the Toronto School thinker, he explicitly traces the origins of rhetoric itself to the development of dialectic.71 McLuhan thereby establishes dialectic at the very heart of the Trinitarian logic of the classical curriculum. Although he championed the “encyclopedic ideal of the unified arts” associated with grammar and its oratorical methods,72 McLuhan

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nevertheless recognized the merits of dialectic when pursued as “a way of testing evidence rather than of organizing facts.”73 It was the latter tendency, epitomized by the stock “themes or ‘places’ of argumentation” mobilized by the Sophists,74 and reified by the tabular oppositions of Petrus Ramus and fellow Protestant reformers of the Renaissance, that McLuhan’s grammarian agenda militated against. For the Stoics, by contrast, dialectics was inseparable from the cosmological operation of the Logos. The intimate fusion of grammar and physics (the latter being indissociable from dialectics) in Stoic cosmology admitted “no clear line  … between what we call syntax and logic respectively”; a proposition that recalls Deleuze’s celebrated formulation of the “blank word” in The Logic of Sense, as that which “says its own sense.”75 NETCO’s language works embodied an analogously performative logic. For instance, the 1969 Montreal Museum of Fine Arts site-specific installation Talk guided visitors to approach the museum’s guards in order to access the work. The guards, in turn, had been directed to respond to such queries by simply stating “talk.”76 In this tautological imperative, a Stoic “saying of sense” cannibalizes the analytical language games of conceptual peers such as Art & Language and its attendant aestheticization of the structuralist matrix.77 Recalling the function of lekta, or “sayables,” in Stoic grammar, Talk subsists as a predicate independent of particular propositions or referents.78 Something similar is legible in the company’s Color/Language studies, originally published in Vancouver magazine in 1975 (Figure 2.1) and subsequently featured in revised form in Art Journal in 1982.79 In these participatory language studies approximating the conventions of concrete poetry, viewers are invited to activate the potentia latent in everyday language by physically “colouring in” the bolded text. These interactive works recall the “physical language” of the Stoics analyzed by Deleuze in The Logic of Sense by bringing into visibility an immanent semiotics.80 If Talk indirectly exposed the Stoic foundations of McLuhan’s discourse on media “effects” – which, as Elizabeth Grosz clarifies, the Stoics considered to be “predicates” – the late NETCO project People/Language (1978), which assembled individuals whose surnames were also common nouns (e.g., “Green,” “Foot,” “Good,” “Gray”), enacted a neo-Stoic grammar of corporeal relationality.81 The embodied linguistics of the latter NETCO work simultaneously recall the use of “figures” to personify the elements of grammar in medieval pedagogy, in which McLuhan’s writings are thoroughly steeped.82 NETCO’s language games staged something akin to the “communication beyond meaning” that proliferates under conditions of computational capitalism according to critical theorist Tiziana

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2.1 N.E. Thing Co. Ltd, “The N.E. Thing Page,” Vancouver, 1975. Reproduced with the permission of IAIN BAXTER&.

Terranova.83 This non-linguistic stance seized upon the a-signifying character of information in classical information theory. As Warren Weaver, the theory’s chief popularizer, explained in 1949, “two messages, one of which is heavily loaded with meaning and the other of which is pure nonsense, can be exactly equivalent … as regards information.”84

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Claude Shannon’s statistical definition of information, which asserted that “semantic aspects of communication are irrelevant,”85 reverberates in McLuhan’s attention to the formal properties of communication as well as in the “absurdity of significations and  … the nonsense of denotations” revealed by the pedagogies of the Stoic sage and Zen master alike in the writings of Deleuze.86 These perspectives are united by what Maurizio Lazzarato would term an “a-signifying semiotics,” one that foreshadows the operativity of contemporary algorithmic governmentality, in which digital behaviourism “does not speak,” according to Rouvroy and Berns, “but it functions.”87 As discussed at greater length below, the riddles or kōans of Zen were a decisive influence  on Iain Baxter’s non-verbal approach to teaching and, subsequently, on NETCO’s informatic turn.88 Asian philosophy was also influential on McLuhan, as several commentators have noted.89 His probes were alternative manifestations of the “aphorism-anecdote” that Deleuze viewed as a shared modality of Stoicism and Zen.90 The neo-Stoic interpretation of McLuhan’s media ecology encouraged by NETCO’s illuminating engagements with the Toronto School thinker does not negate dominant portraits of McLuhan as a grammarian, nor his analyses of the “grammatical physics” of an incarnate Logos.91 Rather, as Theall emphasizes, these perspectives should be recognized as coexisting and competing strands within McLuhan’s work: “Just as Bacon joins the grammatical and the dialectical, the humanist and the scholastic,” writes Theall, “so McLuhan can appear to marry the scholastic-technological with the humanist tradition.”92 Resonating with Theall’s parodic portrayal of the dialectical residue in McLuhan’s thought as an incorrigible excess, NETCO seized upon the latent satirical potential of the media analyst’s efforts to systematize his insights through such dialectical devices as the “square diagrams” reproduced in the Report on Project in Understanding New Media: precursors of the more familiar tetrads of The Laws of Media (1988).93 The company’s ludicrously cryptic VSI formulas are merely the most obvious exempla of its dialectical comedy. Ironically, it was when “beclown[ing]” McLuhan that the copresidents came closest to embodying the tradition of “learned satire” that, for Theall, came to define the Toronto School thinker’s own comic method.94 As McLuhan’s graduate student at the University of Toronto in the early 1950s, Theall had researched the then obscure genre of Varronian satire, in which such works as Pope’s Dunciad were cast. In his dissertation, McLuhan had earlier drawn attention to the ethos embodied by the protagonists of classical comedy as imparting a Stoic ethics of virtue, whereas tragedy dramatizes the pathos of a fate that can only be suffered.95 Like the comedic exploits recounted

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by the Roman playwright Terence, the ACTs and ARTs performed by NETCO’s co-presidents stage an informatic ethics of choice between binary alternatives.96 Much as Shannon and Weaver defined information as the degree of choice between multiple potential messages sent or received, the company’s active engagement with the features of a post-industrial environment celebrated the virtues of an expanded notion of the aesthetic – and of a diversified corporate portfolio – coded in informatic terms. This corporate operationalization of Shannonian freedom of choice recalls the epistemology of information overload developed slightly earlier by the American designers Charles and Ray Eames, who, in the words of Orit Halpern, “were interested in [the pedagogical potential of the] the most choices that could be produced.”97 NETCO’s corporate implementation of this topos of choice also corresponds with the contemporaneous management theories of British cybernetician Stafford Beer, whose “viable system model” (VSM) incorporated feedback mechanisms between the levels in organizational hierarchies, which Andrew Pickering has described as constituting “a model for a democratic subpolitics.”98 Beer’s proposal for “algedonic meters” was envisioned as empowering subaltern voices to respond to the prerogatives of government or management through a qualitative scale of affect reducible to a binary “yea” or “nay”  – a mechanism akin to Facebook’s “like” button today.99 The “alternating positive and negative responses” recorded by Beer’s hypothetical device paralleled the binarism of NETCO’s ACTs and ARTs as an allied micropolitical exercise of organizational choice.100 NETCO’s monetization of choice was also an important forerunner of what Bernard Stiegler has termed the contemporary “digital grammatization” of consumer choice through the algorithmic conversion of online “clicks” into predictive computational models.101 In important ways, McLuhan’s capacious descriptions of information approximate the notion of univocity proposed by Duns Scotus, and later taken up by Deleuze, to describe the condition of common being shared by disparate entities otherwise defined by their irreducible “thisness,” or haecceity.102 McLuhan’s cautionary comments on the homogenizing effects of information media in his Report on Project in Understanding New Media and, subsequently, in Understanding Media, suggest a similarly univocal alternative to the analogical ontology of Aquinas championed by his earlier texts.103 In McLuhan’s 1960s writings, informationalization expresses a neo-Scotist univocity, in which ontology is enunciated “in one and the same ‘sense’ of everything about which it is said.”104 The flat ontology of NETCO’s information space likewise parallels the

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contemporaneous “eliminat[ion of] the hierarchical and analogical senses of being” articulated by the univocal philosophy of Deleuze.105 But in contrast to the latter’s affirmative presentation of Duns Scotus, the univocal overtones of informationalization are at times a source of acute anxiety for McLuhan, as attested by his oft-quoted comments in a March 1969 interview with Playboy magazine: “No one could be less enthusiastic about these radical changes than myself. I am not, by temperament or conviction, a revolutionary; I would prefer a stable, changeless environment of modest services and human scale.”106 The “narcosis” afflicting McLuhan’s cybernetic Narcissus in Understanding Media perpetually threatens to overwhelm the univocal subject of the “Age of Information.”107 Indeed, the subterranean Scotist elements in McLuhan’s thought unearthed by Theall in some ways constitute the shadowy reverse of the “pure immanence” affirmed by Deleuze.108 NETCO seized upon the darkly comic potential of this negative univocity to deflate the hyperbolic claims of “McLuhanism” in such works as Dummy Self-Portrait Sculpture (1971) (Figure  2.2).109 Here, mannequin proxies of the co-presidents pose as corporate “dummies,” caught – like Wyndham Lewis’s behaviourist alter ego before the hatter’s dummy in Snooty Baronet  – in the narcissistic trance of techno-utopianism. Nevertheless, some corporate artefacts, such as the “information form” designed by Bryan Dyson in 1969 to document and archive company projects, disclose a noticeably less negative vision of informatic univocity (Figure 2.3). The non-categorical grid of Dyson’s form levels the taxonomic hierarchies of traditional classification schemes in favour of the singular category of “information,” embracing the operational potential inherent in this inclusive strategy and at the same time redeploying it to travesty archival and bureaucratic protocols. The affective surplus generated by NETCO’s corporate choreography might suggest parallels with the “paradiscursive space of affect” generated by the contemporaneous antihumanist practices of the American and British artists studied by Eve Meltzer, yet the ontological foundations and artful humour of NETCO’s tactics must be rigorously distinguished from the structuralist matrix mined by its peers.110 The company’s independence from the linguistic and semiotic concerns of Analytical philosophy and “French Theory” as initially popularized in North America would consequently prove problematic for the subsequent reception of the N.E. Thing Co. Ltd by the theory-driven Vancouver School of photo-conceptualism, whose members  – preeminently, Jeff Wall and Ian Wallace – would demonstrate a tendency to dismiss the company’s informatic gestures as neo-Dada frivolity or as the products of a naive McLuhanism.111 But as an attempt to render

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2.2 N.E. Thing Co. Ltd, Dummy Self-Portrait Sculpture, 1971, from Celebration of the Body, 1976. Reproduced with the permission of IAIN BAXTER& and the Agnes Etherington Art Centre, Kingston, Ontario.

the materiality of sense, rather than the arbitrariness of signs, NETCO’s art of Sensitivity Information acquires renewed relevance today, as a range of contemporary intellectual projects set out to reassess the linguistic turn. Far from disengaged exercises in armchair philosophizing, the company’s ontological experiments defined an operational framework within which NETCO’s co-presidents navigated, and immanently intervened within, their socio-technical milieu. NETCO’s quasi-ethnographic alertness to what Terranova has more recently termed the “daily deployment of informational tactics” foreshadowed the anthropological turn of subsequent conceptualisms while proposing informatic (in McLuhan’s argot, “post-literate”) alternatives to its linguistic foundations.112 The sensorial and situated perspective on technological change

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2.3 N.E. Thing Co. Ltd, “Information form,” 1969, from N.E. Thing Co. Ltd, 1978. Reproduced with the permission of IAIN BAXTER&.

documented by NETCO researchers in ACTs and ARTs can be productively likened to Joy Parr’s more recent “embodied histories” of the everyday impacts of environmental change as recounted by “local people.”113 As performative “educator[s] of the senses,” the co-presidents resemble the Stoic and Zen teachers of Deleuze, who “speak without speaking.”114 Through humorously paradoxical actions, NETCO personnel elaborated a “science of the ordinary” that set out to document and to learn from the mundane features of a deindustrializing environment.115 But even as its researchers were always attentive to the claims of particularity, NETCO’s corporate pose simultaneously registered the growing influence of transpersonal forces within technological society in a manner paralleling Robert Smithson’s contemporaneous observation that “the artist is tending to a more public or corporate outlook.”116 Yet as a platform for augmenting the artist’s social agency, NETCO’s corporate frame also enacted a “refusal to succumb to bureaucracy” consistent with the contemporaneous discourse of New Leftist youth.117 NETCO’s ludic corporatism thus resonated with the “play-tactics” of the European Situationists,118 and with the Fourierist economics of Robert Filliou, who made frequent trips to Vancouver during the years of

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the company’s operation,119 as well as with the more aspirational and phantasmatic dimensions of mainstream conceptualism recently explored by Chris Gilbert.120 NETCO’s mock corporatism thus stood apart from the functionalist logic of an “aesthetic of administration,”121 as well as the contemporaneous experiments in bureaucracy undertaken by members of government-funded initiatives and artists’ rights organizations such as Opportunities for Youth and CARFAC. As Vincent Bonin and Ken Lum have independently demonstrated, the latter bodies were in equal measure experiments in new forms of collectivity and instantiations of new forms of cybernetic governmentality and self-regulation – organizational tensions that are explored in greater depth in the next section.122

The Psychophysical Corporation Routinely invoked as the “Patron Saint” of the digital age,123 McLuhan’s discourse on information nonetheless remains surprisingly underexamined. The N.E. Thing Co. Ltd was remarkably prescient in seizing upon this dimension of the media thinker’s writings to reimagine the artist’s role in a post-studio milieu as that of a “visual-sensory informer,”124 and the post-medium condition of art itself in an emergent information society as varieties of what it termed Sensitivity Information, or SI for short. This “idea of comprehending ‘all arts as information handled sensitively,’” the company proclaimed in 1966, “breaks the historical chains that keep them apart from each other and grossly misunderstood.”125 Conceptualizing information as the univocal medium of a knowledge economy, NETCO understood the artist’s function to consist in the sensitive processing of that medium. This non-linguistic perspective emerges forcefully in a 1967 interview between then NETCO president Iain Baxter and curator Dorothy Cameron: A fork, a car, a door, a handle or a rock – all these things are information; and if you can get beyond the label-attitude, you are able to see and experience all they contain. The label is what gets in the way of experience. Because an object is labeled a “glass,” people see simply g-l-a-s-s. They do not see all the intrinsic potentials of “glass-ness”: how the glass is a bubble; how it’s a container that captures space; how it’s a clear window into some other little world … People don’t go off into these various realms of magic and empathy, pure form and surrealism, because labelling has become what their appreciation of life is. They have lost their innocent way of looking and feeling.126

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2.4 N.E. Thing Co. Ltd, “Glossary,” 1966, from N.E. Thing Co. Ltd, 1978. Reproduced with the permission of IAIN BAXTER&.

In place of the discrete media categories policed by a waning Greenbergian formalism, NETCO substituted the multiple modalities of an all-purpose Sensitivity Information, delineated in a 1966 “Glossary” (Figure 2.4) as follows: Sound Sensitivity Information, or SSI (“music, poetry [read], singing, oratory, etc.”), Moving Sensitivity Information, or MSI (“movies, dance, mountain climbing, track, etc.”), Experiential Sensitivity Information, or ESI (“theatre, etc.”), and Visual Sensitivity Information, or VSI (“A term developed and used by the N.E. Thing Co. to denote more appropriately the meaning of the traditional words ‘art’ and ‘fine art’ or ‘visual art’”).127 This inclusive nomenclature defined an epistemology that was simultaneously corporeal and informatic, comparable in some ways to that described by the economist and cybernetician Herbert Simon, for whom, in Orit Halpern’s words, “rationality [was] guided by the data gathered through embodied sensory perception.”128 Echoing Bergson’s earlier efforts “to restore the specificity and novelty that has been stripped away by the psychophysicists’ quantification,”129 NETCO’s aspiration to wrest a resistant, qualitative kernel from computation would be challenged in the course of its deepening engagement with concepts of information.

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The varieties of Sensitivity Information enumerated by NETCO’s corporate taxonomy defined an immanent physis, in which the proprietary “things” collated by its researchers circulated within an informatic void recalling the Epicurean natural philosophy recently recognized as influential on Deleuze.130 In De Rerum Natura (first century BCE), the Roman poet Lucretius described the composition of the cosmos in remarkably digital terms, writing that “nothing confronts us but matter mixed with void.”131 NETCO’s univocal ontology of information brings into visibility a striking isomorphism between the McLuhanesque contours of its corporate personhood and the monadic subject of Deleuze, which encapsulates the cosmos within itself while paradoxically occupying a vacuum. Improbably, the origins of NETCO’s corporate monad lay in McLuhan’s writings. At first sight, McLuhan’s Catholicism might discourage such a Leibnizian reading. In Understanding Media he wrote somewhat dismissively that “Leibniz saw in the mystic elegance of the binary system of zero and 1 the image of Creation. The unity of the Supreme Being operating in the void by binary function would, he felt, suffice to make all beings from the void.”132 Yet the classicist McLuhan proposed a characteristically neo-Thomist recuperation of binary numeracy as extending the haptic aisthēsis of digits and toes.133 Furthermore, McLuhan drew extensively upon Central European traditions of physiology and aesthetics that bore the imprint of Leibnizian metaphysics. The proto-cybernetic physiology of the Hungarian-born Canadian stress researcher Hans Selye, which McLuhan adapted in formulating his own model of the sensorium and Cold War rhetoric of technological “coping,” authorizes a monadological interpretation of NETCO’s informatic physics.134 N. Katherine Hayles underscores the ambivalent stakes of early cybernetic visions of embodiment such as Selye’s, which eroded boundaries between subjects and their environment by imagining informational “pathways” bridging carbon- and silicon-based components but also defensively disavowed this newly porous condition via militaristic and masculinist fantasies of bodily recontainment and homeostatic “closure.”135 Selye’s rendering of the body’s milieu intérieur as a non-material network of cybernetic feedback loops, or what he termed “reactons” in a diagram published in McLuhan and Edmund Carpenter’s interdisciplinary journal Explorations (Figure  2.5),136 is a striking artifact of this paradigm. Consistent with the formal emphasis of McLuhan’s communications thought, Selye stated that “stress has its own characteristic form and composition, but no particular cause.”137 The aesthetic investments of Selye’s schematization of physiology in this diagram extend his earlier collaboration with the Montreal artist

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2.5 Hans Selye, “Field Containing Reactons,” Explorations, 1953. Reproduced with the permission of the Hans Selye Foundation.

Marian Dale Scott on a mural for a projected conference and reading room in McGill University’s Department of Histology, where the stress researcher was then employed as an assistant professor.138 The Cubist lattice of Scott’s Endocrinology (1941–43) visualizes the interaction of cellular processes as an “allover” composition that foretells the reticulated design of Selye’s cybernetic illustration of reactons for McLuhan and Carpenter’s Explorations. If in some respects Selye’s reticular diagram anticipates the governing metaphor of more recent network aesthetics, in Understanding Media McLuhan aligns the stress researcher’s cybernetic physiology, rather, with the polarities structuring the proto-informatic colour theory of Wilhelm Ostwald. In Ostwald’s model, chromatic values are distributed according to the logarithmic progression of the Weber–Fechner law.139 Without citing Ostwald or his “colour solid” (Figure 2.6) directly, McLuhan relates Selye’s notion of “autoamputate[ion]”  – which the media thinker likens to the search for sensory “closure” triggered, he argues, when one or more of the senses are extended by media – to the Baltic German chemist’s psychophysical distribution of colour values: “It is with the senses as it is with color,” he writes. “Sensation is always

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2.6

Wilhelm Ostwald, colour solid, from Colour Science, 1931–33.

100 per cent, and a color is always 100 per cent color. But the ratio among the components in the sensation or the color can differ infinitely.”140 Ostwald’s discussion of the “constant ratio” defined by the chromatic intervals of his three-dimensional colour solid mobilizes psychophysical rhetoric complementary to McLuhan’s neo-Thomist descriptions of the sensorium as an embodied computational capacity.141 In turn, NETCO’s VSI formulas draw attention to this repressed computational genesis of McLuhan’s neo-Romantic quest for an informatic reconstruction of the analogue sensorium allegedly fractured by print. In comments recorded in the transcript of a 1967 museum seminar held at the Museum of the City of New York, McLuhan’s collaborator Harley Parker, who served as Head of Design and Installations at the Royal Ontario Museum (ROM) in Toronto from 1957 to 1967 and subsequently as a research associate of the Centre for Culture and Technology, underscored Ostwald’s relevance to McLuhan’s sensorial media analyses: I came to an analogy for [the changing sensory modalities of today] through long study of color. Ostwald was a German physicist, a color scientist of the late 19th Century, and he said at one point that all sensation is one hundred percent. He could have said all perception is one hundred percent. He said, in color it’s as if you had a full test tube of color and you can only change that color or add something to it at the expense of the initial ingredients. I find that this is a good illustration for sensory life. Because as you put more, for instance, of the visual into perception, the other factors, of necessity, must

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go down, if all experience is one hundred percent. If you raise the tactile, the oral will go down. It’s always in a constant flux of orchestration.142 The monist implications of the Baltic German scientist’s colour solid are more overt in an earlier reference to Ostwald in a 1963 article for Curator, in which Parker writes that “all sensation is one hundred percent – a unity.”143 Parker’s observation in another context that “data are not exactly contained in structure. They are the structure, and all data in a structure are in a constant state of interplay,”144 likewise points to Ostwald’s flat ontology as the submerged archetype of NETCO’s quasi-psychophysical inscriptions of Sensitivity Information. Recognizing Ostwald as the ur-source for NETCO’s holistic ontology and sensorial terminology acquires art historiographical significance in the context of Thierry de Duve’s influential reading of Duchamp’s “pictorial nominalism,” which arrogates the company’s ACTs and ARTs to the same linguistic framework.145 Taking Duchamp’s early painting practice as his point of departure, de Duve argues that the “semiotic” structure of Chevreul’s colour theory – its binary matrix of simultaneous colour contrast  – set in motion the linguistic turn enacted by Duchamp’s subsequent readymades.146 “In the same way that Saussure saw differences, and even opposition, as the principle for the construction of any sign,” de Duve writes, “Chevreul similarly saw contrast at the base of all perceptions of color.”147 de Duve proceeds to contrast this “‘linguistic’ treatment of color” inherited by Duchamp from Chevreul via practitioners of Divisionism and Simultaneism (notably, his one-time neighbour František Kupka), to the fantasy of an essentialist language of colour espoused by Kandinsky.148 In distinction to Kandinsky’s ontological project, Duchamp’s nominalist exploration of the unmotivated character of art’s linguistic condition unveils a Symbolic “where that which it names is nothing other than its naming function.”149 Yet de Duve’s analysis inadvertently suggests an alternative to his own linguistic exegesis that is productive in resituating the a-signifying language games of NETCO. Namely, de Duve relates Chrevreul’s colour theory to Fechner’s psychophysics, “in that it treats sensations in their relations to stimuli and organizes these relations in a differential fashion around a basic law, that of simultaneous contrasts.”150 In thus likening the dynamics of simultaneous colour contrast to the relational intensities of “just noticeable difference” measured by psychophysicists, de Duve places Chevreul squarely within a nineteenth-century scientific tradition that conceived of force as polarity.151 This monist paradigm was particularly strong in Central Europe;152 its influence was legible in the work

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of such German-speaking theorists as Hermann von Helmholtz, Adolf von Hildebrand, and Heinrich Wölfflin, whose impact on McLuhan has been traced exhaustively by Cavell.153 In contrast to the linguistic framework of symbolic difference and nomination mobilized by de Duve, these thinkers inaugurated an epistemology of relational intensity and asymbolic inscription. The logarithmic distribution of chromatic values in Ostwald’s geometric solid delimits and quantifies the perceptual capacities of the subject as a progression of magnitudes in a manner coterminous with fellow Baltic German scientist Jakob von Uexküll’s likening of the environment, or Umwelt, constituted by the affective thresholds of the organism, to a “soap-bubble.”154 Brett Buchanan has investigated the impact of Uexküll’s theoretical biology on a range of twentiethcentury thinkers, from Heidegger to Deleuze.155 Uexküll’s soap-bubble ontology – in particular, his description of the “world with only three affects” inhabited by the tick – was an important reference for Deleuze in his discourse on the univocity of being.156 The autopoietic ontologies of Uexküll and Deleuze are homologous to the “automorphic” space explored by McLuhan, which he described as “a space in which each person, each thing, makes it[s] own world.”157 Cavell has discussed the salience of the latter notion to McLuhan’s speculations on the disruptive effects of electronic media on spatial perception. An improbable but striking allusion to Ostwald’s scalar space of intensities is recognizable in Quentin Fiore’s iconic image of fishnet-clad women’s legs in The Medium Is the Massage (1967) (Figure 2.7), whose sensuously distorted grid recalls both the logarithmic divisions of the Baltic scientist’s colour solid as well as the hyperbolic curvature of non-Euclidean spaces explored contemporaneously by modernist artists influential on McLuhan, such as Paul Klee, with whom Ostwald was associated through his role as a member of the Bauhaus advisory board.158 A 1967 NETCO position statement appropriated McLuhan and Fiore’s caption to this image, “when information is brushed against information,” to redefine Conceptual art as “the working of one information upon another.”159 In War and Peace in the Global Village (1968), McLuhan would return to this figure, likening “the new information environments” to “a form of clothing that can be programmed at will.”160 His recurring invocations of “sensory thresholds” as key to apprehending alterations in the technological environment are suggestive of Ostwald’s influence as well as Parker’s.161 It is not improbable that Selye’s aesthetic approach to biology – a product of his doctoral studies in Prague during the 1920s  – served as a conduit for the dissemination of the monist polarities and

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2.7 Peter Moore, photo in Marshall McLuhan and Quentin Fiore’s The Medium Is the Massage, 1967. Peter Moore © 2021 Barbara Moore / Licensed by VAGA at Artists Rights Society (ARS), NY, Courtesy Paula Cooper Gallery, New York.

psychophysical rhetoric that are recurring features of McLuhan’s writings of the later 1950s and 1960s.162 Correspondences between Selye’s definition of stress as the “non-specific response of the body to any demand made upon it” and the univocal “body without organs” formulated by Deleuze with Félix Guattari are explained by the latter figure’s partial derivation from Uexküll’s portrait of the tick’s bubble-world.163 Parker’s first-hand exposure to the Bauhaus-inflected curriculum of Black Mountain College may have served as another channel for the propagation of energetic models of perception. Whether or not McLuhan possessed first-hand knowledge of all of these holistic paradigms, structural parallels between Central European ontologies and the Toronto School thinker’s own univocal conception of being speak to his participation in a common discourse.164 The physiological bases of McLuhan’s speculations on automorphic space are brought into satirical representation by Iain Baxter’s 1968 collection of “inflatable wearables” (Figure  2.8): pneumatic vinyl fashions resembling ludicrous literalizations of Uexküll’s soap-bubble worlds  – a reference likely familiar from Baxter’s earlier studies in

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2.8 Iain Baxter, Inflatable Wearable, 1968. Reproduced with the permission of IAIN BAXTER&.

zoology.165 Baxter’s erotic wearables are consistent with the interactive use of textiles by international contemporaries including the artists Nelson Leirner and Franz Erhard Walther.166 Recalling McLuhan’s theses on clothing as a social extension of the body, Baxter’s fashions “bagged” the hermetically sealed subjects of a plastic society permanently on high alert.167 Cold War paranoia fuelled the political appropriation of Selye’s discourse on homeostasis as a conservative social model promising to restore equilibrium. “Stress was pictured as a weapon,” writes Russell Viner, “to be used in the waging of psychological warfare against the enemy, and Stress research as a shield or vaccination against the contagious germ of fear.”168 Viner situates the homeostatic rhetoric of Selye’s popular writings on stress squarely within this fraught ideological force field. As an expert consultant to the US Army and surgeon general from 1947 to 1957, Selye extolled the virtues of permanent self-defence in a manner consistent with American foreign policy objectives. Selye’s aestheticized recasting of homeostasis as a strategy for self-preservation unintentionally recalled Wyndham Lewis’s avant-garde rhetoric of “armoring” the ego against the shocks of modernity.169 McLuhan would reprise this thesis in 1972, writing with Barrington Nevitt that “each human being creates a kind of ‘space bubble’ that he carries with him as his osmic mask.”170

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McLuhan’s influential theorization of the media of communication as extensions of the human sensorium seeking cybernetic equilibrium under the impact of environmental stressors was a direct outgrowth of Selye’s writings.171 “All extensions of ourselves, in sickness or in health, are attempts to maintain equilibrium,” McLuhan wrote.172 However, the media analyst extended Selye’s speculative biology to describe the homeostatic functioning of planetary information networks in what he would come to think of as an emergent global village. McLuhan’s rhetoric of coping with the stresses of the technological environment owe an important debt to Selye that has been obscured by repetition of the Toronto School thinker’s beloved anecdote of Edgar Allen Poe’s mariner, who, in McLuhan’s imaginative paraphrase, saved himself from catastrophe by mastering the hostile action of the mass-cultural gyre via feedback loop.173 A strategic collusion with the forces of environmental change is equally recognizable in the coping strategies promoted by the monadic NETCO in mock motivational speeches: “We celebrate the ordinary,” company personnel touted.174 Unlike Selye, McLuhan did not construe coping as an exclusively individual enterprise. As an informal adviser to Prime Minister Pierre Trudeau,175 the media analyst elaborated a policy of “cybernation,” in which “autonomy and decentralism” would be achieved by means of a “new environment consisting of a network of information and feedback loops” between semi-autonomous organizations.176 McLuhan’s imagery here recalls the reticulated space of Selye’s Explorations diagram. But if, in his role as a military adviser, Selye projected an image of the social body as a militantly hermetic monad, McLuhan’s reworking of the stress researcher’s rendering of the sensorium in his comments on cybernation substituted an extended and porous social structure. Nevertheless, traces of Selye’s defensive attitude are legible in McLuhan’s 1960 report to the United States Office of Education, the precursor to Understanding Media. “We may be forced,” he wrote, “in the interests of human equilibrium, to suppress various media as radio or movies for long periods of time, or until the social organism is in a state to sustain such violent lopsided stimulus.”177 The Cold War foundations of this strategy were not lost on McLuhan, whose Report on Project in Understanding New Media also cast education within the net of national security: Today, civil defense would seem to consist in protection against media fallout. In the past, war has consisted in the movement of commodities back and forth across frontiers. Today, when the largest commodity of all is information itself, war means no longer the movement of hardware, but of information.

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What had previously been “a peace time” activity within our own boundaries now becomes the major “cold-war” activity across frontiers.178 The next chapter traces the consequences of McLuhan’s program for educational reform on NETCO’s constitution as a cybernetic organization as it was transmitted via co-president Iain Baxter’s teaching appointments at the University of British Columbia and Simon Fraser University.

3

N.E. Thing Co. Ltd: The Logic of Sensitivity All that mass of words is vain which men have devised and ranged against the senses.1

The Univocal University Simon Fraser University (SFU), the “instant university” that served as the institutional backdrop to NETCO’s emergence and early ontological experiments, was a product of Cold War tensions between defensive implosion and decentralizing explosion consistent with the Gestalt dynamics of McLuhan’s Selye-inspired media analyses.2 Published during the period of SFU’s founding and accelerated construction, Understanding Media likened the polarities of organizational transformation to the alternating currents of electricity.3 Building on his doctoral research on the changing patterns of humanistic learning, McLuhan was particularly attuned to frictions associated with the perceived educational “crisis” unleashed by electronic media:4 “Our new concern with education follows upon the changeover to an interrelation in knowledge, where before the separate subjects of the curriculum had stood apart from each other. Departmental sovereignties have melted away as rapidly as national sovereignties under conditions of electric speed.”5 McLuhan’s comments would prove prophetic for the troubled early history of SFU. Initially conceived as a “node” in a projected multicampus network, or “multiversity” on the University of California model, Simon Fraser was intended to ease intensifying enrolment pressures on the established University of British Columbia (UBC) as the baby-boom cohort began to move through the post-secondary system.6 Historian Hugh Johnston notes that “decentralization had become essential” in UBC president John Barfoot Macdonald’s 1962 Report on the future of higher education in British Columbia.7 Macdonald recommended the

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creation of a tiered system, with a second campus to be established in the Greater Vancouver area. This satellite site in Burnaby would deliver undergraduate courses to working-class students from East Vancouver; meanwhile, UBC would maintain its privileged status through competitive admissions policies and by offering graduate degrees.8 Premier W.A.C. Bennett’s appointment of then BC Hydro co-chair Gordon Shrum as chancellor of the future SFU inadvertently set in motion conditions ripe for testing McLuhan’s hypothesis that “the instant electric form reverses explosion into implosion.”9 Cutting ties with UBC, Shrum established the new campus on Burnaby Mountain as an autonomous university with graduate programs in an astonishingly compressed period of only thirty months, between the spring of 1963 and September 1965. This abrupt shift in orientation was but the first  in a series of seemingly “endless reversals or break boundaries passed in the interplay of the structures of bureaucracy and enterprise” that came to define SFU’s early years.10 The “rival conceptions of a university” sketched by Johnston’s study of SFU’s early development serve to illustrate McLuhan’s principle of the “reversal of the overheated medium”;11 the autonomous university that opened in September 1965 under Shrum’s univocal administration materialized as the negative image of Macdonald’s original plan for a stratified and decentralized multiversity. Sharla Sava’s insightful commentary on Iain Baxter’s impactful if short-lived tenure at the Centre for Communication and the Arts underscores SFU’s significance as an infrastructure of governmentality: Sponsored by then Premier W.A.C. Bennett, SFU represents one of the more ambitious projects of the Social Credit government. The spectacular location chosen for the building of the new university, isolated on the top of a mountain, as well as the imposing and rigorous monumentality of its modernist architectural design, convey the grandiose line of the Social Credit vision.12 Johnston charts Social Credit’s and Shrum’s mutual passage from an analogue governmentality premised on discrete media channels to the post-lineal environment of social services embodied by SFU’s campus and programs. Bennett’s political ambitions, he notes, were initially trained on projects such as public hydroelectric power stations, with Shrum as a partner.13 McLuhan’s eminently Innisian gloss on “roads” as media of communication in Understanding Media offers an unintended meta-commentary on the Socreds’ turn from an early focus on physical

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infrastructure to knowledge-based social programs, including education and universities.14 If the decision to site SFU on Burnaby Mountain necessitated the construction of an access route from the Trans-Canada Highway, Shrum viewed architecture as the principal conduit for realizing’s his vision of an instant university. “Architecture,” he noted, “determines the nature, the inner philosophy of a university.”15 There is a striking resonance between Shrum’s determinist view of architecture and McLuhan’s belief that “the architect can orchestrate different spaces, with their differing sensuous involvements, with the same freedom as the composer and the conductor.”16 The winning entry in the 1963 architectural design competition overseen by Shrum  – the iconic Erickson-Massey megastructure – “proposed a more efficient layout to encourage interdisciplinary co-operation and to break down departmental barriers.”17 Johnston speculates that Shrum’s preference for a mix of large lecture halls and smaller seminar rooms was the decisive factor in securing Erickson-Massey’s victory. In its radical fusion of disciplinary functions, the resulting “single structure” recalls McLuhan’s description of “electric light” as “pure information” and “a medium without a message”:18 a compression of formerly discrete media and disciplinary knowledges into a univocal channel. Like McLuhan’s renderings of electric light, the Erickson-Massey megastructure was a monadic “centre-without-a-margin” expressive of the pressures of convergence in an information society.19 Despite the utopian hopes invested in the rapidly constructed SFU, the campus would soon earn a reputation for turmoil as well as the dubious moniker “Berkeley North.”20 John Cleveland has studied the university’s student power movement as a relatively successful exercise in participatory democracy, supported by an alliance between students and junior faculty, leading up to a June 1968 victory for faculty rights following the Canadian Association of University Teachers’ (CAUT) threat of censure. Student protesters’ emulation of Berkeley professors’ contemporaneous appropriation of the IBM punch card to symbolize the growing industrialization of education cleared a path for the inflatable computer punch card that NETCO installed in its booth at the 1970 Data Processing Manager’s Association (DPMA) conferences in Seattle and Vancouver, during which the conceptual company participated as a critical intervention within the burgeoning computer industry.21 As SFU faculty, Baxter’s adoption of a corporate frame simultaneously brought into visibility tensions within the university’s transition to a “capitalist corporation.”22 But while their entrepreneurial habitus may

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have set the future co-presidents somewhat apart from countercultural currents that gripped the SFU student body following the 1967 Summer of Love,23 there can be little doubt that this backdrop of institutional crisis was decisive in shaping the concerns and strategies of NETCO. The interdisciplinarity of Shrum’s pedagogical vision for the fledgling university, imbricated in the univocal infrastructure of the Erickson-Massey megastructure through its physical and metaphorical levelling of departmental hierarchies within a uniform matrix, would be constitutive of the aims and approaches adopted by faculty at the experimental Centre for Communication and the Arts, where Iain Baxter accepted a position as university resident in mid-1966. Sava observes that “art and media were not differentiated” in the Centre’s curriculum and programs, and that “the initial directive of the facility appears to have been geared to production.”24 This description matches artist Victor Doray’s 1968 report on emergent trends in arts education for artscanada. “Some art schools,” he wrote, “thankfully are realizing the futility of formal training in each media, and instead are giving free rein to explore among them by self experimentation, by audio visual referral, and by personal assistance whenever and wherever requested.”25 The Centre for Communication and the Arts’ fusion of art and technology was symptomatic of broader processes integrating “arts training into the engineering curriculum” described by Orit Halpern.26 In keeping with McLuhan’s contemporary recuperation of the medieval Catholic philosophy of Thomas Aquinas, the ultimate goal of the multidisciplinary, sensorial pedagogy developed by faculty at SFU’s Centre for Communication and the Arts was, however, nothing less than a restoration of “the ultimate harmony of all being.”27 This ontological agenda was forcefully articulated by an unrealized proposal for a parallel institute to be modelled after the Centre and the Vancouver-based Intermedia collective (founded in 1967), penned by Baxter with fellow artists Doray and Jack Shadbolt. The authors envisaged their projected Centre for Intermedia Research and Communication Analysis (CIRCA) as a “subtly changing product of many individual human beings, through their extensions of being,” adding that “CIRCA really does sum it up, metaphysically perhaps.”28 The distinctly ontological function, and utopian resonance, of information as it was deployed within this McLuhanesque context marks a significant departure from the alienated affects attributed to “information-subjects” by Eve Meltzer’s structuralist analysis of contemporaneous American projects.29 A 1968 feature for artscanada by composer and Centre faculty member R. Murray Schafer observed that “from the very beginning of the Simon Fraser experience we have been intent on developing technique and

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content for a new teaching which does not break the creative primal unity of the senses.”30 In keeping with McLuhan’s vision of a dawning era of “secondary orality,”31 as his one-time student Walter Ong termed it, Schafer and peers proposed a “panaesthetic grammar joining vision to hearing” in an attempted actualization of the reconstructed sensorium imagined by McLuhan.32 Information was envisioned as a medium of translation between the various media as well as an “audile-tactile” approach to scoring, unencumbered by the visual bias attributed to traditional printed notation schemes:33 “Students will perhaps be trained to describe music in terms of exact frequencies or frequency bands rather than in the limited nomenclature of the tonal system  … The psychology and physiology of aural pattern perception will supersede many former musical studies in which musical soundings were rendered mute by paper exercises.”34 The multimodal pedagogy embraced by Schafer and SFU colleagues materialized the “persistent and recurring dream of synaesthesia, corrupted boundaries, and genre miscegenation” that Caroline A. Jones places in dialectical tension with the dominant  – rationalist and formalist – Greenbergian paradigm of late modernist aesthetics, which enforced a strict segregation of media and the senses.35 However, the centre’s interdisciplinary model was simultaneously an early instantiation of the contemporary university’s (re-)formation of what Friedrich Kittler termed a “complete media system” under computational conditions.36 Although centre faculty initially conceived of their convergent pedagogy in terms consistent with the analogical equivocity publicly espoused by McLuhan, this chapter will trace the rapid implosion of that neo-Thomist paradigm into something more closely matching the proto-digital currents of Scotist univocity later articulated by McLuhan’s former graduate student Donald Theall. In early sketches jotted in the margins of university memos, Baxter brings the centre itself into visibility as an organizational equivalent of the sensus communis evoked by McLuhan. In Baxter’s imaginative diagrams (Figure  3.1), the centre’s constituent arts programs (SA, TA,  VA)  – represented in point-form notation that anticipates the cybernetic code later deployed by NETCO researchers to designate the company’s “departments” (COP, ACT, ART) as well as their informatic “products” (SI, MSI, VSI) – interact in Gestalt patterns suggestive of the systole/diastole action of organic tissue. These biomorphic diagrams extend the  ecological associations of the artist’s earlier hard-edge paintings.37 The concentric rings of the centre’s logotype, designed by Baxter as part of a broader rebranding of SFU’s visual identity undertaken in 1966 at the behest of the university’s first president,

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3.1 Iain Baxter, “Payment of Students,” 1966. Ink on paper, 28 × 22 cm. Art Gallery of Ontario. Gift of Iain Baxter, 2000 LA.IBF.S1.F58.2.1. © Iain Baxter. Reproduced with the permission of IAIN BAXTER&. Photo courtesy of the AGO.

Patrick McTaggart-Cowan, bring these organicist references into the orbit of a McLuhanite iconography of electronic dialogism and organizational transformation. In Understanding Media, McLuhan had invoked the “redundant form inevitable to the electric age, in which the concentric pattern is imposed by the instant quality, and overlay in depth, of electronic speed.”38 The unstated prototype for McLuhan’s electronic “spiral” is, of course, the vortex of Wyndham Lewis and

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Ezra Pound. Relatedly, in their proposal for CIRCA, Shadbolt, Doray, and Baxter had speculated on the associations of the titular “Centre” thus: “A generic, neutral term, but with many of the associations of the vortex (Wyndham-Lewis and Exra Pound [sic]).”39 Lurking within the ontological rhetoric mobilized by centre faculty to justify their informatic pedagogy was the spectre of convergence as both organizational ideal and potential mechanism of social control. As Orit Halpern has documented, the latter concern haunted the informational gambits of contemporaries including Charles and Ray Eames, emerging as a master signifier of sorts for the drive to computation: “The data-filled worlds of the IBM pavilion [designed by the Eames brothers] refracted this changing nature of knowledge and commerce. Inside the pavilion, human perception was also treated as a channel and capacity to be extended, increased, and circulated. This ‘expanded’ media  … not only reformulated perception but linked this form of seeing to forms of thinking.”40 For McLuhan, the multi-screen environment of Expo ’67 – for which his associate Harley Parker had acted as a design consultant – augured similar developments.41 “When the inner spaces of our lives go outward,” he wrote, “the result is a structure like Habitat at Expo ’67.”42 Halpern links the scattered visual field of the Eames’s IBM “Information Machine” to both the appearance of “new institutional spaces for art practice” – notably, György Kepes’s Center for Advanced Visual Culture (CAVS) at MIT  – and the simultaneous reconfiguration of corporations into decentralized bureaucracies.43 John Harwood has studied how IBM “decentralized its various divisions into quasi-autonomous entities” in the process of transforming its corporate architecture into an analogue of the computational apparatus.44 The Centre for Communication and the Arts’ informatic pedagogy was symptomatic of  similar “architectural” pressures immanent in the univocal contours  of the Erickson-Massey megastructure  – preeminently, the incipient corporatization of the university documented by John Cleveland.45 In McLuhan’s neo-Thomist discourse, convergence is synonymous with the reconstitution of the sensus communis fractured by print media as a faculty of translation between the body’s senses by means of their technological extension via the media of communication. His apocalyptic rhetoric of an impending informatic translation promised a reconstructed sensorium, a proposition reminiscent of Brooker’s speculations on the scientific plausibility of electromagnetic “assumption” in The Tangled Miracle, discussed in Chapter 1. McLuhan’s vision of education as a process of “pattern recognition” exploiting conditions of accelerated information movement

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was consonant with the teaching experiments of Charles Eames and György Kepes, which, as Halpern observes, embraced “data overload as a pedagogical principle.”46 Victor Doray, a McLuhan-inspired associate of Iain Baxter’s, notably employed allied metaphors of informatic inundation in his 1968 artscanada feature on the future of arts education. “The flood of information is beginning to cause cracks in our concrete curriculum,” he wrote.47 Analogously, “Eames,” writes Halpern, “spoke of distraction and overstimulation as an education. Rather than worrying about information overload, Eames thought more data offered more ‘choice,’ giving the spectator a freedom to ‘choose’ from and produce his (or her) own patterns and combinations.”48 McLuhan similarly approached pedagogy as a matter of selecting and translating between meaningful environmental forms identified through processes of rapid scanning. Baxter, Schafer, and other SFU faculty adapted McLuhan’s radical pedagogy to experiment with the interdisciplinary potential of information as a medium of translation across arts curricula offered by the non-credit Centre for Communication and the Arts. This informatic framework was intended to facilitate an analogical interplay of programs resembling the organizational equivocity of the decentralized corporation subsequently described by McLuhan with collaborator Barrington Nevitt in Take Today: The Executive as Dropout (1972). If the pressures of convergence productive of this equivocal curriculum recall the “ideal of reintegrating the classical trivium” explored by McLuhan’s doctoral dissertation, the Centre’s radical interdisciplinarity was also coterminous with the body’s metaphorical reconceptualization as a conduit for the transmission and processing of sensory data by cyberneticians.49 NETCO’s early reconfiguration of perception as “data transmission” is legible in a 1966 note penned by Iain Baxter headed “INFORMATION DYNAMICS OF EDUCATION actION,” or IDEA, which explores the applied consequences of the McLuhanesque translation paradigm enshrined in the centre’s curriculum for his fledgling company’s brand, conceived as a potential datum for both sensory (analogue) and technological (electronic) transmission:50 N.E. THING (VISUAL)

—TV —looking —reading ANYTHING (ORAL) —speech —phone —Radio VISUAL, N.E. THING—ANYTHING, ORAL 51

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This note records but one of many thought experiments sketched on centre letterhead and memos preserved today in the artist’s fonds at the Art Gallery of Ontario, which link Baxter’s earliest ambitions for an independent organization to the administrative and curricular goals of centre faculty. For instance, documentation of a 1966 meeting of the Communication Centre Resource Policy Committee, chaired by Baxter during the 1966–67 academic year, contains marginalia detailing plans for a utopian information centre that the artist christened “Centre for Universal Information Potential” (UINPO).52 Baxter’s plans for UINPO anticipate the organizational framework of NETCO, created later the same year. Moreover, a related sheet of notes explicitly ties UINPO to McLuhan’s Centre for Culture and Technology at the University of Toronto,53 created in 1963, suggesting that the Toronto School thinker’s own applied experiments in organizational reform may have served as a template for NETCO’s corporate frame.54 Baxter’s sketches for UINPO include the earliest extant reference to the concept of Sensitivity Information, in the form of a proposed “Sensitivity Information Sub-Centre,” to be established for the purpose of “self-sensitiz[ation].”55 As Tai van Toorn has noted, “sensitivity” was a key word in the early pedagogical discourse of faculty at SFU’s Centre for Communication and the Arts.56 In his 1968 artscanada feature on the centre, Schafer had noted that “in the first year there was the Sensitivity course. We would simply gather in the Theatre, both students and faculty, for a series of experiences, talks and discussions which went on until we got tired.”57 However, as I argue at greater length in the next section, van Toorn’s yoking of NETCO’s production of Sensitivity Information to the field of environmental perception studies and the sensitivity training exercises developed by the San Francisco–based duo of Ann and Lawrence Halprin mistakenly downplays McLuhan’s sensorial ontology as the primary impetus for both the pedagogical innovations of centre faculty and the formation of NETCO. Baxter’s organizational thought experiments suggest that a shared vocabulary of “sensitivity” functioned as a bridge between the public, pedagogical aims of the centre and the private interests of the artist’s corporate platform. Indeed, these sketches imply that NETCO was conceived as an organizational sensorium patterned after the centre’s curricular ratio of the senses. The company consequently symptomatized the growing presence of private industry at SFU, where, John Cleveland observes, “the domination of the university by a group of mainly corporate lawyers and representatives of big business on the Board was highly visible.”58 NETCO’s experiments in privatization foreshadow the corporatization of public universities under neoliberalism.

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3.2 Victor Doray, mobile information van, 1968, artscanada. Courtesy Audrey Capel Doray.

Symptomatically, Baxter’s notes for UINPO weave effortlessly between pedagogical rhetoric (“INFORMATION-KNOWHOW – EDUCATION”) and for-profit language (“Information-Potential – wealth).”59 This fusion of educational and commercial prerogatives echoes McLuhan’s contention that “education follows behind commerce in leadership.”60 NETCO’s proprietary ambitions significantly trouble the anticapitalist aims imputed to the company by Sava and Shaw as well as the “intrinsic social value” vested in the notion of information by conceptual artists generally, according to Vincent Bonin.61 Conversely, for NETCO as for McLuhan, in the age of information, “culture is our business.”62 As a parasitic satellite of the centre, NETCO resembles Doray’s 1968 proposal for a “mobile information van” (Figure 3.2) equipped for ad hoc multimedia self-instruction and intended to facilitate “the fusion of unrelated institutions” as part of a coming “Life-knowledgeopolis.”63 The bubble-like media space defined by Doray’s portable learning environment in turn recalls the proposal put forward by McLuhan’s associate Harley Parker at the above-mentioned 1967 seminar convened at the Museum of the City of New York, for a “newseum”: a space for mounting temporary exhibitions of topical interest, to be located beyond the confines of the museum: I want to build what I call a “newseum,” which consists of a building outside the museum proper, but which draws on the

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3.3 N.E. Thing Co. Ltd, Eunuchversity, ca 1969–70. Button. Reproduced with the permission of IAIN BAXTER&.

artifacts and material of the museum for its shows. The idea of a newseum is that it is concerned with news, any news in the world which is of great moment, whether it occurs in science or archeological discovery or what have you, or whether it occurs on the political scene.64 As satellites of the Centre for Communication and the Arts, UINPO and NETCO are but two in a string of satirical “shadow campuses” sketched by Iain Baxter during his tenure at SFU, culminating in his proposals for a “EUNUCHVERSITY” (Figure 3.3).65 In at least one variation on this latter “anti-academic” enterprise, the EUNUCHVERSITY is envisioned as a book.66 Proclaiming that “the ivory tower has lost its balls!,” Baxter described the projected monograph thus, It is our premise that the university as it now exists has serious faults. It has lost its balls, become castrated, and is totally ineffective. It could well cease to exist. It is a EUNUCHVERSITY. This book is aimed at the fingering of the faults from several points of view.67 An unlikely list of potential contributors drafted by Baxter included Roy Ascott (then the controversial president of Toronto’s Ontario College of Art), Lucy Lippard, David Suzuki, and Donald Theall. The tone of “discouraged optimism” that Baxter hoped to project via the unrealized

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book reflected the artist’s growing sense of pessimism and disappointment with the Centre for Communication and the Arts following the departure of McTaggart-Cowan.68 Early in his tenure at the centre, Baxter had developed an ill-fated alliance with McTaggart-Cowan, who was terminated by faculty vote in May 1968.69 The classical associations of Baxter’s highly visible rebranding of campus communications, an initiative backed by McTaggartCowan, which included an institutional logotype reminiscent of a Greek meander pattern, spoke to a humanistic vision of education recalling the classical ideals promoted earlier by the Values Group at the University of Toronto, to which both Innis and McLuhan had belonged for a time.70 Johnston notes that “although he had no great familiarity with the arts,” McTaggart-Cowan “was a strong supporter of the centre. Yet he had given it only three years to prove itself; and after he was gone, no one in the administration had any commitment to it.”71 The tragic irony of McTaggart-Cowan’s firing is that he was never more than a “subordinate” to the autocratic Shrum, who remained in power long after the CAUT crisis.72 The university’s senate initiated a debate about the future of the centre in 1969 that resulted in its formal dissolution in 1971 and its subsequent reconstitution as a new Department of Fine and Performing Arts within the Faculty of Interdisciplinary Studies.73 Correspondence dated 27 August 1969, penned by acting university president L. Srivastava, documents Baxter’s failure to achieve permanence under new regulations adopted in the summer of 1968. Those regulations, modelled on a 1967 CAUT statement, strongly emphasized peer review by elected tenure and promotion committees.74 Baxter found himself among those faculty who did not survive the “publish-or-perish” culture that was an unintended consequence of this corrective to Shrum’s earlier, arbitrary exercise of administrative power.75 Baxter’s EUNUCHVERSITY was a working through of the “schizoid state” theorized by McLuhan as the product of outmoded epistemological frameworks when applied to the processing of new media environments.76 The dismembered phallus of Baxter’s satirical ivory tower brings into representation the figurative and literal fragmentation of the Centre for Communication and the Arts’ interdisciplinary sensorium under the stresses of intensified written bias formalized by the new promotion and tenure regime. A 1969 memorandum penned by department chair Patrick Lyndon proposed the segregation of arts and communication.77 Baxter responded to Lyndon’s vision of disciplinary secession with a list of counter-demands issued in reply to news of his non-renewal. Baxter called for a “newly formed Arts Centre to

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be independently functioning from the Communication Centre and to have its own budget.”78 These appeals for disciplinary autonomy thematize the dissolution of the centre’s McLuhanesque ontology of “analogy and equivocity” as a fracturing of its curricular sensorium under conditions of intensified visual bias inaugurated by the reinstatement of writing and print as the privileged media of an academic media ecology.79 Following this period of institutional crisis at Simon Fraser, the N.E. Thing Co. Ltd developed an increasingly sophisticated ontology of Sensitivity Information that looked upon McLuhan’s paradigm of media translation with deepening skepticism. In place of the analogical and equivocal representations of informatic transmission as translation found in its pre-1968 production, NETCO’s later figurations of Sensitivity Information register a growing attentiveness to what Deleuze, following Duns Scotus, termed haecceity: the noisy particularity of things. NETCO’s post-1968 embrace of what Cavell evocatively dubs the “ear rational” echo generated, according to McLuhan, by the “meeting of two media” stands in stark contrast to Schafer’s contemporaneous information-theoretic segregation of noise from sound in The Book of Noise (1970).80 As such, the growing haecceity of NETCO’s representations of Sensitivity Information parallels Robert Smithson’s contemporaneous figurations of entropy, explored in the next chapter. The following section traces the sources of NETCO’s newfound sensitivity to the claims of singularity to Baxter’s Zeninspired pedagogy. This recognition of particularity would be key to the subsequent promotions of Ingrid Baxter in 1969 and 1970, which are reassessed in the Coda.

Educators of the Senses NETCO’s informatic epistemology emerges through its innovative pedagogy. From the start, teaching was central to its corporate strategy. The company’s redefinition of the artist, from an autonomous producer of craft objects to a relational “visual-sensory informer,”81 was just as much a recognition of the artist’s growing imbrication within the educationalindustrial complex as it was an operationalization of the expanded opportunities for artists to navigate the post-studio environment of a nascent information society implicit in a corporate frame. Under the sway of McLuhan’s radical pedagogy, NETCO’s co-presidents marketed themselves as “educator[s] of the senses.”82 Baxter’s early conceit that information is a neutral medium for the transmission of perceptual data, recorded in the transcript of his 1967 interview with curator Dorothy Cameron excerpted in Chapter 2,

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would be incorrectly attributed to McLuhan, for whom sensory knowledge was always already a socio-technical artifact. “‘Perceptions are not disclosures,’” McLuhan quoted Adelbert Ames as stating in his Report on Project in Understanding New Media. “We see and feel via the patterns of familiarity imposed by our various media.”83 With time, NETCO’s informatic discourse would evolve into a more sophisticated remediation of McLuhan’s deeply cultural understanding of the effects generated by media environments; the company ultimately harnessed tensions implicit in the media thinker’s speculations to resist his followers’ sometimes reductive applications of his “probes.” Yet Iain Baxter’s comments in the Cameron interview point to a parallel and competing tendency evinced by NETCO’s pedagogical paradigm, which both predated McLuhan’s influence and, improbably, pointed a way out: namely the embodied pedagogy of Zen as popularized for Western audiences by Alan Watts. Baxter first encountered Watts’s influential Radio Pacifica broadcasts during a transitional phase in his early development, which saw the young artist  – then studying abroad at the University of Idaho, and later at Washington State University  – transition out of zoological illustration to watercolour studies influenced by the wildlife imagery of the West Coast mystic painter Morris Graves.84 A growing fascination with Asian mysticism fuelled the artist’s exploration of traditional Japanese formats and techniques in innovative byōbu screen paintings. Executed during a year-long residency in Japan supported by a Japanese government scholarship in 1961, these works were equally inflected by the gestural repertoire of Western action painting. In keeping with the syncretic fusion of East and West articulated by Watts, the eminent Japanese art historian Teruo Ueno praised Baxter’s screen paintings for “showing us possibilities within our world that we hadn’t imagined, heretofore, existed.”85 Zen pedagogy would leave a lasting imprint on the epistemology and ontology of the N.E. Thing Co. Ltd as well as its educational orientation. In Watts’s presentation for Western readers, “whatever the Zen master says or does is a direct and spontaneous utterance of ‘suchness,’ … no symbol but the very thing.”86 NETCO joined contemporaries John Cage and Allan Kaprow in embracing a Zen phenomenology of “suchness” as a critique of representation.87 “Not founded on words and letters,” Watts explained that the Zen master’s “direct pointing  … by nonsymbolic actions or words” designates a world of “unclassified ‘suchness.’”88 The future co-presidents’ exposure to this non-categorical perspective during Iain Baxter’s fellowship year in Japan was formative, as Ingrid Baxter has

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more recently recalled, in the subsequent constitution of the company’s multifarious departments: Some of the early experience that Iain and I had was to go to Japan. And one of the things that I learned there was the openness of the Japanese ways of thinking and the closedness of the North Americans’, of our Western mind. And we’re very, very categorical. And so I think then this leads … to the things that we did with the N.E. Thing Co. Iain creating a very categorical company, and doing our various works in that, be they art, or whatever they were called; but Sensitivity Information, information to make people more sensitive about various things. And the N.E. Thing Company then became an umbrella to state that we knew that we were doing things in many different categories and ways and that they were all, you know, united and non-categorical.89 In stark contrast to the “documentary and functional qualities” projected by contemporaneous exercises in “counterorganization” such as the Art & Language group,90 NETCO’s administration mounted an immanent critique of the very concept of organization. Marcus Boon describes the relational ontology of Zen as unfolding a proto-deconstructive “critique of essences.”91 In contrast to the fidelity to a stable original enshrined in Platonic models of representation, the reverse mimesis enacted by Buddhist semiotics signifies a condition of “essencelessness.”92 Rather than the nihilism that is often imputed to it by Western commentators, however, this emptiness asserted by the Buddhist sign draws attention to the contingency and relativity of all “act[s] of designation or labeling.”93 In place of the conceptual identity central to classical Western metaphysics, Buddhist phenomenology thereby enacts a “nonconceptual” similarity.94 The astonishingly early appropriationist corpus of IT – the punning handle adopted by Iain Baxter in 1965 to facilitate anonymous coproduction with the American artist John Friel and Ingrid Baxter, whose copied products were subsequently folded into the aptly christened COP Department of NETCO – drew upon this Buddhist critique of representation to intervene within the modernist cult of originality.95 In contrast to the Saussurean logic of nomination enacted by Duchamp’s readymades in de Duve’s influential account (which de Duve later applied to a reading of NETCO’s ACTs and ARTs),96 IT’s appropriations constitute non-linguistic acts of designation derived from “Buddhist ecologies

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of the sign.”97 The phenomenal similarity designated by IT’s copies extends an invitation to the viewer to look beyond Platonic narratives of originality and repetition to explore the non-conceptual suchness disclosed by unfiltered perception, the “innocent way of looking and feeling” invoked by Iain Baxter in his 1967 interview with Dorothy Cameron excerpted in Chapter 2.98 The persistence of visuality as a valid mode of aesthetic experience in the subsequent art of the N.E. Thing Co. Ltd anticipates the work of a later generation of Chinese conceptualists who drew on traditions of Chan (Zen) Buddhism. “Unlike most of their Western counterparts,” writes Gao Minglu, “Chinese conceptual artists did not relinquish visual power. On the contrary, they deployed that power to enhance the conceptual meaning of their work.”99 If Baxter’s early rhetoric of the artist’s “innocent” vision is symptomatic of the “anti-modern” currents that Sava diagnoses in NETCO’s communications-based practice, the appropriationist projects of its COP Department equally impart an Innisian recognition of news media as the instruments of neocolonial “information industries,” as well as McLuhan’s understanding of the simulacral character of experience, and art, in a technological society; the “originals” to which COP’s copied “products” jestingly refer are reproductions in American magazines such as Artforum and Art in America, rather than any unmediated perceptual acts.100 Iain Baxter has linked his exposure to the Zen tradition of kōans – riddles intended to guide the student to enlightenment, or satori, which frequently assume a performative presentation101 – to his subsequent development of non-verbal teaching techniques with fellow educator Joel Smith during his MFA studies at Washington State University in 1963–64.102 According to Watts, “the koan system involves ‘passing’ a series of tests based on the mondo or anecdotes of the old masters … The student is expected to show that he has experienced the meaning of the koan by a specific and usually nonverbal demonstration which he has to discover intuitively.”103 Recalling the performative logic of kōans, BAXTER& has stated that his non-verbal teaching involved “trying to just hold up things in the class and do something with them.”104 This unscripted pedagogical theatre was a critique of the “deadening effects” of literate classroom procedure and, by implication, the epistemology  of conformity that mainstream pedagogy increasingly represented to students in the late 1960s.105 The comic overtones of teaching performances such as “Swimming on Dry Land” (ca 1964–65) (Figure  3.4), in which Baxter simulated aquatics by writhing under a clear plastic sheet, simultaneously invoked the tradition of learned satire practised by McLuhan.

3.4 Iain Baxter, “Swimming on Dry Land,” documentation of nonverbal teaching at UBC, ca 1964–66. Reproduced with the permission of IAIN BAXTER&.

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Non-verbal teaching is a recognizable expression of the “culture of spontaneity” that, according to Daniel Belgrad, gave rise to an imagined Pacific Nation.106 As with NETCO’s subsequent dematerialized inventory of Sensitivity Information products, the driving paradox of non-verbal teaching was its substitution of sensation for the cognitive signified conventionally associated with Conceptual art. This approach recalled the earlier tactics of Futurist artists, for whom “language was perceived in terms of sensation.”107 The affective turn spelled by Baxter’s silent teach-ins also paralleled the contemporaneous methodological experiments of fellow pedagogue György Kepes, in which, to quote Halpern, “perception itself became a form of thought.”108 Growing in equal measure out of an exposure to the writings of the American anthropologist Edward T. Hall on “the silent language” of non-verbal communication,109 non-verbal teaching constitutes the earliest chapter in the narrative of Vancouver artists’ acculturation to “theory” recounted by Ian Wallace,110 a one-time student of Baxter’s at UBC. Tai van Toorn has argued that Baxter’s experimental pedagogy illuminates NETCO’s misunderstood epistemology of Sensitivity Information. Van Toorn associates NETCO’s sensorial aims with contemporaneous studies in the field of environmental perception, which “strove to empower users of public space” through group sensitivity training exercises.111 Van Toorn’s research contributes valuable new insights into the pre-McLuhan sources of the culture of multisensory “documentation and witnessing” that Scott Watson posits, but implicitly dismisses, as the non-conceptual precursor to the theoretically savvy Vancouver School of photo-conceptualism.112 As a non-semantic intervention within the symbolic discourse of the university, non-verbal teaching also drew from historically denigrated genres and media such as the non-hierarchical patterning practised by tramp artists, whose marriage of rhizomatic designs, found materials, and everyday objects is suggestive of NETCO’s democratic fusion of art and leisure as varieties of non-categorical Sensitivity Information.113 As a pedagogical variation on the countercultural “be-in,”114 nonverbal teaching pitted the non-linguistic suchness of Zen ontology against the symbolic speech acts of Western epistemology: to be, nonverbal pedagogy seemed to suggest, was preferable to to mean. The concerns of non-verbal teaching are thus situated decisively prior to the advent of French Theory in the pedagogies and conceptual practices of such later Vancouver artists as Jeff Wall and Ian Wallace. Somewhat counterintuitively, the “silent seminar[s]” of non-verbal teaching could, in fact, be abrasively auditory.115 In their 1966 account of the unconventional methodology for artscanada magazine, Matthew

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Baigell and Joel Smith reported that Baxter’s pedagogical performances were sometimes accompanied by recordings of John Cage – another follower of McLuhan, as Donald Theall was early in recognizing  – “played throughout at loud volume.”116 The ambivalent stakes of this information-theoretic and McLuhan-inflected pedagogical discourse on silence and “noise” are even more stark in the contemporaneous writings of Schafer, culminating in the apocalyptic bombast of The Book of Noise and its reports on noise pollution in Vancouver and on the SFU campus in particular. The latter was subject to a protracted period of construction following its premature launch in 1965. In Schafer’s account, the polysemous (simultaneously aural and informatic) concept of “noise” serves as a foil for political tensions at Simon Fraser: A certain university in Western Canada has been in existence for five years. During that time it has been undergoing constant further construction. The profile of this construction noise … has infected the entire campus for this period … Among Canadian universities none has been so troubled by strife, strife affecting not only students but faculty and administration as well, leading to firings, suspensions and court cases. It will not be irrelevant to suggest an understudied correlation between the general chaos and noise level of this campus and its social disorders.117 Schafer would leave SFU in 1975. Van Toorn rightly complicates received portraits of Iain Baxter as the naive McLuhanite of early reports – in the words of Lucy Lippard, “probably the prototype of the new artist, a product of the McLubricated era.”118 Van Toorn identifies compelling points of friction with McLuhan’s program vis-à-vis the company’s humorous riposte to a lacklustre 1968 rendezvous with the media thinker at Vancouver’s Bayshore Inn, orchestrated by then Canada Council officer David Silcox, in the form of a button work (Figure 3.5), in which the acronym “V.I.P.” (standing for “Visually Illiterate Person”) is printed black-on-black, deliberately frustrating sensorial access to the semantic content of the work, and thus pointedly rescinding McLuhan’s ideology of unrestricted translation.119 In effect, the incommensurability of vision and the audile/ tactile values extolled by McLuhan’s writings wittily thematized by VIP indirectly retrieve the non-commutativity of vision and touch in Berkeleian optics, which McLuhan’s neo-Thomist presentation of the Anglo-Irish philosopher represses.120 Nevertheless, there can be little doubt that McLuhan quickly came to dominate Baxter’s approach to non-verbal teaching as he perfected

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3.5 N.E. Thing Co. Ltd, VIP, ca 1968–70. Button. Reproduced with the permission of IAIN BAXTER&.

his performative repertoire during a stint  – from 1964 to 1966  – as an assistant professor at UBC, an early hotbed of McLuhan-inspired sensory exploration. The February 1965 McLuhan-themed Festival of the Contemporary Arts, hosted by the campus, included a sprawling multimedia event titled The Medium Is the Message, for which Baxter oversaw the visual arts component.121 1965 correspondence between Joel Smith and Iain Baxter related to Smith’s articles on their non-verbal methodology also explicitly links their teaching experiments to McLuhan, though Smith expresses skepticism regarding Baxter’s enthusiasm for the Toronto School thinker, writing that “McLuhan … sounds more like a very effective propagandist than a prophet.”122 Baxter’s early interest in McLuhan is further documented by notes for a “Self-interview” presented at UBC in the spring of 1965. Employing such McLuhanderived vocabulary as “lineal,” “mosaic” and “interplay of media,” Baxter states that “macluen [sic] says read the content as meaning a confused environment. We must learn to arrange the sensory life in order to maximize awareness and learning […] to fashion the environment itself as a work of art.”123 Writing in 1967, then Artforum editor-in-chief Philip Leider reported that “underlying Baxter’s playfulness is an intense involvement with the various messages of Marshall McLuhan, and his conversation is heavily larded with terrifying McLuhanesque linguistic horrors: ‘information retrieval’ (in part at least a simple reference to library science), ‘intermedia,’ ‘visual sensitivity information,’ ‘sensitivity information dynamics,’ etc., etc.”124 Although Van Toorn proposes intriguing parallels between the sensorial pedagogy advanced by faculty at the Centre for Communication

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and the Arts and the sensitivity training exercises developed by the San Francisco–based duo Ann and Lawrence Halprin, Schafer’s comments on the perceptual aims of the centre’s pedagogical reforms leave little room for doubt as to their indebtedness to McLuhan. “Why was the sensorium shattered?,” he queried in a 1968 feature for artscanada magazine redolent of McLuhan’s discourse on the sensory conflict instigated by the printing press. “Why do we not have simply one multitudinous art form in which the details of perception corroborate or counterpoint one another in fields of simultaneous interaction?”125 Preceding Schafer’s better-known World Soundscape Project by three years, the analogical, interdisciplinary ideal pursued by centre faculty was actualized by a visionary experiment in “microteaching” performed by Iain Baxter, in which twelve weeks of courses were spontaneously compressed into “a compact 24-hour experimental unit.”126 Commandeering two cars and a panoply of audiovisual equipment, Baxter and his students set out to explore and document a variety of “visual experiences” across the city of Vancouver, including a meal at a Chinese restaurant, a screening of Blow-Up (1966), and a paper dress design show.127 This rapidfire sequence of ad hoc, immersive learning situations dramatized the “epistemology of informational surfeit” that Orit Halpern associates with the contemporaneous pedagogical experiments of the Eames Brothers, Kepes, and other innovative teachers.128 In utilizing a variety of portable media to document the urban environment, 24-hour Class (1967) also represents an early exercise in the “scanning” methodology that would subsequently coalesce in the N.E. Thing Co. Ltd’s A Portfolio of Piles (1968) (Figure 3.6):129 an important precedent for the documentation generated by Dennis Wheeler as part of Robert Smithson’s 1970 Vancouver project Glue Pour, discussed in the next chapter. Furthermore, Baxter’s transformation of the automobile into a multimedia lab anticipates Doray’s 1968 proposal for a mobile information van. Finally, Baxter’s seizing upon the urban environment at large as a McLuhanesque “classroom without walls” paralleled the emergence of what Halpern terms the “sensorial city” brought into representation by the contemporaneous cybernetic learning environments of Kepes.130 If Baxter’s 24-hour Class captures the initial optimism with which faculty at the Centre for Communication and the Arts adopted McLuhan’s discourse on the media as translators as a framework for their interdisciplinary ontology, later examples of Baxter’s media pedagogy reflect the growing mood of skepticism that followed the May 1968 crisis. As Sava notes, “There is a formidable aspect of Baxter’s production which, while embracing the so-called information society, also remained resolutely suspicious of it.”131 In fact, while Baxter’s art

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3.6 N.E. Thing Co., Portfolio of Piles (detail), 1968. Published by the UBC Fine Arts Gallery. Collection of the Morris and Helen Belkin Art Gallery Archives, University of British Columbia, Belkin Art Gallery fonds.

always approached the mediated environment in a spirit of satire, his skepticism of McLuhan can be historicized to mid-1968, as the N.E. Thing Co. Ltd’s initial vision of “the new galleries of the future” as “Television Stations, and Radio Stations and Communications Companies” yielded to what Iain Baxter termed “antiinformation,” registering the increasing sophistication of his reading of McLuhan’s critique of American information theory.132 Richard Cavell has explored McLuhan’s substitution of a “transformation model” for the “transportation model” enshrined in the classical information theory of Claude Shannon and Warren Weaver, which conceptualized the communications process – and information movement – as a linear channel, or “conduit.”133 The telecopier and Telex transmissions that facilitated NETCO’s remote participation in David Askevold’s 1969 Projects class at the Nova Scotia College of Art and Design (NSCAD) incorporated opportunities for “interactivity and participation” consistent with McLuhan’s creative and critical reconceptualization of information theory as “making.”134 A number of transmissions consist of instructions for simple actions to be carried out by students. Photo-documentation of the resulting performances completed the communicational circuit. For instance, one communiqué read: “PAINT THE TOP OF A TREE BROWN AND THE TRUNK GREEN.”135 A subsequent sequence of Polaroids recorded the

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students’ ensuing misadventures, including an “accident on location site while painting trees.”136 A number of other transmissions in this exchange notably frustrate any possibility of communicational transparency or telepresence. SEND LIE AND RECEIVE TRUTH (1969) consists of an otherwise blank page featuring a single black dot, absurdly labelled “TWO SPOTS.” The “Comments” section of the legend below states: WHEN YOU LOOK AT YOUR PAPER YOU HOLD THE TRUTH, I ALSO HOLD THE TRUTH TOO BUT I SENT THE LIE 137 The inaccessible contents of this transmission enact a strategic form of “non-communication” consistent with Eugene Thacker’s theorization of “dark media.”138 Embodying an apophaticism that proceeds through negation and what Thacker terms “discommunication,”139 dark media refuse the correspondence between messages sent and received inscribed in the transmission model of classical information theory as well as Platonic models of representation. But in contrast to the transformational alternative embraced by McLuhan, which authorizes the receiver to creatively repurpose the signal’s form, dark media cancel any possibility of communication, offering instead direct encounters with the alien. Thacker’s dark media resonate with the “Buddhist ecologies of the sign” analyzed by Boon, which similarly designate non-conceptual emptiness.140 Sava rightly underscores the comedic potential latent in such gestures, noting that “the humour” of NETCO’s Trans VSI instructions “resides in the impossibility of … communication.”141 A (tele)copy without an original, requiring optical duplication to answer its truth content, SEND LIE AND RECEIVE TRUTH invokes the infinite regress of the “non-Platonic” copy of Buddhist epistemology by means of its comic non-duality.142 Its singular “spot” resembles a Zen void carved out within the linear channels of the telecopier network.143 As such, SEND LIE AND RECEIVE TRUTH foreshadows the work of Chinese artist Xu Bing, whose Book from the Sky (1987–91) presents “a meaningless text that would function as a space of emptiness,” based on Chan Buddhist notions of the void.144 This and related kōan-like works in NETCO’s NSCAD interchange suggest, moreover, something akin to second-wave cybernetician Gregory Bateson’s recognition that “translations are never complete.”145 What is sometimes viewed as the “naïveté” of NETCO’s utopian communications experiments had, by the time of its 1970 intervention at the Data Processing Managers Association (DPMA) conventions, given way to a prescient critique of the social consequences of information

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technologies.146 In surviving notes for his conference speech, “Human Element in the Information Processing Community,” Baxter called upon participating computer companies, including 3M, IBM, and Xerox, to “solve the problems of the deleterious byproducts [sic] of the ‘American Dream.’”147 Baxter warned that failure to address the social effects of computing could result in nothing less than “immediate government takeover – which could lead to ominous times ahead.”148 Improbably, panel chair and assistant vice president of Management Information Systems William J. Horne praised Baxter’s speech, noting that “the panel in total was accepted as ‘excellent’ [ – ] the highest rating available to the audience in its rating scheme.”149 Baxter developed these themes further in a 1970 radio interview with Charles Amirkhanian: I’ve been very interested in what happens with the whole industry of computers and information. Because, in a sense, what will happen if it’s not handled carefully is it will be taken over by governments, and then, of course, all the obvious ominous aspects are going to happen. If the computing industry itself can’t control the privacy problems and so on, you’re immediately going to see it being taken over, and that will be pretty sad. And so there’s a great concern in the whole computing industry to … for them to rally together and with integrity to try to develop a code of ethics about keeping personal information about people, and so on.150 Baxter’s comments bring into focus a broader “reaction … against the instrumentalism of the technocratic culture of the previous decade and against  … techno-utopianism” during the early 1970s.151 At the same time, his focus on the issue of data privacy foreshadows contemporary debates about cybersecurity and surveillance capitalism in the age of Cambridge Analytica.152 Where Sava reads Iain Baxter’s disappearance from the Vancouver scene following the restructuring of the Centre for Communication and the Arts as a symptom of the “exhausted potential” of interdisciplinary practice,153 I want to argue instead that the “‘counterprotocol’ practices” enacted by NETCO’s later telecopier and Telex transmissions in counterpoint to the company’s growing political engagement were a response to, and brought into representation the reassertion of, disciplinary boundaries following the crises of 1968 and their challenge to the preceding paradigm of analogical translation.154 The reassertion of paper and writing under the bureaucratic regime of the ensuing publish-or-perish culture and its linguistically motivated, theory-based curriculum brought with it a renewed clash between media bias that

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favoured disciplinary specialization and a constitutive “disconnectivity” among media and the senses.155 As the condition of possibility for Baxter’s and Smith’s non-verbal experiments, McLuhan’s multimodal techniques for countering the sensory fragmentation that he associated with the historic dominance of print media suggest that non-verbal pedagogy attempted to wrest an uncontaminated ontological kernel from what the Generation of ’68 increasingly viewed as the compromised epistemology propagated by universities, and a problematic culture of conformity more generally, amid the atrocities of the Vietnam War. This project suggests striking parallels with contemporary resistance to the linguistic turn via renewed attention to affect and ontology. Particularly compelling are correspondences between Baxter’s coupling of McLuhan’s univocal media metaphysics with Zen apophaticism and Alexander Galloway’s more recent gloss on the “non-philosophy” of the French thinker François Laruelle as an attempt to develop an analogue alternative to the “digital” metaphysics of post-structuralism. Galloway’s commentary on the ethical dimensions of Laruelle’s resistance to the digital, and his insistence on its incompatibility with political projects, present an instructive point of entry into a consideration of the limitations of NETCO’s non-verbal teaching as a “nonrepresentational politics.”156 If, in Galloway’s Laruellian argot, the analogue designates the “generic” or “dis-individuate[d]” condition of ethical being,157 strategic digitality must be the precondition for a politics and its competing identitarian claims. While recognizing the timeliness of Laruelle’s ethical call for a “return to the one” on the potential eve of a planetary mass-extinction event, Galloway insists that “the ethical does not trump the political.”158 In perpetual tension with the ethics of an analogue One, politics demands a recognition of the multiple as well as strategic deployments of the digital. Galloway underscores the “odious universalism” that results when ethical categories are, in his words, “insufficiently generic”; the classic example of this categorical inadequacy being the white, male, affluent democratic Subject embodied by the American founding fathers.159 Galloway’s critical assessment of ontological frameworks that elide the constitutive multiplicity of politics has clear implications for the universalizing ambitions of non-verbal teaching and, by extension, for NETCO’s univocal renderings of Sensitivity Information. These limitations are brought into focus by an anecdote from Iain Baxter’s later teaching career. In addition to staging performances for students, non-verbal teaching sometimes invited pupils to orchestrate original actions by way of acculturating them to the protocols of conceptual

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practice. During his tenure at the future Emily Carr University in the early 1980s, Baxter’s students included a young Stan Douglas. In a recent interview, BAXTER& rehearsed a particular performance at Emily Carr in which he invited students to arrive in class dressed in black as a catalyst for conceptual improvisation. Yet Douglas, Baxter recalls, showed up in class wearing white. When questioned, Douglas tersely explained, “I’m Black.”160 Photo-documentation of the resulting student performance (Figure 3.7) shows Douglas in witty defiance of what Galloway would term the “failed sufficiency” of Baxter’s generic information ontology.161 In opposition to Baxter’s deployment of black as a generic manifestation of the void, Douglas draws attention to blackness as a racialized category and signifier, making a powerful statement on the troubling omissions that can proliferate within non-linguistic methodologies. Tomaszewska rightly underscores the Orientalizing undercurrents of Baxter’s and West Coast peers’ appropriations of Asian culture.162 Also at risk in non-verbal teaching, and in the McLuhanesque ontology that it mobilized – not to mention the affective and ontological projects that proliferate today – is their potential to silence the multiplicity of claims and identities that are the condition of possibility for political discourse, through an insufficient articulation of the generic of ethical solidarity. Yet Douglas’s intervention within non-verbal frameworks  – his willingness to play along with, while also against, Baxter’s ontological theatre – simultaneously suggests latent possibilities for epistemological complexity as well as resistance within the contemporary ontological turn: what more striking embodiment of the ethical that Galloway opposes to the fusion imposed by insufficiently generic ontologies can there be than Douglas’s artful insubordination? To the extent that this student performance begins to register the representational concerns that would come to define the Vancouver School, and Douglas’s own mature output, the nuanced interplay between epistemology and ontology that it stages presents a compelling model for thinking,  and rendering visible, a politics of ethics today.

3.7 Iain Baxter (photographer), Class project at Emily Carr, ca 1981–82. Reproduced with the permission of IAIN BAXTER&.

4

Vancouver Vortex: Robert Smithson and Wyndham Lewis All things slowly weaken and fall to ruin.1

Robert Smithson is foundational to standard histories of Vancouver photo-conceptualism. His visits to the Canadian Northwest Coast from late 1969 through early 1970 in conjunction with the Lucy Lippard– curated exhibition 955,000, and in preparation for the unrealized earthwork Island of Broken Glass – which would have dumped more than one hundred tonnes of industrial glass on Miami Islet in the Strait of Georgia – are conventionally viewed as important catalysts in the transformation of the previously marginal city into an important node in international contemporary art networks. Paradigmatically, Bart De  Baere and Dieter Roelstraete attribute the emergence of a Vancouver avant-garde in the late 1960s to a combined “Dan Graham/ Robert Smithson effect,”2 thereby bracketing Smithson with the author of the legendary photo-essay “Homes for America” (1966–67).3 Scott Watson similarly situates germinal products of the nascent photo-conceptual tendency such as Jeff Wall’s Landscape Manual (1969), a narrative mapping of urban space, and the collaboratively produced Free Media Bulletin (1969), securely within the American artists’ sphere of influence.4 More recently, Lara Tomaszewska has challenged this precedence, drawing attention to a pre-existing network of cross-border artistic exchange characterized by a distinctly West Coast “culture of spontaneity” nourished by the Black Mountain poetics of Charles Olson and the aleatory musical compositions of John Cage.5 In the early 1960s, UBC’s annual Festival of the Contemporary Arts provided a venue for contemporary artists to stage a recurring Gesamtkunstwerk of anti-formalist currents crossing borders, media, and disciplines.

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Tomaszewska argues persuasively for shifting the epicentre of this intellectual geography from New York to the imagined “Pacific Nation” sketched by Daniel Belgrad.6 However, this account notably downplays McLuhan’s decisive role in shaping this landscape, notwithstanding the McLuhanite derivation of Cage’s experiments, to which Tomaszewska gives priority.7 In fact, Cage’s fusion of Bergson, McLuhan, and Zen propelled an exploration of non-linguistic “suchness” remarkably aligned with the sensorial investigations of the Vancouver-based NETCO.8 In its privileging of poetry, moreover, Tomaszewska’s reassessment extends the precedence accorded to textual media and linguistic strategies enshrined in the Smithson- and Graham-centred narratives of De Baere/Roelstraete and Watson. Consequently, visual art produced by the N.E. Thing Co. Ltd and contemporaries including Gary Lee-Nova and Michael Morris are relegated to the status of neo-Dada extensions of a nebulous “L.A. Look.”9 In this chapter, I draw from these competing genealogies to reassess Smithson’s Vancouver sojourn for what it can teach us about the contested sources of Conceptual art in Canada and about the disputed origins of Vancouver photo-conceptualism in particular, in light of ongoing re-examinations of the linguistic turn. In particular, I demonstrate that key dimensions of Smithson’s practice, activated and transformed by his preparations for the unrealized Miami Islet intervention and related Vancouver-area projects, participated in the same Toronto School discourse network that I have been tracing in previous chapters, while underscoring the porous and open-ended topology of that network. Despite its abortive fate, Island of Broken Glass left a lasting impression on the Vancouver collective Image Bank, among others.10 As Grant Arnold has documented, Smithson also completed a number of works during his Vancouver fieldwork, include Glass Strata with Mulch and Soil (1970), a modest earthwork executed on the residential property of architect and collector Ian Davidson. Initially conceived as an extension of the horizontal mirror arrays documented by Smithson’s 1969 Artforum photo-essay “Incidents of Mirror-Travel in the Yucatan” that had inspired Davidson’s commission, the work ultimately materialized in January 1970 as a row of thirty-two sheets of clear picture glass, installed vertically.11 Arnold endorses Robert Hobbs’s contention that this work was conceived in “dialectical relationship with Island of Broken Glass.”12 At first glance, Smithson’s Miami Islet debacle, and the ephemeral Glue Pour (1970) (Figure 4.1) that he and a team of assistants executed near the UBC campus as part of Lippard’s multi-venue exhibition 955,000,

4.1 Illyas Pagonis, Dennis Wheeler, Robert Smithson, and Lucy Lippard with Smithson’s Glue Pour, 8 January 1970. Photo: © Christos Dikeakos.

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would seem to have left no enduring monument to the artist’s time in the Vancouver region. Yet Grant Arnold convincingly argues that Smithson’s Canadian interlude was the springboard for his era-defining Spiral Jetty (1970).13 While bringing into focus the same border-crossing tendencies traced by De Baere/Roelstraete, Tomaszewska, and Watson, I want to explore how Smithson’s Vancouver actions unexpectedly highlight the constitutive role of a recognizably Toronto School discourse on the co-evolution of bodies, media, and spatiotemporal perception in the emergence of photo-conceptual practices engaging informatic theories, techniques, and media, both within and beyond the territorial borders of Canada. Given the primacy of documentation in Smithson’s corpus, as well as the information-theoretic associations of his organizing metaphor of “entropy,” information will be central to this reconsideration. The proto-postmodern travelogues of Wyndham Lewis will emerge as important antecedents to Smithson’s experiments in a modality of fiction that Peta Mitchell terms “self-conscious ‘cartographic’ writing”14 and thus as indirect prototypes for Jeff Wall’s critical redeployment of the protocols of photo-journalism in Landscape Manual (1969).15

Anxieties of Influence Previous Smithson commentators have identified the Canadian-born Lewis as a primary source for the antimodernist imaginary inhabited by the American artist’s earthworks, defining examples of the Land Art movement that conjure the historic mounds constructed by Indigenous peoples of the Americas as well as science-fiction visions of post-Anthropocene futures. Fellow postminimalist Dan Graham’s recollection of Smithson citing Lewis as his “favorite writer” in 1965 confirms Smithson’s own avowal in a 1972 interview for the Archives of American Art that he “was very influenced by Wyndham Lewis.”16 Lewis belonged to a cadre of Anglo-American modernists including T.S. Eliot, T.E. Hulme, and Ezra Pound, whose writings Smithson explored in tandem with Catholic imagery and texts during the early 1960s.17 With characteristic ambivalence, Smithson would later dub this group the “Men of 1914,”18 claiming a direct connection to this “antidemocratic intelligentsia” through his childhood pediatrician, William Carlos Williams.19 The contents of Smithson’s library attest to Lewis’s central place in his personal intellectual geography. They include two Lewis titles as well as Geoffrey Wagner’s 1957 monographic study, Wyndham Lewis: A Portrait of the Artist as the Enemy.20

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Jennifer L. Roberts notes that prior to his self-proclaimed “breakthrough” and putative break with his earlier religious commitments in 1964, Smithson had been endeavouring “to reestablish traditional art work in terms of the Eliot-Pound-Wyndham Lewis situation.”21 However, Caroline A. Jones contests the finality of Smithson’s “claims to purgation” circa 1964.22 Gary Shapiro likewise observes parallels between the “antimodernist modernism” of Lewis and Smithson’s protopostmodernism.23 He writes that “Smithson adopts some of the rhetorical and antiacademic tone of Lewis’s polemic” in Time and Western Man, Lewis’s critique of the modernist episteme, but adds that Smithson actually “goes farther than Lewis” in his own excavation of non-modern alternatives to hegemonic formalisms.24 More recently, Nico Israel has drawn attention to resonances between Lewis and Pound’s crystalline figure of the “vortex” and such early Smithson sculptures as Four-Sided Vortex (1965).25 Besides offering Smithson a working model of the artist-author,26 and a rich repertoire of inorganic metaphors, what did Lewis’s example suggest to the American artist? Island of Broken Glass was conceived as an ambitious extension of a series of outdoor interventions representing hypothetical continents, executed by Smithson at Uxmal in the Yucatán and at Loveladies Island in the artist’s home state of New Jersey.27 These fictive “earth maps” forcefully materialize the imaginative geographies charted by the artist in such photo-essays as “Incidents of Mirror-Travel in the Yucatan” (1969).28 The unstable relation between diagram and territory manifested by the continents collapsed the earlier tension between site and documentation articulated by the “non-sites” – museum documentation and physical samples transplanted from remote locations  – which, in the artist’s words, functioned as “three dimensional map[s] of the site.”29 Smithson’s terrestrial maps were, in his words, “concerned with the transference of information.”30 In a 1969 interview with Achille Bonito Oliva for Domus magazine, Smithson retraced the intellectual trajectory, and transnational itinerary, that had led him to the proposed Island of Broken Glass: I’m very interested right now only in land for the work to be on, in other words the work of art needs actual land. When I go back to the United States, I have planned to cover a whole island with broken glass. I … made a small version of that in the Yucatan, because the Yucatan, in a sense, is a very allusive place, a very ungraspable place to comprehend; that suggested to me the idea of, the memory, of Atlantis: so I made a map of Atlantis out of broken glass. And then I built this map of glass in New Jersey;

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the Yucatan project stimulated this project. In Canada there are lots of uninhabited islands; so I plan now to cover a whole island with broken glass. And that is the result of the map of glass of Atlantis.31 Lewis’s writings offer one of several interpretive keys to both the earth maps and the “scanning record[s]” documenting their construction and reproduced by the photo-essays.32 Taking stock of this relationship will have significant revisionist implications for our understanding of Smithson’s informatic concerns as well as the enduring import of his time in the Vancouver region. Lewis’s vexed dramatizations of space/ time polarities in his criticism and fiction of the 1920s and early 1930s suggest a previously overlooked prototype for the generative “antinomies” of Smithson’s early paintings and later Sites/Non-Sites.33 In particular, Lewis’s speculative travelogue Filibusters in Barbary (1932) – an incisive satire of colonialism and of the travel genre itself – suggests a compelling model for Smithson’s conceptual essays, notably “Incidents of Mirror-Travel in the Yucatan.” Roberts has undertaken the most detailed study of the latter text in relation to fellow New Jersey–born travel writer John Lloyd Stephens’s 1843 account of his tour of Central America, to which the title of Smithson’s photo-essay alludes.34 Roberts reads “Incidents of Mirror-Travel in the Yucatan” as staging a “critical inversion” of Stephens’s narrative of discovery, while simultaneously uncovering lingering colonial attitudes in Smithson’s text.35 Roberts argues that Stephens’s Yucatán peregrinations propagated a framework of domination at the level of vision through the efforts of the writer’s travel companion, the British architect and illustrator Frederick Catherwood, to survey and document a recalcitrant territory by imposing a picturesque optics. For the nineteenth-century travel writer, an elevated incidence of the  ocular disorder strabismus, colloquially known as “lazy eye,” among  the Indigenous population of the Yucatán symptomatized a “general lack of industriousness” that had resulted in Maya people’s inability to “see,” and thereby recognize, the impressive cultural achievements of their ancestors.36 By contrast, Stephens’s and Catherwood’s own struggles to map the ruins of Copán and Palenque instantiated a Western capacity to extract order from apparent chaos through active practices of looking. Roberts interprets the nine Mirror Displacements (Figure 4.2) documented by Smithson’s Artforum text – grid-like configurations of partly buried twelve-inch mirrors temporarily installed at sites on the artist’s Yucatán itinerary – as staging a “systematic attempt to oppose Stephens’s visual imperialism.”37 In Roberts’s perceptive

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4.2 Robert Smithson, Yucatan Mirror Displacements, 1969. Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York. © 2021 Holt / Smithson Foundation / Licensed by VAGA at Artists Rights Society (ARS), NY.

reading, Smithson generates a rupture in the colonial gaze through the mirrors’ potentially blinding opacity and strategic deflection of a unitary, perspectival vision. Enframing only blank skies or the dazzling illumination of reflected sunlight, Smithson’s mirrors frustrate expectations of access to the archaeological treasures seemingly promised by the essay’s titular nod to Stephens. While foregrounding these decolonizing undercurrents, Roberts simultaneously critiques Smithson for reinforcing Stephens’s dehistoricized view of the Indigenous peoples of the Yucatán as inhabiting a mythic temporality. The condition of perpetual synchrony evoked by Smithson’s narrative rehearses Stephens’s representations of Maya people as deficient in historical consciousness, while simultaneously reinforcing pejorative views of contemporary governments in the region as, in Smithson’s overdetermined vocabulary, “entropic.”38 In the final

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analysis, Roberts comprehends the “passivism” implicated in the Mirror Displacements’ empty gaze as both reflecting the artist’s own political apathy and projecting it onto his mythical Central American subjects.39 The fragmented, empty field of vision screened by the Mirror Displacements also literalized the “dedifferentiated” mode of scattered seeing, or “unconscious scanning,” theorized by art educator and perceptual psychologist Anton Ehrenzweig in The Hidden Order of Art (1967), a key source for Smithson’s anti-formalist tactics.40 Robert Linsley has interpreted Smithson’s materialization of Ehrenzweig’s dedifferentiated gaze as deconstructing the “optical” Gestalt propagated by the formalist criticism of Michael Fried.41 A non-perspectival reconceptualization of vision was equally central to the critical project mounted by Wyndham Lewis more than four decades earlier, suggesting a key site of convergence with the anti-Gestalt manoeuvres of Smithson’s Mirror Displacements. Lewis articulated his contrarian “philosophy of the eye” in counterpoint to the processual metaphysics of Bergson and Whitehead, which he identified as the template for the stream-ofconsciousness techniques adopted by modernist peers, including James Joyce, Gertrude Stein, and Virginia Woolf.42 The reconstructed spatial frame championed by Lewis in his texts of the 1920s and early 1930s as an antidote to the temporal flux celebrated by Bergsonian modernists marks both a point of continuity with, and a hypertrophied refrain of, the visual stasis vaunted by his earlier Vorticist aesthetics. Reed Way Dasenbrock has demonstrated that vision persisted as the governing model for the literary experiments of former Vorticists during the interwar period  – painting, and Lewis’s semi-abstract canvases in particular, continuing to serve as paragons.43 Operating as what Andrew Gaedtke has aptly dubbed a “proto-media critic” decades prior to the emergence of cultural studies as an accepted academic discipline, Lewis traced a broad range of developments in popular culture to an “ontological crisis” that he ascribed to a Bergsonmad modernity.44 Everything from advertisers’ manipulation of consumer sentiment to the silent slapstick of Charlie Chaplin was evidence of a perilous rejection of the stability of Platonic form that threatened to plunge European nations into cultural barbarism and a resumption of the hostilities suspended by the Treaty of Versailles. For Lewis, who had served as a bombardier and an official war artist for both the British and Canadian militaries during the First World War, the latter prospect was a source of acute anxiety that fuelled his deepening commitment to pacifism throughout the interwar period, notwithstanding his seemingly contradictory endorsement of fascism in the early 1930s, a tension explored in greater detail below.45

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While it would be tempting to read the reconstructed vision valorized by Lewis’s interwar criticism as a manifestation of reactionary classicism tout court, his visual and spatial paradigm was, in fact, formulated in agonistic tension with the neoclassicism of Parisian contemporaries. In Paul Edwards’s carefully argued reassessment of Lewis’s career, the  cultural and metaphysical polemic of Time and Western Man marks the culmination of a half-decade-long project of epistemic re-examination argued across multiple published volumes, including The Art of Being Ruled and The Lion and the Fox (1927).46 These texts were substantially revised excerpts from an unwieldy ur-manuscript initiated in 1923, originally exceeding 350,000 words and prospectively titled “The Man of the World.”47 Edwards argues that this period of concentrated critical activity must be read as following on the heels of a misunderstood postwar interlude of lingering avant-garde optimism, during which Lewis attempted to recuperate the constructivist energies of Vorticism, the brief-lived, English avant-garde movement he had spearheaded with Ezra Pound, which effectively came to a close with the muted reception of the second issue of its little magazine Blast in 1915 and the wartime casualties of key affiliates T.E. Hulme and Henri Gaudier-Brzeska.48 The subsequent interlude ended just as abruptly, with the disappointing reception of Lewis’s 1919 neo-Vorticist manifesto The Caliph’s Design and the Lewis-orchestrated Group X exhibition held at the Mansard Gallery in 1920, followed by the artist’s inability to afford studio space after October 1923. Together with a series of comedic paintings collectively known as the Tyros, these forays constituted Lewis’s ill-conceived bid to mount a viable populist alternative to Continental modernisms. As early as his 1919 manifesto, Lewis had begun to accuse the latter of betraying the revolutionary ambitions of the prewar avant-garde for a dubious purchase on the fashion system of commodity culture. Lewis’s turn to English traditions of satire to legitimize his rejoinder to the Parisian avant-garde cleared a path for his subsequent exploration of the non-perspectival optics of George Berkeley and other British empiricists, whose theories – as will be examined at greater length below – bear a remarkable resemblance to Smithson’s subsequent anti-Cartesian manoeuvres.49 In Time and Western Man, Lewis reprised his earlier critiques of Picasso and Stein, now arguing that their fashionable experimentation with temporal forms (and, in Picasso’s case, regular rotation through styles) was symptomatic of a pervasive condition of “permanent novelty” rooted in the ontologies of Bergson, Whitehead, and other process philosophers.50 This assault on late modernism as the product of

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capitalist economies of aesthetic co-optation and planned obsolescence culminated in Lewis’s 1930 satirical masterwork, The Apes of God. Revisiting the bourgeois bohemia parodied by his wartime novel Tarr (1918), The Apes of God anatomizes the denizens of Bloomsbury with a zoologist’s eye. Inhabiting the panoptic centre of this vortex of artistic counterfeiture and social pretension is the punningly perspectival Pierpoint (or, “peer-point”),51 Lewis’s presumed alter ego, who, like Beckett’s Godot, never appears in person but whose God-like presence propels the novel’s action, or in-action, such as it is. Pierpoint’s self-appointed evangelist, Horace Zagreus, leads a newly discovered “genius” on a Dantean tour of London’s art circles, the characters they encounter declaiming various points of theory attributed (or more accurately misattributed) to Pierpoint along the way. These “broadcast[s],”52 as the presciently media-critical Lewis terms them, articulate an ontology of transmission that glosses the late modernist economy of the commoditized copy, or avant-garde knock-off, critiqued by Time and Western Man. As each “ape” successively rehearses the insights of Pierpoint, whose novelty the artist-author implicitly arrogates to his own prewar innovations as a Vorticist painter and prose stylist, the novel progressively incarnates the argumentation of Lewis’s foregoing volumes of cultural criticism.

Changing Concepts of Time The Apes of God constitutes an overlooked prototype for Smithson’s interventions in modernist economies of originality and vision. The anxieties of influence rehearsed by Lewis’s novel suggest an additional archetype for Smithson’s exploration of recursive modes of “transhistorical consciousness” previously traced to the Mesoamericanist George Kubler.53 In Pamela M. Lee’s perceptive analysis, Kubler’s typological approach to art historiography  – as the study of objects considered as sequential solutions to enduring formal problems  – appealed to Smithson as an antihumanist alternative to the organicism of dominant, formalist frameworks. “However useful it is for pedagogical purposes,” Kubler’s popular 1962 monograph The Shape of Time admonished readers that “the biological metaphor of style as a sequence of life-stages was historically misleading, for it bestowed upon the flux of events the behavior and shape of organisms.”54 Kubler’s words reverberate in Smithson’s 1966 conceptual essay “Quasi-Infinities and the Waning of Space,” in which he observes that “the biological metaphor is at the bottom of all ‘formalist’ criticism.”55 In place of organicist

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conceptions of history as growth and decay, Kubler substituted analogies drawn from the physical sciences – a strategy with predictable appeal for the geologically minded Smithson. Lee attributes Kubler’s and Smithson’s mutual critique of historiographic approaches grounded in artists’ biographies to the emergence of a non-anthropocentric concept of time derived from the postwar science of cybernetics. Norbert Wiener’s 1948 introduction to the new discipline, Cybernetics: Control and Communication in the Animal and Machine, reframed problems of “communication over time” in an effort to render the unforeseeable flow of future events amenable to calculation and control.56 Derived from self-correcting antiaircraft technologies known as servomechanisms, the predictive temporality of “feedback” posited by cybernetics was analogized to non-human forms of machinic time.57 But though upheld as an ideal of self-regulation, in practice feedback was notoriously subject to interference, which tended to progressively erode systems’ capacity to adapt to new conditions. Extrapolating from the information theory of Claude Shannon and Warren Weaver, Wiener labelled this thermodynamic principle of irreversible decay “entropy”  – subsequently a key term in Smithson’s lexicon as well.58 Lee notes that the opening chapter of Cybernetics situates the automated time scales navigated by the servomechanism not, as might be expected, within the mechanistic temporality of post-Newtonian science, but rather within “the same sort of Bergsonian time as the living organism.”59 On a first reading, Wiener’s invocation of Bergson and the “time-structure of vitalism” in the context of cybernetic machines’ inexorable drift toward disorganization is bound to strike a discordant note.60 Bergson’s neo-vitalist revision of Darwinian theory in Creative Evolution championed a conception of life as “endlessly continued creation”61  – a far cry from the terminal state of sameness forecast by Wiener’s cybernetics. But in echoing Bergson’s own definition of biological temporality as “irreversible,” Wiener’s text yields an unlikely homology between the time of vitalist ontogenesis and the thermodynamic stasis that is the ineluctable fatum of cybernetic systems.62 Smithson’s engagement with entropy is properly located within a related tension between mechanistic and vitalist conceptions of temporal process. Humpty Dumpty, among the artist’s favoured metaphors for entropy, forcefully personifies the unidirectional momentum common to Bergsonian evolution and cybernetic recursion, just as Smithson’s ponderous art jestingly materializes the sedimentary action of history.63 This irreversibility of time’s arrow is notably de-emphasized in Lee’s triangulation of cybernetic motifs figured by Kubler, Smithson,

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and Wiener. Lee instead foregrounds the “Niagara of increasing entropy” that all three foresaw as the homogenizing vector of temporal passage.64 Kubler maintained that art, as a field of finite formal innovations and potentially unlimited replication, compels an awareness of the imminent exhaustion of formal possibilities. Lee draws attention to Smithson’s representations of futurity as a “horizon of sameness,” echoing the entropic “perspective of approaching completion” sketched by Kubler.65 “Art and its history,” Lee concludes, “for Kubler, Wiener, and Smithson alike, seems a set of diminishing returns. Nothing new under the stars.”66 This interpretation significantly downplays the vitalist and specifically Bergsonian strands in cybernetic theory privileged by Wiener’s foundational writings. Bergson also notably influenced Kubler’s cybernetic revision of art historiography via his mentor, the Yale medievalist Henri Focillon.67 Jae Emerling has argued persuasively for a Bergsonian interpretation of Focillon’s work, while Adi Efal has traced the French thinker’s influence on both Focillon and Kubler.68 The impact of Bergson’s thought was not limited to Kubler’s privileging of morphology and duration over iconological interpretation. The Mesoamericanist’s conception of the artifacts of art history as objectifying a sequence of linked solutions to enduring formal “problems” is also a tacit reformulation of Bergson’s problematic of creative evolution as the organism’s response to challenging environmental conditions. In Creative Evolution, Bergson counters the Darwinian postulate of adaptation as a process of random and piecemeal mutation with a notion of evolution as embodying holistic solutions to functional problems. Bergson’s influential illustration of this problematic is the eye, whose structure – from mollusks to complex vertebrates – constitutes a working demonstration that evolution does not proceed by accidental variation, but “reacts positively, it solves a problem.”69 Kubler’s description of the artifacts of human manufacture as answering “problems” notably reprises Bergson’s language. “Every man-made thing,” writes Kubler, “arises from a problem as a purposeful solution.”70 We similarly recognize unmistakable echoes of Bergson’s problematic in Wiener’s dismissal of conventional oppositions between mechanism and vitalism as “badly posed questions.”71 Bergson’s optical instantiation of the pragmatic of creative evolution likewise reverberates in Lewis’s ostensibly oppositional philosophy of the eye. The Bergsonian threads of Kubler’s text point to a more ambivalent discourse on time and biology than Lee acknowledges. Despite its apparent spatial bias, Kubler’s topological mapping of durational structures in fact flirts with temporal metaphors at almost every turn. In the very same breath that he criticizes “the biological metaphor of

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style,” Kubler invokes Bergson’s rhetoric in discussing the “flux of events” inevitably distorted by such a framework.72 Indeed, duration  – the keyword in Bergsonian metaphysics – permeates Kubler’s discussion of “morphological problems.”73 As Reinhold Martin has documented, Smithson’s entropic idiom is similarly haunted by the spectre of its organicist Other.74 The vitalist excess of Smithson’s cybernetic discourse is indicative of the Bergsonian origins that it shared with the art historiographies of Focillon and Kubler as well as Wiener’s fraught representations of temporality. For Smithson, Lewis’s writings served as a bridge between Bergson and Kubler. Previous commentators have proposed temporal readings of Smithson’s antimodernist tactics amenable to a Bergsonian discourse on matter and memory. Linsley reads Smithson’s rejection of the stasis vaunted by the formalist criticism of Michael Fried to the effect that “in Smithson’s universe, the victory will always belong to time.”75 For Roberts, the Mirror Displacements similarly function as working models of the involuntary memory described by Marcel Proust and Samuel Beckett under the mutual influence of Bergsonian mnemotechnics.76 Andrew Uroskie undertakes the most extended analysis of Smithson’s figurations of temporality. He applies the neo-Bergsonian “time-image” that Deleuze theorized as defining of post–Second World War cinema to reassess Smithson’s filmic documentation of his iconic earthwork Spiral Jetty (1970) as “less concerned with delineating spatial location than with the elaboration of what could be called a ‘stratigraphic’ conception of time.”77 As discussed below, the travel writings of Wyndham Lewis suggest an overlooked antecedent for the paradoxical dynamics of “unmapping” invoked by Uroskie to elucidate Smithson’s temporalization of spatial forms.78 Like the tacit Bergsonism of Kubler’s cybernetic historiography, Lewis’s anti-Bergsonian polemic harbours a debt to the French thinker that further illuminates the conflicted antinomies of space and time that propel Smithson’s practice. In a penetrating study of the enabling dualisms of Lewis’s critique of process philosophy, SueEllen Campbell argues that Bergson’s Creative Evolution served as “a hidden model – a model Lewis mirrors, inverts, and conceals throughout the philosophical arguments of Time and Western Man.”79 Ann Reynolds exposes an analogously contrarian apparatus active within Smithson’s dualistic practice: “geology replaces biology, inanimate replaces animate, abstraction replaces representation, antimatter replaces anti-illusionism.”80 These tensions are partly explained by the fact that Lewis belonged to a generation of Anglo-American modernists influential on Smithson, who collectively disavowed Bergson following a formative period of

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interest in his work.81 Mary Ann Gillies notes that “during Lewis’s continental wanderings of 1902–1908, his base was Paris, and while in Paris he attended Bergson’s lectures at the Collège de France.”82 The subsequent repudiation of the French thinker by the avant-garde coincided with the rapid popularization of his philosophy following the English translation of Creative Evolution in 1911.83 Lewis’s anti-Bergsonian turn may also have been a response to the shifting reception of the philosopher by leftist and rightist audiences. Sanford Schwartz observes that “Bergson provoked a variety of distinct and sometimes incompatible responses.”84 While the anti-positivist orientation of his earlier text, Matter and Memory, was initially embraced by conservative readers keen to assert the self-determination of the ego, Creative Evolution repositioned Bergson as an exponent of what Schwartz terms a “vitalism of the Left,” which came to embrace the philosopher’s vision of a coming “society of creators” as a platform for social reform.85 It was this socialist pole of the Bergsonian political spectrum to which the Canadian modernist Bertram Brooker gravitated (see Chapter 1), as demonstrated by his works of socially conscious short fiction and his editorial advisory role for the leftist magazine The Canadian Forum.86 The revelation of Bergson’s social consciousness – widely broadcast by the rightist Action Française – is not likely to have been welcomed by the authoritarian Lewis, however. In a jiu-jitsu-like move, Lewis’s Vorticist and post-Vorticist production inverted the familiar binaries of Bergsonian philosophy, now championing the intellectual and material pole denigrated by Bergson. Nevertheless, as Richard Lofthouse perceptively observes, “there was of course much vitalism in Vorticism as well.”87 In his nuanced reassessment of the frequently self-contradictory twistings and turnings of Lewis’s career and thought, Paul Edwards similarly argues that “Lewis becomes in 1913 a more intrinsically Bergsonian artist, though of a peculiarly perverse and rebellious kind.”88 Bergson’s enduring stamp is particularly legible in Lewis’s corrective to the alleged excesses of time-philosophy, namely his Berkeleian philosophy of the eye and the Vorticist aesthetics of “Imagism” that preceded it.89 In particular, Bergson’s ontology of the “image” in Matter and Memory, discussed below, suggests a prototype for Lewis’s discourse on vision that, in turn, offers a new path of approach to the anti-“optical” manoeuvres of Smithson conventionally traced to the anti-Gestalt writings of Ehrenzweig. The conflicted investments of Lewis’s discourse are nowhere more apparent than in his travel writings. Filibusters in Barbary appeared on the heels of the artist-author’s parody of a time-minded bourgeois

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bohemia in The Apes of God and his subsequent, disastrous endorsement of Hitler as a “Man of Peace” in a 1931 report from Berlin.90 David Farley argues that Filibusters in Barbary attempted “to find some political or social structure that would prevent a recurrence of the events that led to the First World War.”91 The divided argumentation of the resulting discourse on the politics of space and time suggests a compelling prototype for Smithson’s unresolved dialectic of entropy and remembrance. Smithson’s proposal for Island of Broken Glass forcefully embodied this Lewisian interface with the cosmopolitical mnemotechnics of Bergsonism. Drawing on Lewis’s travelogue as inter-text, I want to revisit Smithson’s “Incidents of Mirror-Travel in the Yucatan,” and the hypothetical continents that grew out of the expeditionary project documented by that essay, as mining a repressed Bergsonian ontology of matter and memory that would illuminate his subsequent Vancouver-area projects. Cybernetic and thermodynamic notions of entropy – variously interpreted as information-theoretic equilibrium or thermodynamic heat death – have conventionally been mobilized to elucidate Smithson’s representations of temporality. Lewis’s critical dialogue with Bergson suggests another path of approach to Smithson’s figurations of what Reinhold Martin has aptly dubbed “organicism’s other.”92 Much as Lewis scholars have identified lingering traces of Bergsonian ontology in the Vorticist artist’s anti-Bergsonian polemic, so too have revisionist studies of Smithson’s crystalline practice identified an excess of what Caroline A. Jones refers to variously as “libidinal flows” and “flux and change.”93 How does this temporal surplus inform Smithson’s transformation of conventional documentary formats into what Reynolds terms “the undifferentiated flow of information” communicated by the photo-essays?94 Risking the prospect of, in Nico Israel’s admonitory words, “merely … add[ing] another example of Smithsonian ‘influence’ … onto the heap of others recently or long ago unearthed,”95 this chapter will map affinities between the philosophical frameworks and rhetorical strategies mobilized by Lewis and Smithson, thereby adding additional complexity to existing narratives of the American artist’s enabling contributions to contemporary Vancouver art and economies. Less an investigation of a previously underexplored reference in Smithson’s multivalent system of intertextuality, this case study will instead demonstrate that the Lewisian tropes latent in the American artist’s work necessitate a reconsideration of previous genealogies of Vancouver conceptualism. If the coeval production of the N.E. Thing Co. Ltd brings into visibility the decisive impact of McLuhan’s critical information theory on Canadian conceptualism, then Smithson’s postminimalism instantiates

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something like a late- or neo-Vorticism – one parallel to the Canadian Vorticism practised contemporaneously, in Gregory Betts’s account, by McLuhan’s associates in western Canada, Sheila and Wilfred Watson.

Scanners Smithson’s presence in Vancouver is a standard anchor in histories of photo-conceptualism. Scott Watson’s narrative is axiomatic in pointing to Smithson’s photo-essays and those of fellow American artist Dan Graham as models for the “urban semiotic” subsequently mined by Jeff Wall and Ian Wallace in foundational photo-text projects such as Wall’s 1969 Landscape Manual and Wallace’s La Melancholie de la rue (1973).96 While acknowledging Graham’s and Smithson’s departures from the hermetic self-reflexivity of New York Minimalism, a break dramatized by those artists’ turn away from the idealized space of the gallery to document the hybrid zones of the metropolitan fringe, Watson notably privileges a genealogy of photo-textual representation at the expense of the perceptual discourses and practices that were generative of this conceptual modality. NETCO’s unresolved position in this lineage is diagnostic of a broader field of tensions in established histories of photo-conceptualism. Watson credits the Vancouver company with defining a semiotic “strategy” whose theorization he nonetheless tacitly arrogates to Wall and Wallace.97 NETCO’s chronological status is similarly uncertain. Watson asserts that “the earliest locally produced image of what I have been calling the defeatured landscape was made, I believe, by Iain and Ingrid Baxter.”98 The work in question, Ruins (1968), a Cibachrome transparency depicting a generic suburban landscape, is alleged to show “a clear debt to Smithson.”99 Though recognizing the company’s early innovations in Cibachrome photography – predating by a decade the better-known work of Wall in the same medium  – Watson thereby situates NETCO’s production squarely within a narrative of one-way American influence.100 In fact, Smithson had himself cited Iain Baxter and the N.E. Thing Co. Ltd’s 1968 artist’s book A Portfolio of Piles in his seminal earthworks essay “A Sedimentation of the Mind,” published in Artforum the same year that Ruins was shot.101 “Recently, in Vancouver,” wrote Smithson, “Iain Baxter put on an exhibition of Piles that were located at different points in the city; he also helped in the presentation of a Portfolio of Piles.”102 Rather than relegating NETCO to the derivative rank of Smithson acolyte to which Watson consigns the company, it is imperative to recognize that Smithson had himself promoted the Vancouver

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company to the vanguard of an emergent earth art movement. Fellow Vancouver photo-conceptualist Christos Dikeakos reinforces this precedence, noting that “it’s important to mention the Baxters. Their use of Duchamp’s ready-made nomination in the catalogue A Portfolio of Piles (1968) was a seminal work for photoconceptual practice here.”103 Dikeakos foregrounds the formative impact of NETCO’s photography on subsequent photo-conceptual projects while observing its parallels, and synchronicity, with Smithson’s scanning methodology. Smithson’s papers at the Archive of American Art include correspondence with Iain Baxter from 1968 accompanied by photo-documentation of various NETCO “Earth” projects, including an “Eroding Fountain” and other works sent in response to inquiries related to the American artist’s “A Sedimentation of the Mind” essay, published later the same year.104 As introduced above, scanning denotes a peripheral or scattered mode of seeing originally theorized by arts educator Anton Ehrenzweig and adapted by Smithson into a processual alternative to the instantaneous, Gestalt opticality vaunted by Greenberg and fellow formalist critics, notably Michael Fried. As transformed by Smithson, scanning also came to be associated with mapping techniques that translated the process of documenting fieldwork into a non-linear network of spatialized “views.”105 A crucial artifact of this methodology is the sketch for an unrealized “scanning record” of the Glue Pour (Figure 4.3) executed by Smithson near the UBC campus in Vancouver with assistance from Dikeakos, Lucy Lippard, and then UBC students Ilya Pagonis and Dennis Wheeler. In his gloss on this document, Grant Arnold echoes Linsley’s interpretation of the earlier Mirror Displacements executed in the Yucatán, which similarly mobilized the potentialities of a dedifferentiated gaze, as a critique of formalist and rationalist optics: Had the scanning record been completed, it would have undercut the foundation of the Cartesian model of vision to a degree beyond that of any of his earlier photographic works. The deployment of multiple perspectives and technically diverse types of photographs would have also challenged a phenomenological apprehension, based on the idea of a single body moving physically around the work.106 Arnold rightly draws attention to the innovative features of the proposed Glue Pour scanning record, which would have incorporated a previously unseen degree of complexity as well as a newfound break with embodied modes of seeing. It is likely that the “pathways radiat[ing] in all directions” schematized by Ehrenzweig’s pedagogical diagram of “the maze

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4.3 Robert Smithson, Glue Pour, 1970. © 2021 Holt / Smithson Foundation / Licensed by VAGA at Artists Rights Society (ARS), NY.

(serial structure) of a creative search” (Figure 4.4) suggested a model for the “forking arrangement” of Smithson’s proposed documentation of Glue Pour.107 Ehrenzweig’s figure brings into view the “fruitful alternation between differentiated and undifferentiated modes of functioning,” which he identified as the key to a healthy creative ego, and which Smithson was frequently wont to invoke in interviews and statements.108 The ramified pathways common to both Ehrenzweig’s diagram and Smithson’s Glue Pour sketch must also be read in counterpoint to the linear “conduit” modelled by the mathematical information theory of Shannon and Weaver, which served as a foil to both McLuhan’s ecological media analyses and numerous Conceptual art projects of the same period.109 The term scanning had likewise early entered NETCO’s lexicon, albeit via a different route. The information aesthetics of the French

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4.4 Anton Ehrenzweig, the maze (serial structure) of a creative search, The Hidden Order of Art, 1967. © 1971 by Anton Ehrenzweig. Published by the University of California Press.

psychologist Abraham Moles, which became available in English translation in 1966, had reinforced the company’s McLuhan-derived conceptualization of the “work of art as a creator of sensations.”110 In Moles’s theorization, the aesthetic subject is redescribed as a “receptor” engaged in acts of “scanning” its environment for the purpose of “selecting” and subsequently “assembling” aesthetic data into meaningful patterns.111 Baxter’s annotation of a cartoon by Alan Dunn reproduced in McLuhan and Fiore’s The Medium Is the Massage attests to his early fusion of McLuhan and Moles; it reads, “BOUNCING INFO INTO RECEPTORS.”112 A Portfolio of Piles operationalizes the computational procedures of scanning and selection delineated by Moles, the resulting documentation of readymade “piles” enacting a punningly scatological travesty of the French theorist’s methodology of symbolic assemblage. As Smithson observed, NETCO’s informatic protocols embodied an “anthropomorphic” application of the non-linear optics authorized by cybernetic phenomenologies.113

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Recognizing the shared centrality of scanning methodologies within the practices of NETCO and Smithson not only disturbs the linear account of influence rehearsed by Watson, suggesting something more akin to mutual participation in a shared discourse network, but also simultaneously foregrounds perceptual and cybernetic dimensions of photo-conceptualism occluded by earlier histories of Vancouver art and economies written in the wake of the linguistic turn.114 In particular, scanning techniques highlight the underemphasized role of vision in a photo-conceptual tradition conventionally represented as primarily motivated by linguistic investments. While Ehrenzweig and Moles were undoubtedly primary sources for the scanning procedures developed independently but in parallel by Smithson and NETCO, I want to explore Wyndham Lewis’s discourse on vision in Time and Western Man – a text owned by Smithson, which also served as a springboard for McLuhan’s analyses – as an additional point of origin for the perceptual manoeuvres deployed by the American artist and the Vancouver company alike. Linsley, Reynolds, and others have convincingly argued that the dedifferentiated visuality theorized by Ehrenzweig offered a model for Smithson’s anti-Gestalt explorations. Lewis’s philosophy of the eye suggests a longer trajectory that ultimately implicates the scanning methodologies of the 1960s within deep-rooted empiricist ontologies of the image. The publication of Time and Western Man marked the culmination of Lewis’s critique of a postwar modernism turned fashion system, an institutionalized recycling of avant-garde experiments propelled by economic imperatives and the pervasive influence of Bergsonism and other process philosophies. In repositioning formalist artworks as kitschy analogues of B movies and pulp fiction, Smithson’s photo-essays echo Lewis’s arguments. In key respects, Lewis’s ideology critique also anticipated Peter Bürger’s influential Theory of the Avant-Garde (1974). Bürger distinguished between a socially motivated, but failed, historical avant-garde, “whose aim it [was] to reintegrate art into the praxis of life,” and a fatally compromised, post–Second World War “neo-avant-garde,” which negated the radical intentions of antecedents by restoring their disruptive tactics to a bourgeois sphere of musealized autonomy.115 Lewis was remarkably prescient, if prematurely inopportune, in assessing the products of the post–First World War rappel à l’ordre as evidence of a taming of avant-garde ambitions to transform society through art – a project that, as Edwards has demonstrated, Lewis was himself still optimistically pursuing as late as the 1919 pamphlet The Caliph’s Design.116 Yet the analogy to Bürger’s text must be qualified by the recognition that Lewis’s polemic of failed avant-gardism hinged, in part, on the very

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rapprochement of art and life that he condemned in the case of such Bloomsbury contemporaries as the Sitwell family of artist-patrons, the not-so-veiled targets of Lewis’s Rabelaisian satire in The Apes of God. It is necessary to distinguish Lewis’s theory of art from what he viewed as the illegitimate aesthetics of Bergsonian modernism and its celebration of sympathetic merger with, and durational dissolution of, the object.117 As introduced above, Lewis’s cultural criticism of the 1920s expanded the earlier, painterly aesthetics of Vorticism into an oppositional philosophy of the eye answering what could be called  – to quote the Canadian poet bpNichol – the “ear rational” paradigm embraced by modernist peers inspired by the auditory and time-based philosophy of Bergson, including Eliot, Joyce, Stein, and Woolf.118 However, Lewis’s philosophy of the eye not only impresses the reader as a distinctly underwhelming alternative to Bergson’s innovative critique of the Western metaphysical tradition, but also simultaneously engages in a covert traffic with the French thinker’s ideas. But where SueEllen Campbell has proposed that Bergson’s Creative Evolution furnishes a hidden model for Time and Western Man, I want to suggest that Lewis’s discourse on space and vision suggests a different text in the Bergsonian corpus as its submerged prototype, namely Matter and Memory. Matter and Memory sketched a radical approach to consciousness and mind, one that harnessed new developments in neuroscience. In Bergson’s proto-phenomenological account, the world is composed of “images,” the body itself being just another image, to which other images are referred through its actions and perceptions.119 In this schema, the brain does not contain the mind but is merely a locus for the coordination of actions to be executed upon these ambient images. Notwithstanding its endurance in time, Bergson’s “ontology of the image” thus bears a surprising resemblance to the visual metaphysics of Lewis.120 Like Bergson, Lewis’s construction of visuality is distinctly non-perspectival, yet realist. Moreover, as Suzanne Guerlac writes, Bergson’s “images are,” like the vaunted objects of Lewis’s ideal gaze, “matter and at the same time they are perceptions.”121 Lewis’s vexed engagements with Bergsonian concepts of duration and extensity in Time and Western Man shed new light on Smithson’s similarly uneasy discourse on “time and its measure,” to quote Pamela M. Lee on the “chronophobic” turn in 1960s art and criticism, of which Lee views the American postminimalist’s writings to be diagnostic.122 Even as art historians have frequently invoked Smithson’s favoured metaphor to draw attention to the temporal aspects of his practice, entropy is simultaneously suggestive of a terminal state of sameness consistent

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with the static and spatial paradigm valorized by Lewis. The “repetition,” “absolute inertia,” and “backwards” progress conjured by such Smithson texts as “Ultramoderne” (1967) notably echo Lewis’s deployment of a hyperbolic rhetoric of anti-Bergsonian hypostatization four decades prior in Time and Western Man.123 George Baker and Andrew Uroskie have independently read Smithson’s Spiral Jetty film through the lens of Deleuze’s Bergson-inspired study of postwar cinema as bringing into representation a crystalline “time-image.”124 Drawing out the latent Bergsonian threads in this genealogy, Felicity Colman has fruitfully proposed that the French thinker’s “mattering of the image” offers insights into Smithson’s exploration of “modes of cognitive perception” in moving-image works such as his collaborative film with Nancy Holt, Swamp (1970–71).125 Colman’s investigation of the processual methodology mobilized by Smithson and Holt as effectuating a creative deformation of the “diagram,” which the Bergsonian subject marks out on matter in preparation for action, hinges on Smithson’s only direct reference to the French philosopher.126 The early Smithson text “Entropy and the New Monuments” (1966) quotes the following passage from Creative Evolution as part of an ironic détournement of Bergsonian philosophy: “The history of philosophy is there, however, and shows us the eternal conflict of systems, the impossibility of satisfactorily getting the real into the ready-made garments of our ready-made concepts, the necessity of making to measure.”127 Colman interprets Smithson’s ironic gloss on Bergson in this essay as a reminder that “pre-figured systems miss the point of artworks that are, as he says, ‘puns on the Bergsonian idea of “creative evolution.’”128 Colman argues that Smithson’s harnessing of Bergson’s theory of the increasing diversity of biological forms to an entropic reading of Minimalist sculpture constitutes a creative misreading of the French thinker, one that serves to revise what Colman terms the “error of the diagram,” that is, the paradoxical hypostatization of the vectorial motility celebrated by Bergson effectuated by the very act of its schematization – including Bergson’s own influential diagrams, such as the cone of memory discussed in Chapter 1.129 Upon closer scrutiny, however, Smithson’s claim that Minimalism deliberately frustrates modernist expectations of formal innovation is entirely faithful to Bergson’s critique of readymade categories. Indeed, Smithson’s nuanced recognition of the perpetual tensions obtaining between biological differentiation and rationalist stereotyping in Bergsonian ontology – the friction between creative evolution and readymade classifications – suggests an alternative, or more likely parallel, inspiration

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for the anti-vital overtones of the artist’s discourse on entropic temporality to the usually cited Kublerian critique of the biological metaphor. Colman’s exploration of Bergson’s “image-matter” as a submerged source for Smithson’s perceptual experiments complements Eve Meltzer’s interpretation of the “crystalline materiality” deployed by Smithson as “a compelling alternative to the structuralist  … turn” pursued by his UK– and New York City–based peers.130 I want to complicate this materialist view of Smithson, however, while also building on Colman’s reading of the Bergsonian bases of his practice, by investigating Lewis’s putatively critical but, in fact, highly ambivalent presentation of Bergson as a source mined by Smithson’s perceptual rhetoric and scanning methodology. I will explore Lewis’s synthesis of a Bergsonian ontology of the image with the critical optics of the eighteenth-century philosopher George Berkeley as a previously overlooked point of departure for Smithson’s discourse on perception and development of a scanning methodology. Campbell proposes that “in Berkeley’s Principles of Human Knowledge, [Lewis] finds several of his own central terms and one of his own characteristic structures of thought, a complex set of oppositions joined by paradox.”131 In building on Campbell’s observation that “Berkeley [is] one of the few thinkers whose influence Lewis ever directly embraces,” my intention is not to refute standard interpretations of Smithson’s scanning methodology as adapting Ehrenzweig’s anti-Gestalt writings, for which the artist’s own published texts provide ample support.132 My goal is more modest, namely to demonstrate that Lewis’s presentation of Berkeley’s alternative to Cartesian optics coloured Smithson’s reception and reworking of Ehrenzweig’s dedifferentiated vision in ways that contribute additional nuance and texture to our understanding of this dimension of his practice, as well as its impact on, and interaction with, the Vancouver scene.

Smithson’s Transcendental Empiricism Berkeley’s strategic significance for Lewis’s critical project emerges with clarity from the conclusion to Book 2 of Time and Western Man. Lewis invokes Berkeley’s anti-Cartesian thesis that “a man need only open his eyes to see” as endorsing the “vivid realism” advocated by Time and Western Man as an alternative to the blur of Bergsonian flux.133 However, this appeal to the Anglo-Irish philosopher is riven with paradox. SueEllen Campbell draws attention to the contradictory investments of Berkeley’s immaterialism: “[Berkeley] is an idealist. Yet

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he insists that such idealism implies a vivid, concrete, and particularized world – the world we are directly given by our senses.”134 Recalling the diagrammatic condition of Bergson’s image-matter, Berkeley’s percept merges with matter while paradoxically remaining immaterial. Lewis is not blind to these tensions. Even as he turns to Berkeley’s metaphysics to counter the perceived disintegrating effects of scientific realism and the flux of process philosophy, Lewis openly confesses the central enigma of Berkeleian idealism, namely that “the material world must, from [Berkeley’s] standpoint, be imaginary … And the more solid it is the more unearthly, in that sense.”135 Despite the ostensibly solid objects with which its world may appear to be populated, it is in fact a ghostly unreality perceived by the Berkeleian subject. The unresolved conflicts implicit in Lewis’s presentation of Berkeley’s theory of vision are derived in large part from his decisive misreading of the constitutive disjuncture between the faculties of touch and sight articulated by the Anglo-Irish philosopher, which Lewis misconstrues as the common sense of Aristotle.136 In contradistinction to Lewis’s visual construction of space, Branka Arsić clarifies that for Berkeley, “spatial extension  … and everything that defines the spatial situation of an object is the proper object of touch.”137 Ironically, where Lewis appeals to Berkeley’s philosophy as the embodiment of classical common sense, Arsić describes how, in the Berkeleian world, “Every sense goes its own way, to its own objects … A world of nightmare appears in which only surprises and astonishments are continuous: a world of horror, a world of schizophrenia.”138 In fact, Berkeley’s theorization of  the sensorium as comprising discrete sensory systems productive of schizoid states strikingly foreshadows Friedrich Kittler’s neo-Machian discussion of the “untranslatability” of sensory channels as manifested by the writings of jurist Daniel Paul Schreber.139 In a characteristically dualistic move, Lewis seizes upon the unlikely creative potential implicit in this condition of unreality endemic to the Berkeleian subject in order to celebrate the self-fashioning imagination’s capacity to endow the given with an ideal clarity that it lacks materially. The artist thereby emerges as the archetype of an autotelic perception. Campbell observes that from a Berkeleian perspective, “like an artist, each of us creates our own world.”140 By the same token, there is more than enough of the phantasmatic haunting the Berkeleian imagination to match the “discrete apparitions” that Lewis imputes to his time-school adversaries.141 In particular, the ambivalent status of Berkeley’s objects of vision – being concrete but imaginary – and the automorphic imperative with which the philosopher tasks his

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observant subjects, ironically bear an unmistakable resemblance to both the genetic image-matter of Bergsonian ontology and the French thinker’s forecast of a coming society of creators. Arsić’s post-structuralist account of Berkeley’s visual ontology is fertile ground for reassessing the “bipolar rhythm between mind and matter” traced by Smithson’s Lewis-inspired documentary and perceptual manoeuvres.142 Matching the artist’s report of the non-rational “‘antivision’ or negative seeing” activated by his Yucatán Mirror Displacements, maps and diagrams appear in Berkeley’s critique of Cartesian optics, in Arsić’s words, as “fantasies we have no reason to follow.”143 Appealing to the evidence of experience to counter the geometrical abstractions mobilized by rationalist frameworks, Berkeley objects that “those lines and angles, by means whereof some men pretend to explain the perception of distance, are themselves not at all perceived, nor are they in truth ever thought of by those unskilful optics.”144 Berkeley posits that in place of the ordered visual field imposed by linear perspective to account for situational perception, “what we strictly see are not solids, nor yet planes variously coloured; they are only diversity of colours.”145 The Berkeleian subject’s gaze is consequently characterized by a “perpetual mutability and fleetingness,” which, in “render[ing its objects] incapable of being managed after the manner of geometrical figures,” generates what Arsić describes as a “mad, pure optical tactility.”146 Sounding very much like Berkeley in the passages quoted above, Smithson similarly reported that “the mirror displacement cannot be expressed in rational dimensions. The distances between the twelve mirrors are shadowed disconnections, where measure is dropped and incomputable.”147 Rather, the “broken geometry” reflected by the Mirror Displacements thrives on what he terms “surds”: a neologism signifying the alogos of a non-rational space.148 This thematic recalls an earlier series of three-dimensional sculptures, the Alogons of 1966–67: “perceptual conundrums” that preposterously solidify the orthogonals of one-point perspective diagrams, and whose collective title, as Ann Reynolds informs us, “comes from the Greek word that refers to the unnameable and irrational number.”149 Like the “wilderness of unassimilated seeing” reported by Smithson in his “Yucatan” photo-essay,150 Arsić describes the Berkeleian subject as “situated in a jungle of visual lawlessness because the visual is here not geometrical.”151 But where Berkeley stresses the immateriality of the world perceived by the senses, on a surface reading Smithson would, on the contrary, appear to be emphasizing the concrete materiality of vision: “Color as an agent of matter filled the reflected illuminations [of the twelve mirrors] with shadowy tones, pressing the light into dusty

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material opacity.152 Eve Meltzer underscores Smithson’s skepticism of the structuralist frameworks adopted by peers, a distrust that extended to the contemporaneous enthusiasm for computational “systems” showcased by Software, a 1970 exhibition curated by Jack Burnham at the Jewish Museum in New York.153 Yet the “material reason” that Meltzer attributes to Smithson’s anti-systemic practice overlooks the continuous “interaction between mind and matter” which propelled the “endless doubling” staged by his art and writings.154 In fact, Smithson’s art and writings negotiate a “back and forth rhythm” between ideation and concretion that reprises the paradoxical dualisms of Lewis’s remediation of Berkeley’s critical optics.155 Robert Linsley productively implicates Smithson’s meditations on sight  – culminating in his eminently Berkeleian proposition that “a great artist can make art by simply casting a glance” – within a strategic “theatricalization of vision” directed at then prevailing models of “opticality” associated with the criticism of Michael Fried.156 Yet Linsley’s analysis of Smithson’s dialogue with Fried and Pollock in the “Yucatan” essay, as furnishing confirmation of “the persistence of painting as the paradigm of critical experience,” misses the American artist’s primary target.157 Smithson’s visual manoeuvres are part of a larger critique of rationalism in general, and of Cartesian optics in particular, in which documentary formats – particularly mapping and photography – are mobilized as potential sites of “information feedback” that resist representational systems.158 Photography, and in particular the photo-documentary techniques harnessed by Smithson’s scanning methodology, are pivots between the situated “act of viewing” that the artist associates with the process of art-making and the abstract systems deployed for “locating” the resulting work for exhibition and publication purposes.159 The punning title of Anthony Robbin’s 1969 Art News interview with Smithson  – “Smithson’s Non-Site Sights”  – elucidates this Berkeleian dialectic between the “sights” activated by the artist’s sites, and the abstraction, or non-site (literally non-sight, or geometricizing blindness),160 brought into representation by his maps and other exhibition techniques. Smithson’s traffic between a rational optics and an undisciplined vision both mobilizes and ultimately confounds the Berkeleian dualisms informing Lewis’s parallel critique of scientific realism in Time and Western Man. Smithson’s cybernetic capture of “on-the-spot experience”161 sets in motion a feedback loop with the gallery space that calls into question Reinhold Martin’s contention that the residual organicism disclosed by the artist’s practice either went unrecognized by its author, or else points to an inattentive reading of Norbert Wiener’s Bergson-inflected

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writings on entropy.162 Smithson’s eminently Berkeleian reports of the non-geometric discontents of organic vision function, rather, as knowing interventions within the positivist discourses of crystallography, geology, and other “hard” sciences. Smithson’s organic allusions, and invocations of embodied modes of seeing in particular, are highly calculated disruptions to the rationalist protocols of formalist practices of seeing that reprise the earlier counter-hegemonic tactics of both Lewis and Berkeley. The critical contours of Smithson’s project are thrown into relief when his Yucatán Mirror Displacements, and the photo-documentation that accompanied the Artforum text in which he reported on them, are recognized as rejoinders to the positivist systems of representation deployed by the multidisciplinary artist’s nineteenth-century interlocutor and foil, John Lloyd Stephens. Jennifer L. Roberts astutely reads Smithson’s Yucatán project as an anti-colonial “inversion or undoing of Stephens’s operations.”163 The principal procedures to which Roberts refers are the colonial techniques of representation applied by Stephens and fellow traveller Frederick Catherwood in attempting to generate an “objective” visual record of the ruins at Copán and related archaeological sites. Their efforts were impeded by the region’s unfamiliar and unwieldy vegetation, a resistance that, in Roberts’s assessment, the Western travellers in turn projected onto their Indigenous hosts and guides, thereby conflating cultural difference with the medical condition of strabismus endemic to the region’s Maya population. This analysis hinges on a reading of Catherwood’s illustrations as effecting a colonizing transformation of the Maya jungle into “a Western space,” one that Roberts views as specifically picturesque  – that is, a landscape representation internally divided into “figure and ground, fore and aft.”164 However, the majority of Catherwood’s engravings do not support this interpretation, being planar representations of single objects  – particularly altars and stelae  – strategically isolated from the surrounding landscape and rendered without aerial perspective. The resulting images more closely approximate the conventions of scientific illustration than those of picturesque landscape painting. Roberts overlooks a key colonial technology in Stephens’s narrative; namely, the camera lucida that Catherwood employed to render his illustrations. A portable device patented in 1807 by William Hyde Wollaston, the camera lucida superimposes a reflected image over the drawing surface in either a half-silvered mirror or a quadrangular prism, through which the artist looks down while working. The dim, unstable, and split field of vision generated by the half-silvered version of this optical instrument significantly troubles the “spatial and

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temporal continuum” characteristic of the picturesque mode, which Roberts attributes to Catherwood’s illustrations.165 To be sure, Stephens’s two-volume publication includes some views matching Roberts’s gloss on the picturesque, but most of these represent colonial spaces dominated by European architecture, with only a handful showing Maya ruins. In any case, Stephens’s narrative leaves little room for doubt that it was not, in fact, the ruins approached as topographical landscape views that “proved challenging to discern,”166 but rather the single artifacts and, especially, undeciphered hieroglyphs, which dominate the resulting list of figures, and for which Catherwood took notably less artistic licence. As Stephens tellingly reported, “The ‘idol’ seemed to defy his art.”167 In their “present[ation of] two pictures simultaneously” (aerial and terrestrial), Roberts interprets Smithson’s Mirror Displacements as redeploying the self-cancelling mirror images generated by his earlier Enantiomorphic Chambers (1964) to reproduce the divided visual field of the Indigenous strabismus-sufferer.168 For Roberts, Smithson’s interventions thereby amount to a defiant “recognition of the recalcitrance of the colonized Other” that undoes the picturesque suture effected by the panoramas of Catherwood.169 However, Roberts misses the primary target of Smithson’s postcolonial critique: Cartesian optics. The artist’s use of mirrors and photography incisively repurposes the technologies harnessed by Catherwood’s engravings  – the half-silvered mirror of the camera lucida and the supplementary technologies of mechanical reproduction that facilitated publication of the resulting illustrations – to visualize a neo-Berkeleian alternative to the colonial spatial order sustained by rationalist optics. Smithson’s Mirror Displacements theatricalize the tenuous conditions of visibility navigated by the operator of the camera lucida. The blank opacity of the mirror arrays – metonyms for the camera lucida’s half-silvered plane  – metaphorically cancels the optical “fusion” of conflicting visual information required by the draughtsman’s acculturation to the instrument’s “correct” use.170 In contrast to the discrete pictorial projection externalized by the camera obscura, David Tomas observes that the camera lucida projects “a virtual image” directly onto the operator’s retina: an embodied configuration that notably reprises Berkeley’s immaterialism and foreshadows contemporary technologies of virtual reality.171 Smithson’s undoing of the illusory closure performed by Catherwood’s colonial gaze can be understood as intervening in a longer, transcultural trajectory of the deployment of optical instruments as colonial technologies of power, which Tomas traces to a precursor of the camera lucida proposed by the British natural philosopher Robert Hooke in 1694. This “PictureBox” was intended to ensure the reliability of visual data recorded by

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explorers and travellers in a rapidly expanding colonial field as that information subsequently circulated in reproduction.172 The Berkeleian visuality of the Mirror Displacements necessitates a revision to Robert Linsley’s insightful exegesis of this series. Where Linsley interprets the horizontal format and material excess of Smithson’s partly buried mirrors as enacting a parodic para-painterly dialogue with the drip and stain procedures of Morris Louis and Jackson Pollock vaunted by Fried’s opticality, Smithson’s mobilization of Berkeley’s theory of vision directly counters the Cartesian notion that “external objects are painted on the retina or fund of the eye” by light rays.173 Berkeley substitutes a simulacral conception of the optical sign for Descartes’s pictorial model of retinal images – a simulacral framework that, I want to propose, also informs the photo-mechanical by-products of Smithson’s investigations into the sites/sights of vision. In Berkeley’s immaterialism, images in the eye are understood to be “pictures or copies, whereof the archetypes are not things existing without,” but rather, “the originals or true things themselves.”174 The copies without models of Berkeleian vision are simulacra instantiating a mode of “presentation without representation” distinctive of empiricist ontologies.175 Smithson’s enantiomorphic meditations on “visible blindness” in the “Yucatan” essay rehearse the Berkeleian conditions of this uncanny “sight turned away from its own looking.”176 Like Berkeley’s alternative to Cartesian optics, Smithson’s simulacral mirrors take aim at rationalist systems of representation as well as, in Smithson’s case, the informational status attributed to documentation by positivist epistemologies. Lacking the reversing lenses integral to the functioning of Catherwood’s camera lucida, Smithson’s mirrors stage a refusal to “correct” the images they reflect, since, like the unmediated Berkeleian percept of pure colour, they do not operate according to the rational geometry of Cartesian optics or its representational logics. What then to make of Smithson’s claim that “the camera is a mechanism – a Cartesian eye”?177 The artist deploys this device that “squares everything” in the service of a neo-Bergsonian critique of those very rationalist systems of which photography is conventionally seen to be the technical embodiment.178 “Always caught between [the] two worlds” of his dialectic, Smithson incorporates photo-documentation into his Yucatán installations in order to infect the representational apparatus of rationalism from within.179 As such, Smithson’s corrupting intervention foreshadows the more recent work of Leandro Katz, whose The Catherwood Project (1985–93) utilized photography to inhabit the same views of the Maya monuments once occupied by the eponymous

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British illustrator, while smuggling evidence of his own presence into the scene.180 Smithson’s “Yucatan” photo-essay travesties Catherwood’s positivist documentation of those sites by retrieving the “mirror-world” of Berkeleian immaterialism invoked by Lewis in the concluding paragraphs of Time and Western Man, a text likewise structured by a series of conscious oppositions, and unconscious conflations, of Bergson’s image-matter and Berkeley’s simulacral “pictures.”181 Perception and photography are central to Smithson’s reactivation, but also reworking, of Lewis’s bipolar apparatus, which, as Campbell underscores, is itself “a sort of mirror image of Bergson’s [philosophical dualism].”182 However, it is Berkeley’s transcendental empiricism that emerges from this reassessment as the archetypal mirror within the Lewisian mirrorworld refracted by Smithson’s scanning records. Echoing Lewis’s critical borrowings from Matter and Memory, Smithson’s photo-documentation effects a strategic “de-organicization” of the Bergsonian image-matter reflected by his Mirror Displacements.183 This operation can be traced to the “passivity” attributed to sensation in Berkeleian metaphysics, which generates an “exhausted world” of simulacral percepts, or what Lewis aptly termed “a sign-world” in Time and Western Man.184 The unintended irony inherent in Lewis’s strategy, and in Smithson’s critique of systems theory organicism mounted in its wake, is that, as Dorothea Olkowski demonstrates, Bergson’s image-matter was likewise derived from a reading of Berkeley.185 This recognition illuminates the striking parallels between the image-matter of Bergsonian memory and Berkeley’s picture of a “mind that is not different from sensations.”186 But Bergson transforms Berkeley’s passive percept and “exhausted subjectivity” into supports for a practical intelligence directed toward action.187 In a reversal of Bergson’s gesture, it is this very activity that Lewis and Smithson drain from Bergsonian image-matter, substituting a Berkeleian passivity. A brief comparison of the scanning record generated by Smithson’s Glue Pour – executed on the UBC campus in early 1970 – and the N.E. Thing Co. Ltd’s A Portfolio of Piles, which Smithson referenced in his “A  Sedimentation of the Mind” essay, will elucidate distinctions between the passive percept of Berkeley and Lewis and the active image of Bergson and McLuhan. The scanning record for Glue Pour preserved today with Smithson’s papers at the Smithsonian depicts a branching sequence of boxes, as if illustrating the artist’s Berkeleian assertion that the rationalist medium of “photography squares everything.”188 By contrast, as Smithson himself wrote, A Portfolio of Piles brings into

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representation an “anthropomorphic” view of matter  – as an effect of human agency  – derived from McLuhan’s neo-Bergsonian extensions thesis.189 Where the Molesian or neo-Thomist “forms” scanned by NETCO personnel correspond to McLuhan’s Bergsonian notion of media as inextricably entangled in the pragmatic “problems” generated by the evolutionary imperative,190 the grid-like arrangement of squares in Smithson’s diagram parodies the map-like abstraction, and consequent deorganicization, imposed by photography’s Cartesian documentation of sight. As Smithson stated in a 1971 interview with Gregoire Müller, “a photograph acts as a kind of map.”191 Similarly, Arnold refers to Smithson’s scanning records as unfolding “mapping as a mode of abstraction.”192 In addition to “locating” the work as a site/sight,193 the map-like function of Smithson’s photography introduces an element of Lewisian abstraction, and thus of Berkeleian passivity, in the same breath that the simulacral percept infects and distorts the truth-claim of the resulting image. Nevertheless, the unprecedented complexity of the Glue Pour scanning record noted by Arnold – and in particular, its implied mapping of actions executed by a human agent  – may register the indirect influence of NETCO’s McLuhanite, but also Moles-derived, photoconceptual practice, via Smithson’s intensive conversations with Vancouver filmmaker Dennis Wheeler, a former student of the Molesian Baxter, who was tasked with assembling the never-realized scanning record from photo-documentation of the action shot by Christos Dikeakos.194 Moles’s informatic reconceptualization of the artist as an embodied receptor suggests a point of continuity between the photographic methodologies of NETCO and Smithson. For both NETCO and Smithson, photography functioned as a form of non-linguistic “designation.”195 And in both cases, designation was synonymous with Shannon–Weaver’s information-theoretic conceptualization of information as choice. As Ann Rosenberg insightfully observed, “the company … demonstrated that art could be chosen, designated.”196 But implicitly distinguishing his simulacral practice from that of NETCO, Smithson cautioned that “I don’t simply pile things up. The shape imposed is a three-dimensional map.”197 Unlike NETCO’s ACT-ive Portfolio, Smithson’s scanning record effects a Berkeleian devitalization and a Lewisian abstraction of the artist’s on-site perceptual actions. The next section will explore how Smithson’s Lewisian earth maps operate as metonyms of an emergent planetary space isomorphic with McLuhan’s global village. This re-examination of Smithson’s photo-documentation of the Mirror Displacements and the scanning record for Glue Pour through

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the lens of Lewis’s writings has yielded a more complex and multivalent network of correspondences with the contemporaneous photoconceptual practice of the N.E. Thing Co. Ltd. The Lewisian dualisms rehearsed by Smithson’s methodology of information feedback between a concrete but immaterial vision and the abstraction imposed by documentary capture and dissemination suggest further parallels with the McLuhan-derived polarities structuring NETCO’s practice of designation, notably, the company’s iterative selection of ACTs (Aesthetically Claimed Things) and ARTs (Aesthetically Rejected Things). This family resemblance is explained by Lewis’s foundational impact on McLuhan as well as their mutual participation in a tradition of transcendental empiricism with Epicurean and Stoic foundations.198 Occupying opposite poles in this formation, NETCO and Smithson defined competing options within the Vancouver milieu circa 1969–70 that would reverberate in the subsequent development of photo-conceptualism: on the one hand, the socially operative – but not overtly political – practice of NETCO, aimed at augmenting the artist’s capacity to navigate the social; and on the other, the passive percept mined by Smithson’s politicized ethnography of contemporary visual culture. This polarity conveniently maps onto the “active-passive spectrum” between contemporary networked and database forms more recently sketched by Lane Relyea, with NETCO’s distributed actors actively aggregating environmental data like model “networkers,” whereas the depotentialized sights/sites indexed by Smithson’s scanning records resemble the passive contents of the ubiquitous database awaiting user activation.199

Imagined Geographies An account of Lewis’s 1931 fieldwork in Morocco in preparation for his Persian-set novel Snooty Baronet (discussed in Chapter 1), Filibusters in Barbary offers an unlikely key to the neo-Berkeleian optics manifested by Island of Broken Glass and other projects associated with Smithson’s Vancouver travels. Besides Time and Western Man, Smithson’s library contained a second volume authored by Lewis: a 1966 anthology published by Signet that includes two long extracts from this Moroccan travelogue.200 Written in the immediate aftermath of Lewis’s disastrous commentary on recent developments in Berlin, David Farley describes Filibusters in Barbary as “navigat[ing] a complicated course between cultural critique, polemic, and parody” that simultaneously mounts an improbable search for “the outlines of a revivified West” in the heterogeneous composition of colonial Moroccan society.201 Countering Hitler’s nostalgic appeals to a mythical Roman and Teutonic past, Lewis

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would uphold Morocco’s indigenous Berbers as embodying a viable spatial alternative to the time-obsessed culture of European modernity matching his own earlier prescriptions in Time and Western Man. Employing the same satiric techniques as The Apes of God, Lewis’s eccentric travelogue is structured by a familiar series of Bergsonian dichotomies. Farley seizes upon SueEllen Campbell’s nuanced reading of the tense dynamics of Lewisian dualism to interpret the satire of Filibusters in Barbary as articulating “a momentary failure of satire itself,” one that opens onto the possibility of an “almost utopian internationalism.”202 I want to propose that Smithson retraces Lewis’s transit between satirical travelogue and utopia in the earth maps: physical materializations of hypothetical continents, of which the unrealized Island of Broken Glass was intended to be the most ambitious exemplar. The proto-postmodern irony of Filibusters in Barbary suggests a previously overlooked model for Smithson’s own exercises in selfconscious travel writing – in particular, “Incidents of Mirror-Travel in the Yucatan.” Like Lewis’s text, Smithson’s photo-essay satirizes the travel genre from within, exploding the imperialism and positivism of its host text, John Lloyd Stephen’s Incidents of Travel in Yucatan (1843), through a calculated travesty of the visual norms of colonial documentation. It is Lewis’s tenuous dialectic of space and time, however, that furnishes Smithson with the structuring polarities of the “Yucatan” essay and the earth maps that text brought into representation for the first time. Lewis’s travelogue is propelled by the argument that the Western fascination with alterity is symptomatic of a time-obsessed, Bergsonian imaginary. Elaborating an ideology critique anticipating Edward Said’s Orientalism (1978), Lewis proposes that the exoticized Other is set apart by European observers more through the imposition of a mythical time than by any geographic distance.203 In addition to taking aim at the romantic conventions of travel literature, Lewis’s facetious descriptions of the “first-class ‘Islamic sensation[s]’” exuded by the historic Moroccan settlement of Tlemcen is also recognizable as an extension of his earlier critique of the “triumph of history over the eyes,” that is, of Bergsonian temporality over Berkeleian vision.204 Yet, much as Roberts demonstrates that the decolonial criticism of Smithson’s “Yucatan” essay simultaneously participates in a more widespread, and problematic, “cultural project of dehistoricizing the ancient Maya,” Farley observes that Lewis’s satirical inversion of the travel genre’s conventional emphasis on history is perpetually in danger of merging with its historiographic rivals.205 Lewis’s caricatural self-portrait as the proverbial “well-informed traveler” places him in an analogous position to the historically minded tourist who, like Berkeley’s disapproving representation of

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the Cartesian subject, “see[s] too much, and much that is not there at all.”206 Exaggerating the threat of touristic learning for comedic effect, Lewis preposterously claims that “the name of the first king [of the Abdenwadite dynasty], Yarmorasen, I knew as well as I knew my own.”207 In short, we find Lewis alternately affirming and disavowing the virtues of history as he weaves a satiric circuit between earnest reportage and critical irony. Smithson’s “Yucatan” text is similarly structured by unresolved tensions between the Berkeleian delirium of present perception and a welter of dubious historical information. Drawing on an ingeniously eclectic bibliography of tourist guides, popular histories of the Maya, geology manuals, and Plato’s Timaeus, Smithson elaborates an antiacademic discourse that troubles the truth-claims of conventional reference works, chief among them the travel book as first-person historical non-fiction. More than a challenge to the epistemological integrity of informational media, Smithson’s mongrel text follows Lewis’s example in materially collapsing the linear trajectory of historicism into a spatial mosaic of disparate times. Juxtaposing the “stark geometry of the Machine Age” with the “vast, non-human lines of nature” evoked by the non-rational spaces of traditional Moroccan architecture, Lewis conjures what Bergson would term a “spatialized time,” in which past and present coexist in a paradoxical state of archaic futurity.208 Lewis’s conflation of historic architecture, geology, and modernist abstraction in his Moroccan travelogue discovers a precedent in his earlier painting Bagdad (1927–28) (Figure 4.5), whose sedimentation of architectural and geological elements anticipates Smithson’s earth maps in its allusion to, and satirical concretion of, the virtual strata of Bergson’s influential diagram of the cone of memory, discussed in Chapter 1. The anachronic montage of Filibusters in Barbary cultivates striking incongruities that ultimately expose fractures in Lewis’s argumentation. Notably, Lewis draws an analogy between the Moroccan kasbah, or citadel, and “the appeal of the swarming skyscraper.”209 Lewis’s conflation of ancient and modern architecture in Filibusters in Barbary to sketch a spatialized temporality suggests a precedent for the knowing anachronism of Smithson’s essay on 1930s Mayan Deco, “Ultramoderne,” as well as the time-travelling analogies subsequently mobilized by “Incidents of Mirror-Travel in the Yucatan.” Where Lewis’s timedefying gaze spies skyscrapers in the Atlas Mountains, Smithson and his travel companions are alternately addressed by, and play at being, Maya and, anachronistically, Aztec gods: “In the rear-view mirror appeared Tezcatlipoca – demiurge of the ‘smoking-mirror,’” Smithson reports in “Incidents of Mirror-Travel in the Yucatan.” “‘All those guide books are

4.5 Wyndham Lewis, Bagdad, 1927–28. Oil on wood, 183 × 79 cm, © Wyndham Lewis and the estate of Mrs G.A. Wyndham Lewis by kind permission of the Wyndham Lewis Memorial Trust (a registered charity). (Photo: Tate.)

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of no use,’ said Tezcatlipoca. ‘You must travel at random, like the first Mayans.’”210 I will return to the troubling racial masquerade of this episode in the Coda. For now, let us simply note that the Tezcatlipoca who addresses Smithson in the proverbial rear-view mirror – sounding more like Lewis’s Canadian disciple Marshall McLuhan than any Maya god  – echoes the signature prolepses and skepticism of traditional reference works voiced by Lewis’s Moroccan travelogue. Lewis’s dualistic juxtaposition of discrete spatialized times in Filibusters in Barbary pivots on a central dichotomy between urban and desert spaces: the labyrinthine souk and the monumental kasbah of the Atlas mountains, a polarity that he would develop further in the posthumously published “Kasbahs and Souks” (1983). From this binary, Lewis attempts to distill a nomadic ideal from Morocco’s indigenous Berber population  – a “political remedy for the troubled West” that Farley posits as the true object of his North African travels.211 The nomadic virtues that Lewis projects onto the North African Berbers strikingly anticipates the neo-primitivist discourse on “nomadology” as an alternative to Western capitalism subsequently elaborated by the neo-Bergsonian Deleuze in collaboration with Félix Guattari in A Thousand Plateaus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia.212 Lewis’s dialectic of “Tent-versus-Oasis” is equally suggestive of the tensions between Site and Non-Site structuring Smithson’s Yucatán travelogue.213 From the nomads he observed in Morocco, Lewis attempted to wrest the exemplar of a post-national “new West” capable of withstanding the threat of renewed hostilities then menacing Europe.214 Lewis’s nomadic ideal would furnish a template for McLuhan’s metaphor of the global village and its evocations of post-digital “retribalization.”215 Usually traced to Lewis’s post–Second World War text America and Cosmic Man (1948), McLuhan’s planetary speculations discover an earlier prototype in Filibusters in Barbary. Lara Trubowitz argues that the latter text undertakes “a structural analysis of postcolonial power relations.”216 Key to that examination is Lewis’s proto-McLuhanite thesis that “our civilization, with the impetus given it by machines, is turning from the settled to the restless ideal – from ‘civilization’ to ‘savagery.’”217 In Lewis’s prescient if inadequately resolved postcolonial accounting, it is colonial Europeans who have become “barbarians,” the filibusters of his ironic title being the “empire-builder[s]” of the West, not the expected Berber “‘brigand’ of the Desert” of Orientalist fantasy.218 “What is all white colonization however but brigandage?,” queries an unexpectedly decolonial Lewis.219 More than simply a component part of Lewis’s surprising – because written by the recent author of Hitler – critique of race as an “abstraction,”220 this inversion of historic colonizer/colonized

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relations sketches nothing less than a coming postcolonial order of global nomadism, one that sets the stage for the neo-primitivist planetary utopias of McLuhan and, subsequently, Deleuze and Guattari. Lewis crucially fails to identify a real space onto which he can map his nomadic subjects. More accurately, he misrecognizes his postnational utopia in what Farley terms the “unreal space” traversed by pilots of the Aéropostale airmail service over the disputed desert territory of the Rio de Oro region.221 Farley draws attention to the apparent contradiction in Lewis’s symbolic elevation of the celebrated French author and aviator Antoine de Saint-Exupéry, whose Vol de nuit (1931) recounts the exploits of Aéropostale airmen, to the status of a Western “nomad,” given Lewis’s overall project of debunking the Romantic paraphernalia of the travel genre.222 It is in the mirage-inducing altitudes of Saharan airspace that Lewis improbably locates his spatial alternative to a time-obsessed interwar Europe. Farley observes that the “SandWind” that materializes the spatial “agency” that is the purported object of Lewis’s travels conveniently furnishes “a space that has no history.”223 In his conflation of the Berbers’ nomadic practices of spatiality with an intangible physical space, Lewis foreshadows the “revalorization of non-Western mapping practices” in contemporary literature and literary theory as documented by Peta Mitchell: from Borges to Deleuze and Guattari.224 According to Mitchell, this “nomadic imperative” defines a critical departure from the Cartesian optics and discourses of informational objectivity underwriting colonial cartographies.225 Clearing a path for the speculations of Deleuze and Guattari on nomadology – their term for the non-rational spatiality pursued by the mobile, postCartesian subject – Lewis’s project of imaginative geography in Filibusters in Barbary set an influential precedent for Smithson’s earth maps in its appropriation and reworking of Indigenous mapping practices that merge the more-than-human with the real. Farley overlooks another dimension of Lewis’s text that yields additional clues to the sources and meanings of Smithson’s earth maps, namely Lewis’s identification of the mirage-like space of the Saharan Sand-Wind with the lost territory of Atlantis. “This artificial plain of torrid sand in-flight invariably moved ocean-ward,” Lewis writes. “Often it would stretch out from the coast of the Rio de Oro over the Atlantic as far as the Canaries – re-establishing, in its semi-solid form, the landbridge of the Lost Atlantis.”226 In thus conflating the spatial agency of the Sand-Wind with the legendary Atlantis, Lewis is attempting to impart an elusive materiality to his nomadic ideal that is absent from Farley’s reading. In fact, Lewis’s references to Atlantis challenge the mythic status conventionally conferred on the island: “that there was once a

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land-bridge of some kind across the ocean to the shores of America is not disputed,” he contends.227 This claim echoes the theories of Ignatius Donnelly and other “historians” of Atlantis that identified the “Dolphin’s Ridge” discovered by the nineteenth-century British deep-sea Challenger expedition as material proof of the submerged continent’s one-time existence.228 This Atlantean turn in Lewis’s nomadic discourse suggests a model for Smithson’s earth maps, which similarly allude to the mythical island as well as the parallel lost continent of the Pacific, Mu. Lewis’s appeal to an Atlantean genealogy to endow his nomadic space with a concrete, if conveniently inaccessible, referent must also be situated within his problematic critique of colonialism and race – to which I return in the Coda. Crucially, Atlantis provides Lewis with an alternative pedigree for his idealized Berbers, who he speculates are descendants of the same “race” of “black Celts” as the modern-day inhabitants of Cornwall, Wales, and Scotland, a hypothesis he derives from the writings of journalist Budgett Meakin.229 Although elsewhere in Filibusters in Barbary Lewis squarely takes aim at race as an ideological construct, here we find him problematically seeking a genetic basis for undoing racial typologies. In part, this discrepancy symptomatizes Lewis’s anxieties that his idealized Berber nomads could be confused with their Arab neighbours (with the “Semitic” origins of Arab peoples constructed by discredited racial science being his ultimate source of disquiet).230 “The Berber nature,” Lewis reassures the reader in “Kasbahs and Souks,” “is like the European nature.”231 In turning to Plato’s lost continent to explicate this shared “nature,” Lewis echoes the spurious racial theories endorsed by previous Atlantean theorists such as Churchward, while problematically laying the foundations for a projected post-national future on the same troubling basis. The first intimations of this Atlantean futurity appear in Lewis’s 1929 article “A World Art and Tradition,” in which he responds to a generalized retreat from avant-garde experimentation during the interwar period, praising “the few dozen artists … who continue in those directions” as “Aztecs or Atlanteans, representatives of a submerged civilization.”232 Anticipating the program of transnational reconstruction forecast by Filibusters in Barbary, Lewis speculates that this Mu-like domain of submerged avant-garde practice may nonetheless constitute “the actual world of the future.”233 Although Smithson could not have been familiar with Lewis’s lengthier discussion of a submerged Atlantic land bridge, which he invoked to explain dubious cultural correspondences between Mexico and Morocco – what Lewis termed the “Mexican illusion” – in the posthumously published “Kasbahs and Souks,” Filibusters in Barbary also

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alludes to this “land-bridge.”234 The spatial alternatives to Bergsonian modernity pursued by Lewis and Smithson are thus situated within a shared Atlantean discourse. Smithson’s references in the “Yucatan” essay to such “historians” of Atlantis and Mu as Ignatius Donnelly and, indirectly, James Churchward echo Lewis’s anti-academic mobilization of the lost continent to imagine a nomadic, post-national world order.235 Lewis’s utopian discourse on Atlantis contextualizes Smithson’s earth maps as parallel attempts to visualize post-national space. The white limestone earth map that Smithson installed in a suburb of the Yucatán city of Uxmal brings into representation themes familiar from Lewis’s Moroccan travelogue. A ludicrous reconstruction of the Great Ice Cap of Gondwanaland – the ancient supercontinent that occupied earth’s southern hemisphere between approximately 550 and 180 million years ago – Smithson’s earth map recalls Lewis’s Atlantean representations of global space in Filibusters in Barbary as well as Churchward’s discussion of the mythical lost continent of Mu. The location of Smithson’s Yucatán earth map is not fortuitous. The Maya Temple of Sacred Mysteries at Uxmal appears several times in Churchward’s The Lost Continent of Mu, to which Smithson makes reference in his “Yucatan” essay. Churchward claims that inscriptions on the walls of the temple constitute “the most important records” of the lost continent.236 Smithson’s decision to site his earth map of the prehistoric Gondwanaland at Uxmal suggests an informed intervention within Churchward’s speculative history of the Pacific supercontinent and its alleged links with the Maya ruins at Uxmal. Smithson’s Uxmal installation is also key to unravelling his utopian ambitions for the unrealized Island of Broken Glass as an allied Lewisian exercise in imaginative geography paralleling McLuhan’s Lewis-inspired vision of an emergent global village – less an evocation of a fantasized Pacific Nation, then, than the projection of a truly planetary space. In an endnote to the “Yucatan” essay, Smithson revealingly writes that “on a site in Loveladies, Long Beach Island, New Jersey a map of tons of clear broken glass will follow Mr. Scott-Elliot’s map of Atlantis. Other Maps of Broken Glass (Atlantis) will follow.”237 The Uxmal installation stands at the head of this Atlantean series of earth maps, real or projected, with the unexecuted Miami Islet artwork envisioned as the most ambitious instantiation. As Grant Arnold proposed, “The remote location of the island would have given it a kind of ‘lost’ status that in some ways paralleled that of Atlantis.”238 Counterintuitively, the prospective site of the Canadian earth map would have situated Island of Broken Glass squarely within the same referential terrain mined by the earlier Uxmal

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installation. Churchward’s narrative of Mu makes several references to the Indigenous peoples of British Columbia, and to Vancouver Island in particular. In one extended passage, Churchward problematically interprets a Nootka tableau as depicting “Mu and her destruction.”239 In a troubling conflation of culturally and historically specific signifiers anticipating Smithson’s interpolation of Aztec gods into his Maya travelogue, Churchward reads a winged serpent portrayed in the Nootka work as a representation of the Aztec divinity Quetzalcoatl, whose “double aspect” Smithson likewise invokes in his “Yucatan” essay as personifying the split perception figured by his Mirror Displacements and his dualist conceptual apparatus more generally.240 The proposed locale for Island of Broken Glass would thus have held strong associations for Smithson with Churchward’s descriptions of Mu: the Pacific mirror-image of the lost Atlantic continent. Smithson’s interface with Churchward’s Mu via his unrealized proposal for Miami Islet underscores the critical stakes of his earth maps, which, like the postmodern cartographic fictions studied by Mitchell, set out to destabilize the Cartesian optics and discourses of objectivity mobilized by the “classical map.”241 As such, Smithson’s fictive geographies articulated a “utopian form of vision shared by Situationists and Conceptualists,” who were similarly engaged in the mapping of fabulated spaces, as Peter Wollen has documented.242 Indeed, his related scanning methodology put into operation something like a cybernetic dérive. If the Berkeleian flux conjured by Lewis’s Atlantean Sand-Wind offered a prototype for the irrational perspective and particulate materiality embodied by Smithson’s earth maps, Churchward’s anti-academic methodology supplied a model for the critique of scientific objectivity that they simultaneously manifested. Smithson’s borrowings from Churchward’s dubious historiography  – and from the equally questionable scholarship of Ignatius Donnelly, the author of a popular nineteenth-century study of Atlantis, which he likewise cites in his “Yucatan” essay – enacted a calculated travesty of scholarly norms, and of the linear temporality of historicism in particular, that retrieved the anti-temporal stratagems of Filibusters in Barbary. Despite their critical orientation, in the Coda I will explore the earth maps’ continued propagation of racial politics reminiscent of Lewis’s conflicted venture in postcolonial critique.

Coda

Information emerges from this reassessment as a persistent locus of modernist and contemporary art practices implicated in a common discourse network organized around the co-shaping of bodies and computational media and techniques. This network is centred in English Canada but extends well beyond the territorial borders of the Canadian nation-state. The advertising writings of Canada’s first abstract artist, Bertram Brooker, explored census data and other statistical instruments as both technologies of biopolitical administration and vectors of aesthetic resistance. These investigations shaped the deindividuated figures portrayed by his semi-abstract canvases of the mid-1920s as well as the numeric motifs, and demographic rhetoric, mobilized by his commercial designs of the same period. Brooker’s statistical subjects establish an important precedent for contemporary discourses on the “quantified self” associated with self-tracking media such as Fitbit and Apple Watch as well as the data economy’s eclipse of the historic culture industries in what Bernard Stiegler has labelled the “age of disruption.”1 Brooker initiated a highly ambivalent discourse on information and modernization that in many ways continued to define the terms of reference for subsequent English Canadian artists’ and thinkers’ conflicted engagements with the features of an emergent information society. Brooker seized upon the statistician’s toolbox to articulate a qualitative “humanics” in counterpoint to dominant, mechanistic approaches to consumer psychology, even as the associationist and behaviourist frameworks that constituted the object of his critique drew upon the very same techniques of informationalization. These

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tensions point to an apparent contradiction at the heart of Brooker’s project. Through their reduction of subjectivity to an informational pattern, his artworks and writings effect a hypostatization seemingly at odds with his qualitative and ontological counterproposals. In fact, Brooker’s adaptation of Bergsonian concepts to pragmatic problems in advertising and parallel production of innovative abstractions represents an eminently Bergsonian resolution of these competing tendencies. John Mullarkey argues that rather than being an absolute or static opposition, the polarities of Bergsonism are properly understood as defining a perpetual “process of dualisation.”2 Consequently, mathematics occupies a highly ambivalent position in Bergson’s writings; commentators frequently overlook the French philosopher’s initial training as a mathematician.3 Bergson’s early critique of psychophysical techniques of quantification in Time and Free Will – techniques that, he claimed, reduce consciousness to a progression of discrete magnitudes  – constitutes only the most extreme statement of what would evolve into an increasingly relational model of (quantitative) matter and (qualitative) memory in his subsequent writings. Brooker’s textbook Copy Technique in Advertising is a prototypical artifact of the Bergsonian tensions structuring his engagements with informatic media and techniques. In turning to a quantitative methodology resembling Melvil Dewey’s decimal approach to knowledge representation to organize his own qualitative arguments (Figure C.1), Brooker seems to betray his stated ambition of carrying out an oral and rhythmic renovation of conventional, print-based marketing, a project of reform propelled by his enthusiastic reception of a range of Bergson-inspired artists and authors affiliated with the one-time Rhythmist John Middleton Murry. At the same time, this very ambivalence can be recognized as enacting the dualisms of Bergsonian ontology through a hybridization of competing media that clears a path for Innis’s subsequent quest for a corrective “balance” of conflicting (oral and written) forms of bias as well as the “secondary orality” theorized by McLuhan’s one-time student Walter Ong.4 Brooker’s therapeutics of qualitative excess thereby countered a nascent regime of quantification through strategies foreshadowing Bernard Stiegler’s championing of the “improbable” in the face of an entropic contemporaneity accelerated by predictive computation.5 In turning to Bergson in search of what he terms “neganthropic” alternatives to the homogenizing vector of contemporary models of economic disruption, Stiegler recalls Brooker’s organicist retort to the associationist atomization that characterized the dominant financial models of his time.6

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C.1 Bertram Brooker (Richard Surrey), detail of Copy Technique in Advertising, 1930.

A similar tension is legible in the earlier of Brooker’s pendant McGraw-Hill textbooks, Layout Technique in Advertising (1929). If Copy Technique in Advertising is primarily concerned with the latent sonic properties of text, the earlier work is devoted to the problem of dynamizing the static spatiality of print formats through an application of Bergsonian design precepts gleaned from the writings of the Mexican artist and educator Adolfo Best-Maugard.7 Like all of the artists examined in this book, Brooker demonstrates a keen awareness of informational media’s capacity to shape the formal properties of communication and artistic expression prior to being invested with a symbolic content. This

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Coda will revisit the strategies mobilized by the other figures explored in previous chapters to both navigate and immanently intervene within the data flows of an information society, but with a new emphasis on the issues of identity and representation that are urgently reshaping our understanding of these histories today. Beginning, out of sequence, with a postcolonial reappraisal of Robert Smithson’s earth maps, the spiralling, vortical structure of this concluding chapter pays homage to the redundant, cyclical shape attributed to electronic signals by McLuhan. Extending earlier analyses, it closes with a condensed case study of the Toronto-based collective General Idea that highlights both tensions within this discourse network and their potential to articulate resistance to the universalizing tendencies seemingly endemic to informatic modes.

“Black Celts” and White Indigeneity: “Playing Indian” in the Global Village In complex tension with the visions of nascent global harmony that they seemingly embody and project, the Atlantean geographies of Lewis and Smithson, introduced in the previous chapter, are simultaneously racially fraught. An overlooked prototype for the idealized Atlantean spatiality with which Lewis hoped to resist the nostalgic nationalisms of European fascist regimes in Filibusters in Barbary is found in a littleknown work of science fiction by the German author Hans Dominik, which Lewis discusses in Paleface (1929), his earlier commentary on contemporary racial politics in America. Written in the wake of a 1927 trip to New York, Paleface is an astoundingly bigoted work of racial paranoia and white nationalism, even for the author of the notorious Hitler. Set amid derogatory criticisms of W.E.B. Du Bois and D.H. Lawrence, Lewis approaches Dominik’s 1925 novel Atlantis as a speculative forecast of looming geopolitical and racial tensions. Atlantis tells of a Black sovereign who strives for energy autonomy and racial parity for the African continent. These efforts are met with resistance from Europeans, who – like Lewis himself in Paleface – view racial equality as an unwelcome diminution of white privilege. American capitalist Guy Rouse foils the African emperor’s geothermal ambitions by diverting the Gulf Stream with a breach in the isthmus of Panama, thereby setting in motion rapid glaciation in Europe and an ensuing period of white migration. As Lewis summarizes the book’s geo-aesthetic conclusion, “the White Race is eventually saved; it is installed on a brand new Atlantis, which however has to rise out of the ocean to receive it.”8 Not coincidentally, this Atlantean resolution of planetary conflict foreshadows Smithson’s sketches related to the thwarted Island of Broken

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C.2 Robert Smithson, Map of Broken Clear Glass (Atlantis), 1969. Princeton University Art Museum. © 2021 Holt / Smithson Foundation / Licensed by VAGA at Artists Rights Society (ARS), NY.

Glass, a project originally slated for installation on a rocky outcrop in the Strait of Georgia, northwest of Vancouver. Map of Broken Clear Glass (Atlantis) (1969) (Figure  C.2) situates a related Atlantean earthwork proposal off the Rio de Oro coast in North Africa, the precise location where Lewis had projected the aerial outlines of a reconstructed Atlantis in Filibusters in Barbary. Though written only two short years after his disparaging gloss on Dominik’s racialized utopia, Lewis’s Moroccan travelogue improbably seized upon the German science fiction author’s signature genre of the “‘World’ book” as a template for imagining a planetary alternative

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to the  fractional nationalisms of contemporaneous fascist movements, whose racist ideologies bear an unmistakeable resemblance to Lewis’s own earlier views on race in Paleface.9 This apparent reversal in Lewis’s valuation of the Atlantean metaphor as a political ideal certainly smacks of opportunism. Wrestling with the recognition that fascism will not be the politically stabilizing force that, as a shell-shocked veteran of the First World War, he had initially hoped it to be, we now find Lewis turning to the very stockpile of pulp fiction cliché that he had only recently ridiculed in Paleface, this time in search of a geopolitical panacea. Given his foregoing critique of D.H. Lawrence’s primitivist portrayal of the Indigenous peoples of Mexico, Lewis must have been acutely aware of the potential for self-contradiction inherent in his idealized representation of “Atlantean” Berbers in Filibusters in Barbary, discussed in Chapter 4. As we have already seen, Lewis’s “Kasbahs and Souks” propagates the myth of the Berbers’ Atlantean origins hypothesized by Donnelly.10 Attempting to dodge the primitivism of which he accuses his rivals, Lewis rehearses the bogus racial genealogy of James Churchward in The Lost Continent of Mu, positing a common ethnic origin for Berber and Celtic peoples. “Through Yucatan and the inland parts of Central America a white race predominated,” Churchward had written in his popular account of Atlantis’s hypothetical Pacific counterpart; “They were called Mayas, and the white races of Europe, Asia Minor and northern Africa are easily traced from them.”11 Smithson’s “Incidents of Mirror-Travel in the Yucatan” likewise references Mu, though citing Donnelly. Like Churchward, whose book Smithson owned, Donnelly claimed that Atlantis was “the original seat of the Aryan or Indo-European family of nations.”12 Lewis’s quest for an Aryan Atlantis in Filibusters in Barbary clears a path for the Persian terminus of Snooty Baronet (discussed in Chapter 1), which he was researching during his Moroccan travels in 1931, Iran being another “Aryan” homeland. Lewis’s misappropriation of  Zoroastrian metaphysics in Snooty Baronet, and falsified attribution of Atlantean ancestry to his romanticized Berber subjects in “Kasbahs and Souks,” disturbingly evoke a common Aryan referent that begs questions, in turn, about Smithson’s motivations for engaging with the British artist-author travelogues. Churchward’s and Donnelly’s racialized accounts of the Maya pyramids’ construction shed new light on the questionable stakes of Smithson’s Yucatán expedition. Previous postcolonial readings of Smithson’s “Yucatan” photo-essay have connected it to a discursive tradition initiated by John Lloyd Stephens, the nineteenth-century New Jersey explorer whose 1843 Incidents of Travel in Yucatan is the

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titular foil to Smithson’s photo-essay. Stephens attributed present-day Maya populations’ purported ignorance about the accomplishments of their pyramid-building ancestors, whose historic monuments he and other white explorers “discovered” in a state of ruination, to cultural “degenerat[ion].”13 Similarly, Smithson wrote that “the world of the Maya and its cosmography has been deformed and beaten down by the pressure of years.”14 Churchward’s writings are representative of an equally offensive tradition of commentary on the Maya, one that effects an outright erasure of Indigenous presence by attributing the same historic accomplishments to a lost population of white Maya: fantasized descendants of a bygone elite of light-skinned Atlanteans. The secondary dispossession propagated by the discourses out of which the projects of Atlantean reconstruction pursued by Lewis and Smithson emerged is compounded by both artists’ propensity for “playing Indian,” Philip Deloria’s term for a long-standing tradition in which American identity is re-enacted simultaneously through, and against, an imagined Indigenous Other.15 As documented by Deloria, Indian play has been a recurrent symptom of crises in American nationhood, from revolutionary times through modernity. Mark Watson complicates the more recent history of this phenomenon, noting that widespread countercultural manifestations of Indian play in the late 1960s and early 1970s departed from historic precedents in their post-nationalist outlook and techno-utopianism, developments that Watson attributes to the reception of McLuhan’s neo-primitivist pronouncements about impending global connectivity.16 Indian play is an integral, if understudied, feature of Lewis’s North American writings that constitutes an important prehistory to the countercultural currents analyzed by Watson. The reputed source for McLuhan’s neo-primitivist global village, America and Cosmic Man symptomatically evokes Indigeneity as a deferred promise of renewed authenticity. Responding to Diego Rivera’s murals at the Detroit Institute of Art, Lewis opines that Mexico is peopled by aboriginal Americans, and when the Indian culture of Mexico melts into the great American mass to the north, the Indian will probably give it its art, as the Negro has its music … It took an Indian[, Rivera,] [sic] to understand the tropical shapes of the great steel labyrinths.17 Conforming to the pattern of ambivalent oppositions mapped by Deloria’s long history of Indian play, Lewis conjures historic constructions of Indigeneity as the support for a coming post-racial

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society. He introduces this theme by way of an anecdote about the seventeenth-century explorer La Salle, whose crew mutinied during an expedition on the Mississippi, supposedly abandoning their canoe with the declaration “Nous sommes tous sauvages” etched on its hull.18 For Lewis, this statement is metonymic of the enduring tabula rasa character of North American society, which he describes as “the cradle of a new type of man: not a man that is Mongol, or African, or Celt, or Teuton, or Mediterranean, but the sum of all these.”19 Lewis envisions the ultimate product of this melting-pot as a “universal culture.”20 The earlier novel America, I Presume (1940) is a revealing palimpsest of Lewis’s shifting views on race, Indigeneity, and cosmopolitanism during his North American sojourn. Protagonist Archibald Corcoran’s selfreflexive attribution of co-authorship to his celebrated mystery-writer wife, Agatha Morgan, implies a condition of double consciousness that illuminates Lewis’s own frequently conflictual positions.21 Her hardboiled authorial persona and purported Indigenous ancestry implicate Agatha as the unlikely alter ego of the infamously misogynist Lewis, who, Thomas Dilworth contends, “was himself part Indian – as he had recently learned [upon arriving in North America in September 1939] from his relatives in Toronto and New York State.”22 “Agatha,” Corcoran informs the reader, “is dark: almost swarthy. She has Italian blood: also (she has allowed herself to be persuaded) Indian … She has something of the aborigenee, something of the Roman.”23 Crucially, Corcoran distances himself from the optimistic portrait of American society painted by America, I Presume – a portent of the “cosmic” America later foretold by America and Cosmic Man – attributing its hopeful outlook to his spouse. In a telling footnote, Corcoran cautions that “Agatha has been given an absolutely free hand by me in these chapters; but if I am to set my name to this composition I must really at this point protest.”24 These textual tensions symptomatize Lewis’s own divided voice on questions of identity and race, reinforcing the strategic character of the late cosmopolitanism promoted by America and Cosmic Man. In America, I Presume, Agatha proposes a vision of American empire conspicuously prophetic of Lewis’s subsequent views in America and Cosmic Man. She sketches a future Pan-American state, whose “capital city would have to be midway between North and South.”25 Anticipating Smithson’s speculative gloss on Mayan Deco in the 1967 conceptual essay “Ultramoderne,” she further proposes that the emperor’s “court would be established in an equatorial skyscraper,” pejoratively imagining a coronation marked by human sacrifice.26 The implied Atlantean prototype for this Pan-American utopia is clear from the narrator’s subsequent avowal that, like Britain, “America is an island, too.”27 Lewis

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here conjures long-standing associations between the island utopias hypothesized by European thinkers such as Thomas More and Francis Bacon and Indigenous societies of the Americas.28 Agatha’s Pan-American idyll is a far cry from the white nationalism espoused by Lewis in Paleface, his response to a previous American voyage undertaken just over a decade earlier. In Paleface, he had declared himself to be the partisan of “all those who suffer from paleness of complexion and all those under a cloud because their grandfathers exterminated the Redskins.”29 Yet Paleface simultaneously praised Indigenous peoples’ “copper skin” as the embodiment of an impending post-racial society.30 The latter, problematic privileging of Indigeneity runs counter to a persistent target of Lewis’s critique in Paleface, namely the “Indian-worship” that he attributes to modernist rivals such as D.H. Lawrence.31 Lewis accuses Lawrence of trafficking in a “fashionable primitivist doctrine.”32 Unsurprisingly, this romanticized Indigeneity is revealed to be yet another avatar of the Bergsonian metaphysics of flux that is the familiar target of earlier Lewis texts including Time and Western Man: “Everything Flows! – for the Indian, as for Bergson, Mr. Lawrence, etc.”33 Rehearsing a long tradition of Indian play, Smithson’s “Yucatan” essay wagered an improbable renewal of Western subjectivity on a masquerade of Indigenous identities hearkening back to Lewis’s example. As mentioned in Chapter 4, while executing and documenting hypothetical continents in the Yucatán, the artist and his companions – his wife, the artist Nancy Holt, and gallerist Virginia Dwan – had assumed the personae of Maya and, incongruously, Aztec gods. “Bob saw us as three Mayan gods, each with a defining perspective,” Dwan reported in a 2014 obituary for Holt.34 There is, to be sure, an element of self-conscious irony implicated in Smithson and companions’ adoption of these identities that recalls Lewis’s ambivalent critique of Orientalist tropes in Filibusters in Barbary. In a section of his Moroccan travelogue excerpted by the Signet anthology owned by Smithson, titled “Film Filibusters,” Lewis satirized romanticized representations of non-Western cultures by characterizing the cast of Rex Ingram’s 1931 film Love in Morocco, who were staying in the same hotel as Lewis in Fez, as “sham sheiks.”35 Smithson’s facetious documentation of the ramshackle Hotel Palenque, shot while travelling with Holt and Dwan and later presented as slides during a mock archaeological lecture at the University of Utah in 1972, can be understood as similarly lampooning McLuhan-inspired forms of countercultural Indian play.36 But there can be no doubt that, like Lewis’s earlier Atlantean musings, Smithson’s Indian play is beset by unresolved tensions between parody and affirmation.

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Smithson’s techno-primitivist renovation of long-established conventions of racialized masquerade in his “Yucatan” photo-essay paralleled, and may have responded to, the contemporaneous rhetorical innovations honed by Stewart Brand’s epochal Whole Earth Catalog, which, as Fred Turner observes, interpellated its ideal reader as a “nomad and technocrat.”37 The notional “Cowboy Nomad figure” addressed by the Whole Earth Catalog was a problematic amalgam of “Daniel Boone and eighteenth-century Native American warriors,” much as Smithson’s Maya gods condensed seemingly incompatible prototypes ranging from Indigenous deities to nineteenth-century colonial explorers and present-day Western tourists.38 Like Smithson’s Artforum essay, Turner notes that “the Catalog offered its readers ways to enter its world and become ‘as gods,’” the ultimate aim of Brand’s DIY magazine having been to “found a new tribe of technology-loving Indians.”39 Turner’s gloss on Brand’s McLuhan-fuelled techno-primitivism is consistent with Mark Watson’s thesis that “McLuhan’s theory of electronic retribalization provided the counterculture … [with] an up-to-date yet futuristic form of primitivism.”40 If Lewis’s occasional adoption of Indigenous personae paralleled the primitivist role-play that he critiqued in the modernist writings of D.H. Lawrence, Smithson’s Indian play matches Deloria’s description of a subsequent generation of countercultural Indians, who “appropriate[ed] and cobbl[ed] together meanings that crossed borders of culture and race” to forge cosmopolitan alternatives to American imperialism during the Vietnam War.41 The multicultural perspective embraced by white communalists donning appropriated Indigenous identities studied by Deloria coincided with the Lewis-derived cosmopolitanism of McLuhan’s global village, a world view ultimately grounded in a colonial fantasia of racial masquerade. Lara Trubowitz observes that Lewis “often correlates the concept of race with the vicissitudes of fashion or dress, presenting it as … a kind of costuming.”42 McLuhan’s neo-primitivist posturing has prompted Brian Johnson to liken the media thinker to Daniel Francis’s figure of the “plastic shaman”: a non-Indigenous individual who misappropriates “an Indian persona and claim[s] to have a special insight into the Indian way of life.”43 Deloria denounces such spectacles of Orientalist theatricality, noting that a “cosmopolitan focus on culture-crossings and simultaneities … suggested that one’s identity was a matter not so much of descent as of consent and choice.”44 The cosmopolitan spatiality embodied by Smithson’s earth maps and hypothetical continents, like the planetary topographies proposed by McLuhan and Lewis before him, materialized precisely such a rejection of Western subjectivity premised on a desire to inhabit other identities.

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C.3 Robert Smithson, Spiral Jetty, 1970. Rozel Point, Great Salt Lake, Utah. Photograph: Charles Uibel/Great Salt Lake Photography © Holt / Smithson Foundation and Dia Art Foundation / Licensed by VAGA at Artists Rights Society (ARS), NY.

Smithson’s self-fashioning into the fictive avatar of a Maya divinity during his Yucatán fieldwork manifests a broader countercultural experimentation with signifiers of Indigenous identity as a modality of antiwar protest. Deloria observes that “native resistance provided a homegrown model for opposition to the American military imperialism that protestors saw in Vietnam.”45 An allied logic of symbolic protest via cultural appropriation is legible in the pictographic contours of the artist’s signature Spiral Jetty (1970) (Figure C.3), whose rocky vortex was allegedly inspired, in part, by Indigenous legends of an otherworldly “whirlpool” connecting Great Salt Lake to the Pacific Ocean.46 Nico Israel has convincingly read Smithson’s film version of Spiral Jetty, which documents the earthwork’s construction, as an oblique expression of antiwar sentiments. Smithson’s protest solidifies in the film’s climactic confrontation on the rings of the Jetty between the artist and a helicopter (a nod to Hitchcock’s North by Northwest),47 whose aerial gaze conflates two ubiquitous media of the Vietnam War: television and the Bell UH-1 Iroquois gunship. The cosmopolitan utopias of Lewis, McLuhan and Smithson alike simultaneously conceal and perpetuate a colonial optics of Indigenous dispossession and Indian play. The Atlantean cartographies of Smithson and Lewis emerged out of a shared context of racial masquerade and plastic shamanism that previous scholars have associated with the postmodern neo-primitivism of McLuhan’s global village. In effect, McLuhan’s speculations on utopian spatiality bridge the Atlantean

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geographies sketched by Lewis, his mentor, and Smithson, whose conceptual writings make repeated direct and indirect references to both Canadian-born media thinkers. Through his role as an informal adviser to Prime Minister Pierre Trudeau, McLuhan’s cosmopolitan vision would indirectly shape Canada’s official policy of multiculturalism. His relationship to Lewis is thus significant for bringing into visibility what Andrew Baldwin has described as “a longstanding genealogical tension operating between multicultural ideology and whiteness,” a trajectory anteceding Trudeau’s policies, which Baldwin excavates through a revisionist reading of Lawren Harris’s freighted representations of urban immigrant communities in the early decades of the twentieth century.48 Baldwin argues that the veneer of inclusivity promoted by Harris’s paintings of Toronto’s Ward neighbourhood in fact propagated a white nationalist governmentality premised on the tacit segregation of multicultural urban precincts from the wilderness spaces idealized by the Group of Seven painter’s landscape canvases, with the latter symbolically “furnish[ing] ‘white’ Canadians with a discourse that legitimizes their national belonging as a pioneering, originary form of belonging.”49 There is a troubling isomorphism between the racially fraught cosmopolitan geography navigated by Lewis’s North American travel writings and Harris’s segregated spatial imaginary. The stratified multiculturalism promoted by Harris’s paintings is an important antecedent to McLuhan’s global village, which Ginger Nolan characterizes as riven by “imbalances of semiotic power” between the Global North and the Global South.50 More than vestiges of historic topographies of colonial power, Nolan explores the inequities in communicational affordance delineated by McLuhan’s planetary geography as actively produced by his program of media literacy, which was modelled, Nolan argues, on the state-sponsored displacement of indigenous Kenyans through enforced “villagization.”51 Dispossession of lands was accompanied by forms of semiotic subjugation, whereby villagers were acculturated to new media such as film and radio even while remaining unlettered and thus enduringly dependent on Kenya’s literate white settler population. As theorized by the ethnopsychiatrist John Colin Carothers, this neocolonial strategy was an enduring reference for McLuhan in his meditations on the forms of “post-literacy” produced by new media.52 He notably cites Carothers in connection with his inaugural reference to the global village in The Gutenberg Galaxy. Baldwin’s analysis of the racial dichotomies governing the production of space legitimized by Harris’s paintings likewise complements the scholarship of Armond Towns on the neglected racial foundations

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of  spatiotemporal “bias” in the thought of McLuhan and other members  of the Toronto School. Rejecting the categorical fixity characteristic of colonial representations of space, Towns argues that “Black geographies reproduce spaces in ways that contradict and disrupt white conceptions of space, place, and being.”53 The covert wayfinding practices that supported escaped slaves’ successful navigation of the Underground Railroad  – practices based in the temporality of oral communication – exemplify alternatives to white spatial bias. Today, it is imperative to recognize the anti-Cartesian cartographies of Lewis, McLuhan, and Smithson as co-optations of the very tactics for evading the classificatory colonial gaze described by Towns. Ironically, Lewis’s appropriation of Indigenous spatiality to imagine a planetary society also hinged on yet another in a long series of covert Bergsonisms; his calls for a “world government” in American and Cosmic Man were strongly reminiscent of the French thinker’s earlier involvement with the League of Nations.54

Ingrid Baxter: Corporate Personhood and Gender Insubordination Stan Douglas’s identitarian intervention within the conceptual pedagogy of Iain Baxter discussed in Chapter 3 suggests new possibilities for approaching the chronically misunderstood administrative labour of NETCO co-president Ingrid Baxter. Derek Knight has noted that “some reassessment of this collaborative process between Iain and Ingrid Baxter is necessary to achieve a greater understanding of what Ingrid’s role might have been, since it is not well understood outside the perfunctory label of co-president. Questions about her function and how we should measure her contribution remain unanswered.”55 In a 2011 interview with Alexander Alberro, Ingrid Baxter herself expressed uncertainty about the historicization of her role, stating that “I’ve never worn the label artist very well. I have never worn any labels very well, such as housewife, entrepreneur, and the like.”56 Some historians have interpreted lingering questions about Ingrid Baxter’s contributions to NETCO as a symptom of female artists’ erasure from institutionalized histories of conceptualism in the period prior to the full impact of second-wave feminism on the North American art scene beginning in the fall of 1970.57 In a 2009 interview with Grant Arnold, however, Ingrid Baxter described her contributions to the company in terms that cast doubt on this approach: “I don’t think I’ve yet reached the  point of thinking  of myself as a visual artist … Iain did most of the actual production of works, and I would consult, or insult, whatever I felt like, or the project needed.”58

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In attempting to account for Ingrid Baxter’s agency within the N.E. Thing Co. Ltd, I follow the example set by Siona Wilson’s study  of feminist projects carried out within the “mixed-gender collective[s]” of the Berwick Street Film Collective and COUM Transmissions, particularly as they bring into visibility “the struggle for women’s equality in the workplace.”59 The Vancouver art community within which the Baxters operated was a microcosm of the patriarchal milieu of the larger art world.60 Catalysed by the scholarship of Nancy Shaw, growing recognition of this circumstance has inspired a string of historians to advance a feminist recovery of Ingrid Baxter. But while Ingrid Baxter’s achievements remain poorly understood to this day, I want to argue that the frameworks marshalled by Shaw and others have unintentionally set in motion a secondary occlusion of her innovative practice. Shaw drew on the lessons of second-wave feminism to interrogate the unacknowledged ways in which Ingrid Baxter’s domestic role of “at-home Mom” may have shaped the company’s photo-conceptual output while also contributing to the co-president’s erasure by a misogynist art world beholden to ideals of heroic masculinity that could be attributed to an athletic and charismatic Iain Baxter.61 This reading recast the company’s pioneering conceptual products as “mementos of family outings” documenting the trappings of heteronormative suburban leisure, with which the Baxters, and NETCO, were thereafter closely identified.62 Complicating Shaw’s domestic reading are the signs of corporate delegation legible in the acknowledgments to A Portfolio of Piles, which list Iain Baxter’s colleagues Fred Herzog, Duane Lunden, and Ivar Asmussen as contributing photographers.63 Nonetheless, Shaw’s narrative proved instrumental in transforming the groundbreaking features of the company’s posthuman authorship, and its shifting cast of personnel, into a stable duo amenable to the default liberal humanist lens applied by many second-wave recuperation narratives. However, this model strains to account for projects that operate within relational idioms of the type  – pre-eminently described by Donna Haraway in “A Cyborg Manifesto” – that offer a more productive path of approach to the proto-feminist currents active, but not fully resolved, within NETCO’s distributed assemblage of human and non-human actors.64 The corporate relationality of NETCO was, of course, primarily an operationalization of then emergent post-Fordist models of the networked self, particularly as treated to preliminary theorization by McLuhan in his commentaries on the business world.65 It is a testament to the influential legacy of Shaw’s revisionist history of the company that museums and historians quickly and indeed almost universally,

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substituted the individual authors Iain Baxter and Ingrid Baxter for the established corporate attribution of N.E. Thing Co. Ltd. It is characteristic of the chronic lag in reception that seems to afflict Canadian art historiography that a reading foregrounding Ingrid Baxter’s domestic identity enjoyed so much popularity in Canada at the very moment that third-wave feminism was undergoing a process of institutionalization within the American academy under the rubric of Judith Butler’s theorization of gender performativity.66 Butler influentially recast all gender roles as forms of “drag” that effectively imitate an ideal ego without an original.67 While recent reassessments of the shift in perspective associated with the rise of performance theory rightly warn against reading second-wave feminism’s construction of gender as naively “essentialist” and theory-based notions as more “advanced,” I want to revisit Butler’s notion of “gender insubordination” in order to elucidate the corporate role-play of Ingrid Baxter as a deliberate, and in retrospect anticipatory, travesty of gendered constructions of corporate ontology.68 In light of the continued prevalence of recuperation narratives – a tendency currently receiving new momentum with the rise of a fourth-wave feminist formation that is returning to, and amplifying, feminist critiques of the 1970s – the interpretive possibilities suggested by Butler’s work remain a compelling, and notably underdeveloped, historiographic alternative or supplement.69 In an essay originally published in an anthology devoted to the question of queer identity, Butler proposed the concept of gender insubordination to interrogate the very premise of an identitarian matrix, controversially arguing for a reclamation of the elements of mimicry active within the performance of gay and lesbian identities. For Butler, this mimicry does not correspond to derogatory views of LGBTQ subjectivities as somehow derivative of or secondary to an originary heterosexual norm, the mimesis of gender ideals being common to all subject positions on the gender continuum. In this mutually reinforcing field of difference, heterosexual performance is just as dependent upon the other terms as any other. Instead, what Butler identified as characteristic of a queer positionality is its capacity to reveal the norm itself as dependent upon anti-foundationalist forms of masquerade. An important precursor to Butler’s theory that would have been influential in NETCO’s milieu is Susan Sontag’s notion of camp.70 Writing in artscanada in 1967, McLuhan appropriated Sontag’s concept to articulate his understanding of obsolescence as the process of retrieving cultural archetypes: “By simply taking into the shopwindow old toys, old ornaments, and the things Mom used to wear thirty years ago, you turn them into art forms and you have C-A-M-P, this mysterious new

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archetype.”71 Furthermore, McLuhan’s theatrical conception of social “roles” foreshadowed Butler’s theory of gender performativity.72 Ingrid Baxter’s de-essentializing performance of a historically gendered managerial role can be analogized to the forms of “camp conceptualism” active in the McLuhan-inflected Toronto scene of the 1970s delineated by Philip Monk.73 (Here it is worth noting, in passing, that the Baxters relocated to Toronto following Iain Baxter’s failure to obtain permanent status at SFU; both co-presidents began teaching at York University in 1973.) Just how Butler’s deconstruction of the gendered ontologies presupposed by both the dominant culture of misogyny and some historic feminist critiques of that formation might advance the project of developing a critical understanding of Ingrid Baxter’s corporate performance emerges clearly from the recognition that self-conscious role-play was constitutive of NETCO’s McLuhanesque corporate theatre. The latter explicitly substituted the public personae of the corporation and its employees for the private identities of husband and wife, father and mother. Like the freewheeling members of the Merry Pranksters south of the border, NETCO’s co-presidents were simultaneously “themselves and characters in a scene.”74 Cavell similarly notes that the Baxters’ “use of an acronym to sign their art conveyed that they were not expressing subjectivities but rather entering into a pre-existing discourse.”75 NETCO’s organization chart, and Ingrid Baxter’s carefully crafted role therein, invited viewers to evaluate the actions of its executive team within a non-essentialist framework suggestive of what Benjamin Buchloh subsequently termed an “aesthetic of administration,” notwithstanding the co-presidents’ ludic distortions of that frame discussed in Chapters 2 and 3.76 It needs to be emphasized that, to the best of my knowledge, the NETCO corpus does not include a single representation of Ingrid Baxter in the domestic role in which she was retrospectively recast by Shaw in an effort to recuperate her corporate labour as a variation on what Helen Molesworth would later term “housework,”77 namely a bringing into the public sphere of gendered and typically underpaid or unpaid forms of labour usually confined to domestic space, or to the unseen spaces of public institutions. Such a strategy is often associated with Mirele Laderman Ukeles’s performance of maintenance functions habitually carried out by janitorial staff at the Wadsworth Atheneum in 1973. Far from displaying the trappings of domesticity attributed to them by Shaw, NETCO’s (rare) representations of the Baxters’ children acquire an aura of science fiction in artworks such as And They Had Issue, presented at the Art Gallery of York University in 1973, in which Tor and Erian Baxter were presented to the public on plinths as a Gilbert & George–like living sculpture.

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What is so striking about Ingrid Baxter’s corporate labour is, rather, the way in which it brings into visibility the work of women professionals occupying public roles formerly reserved for men. Ingrid Baxter’s travesty of gender norms – the conventions of “transnational business masculinity” traditionally vested in corporate habitus, and sometimes conflated with the very ontology of the corporation – has equally troubled the expectations of second- and third-wave feminist art historians seeking to uncover the ways in which art by women can illuminate invisibilized forms of labour and the gendered foundations of the dialectical segregation of private space and the public sphere.78 NETCO’s early recognition of the gendered attributes of the corporate legal person instead anticipated the writings of feminist organizational scholars such as R.W. Connell on “gendered institutions.”79 Ingrid Baxter’s groundbreaking performance, and disruption, of corporate norms revised the familiar terms of the second-wave slogan “the personal is political,”80 suggesting an alternative imperative along the lines of personalize the public. Rather than engaging in the representational work of exposing “hidden” scenes of labour as the unrecognized condition of possibility for the constitution and maintenance of a public sphere,81 Ingrid Baxter’s promotion to co-president enacted an immanent restructuring of social relations. While attaining a remarkable degree of visibility within a misogynist art system, and a strikingly non-sexist one at that, and despite inscribing this change of status into the very legal fabric of the company prior to the critiques of transnational masculinity elaborated by feminist organizational scholars beginning only in the later 1970s, Ingrid Baxter’s masquerade of gender norms evidently was, and continues to be, unsettling to many viewers. Her champions – who, somewhat ironically, have forced her back into a domestic space that, at least while inhabiting her corporate persona, she had succeeded in escaping – have evidently shared this anxiety. Uncomfortable perhaps with the unabashedly capitalistic goals of NETCO and its co-presidents, Ingrid Baxter’s would-be advocates have read the company as a “co-optation of collaborative production for commercial purposes,” in the process misattributing works created prior to the company’s foundation, notably Iain Baxter’s solo work Bagged Place (1966).82 Viewed through the lens of the second-wave recuperation narratives institutionalized in Canadian art historiography, it has been seen as necessary to decry inequities in NETCO’s partnership that continued to favour Iain Baxter’s visibility even after 1970 as the  products of a presumed power imbalance at home, rather than as the structural effects of capitalist stratification. NETCO’s persistent power struggles notably parallel the failure of its American

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counterpart, USCO, to “escape  … gender politics.”83 Earlier critiques have also been at the expense of acknowledging and exploring the highly innovative features of Ingrid Baxter’s controversial corporate manoeuvres, which anticipated Butler in suggesting that gender is a construct that is performed and open to renegotiation  – one that, moreover, constitutes a compelling antecedent of corporate leadership for the growing number of female-identified arts administrators today.84 Far from the “equal artist-partners[hip]” projected by some commentators, inattentive to the historical gap separating the period of the company’s activity from its present-day memorialization, the N.E. Thing Co. was, rather, a non-human actor that facilitated forms of distributed authorship specific to a corporate agency.85 Ingrid Baxter has underscored that “Iain and I never thought of ourselves as an art collective.”86 When cooperative, NETCO’s activities rarely unfolded on the even footing assumed by some analysts, as attested by the preponderance of attention devoted to Iain Baxter from the outset of its operations. In part, this asymmetrical representation undoubtedly reflects a structural gender disequilibrium within the art world. Yet it is notable that the company was based in a city boasting a significant number of established and outspoken women art critics, all of whom were early champions of NETCO even as they uniformly singled out the contributions of Iain Baxter for praise.87 This pattern was not limited to Vancouver: other early promoters included the New York–based Lippard and the Toronto-based Dorothy Cameron.88 While the gender identity of the company’s critics does not absolve these commentators of a misogynist bias commensurate with their era, it does paint a somewhat different picture than that of the boys’ club that promoted and sheltered male Abstract Expressionists and their colour field heirs.89 More consequential than the possibility of a systemic diminution of Ingrid Baxter’s contributions in these accounts, I want to argue, is the fact that they fail to grasp the innovative implications of Ingrid Baxter’s enactment of a corporate persona because of the multivalent heterodoxy of that role. The haecceity exposed by Ingrid Baxter’s executive performance – the gendered “suchness” of her co-presidency – proffers another poignant example of the latent political potential of that which resists “translation” under an analogical paradigm. In interviews, Ingrid Baxter has consistently downplayed the influence of McLuhan’s writings on the evolution of her thought.90 It is nonetheless likely that his Sontag-inflected critiques of hegemonic gender roles indirectly shaped her deconstruction of corporate habitus through, in her words, “osmosis.”91 Janine Marchessault has convincingly argued that “while McLuhan was not a feminist, his work

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is significant for early feminist thought.”92 The Mechanical Bride, in particular, mounted an astonishingly early analysis of gender roles in postwar North American society, as the product of consumption patterns. Marchessault focuses her reading of that text on its satirical appropriation of popular representations of women’s bodies as “mechanical dolls [that] speak to a desire to expand the sexual domain and to ‘possess machines.’ ”93 McLuhan’s analyses of industrial capitalism’s “love-goddess assembly line” foreshadow Anne Balsamo’s more recent exploration of the entanglement of gendered bodies and technology.94 However, The Mechanical Bride is equally notable for its critical figurations of masculinity and for its emphasis on gender as performance, or role, which is the term McLuhan would have preferred. I want to argue that it was as a critique of what feminist organizational scholars R.W. Connell and James W. Messerschmidt term “hegemonic masculinity” that McLuhan’s exploration of gender was influential on NETCO’s corporate manoeuvres.95 Iain Baxter’s McLuhan-inspired presidential persona and interventions within the symbolic economy of hegemonic masculinity emerge as key precedents for Ingrid Baxter’s subsequent, but no less consequential, critical practice. From his earliest forays into the corporate arena, operating with John Friel and Ingrid Baxter under the futuristic moniker IT,96 Iain Baxter engaged in a travesty of dominant representations of the masculine artist as independent and innovative. Works such as Pneumatic Judd (1965) suggest that the “boy’s toys” techno-aesthetic of Minimalism was just as easily deflated as filled with the proverbial hot air of Madison Avenue.97 Such early “extension” pieces – punning prostheses of the big names in contemporary art – subject conventional constructions of artistic persona, and male bravura, to a parodic detumescence recalling McLuhan’s satirical analyses of popular representations of manhood in The Mechanical Bride. Indirectly retrieving the erotic slapstick of Kell-Imrie’s mechanistic couplings with Val in Lewis’s Snooty Baronet (see Chapter 1), the balloon-like prostheses of IT wittily suspend the sufficiency of naturalizing representations of sexuality. The media analyst’s explorations of symbolic “cluster image[s]” of masculinity (from businessman to superman) are focused on the “big, dynamic extrovert” who is representative of “the big firm which buys up or crushes its competitors.”98 Nevertheless, some of McLuhan’s observations point to the emergence of novel forms of cybernetic masculinity, clearing a path for his later reflections on the effects of electronic media on management as well as for NETCO’s subsequent gender critique of post-industrial institutions and embryonic forms of neo-entrepreneurial subjectivity.99

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In a section of The Mechanical Bride titled “I’m Tough,” McLuhan observes that “the real toughness today has shifted from the personal Darwinian melodrama to the abstractions of logistics, Cybernetics, and consumer research.”100 Cavell has remarked that in documenting the mediation of sexuality through surveys, “McLuhan anticipated the connection between the libidinal economy, digital culture, algorithmic numeration and sensory involvement.”101 It is within these gendered socio-cultural abstractions that NETCO’s exploration of the moral personhood of the post-Fordist corporation is properly located. A critical interface with the “push-button football” masculinity of the cybernetic age described by McLuhan is legible in a Telex work transmitted by NETCO to various corporations,102 in which the responding president was cabled the following instructions rehearsing a scene of symbolic corporate castration: TO THE PRESIDENT … DON’T LOOK AT THIS UNLESS YOU ARE READY FOR ANYTHING OK SIT DOWN AND WITH A PAIR OF SISSORS CUT 4 INCHES OFF YOUR TIE AND PLEASE MAIL IT IMMEDIATELY TO IAIN BAXTER PRES N E THING CO … NOW YOU ARE READY FOR ANYTHING 103 This work  – appropriately addressed to McLuhan himself in a communiqué of 18 December 1969  – interpellated the networked knowledge worker forecast by prophets of the decentralized “adhocracy” endemic to computational capitalism such as Alvin Toffler.104 NETCO’s corresponding president is correlatively implicated in the role of the “stay at home commuter” envisioned by McLuhan and collaborator Barrington Nevitt as the “dropout” of the distributed corporation.105 The response cabled by one company president drew attention, however, to the implicit gendering performed by the putatively gender-neutral language employed by futurist management literature, satirically recycled here by NETCO: “I don’t have a tie, I’m a woman,” she responded.106 This exchange underscores the extent to which, as Orit Halpern notes, “cybernetics … aspired to the elimination of difference”107 yet simultaneously encountered resistance to that universalizing ideal within the channels of a network society. NETCO’s early adoption of networked communications technologies to critically probe the implicit gendering of organizations

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in the Information Age described by McLuhan is indicative of the company’s self-positioning as a visionary multi-divisional enterprise. The company’s departments have been misconstrued as bureaucratic or functional entities, as well as the “entrepreneurial family unit” portrayed by Shaw.108 NETCO’s repeated exercises in establishing branch plants – ICOME, Sensinfodyn, SYDCO, and so on  – speak, rather, to a newly distributed transnational outlook anticipatory of globalizing currents under neoliberal policies of trade liberalization in the 1980s. Viewed through the lens of the networked corporation, NETCO’s restructuring (the promotion of Ingrid Baxter to co-president in 1970) emerges as a critical intervention within the hegemonic CID Structure: an exercise in critically regendering the horizontal organization.109 Together, Ingrid Baxter and Iain Baxter probed the representational conventions of nascent transnational business masculinity and the gender-neutral figure of the “generic manager,”110 simultaneously subverting and structurally reconfiguring the implicit gendering of those institutions and symbols. In retrospect, there are notable parallels between NETCO’s critical restructuring of gender roles and the anti-patriarchal stratagem pursued by the company’s Toronto-based counterpart, General Idea, discussed in the next section. As the 1970s unfolded, Ingrid Baxter’s growing visibility within the company was registered by critics, notably Lippard, who invited NETCO (as a company) to participate in the otherwise all-female exhibition of Conceptual art, c. 7,500, initially presented at the California Institute of the Arts (CalArts) in 1973.111 The company’s contribution to that show (Figure C.4) – documentation of a swimming performance executed by Ingrid Baxter in the SFU pool, where she had formerly worked as an instructor  – constitutes a rare and valuable instance of a NETCO piece unequivocally credited to the co-president.112 Ingrid Baxter’s earlier coordination of the 1967 happening Centennial Aquatic Event, a theatrical presentation of “water VSI” in the SFU pool, where she was then employed as an instructor, set the stage for the synchronized swimming performances staged by Glenn Lewis’s New York Corres Sponge Dance School of Vancouver beginning in the spring of 1970.113 While other company works document Ingrid Baxter’s role as a performer in NETCO’s mock fashion spectacles and athletic exhibitions,114 it is in her capacity as the androgynous conceptual administrator portrayed by the 1969 series Inactive Verbs (Figure C.5), which depicts the generic routines of cognitive labour (“Pondering,” “Thinking,” “Wondering,” etc.) that the co-president most powerfully inserts herself within, and utterly transforms, the conventions of mainstream conceptualism. Departing from the affective typologies performed by Suzy Lake or Martha Wilson, a

C.4 N.E. Thing Co. Ltd, “Retro-Aesthetically Executing the Crane,” 1972, from the exhibition catalogue c. 7,500, 1973. Reproduced with the permission of IAIN BAXTER&.

po-faced Ingrid Baxter preposterously embodies a matrix of immaterial actions that travesty standard representations of the rational manager, her knitted vest adding an irreverent DIY flourish.115 We might well ask to what extent the co-president’s anti-sexist interventions within the protocols of conceptual administration informed Lippard’s own subsequent adoption of similar leadership roles in the Art Workers’ Coalition (AWC) and, subsequently, within a variety of splinter groups. The Iain Baxter& fonds at the Art Gallery of Ontario and those of Lippard at the Archives of American Art document a sustained correspondence between the co-presidents and the American critic. Ingrid Baxter’s promotion to vice-president in January, 1969 and, later, to co-president in July 1970 notably preceded Lippard’s “immers[ion] … in the women’s movement,” beginning in the fall of 1970.116 This chronology challenges the image of Lippard’s AWC advocacy as located within the exclusively anti-capitalist trajectory promoted by Julia Bryan-Wilson and Vincent Bonin, yet adds further complexity to the picture of mixed – commercial and critical – motives informing the work of Lippard’s then partner, Seth Siegelaub. Siegelaub was in communication with NETCO through Lippard, a connection that brought him to Simon Fraser University to stage his telephone-based “Simon Fraser Exhibition” in May and June of 1969.117

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C.5 N.E. Thing Co. Ltd, Inactive Verbs, 1969. Reproduced with the permission of IAIN BAXTER&. Courtesy VOX – Centre de l’image contemporaine, Montreal.

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Through her struggle for equitable representation in NETCO’s executive, Ingrid Baxter set a powerful example in proto-feminist a/counting that may have guided Lippard’s transition from the “utopian … openness” of the “mapping [and …] measurements” carried out as part of the early “numbered” exhibitions, Number 7 (1969), 557,087 (1969) and 955,000 (1970), to the activist demography subsequently deployed as part of her involvement in the AWC and the Ad Hoc Women Artists’ Committee.118 Another explanation for the relatively greater emphasis placed on Iain Baxter in primary documentation of the company’s activities is his formal art training, and his prior and award-winning independent art practice, as well as his subsequent experience as an innovative and highly visible arts pedagogue during the years when Ingrid Baxter was struggling to find a place within the corporate hierarchy of NETCO, as well as a performative vocabulary with which to translate her training and work in physical education into the industrial choreography authorized by the company’s organizational apparatus.119 This is a narrative of gradual coming into representation, and then of a radical restructuring of that representation, over the course of NETCO’s more than ten years of operations. That narrative has remained obscure due largely to the uncomfortable implications of its corporate investments as well as its troubling of stable gender categories and roles.120 NETCO’s commercial theatre of dispersed authorship presents an enduring challenge to the anti-capitalist claims and semiotic frameworks embraced by contemporaneous collective projects such as Art & Language and the Art Workers’ Coalition. NETCO’s “play tactics” more closely approximate the ludic manoeuvres attributed by Chris Gilbert to such postwar collectives as the Situationist International, as a Marcusean dream of labour transformed into collective leisure.121 Such utopian projects have been critiqued for occluding the role of women and markers of difference more generally;122 even so, Ingrid Baxter seized upon NETCO’s McLuhanesque information concepts as a platform for enacting a “deep-seated play” of traditional gender roles that anticipated the subsequent performative insights of Butler, thereby also solidifying her visibility within the corporation.123 In retrospect, Ingrid Baxter’s corporate performance could be categorized with those early works of feminist art revisited by Abigail Solomon-Godeau – including the photographs of fellow American-Canadian Suzy Lake – which, when viewed from a contemporary vantage, reveal feminine ideals and roles to be riven by “the ambiguities of gender itself,” rather than by the disclosures of natural or stable selfhood that they were once taken to be.124

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General Idea Although this book has focused on just three case studies, its conclusions are generalizable. Commonalities and fissures in artists’ respective engagements with information concepts revealed by comparative analysis of the work of Bertram Brooker, NETCO, and Robert Smithson are also discernible in the practices of contemporaries, including General Idea, Image Bank, Intermedia, Gary Lee-Nova, and Les Levine. Limitations of space restrict my consideration of possible directions for future research to just one of these: General Idea. Like NETCO’s conceptual business platform, the faux-corporate framework mobilized by General Idea brings into visibility the “organizational shift” that Lane Relyea correlates with the emergence of computational capitalism.125 In retrospect, the Toronto-based collective’s evolving figurations of information can be recognized as reprising and, in almost Bergsonian fashion, creatively complicating the prior informatic representations of Brooker, NETCO, and Smithson. Like NETCO, General Idea challenges conventional historiographies of collaborative practice; its transgression of preconceived notions of cooperative activity similarly developed out of a critical interface with corporatism and gender norms. Phillip Monk’s baroque homage to General Idea’s intricate structures of self-mythologization, Glamour Is Theft (2012), productively refocuses attention on the neglected early years of the group’s formation out of a pre-existing correspondence network loosely affiliated with Vancouver’s Image Bank (Michael Morris and Vincent Trasov). Felicity Tayler posits that the International Image Exchange Directory (1972), a published index of correspondents’ addresses, structured “new forms of community” driven by desire – notably, though not exclusively, by a desire for queer belonging.126 Appropriating the collaborative mechanisms of this “alternative information network,”127 General Idea orchestrated its earliest collective performances, its 1971 Miss General Idea Pageant and related events, by soliciting the participation of network members. The first, and nominally last, Miss General Idea was none other than Image Bank’s Morris – or, rather, his Duchampian alter ego Marcel Idea. As Scott Watson has observed, correspondents’ adoption of pseudonymous identities was an unofficial prerequisite for admittance to the secretive but public network. This conjugation of communications tactics and fabulated personae indirectly retrieved the colourful heteronyms enacted by Brooker in the pages of Marketing and Printers’ Ink as an exploration of the advertising potential of Bergsonian multiplicity fifty years earlier. As the ambiguously gendered embodiment of General Idea’s corporate accounting, Miss General

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Idea could similarly be understood today as unintentionally reprising Brooker’s marketing speculations on “averag[ing]” the sexes, discussed in Chapter 1.128 Such speculations reveal the imprint of sexual theorists Edward Carpenter and Havelock Ellis.129 Exploring the subsequent evolution of General Idea’s corporate architecture – metaphorically imbricated in The 1984 Miss General Idea Pavillion and related series of Showcard “blueprints” – Monk recovers the troubling dynamics of GI’s early transition from public information infrastructure to proprietary grid: an appropriation of the Eternal Network under the sign of a fictive rebranding exercise that indirectly reprised NETCO’s earlier transition from a satellite of the vanguard Centre for Communication and the Arts at SFU to an autonomous corporate entity with a purchase on the emergent channels of an information economy. It was only in 1975, Monk reminds us, that General Idea consolidated itself as the celebrated trio of its later, corporate oeuvre: “To start with, General Idea were not always, well, General Idea. In the beginning they operated without a name – or with individual projects under their own name.”130 Initially, protagonists AA Bronson, Felix Partz, and Jorge Zontal formed the central node in an informal network of friends and accomplices. In some ways, the transition highlighted by Monk paralleled the process of formalization inscribed in NETCO’s 1969 articles of incorporation. But whereas the N.E. Thing Co. Ltd’s shift to full corporate personhood generated a viable legal structure within which Ingrid Baxter was able to renegotiate her visibility, Monk is conspicuously silent about the identities of the original membership made redundant by GI’s restructuring. Clues exist, of course, not only in the photo-documentation of early pageant performances and other collective actions, but also in the early corporate paraphernalia, such as the business cards for Art Metropole – the artist-run centre founded by General Idea in 1974 on Toronto’s Yonge Street – which give equal weight to Granada Gazelle in a list of organizational contacts whose other names are restricted to the famous “three.” Only Fern Bayer, in her meticulously researched history of General Idea’s early years, singles out the contributions, and subsequent occlusion, of early femaleidentified collaborators of the future trio, including Mimi Paige, Granada Gazelle (aka Sharon Venne), and Honey Novick.131 But if General Idea’s formation was dependent on these incorporations, it must also be emphasized that its collective frame simultaneously carved out a space for the performance of counter-hegemonic identities in a Canadian art world dominated by heterosexist and homophobic patriarchy. The writer who has approached these dimensions of General Idea’s organizational history with the most sophistication is Elizabeth

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Lebovici. In her punningly titled essay “Gender ‘Trouple,’” Lebovici underscores the resonance between GI’s enactment of a queer sociality and Susan Sontag’s “Notes on ‘Camp’” (1964), an important precursor to Butler’s performance theory in its harnessing of artifice and a purposeful warping of causal and temporal relations to trouble the foundational claims of heteronormative subject positions.132 Scott Watson aptly describes AA Bronson’s self-reflexive account of Image Bank, “Pablum for the Pablum Eaters” (1973), as “a project to end the domination of the Cartesian grid of space-time continuities on the imagination.”133 General Idea’s campy détournement of calendrical temporality foreshadowed Elizabeth Freeman’s more recent theorization of “queer time” as characterized by a “privileging of delay, detour, and deferral.”134 In retrospect, the tactical deformation of linear time performed by GI’s mock-corporate communications can also be recognized as having unintentionally retrieved the Bergsonian advertising strategies of Bertram Brooker five decades earlier. But if Sontag’s discourse on camp was one point of origin for GI’s elaborate travesties of beauty pageants and other retro artifacts of an obsolete consumer culture whose re-enactment revealed that society to be vertiginously without foundation, the group’s allusions to the New York critic and, indeed, direct references to homosexuality were few, GI initially preferring coded terminology such as “alternate lifestyle.”135 As Lebovici reminds us, it was only “after the emergence of the AIDS epidemic [that] gay discourse became a necessity.”136 General Idea’s avowed indifference to “gay art” in the 1970s positioned the collective during this period alongside queer postmodernists such as William S. Burroughs, who, as Jonathan D. Katz describes, embraced selfeffacing tactics of camouflage and code, in contrast to the public acts of “naming” that would define the AIDS activism of the subsequent culture wars.137 In approaching the identities staged by GI’s corporate theatre prior to the AIDS crisis, it is imperative to avoid retroactive projections of contemporary sexualities onto a group project forged out of the communal ideals of the sixties correspondence scene in Canada and an antihumanist corporate frame derived from the heterodox modernist sources mined by McLuhan’s writings.138 Much as Butler’s theorization of “gender insubordination” destabilizes essentializing claims on identity, both queer and straight, General Idea’s project in the 1970s is more accurately characterized as, in the fitting words of Gregg Bordowitz, “reveal[ing] the hypocrisy of dominant heterosexual norms” than as articulating a “gay” aesthetic.139 Lebovici’s drawing attention to GI’s organizing motifs of triangle and threesome as effecting “an instant rupture with the geometry of patriarchal

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representations” is another eloquent reminder of the modernist virus active at the heart of General Idea’s Burroughs- and Stein-inspired enterprise.140 As an anti-patriarchal stratagem, General Idea’s geometric method resonates with the non-dual arithmetic of “not-two” mobilized by NETCO’s gender-defying governance structure, discussed in Chapter 3; NETCO’s Zennist non-duality, in turn, inadvertently retrieves the Bergsonian mathematics of multiplicity informing Brooker’s qualitative understanding of number, discussed in Chapter 1.141 In recalling NETCO’s theatricalization of a McLuhanesque ideal of information and leisure, General Idea’s pageantry more closely approximated the Marcusean aspirations of conceptualists catalogued by Chris Gilbert than the analytical exercises of contemporaries associated with Art & Language, or, as discussed by Gregg Bordowitz, the later activism of ACT UP.142 An early artifact of General Idea’s utopian aspirations is the Orgasm Energy Chart (1970) (Figure C.6), a questionnaire circulated within the collective’s network that enjoined respondents to generate a graphical representation of their sexual activity over a one-month period.143 The completed charts are an indirect travesty of the psychophysical and statistical decomposition of subjectivity performed by Brooker’s innovative market research of the 1920s, and brought into visibility by the composite bodies figured by his quasi-abstract canvases of the 1920s. In fact, Brooker’s reworking of dominant presentations of associationist psychology and statistics had pursued a detour through the writings of Edward Carpenter, Havelock Ellis, and Vernon Lee amounting to an important prehistory to GI’s queering of marketing instruments.144 General Idea’s Orgasm Energy Chart shines a light on this long history of invasive biopolitical techniques pioneered by earlier generations of market researchers and government statisticians. In true Foucauldian fashion, Orgasm Energy Chart reveals “the ‘putting into discourse of sex’” as a contemporary technique of power, or, properly speaking, as the exercise of “biopower.”145 In reducing the most intimate activities of an entire community to a simple distribution of magnitudes, Orgasm Energy Chart gestures, moreover, toward the “hyper-segmentation” of markets and populations under contemporary conditions of algorithmic governmentality, as well as the ubiquitous threat of personal data exposure in the age of Cambridge Analytica.146 A likely inspiration for Orgasm Energy Chart, McLuhan’s satirical rendering of the generic “chart-image” produced by market researchers’ informatic toolbox in The Mechanical Bride was a point of reference shared by General Idea and NETCO.147 These parallels may be explained, in part, by AA Bronson’s and Jorge Zontal’s participation in the Vancouver context in which NETCO was active during the later 1960s;

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C.6 General Idea, Orgasm Energy Chart, 1970. © General Idea, 1970/2021, courtesy Estate of General Idea, Toronto.

Bronson had met Iain Baxter during a 1968 visit to SFU’s Centre for Communication and the Arts.148 Yet there can be no doubt that the Toronto collective orchestrated a powerful Menippean satire of the contemporary society of the spectacle in its own right. General Idea’s “rehearsals” for The 1984 Miss General Idea Pageant – including Blocking (1974), Going Thru the Motions (1975), and Towards an Audience Vocabulary (1977) – coached audiences in the protocols of pageant etiquette,149 and thus in the mass stereotyping of affect and bodies alternately described, critiqued, and operationalized by the statistically oriented

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writings and artistic explorations of McLuhan and Brooker. It is not implausible that these performances also made oblique reference to, and satirical commentary on, the highly publicized but ultimately foiled efforts of Harley Parker, McLuhan’s associate and ROM head of design and installations, introduced in Chapter 2, to engage youthful audiences – in particular, the hippie denizens of adjacent Yorkville – through responsive, informatic environments.150 Adding to these parallels between the corporate authorships of General Idea and NETCO are correspondences between the organizational architectures, and untimely ruination, of the two bodies’ archetypal edifices: the Centre for Communication and the Arts and The 1984 Miss General Idea Pavillion. The fragmentation of the centre’s McLuhan-inspired interdisciplinary “sensorium” of arts programs under the stresses of SFU’s turbulent early growth foreshadowed the ritual unmaking of General Idea’s notional Pavillion in 1977. At the same time, the ceremonial destruction of the Pavillion harkened back to Smithson’s influential figurations of entropy; in particular, the “de-architecturization” staged by Partially Buried Woodshed, installed at Cornell University in 1969, cleared a path for the 1977 unmaking of GI’s 1984 Miss General Idea Pavillion.151 Philip Monk observes of GI’s Pavillion that “architecture serves a purpose and follows a program; it is a corporate activity, indeed, a corporate creativity; lone vision is insufficient in a world of business.”152 As a container for the informatically circumscribed bodies and desires coordinated by the pageants, the Pavillion also retrieves the “despatialized” architecture of the Eames’s earlier “Information Machine,” as well as the somatic built environments materialized by the cybernetic pedagogy of Kepes.153 A more proximal referent, however, may have been Toronto’s CN Tower, in the memorable words of Arthur Kroker that “perfect phallocentric symbol of the union of power and technology in the making of the Canadian discourse.”154 The tower’s spectacular construction from 1973 to 1976 notably coincided with the metaphorical erection, and subsequent detumescence, of General Idea’s Pavillion, a project first announced in the pages of the collective’s parasitic house organ, FILE magazine, in 1973.155 Indeed, the 1977 “burning” of the Pavillion is legible as a ritual demolition of the manipulative conjunction of information technologies and sensorial environments imbricated in the tower through the consultative role in its design played by McLuhan’s one-time collaborator and former University of Toronto professor of psychiatry, Daniel Cappon.156 In 1965, Cappon assisted McLuhan in developing an IBM Sensory Profile Study for quantifying the modal preferences of distinct audience segments. Prior to cutting ties with

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Cappon, McLuhan had hoped to apply this instrument toward the Parker- and Selye-like ambition of computationally engineering new environments capable of modifying the sensory “ratios” of their occupants in response to shifting social priorities.157 Given Cappon’s dual identity as a controversial and outspoken critic of homosexuality, General Idea’s Pavillion lends itself to the reading that it is a travesty and dissolution of the authoritarian contours of the psychiatrist’s normative info-architecture.158 Although its Pavillion was putatively consumed by conflagration in 1977, it is significant that GI chose to hold its tenth anniversary celebration, High Profile, at the CN Tower the following year.159 Monk’s ingenious simulacrum of General Idea’s conceptual cosmogony rightly draws attention to the structural imprint of William Burroughs’s “cut-up method” on the Pavillion’s “‘Collage or Perish’ edifice.”160 True to Burroughs’s collage ethos, the digital architectonics of the Pavillion – like the collective’s larger mythical apparatus – constituted a “system of signs in motion.”161 Reminiscent of the processual logic of bifurcation that Bergson substituted for the stable classifications of evolutionary taxonomy, General Idea’s complex had “no room for enclosures, but only divisions.”162 Here, digitalism instituted a politics of multiplicity as an inclusive spatiality for the performance of homosocial identities. The computational background to Burroughs’s stylistic innovations bears comment here. Burroughs was the grandson of his namesake, William Seward Burroughs, the inventor of an adding machine sold by the American Arithmometer Company, and later, the eponymous Burroughs Adding Machine Company of Detroit.163 In 1953, the Burroughs Corporation began selling computer products in addition to the adding machines and typewriters that had established its market dominance. Chris Meister has documented the role of modernist industrial architecture in defining the computational space occupied by the Burroughs Adding Machine Company.164 Monk’s emphasis on the semiotic flux of Burroughs’s garbled prose notably overlooks the informatic flow of Stein’s psychophysically inspired experiments in the generative possibilities of repetition, to which Bordowitz gives greater prominence in his equally compelling account of General Idea.165 Indeed, the inaugural iteration of the collective’s Miss General Idea Pageant was staged as an impromptu finale to a theatrical performance held at the St Lawrence Centre for the Arts in 1970. A loose reinterpretation of Stein’s 1913 play What Happened, this ten-day event aggregated data generated by both performers and audience members, utilizing a combination of audio, video, and

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photography to establish a feedback loop with the on-stage action.166 Today, this cybernetic mise en scène is recognizable as an early materialization of what Lev Manovich describes as the database as governing symbolic form of the computer age.167 The psychophysical logic of Stein’s stuttering language games suggests an alternative frame for interpreting the informatic discontents of the collective’s Pavillion such as the layout-like grid of the Showcards, which “served the same archival function as FILE, but now totally devoted to the Pavillion.”168 Resituating General Idea within the reception of Stein’s psychophysical poetics notably implicates the Toronto collective within the same Bergsonian lineage as Brooker and McLuhan.169 Rather than the structuralist imaginary of Barthes, Debord, and Lévi-Strauss that propels Monk’s linguistically motivated chronicle of General Idea’s procedures of auto-mythologization (however dynamic in his retelling), it was, rather, the psychophysical flux conjured by McLuhan and Stein that animated the collective’s system. Channelling the psychophysical bases of Stein’s stylistic innovations in the laboratory experiments of Hugo Münsterberg in which she participated as a student, Gregg Bordowitz has observed of Stein’s writing that it is “about thresholds … about recursivity … about a body writing.”170 General Idea’s glamour protocols were not exclusively mobilized by a semiotic-structuralist matrix; rather, glamour is innervation. A logic of innervation emerges forcefully from Bronson’s selfreflexive comments on Image Bank’s Colour Bar Research (1970–78) (Figure C.7) project in the early FILE essay “Pablum for the Pablum Eaters.” Sounding remarkably like Gustav Fechner (or perhaps Harley Parker ventriloquizing Wilhelm Ostwald) on just noticeable differences in perception as the fundamental threshold of human meaningmaking, Bronson writes insightfully of Image Bank’s polychromatic painted objects that they “are the charts of differentiating features.”171 Yet Bronson qualifies the proto-digitalism implicit in his recognition that “colour and tone then act as a means of splitting and joining” by insisting on the sociality of the meanings thereby produced. “Only the initiated hold the grid squarely between their palms,” he cautions.172 In effect, Bronson queers the binary matrix of psychophysics by resituating its thresholds of difference within a socialized spectrum of intensity and desire. As an alternative to the insufficiently generic architecture of the Cappon-inflected CN Tower, General Idea’s Pavillion proposed a Burroughs- and Stein-inspired informatic dissolution of categories.173 As previously noted, the collective’s satirical “architexture” of ruination was also inspired by the informatic immaterialism of Smithson’s allegories

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C.7 Michael Morris, Colour Bars in a Forest Landscape, 1972. Reproduced with the permission of Michael Morris.

of entropy, AA Bronson citing the latter’s “Incidents of Mirror-Travel in the Yucatan” as sowing “the seeds of [General Idea’s] elaborate and invented universe.”174 Indeed, Bronson has observed that the 1969 issue of Artforum containing Smithson’s photo-essay constituted the first addition to the collection that would eventually become the artist-run centre Art Metropole.175 Smithson’s resistant reworking of the informatic media of cartography and photo-journalism set an influential precedent for the Toronto collective’s similarly agonistic and ludic interventions in hegemonic information media. At the same time, Smithson’s mythopoetic meditations on Maya culture  – modelled, in part, on the earlier Moroccan fieldwork of Lewis  – suggests an alternative, but complementary, point of origin for the usually cited writings of Lévi-Strauss for General Idea’s approach to the study of visual culture as a form of “ethnography.”176 As Felicity Tayler has noted, this methodology, which GI shared with its Smithsoninspired counterparts at Image Bank, could, in tandem with a queer play of identities, occasionally give rise to troubling primitivist imagery and tropes that demand reassessment today.177 This survey of the previously underemphasized informatic dimensions of General Idea’s corporate theatre has corroborated the claims of earlier chapters while continuing to sketch future directions for the study of information art. General Idea’s projects disclose striking

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consistencies with the earlier work of Brooker, NETCO, and Smithson. Indeed, the collective’s evolving relationship with the information industries of American consumer culture played out as a quasiBergsonian recapitulation and creative “complication” of the preceding history of information art in English Canada: from the psychophysical decomposition of the body and subjectivity carried out by Brooker to a Smithson-like politics of entropy and passive perception.178 Yet the Toronto-based group simultaneously enacted a queering of earlier informatic forms and strategies that endows its information ecology with a distinct libidinal economy. In some respects, General Idea’s queering of McLuhanesque notions of information as embodiment and social ontology introduces an element of particularity reminiscent of the suchness inscribed in Ingrid Baxter’s critical, but also conflicted, inhabitation and transformation of a corporate executive role. Like the other projects examined in this book, General Idea’s engagements with information reveal an attentiveness to the sensorial and socially situated potential of information.

Conclusion Although the AIDS crisis would coincide with a more decisive break with its earlier networked apparatus, Monk’s Is Toronto Burning? (2016) documents General Idea’s embrace of a subcultural semiotics following the 1977 symbolic conflagration of its Miss General Idea Pavillion. This moment of self-reinvention roughly coincided with the 1978 separation of NETCO’s co-presidents, which effectively brought company operations to an abrupt close – a cessation of corporate affairs formalized by Iain and Ingrid Baxter’s 1983 divorce agreement. Beyond these circumstantial causes, a more systemic rupture between the informatic paradigm charted in these pages and ensuing forms of digital culture and networked practice can be attributed to several contextual factors. McLuhan’s death in 1980 coincided with the onset of a roughly decade-long eclipse of his scholarly reputation, as an ascendant linguistic turn consolidated its gains within the North American academy. Perhaps most consequential was the rise of personal computing and, later, the internet and the World Wide Web, which ushered in new material infrastructures of communication as well as visualization capabilities whose impact on artistic practice remains to be fully historicized in the Canadian context. Notably, this historical caesura also corresponds with the election of neoliberal governments in North Atlantic countries, beginning with Margaret Thatcher’s 1979 victory in the United Kingdom. Although the

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organizational forms inhabited by NETCO and General Idea may have anticipated the subsequent rise of the networked structures and subjectivities pre-eminently described by Luc Boltanski and Ève Chiapello, they also retain vestiges of prior formations that distinguish them from their neoliberal successors. While remarkably nimble in navigating the channels of early telecommunications networks like Telex, NETCO’s corporate sensorium was ultimately patterned after the defensively insulated Cold War monad of Hans Selye; consequently, it was neither as flexible nor as porous as the neoliberal networker described by Boltanski and Chiapello. Always too “busy” to be fully integrated into local networks like Intermedia or Image Bank, the company also maintained an autonomy – and remained tethered to family and place – to a degree incompatible with contemporary imperatives of ceaseless mobility.179 General Idea proved better equipped to absorb the shockwaves of the conservative revolution of the late 1970s and early 1980s, successfully transitioning from the countercultural modalities of informatic group subjectivity that had characterized the 1970s correspondence scene to the activist and subcultural forms of belonging that marked resistance movements of the 1980s and after. That process of reinvention involved a jettisoning of earlier “preidentitarian” relations, as José Esteban Muñoz would say.180 This mutation within General Idea’s viral stratagem effectively materializes the limits to information as a non-representational politics, one that did not facilitate the acts of naming integral to AIDS activism and other forms of community mobilization that challenged the conservative policies of neoliberal governments. Yet it was this same non-representational paradigm that had enabled Ingrid Baxter’s immanent restructuring of corporate hierarchies, as well as the direct interventions of NETCO and General Idea within the channels of an emergent network society. This immanent approach to the critique of informatic form anticipates more recent digital materialisms focused on infrastructural models of communication and power, while also highlighting identitarian shortcomings of those same non-linguistic frameworks. The Baxters’ immanent inhabitation of neo-entrepreneurial subjectivities also foreshadows the forms of non-oppositional “occupational realism” described by Julia BryanWilson as an alternative to mainline practices of institutional critique.181 In retrospect, Robert Smithson’s involvement “with travel as a practice” brings into visibility the nascent trajectories of hypermobility that define the networked space of contemporary computational capitalism.182 At the same time, the lingering primitivist elements in Smithson’s work draw attention to the persistence of inequalities within this nomadic “space of international mobility,”183 in particular, to the

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ongoing legacies of colonial domination. Although lacking the explicit primitivism of Smithson’s conceptual travelogues and associated earth maps, Jeff Wall’s 1969 urban travelogue Landscape Manual reprised the same ethnographic methods likewise reimagined by General Idea and Image Bank in emulation of Smithson’s example. This anthropological model continued to underwrite the later, fully photo-conceptual work of Wall and peers, including Ian Wallace, in ways that remain to be fully explored. In part, this shared ethnographic methodology established the conditions of possibility for the constitution of the database as the dominant symbolic form of contemporary networked economies; its practitioners having effectively modelled the aggregation of data as both aesthetic practice and everyday habitus. The N.E. Thing Co.’s ACTs and ARTs, in particular, rehearse the functional dynamics of a now ubiquitous “database culture” driven by user transactions reduced to a binary of “likes” or invective.184 Yet it may be in its attempted privatization of public education as a parasitic satellite of SFU’s Centre for Communication and the Arts that NETCO came closest to modelling the neoliberal contours of today’s cognitive capitalism. Counterintuitively, the earliest figure studied by this book, Bertram Brooker, comes closest to foreshadowing contemporary conditions of ubiquitous datafication. This can be explained by Brooker’s parallel involvement in the fields of marketing and visual art. His exploration of behaviourist and statistical frameworks in the pages of Marketing and Printers’ Ink anticipates the neo-behaviourism operationalized by digital algorithms today that attempt to anticipate consumer habits based on abstract models of previous online actions. The statistical logic informing the composite bodies populating Brooker’s quasi-abstractions of the 1920s anticipates the contemporary emergence of “statistical doubles” extracted from consumers’ digital footprints.185 Brooker’s reduction of individual affects to transpersonal statistics simultaneously clears a path for the emergence of corporate subjectivities in the work of NETCO, General Idea, and peers. In some sense, the “queer futurity” unfolded by the Steinian postmodernism of General Idea in the 1970s brings Brooker’s Bergsonian warping of the linear timelines of associationist advertising full circle.186 Ironically, Brooker’s resistant figurations of multiple coexisting temporalities in a series of advertisements for The Globe newspaper in 1928–29 (Figure C.8) foreshadows Jonathan Crary’s description of contemporary capitalism’s “inscription of human life into duration without breaks.”187 Today, Brooker’s redemptive vision of qualitative time regained has given way today to a 24/7 society whose unrelenting computational

C.8 The Globe (Bertram Brooker, designer), “Globe Readers Are Leaders” (detail), Marketing, 1928. Advertisement.

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schedules insidiously pass “beyond clock time.”188 Although the “alternate temporalities” proposed by Brooker’s Bergsonian reforms were intended to be therapeutic, they ironically paved the way for our own era of “working without pause.”189 Finally, Toronto School of Communication theory emerges from this reassessment as elucidating the non-representational contours of digital culture in a manner complementary to more recent developments associated with the affective and ontological turns as well as aspects of digital materialism. The empiricist foundations of Toronto School media analysis excavated by this book have, in particular, illuminated the dynamics of hypervisibility that propel the contemporary attention economy. This emphasis on visuality has, in turn, encouraged a re-examination of the visual logic motivating practices previously miscategorized as anti-visual, realigning them with global conceptual currents active in Latin America and Asia. But while this focus on media form is revelatory of the organizational turn in the aesthetic imaginary that Lane Relyea associates with computational capitalism, the case studies surveyed by this book have also drawn attention to the limitations of this paradigm – to its troubling occlusion of the politics of representation. Nonetheless, General Idea, Ingrid Baxter, and Stan Douglas persuasively demonstrate the potential for the lessons of Toronto School media analysis to resist universalizing claims and systems of domination.

Notes

Introduction 1 2 3 4 5 6

7 8

9 10 11 12 13 14 15 16

Bergson, Mélanges, 940. See, for instance, Kholeif, “Electronic Superhighway.” McLuhan, Report, 19. McLuhan, “Notes on the Media”; Theall, The Virtual Marshall McLuhan, 13. See Allan, “Marshall McLuhan and the Counterenvironment.” See Allan, “Understanding Information.” Richard Cavell and Donald Theall have discussed McLuhan’s critical dialogue with American information theory and cybernetics. See Cavell, “McLuhan and Spatial Communication”; Cavell, Remediating McLuhan; Theall, The Virtual Marshall McLuhan. See McCarthy, “The Artist and the ‘Information’”; Staniszewski, The Power of Display, 281–2. The infamous run-on subtitle of Lucy Lippard’s chronology of Conceptual art, Six Years, symptomatically refers to “conceptual or information or idea art.” See Lippard, Six Years. For an introduction to the spectacular architecture of mainframe computing, see Harwood, The Interface. See Goodyear, “From Technophilia to Technophobia.” Taylor, When the Machine Made Art, 54. See Munton, “Abstraction, Archaism and the Future.” See Lauder, “Visualizing Computational Art in Canada.” See Kittler, Discourse Networks. See also Foucault, Archaeology of Knowledge. McLuhan and Carpenter qtd in Darroch, “‘The Arts Once More United.’” Gordon, Marshall McLuhan, 202.

202

17 18 19 20

21 22 23 24 25 26

27 28 29 30 31 32 33 34 35 36 37 38 39 40 41 42

43 44 45 46 47 48

Notes to pages 7–12

Allan, “Understanding Information,” 156. Bonnett, Emergence and Empire, 140. Tiessen, “From Literary Modernism.” See also Cavell, McLuhan in Space. See Crocker, Bergson. Similarly, Janine Marchessault has argued that “McLuhan’s relation to Bergson could help us to better understand what is meant by ‘cosmic consciousness.’” Marchessault, Marshall McLuhan, 214. See also Cavell, McLuhan in Space, 60–1. Culp, Dark Deleuze, 2. See Betts, Avant-Garde Canadian Literature, Chapter 4. See also Betts, Hjartarson, and Smitka, Counter-Blasting Canada. See Terranova, Network Culture, 26–7, 50–2. See May, The Information Society; Webster, Theories of the Information Society. Kane, Chromatic Algorithms, 18; Patterson, Peripheral Vision, 26. Kane, Chromatic Algorithms, 103, 108. Grant Taylor notes that “large research laboratories associated with the military or otherwise dominated computer art production” from 1963 to 1965. Taylor, When the Machine Made Art, 29. Frazer, “Interactive Architecture,” 39. Broeckmann, Machine Art, 69. Kane, Chromatic Algorithms, 117, 133. Bergson, Creative Evolution, 89, emphasis in the original; Deleuze, Bergsonism, 22. Bergson, Creative Evolution, 54. Cook, “Introduction//The Message Is the Medium,” 13, my emphasis. Ramírez, “Tactics for Thriving on Adversity,” 67. See Lippard and Chandler, “The Dematerialization of Art,” 31. Ramírez, “Tactics for Thriving on Adversity,” 62. Ibid., 56; Meltzer, Systems We Have Loved, 199. Ramírez, “Tactics for Thriving on Adversity,” 67. McLuhan, Understanding Media, 5–6. See Day, “The ‘Conduit Metaphor’”; Gleick, The Information; Soni and Goodman, A Mind at Play. See Weaver, “Recent Contributions,” 9. McLuhan, Understanding Media, 80. Bergson, Time and Free Will, 105. For an illuminating discussion of Bergson’s critical mathematics of “the obscure number of the quality,” see Lapoujade, Powers of Time, 30. Meltzer, Systems We Have Loved, 177. Frampton, “Prospects for a Critical Regionalism.” Camnitzer, Farver, and Weiss, “Foreword,” vii. Camnitzer, Farver, and Weiss, “Foreword,” vii. Howard, “Progress,” 69. See also Kuffert, A Great Duty. See, for instance, Campbell, Clément, and Kealey, Debating Dissent.

Notes to pages 13–17

203

49 Frye, “Conclusion to a Literary History of Canada,” 225. 50 See, for instance, Regimbal, “Institutions of Regionalism.” 51 Elizabeth Grosz writes that “the Stoics are perhaps the first thoroughgoing materialists.” Grosz, The Incorporeal, 23. 52 McLuhan, Understanding Media, 79–80. 53 Antliff, Inventing Bergson, 43. 54 Deleuze, Kant’s Critical Philosophy, ix. 55 See Kern, The Culture of Time; Berland, North of Empire; Cavell, McLuhan in Space. 56 Martin, “Organicism’s Other,” 49. See also Lewis, The Art of Being Ruled, 26. 57 See Clarke and Henderson, From Energy to Information. 58 Deleuze, “Bergson’s Conception of Difference,” 43; Bryant, Difference and Givenness, 54. 59 Weaver, “Recent Contributions,” 9. 60 Laruelle, Principles of Non-Philosophy, 30, 25. See also Laruelle, “Toward a Science.” 61 Galloway, Laruelle, xxxiv. 62 Mullarkey, “‘For We Will Have Shown It Nothing,’” 209. 63 “The open-ended nature of conceptualism,” writes Catherine Moseley, “discourages definitions that place a hermetic and historic framework around what art ‘is.’” Moseley, “A History of an Infrastructure,” 165. 64 Bryant, Difference and Givenness, 9. 65 McLuhan, “Joyce, Aquinas, and the Poetic Process,” 7. 66 Deleuze, Difference and Repetition, 38. 67 Robertson, The Passport in America, 17. 68 See Boundas, “Translator’s Introduction,” 5. 69 Deleuze, Empiricism and Subjectivity, 107. 70 “It is not necessary to force the texts in order to find in the habit-anticipation most of the characteristics of the Bergsonian durée or memory. Habit is the constitutive root of the subject, and the subject, at root, is the synthesis of time – the synthesis of the present and the past in light of the future.” Deleuze, Empiricism and Subjectivity, 92–3. 71 Deleuze, Empiricism and Subjectivity, 80, emphasis in the original. 72 Deleuze, Empiricism and Subjectivity, 83. 73 Cheetham, Artwriting, 35–7. 74 Deleuze, Empiricism and Subjectivity, 22. 75 Deleuze, Empiricism and Subjectivity, 23; Manovich, “Database as Symbolic Form,” 81. 76 See, in particular, Untitled (ca 1927), a drawing by Brooker now in the collection of Museum London in London, Ontario. 77 Deleuze, Empiricism and Subjectivity, 23. 78 Deleuze, Kant’s Critical Philosophy, x.

204

Notes to pages 17–24

79 Buchloh, “Conceptual Art 1962–1969,” 134. See also Carolyn Kane’s discussion of the “rational aesthetics” of 1950s German computer art as well as Zabet Patterson’s exploration of “how science and technology enable innovations in art practice.” Kane, Chromatic Algorithms, 103; Patterson, Peripheral Vision, xvi. 80 Deleuze, Expressionism in Philosophy, 167. Laruelle similarly discusses “‘philosophies of immanence’ (Spinoza, Leibniz, Nietzsche and now Deleuze and also Michel Henry …).” Laruelle, Principles of Non-Philosophy, 19. 81 Rouvroy and Berns, “Algorithmic Governmentality,” ix. 82 Innis, The Bias of Communication, 83. 83 Innis quotes Lewis approvingly, while radically misunderstanding his argument. See Innis, The Bias of Communication, 79. See also Lewis, Time and Western Man, 12. 84 See Berkeley, “An Essay,” 11; Bergson, Matter and Memory, 10–11. 85 Theall, The Virtual Marshall McLuhan, 174. 86 McLuhan, The Gutenberg Galaxy, 271. 87 Lewis, Time and Western Man, 392, emphasis in the original; Arsić, The Passive Eye, 95. 88 “The objects of sight and touch are two distinct things.” Berkeley, “An Essay,” 23. 89 Bergson, Matter and Memory, 32. 90 See Kittler, Discourse Networks; Jones, Eyesight Alone. 91 Grosz, The Incorporeal, 27, 30. 92 Wood, “Dated Conceptualism,” 67. 93 See Tippett, Making Culture. 94 Deleuze, Bergsonism, 117. 95 Buchloh, “Conceptual Art 1962–1969,” 107. For an excellent analysis of Smithson’s engagements with period debates about perceptual psychology, see Reynolds, Robert Smithson, Chapter 1. 96 Rouvroy and Berns, “Algorithmic Governmentality,” x. 97 Rouvroy and Berns, “Algorithmic Governmentality,” iii. 98 See Barthes, “The Death of the Author.” 99 Arnold, “Robert Smithson in Vancouver,” 22. 100 Molesworth, “House Work and Art Work,” 78. 101 McLuhan, The Gutenberg Galaxy, 31.

Chapter One 1 Bertram Brooker, “Cassandra: A Tragedy in Four Acts,” ca 1912, manuscript, mss. 16, box 2, folder 6, BBF, UMASC. 2 Brooker [Spane], “Make Advertising Believable,” 75. 3 Innis, The Bias of Communication, 83.

Notes to pages 24–7

205

4 McLuhan, The Mechanical Bride, 48; Brooker [Surrey], “Hammering Brass Tacks,” 64. 5 Stamps, Unthinking Modernity, 11. 6 Lears, Fables of Abundance, 12. 7 Brooker [Surrey] quoted in ibid., 319. 8 Lears, Fables of Abundance, 140. 9 See Gillies, Henri Bergson and British Modernism; Quirk, Bergson and American Culture. 10 Brown, The Corporate Eye, 168. 11 Bergson, Creative Evolution, 30. 12 Schwartz, “Bergson and the Politics,” 277. 13 Schwartz, “Bergson and the Politics,” 279, emphasis in the original. 14 Brooker quoted in Grace, “‘The Living Soul of Man,’” 8. 15 Betts, Avant-Garde Canadian Literature, 215. 16 See Lauder, “It’s Alive!,” 95. 17 See Betts, “‘The Destroyer.’” Despite its close reading of McLuhan’s influence on the writings of Sheila Watson, Betts’s earlier MA thesis makes no mention of either Lewis or Vorticism. See Gregory Betts, “Severed from Roots.” See also Davis, The Logic of Ecstasy; Reid, Bertram Brooker. 18 Zemans, “First Fruits,” 17, 21. Luff similarly concluded that Brooker “did not espouse Theosophy as a belief system.” Luff, “Progress Passing through the Spirit,” 10. 19 Luff, “Progress Passing through the Spirit,” 30; see also 37n62. Sherrill Grace had earlier noted that Brooker’s interest in “the oneness of all things … and the reality of process and change” was consistent with the “ideas of … men like Bergson and Ortega.” Grace, “‘The Living Soul of Man,’” 8. 20 Lauder, “Marketing Subjects,” 94. Listed in Blast’s colophon, Bell & Cockburn was the Toronto agent of the British publisher John Lane. See Lauder, “It’s Alive!,” 85, 102n35. Strengthening the probability that Brooker was familiar with Blast is a reference in his 1 November 1927 Hart House talk on William Blake to “the inevitable splitting up of artistic tendencies into schools and groups, each with their blasts and manifestoes.” Bertram Brooker, “Blake,” 1927, manuscript, mss. 16, box 10, file 13, BBF, UMASC. See also Luff, “Progress Passing through the Spirit,” 157n55. 21 Lauder, “Marketing Subjects,” 84–6; Lauder, “It’s Alive!,” 92. 22 See Betts, “Introduction,” xlii, xlviii; Betts, Avant-Garde Canadian Literature, 126–8, 130, 216. 23 See Beckett and Cherry, “Women under the Banner.” 24 Betts, “Introduction,” xlviii. See also Brooker [Spane], “Make Advertising Believable,” 75, 96; Brooker [Surrey], “Making Orders Flow Downhill,” 3; Brooker [Surrey], “Are Statistics More Convincing,” 115; Brooker [Surrey], Copy Technique in Advertising, 217.

206

Notes to pages 27–34

25 Bertram Brooker, “The 7 Arts,” August 24, 1929, manuscript, BBE; Brooker [Surrey], Layout Technique in Advertising, 174; Brooker [Surrey], Copy Technique in Advertising, 254–5. 26 See Grace, “‘The Living Soul of Man,’” 9; Zemans, “First Fruits,” 19, 34n13. 27 See Bertram Brooker, “Books That Have Influenced Me,” n.d. manuscript, mss. 16, box 10, folder 9, BBF, UMASC; Grace, “‘The Living Soul of Man,’” 5; Wagner, “‘God Crucified Upside Down,’” 46; Zemans, “First Fruits,” 19. 28 See Grace, “‘The Living Soul of Man,’” 9; Zemans, “First Fruits,” 33n5. 29 Foucault, The History of Sexuality, 1:140. 30 Huyssen, After the Great Divide, vii. See also Varnedoe and Gopnik, High & Low. 31 Hudson, “Disarming Conventions,” 82, 102. 32 Syperek, “An Excess of Prudery?,” 167. 33 See Foss, “Living Landscape.” 34 See “‘Nudes in Landscape’ Causes Art Dispute,” Toronto Star, 7 March 1931, 2. 35 Brooker, “Nudes and Prudes,” 105. 36 Betts, “‘The Destroyer,’” 138. 37 See Brooker, “Mysticism Debunked,” 202–3. 38 Brooker [Herne], The Tangled Miracle, 3. 39 Brooker [Herne], The Tangled Miracle, 7. 40 Brooker [Herne], The Tangled Miracle, 58. 41 Brooker [Herne], The Tangled Miracle, 53. 42 Brooker [Herne], The Tangled Miracle, 87. 43 See Brooker, Elijah, n. pag. 44 Brooker [Herne], The Tangled Miracle, 6. Prior to her disappearance, Weir had “become interested in Spiritualism, and it is believed that the date was recently fixed by a spirit voice, purporting to be none other than the prophet Elijah, communicated through a well-known medium” (7). 45 See Brooker, “Mysticism Debunked,” 202–3. See also Bucke, Cosmic Consciousness. 46 Brooker, “Mysticism Debunked,” 202, 203. 47 See, for instance, Davis, The Logic of Ecstasy; Reid, Bertram Brooker. 48 Bertram Brooker, “Plot,” August 18, 1925, manuscript, mss. 16, box 3, folder 1, BBF, UMASC. 49 Bertram Brooker, “Manchee,” August 26, 1925, manuscript, mss. 16, box 3, folder 1, BBF, UMASC. 50 Brooker, “Plot,” 18 August 1925. 51 Bertram Brooker, “Jevon,” 25 August 1925, manuscript, mss. 16, box 3, folder 1, BBF, UMASC. 52 Brooker, “Jevon,” Brooker, “Plot,” 21 August 1925, manuscript, mss. 16, box 3, folder 1, BBF, UMASC. 53 Brooker [Herne], The Tangled Miracle, 197–8, emphasis in the original. 54 See Reid, Bertram Brooker, 13.

Notes to pages 34–41

207

55 Henderson, Duchamp in Context, 129. See also Luisetti and Sharp, “Reflections on Duchamp.” 56 See Henderson, Duchamp in Context, 167; Henderson, The Fourth Dimension, 250. 57 See Bergson, Laughter. 58 Bergson, Creative Evolution, xiv, 48. See also Henderson, Duchamp in Context, 77. 59 In The Mechanical Bride, McLuhan likewise wrote that “the famous portrait of a ‘Nude Descending a Staircase’… is a cleansing bit of fun intended to free the human robot from his dreamlike fetters. And so with Wyndham Lewis’s The Apes of God.” McLuhan, The Mechanical Bride, 100–1. The Mechanical Bride’s title was inspired by The Large Glass. See Gordon, Marshall McLuhan, 153. 60 See Henderson, Duchamp in Context, 181. 61 Henderson, Duchamp in Context, 180. 62 See Bertram Brooker, “Diary,” 24 January 1927, manuscript, BBE. 63 Bergson, Time and Free Will, 125; Reid, Bertram Brooker, 12. 64 Brooker [Ting], “Hoist the Sales.” 65 Guerlac, Thinking in Time, 47. 66 Guerlac, Thinking in Time, 48. 67 Guerlac, Thinking in Time, 48. 68 Brooker, Yearbook of the Arts, 271. 69 See Kern, The Culture of Time, 21, 117. 70 See Zemans, “First Fruits,” 18, 33n9. 71 Zemans, “First Fruits,” 30. 72 Brooker [Surrey], “Seven Uses for ‘Costume,’” 344. 73 Brooker [Surrey], Copy Technique in Advertising, 133. 74 See Antliff, Inventing Bergson, Chapter 3. 75 Cavell, McLuhan in Space, 15. 76 See Brooker, “Prophets Wanted,” 183–93. Brooker’s first reference to Murry appears to date from 1923. See Brooker [Surrey], “The Obvious Versus the Trite,” 91. 77 Brooker [Surrey], “Rhythmical Headings?,” 40, emphasis in the original. 78 See, for instance, Murry, “Art and Philosophy,” 9–12. 79 Martin, Modernism and the Rhythms, 56. 80 See Lanzoni, “Practicing Psychology,” 337. 81 Burdett, “Is Empathy the End,” 260. 82 See Burdett, “‘The Subjective Inside Us.’” 83 Towheed, “The Creative Evolution,” 48. 84 See Brooker [Bartholdy], “The Censorship of Photoplays,” 4. 85 Darwin, The Descent of Man, 1:63. 86 Infante, “Atrophy and Development,” 14. Benjamin Morgan explicitly situates Lee’s physiological aesthetics within the tradition of Burke. See Morgan, “Critical Empathy,” 36.

208

87 88 89 90 91 92 93 94

95 96 97 98 99 100

101 102 103 104 105 106 107 108 109 110 111 112 113 114

Notes to pages 41–7

Infante, “Atrophy and Development,” 16. Lanzoni, “Practicing Psychology,” 331. Lee, The Psychology, 83–4. See Towheed, “The Creative Evolution,” 34. Brooker, “Nudes and Prudes,” 105–6. Hudson, “Disarming Conventions,” 102, 90. Bertram Brooker, “LOVE Re High and High Places,” The Brave Voices, ca 1952– 55, manuscript, BBE. Bertram Brooker, “A Short Section from Chapter on LOVE,” The Brave Voices, ca 1952–55, manuscript, BBE. Brooker’s notes for The Brave Voices contain other references to “MUSIC and SEX as [the] nearest apprehension of world energy.” Bertram Brooker, “LOVE re women in love,” The Brave Voices, ca 1952– 55, manuscript, BBE. Brooker [Spane], “Visualize Events,” 161. Bertram Brooker, “Nature,” The Brave Voices, ca 1952–55, manuscript, BBE; Bertram Brooker, “Bergson,” The Brave Voices, ca 1952–55, manuscript, BBE. Bergson, Matter and Memory, 151, emphasis in the original. See Bertram Brooker, “Foreword,” The Brave Voices, ca 1952–55, manuscript, BBE. Brooker, “Foreword,” emphasis in the original. Brooker, “Foreword,” 18. Helen Palmer has parsed the Bergsonian sources of Russian Futurism, noting that “at times Ouspensky sounds positively Bergsonian.” Palmer, Deleuze and Futurism, 163. See also Fink, Bergson and Russian Modernism. Brooker, “Foreword,” emphasis in the original; Brooker, “Bergson.” Brooker [Surrey], “One Thousand Sources of Copy Ideas – Copy,” 155, 157. Brooker [Surrey], “Rhythmical Headings?,” 39. See also Crary, Suspensions of Perception. McLuhan, The Mechanical Bride, 34; Innis, The Bias of Communication, 190. Innis, Changing Concepts of Time, 11. Innis, Changing Concepts of Time, 1. See The Canadian Forum, “The Canadian Forum Editorial Committee,” ca 1925, manuscript, BBE. See Brooker, “Idolaters of Brevity,” 263–8. See also Buxton, “Harold Innis’s Excavation of Modernity.” Whitman, Leaves of Grass, 17. Lewis, Time and Western Man, 324. Buckley, Mechanical Man, 118. Lewis, Time and Western Man, 320. See also Crary, Techniques of the Observer; Foucault, The Birth of the Clinic. Lewis, Time and Western Man, 324. See Stanfield, “‘This Implacable Doctrine,’” 243.

Notes to pages 47–51

209

115 Lewis quoted in Stinson, “The Vortex as Ontology,” 123; Stanfield, “‘This Implacable Doctrine,’” 249. 116 Lewis, Snooty Baronet, 40. 117 Lewis, Time and Western Man, 328; Lewis, Snooty Baronet, 16. 118 McLuhan, Understanding Media, 46. 119 Lewis, Snooty Baronet, 135–6, emphasis in the original. 120 Lewis, Snooty Baronet, 138; Plumptre qtd in Watson, Marginal Man, 161. See also McCutcheon, The Medium Is the Monster, Chapter 4. 121 Lewis, Snooty Baronet, 205, emphasis in the original. 122 See Lewis, The Art of Being Ruled, 26; Lewis, The Human Age, 464. Lewis’s irreverent, pulp-fiction treatment of “Iranian dualism” in Snooty Baronet foreshadows his deflationary admission in The Human Age that his digital metaphysics amounts to nothing more than “a phoney cosmic dualism” (464). 123 Lewis, “Towards an Earth Culture,” 381. 124 Lewis, Time and Western Man, 329; Kenner, Wyndham Lewis, 113, 107. 125 Joshua Gang’s term for forms of literary modernism inspired by the “behaviorist critique of introspection.” Gang, “Mindless Modernism,” 117. 126 Johnston, Selling Themselves, 173. 127 Brooker qtd in Johnston, Selling Themselves, 174, emphasis in the original. 128 Brown, The Corporate Eye, 162. 129 Ann Davis writes that “Whitman was promoting the common and the average.” Davis, The Logic of Ecstasy, 63. Not coincidentally, Bergson scholar Suzanne Guerlac situates the North American reception of Bergson within a Transcendentalist lineage: “Bergson was received in America in the spirit of Emerson and Whitman.” Guerlac, Thinking in Time, 11. 130 Brooker [Surrey], “Roll Your Own Vocabulary,” 102; Brooker [Surrey], “One Thousand Sources of Copy Ideas VI,” 401; Brooker [Surrey], Copy Technique in Advertising, 78. 131 Elspeth Brown notes the advertising industry’s tendency “to collapse class distinctions into a composite portrait.” Brown, The Corporate Eye, 162. 132 Buckley, Mechanical Man, 137. 133 Buckley, Mechanical Man, 141. 134 Lears, Fables of Abundance, 225. 135 Brooker [Surrey], “A Rating System for Words,” 105. See also Thorndike, The Teacher’s Word Book. 136 Brooker quoted in Lears, Fables of Abundance, 319. 137 Brooker [Surrey], “A Rating System for Words,” 106. 138 Brooker [Surrey], “A Rating System for Words,” 106. See also Brooker [Surrey], “Take a Tip from Tchekhoff.” 139 Brooker [Surrey], “A Rating System for Words,” 107, emphasis in the original. 140 Rouvroy and Berns, “Algorithmic Governmentality,” vi. 141 Brooker [Surrey], “A Rating System for Words,” 107.

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142 143 144 145 146 147 148 149 150 151 152 153 154 155 156 157 158 159 160 161 162 163 164 165 166 167 168 169 170 171 172 173 174 175 176 177 178

Notes to pages 51–7

Gang, “Mindless Modernism,” 129. See Gang, “Behaviorism and the Beginnings,” 1. See Gang, “Behaviorism and the Beginnings,” 2. Brooker [Surrey], “A Rating System for Words,” 108. Brooker [Surrey], “A Rating System for Words,” 108. See Nakano, “Intuition and Intellect”; Nakano, “Katherine Mansfield and French Philosophy”; Nakano, “Katherine Mansfield, Rhythm.” Morgan, “Critical Empathy,” 45. Morgan, “Critical Empathy,” 39. Morgan, “Critical Empathy,” 49. Brain, “The Pulse of Modernism,” 413. Morgan, “Critical Empathy,” 49. See also Dames, The Physiology of the Novel, lxii. Heidelberger, Nature from Within, 20. See Crary, Techniques of the Observer, 145. See Fechner, Elements of Psychophysics, 46–47. Kittler, Discourse Networks, 292. Crary, Techniques of the Observer, 146; Crary, Suspensions of Perception, 25. Scott, The Psychology of Advertising, 35. Scott, The Psychology of Advertising, 38. Scott, The Psychology of Advertising, 42. Patterson, Peripheral Vision, xviii. Brooker [Spane], “‘Shape’ as an Attention Compeller,” 140. Brooker [Spane], “‘Shape’ as an Attention Compeller,” 140, 142. Brooker [Surrey], “Rhythmical Headings?,” 39. Hui, The Psychophysical Ear, 21. See also Mullarkey, Bergson and Philosophy, 22. Heidelberger, Nature from Within, 7. Guerlac, Thinking in Time, 42. Heidelberger, Nature from Within, 106. See Fechner, Vorschule der Aesthetik. Hui, The Psychophysical Ear, 17. Bergson represented the act of perception as “attention to life.” Bergson, Matter and Memory, 173, emphasis in the original. Kittler, Discourse Networks, 43. See Kittler, Discourse Networks, 225. See also Meyer, Irresistible Dictation; Posman, “Time.” Kittler, Discourse Networks, 189. See Brooker [Surrey], Layout Technique in Advertising, 155; Brooker [Surrey], “One Thousand Sources of Copy Ideas – X,” 82. See Hollingworth, Advertising and Selling, 213. Cowan, Walter Ruttmann, 122. Lev Manovich, “Introduction to Info-Aesthetics”; Bonnett, Emergence and Empire, 169.

Notes to pages 57–62

179 180 181 182 183 184

185 186 187 188 189 190 191 192 193 194 195 196 197 198 199

200 201

211

Bonnett, Emergence and Empire, 166. Brooker [Reliance Engravers], “Figure Drawing,” 461, emphasis in the original. McLuhan, The Mechanical Bride, 79. Reid, A Concise History, 183. Harper, Painting in Canada, 323; Hollingworth, Advertising and Selling, 212. Brooker [Spane], “‘Shape’ as an Attention Compeller,” 140, 142. Harnessing G.K. Chesterton’s story “The Wrong Shape” to practical problems in communication, Brooker clears a path for McLuhan’s approach to the Catholic modernist’s detective fiction as modelling a New Critical methodology of close reading. See McLuhan, “G.K. Chesterton.” Foreshadowing McLuhan’s storied Ryerson Media Experiment, in the same text Brooker reports that “particular classes of media have been identified as furnishing the best audience for a particular message.” Brooker [Spane], “‘Shape’ as an Attention Compeller,” 140. See also McLuhan, Report, 138–58. See also Brooker [Surrey], “The Paradox as an Aid in Selling,” 3–6, 153–60. See Kane, Chromatic Algorithms, 108–09; Patterson, Peripheral Vision, 75; Simon, “Designing Organizations.” Bertram Brooker, “Notes,” 29 August 1925, manuscript, mss. 16, box 3, folder 1, BBF, UMASC. Joselit, “Dada’s Diagrams,” 232. Rouvroy and Berns, “Algorithmic Governmentality,” vii. Bergson, Matter and Memory, 111, emphasis in the original. McLuhan, The Mechanical Bride, 48, 50. See Relyea, Your Everyday Art World, Chapter 1. Brooker [Anonymous], “How the Census,” 781. See also Robinson, The Measure of Democracy, 23. See Johnston, Selling Themselves, 206. See also Brooker, “Census of Merchandising in Canada,” 117. Brooker [Surrey], “Three Copy Points of View,” 264, emphasis in the original. Brooker, “Markets are People!,” 22. Brooker, “A Statistical Picture,” 394. Brooker, “A Statistical Picture,” 394. Brooker [Surrey], “Making the Package the Hero,” 256. Brooker had earlier employed the term “niche” in a 1926 article for Marketing: “The problem,” he wrote, “is to fill the vacuum of desire in the prospect’s mind, to fill the niches in market environment, to fill the five channels of the senses.” Brooker [Surrey], “One Thousand Sources of Copy Ideas – IV,” 337, my emphasis. Brooker, “Here Lies John Mass,” 27; Marchand, Advertising the American Dream, 63. Brooker, “Here Lies John Mass,” 27. See also Brooker [Surrey], “Are Statistics More Convincing.”

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202 203 204 205 206 207 208 209 210 211 212 213 214 215 216 217 218

219

220 221 222 223 224 225 226 227

228

Notes to pages 62–6

Brooker, “Here Lies John Mass,” 27. Brooker, “Here Lies John Mass,” 28. Relyea, Your Everyday Art World, viii. Foucault, The History of Sexuality, 1:138; Hacking, “How Should We Do,” 181. Cowan, Walter Ruttmann, 9. Cowan, Walter Ruttmann, 78. Cowan, Walter Ruttmann, 80. Brooker [Surrey], “One Thousand Sources of Copy Ideas VI,” 410. Cowan, Walter Ruttmann, 80; Brooker, “A Statistical Picture,” 394. Cowan, Walter Ruttmann, 94; Foucault, The History of Sexuality, 1:141. See Terranova, Network Culture, 26–7, 50–2. Virilio, The Vision Machine, 75. Rouvroy and Berns, “Algorithmic Governmentality,” xvi. Cowan, Walter Ruttmann, 100. Cowan, Walter Ruttmann, 101. Brooker, “A Statistical Picture,” 394, my emphasis. Brooker, “How American Advertisers,” 87; Stead, “Selling Canada,” 253. See also Dyer, “Why We Buy Canadian Art”; Lismer, “A Distinctive Canadian Character”; Love, “C.N.R. Employs Canadian Artists”; Rimmer, “Selling Canadians Faith in Canada.” Grace, “Figures in a Ground,” 64. With an American readership in mind, Brooker quoted the general sales manager of Palmolive Co. of Canada, A.D. Rettinger, on the pluralistic character of the Canadian market in a 1924 article for Printers’ Ink: “geography seems to have more to do with … differences [in merchandising conditions] than nationality … Quebec, with its large proportion of French, does present a problem that is unique on the continent.” Rettinger qtd in Brooker, “Marketing Conditions in Canada,” 129. Brooker qtd in Zemans, “The Art and Weltanschauung,” 65. Brooker [The Globe], “Citizens of No Mean City.” Marchand, Advertising the American Dream, 63; Brooker [The Globe], “Citizens of No Mean City.” Brooker [The Globe], “Citizens of No Mean City.” McLuhan, “American Advertising,” 133. McLuhan, The Mechanical Bride, 79. McLuhan, The Mechanical Bride, 5. “Central to [Jevon’s] development is a Toronto architect who has come north to write a book on the fourth dimension (Bragdon).” Brooker quoted in Zemans, “First Fruits,” 36n47. See Reid, Bertram Brooker, 12–13.

Notes to pages 67–8

213

Chapter Two 1 2 3 4

Baxter qtd in Fleming, Baxter 2, 36. “We do not know what the body can do.” Spinoza qtd in Deleuze, Spinoza, 17. See Foucault, The History of Sexuality, 1:135. Baxter in Amirkhanian, “Thin Air”; Paul Grescoe, “Steady, Now. Is this Art?,” Canadian Weekend Magazine, 25 January 1969, 15; Susan Paynter, “N.E. Thing Can Happen When You Meet Iain Baxter,” Seattle Post-Intelligencer, 19 July 1970, 6. 5 See Baxter with Arnold, “Interview”; Tomaszewska, “Borderlines of Poetry and Art,” 123. In the company’s 16 January 1969 articles of incorporation, Iain Baxter is listed as one of two founding shareholders, with NETCO’s secretary and counsel, Sholto Hebenton, holding the other share. The minutes of a subsequent meeting held on 18 January 1969 document Ingrid Baxter’s appointment to the office of vice-president and election as co-director. The same minutes record Ingrid Baxter’s purchase of 2,000 company shares, valued at 1¢ per share, and an allotment of an additional 1,998 shares to Iain Baxter, as well as the transfer of Sholto Hebenton’s one common share to him. Ingrid Baxter was subsequently appointed to the office of co-president during a meeting of the directors held 17 July 1970, a change retroactively noted in the minutes of the 18 January 1969 meeting. There was only ever one “chairman” of the corporation under British Columbia law: Iain Baxter. See N.E. Thing Co. Ltd., “Photocopy of Memorandum of Association (certified copy),” 16 January 1969, manuscript, box 9, file 18, IBF, EPTRLA; N.E. Thing Co. Ltd., “Minutes of the First Meeting of Directors of N.E. Thing Co. Ltd.,” 18 January 1969, manuscript, box 9, file 18, IBF, EPTRLA; N.E. Thing Co. Ltd., “Minutes of a Meeting of the Directors of the N.E. Thing Co. Ltd. held as of the 17th day of July, 1970,” 17 July 1970, manuscript, box 9, file 18, IBF, EPTRLA; Vancouver Art Gallery, 17 Canadian Artists, n. pag. See also N.E. Thing Co. Ltd., “Companies Act No. 84030,” The British Columbia Gazette, 30 January 1969, 291. Surviving documentation suggests that the company name began as a nom de plume for Iain Baxter, but was gradually consolidated as a corporate structure: “N. E. Thing Company is a pseudonym for my name (Iain Baxter).” Iain Baxter to C. Appleby, 25 March 1970, manuscript, box 10, file 11, IBF, EPTRLA. See also Soutter, “The Visual Idea,” 92n3. 6 French, “The Corporation,” 211, emphasis in the original. 7 See Iain Baxter, “ICOME: Bits of Information – Con’t,” Architecture Canada, 21 December 1970, 1; Fleming, Baxter 2, 92; Robert Fulford, “A Reward for Frivolity,” Toronto Daily Star, 2 February 1967, 33; Grescoe, “Steady, Now,” 15; Leider, “Vancouver Scene with No Scene,” 7; Joan Lowndes, “The Message Is – VSI: The Plastic World of Iain Baxter,” The Province, 3 February 1967, 3;

214

8 9 10 11 12 13

14 15 16 17 18 19 20 21 22 23 24 25

26 27 28

Notes to pages 68–71

N.E. Thing Co. Ltd., North American Time Zone, n. pag. “We have a number of people [involved in the corporation]. We have a person involved with the whole photography division, and another man is handling an area that we have, a subsidiary called ICOME, which is International Consultants on Media, and it’s a whole area dealing with actual consulting to industry about problems of media and using media; which, I’m saying that, I’m saying telex and telecopier and computers and so on, in terms of the educational potential of these things.” Baxter in Amirkhanian, “Thin Air.” Harwood, The Interface, 6. Hobbes, Leviathan, 151. Latour, We Have Never Been Modern, 129. “The human is in the delegation itself” (138). French, “The Corporation,” 212. Cavell, Remediating McLuhan, 31. See Crowston with Arnold, “Episodes in Conceptual Art,” 77; Joan Lowndes, “N.E. Thing Company Sells Art to Businessmen,” Vancouver Sun, 4 June 1970, 41; Susan Paynter, “Doing N.E. Thing for Gross National Good,” Seattle PostIntelligencer, 21 June 1970, 6. Badiou, Number and Numbers, 1. N.E. Thing Co. Ltd., “Operations Statement,” 1968, manuscript, box 7, file 1, IBF, EPTRLA. Lamberti, Marshall McLuhan’s Mosaic, 133, emphasis in the original. N.E. Thing Co. Ltd., “Operations Statement,” n. pag. Relyea, Your Everyday Art World, vii. McLuhan, Understanding Media, 5–6; Rancière, The Politics of Aesthetics, 7. See also Frohne, “Art In-Formation,” 38–43. See McLuhan and Nevitt, Take Today. See also Martin, The Organizational Complex. Halpern, Beautiful Data, 133. See Marchessault, “McLuhan’s Pedagogical Art”; Stamps, Unthinking Modernity, 101–3; Theall, The Medium, 85. Kittler, “Universities,” 245. McLuhan, “Five Sovereign Fingers Taxed,” n. pag. Theall, The Virtual Marshall McLuhan, 74. An early essay by McLuhan on the Scotist poet Gerard Manley Hopkins suggests a possible source for his later monism. See McLuhan, “The Analogical Mirrors.” “Post-digital computation returns to the pre-digital.” McLuhan, Report, 1. See also Galloway, Laruelle, xviii. McLuhan, The Gutenberg Galaxy, 261. See also Pope, “The Dunciad.” “‘Writing in aphorisms’ was part of the Stoic technique of dialectics and rhetoric.” McLuhan, The Classical Trivium, 114–15.

Notes to pages 71–4

215

29 Dumont, “Transcendental Being,” 135. See also Harris, “Duns Scotus and His Relation.” 30 Deleuze, The Logic of Sense, 11. 31 Deleuze, The Logic of Sense, 11. 32 Theall, The Medium, 7. 33 McLuhan, The Classical Trivium, 43. See also Allan, “Marshall McLuhan and the Counterenvironment.” 34 McLuhan, The Classical Trivium, 1; Theall, The Virtual Marshall McLuhan, 105. 35 Baxter in Amirkhanian, “Thin Air.” 36 Donald Theall to Iain Baxter, 18 April 1967, manuscript, box 7, file 5, IBF, EPTRLA. 37 See Iain Baxter, “Paper Clips; Icome,” ca 1970, manuscript, box 15, file 31, IBF, EPTRLA. Other nominal ICOME members were Victory Doray (“AV”), Barry Briscoe (“ARCH[itecture]”), and Brian Dyson and Paul Woodrow (“photo, theatre, music”). Baxter, “Paper Clips.” 38 On the transition from analogue to digital, see Deleuze, “One Less Manifesto,” 253. 39 See Peters, “McLuhan’s Grammatological Theology,” 227–42. 40 “[A] humorous stoicism is the anglo-saxon philosophy.” Lewis, Tarr, 35. 41 Theall, The Medium, 5. 42 See Willmott, McLuhan, 32–3. 43 McLuhan, Report, 23, emphasis in the original. 44 See Allan, “Marshall McLuhan and the Counterenvironment,” 25. For insightful analyses of Walter Benjamin’s theorization of “innervation,” see Hansen, “Benjamin and Cinema”; Hansen, “Room-for-play”; Buck-Morss, “Aesthetics and Anaesthetics.” 45 See Bennett, “Deleuze and Epicurean Philosophy”; Holmes, “Deleuze, Lucretius, and the Simulacrum”; Johnson, “Another Use of the Concept”; Sellars, “Aiôn and Chronos,” 177–205; Sellars, “An Ethics of the Event”; Smith, “The Concept of the Simulacrum.” 46 N.E. Thing Co. Ltd., “Companies Act No. 84030,” 291; N.E. Thing Co. Ltd., “Operations Statement,” n. pag.; Deleuze, Francis Bacon; Crowther, The Phenomenology of Modern Art, 19. 47 See Theall, The Virtual Marshall McLuhan, 74. 48 Fleming, Baxter 2, 48. The Baxters humorously christened their residence “the Seymour Plant.” Wood, “Capital and Subsidiary,” 15. 49 See Lippard, ed., 955,000, n. pag. 50 NETCO’s sensorial processing of banal information recalls McLuhan’s portrait of Hopkins, whom he praised for “deal[ing] sensitively with the commonplaces … and record[ing] a vigorous sensuous life in the order of nature.” McLuhan, “The Analogical Mirrors,” 210.

216

51 52 53 54 55

56 57 58 59 60 61 62 63

64 65 66 67 68 69 70 71 72 73 74 75

76 77 78 79 80 81 82

Notes to pages 74–7

Iain Baxter quoted in Fleming, Baxter 2, 36. Theall, The Medium, 72. Shaw, “Siting the Banal,” 31. N.E. Thing Co. Ltd., “c o n c e p t,” 1967, manuscript, box 7, file 2, IBF, EPTRLA. Theall, The Medium, 31; Watts, The Way of Zen, 64. In a 10 July 1970 letter to David Silcox, McLuhan himself opined that “I think his [Baxter’s] playfulness is significant and valuable.” N.E. Thing Co. Ltd., N.E. Thing Co. Ltd., n. pag. Theall, The Medium, 39, 96. de Duve, Kant after Duchamp, 296–300. Palmer, Deleuze and Futurism, xxii. See Watts, The Way of Zen, 40. See Heiser, “A Romantic Measure”; Verwoert, “Impulse Concept Concept Impulse.” Heiser, “A Romantic Measure,” 135. Heiser, “A Romantic Measure,” 139. Jack Shadbolt, Victor Doray, and Iain Baxter, “Intermedia,” 1967, manuscript, box 7, file 2, IBF, EPTRLA; N.E. Thing Co. Ltd., “By Way of Introduction,” n. pag.; Michaels, “Foreword,” 8. Lippard, “Iain Baxter,” 6. Groys, History Becomes Form, 3. See McLuhan, “Art as Anti-Environment.” Groys, History Becomes Form, 3, my emphasis. McLuhan, The Classical Trivium, 43. Gordon, “Editor’s Introduction,” x, my emphasis. See also Curtius, European Literature, 37. See Gordon, Marshall McLuhan, 75; McLuhan, The Classical Trivium, 42. See McLuhan, The Classical Trivium, 40. McLuhan, The Classical Trivium, 214. McLuhan, The Classical Trivium, 45. McLuhan, The Classical Trivium, 41. Arnold qtd in McLuhan, The Classical Trivium, 51; Deleuze, The Logic of Sense, 79. In his commentary on Spinoza, Deleuze describes a Stoic tradition in which “each attribute is a distinct name or expression; what it expresses is so to speak its sense.” Deleuze, Expressionism in Philosophy, 62. Vazan, “Survey ’69,” 61. See, for instance, Pilkington and Rushton, “Models and Indexes.” Grosz, The Incorporeal, 31. Baxter, “Color/Language Studies”; N.E. Thing Co. Ltd., “The N.E. Thing Page.” Deleuze, The Logic of Sense, 153. Grosz, The Incorporeal, 30; N.E. Thing Co. Ltd., Another 2 Projects, n. pag. Curtius, European Literature, 39.

Notes to pages 78–83

83 84 85 86 87 88 89 90 91 92 93 94 95 96 97 98 99 100 101 102 103 104 105 106 107 108 109 110 111 112 113 114 115 116

117

217

See Terranova, “Communication Beyond Meaning.” Weaver, “Recent Contributions,” 8. Shannon, “The Mathematical Theory of Communication,” 31. Deleuze, The Logic of Sense, 155. Lazzarato quoted in Rouvroy and Berns, “Algorithmic Governmentality,” xv. See Durham, “IAIN BAXTER&,” 102–3, 224. See, especially, Lamberti, Marshall McLuhan’s Mosaic, 84–90; Zhang, “McLuhan and I Ching.” Deleuze, The Logic of Sense, 162. Theall, The Virtual Marshall McLuhan, 109. Theall, The Medium, 101. Theall, The Virtual Marshall McLuhan, 72. Theall, The Virtual Marshall McLuhan, 220, 41. See McLuhan, The Classical Trivium, 112. Quoting the Roman anthologist Stobaeus, Grosz observes that “for the Stoics, ‘propositions [lekta] are the objects of acts of assent.’” Grosz, The Incorporeal, 41. Halpern, Beautiful Data, 103. Pickering, The Cybernetic Brain, 243, 268. See Pickering, The Cybernetic Brain, 269–71. Pickering, The Cybernetic Brain, 271. Stiegler, The Age of Disruption, 49. See Cross, “Recent Work,” 135–48; King, “Scotus on Metaphysics”; Duns Scotus, Philosophical Writings; Widder, “John Duns Scotus.” See, for instance, McLuhan, “Joyce, Aquinas, and The Poetic.” Deleuze, The Logic of Sense, 205. Ramey, The Hermetic Deleuze, 37. McLuhan, “Playboy Interview,” 267. McLuhan, Understanding Media, 41, 36. See Deleuze, Pure Immanence. See Theall, The Virtual Marshall McLuhan, 27. Meltzer, Systems We Have Loved, 89. See, for instance, Wallace, “On the ‘Impure.’” Terranova, “Communication beyond Meaning,” 54; McLuhan, The Gutenberg Galaxy, 2. See also Kosuth, “The Artist as Anthropologist.” Parr, Sensing Changes, 1. Fleming, Baxter 2, 37; Deleuze, The Logic of Sense, 156. De Certeau, The Practice of Everyday Life, 13. Smithson, “Untitled (Site Data),” 363. Smithson’s remark echoes McLuhan’s observation that “in the present time, the artist has shifted his attention from the private to the corporate scene and space.” McLuhan, “Environment as Programmed Happening,” 122. See Palmer, Canada’s 1960s, 253.

218

Notes to pages 83–9

118 See Andreotti, “Play-Tactics.” 119 See Martin, “On the Difficulties,” 20. Fluxus constitutes a parallel manifestation of the neo-Bergsonian currents animating NETCO’s practice. See Foster et al., Art Since 1900, 494. Another international artist with a documented interest in the biophilosophy of Bergson and the economic theories of Fourier was Roy Ascott, who, as president of the Ontario College of Art, had unsuccessfully attempted to recruit Iain Baxter. See Shanken, “From Cybernetics to Telematics,” 6, 27–8, 75. 120 See Gilbert, “Herbie Goes Bananas.” 121 Buchloh, “Conceptual Art 1962–1969.” 122 See Bonin, “Documentary Protocols”; Lum, “Canadian Cultural Policy.” 123 Theall, The Virtual Marshall McLuhan, 162. 124 Baxter qtd in Cameron, Sculpture ’67, 84. 125 N.E. Thing Co. Ltd., “Glossary,” 1966, manuscript, box 5, file 11, IBF, EPTRLA. 126 Baxter quoted in Cameron, Sculpture ’67, 84, emphasis in the original. 127 N.E. Thing Co. Ltd., “Glossary,” n. pag. 128 Halpern, Beautiful Data, 177. 129 Mullarkey, Bergson and Philosophy, 23. 130 N.E. Thing Co. Ltd., “Operations Statement,” n. pag. 131 Lucretius, The Nature of Things, 168. 132 McLuhan, Understanding Media, 114, emphasis in the original. 133 See Heller-Roazen, The Inner Touch. 134 See Cavell, McLuhan in Space, 86–7. 135 Hayles, How We Became Posthuman, 2; McLuhan, Understanding Media, 44. 136 Selye, “Stress,” 70, my emphasis. Selye likened the physiology of stress to a “feed-back mechanism.” Selye, The Stress of Life, 198, emphasis in the original. 137 Selye, The Stress of Life, 54, my emphasis. 138 See Trépanier, Marian Dale Scott, 159–64. See also Jackson, “The Biochemistry of Life.” 139 See Ostwald, Colour Science, 1:48–50. 140 McLuhan, Understanding Media, 44. 141 Ostwald, Colour Science, 1:96. 142 McLuhan et al., Exploration of the Ways, 10. 143 Parker, “The Museum,” 353. On the monist orientation of Ostwald’s science, see Deltete, “Wilhelm Ostwald’s Energetics”; Hapke, “Wilhelm Ostwald’s Combinatorics”; Stewart, “Sociology, Culture, and Energy.” 144 Parker, “The Museum,” 351, my emphasis. 145 See de Duve, Kant after Duchamp, 296–300. 146 de Duve, Pictorial Nominalism, 148. 147 de Duve, Pictorial Nominalism, 149. 148 de Duve, Pictorial Nominalism, 148. 149 de Duve, Pictorial Nominalism, 61. 150 de Duve, Pictorial Nominalism, 146.

Notes to pages 89–94

219

151 Crary, Suspensions of Perception, 26. See also Didi-Huberman, L’image survivante, 157. 152 See Botar, “Defining Biocentrism.” 153 See Cavell, McLuhan in Space, 71–5. 154 Uexküll, Theoretical Biology, 42. 155 See Buchanan, Onto-Ethologies. Deleuze, for instance, proclaims that “Uexküll … is a Spinozist.” Deleuze, Spinoza, 126. 156 Deleuze, Spinoza, 124. 157 McLuhan quoted in Cavell, McLuhan in Space, 70. 158 See Ball and Ruben, “Color Theory in Science and Art,” 4846. McLuhan himself likened the “open-mesh silk stocking” to “the mosaic of the TV image.” McLuhan, Understanding Media, 29. 159 McLuhan and Fiore, The Medium is the Massage, 76; N.E. Thing Co. Ltd., “Some Thoughts Re: Communications and Concepts,” 1967, manuscript, box 7, file 1, IBF, EPTRLA. 160 McLuhan and Fiore, War and Peace, 36–37. 161 McLuhan, “New Technology and the Arts,” 6. Richard Cavell traces McLuhan’s reception of psychophysics via Hermann von Helmholtz and Edwin G. Boring. See Cavell, McLuhan in Space, 74. 162 See Selye, The Stress of Life, 14–17. 163 Selye, Stress without Distress, 14; Deleuze and Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus, 4. 164 Oliver Botar has retraced this Central European discourse on physiological aesthetics as articulating a form of “biocentrism.” See Botar, “Prolegomena,” 1998. 165 See “‘Plastic Birds Batman’: It’s BALLOON GIRL,” The Columbian, 18 October 1968, 8; Ann Rosenberg, “N.E. Thing Really Goes,” Vancouver Sun, 6 December 1968, 9A. 166 See Celant, Settembrini, and Sischy, Looking at Fashion. 167 Paul Grescoe picked up on the McLuhanesque overtones of Baxter’s disposable fashions, writing that “they extend the body.” Grescoe, “Steady, Now,” 15, my emphasis. 168 Viner, “Putting Stress in Life,” 399, emphasis in the original. 169 Foster, Prosthetic Gods, 115. 170 McLuhan and Nevitt, Take Today, 31. 171 See Hayles, How We Became Posthuman, 34. 172 McLuhan, Understanding Media, 42. 173 See McLuhan, The Mechanical Bride, v. 174 N.E. Thing Co. Ltd. qtd in Shaw, “Siting the Banal,” 25. 175 Theall likens McLuhan’s role as adviser to Trudeau to that of a “court jester.” Theall, The Medium, 32. 176 McLuhan, “Cybernation and Culture,” 107, 98. 177 McLuhan, Report, 9. 178 McLuhan, Report, 2.

220

Notes to pages 95–8

Chapter Three 1 Lucretius, The Nature of Things, 95. 2 Cleveland, “‘Berkeley North,’” 194. Michael Darroch has unearthed connections between the interdisciplinary ideal pursued by McLuhan and Edmund Carpenter’s Ford Foundation–funded Explorations group and the Cold War–fuelled pedagogical speculations of the political cyberneticist Karl W. Deutsch, who “viewed the disciplinary specialism championed by [traditional] university models to be a threat to establishing peace on an international scale.” Darroch, “‘The Arts Once More United.’” 3 See McLuhan, Understanding Media, 35. 4 McLuhan, Understanding Media, 35 5 McLuhan, Understanding Media, 35–6. 6 Johnston, Radical Campus, 52. 7 Johnston, Radical Campus, 21. 8 See Cleveland, “‘Berkeley North,’” 196; Johnston, Radical Campus, 21–2. 9 McLuhan, Understanding Media, 35. 10 McLuhan, Understanding Media, 39. 11 Johnston, Radical Campus, 3; McLuhan, Understanding Media, 33. 12 Sava, “The Centre,” 83. 13 See Johnston, Radical Campus, 18. See also Tomaszewska, “Borderlines of Poetry and Art,” 63–4. 14 McLuhan’s discussion of the relationship between papyrus and roads extended Innis’s analyses of the decentralizing effects of papyrus on the administrative apparatus of the Roman Empire. See Innis, Empire and Communications, 122, 125; McLuhan, Understanding Media, 89–2. 15 Shrum qtd in Johnston, Radical Campus, 43. 16 McLuhan, “Environment as Programmed Happening,” 113. 17 Johnston, Radical Campus, 48. 18 Johnston, Radical Campus, 53; McLuhan, Understanding Media, 8. 19 McLuhan, The Gutenberg Galaxy, 213. 20 Johnston, Radical Campus, 129. 21 See Johnston, Radical Campus, 127. The computer as a symbolic site of institutional conflict was also central to the 1969 Computer Centre Incident at Sir George Williams University in Montreal. See Martel, “‘Riot’ at Sir George Williams,” 97–114. 22 Cleveland, “‘Berkeley North,’” 194. NETCO’s inflated punch card also retrieved such historic exemplars as the “giant mock punch card” installed in IBM’s exhibit at the 1939 World’s Fair in New York. Harwood, The Interface, 104. 23 See Cleveland, “‘Berkeley North,’” 205; Watson, “Urban Renewal,” 32. 24 Fleming, Baxter 2, 93; Sava, “The Centre,” 83. 25 Doray, “The Future of Education,” 31–4.

Notes to pages 98–103

221

26 Halpern, Beautiful Data, 99. 27 McLuhan, Understanding Media, 5–6. 28 Shadbolt, Doray and Baxter, “Intermedia,” 1967, manuscript, box 7, file 2, IBF, EPTRLA. 29 Meltzer, “The Dream,” 126. 30 Schafer, “Cleaning the Lenses of Perception,” 10. 31 Ong, Orality and Literacy, 2. 32 Schafer. “Cleaning the Lenses of Perception,” 10. 33 McLuhan, Gutenberg Galaxy, 39. 34 Schafer, The New Soundscape, 3. 35 Jones, Eyesight Alone, 12. See also Greenberg, “Towards a Newer Laocoon.” 36 Kittler, “Universities,” 249. See also Terranova and Bousquet, “Recomposing the University.” 37 See Iain Baxter, “SFU. Info. Re: Logo Design Etc.,” 1966, manuscript, IBPP. 38 McLuhan, Understanding Media, 26. 39 Shadbolt, Doray and Baxter, “Intermedia,” n. pag. 40 Halpern, Beautiful Data, 129. 41 See “Harley Parker,” LAROM. 42 McLuhan, “Environment as Programmed Happening,” 114. See also Marchessault, “Multi-Screens and Future Cinema,” 29–51. 43 Halpern, Beautiful Data, 95. 44 Harwood, The Interface, 118. 45 See also Halpern’s discussion of Charles Eames as an “architect.” Halpern, Beautiful Data, 134. 46 McLuhan, Understanding Media, vii; Halpern, Beautiful Data, 101. 47 Doray, “The Future,” 31. See also Capel-Doray and Doray, “Audrey Capel-Doray.” 48 Halpern, Beautiful Data, 102. 49 Gordon, “Editor’s Introduction,” xi. 50 Meltzer, “The Dream,” 123. 51 Iain Baxter, “N.E. THING CO NETCO IDEA,” 1966, manuscript, box 5, file 11, IBF, EPTRLA. 52 Iain Baxter, “Communication Centre Resource Policy Committee,” 1966, manuscript, box 2, file 14, IBF, EPTRLA. 53 Iain Baxter, “The ‘Fine Arts,’” 1966, manuscript, box 5, file 9, IBF, EPTRLA. 54 Prior to the Centre for Culture and Technology, there was Idea Consultants, McLuhan’s brief-lived commercial venture with William Hagon. See Marchand, Marshall McLuhan, 109. McLuhan’s subsequent association with the San Francisco–based advertising agency headed by Howard Gossage and Dr Gerald Feigen suggests further parallels with NETCO’s business platform. See Theall, The Virtual Marshall McLuhan, 84–7. 55 Iain Baxter, “Centre for Universal Information Potential,” 1966, manuscript, box 2, file 14, IBF, EPTRLA.

222

56 57 58 59 60 61 62 63 64 65 66 67 68 69 70

71 72 73 74 75 76 77 78 79 80 81 82 83 84 85 86

Notes to pages 103–8

See van Toorn, “On Site, Out of Sight,” 116–36. Schafer, “Cleaning the Lenses of Perception,” 12. Cleveland, “‘Berkeley North,’” 195. Baxter, “The ‘Fine Arts,’” n. pag. McLuhan, Report, 4. Bonin, “Documentary Protocols,” 25. See also Sava, “The Centre,” 88; Shaw, “Expanded Consciousness,” 107. See McLuhan, Culture Is Our Business. Doray, “The Future,” 32, 33. Parker qtd in McLuhan et al., Exploration of the Ways, 33. Doray, “The Future,” 31; Iain Baxter, “Eunuchversity,” ca 1970, manuscript, box 13, file 1, IBF, EPTRLA. Iain Baxter, “Eunuchversity,” ca 1969, manuscript, box 10, file 2, IBF, EPTRLA. Iain Baxter, “Eunuchversity,” ca 1969, manuscript, box 11, file 10, IBF, EPTRLA. Baxter, “Eunuchversity,” ca 1969, box 10, file 2. See also Johnston, Radical Campus, 245–6. See Johnston, Radical Campus, 266–9. See Buxton, “The ‘Values’ Discussion Group”; Marchessault, Marshall McLuhan, 104–5. The “humanist bias toward communication” advocated by fellow Centre faculty member Tom Mallinson, who was on the committee that hired Iain Baxter and who served on the Communication Centre Resource Policy Committee chaired by Baxter in 1966–67, would have been influential on Baxter’s design. Sava, “The Centre,” 84. Johnston, Radical Campus, 245. Cleveland, “‘Berkeley North,’” 194. See Johnston, Radical Campus, 246. See L. Srivastava to Iain Baxter, 27 August 1969, manuscript, box 9, file 19, IBF, EPTRLA; Johnston, Radical Campus, 215–16. Johnston, Radical Campus, 215. McLuhan, Report, 25. See Patrick Lyndon, “The University Arts Centre,” 1969, manuscript, box 10, file 3, IBF, EPTRLA. Iain Baxter to Patrick Lyndon, 27 August 1969, manuscript, box 9, file 9, IBF, EPTRLA. McLuhan, “Joyce, Aquinas, and the Poetic,” 9. Cavell, McLuhan in Space, 222; McLuhan, Understanding Media, 55. See also Schafer, The Book of Noise. Baxter quoted in Cameron, Sculpture ’67, 84. Fleming, Baxter 2, 37. McLuhan, Report, 12. See Darling, “IAIN BAXTER&’s,” 72. Ueno qtd in Moos, IAIN BAXTER&, 149. Watts, The Way of Zen, 88.

Notes to pages 108–12

223

87 Foster et al., Art Since 1900, 491. 88 Watts, The Way of Zen, 88, 77, 76. 89 Baxter with Arnold, “Interview.” In a 1976 interview with Ann Rosenberg, Iain Baxter similarly denounces what he terms “categoritis.” Baxter in Rosenberg, “Interview / N.E. Thing Co.,” 177. 90 Gilbert, “Art and Language,” 83, 87. 91 Boon, In Praise of Copying, 27. 92 Boon, In Praise of Copying, 25. 93 Boon, In Praise of Copying, 28. 94 Boon, In Praise of Copying, 31. 95 See Fleming, Baxter 2, 24; Grescoe, “Steady, Now,” 15. “In Pneumatic Judd,” writes Tomaszewska, “Iain Baxter’s plastic replica of a metal Judd sculpture pokes fun at the notions of value and autonomy in modernist art.” Tomaszewska, “Borderlines of Poetry and Art,” 52. 96 See de Duve, Kant after Duchamp, 296–300. 97 Boon, In Praise of Copying, 28. 98 Baxter qtd in Cameron, Sculpture ’67, 84. 99 Gao, “Conceptual Art,” 128. 100 Sava, “The Centre,” 86; Innis, The Bias of Communication, 83. 101 The significance of these concepts to Baxter is evident from the naming of his son, Tor (from sa-tor-i), who was born during the Baxters’ Japanese sojourn. 102 The transcript of a 1963 “Silent Seminar,” presumably held at Washington State University, in which Iain Baxter and the painter Gaylen Hansen were participants, documents Baxter’s development of ideas that would coalesce in his non-verbal teaching experiments with Joel Smith: “Visual insight gets a chance to ‘see’ so to speak without verbal glaucoma … In art, is silence golden [sic].” Iain Baxter, “Silent Seminar,” 1963, manuscript, box 3, file 8, IBF, EPTRLA. 103 Watts, The Way of Zen, 105, emphasis in the original. 104 Lauder, “‘An Educational Stance,’” n. pag. 105 Baigell, “Teaching without Words,” 2. 106 See Belgrad, The Culture of Spontaneity. 107 Palmer, Deleuze and Futurism, 32. 108 Halpern, Beautiful Data, 99. 109 Hall, The Silent Language, 10. On Hall’s influence on McLuhan’s conceptualization of the media as “outerings” of the senses, see Rogers, “The Extensions of Men.” 110 Wallace, “The Frontier of the Avant-Garde,” 54. 111 Toorn, “On Site, Out of Sight,” 124. 112 Watson, “Urban Renewal,” 34. 113 See Lauder, “‘An Educational Stance,’” n. pag. 114 See Turner, From Counterculture to Cyberculture, 51–2. 115 See Baxter, “Silent Seminar.”

224

Notes to pages 113–17

116 Baigell and Smith, “Happening in the Classroom,” 370. See also Theall, The Medium, 153. 117 Schafer, The Book of Noise, 23. 118 Lippard, “Iain Baxter,” 6. 119 See Iain Baxter to Marshall McLuhan, 30 January 1970, manuscript, box 15, file 55, IBF, EPTRLA; Silcox, “An Outside View,” 154–6. 120 McLuhan’s synaesthetic presentation of Berkeley’s optics represents a profound – if productive – misreading; Berkeley having posited, rather, that “vision is the product of an independent visual system.” Atherton, “How to Write the History,” 153. 121 See Grescoe, “Steady, Now,” 15; Fleming, Baxter 2, 12, 93; Tomaszewska, “Borderlines of Poetry and Art,” 126–7. 122 Joel Smith to Iain Baxter, 2 July 1965, manuscript, box 5, file 7, IBF, EPTRLA. 123 Iain Baxter, “Self-interview,” 1965, manuscript, box 4, file 7, IBF, EPTRLA. 124 Leider, “Vancouver Scene with No Scene,” 7. 125 Schafer, “Cleaning the Lenses of Perception,” 10. See also Schafer, “McLuhan and Acoustic Space.” 126 Iain Baxter, “Iain Baxter,” 1 May 1967, box 7, file 16, IBF, EPTRLA. 127 Iain Baxter, “Iain Baxter.” See also Lauder, “‘An Educational Stance,’” n. pag.; Lauder, “Super 8 INFORMATION,” 7. 128 Halpern, Beautiful Data, 83. 129 Arnold, “Robert Smithson in Vancouver,” 22. 130 McLuhan, “Classroom without Walls”; Halpern, Beautiful Data, 98. 131 Sava, “The Centre,” 85. 132 Iain Baxter annotation to N.E. Thing Co. Ltd., “c o n c e p t,” n. pag., emphasis in the original. 133 Cavell, “McLuhan and Spatial Communication,” 348, emphasis in the original. See also Day, “The ‘Conduit Metaphor.’” 134 Sava, “The Centre,” 86; Cavell, “McLuhan and Spatial Communication,” 349. 135 N.E. Thing Co. Ltd., Trans VSI Connection NSCAD-NETCO, n. pag, emphasis in the original. 136 N.E. Thing Co. Ltd., Trans VSI Connection NSCAD-NETCO. 137 N.E. Thing Co. Ltd., Trans VSI Connection NSCAD-NETCO. 138 Thacker, “Dark Media,” 80, 81. 139 Thacker, “Dark Media,” 89. 140 Boon, In Praise of Copying, 28. 141 Sava, “The Centre,” 83. 142 Boon, In Praise of Copying, 35. 143 See Dennis Durham’s interpretation of the related NETCO Telex work Fill in a Hole (1968) as similarly staging a Zen void. Durham, “IAIN BAXTER&,” 148. 144 Gao, “Conceptual Art,” 135.

Notes to pages 117–23

225

145 Halpern, Beautiful Data, 196. For a discussion of Bateson’s influence on McLuhan, see Theall, The Virtual Marshall McLuhan, 61, 127, 224. 146 Sava, “The Centre,” 88. 147 Iain Baxter, “Synopsis of Speech – DPMA International Conference June 23–26, 1970,” 1970, manuscript, IBPP. 148 Iain Baxter, “Synopsis of Speech.” 149 William J. Horne to Iain Baxter, 9 July 1970, manuscript, IBPP. 150 Baxter in Amirkhanian, “Thin Air.” 151 Gere, “Minicomputer Experimentalism,” 124. 152 See Zuboff, The Age of Surveillance Capitalism. 153 Sava, “The Centre,” 85. 154 Galloway, Protocol, xvii. Sava notes that “disciplinary boundaries [at SFU] were reinstated.” Sava, “The Centre,” 88. See also Johnston, Radical Campus, 223. 155 Galloway, Protocol, xvi. 156 Galloway, Laruelle, xviii. 157 Galloway, Laruelle, 203, 205. 158 Galloway, Laruelle, 202. 159 Galloway, Laruelle, 203. 160 See Baxter qtd in Lauder, “‘An Educational Stance,’” n. pag. 161 Galloway, Laruelle, 203. 162 See Tomaszewska, “Borderlines of Poetry and Art,” 74n111.

Chapter Four 1 2 3 4

5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12

Lucretius, The Nature of Things, 55. De Baere and Roelstraete, “Introducing Intertidal,” 11. See also Allan, “Conceptual Art Magazine Projects.” See Watson, “Discovering the Defeatured Landscape,” 262–5. See also Lunden, Wall, and Wallace, Free Media Bulletin. Felicity Tayler has added the conceptual books of Ed Ruscha to the list of influential American prototypes circulating within the Vancouver scene of the late 1960s. See Tayler, “Delayed Climax,” 53. Belgrad qtd in Tomaszewska, “Borderlines of Poetry and Art,” 88. Blaser quoted in Tomaszewska, “Borderlines of Poetry and Art,” i. The Pacific Nation was a magazine published by the poet Robin Blaser. See Cage, “McLuhan’s Influence.” On the McLuhan-derived Bergsonian currents active within NETCO’s practice, see Allan, “Marshall McLuhan and the Counterenvironment.” Tomaszewska, “Borderlines of Poetry and Art,” 173. See Watson, “In the Image Bank,” 15; Laroche, “Babyland,” 75. See Arnold, “Robert Smithson in Vancouver,” 20. Arnold, “Robert Smithson in Vancouver,” 20.

226

Notes to pages 125–7

13 “Smithson’s time in [Vancouver] played a crucial role in the realization of Spiral Jetty.” Arnold, “Robert Smithson in Vancouver,” 10. Arnold also documents Smithson’s fieldwork for a proposed subterranean cinema at Anaconda Copper Mine at Britannia Beach north of Vancouver, which later materialized in textual form as the 1971 essay “A Cinematic Atopia” as well as in now lost documentation of a paint pour, Spill: Boulder White Paint (Britannia Beach Project) (1969), intended for inclusion in Lippard’s 955,000 but never exhibited. See Arnold, “Robert Smithson in Vancouver,” 17–19. See also Smithson, “A Cinematic Atopia.” 14 Mitchell, Cartographic Strategies of Postmodernity, 1. 15 Wall has aptly described the format of Smithson’s conceptual essays as being “a mock-travelogue.” Wall, “‘Marks of Indifference,’” 37. 16 Graham qtd in Crow, “Cosmic Exile,” 37; Smithson qtd in Cummings, “Interview,” 282. 17 See Crow, “Cosmic Exile,” 37; Tsai, Robert Smithson Unearthed, 14–16. 18 Kenner, The Pound Era, 550. 19 Smithson qtd in Roberts, Mirror-Travels, 15. See also Crow, “Cosmic Exile,” 37; Reynolds, Robert Smithson, 10. 20 See Reynolds, Robert Smithson, 312, 325, 329. See also Wagner, Wyndham Lewis. 21 Smithson qtd in Jones, Machine in the Studio, 303; Smithson qtd in Roberts, Mirror-Travels, 15. 22 Jones, Machine in the Studio, 303. 23 Shapiro, Earthwards, 38. 24 Shapiro, Earthwards, 29. 25 Israel, Spirals, 165. 26 Eugenie Tsai writes that “Smithson’s … artistic ideal of the painter-poet [was] exemplified by William Blake and Wyndham Lewis.” Tsai, Robert Smithson Unearthed, 11. 27 Smithson also claimed to have constructed earth maps at Alfred, New York, and in a lagoon on Summerland Key, Florida. See Smithson qtd in Norvell, “Fragments of an Interview,” 193; Smithson qtd in Müller, “… The Earth, Subject to Cataclysms,” 261. 28 Smithson qtd in Norvell, “Fragments of an Interview,” 193. 29 Smithson qtd in Bear and Sharp, “Discussions with Heizer, Oppenheim, Smithson,” 244. 30 Bear and Sharp, “Discussions,” 244. 31 Smithson qtd in Arnold, “Robert Smithson in Vancouver,” 12. 32 Arnold, “Robert Smithson in Vancouver,” 22. 33 Hobbs, Robert Smithson, 12, 14. 34 See Stephens, Incidents of Travel in Yucatan. 35 Roberts, “Landscapes of Indifference,” 544. 36 Roberts, “Landscapes of Indifference,” 549, 548.

Notes to pages 127–33

37 38 39 40 41 42 43 44 45

46 47 48 49

50 51 52 53 54 55 56 57 58 59 60 61 62 63

64 65 66 67 68

227

Roberts, “Landscapes of Indifference,” 553. Kardon qtd in Roberts, “Landscapes of Indifference,” 562. Roberts, “Landscapes of Indifference,” 562. Ehrenzweig, The Hidden Order of Art, 56, 25. See also Roberts, “Landscapes of Indifference,” 556. See Linsley, “Mirror Travel in the Yucatan.” Lewis, Time and Western Man, 392, emphasis in the original. See also Shapiro, Earthwards, 29. See Dasenbrock, The Literary Vorticism, 25–6. Gaedtke, “The Machinery of Madness,” 69, 17. “A key aspect of Lewis’s sympathy for fascism,” Nathan Waddell attempts to clarify, “was that it seemed to offer a means of avoiding war.” Waddell, “Lewis and Fascism,” 89. See Lewis, The Art of Being Ruled; Lewis, The Lion and the Fox. Edwards, Wyndham Lewis, 286. See Edwards, Wyndham Lewis, 218. See also Wees, Vorticism and the English Avant-Garde. See Edwards, Wyndham Lewis, 256, 337. In addition to Berkeley, Lewis drew on the empiricism of David Hume (331–2). See Lewis, Time and Western Man, 351–3, 355–9. Wyndham Lewis, Time and Western Man, 123, emphasis in the original. Miller, Late Modernism, 117. Lewis, The Apes of God, 418. Smithson, “Ultramoderne,” 63. Kubler, The Shape of Time, 8. Smithson, “Quasi-Infinities,” 35n15. Lee, Chronophobia, 235. Wiener, Cybernetics, 6, emphasis in the original. Weaver, “Recent Contributions,” 12, emphasis in the original. Wiener, Cybernetics, 44. Wiener, Cybernetics, 44. Bergson, Creative Evolution, 178. Wiener, Cybernetics, 38. See also Halpern, Beautiful Data, 51–3. See Reynolds, Robert Smithson, 285n7; Shapiro, Earthwards, 39; Smithson qtd in Roth, “An Interview with Robert Smithson,” 93; Smithson qtd in Sky, “Entropy Made Visible,” 301, 307. Wiener, The Human Use of Human Beings, 134. See also Smithson quoted in Sky, “Entropy Made Visible,” 302. Lee, Chronophobia, 248; Kubler, The Shape of Time, 12. Lee, Chronophobia, 256. Kubler was also co-translator of Focillon’s La vie des forms (1934). See Emerling, “Afterword,” 270n27; Efal, “Art History,” 57.

228

Notes to pages 133–7

69 Bergson, Creative Evolution, 70, my emphasis. 70 Kubler, The Shape of Time, viii, 8. 71 Wiener, Cybernetics, 44. Gilles Deleuze identifies “badly stated problems” as one of two types of “false problems” addressed by Bergsonian methodology: “For a speculative problem is solved as soon as it is properly stated.” Deleuze, Bergsonism, 18, 15. 72 Kubler, The Shape of Time, 8. 73 Kubler, The Shape of Time, viii. See also Lundy, “Bergson, History and Ontology,” 24–7. 74 See Martin, “Organicism’s Other,” 34–51. 75 Linsley, “Painting Outside Itself,” 67. 76 See Addyman, “‘Speak of Time, without Flinching,” 103–26; Gunter, “Bergson and Proust,” 157–76. 77 Uroskie, “La Jetée en Spirale,” 56, 58. See also Deleuze, Cinema 2. 78 Uroskie, “La Jetée en Spirale,” 70. 79 Campbell, The Enemy Opposite, 98–9. See also Gillies, Henri Bergson and British Modernism, 50. 80 Reynolds, Robert Smithson, 70. 81 See Douglass, “Bergson, Vitalism, and Modernist Literature,” 112. 82 Gillies, Henri Bergson and British Modernism, 50. 83 See Villis, Reaction and the Avant-Garde, 24. 84 Schwartz, “Bergson and the Politics,” 277. 85 Schwartz, “Bergson and the Politics,” 278; Deleuze, Bergsonism, 111. 86 See Betts, “Introduction,” xxix; The Canadian Forum, “The Canadian Forum Editorial Committee.” 87 Lofthouse, Vitalism in Modern Art, 250. 88 Edwards, “Wyndham Lewis’s Vorticism,” 39. 89 See Dasenbrock, The Literary Vorticism, Ch. 3. 90 Lewis, Hitler, 32. 91 Farley, Modernist Travel Writing, 114. 92 Martin, “Organicism’s Other.” 93 Jones, Machine in the Studio, 277, 310. 94 Reynolds, Robert Smithson, 83. 95 Israel, “At the End of the Jetty,” 5. 96 Watson, “Discovering the Defeatured Landscape,” 265. Ian Wallace similarly places NETCO’s A Portfolio of Piles within a Graham–Smithson genealogy. See Wallace, “The Frontier of the Avant-Garde,” 56. 97 Watson, “Discovering the Defeatured Landscape,” 265. 98 Watson, “Discovering the Defeatured Landscape,” 263. 99 Watson, “Discovering the Defeatured Landscape,” 263. 100 See Watson, “Discovering the Defeatured Landscape,” 263. See also Moos, “Locating IAIN BAXTER&”; Galassi, “Unorthodox,” 61n34.

Notes to pages 137–43

101 102 103 104

105 106 107 108 109 110 111 112 113 114

115 116 117 118 119

120 121 122 123

229

The work was not assembled until 1990. See Knight, N.E. Thing Co., 21. Smithson, “A Sedimentation of the Mind,” 102. Dikeakos qtd in Lauder, “Glue Pour, 1970,” 92. “Dear Robert Smithson: here are the photos of 2 of the projects in earth the N.E. THING CO. would like to do. ERODING FOUNTAIN would be easy to setup [sic] in model form if you wished to do so. It could be on a base of 3' × 3' plywood with 10" to 12" small chrome pipe mounted in centre. Pour water to to [sic] show erosion and let dry.” Iain Baxter to Robert Smithson, 28 June 1968, reel 3834, RSNHP, AAA. Smithson, “Incidents of Mirror-Travel,” 130. Arnold, “Robert Smithson in Vancouver,” 22. Ehrenzweig, The Hidden Order of Art, 36; Arnold, “Robert Smithson in Vancouver,” 22. Ehrenzweig, The Hidden Order of Art, 35, my emphasis. See Day, “The ‘Conduit Metaphor.’” Moles, Information Theory and Esthetic Perception, 2. Moles, Information Theory and Esthetic Perception, 161, 8, 59, 60. Iain Baxter, “Annotated Photocopy of Alan Dunn Cartoon in The Medium Is the Massage,” 1967, box 7, file 19, IBF, EPTRLA. See Smithson, “A Sedimentation of the Mind,” 102. See, in particular, Jeff Wall’s discussion of photojournalism and the “news event” as influential in the emergence of post-pictorialist photography. Wall, “‘Marks of Indifference,’” 33. Bürger, Theory of the Avant-Garde, 22, 58. See Lewis, The Caliph’s Design. See Mao, Solid Objects, Ch. 2. bpNichol qtd in Cavell, McLuhan in Space, 151. “My body is, then, in the aggregate of the material world, an image which acts like other images, receiving and giving back movement, with, perhaps, this difference only, that my body appears to choose, within certain limits, the manner in which it shall restore what it receives.” Bergson, Matter and Memory, 19. Underscoring the Epicurean roots of Bergson’s ontology of the image, this key passage bears a remarkable resemblance to Lucretius’s account of perception in De Rerum Natura: “there are what we call the ‘images’ of things, and these, like membranes torn off from the surface of things, flit this way, that way, through the air.” Lucretius, The Nature of Things, 84. Not coincidentally, one of Bergson’s first publications was a translation of selected texts by Lucretius. See Guerlac, Thinking in Time, 9. Colman, “The Matter of the Image,” 120. Guerlac, Thinking in Time, 112. Lee, Chronophobia, xii. Smithson, “Ultramoderne,” 63, 64, 65.

230

Notes to pages 143–7

124 Uroskie, “La Jetée en Spirale,” 56. See also Baker, “The Cinema Model,” 79–113. 125 Colman, “The Matter of the Image,” 119, 117. 126 See Colman, “The Matter of the Image,” 120–7. 127 Bergson, Creative Evolution, 48. See also Bergson qtd in Smithson, “Entropy and the New Monuments,” 19. 128 Colman, “The Matter of the Image,” 118. See also Colman, “Affective Entropy,”172. 129 Colman, “The Matter of the Image,” 123. See also Harris, “Diagramming Duration,” 98. 130 Harris, “Diagramming Duration,” 120; Meltzer, Systems We Have Loved, 150, 143. 131 Campbell, The Enemy Opposite, 88. 132 Campbell, The Enemy Opposite, 87. 133 Berkeley quoted in Lewis, Time and Western Man, 445, emphasis in the original. See also Lewis, Paleface, 253. 134 Campbell, The Enemy Opposite, 88. 135 Lewis, Time and Western Man, 448–9, emphasis in the original. 136 See Berkeley, “An Essay,” 23. See also Atherton, “How to Write the History,” 153. 137 Arsić, The Passive Eye, 167. 138 Arsić, The Passive Eye, 174. 139 Kittler, Discourse Networks, 268; see also 290–311. 140 Campbell, The Enemy Opposite, 91. 141 Lewis, Time and Western Man, 399. 142 Smithson quoted in Leavitt, “Earth,” 187. 143 Smithson, “Incidents of Mirror-Travel,” 130; Arsić, The Passive Eye, 50. 144 Berkeley, “An Essay,” 9. 145 Berkeley, “An Essay,” 66. 146 Berkeley, “An Essay,” 65; Arsić, The Passive Eye, 163. 147 Smithson, “Incidents of Mirror-Travel,” 123–4. 148 Smithson, “Incidents of Mirror-Travel,” 127, 124. See also Smithson, “The Spiral Jetty,” 147. 149 Reynolds, Robert Smithson, 22, 74. 150 Smithson, “Incidents of Mirror-Travel,” 129. 151 Arsić, The Passive Eye, 50. 152 Smithson, “Incidents of Mirror-Travel,” 125. 153 See Smithson qtd in Norvell, “Fragments of an Interview,” 194. 154 Meltzer, Systems We Have Loved, 145; Smithson qtd in Norvell, “Fragments of an Interview,” 193, my emphasis. 155 Smithson, “Earth,” 178. See also Smithson qtd in Norvell, “Fragments of an Interview,” 194. 156 Smithson, “A Sedimentation of the Mind,” 112; Linsley, “Mirror Travel in the Yucatan,” 15. See also Fried, “Art and Objecthood.”

Notes to pages 147–52

231

157 Linsley, “Mirror Travel in the Yucatan,” 30. 158 Smithson quoted in Toner, “Interview with Robert Smithson,” 234. 159 Smithson quoted in Bear and Sharp, “Discussions with Heizer, Oppenheim, Smithson,” 246; Smithson quoted in Müller, “… The Earth, Subject to Cataclysms,” 254. 160 See Robbin, “Smithson’s Non-Site Sights,” 175. 161 Smithson qtd in Toner, “Interview with Robert Smithson,” 236. 162 See Martin, “Organicism’s Other,” 48. 163 Roberts, “Landscapes of Indifference,” 552. 164 Roberts, “Landscapes of Indifference,” 549. 165 Roberts, “Landscapes of Indifference,” 549. 166 Roberts, “Landscapes of Indifference,” 545. 167 Stephens, Incidents of Travel in Central America, 1:120. 168 Roberts, “Landscapes of Indifference,” 556. 169 Roberts, “Landscapes of Indifference.” 170 Tomas, Beyond the Image Machine, 113. 171 Tomas, Beyond the Image Machine, 106, emphasis in the original. 172 Tomas, Beyond the Image Machine, 118. 173 Berkeley, “An Essay,” 40. 174 Berkeley, “An Essay,” 51. 175 Arsić, The Passive Eye, 120. 176 Smithson, “Interpolation of the Enantiomorphic Chambers,” 40; Smithson, “Incidents of Mirror-Travel,” 129. 177 Smithson qtd in Müller, “… The Earth, Subject to Cataclysms,” 255. 178 Smithson qtd in Lipke, “Fragments of a Conversation,” 188. 179 Smithson quoted in Bear and Sharp, “Discussions with Heizer, Oppenheim, Smithson,” 249. 180 See Herzberg, “Leandro Katz,” 6. 181 Lewis, Time and Western Man, 450; Berkeley, “An Essay,” 51. 182 Campbell, The Enemy Opposite, 114. 183 Dasenbrock, The Literary Vorticism, 53. 184 Arsić, The Passive Eye, 104, 112; Lewis, Time and Western Man, 443. 185 See Olkowski, Gilles Deleuze and the Ruin, 91–2. See also Bergson, Matter and Memory, 10–11, 214–15. 186 Arsić, The Passive Eye, 121. 187 Arsić, The Passive Eye, xi. See also Guerlac, Thinking in Time, 7. 188 Smithson qtd in Lipke, “Fragments of a Conversation,” 188. 189 Smithson, “A Sedimentation of the Mind,” 102. 190 For McLuhan’s relationship to Bergson, see Allan, “Marshall McLuhan and the Counterenvironment”; Crocker, Bergson, 17–30. 191 Smithson quoted in Müller, “… The Earth, Subject to Cataclysms,” 254. 192 Arnold, “Robert Smithson in Vancouver,” 12.

232

Notes to pages 152–8

193 Smithson qtd in Müller, “… The Earth, Subject to Cataclysms,” 254. 194 See Arnold, “Robert Smithson in Vancouver,” 21. See also Lauder, “Glue Pour, 1970,” 92; Wheeler and Smithson, “Well, in Nature.” Ingrid Baxter recalls Smithson’s visit to the N.E. Thing Co.’s North Vancouver headquarters in the company of Lucy Lippard. See Baxter, “In the Wilds,” 183. 195 Smithson qtd in Lipke, “Fragments of a Conversation,” 189. 196 Rosenberg, “Interview / N.E. Thing Co.,” 167. 197 Smithson qtd in Toner, “Interview with Robert Smithson,” 234. 198 See Bell, Deleuze’s Hume, 109; Quéma, The Agon of Modernism, 185; Theall, The Virtual Marshall McLuhan, 173. 199 Relyea, Your Everyday Art World, 14; Boltanski and Chiapello, The New Spirit of Capitalism, 359. 200 See Reynolds, Robert Smithson, 312. 201 Farley, Modernist Travel Writing, 99, 104. 202 Farley, Modernist Travel Writing, 138, 122. 203 See Said, Orientalism. 204 Lewis, A Soldier of Humor, 432, 430. 205 Roberts, “Landscapes of Indifference,” 561. 206 Lewis, A Soldier of Humor, 427, 430. 207 Lewis, A Soldier of Humor, 428. 208 Lewis, A Soldier of Humor, 434, 433; Bergson, Creative Evolution, 363. 209 Lewis, Journey into Barbary, 57. 210 Smithson, “Incidents of Mirror-Travel,” 120. 211 Farley, Modernist Travel Writing, 117. 212 See Deleuze and Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus, Ch. 12. 213 Lewis, Journey into Barbary, 202. 214 Edwards, Wyndham Lewis, 382. 215 McLuhan, The Gutenberg Galaxy, 7. In 1948, Lewis postulated that “the earth has become one big village.” Lewis, America and Cosmic Man, 16. In 1929, Lewis had earlier proposed that “the Earth has become one place, instead of a romantic tribal patchwork of places.” Lewis, “A World Art and Tradition,” 56, emphasis in the original. 216 Trubowitz, “Race and Antisemitism in Lewis,” 119. 217 Lewis, Journey into Barbary, 75. 218 Lewis, Journey into Barbary, 213, 206, 204. 219 Lewis, Journey into Barbary, 202. 220 Lewis, Journey into Barbary, 143. Lara Trubowitz underscores that “‘race’ in Filibusters is a manufactured idea for Lewis.” Trubowitz, “Race and Antisemitism in Lewis,” 121. 221 Farley, Modernist Travel Writing, 141. 222 Lewis, Journey into Barbary, 170. See also de Saint-Exupéry, Vol de nuit. 223 Lewis, Journey into Barbary, 173; Farley, Modernist Travel Writing, 141.

Notes to pages 158–69

224 225 226 227 228 229 230 231 232 233 234 235 236 237 238 239 240 241 242

Mitchell, Cartographic Strategies of Postmodernity, 77. Mitchell, Cartographic Strategies of Postmodernity, 78. Lewis, Journey into Barbary, 174–5, my emphasis. Lewis, Journey into Barbary, 194. See Donnelly, Atlantis, 46–53. See Lewis, Journey into Barbary, 191. See also Meakin, The Moors. Lewis, Journey into Barbary, 191. Lewis, Journey into Barbary, 211. Lewis, “A World Art and Tradition,” 30. Lewis, “A World Art and Tradition.” Lewis, Journey into Barbary, 193, 175, emphasis in the original. See Smithson, “Incidents of Mirror-Travel,” 131. Churchward, The Lost Continent of Mu, 48. Smithson, “Incidents of Mirror-Travel,” 133n1. Arnold, “Robert Smithson in Vancouver,” 15 Churchward, The Lost Continent of Mu, 53. Smithson, “Incidents of Mirror-Travel,” 131. Mitchell, Cartographic Strategies of Postmodernity, 18. Wollen, “Mappings,” 46.

Coda 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13 14 15 16 17 18 19

Stiegler, The Age of Disruption, 293. See also 302. Mullarkey, Bergson and Philosophy, 37. See Guerlac, Thinking in Time, 30, 42. Innis, The Bias of Communication, 64, 62; Ong, Orality and Literacy, 2. Stiegler, The Age of Disruption, 42. See Stiegler, The Age of Disruption, 27, 247, 292. See Cavell, McLuhan in Space, 15; Betts, “‘The Destroyer,’” 247. Lewis, Paleface, 52. Lewis, Paleface, 47. See Lewis, Journey into Barbary, 196. See also Donnelly, Atlantis, 196, 407. Churchward, The Lost Continent of Mu, 204. Donnelly, Atlantis, 2. See also Reynolds, Robert Smithson, 174; Vilches, “Mirrored Practices,” 110n12. Roberts, “Landscapes of Indifference,” 551. Smithson, “Incidents of Mirror-Travel,” 127. Deloria, Playing Indian, 7. See Watson, “The Countercultural ‘Indian,’” 209, 212. Lewis, America and Cosmic Man, 151–2. Lewis, America and Cosmic Man, 152. Lewis, America and Cosmic Man, 153.

233

234

Notes to pages 169–74

20 Lewis, America and Cosmic Man, 159. 21 See Lewis, America, I Presume, 32–3. 22 Dilworth, “Out of Canada,” 161. Speculating on Lewis’s ancestry, Catherine Mastin and Robert Stacey suggest that his mother’s French Canadian family “may have had Huron Indian blood.” Mastin and Stacey, “Introduction,” 20. See also Edwards, Wyndham Lewis, 365. 23 Lewis, America, I Presume, 52. 24 Lewis, America, I Presume, 134. 25 Lewis, America, I Presume, 150. 26 Lewis, America, I Presume, 150. 27 Lewis, America, I Presume, 205. 28 See, for instance, Cave, “Thomas More”; Schmidt, “The Well-Ordered Commonwealth.” 29 Lewis, Paleface, 3, emphasis in the original. 30 Lewis, Paleface, 6. 31 Lewis, Paleface, 234. 32 Lewis, Paleface, 223, emphasis in the original. 33 Lewis, Paleface, 184. 34 Dwan, “Nancy Holt,” 69. See also Reynolds, Robert Smithson, 174. 35 Lewis, A Soldier of Humor, 434. 36 See Hobbs, Robert Smithson, 164–5; Bois and Krauss, “A User’s Guide to Entropy,” 57. 37 Turner, From Counterculture to Cyberculture, 86. 38 Turner, From Counterculture to Cyberculture, 87. 39 Turner, From Counterculture to Cyberculture, 83, 68. 40 Watson, “The Countercultural ‘Indian,’” 215. 41 Deloria, Playing Indian, 164. 42 Trubowitz, “Race and Antisemitism in Lewis,” 120. 43 Francis, The Imaginary Indian, 122. See also Johnson, “Plastic Shaman,” 47. 44 Deloria, Playing Indian, 173. 45 Deloria, Playing Indian, 159. 46 See Yard, “Robert Smithson,” 86. 47 See Ursprung, Allan Kaprow, 187. 48 Baldwin, “The White Geography,” 532. 49 Baldwin, “The White Geography,” 542, emphasis in the original. 50 Ginger Nolan, The Neocolonialism, 2. 51 Ginger Nolan, The Neocolonialism, 2. 52 McLuhan, The Gutenberg Galaxy, 46. See also Nolan, The Neocolonialism, 11. 53 Towns, “The (Racial) Biases of Communication,” 483. 54 Lewis, America and Cosmic Man, 220. See also Lefebvre and White, “Introduction,” 3.

Notes to pages 174–8

235

55 Knight, N.E. Thing Co., 6. The handwriting employed in the company’s information forms suggests that it was Iain – not Ingrid (as some commentators have suggested) – who acted in a “secretarial” role in maintaining NETCO’s corporate archive. 56 Baxter qtd in Alberro, “Interview with Ingrid Baxter,” 41. 57 See Lippard, “Curating by Numbers”; Bryan-Wilson, Art Workers, 153. 58 Baxter with Arnold, “Interview.” 59 Wilson, Art Labour, Sex Politics, xxviii; Molesworth, “House Work and Art Work,” 84–5. 60 See Modigliani, “Engendering a Counter-Tradition.” 61 Baxter, “Into the Wilds,” 185. 62 Shaw, “Siting the Banal,” 29. For instance, Vincent Bonin writes of “microevents taken from the Baxters’ everyday existence” as the basis for NETCO’s corporate practice. Bonin, “Documentary Protocols,” 53. 63 See N.E. Thing Co. Ltd., A Portfolio of Piles, n. pag. 64 See Haraway, “A Cyborg Manifesto,” 149–81. 65 See Boltanski and Chiapello, The New Spirit of Capitalism, 259; Relyea, Your Everyday Art World, 5. 66 See Bonin, “Here, Bad News,” 82–95. 67 See Butler, “Imitation and Gender Insubordination,” 312. 68 See Molesworth, “House Work and Art Work,” 71–5; Wark, Radical Gestures, 7. See also Butler, “Imitation and Gender Insubordination,” 307–20. Marsha Meskimmon proposes a critical “chronology through cartography” as a postcolonial rejoinder to developmental models. Meskimmon, “Chronology through Cartography,” 323. 69 See Butler, “Art and Feminism.” 70 See Sontag, “Notes on ‘Camp.’” 71 McLuhan, “New Technology and the Arts,” 7. 72 McLuhan, The Gutenberg Galaxy, 14. See also McLuhan, “Roles, Masks, and Performances.” McLuhan’s performative understanding of gender likely took a cue from Lewis, who, as Paul Edwards observes, “regard[ed] gender as virtually entirely conventional or ideological, not natural.” Edwards, Wyndham Lewis, 345. 73 Monk, Is Toronto Burning?, 26. 74 Turner, From Counterculture to Cyberculture, 63. 75 Cavell, McLuhan in Space, 182. 76 See Buchloh, “Conceptual Art 1962–1969.” 77 Molesworth, “House Work and Art Work,” 78. 78 Connell, “Masculinities and Globalization,” 16. 79 Connell, “Masculinities and Globalization,” 11. 80 Wark, Radical Gestures, 5.

236

Notes to pages 178–80

81 Molesworth, “House Work and Art Work,” 82. 82 Shaw, “Expanded Consciousness,” 107. “The Bagged Place show (February 1966) was still Iain.” Baxter qtd in Alberro, “Interview with Ingrid Baxter,” 41. 83 Turner, From Counterculture to Cyberculture, 50. 84 Ingrid Baxter’s critical exploration of gender roles cleared a path for the subsequent work of Martha Wilson in the early 1970s, which, as Jayne Wark argues, “prefigured some of Butler’s ideas about gender performativity.” Wark, “Martha Wilson,” 9. 85 Modigliani. “Letter to the Editor,” 9. 86 Baxter qtd in Alberro, “Interview with Ingrid Baxter,” 41. 87 See, for instance, Sally Hayman, “He Collects Uncollectable Art Objects,” Seattle Post-Intelligencer, 21 June 1970, 11; Lowndes, “The Message Is – VSI,” 3; Joan Lowndes, “Coast to Coast Art,” Vancouver Sun, 10 July 1969, 10A; Lowndes, “Iain Baxter”; Susan Paynter, “Doing N.E. Thing for Gross National Good,” Seattle Post-Intelligencer, 21 June 1970, 1, 6; Susan Paynter, “N.E. Thing Can Happen When You Meet Iain Baxter.” Seattle Post-Intelligencer, 19 July 1970, 6–7; Pierce, “Word Worth,” n. pag.; Ann Rosenberg, “Iain Baxter: A Possible Sculptor of International Significance,” Vancouver Sun, 8 September 1967, 3A, 26A; Ann Rosenberg, “N.E. Thing Really Goes,” Vancouver Sun, 6 December 1968, 9A. 88 See Cameron, Sculpture ’67, 84; Lippard, “Vancouver”; Lippard, “Iain Baxter.” 89 See Brennan, Modernism’s Masculine Subjects. 90 Ingrid Baxter has stated that “this Marshall McLuhan bit is much overrated … I skimmed his book, but I don’t think IAIN read, from cover to cover, any of McLuhan’s philosophy. It’s much exaggerated.” Scott, “Mr. Concept,” 97. 91 In a 2009 interview, Grant Arnold asks Ingrid Baxter: “Was that interest in the idea of the kind of sender and receiver coming out of any kind of specific influences, like Marshall McLuhan for example? … And, was that something that you kind of read a lot of, Marshall McLuhan?” Baxter relies: “No. I think it’s osmosis – intuitively, yeah. I don’t think I really read … I would read snippets of Marshall McLuhan, but not really, you know, studied up all that.” Baxter with Arnold, “Interview.” 92 Marchessault, “Mechanical Brides and Mama’s Boys,” 175. 93 Marchessault, “Mechanical Brides and Mama’s Boys,” 176. 94 McLuhan, The Mechanical Bride, 93. See also Balsamo, Technologies of the Gendered Body. 95 Connell and Messerschmidt, “Hegemonic Masculinity,” 832. 96 See Baxter qtd in Alberro, “Interview with Ingrid Baxter,” 41; Fleming, Baxter 2, 92; Grescoe, “Steady, Now,” 15. 97 Milthorp, “Fascination, Masculinity, and Cyberspace,” 135. 98 McLuhan, The Mechanical Bride, 122, 115.

Notes to pages 180–5

99 100 101 102 103 104 105 106 107 108 109

110 111 112

113 114 115 116 117 118 119 120

121

237

See McLuhan, Culture Is Our Business; McLuhan and Nevitt, Take Today. McLuhan, The Mechanical Bride, 131. Cavell, Remediating McLuhan, 50. McLuhan, The Mechanical Bride, 123. N.E. Thing Co. Ltd., N.E. Thing Co. Ltd., n. pag. N.E. Thing Co. Ltd., N.E. Thing Co. Ltd. See also Toffler, Future Shock, Ch. 7. N.E. Thing Co. Ltd., “Business Philosophy,” 249; McLuhan and Nevitt, Take Today, 4. IAIN BAXTER&, conversation with the author, 20 November 2010. Halpern, Beautiful Data, 196. Shaw, “Expanded Consciousness,” 102. NETCO foreshadows feminist organizational scholarship on “gendering organizations” through processes of “paying attention to how organizational structures and processes are dominated by culturally defined masculine meanings.” Alvesson and Billing, Understanding Gender and Organizations, 72. Connell and Wood, “Globalization and Business Masculinities,” 354. See Butler, “Women – Concept – Art.” To the best of my knowledge, the only other NETCO work explicitly credited to Ingrid Baxter is Older Than Younger Than, described in 1974 as a “series started in 1969. Ingrid Baxter, Co-president has been involved in this series. A book will be coming out soon about this concept.” N.E. Thing Co. Ltd. qtd in The Owens Art Gallery, Investigations, n. pag. In her report on the Arctic Circle projects sponsored by the Edmonton Art Gallery as extensions of its concurrent exhibition Place and Process, Lucy Lippard additionally describes a number of actions executed by Ingrid Baxter, including a “water exchange” between the Seymour and the Mackenzie rivers. Lippard, “Art within the Arctic Circle,” 668. N.E. Thing Co. Ltd., N.E. Thing Co. Ltd., n. pag. See also Baxter, “In the Wilds,” 180–1; Watson, “In the Image Bank,” 15. See, for instance, Sheila McCook, “Huff, Puff – It’s Instant Wardrobe,” Ottawa Citizen, 11 June 1969, 49. 49; Rosenberg, “N.E. Thing Really Goes,” 9A. See also Ingrid Baxter’s irreverent performance of executive labour in the 1969 NETCO work President of a Company Face Screwing. Bryan-Wilson, Art Workers, 159. See Alberro, Conceptual Art, 156, 207n22. See Lippard, “Curating by Numbers.” See Baxter, “Water Ways,” 1983. In a 1976 interview with Ann Rosenberg for The Capilano Review, Ingrid Baxter states that “the business has to be a financially rewarding thing for everyone involved. It has to turn bucks, so to speak … We’re sold in.” Baxter in Rosenberg, “Interview / N.E. Thing Co.,” 171, emphasis in the original. See Andreotti, “Play-Tactics,” 36–58; Gilbert, “Herbie Goes Bananas,” 67–81.

238

122 123 124 125 126 127 128 129

130 131 132

133 134 135 136 137 138 139 140 141

142 143 144 145 146 147 148 149 150

Notes to pages 185–91

See, for instance, Katz, “Allan Ginsberg, Herbert Marcuse.” Butler, “Imitation and Gender Insubordination,” 311. Solomon-Godeau, “The Woman Who Never Was,” 344. Relyea, Your Everyday Art World, vii. Tayler, “Delayed Climax,” 52. See also Image Bank, International Image Exchange Directory. Lippard, Six Years, 9. See Brooker, “A Statistical Picture,” 394. Brooker owned a 1918 edition of Carpenter’s Love’s Coming-of-Age, and a 1923 edition of Ellis’s The Dance of Life. See “Personal Library of Bertram Brooker,” donor files, BBF, UMASC. Monk, Glamour Is Theft, 158. See Bayer, “Uncovering the Roots,” 22–120. See Lebovici, “Gender ‘Trouple,’” 90. Without employing terms like “gay,” “lesbian,” or “queer,” Sontag allusively defined kitsch as “something of a private code, a badge of identity even, among small urban cliques.” Sontag, “Notes on ‘Camp,’” 515. Watson, “In the Image Bank,” 17. Freeman, Time Binds, xi, xvi. Bronson, “Pablum for the Pablum Eaters,” 20. Lebovici, “Gender ‘Trouple,’” 96. Lebovici, “Gender ‘Trouple,’” 88; Katz, “‘The Senators Were Revolted,’” 243. For a historicization of shifting sexual identifications relative to cultural production, see Lord and Meyer, Queer Art and Culture. Bordowitz, General Idea, 64. Lebovici, “Gender ‘Trouple,’” 85. Lankavatara Sutra qtd in Watts, The Way of Zen, 64. Joshua Ramey writes that “Spinoza’s geometrical method … attempts to move the mind beyond or through linguistic signs to a ‘metasemiotic’ mode of apprehension or superior insight beyond the limits of a thought bound to signification.” Ramey, The Hermetic Deleuze, 87. See Bordowitz, General Idea, 73–4. See Lebovici, “Gender ‘Trouple,’” 100. See Grace, “‘The Living Soul of Man,’” 9; Zemans, “First Fruits,” 33n5. Foucault, The History of Sexuality, 1:12, 140. See also Robinson, The Measure of Democracy. Rouvroy and Berns, “Algorithmic Governmentality,” xiii. McLuhan, The Mechanical Bride, 48. See Ritchie, “Allusions, Omissions, Cover-Ups,” 14–15; Tayler, “Delayed Climax,” 56n2. See Bonnet, “Setting the Stage,” 32. See Genosko, “Where the Youth Aren’t”; Parker, “The Museum.”

Notes to pages 191–6

151 152 153 154 155

156 157 158

159 160 161 162 163 164 165 166 167 168 169 170 171 172 173 174 175 176 177 178 179

180

239

See Foster et al., Art Since 1900, 552. Monk, Glamour Is Theft, 82. Halpern, Beautiful Data, 135. Kroker, Technology and the Canadian Mind, 9. See Bayer, “Uncovering the Roots,” 94. As a symbolic devivification of the humanistic contents of LIFE magazine, FILE retrieved Lewis’s earlier satiric devitalization of Bergson’s philosophy of life. See “Inventory of the Daniel Cappon fonds,” DCF. See Marchand, Marshall McLuhan, 174–5. See, for instance, Daniel Cappon, “The Homosexual Hoax: This Aberration Is Not a Right,” Toronto Star, 10 January 1973, 6; Marilyn Dunlop, “Most Homosexuality Easily Cured,” Toronto Daily Star, 10 October 1968, B40; Sidney Katz, “Homosexuals: Sick or Not?,” Toronto Star, 10 April 1974, B3. See Monk, Is Toronto Burning?, 234. Monk, Glamour Is Theft, 53, 63. See also Watson, “In the Image Bank,” 14. AA Bronson qtd in Monk, Glamour Is Theft, 180. Monk, Glamour Is Theft, 166. See Grauerholz, “Introduction,” vii. Meister, “Albert Kahn’s Partners,” 80–1. See Bordowitz, General Idea, 19–22. See Bayer, “Uncovering the Roots,”44–6; Bordowitz, General Idea, 21; Morton, “General Idea.” See Manovich, “Database as Symbolic Form.” Monk, Glamour Is Theft, 195. See, for instance, Riddell, “Stein and Bergson.” Bordowitz, “Timed Transcription,” 37. Bronson, “Pablum for the Pablum Eaters,” 30. Bronson, “Pablum for the Pablum Eaters,” 30. See Monk, Glamour Is Theft, 190. Monk, Glamour Is Theft, 147, emphasis in the original; Bronson qtd in Monk, Glamour Is Theft, 161. See Bronson qtd in Monk, Glamour Is Theft,161. Watson, “In the Image Bank,” 18. See Tayler, “Delayed Climax,” 50. Bergson, Creative Evolution, 70. “We were so busy doing things … and [had] so many projects,” Ingrid Baxter recalled in a 2009 interview with Grant Arnold. “We were just really, really busy, and didn’t get involved in the community all that much. Intermedia was really active, and we were on the fringe, and went to meetings, and did some stuff, but it was always just so many things to get done at home base.” Baxter with Arnold, “Interview.” See also Lyotard, The Postmodern Condition, 66. Muñoz, Cruising Utopia, 116.

240

181 182 183 184 185 186 187 188 189

Notes to pages 196–9

See Bryan-Wilson, “Occupational Realism.” Tsai, Robert Smithson Unearthed, 26. Relyea, Your Everyday Art World, 7. Relyea, Your Everyday Art World, ix. Rouvroy and Berns, “Algorithmic Governmentality,” xvi. Muñoz, Cruising Utopia, 83. Crary, 24/7, 8. Crary, 24/7, 8. See also Brooker [The Globe], “Globe Readers Are leaders,” 119. Crary, 24/7, 19, 10.

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Index

Action Française, 135 ACT UP, 189 Ader, Bas Jan, 75 Ad Hoc Women Artists’ Committee, 185 advertising, 20–1, 24–8, 36–40, 42–6, 49–66. See also marketing AIDS, 188, 195–6 Alberro, Alexander, 174 algorithmic governmentality, 21, 60, 63, 79, 189; and “statistical doubles,” 63 Allan, Kenneth, 3, 6, 72 Allen, Grant, 40–2 anticapitalism, 10, 104; and dematerialization, 9 apophaticism, 117, 119 Apple Watch, 162 Aquinas, Thomas, 70–1, 80, 98 architecture, 68, 97–8, 101, 149, 155, 187, 191–3, 201n9; as “architexture,” 193; and Erickson– Massey Architects, 97–8. See also General Idea Arnold, Grant, 123–4, 138, 152, 160, 174, 226n13, 236n91, 239n179

Arsić, Branka, 145–6 Art & Language, 77, 109, 185, 189 Art Gallery of Toronto, 28, 66 Art Metropole. See General Idea Arts and Letters Club, 8, 36, 66 Art Workers’ Coalition (AWC), 183, 185 Ascott, Roy, 105, 218n119 associationism, 15–16, 24, 39, 50, 54–6, 162–3, 189, 197. See also empiricism Atlantis, 126–7, 158–61, 165–7 attention, 45, 51, 54–60, 199 attention economy, 60, 199 avant-garde, 75–6, 92, 130–1, 135, 159; perceived failure of, 141; and the transformation of everyday life, 9, 11. See also neo-avant-garde Aztec, 159; gods, 155, 161, 170 Bacon, Francis (painter), 73 Bacon, Francis (philosopher), 72, 79, 170 Baker, George, 143 Baldwin, Andrew, 173 Balsamo, Anne, 180

276

Index

Bateson, Gregory, 117, 225n145 Bauhaus, 90–1 Baxter, Iain: 24-hour Class, 115; byōbu screen paintings, 108; and “Centre for Universal Information Potential” (UINPO), 103–5; and “EUNUCHVERSITY,” 105–6; and inflatable wearables, 91–2; and Japanese government scholarship, 108–9, 223n101; and McLuhan, 72, 79, 92, 99–100, 102–4, 106–8, 110, 113–16, 119–20, 140, 180, 216n55; and non-verbal teaching, 110–13, 119–20, 223n102; and rebranding of SFU, 99–100, 106, 187; “Selfinterview,” 114; and Stan Douglas, 120; as university resident, 98; and Zen, 79, 107–8, 110, 119 Baxter, Ingrid: as administrator, 68–9, 174, 196, 177; Centennial Aquatic Event, 182; election as copresident, 68, 107, 178, 180, 213n5; and “gender insubordination,” 176–9, 182, 183; Inactive Verbs, 182–3, 184 fig. C.5; and Lippard, 185; and McLuhan, 179–80, 185, 236n90, 236n91; Older Than Younger Than, 237n112; recuperation of, 175–6, 178; and role-play, 177, 195, 236n84, 237n115; and Siegelaub, 183; and “water exchange,” 237n112; and “water VSI,” 182 Bayer, Fern, 187 Beer, Stafford, 80 behaviourism, 10, 12, 21, 24, 39, 46–51, 53, 57, 60, 62, 81, 162; and neo-behaviourism, 51, 79, 197 Belgrad, Daniel, 112, 123 Bell Labs, 8 Bennett, W.A.C., 96 Bense, Max, 60

Berbers, 154, 157–9, 167 Bergson, Henri: auditory paradigm of, 46, 54–5, 142; Creative Evolution, 13, 27, 44, 132–5, 142–3; on dance, 36–7; and dualism, 14–15, 20, 34, 55, 72, 134, 151, 163, 189; on durée (duration), 14, 16, 18, 34–6, 43–4, 133–4, 142, 197, 203n70; on élan vital, 9, 19, 21; and evolutionary problematic, 9, 18–19, 133, 152; and “image of thought,” 21; lectures at Collège de France, 135; and Lucretius, 229n119; Matter and Memory, 18, 43, 135, 142, 151, 229n119; on melody, 36, 40, 42; on memory, 43–5, 55, 134, 143, 151, 155, 163, 203n70; and ontology of the “image,” 135–6, 142–6, 151, 229n119; on qualitative multiplicity, 10, 27, 40, 57, 189; on sound, 42, 46; on “spatialized time,” 155; Time and Free Will, 42, 54–5, 163. See also virtuality Berkeley, George, 6, 17–18, 23, 130, 144–51, 154, 227n49 Berland, Jody, 14 Berns, Thomas, 17, 21, 51, 60, 79 Bertalanffy, Ludwig von, 7 Berwick Street Film Collective, 175 Best-Maugard, Adolfo, 164 Betts, Gregory, 27, 29–31; and “Canadian Vorticism,” 7, 26, 46, 137. See also Vorticism Black Mountain College, 91 blackness, 120 Boltanski, Luc, 196 Bonin, Vincent, 84, 104, 183, 235n62 Bonnett, John, 7, 57 Boon, Marcus, 109, 117 Bordowitz, Gregg, 188–9, 192–3 Bragdon, Claude, 66, 212n227

Index

Brain, Robert Michael, 53 Brand, Stewart, 171 Broeckmann, Andreas, 8–9 Bronson, AA, 187–90, 193–4 Brooker, Bertram: on “advertisingese,” 51; on “average Canadian consumer,” 21, 62–4; The Brave Voices, 27, 42–4, 208n94; Copy Technique in Advertising, 25, 37, 39, 163, 164 fig. C.1; Elijah, 31, 32 fig. 1.2; Figures in a Landscape, 28, 29 fig. 1.1, 30, 35–6; Fugue, 36, 37 fig. 1.3; Green Movement, 37, 38 fig. 1.4, 49, 63; “humanics,” 49, 162; Jevon, 15, 31, 33, 35–6, 60, 61 fig. 1.11, 66, 212n227; Layout Technique in Advertising, 25, 164; and Murry, 27, 29, 31, 39–40, 163, 207n76; and music, 42, 208n94; “Nudes and Prudes,” 28, 41; on radio, 28, 36, 43, 46; and rhythm, 37, 39–41, 45, 163; and Rhythmism, 27, 39, 52, 163; and scenarios for silent films, 31, 41; Sounds Assembling, 57, 59 fig. 1.10, 60–1; Space and Time, 18, 19 fig. I.2, 41; The Tangled Miracle, 29–36, 42, 101; theory of gravitation, 44–5; Yearbook of the Arts in Canada, 36–7 fig. 1.3. See also Bergson, Henri; synaesthesia Bryan-Wilson, Julia, 183, 196 Bucke, R.M., 31 Buchloh, Benjamin. See conceptualism Buddhism, 110; as “critique of essences,” 109, 117 Bürger, Peter, Theory of the AvantGarde, 141 Burke, Edmund, 207n86 Burnham, Jack, 147 Burroughs, William S., 188–9, 193; and “cut-up method,” 192

277

Burroughs Adding Machine Company, 192 Butler, Judith: on “gender insubordination,” 176, 188; on gender performativity, 176–7, 179, 185, 188, 236n84 Cage, John, 108, 113, 122–3 Cambridge Analytica, 118, 189 camera lucida, 148–50 Cameron, Dorothy, 84, 107, 108, 110, 179 camp, 176–7, 188 Campbell, SueEllen, 134, 142, 144–5, 151, 154 Canada, and Canadianicity, 11, 23 Canadian Association of University Teachers (CAUT), 97, 106 Canadian Forum, The, 29, 46, 135 Cappon, Daniel, 191–3 CARFAC, 84 Carothers, John Colin, 173 Carpenter, Edmund, 6–7, 86–7, 220n2 Carpenter, Edward, 27, 187, 189 cartography, 20, 194, 235n68; anti-Cartesian, 174; and “Black geographies,” 174; “‘cartographic’ writing,” 125, 161; and Indigenous mapping practices, 158; and “unmapping,” 134 Catherwood, Frederick, 127, 148–51 Catholicism, 70, 76, 86, 98, 125; Catholic modernism, 73, 211n184 Cavell, Richard, 14, 39, 68, 90, 107, 116, 177, 181, 201n6, 219n161 Celts, 159, 165, 167, 169 Center for Advanced Visual Culture (CAVS), 101 Centre for Communication and the Arts. See Simon Fraser University (SFU)

278

Index

Chandler, John, 9 Chaplin, Charlie, 129 Cheetham, Mark, 16 Chevreul, Michel Eugène, 89 Chiapello, Ève, 196 Churchward, James, 159–61, 167–8 Clark, Lygia, 9 Cleveland, John, 97, 101, 103 Cold War, 86, 93–5, 196, 220n2; paranoia, 92 Colman, Felicity, 143–4 colour theory, 87–9 communication: infrastructure, 67, 195–6; McLuhan’s analyses of, 8, 74, 79, 93, 96, 101; “over time,” 132; and telecommunications, 20, 196; theory of sympathetic, 37, 39. See also cybernetics; empathy computer art, 4–5, 8–9, 202n26, 204n79 Conceptual art. See under conceptualism conceptualism: as “aesthetic of administration,” 177; Chinese conceptualism, 110; Conceptual art, 3–4, 22, 90, 104, 112, 123, 139, 182, 201n8; global conceptualism, 11, 199; Latin American, 9–10, 199; Moscow Conceptualism, 76; Romantic Conceptualism, 75. See also dematerialization; Vancouver photo-conceptualism Connell, R.W., “gendered institutions,” 178 continentalism, 12 Cook, Sarah, 9 Copán, 127, 148 COUM Transmissions, 175 counterculture: and Indigeneity, 171 Crary, Jonathan, 47, 54, 197 Crocker, Stephen, 7 Cubism, 14, 34–5, 60, 87

culture wars, 188 cybernetics: and Cold War, 86; and entropy, 107, 125, 128, 132–4, 136, 142–4, 148, 163, 191, 194, 195; and feedback, 80, 86, 93, 132, 147, 153, 193; and university, 94, 99, 102, 115, 117, 220n2. See also embodiment; Selye, Hans Darwin, Charles, 40–2, 132–3, 181 “database culture,” 197 data economy, 162 datafication, 197 data-mining, 51, 62 Data Processing Manager’s Association (DPMA), 97, 117 Davidson, Ian, 123 Davis, Ann, 26, 209n129 death of the author, 22, 68 De Baere, Bart, 122, 123, 125 de Duve, Thierry, 75, 89–90, 109 de la Mare, Walter, 37–9 Deleuze, Gilles: and “time-image,” 134, 143 Deloria, Philip: and antiwar protest, 172; “playing Indian,” 168, 171 dematerialization: as de-emphasis of visual, 9, 199; “inverted,” 9 Depero, Fortunato, 25 de Saint-Exupéry, Antoine, 158 designation, 109, 152–3 Dewdney, Alexander Keewatin (“Kee”), 5 diagram, 44–5, 60, 86–7, 93, 126, 138–9, 143, 152, 155 dialectic, 22, 70–7, 136, 147, 150, 154, 157 digital, as digitality, 10, 14–15, 17, 19, 22, 69–72 digital culture, 7, 181, 195, 199 digital materialism, 67, 70, 196, 199 Dikeakos, Christos, 138, 152

Index

Dismorr, Jessica, 27. See also Rhythmism Dominik, Hans, 165–6 Donnelly, Ignatius, 159–61, 167 Doray, Victor, 98, 101–2, 215n37; “mobile information van,” 104, 115 Douglas, Stan, 120, 174, 199 dualism. See Bergson, Henri; digital, as digitality Du Bois, W.E.B., 165 Duchamp, Marcel, 8, 9, 186; The Bride Stripped Bare, 34; Nude Descending a Staircase, No. 2, 34–5, 37, 207n59; and “pictorial nominalism,” 89, 138; and readymade, 109 Duns Scotus, 22, 70–1, 80–1; and “dullness,” 74; and haecceity, 80, 107, 179; and Scotism, 71, 73–4, 81, 214n25. See also univocity Duquet, Suzanne, 5 Dwan, Virginia, 160, 170 Dyson, Bryan, 68, 81, 215n37 Eames, Charles, 69, 80, 101–2, 115, 191, 221n45 Eames, Ray, 69, 80, 101, 115, 191 Edwards, Paul, 130, 135, 141, 227n49, 235n72 Ehrenzweig, Anton, 129, 135, 138–9, 140 fig. 4.4, 141, 144 einfühlung. See empathy Eisenstein, Sergei, 73 electromagnetism, metaphors, 35, 101 Eliot, T.S., 125–6, 142 Ellis, Havelock, 187, 189, 238n129 embodiment: cybernetic, 86, 152 Emily Carr University, 120, 121 fig. 3.7 empathy, 39–41, 53, 84

279

empiricism, 11, 15–18, 41, 43, 130, 141, 150, 199, 227n49; and human nature, 16–17, 203n70; and imagination, 16–17, 145; logical empiricism, 55. See also associationism; Berkeley, George; Hume, David; transcendental empiricism entropy. See cybernetics Epicureanism, 73, 86, 153, 229n119 ethnography, 82, 153, 194, 197 Experiments in Art and Technology (E.A.T.), 3 Expo ’67, 101 Facebook, 80 Farley, David, 136, 153–4, 157–8 Fechner, Gustav, 53–6, 89, 193; “measurable units of sensation,” 54, 89, 193; panpsychism, 55. See also Weber–Fechner law feedback. See cybernetics feminism: second-wave, 174–6, 178; third-wave, 176, 178; fourth-wave, 176 Fergusson, John Duncan, 27. See also Rhythmism Festival of the Contemporary Arts. See University of British Columbia (UBC) Filliou, Robert, 83 Fiore, Quentin, 90, 91 fig. 2.7, 140 Fitbit, 162 FitzGerald, LeMoine, 26 Focillon, Henri, 133–4, 227n67 Foikus, Kim, 74 Ford, Ford Madox, 39 Fordism, 62. See also post-Fordism formalism: opticality, 25, 129, 135, 138, 147–8; physiological formalisms, 53. See also Fried, Michael; Greenberg, Clement

280

Index

Foucault, Michel, 6, 19, 27, 47, 62; “administration of collective bodies,” 63; biopolitics, 7, 27, 62–4, 66, 162, 189; biopower, 27, 189 Frampton, Kenneth: “critical regionalism,” 11 Francis, Daniel: “plastic shaman,” 171–2 Freeman, Elizabeth, 188 Free Media Bulletin, 122, 225n4 Fried, Michael, 25, 129, 134, 138, 147, 150. See also formalism Friel, John, 109, 180 French, Peter A., 68 Frye, Northrop: “garrison mentality,” 13 Galloway, Alexander, 15, 71, 119–20. See also digital, as digitality Galton, Francis, 63 Gaudier-Brzeska, Henri, 130 Gazelle, Granada (Sharon Venne), 187 gender: and collectives, 175, 179, 187; and organizations, 176–8, 180–2, 186, 189, 237n109. See also Butler, Judith; feminism; masculinity; subjectivity General Idea, 6, 8, 13, 23, 165, 182, 186–98, 199; The 1984 Miss General Idea Pavillion, 187, 191–3, 195; as anti-patriarchal, 182; Art Metropole, 187, 194; Blocking, 190; and CN Tower, 191–3; FILE, 191, 193, 239n155; Going Thru the Motions, 190; High Profile, 192; Miss General Idea Pageant, 186–92; Orgasm Energy Chart, 189, 190 fig. C.6; and queering of McLuhan, 195; Showcards, 193; Towards an Audience Vocabulary, 190 Gilbert, Chris, 84, 185, 189

Gillies, Mary Ann, 25, 135 Gordon, W. Terrence, 6 Grace, Sherrill, 64, 205n19 Graham, Dan, 23, 122–3, 125, 137, 228n96 Graves, Morris, 108 Great Salt Lake, 172 fig. C.3 Greenberg, Clement, 13, 20, 138; Greenbergian formalism, 75, 85. See also formalism Grosz, Elizabeth, 20, 77, 203n51, 217n96 Guattari, Félix, 91, 157–8 Guerlac, Suzanne, 36, 142, 209n129 Hacking, Ian, 62 haecceity. See Duns Scotus Hall, Edward T., 112, 223n109 Halpern, Orit, 69, 80, 85, 98, 101–2, 112, 115, 181, 221n45 Halprin, Ann and Lawrence, 103, 115 Haraway, Donna, 175 Harmon, Leon, 4 Harris, Lawren, 31, 33, 36, 173 Harwood, John, 101, 201n9, 220n22 Hayles, N. Katherine, 86 Hebb, Donald O., 7 Helmholtz, Hermann von, 90, 219n161 Henderson, Linda Dalrymple, 34–5 Herzog, Fred, 175 heterosexism, 187 Hildebrand, Adolf von, 90 hippies. See counterculture: and Indigeneity Hitchcock, Alfred: North by Northwest, 172 Hitler, Adolf, 136, 153 Hogarth, William, 16 Hollingworth, Harry L., 56 fig. 1.8, 57, 60

Index

Holt, Nancy, 170; Swamp, 143 homophobia, 187 Hooke, Robert, 149 “housework.” See Molesworth, Helen Housser, F.B., 31, 33, 36 Hudson, Anna, 28, 35, 41 Hui, Alexandra, 55 Hulme, T.E., 125, 130 Hume, David, 15–17, 49, 227n49. See also associationism; empiricism Huyssen, Andreas, 28 IBM, 68, 97, 118, 220n22; “Information Machine,” 70, 101. See also McLuhan, Marshall identity: Canadian, 12, 64; gender, 20, 179, 188; and Indigeneity, 171–2; and information as a non-representational politics, 196, 199; and “naming,” 188, 196; national, 64, 168; Platonic, 109; and “preidentitarian” relations, 196; queer, 176, 188, 238n132; and racialization, 169; and representation, 23, 165; statistics and “composite identity,” 27. See also Canada Image Bank, 123, 188, 194, 196–7; Colour Bar Research, 193, 194 fig. C.7; International Image Exchange Directory, 186 Imagism, 135 immanence: information as, 11, 13, 17, 74–5; philosophies of immanence, 17, 204n80; “pure immanence,” 81; and semiotics, 77; and theology, 33 Indigeneity, 168–70; white appropriation of, 20, 170–2 information: and “antiinformation,” 116; counter-circulation of, 10; flood of, 102; “information

281

industries,” 17, 20, 24, 31, 35, 110, 195; as innervation, 73, 193. See also information society; N.E. Thing Co. Ltd (NETCO) INFORMATION (exhibition), 4, 5 information art, 3–9, 11, 13, 15–18, 28, 75, 194–5 “information ecology,” 72, 195 Information Machine (Olivetti), 4 information society: “Age of Information,” 81, 104; informationalization, 8, 20, 48, 51, 53, 80–1, 163 information theory, 4, 10, 14, 78, 107, 113, 116–17 Ingram, Rex: Love in Morocco, 170 innervation, 41, 73, 193, 215n44. See also information Innis, Harold Adams, 6–9, 17–18, 20, 24–5, 31, 45–6, 48. See also information Innis, Mary Quayle, 46 Israel, Nico, 126, 136, 172 IT, 109; Pneumatic Judd, 180 Johnston, Hugh, 95–7, 106 Jones, Caroline A., 20, 99, 126, 136 Joyce, James, 70, 71, 129, 142 J. Walter Thompson, 12, 50, 61, 63 Kandinsky, Wassily, 89 Kane, Carolyn L., 8, 204n79 Kant, Immanuel: and categories of space and time, 14; and faculties, 68; and faculty of judgment, 17, 41, 75; Kantianism, 13, 16, 20, 41, 68. See also formalism; Fried, Michael; Greenberg, Clement Kaprow, Allan, 108 Katz, Jonathan D., 188 Katz, Leandro, 150 Kelly, Mary, 11

282

Index

Kenner, Hugh, 49, 71 Kepes, György, 101–2, 112, 115, 191 Kern, Stephen, 14 Keyserling, Hermann, 27 Kittler, Friedrich, 6, 20, 28, 53, 70, 99, 145; and “discourse network,” 6, 10–12, 23, 55, 123, 141, 162, 165 Klein, Yves, 75 Knowlton, Kenneth, 4 Kroker, Arthur, 191 Kubler, George, 131–4, 144 Kupka, František, 89 Lake, Suzy, 182, 185 Land Art, 125. See also Smithson, Robert Laruelle, François, 15, 119, 204n80 La Salle, René-Robert Cavelier, Sieur de, 169 Lawrence, D.H., 170–1 “lazy eye.” See strabismus Lears, Jackson, 25, 50 Leavis, F.R., 53 Lebensphilosophie, 27 Lebovici, Elizabeth, 188 Lee, Pamela M., 131–3, 142 Lee, Vernon, 21, 39–41, 43, 53, 55, 189, 207n86 Lee-Nova, Gary, 123 Leibniz, Gottfried Wilhelm, 86, 204n80 Leider, Philip, 114 Leirner, Nelson, 92 Levine, Les, 186 Lewis, Glenn, 182 Lewis, Wyndham: America and Cosmic Man, 157, 168–9, 232n215; America, I Presume, 169; The Apes of God, 131, 136, 142, 154, 207n59; The Art of Being Ruled, 47, 49, 130; Bagdad, 155, 156 fig. 4.5; Blast, 27, 130, 205n20; The Caliph’s Design,

130, 141; claims to Indigenous ancestry, 169, 234n22; and fascism, 129, 136, 153, 165, 167, 227n45; Filibusters in Barbary, 127, 135–6, 153–5, 157–61, 165–7, 170, 232n220; and gender, 235n72; and Group X, 130; Hitler, 157, 165; The Human Age, 49, 209n122; misogyny, 169; Paleface, 165, 167, 170; “philosophy of the eye,” 18, 129, 133, 135, 141–2; and postcolonial critique, 157–8, 161; and race, 157, 159, 165, 167, 169, 171, 232n220; Snooty Baronet, 47, 49, 81, 153, 167, 180; Tarr, 131, 215n40; “A World Art and Tradition,” 159, 232n215. See also Time and Western Man; Vorticism linguistic turn, 82, 89, 119, 123, 141, 195 Linsley, Robert, 129, 134, 138, 141, 147, 150 Lippard, Lucy R.: and feminism, 183, 185; and leadership, 183 Lipps, Theodor, 40 Lismer, Arthur, 26, 28, 36 Louis, Morris, 150 Lucretius, 86, 122, 229n119 Luff, Carole, 27, 205n18 Lum, Ken, 84 Lunden, Duane, 69, 175 Macdonald, John Barfoot, 95–6 Mallinson, Tom, 222n70 Manovich, Lev, 16, 193 Mansfield, Katherine, 39, 51, 52 fig. 1.7, 56–7 Marchessault, Janine, 179–80, 202n20 marketing, 7, 12, 20–1, 24–5, 27–8, 39, 44–6, 49–51, 54, 57–66; and market surveys, 50, 63; and niche

Index

marketing, 20–1, 62, 211n199. See also advertising Martin, Reinhold, 134, 136, 147 masculinity, 175, 178, 180–2; cybernetic, 180; hegemonic, 180. See also gender Maya, 127–8, 148–50, 154–5, 157, 160–1, 167–72, 194 McLuhan, Marshall: as adviser to Trudeau, 93, 173, 219n175; on “anti-environment,” 76; as artist, 3; on Baxter, 216n55; and Bergson, 7, 11, 13–14, 20, 72, 123, 151–2, 193, 202n20, 225n8; and Berkeley, 18, 113, 224n120; Centre for Culture and Technology, 88, 103, 221n54; classical sources, 13, 22, 71–7, 79, 102, 106, 153, 214n28; Counterblast, 70; on “counterenvironment,” 3–4; death of, 195; and dialectic, 22, 70–9, 214n28; on Duchamp, 207n59; and “effects” of media, 7, 69, 71, 73, 77, 80, 108, 110, 152, 180, 220n14; and Francis Bacon, 72, 79; and gender 235n72; and “global village,” 23, 49, 93, 152, 157, 160, 168, 171–3; as grammarian, 72, 76–7, 79, 99; The Gutenberg Galaxy, 18, 71, 173; IBM Sensory Profile Study, 191; influence on N.E. Thing Co. Ltd, 113–14, 236n90, 236n91; The Laws of Media, 72, 79; The Mechanical Bride, 24, 45, 57, 60, 66, 180–1, 189, 207n59; The Medium Is the Massage, 90, 91 fig. 2.7, 140; and “neo-Pythagorean digitalism,” 72; and “orchestration,” 45; as “plastic shaman,” 171–2; on “post-literacy,” 82, 173; Report on Project in Understanding New Media, 72–3, 79, 80, 93, 108; “sound-based paradigm,” 25, 46; and translation,

283

7, 10, 14, 16, 71, 73–4, 99, 101–2, 107, 113, 115; Understanding Media, 13, 35, 48, 70, 74, 80–1, 86, 87, 93, 95–6, 100; use of “probes,” 71, 79, 108; War and Peace in the Global Village, 90. See also McLuhanism; New Criticism; virtuality McLuhanism, 81. See also McLuhan, Marshall McShine, Kynaston, 4 McTaggart-Cowan, Patrick, 100, 106 media, 3–4, 6–9, 12–13, 16–17, 19–25 media art history, 20 Meireles, Cildo, 10 Meltzer, Eve, 11, 81, 98, 144, 147 memory, 54–5, 126, 134, 136, 143, 151, 155, 163, 203n70; involuntary, 134; in marketing, 44–5, 54, 62; universal (la durée réelle), 43–4 Merry Pranksters, 177 Mezei, Leslie, 5 Miami Islet, 122–3, 160–1 Minimalism, 137, 180 Mitchell, Peta, 125, 158, 161 Mohr, Manfred, 4 Moles, Abraham, 60, 140–1, 152 Molesworth, Helen, “housework,” 177 Molnar, Vera, 4 monism, 35, 55, 70, 73, 89–90, 214n25, 218n143 Monk, Phillip, 177, 186–7, 191–3, 195 Montreal Museum of Fine Arts, 77 More, Thomas, 170 Morocco, 153–5, 157, 159–60, 166–7, 170, 194. See also Atlantis Morris, Michael, 123, 186 Morris, Robert, 11 Mu, 159–61, 167. See also Atlantis; Pacific Nation Mullarkey, John, 15, 163

284

Index

Muñoz, José Esteban, 196 Münsterberg, Hugo; 56; and Gertrude Stein, 55, 193 Murry, John Middleton, 27, 29, 31, 39–40, 163, 207n76; The Adelphi, 39; The Blue Review, 27, 39; God, 29; Rhythm, 27, 39, 40; and Rhythmism, 27, 163 Nake, Frieder, 4 Narcissus, 81 Nashe, Thomas, 72, 76 Naturphilosophie, 55 neo-avant-garde, 141 neo-Dada, 81, 123 neoliberalism, 13, 19, 103, 182, 195–7 N.E. Thing Co. Ltd (NETCO): ACTs and ARTs, 75, 80, 83, 89, 109, 197; Celebration of the Body, 73, 75; and Cibachrome, 137; Color/Language, 77; and data privacy, 118; Dummy Self-Portrait Sculpture, 81, 82 fig. 82; formulas, 73–4, 79, 88; founding, 67–8, 109, 213n5; “Glossary,” 85 fig. 2.4; “hydro projects,” 74; and information ecology, 72, 195; information form, 81, 83 fig. 2.3, 235n55; A Portfolio of Piles, 115, 116 fig. 3.6, 137–8, 140, 151, 175, 228n96; Ruins, 137; SEND LIE AND RECEIVE TRUTH, 117; Talk, 77; VIP, 113, 114 fig. 3.5; Sensitivity Information, 22, 35, 68–70, 73–4, 82, 84–6, 89, 103, 107, 109, 112, 114, 119 networks: correspondence network, 186; “Eternal Network,” 187; and neoliberal networker, 61, 153, 196 Nevitt, Barrington, 92, 102, 181 New Criticism, 51, 53, 211n184 New York Corres Sponge Dance School of Vancouver, 182 Nolan, Ginger, 173 Noll, A. Michael, 4

nomadism, 20, 157–60, 171, 196 Nootka, 161 Nova Scotia College of Art and Design (NSCAD), 116–17 Novick, Honey, 187 nude, the, 21, 28–30, 34, 36–7, 40–1, 53, 207n59; Nudes in a Landscape, 29 fig. 1.1 number: “colour as number,” 9; “empire of number,” 69; “irrational number,” 146; “the obscure number of the quality,” 202n42; and “proto-feminist a/counting,” 185; qualitative multiplicity, 10, 27, 40, 57; “reading-by-numbers,” 53; as return of the repressed, 11. See also statistics occupational realism, 196 Oiticica, Hélio, 9 Oliva, Achille Bonito, 126 Olson, Charles, 122 Ong, Walter: “secondary orality,” 99, 163 Ontario College of Art (OCA), 105, 218n119 Ontario Society of Artists (OSA), 28–31, 36, 41 ontology: and be-ins, 112; and the ontological turn, 120, 199 opticality. See formalism Ostwald, Wilhelm, 87–90, 193, 218n143 Pacific Nation, 123, 160, 225n6; and “culture of spontaneity,” 112 Pagonis, Ilya, 124 fig. 4.1, 138 Paige, Mimi, 187 Palenque, 127. See also Smithson, Robert Parker, Harley, 88–91, 101, 191; “newseum,” 104. See also Royal Ontario Museum (ROM)

Index

Partz, Felix, 187 Patterson, Zabet, 8, 54, 204n79 pedagogy: and architecture, 97–8, 101–2, 107; “choice” as, 80; “classroom without walls” as, 115; and Cold War, 93–5, 220n2; cybernetic, 191; “data overload” as, 102; “deadening effects” of, 110; “duncical tendencies” of, 71; “educator of the senses” as, 107; of information overload, 115; interdisciplinary, 22, 99, 102; nonverbal teaching as, 79, 110, 112–14, 119–20, 223n102; as “pattern recognition,” 101; privatization of, 72, 76, 103–4; reformist, 74; sensorial, 98, 112, 114–15; and social control, 101; Stoic, 79; teach-ins as, 112; trivium and, 76, 77; Zen, 79, 107–8, 110, 112 perspective, 138, 145–6, 148, 161 photography, 37, 74, 137–8, 147, 149– 52, 175, 185, 193, 214n7, 229n114 physiological aesthetics, 21, 39–40, 42–3, 53, 55, 57, 75, 207n86, 219n164. See also formalism Picabia, Francis, 8, 60 Picasso, Pablo, 130 Pickering, Andrew, 217 picturesque, 28, 127, 148–9 Platonism, 109–10, 117, 129, 159; and non-Platonism, 117; Timaeus as, 155 Playboy, 81 “playing Indian.” See Deloria, Philip Poe, Edgar Allen, 93 Pollock, Jackson, 147, 150 Pope, Alexander, The Dunciad, 71, 79 Post-Fordism, 69, 175, 181. See also Fordism post-nationalism, 12, 20, 157, 159, 160, 168 Pound, Ezra, 76, 101, 125–6, 130

285

primitivism, 157–8, 167–8, 170–2, 194, 196–7 Printers’ Ink, 21, 24–5, 50–3, 57, 60, 186, 197, 212n219 Proust, Marcel, 134 psychophysics. See Fechner, Gustav Pudovkin, Vsevolod, 73 Quebec, 12, 64, 212n219 Quetelet, Adolphe, 63 Quetzalcoatl, 161 Quirk, Thomas, 25 Ramírez, Mari Carmen, 9 Ramus, Petrus, 77 Reid, Dennis, 26 Relyea, Lane, 69, 153, 186, 199 representation: critique of, 108–9. See also identity Reynolds, Ann, 134, 136, 141, 146 Rhythmism, 27, 39–40, 52, 163. See also Fergusson, John Duncan; Murry, John Middleton Richards, I.A., 51, 53 Rivera, Diego, 168 Roberts, Jennifer L., 126–9, 134, 148–9, 154 Roelstraete, Dieter, 122–3, 125 Rosenberg, Ann, 152, 223n89 Rouvroy, Antoinette, 17, 21, 51, 60, 79 Royal Ontario Museum (ROM), 88, 191. See also Parker, Harley Ruscha, Ed, 225n4 Ruttmann, Walter, 28, 63–4; hygiene films, 63–4 Said, Edward: Orientalism, 154 scanning, 23, 102, 115, 127, 129, 138–41, 144, 147, 151–3, 161 Schafer, R. Murray, 22, 98–9, 102–3, 115; The Book of Noise, 107, 113 scholasticism, 70, 75, 79; educational theory of, 74

286

Index

Schreber, Daniel Paul, 145 Scott, Marian Dale, 87 Scott, Walter Dill, 54 Selye, Hans, 86–7, 90–3, 95, 192, 196, 218n136. See also stress sensus communis, 70, 99, 101 sexology. See Carpenter, Edward; Ellis, Havelock Shadbolt, Jack, 98, 101 Shannon, Claude E., 14, 79, 116, 132, 139, 152; “freedom of choice,” 10, 80. See also information theory Shaw, Nancy, 104, 175, 177, 182 Shrum, Gordon, 74, 96–8, 106 Siegelaub, Seth, 183 Silcox, David, 113, 216n55 Simon, Herbert A., 60, 85 Simon Fraser University (SFU), 74, 94–5, 98, 107, 113, 183; and Centre for Communication and the Arts, 22, 96, 98–9, 101–7, 114–15, 190–1. See also architecture simulacrum, 110, 150–2, 192 Situationism, 83, 161, 185 Smithson, Robert: Alogons, 146; and Anaconda Copper Mine, 226n13; and Baxter, 229n104; and Bergson, 136, 144; and Berkeley, 144, 146–53; earth maps of, 20, 23, 126–7, 152, 154–5, 158–61, 165, 171, 197, 226n27; Enantiomorphic Chambers, 149; “Entropy and the New Monuments,” 143; Four-Sided Vortex, 126; Glass Strata with Mulch and Soil, 123; Glue Pour, 115, 124 fig. 4.1, 138, 139 fig. 4.3, 151–2; and Hotel Palenque, 170; “Incidents of MirrorTravel in the Yucatan,” 123, 126–7, 136, 147, 150, 154–5, 160–1, 167, 170, 194; and Indian play, 155, 157, 161, 170–2; Island of Broken Glass, 22, 122–3, 126, 136, 153–4, 160–1;

and Lewis, 125–7, 129, 131, 134–6, 141, 143–4, 147–8, 151–61, 165–74, 226n26; Mirror Displacements, 127, 128 fig. 4.2, 129, 134, 138, 146, 148–52, 161; and N.E. Thing Co. Ltd, 232n194; Non-Sites, 126–7, 147, 157; Partially Buried Woodshed, 191; and organicism, 131, 134, 136, 147, 151; “Quasi-Infinities and the Waning of Space,” 131; “A Sedimentation of the Mind,” 137–8, 151; Spill: Boulder White Paint (Britannia Beach Project), 226n13; Spiral Jetty (earthwork), 125, 172 fig. C.3, 226n13; Spiral Jetty (film), 134, 143, 172; “Ultramoderne,” 143, 155, 169; and Vancouver-area travels, 22, 122, 226n13; and Wall, 23, 122, 125, 137, 197, 226n15; and Wallace, 23, 137, 197, 228n96. See also camera lucida; cybernetics; Holt, Nancy; Kubler, George; Stephens, John Lloyd; Yucatán Société Anonyme, 66 Software (exhibition), 147 Solomon-Godeau, Abigail, 185 Sontag, Susan, 176, 179, 188, 238n132. See also camp sound. See Brooker, Bertram; McLuhan, Marshall; Ong, Walter; Rhythmism; synaesthesia space: Atlantean, 165; and “despatialized” architecture, 191; and international mobility, 20, 196; non-Euclidean, 90; planetary, 152, 160; post-national, 20, 160. See also architecture; Bergson, Henri; cartography Spencer, Herbert, 27 Spengler, Oswald, 27 Spinoza, Baruch, 67, 204n80, 213n2, 216n75, 219n155, 238n141

Index

statistics, 7–8, 10, 20–1, 24–5, 27–8, 49–53, 57, 61–6, 79, 162, 189–90, 197; and “Average Canadian Consumer,” 21, 62–4; Dominion Bureau of Statistics, 61; “statistical optics,” 63. See also algorithmic governmentality; number Stein, Gertrude, 55, 129, 130, 142, 189, 192–3, 197. See also Münsterberg, Hugo Stephens, John Lloyd, 127–8, 148–9, 167–8 Stiegler, Bernard, 80, 162–3 St Lawrence Centre for the Arts, 192 Stoic: Comedians, 71; cosmology, 77; ethics, 79–80; lekta, 77, 217n96; “physical language,” 77; “saying of sense,” 77 strabismus (“lazy eye”), 127, 148–9 stress, 26, 67, 86, 91–3, 106, 191, 218n136. See also Selye, Hans subjectivity, 8; Bergsonian, 43, 60, 143; Berkeleian, 145–6, 151; behaviourist, 47; Cartesian, 155; consumer, 64; corporate, 67–9, 86, 197; countercultural, 196; and critiques of Subject, 119, 177; cybernetic, 86, 140; empiricism and, 16–17, 203n70; LGBTQ, 176, 188; Meltzer on, 98; monadic, 92; neo-entrepreneurial, 180, 196; neo-Kantian, 68; networked, 13, 196; nomadic, 158; post-Cartesian subject, 158; posthuman, 22; psychophysical, 54, 90, 195; renewal of Western, 170; statistics and, 49, 63, 162–3, 189; univocal, 81. See also identity suchness, 20, 108, 110, 112, 123, 179, 195 Surrey, Richard. See Brooker, Bertram

287

surveillance capitalism, 118 Suzuki, David, 105 synaesthesia, 28, 36, 43, 70, 99, 224n119 Syperek, Pandora, 28, 35 telecopier, 5 fig. I.1, 10, 116–18, 214n7 Telex, 116, 118, 181, 196, 214n7, 224n143 temporality: and a 24/7 society, 197; and alternate temporalities, 199; and “queer futurity,” 197; and “queer time,” 188; and “spatialized time,” 155, 157; and time-based alternatives, 25, 45; and time travel, 155. See also Bergson, Henri; memory Terranova, Tiziana, 78, 82 Thacker, Eugene, 117 Thatcher, Margaret, 195 Theall, Donald, 18, 22, 70–2, 74, 76, 81, 99, 105, 113, 201n6; “learned satire,” 79, 219n17 Theosophy, 26, 31, 33, 36, 205n18 Thorndike, Edward L., 50–3, 57, 60 Tiessen, Paul, 7 Time and Western Man, 26, 47, 130–1, 141–4; and Henri Bergson, 134, 142–3, 151, 170; and George Berkeley, 18, 144–5, 151. See also Lewis, Wyndham Toffler, Alvin: “adhocracy,” 181 Tomas, David, 149 Tomaszewska, Lara, 120, 122–3, 125, 223n95 Toorn, Tai van, 103, 112–14 Toronto School of Communication, 5–7, 9–11, 17, 22–3, 123, 125, 174, 199. See also Kittler, Friedrich tourism, 154, 171; tourist guides, 155; touristic learning, 155

288

Index

Towns, Armond, 173–4 transcendence, 9, 13, 17, 28–31, 33, 35–6, 75 transcendental empiricism, 151, 153; as “genesis of the sensible itself,” 15. See also empiricism Transcendentalism, 209n129 translation. See McLuhan, Marshall transreason, 75 Trasov, Vincent, 186 Trudeau, Pierre, 12, 93, 173, 219n175 Tucumán Arde, 9 Turner, Fred, 171 Uexküll, Jakob von, 219n155, 90–1 Ukeles, Mirele Laderman, 177 Underground Railroad, 174 University of British Columbia (UBC), 95–6, 112; Festival of the Contemporary Arts, 114, 122; and Glue Pour, 123, 138, 151 univocity, 13, 15, 35, 70–4, 80–1, 84, 86, 90–1, 96–9, 101, 119. See also Duns Scotus Uroskie, Andrew, 134, 143 USCO, 179 utopia, 154, 158, 166, 169–70, 172; and utopianism, 11, 66–7, 75–6, 97, 98, 103, 117, 154, 160–1, 185, 189; techno-utopianism, 81, 118, 168. See also Atlantis; Bacon, Francis (philosopher); More, Thomas Uxmal, 126, 160 Vancouver photo-conceptualism, 22, 81, 112, 122–3, 125, 137–8, 141, 153, 197 Vietnam War, 4, 12–13, 119, 171–2; and antiwar protests, 172 Vilder, Roger, 5 virtuality, 22; Bergson and, 8, 43, 60, 63, 66, 155; McLuhan and, 22; and virtual reality, 149

visuality: anti-Cartesian, 147; Gestalt, 129, 135, 138, 141, 144; and visual bias, 99, 107; and visualization, 45, 54, 57, 62–4, 66, 87, 149, 160, 195. See also formalism; perspective Vitagraph Company of America, 31, 41 vitalism, 25–7, 41, 53–4, 56, 132–5, 239n155; and Canadian vitalist modernism, 26; and “vitalism of the Left,” 135; and “the vitalist controversy,” 26 void, 22, 75–6, 86, 120, 224n143; and “empty spaces,” 76; as “spot,” 117; and Xu Bing, 117 Vorticism, 4, 7, 26–7, 46, 47, 129–31, 135–7, 142, 205n17. See also Betts, Gregory; Lewis, Wyndham Wall, Jeff, 23, 69, 81, 112, 137; Landscape Manual, 122, 125, 137, 197, 226n15, 229n114 Wallace, Ian, 23, 69, 81, 112, 137, 197, 228n96; La Melancholie de la rue, 137 Walther, Franz Erhard, 92 Wark, Jayne, 236n84 Watson, John B., 10, 12, 46–7, 49–51, 61–2 Watson, Mark, 168, 171 Watson, Scott, 112, 122–3, 125, 137, 141, 186, 188 Watson, Sheila, 137, 205n17 Watson, Wilfred, 137 Watts, Alan, 108, 110 Weaver, Warren, 10, 14, 78, 80, 116, 132, 139, 152. See also information theory; Shannon, Claude E. Weber, Ernst Heinrich, 53–4. See also Weber–Fechner law Weber–Fechner law, 53, 87. See also Fechner, Gustav

Index

Wheeler, Dennis, 115, 124 fig. 4.1, 138, 152 Whitehead, Alfred North, 129, 130 Whitman, Walt, 33, 49, 209n129 Whole Earth Catalog, 171. See also Brand, Stewart Wiener, Norbert, 14, 132–4, 147. See also cybernetics: and entropy Williams, William Carlos, 125 Willmott, Glenn, 73, 76 Wilson, Martha, 182, 236n84 Wölfflin, Heinrich, 90 Wollaston, William Hyde, 148 Woolf, Virginia, 129, 142 Xerox, 5 fig. I.1, 118 Xu, Bing, Book from the Sky, 117

289

Yucatán, 126–8, 138, 146, 148, 150, 157, 160, 167, 170, 172. See also Maya Zemans, Joyce, 26–7, 37 Zen, 22, 75–6, 79, 83, 107–10, 112, 117, 119, 189, 224n143; essencelessness, 109; kōans, 79, 110, 117; pedagogy, 108; satori, 110, 223n101; suchness, 20, 108, 110, 112, 123, 179, 195 Zontal, Jorge, 187, 189 Zoroastrianism, 14, 48, 167