Ezra Pound and Marshall McLuhan: A meditation on the nature of influence

In the early days of "wireless" technology, it was the fashion of first-time and somewhat skeptical users to exhort that they were "raising' so-and-so by telegraph." Their use of the term "raising" was homologous with "raising" the departed via the Ouija board, another medium of fascination at the turn of the twentieth century. That the occult and wireless technology connaturally attended the birth of modernism was no coincidence. Because it was non-corporeal and without the self-reifying "efficiency" of Cartesian casuality, "wireless" was considered occultish.;A similar social phenomenon relating to "virtual" technologies is recurring today, manifest in the resurgence of interest in Marshall McLuhan. While much McLuhanism and quasi-McLuhanism is floating around in hyperspace--most of it appropriating the McLuhan name metonymically without considering, beyond a few aphorisms, what the man actually meant--the real story of the rising McLuhan myth is related to our culture's fascinating schizophrenia: its simultaneous technophobia and technofetish. The hegemony of digital ubiquity, then, coupled with our repressed Romantic aversions to technology are "raising" McLuhan's name; that is, in a search for theorists to explain and legitimize the implications of a suddenly autocratic technocracy, we are exhuming the seer who predicted its rise to dominance in the first place. We are only secondarily "raising" McLuhan "via" the digital chip--that is merely our "field," McLuhan would have argued--rather, our primary formal iteration seems to be a appropriate McLuhan as legitimizing medium, bringing us back reluctantly to Tom Wolfe's question, "What if he is right?" In short, our backward search for a bete noire has not only conjured McLuhan, but license a historical relativism whose presiding metaphor is that of the rear-view mirror.;It is in the same spirit of cultural and historical relativism that the following these presides. Using the metaphor of the rear-view mirror to effect a reversed historical psychoanalysis, I have fixed mcLuhan as an analysand for whom the historical figure of Ezra Pound, his modernist mentor, creates a turbulent anxiety of influence. Just as out technocratic culture revisits McLuhan to assuage its own anxiety (seeking balm for its phobia, and desiring legitimization and arousal of its fetish), so does McLuhan, I show, draw on Pound's modernism to make similar sense (and play) of the burgeoning postmodernity that threatens the visual and the literate with the oral and haptic.