The Notion of Roles

The following is an excerpt of an email sent from Will to Art and the group on 10 November 2015.

Installing folding tops at Ford's Highland Park Plant, 1915

I think we're both touching different parts of the same elephant!

McLuhan blamed industrialization for homogenizing us, and industrialization is a byproduct of the age of print. Print creates centralized government and bureaucracy, but it fragments psychically in that we read alone and in silence, which creates the primacy of the individual instead of group-oriented tribal thought. Industrialization gives us jobs where the tribal mindset gives us roles, and roles allow for greater expression than fragmented jobs. But tribes also live in a state of nearly constant warfare and tend to reject pluralistic viewpoints. Literate man is more open-minded. Literate man overheated is industrial man, who tends to conform. Electronic man tends to position himself in the tribe of his choice, then go to war.

Henry Ford wouldn't partake in the digital retribalizing impulse, but there is definitely a lot of engagement with social Darwinism and the segregation of people into distinct tribes with a goal of pitting them against each other for self-serving ends. There is an element of masterminding group conflict for personal gain that seems lodestoneish to me.

To get back of the idea of roles, these are how the tribe, in McLuhan's terms, express diversity. Belief in tribes is supposed to be orthodox and relational. Beowulf identifies himself as Beowulf, thane of King Hygelac of the Danes, son of Ecgtheow. Odysseus tells Polyphemus his name is Odysseus, King of Ithaca, son of Laertes. If you ask a tribal person why he doesn't steal, he says my people are not thieves. A literate person says I am not a thief. A digital person says I don't feel like it. If I am an eccentric member of the tribe, the tribe finds a role for me, probably as priest, artist, or fool. If I am violent, I'm a warrior. If I'm scholarly, I'm a wise man or advisor. In this regard, everybody can support the same values despite individual charisms, and everyone can value difference. The tribal values are the same; the ways of serving them vary, and everyone depends on the differences in roles. That is a different approach than the industrial vision in which the jobs are the jobs and you conform to them, quit, get fired, or find a new job. It's a sign of change, though, that business keeps on talking about getting everybody on the right seat of the bus; that's a sign that business is embracing the notion of roles.

I agree that social media should probably start leaning more toward the ear. That would explain the ascendancy of video and the archaic feel of email. I think the print aspect of words and images is part relic, partially something closer to the hieroglyph. That would explain the transition from the emoticon to the emoji. I also think the short sentences we get from Twitter thought are like grunts—the little brother equivalent of newspeak. The content tends to polarize, and for McLuhan, the tendency toward polarization would be the form itself—the medium is the message. I see a parallel between the 140-character message, the advertising slogan, and the battle cry.

In some form, if McLuhan is correct, as print becomes obsolete, it should find new life as art. Of course, I'm reminded of Liza's word art.

The Lodestone

The following is an excerpt of an email sent from Will to Art on 9 November 2015.

I've been trying to deal with how inordinately white our story of Detroit is, and I think I gained some insight into the Lodestone. Reading Beowulf again has helped.

In the days of Scandinavian warriors, the tribes believed in the same gods and the same code. They sang of each other in their songs. Still, they were at war. Why? It would be easy to point to blood feuds and what not, but I say the Lodestone.

The Lodestone tribalizes people, makes life us vs. them. At the end of Beowulf, Beowulf has to fight a monster who is guilty of the worst abuses of warrior culture—it marauds mercilessly in the dark, it exacts too harsh a price in vengeance, it obliterates, it hoards, and it honors no loyalties.

In fighting the dragon, Beowulf dies in a sense for the sins of his culture. I can see Leif's sister on a similar quest. She understands that the Lodestone pits tribe against tribe and risks her own life trying to bury it deep within the earth's core, surpassing Beowulf in bravery by fighting furry dinosaurs along the way. Somewhere along the journey, though, she goes from being like the tribeless man who buried the treasure that the dragon made his nest to the dragon itself. She hoards the Lodestone in the caves of Detroit, disturbed only every few decades by people drawn to the stone's power.

The tribalistic effect of the stone accelerates the American myths of The Law of the Jungle and Social Darwinism. The Lodestone makes Henry Ford create Inkster for black workers and Dearborn for white workers—it tribalizes and spurs conflict and misunderstanding. This lodestone causes uneasy alliances that break into wars, like union conflict and Ford's horizontal monopoly approach to business, so that even peace fuels conflict.

The result on the Witkowskis is that even though they see themselves as enemies of racism and feel solidarity with those who suffer or yearn for better lives, they also "class off." Stan's exposure to the Lodestone causes the Chrysler and the Lodge, which is an unknowing act of tribal warfare. His view of himself as a self-made man makes him like Scyld Scyfing and his descendants like Hrothgars.

Will lacks the empathy skills to put human beings above the acquisition of wealth, power, and fame, and Arthur seeks out a cult to compensate for his inability to break past his princely obligations to the Witkowski tribe. He yearns for a universal brotherhood and sisterhood that the Lodestone works to prevent, and the misexpression of that desire is the cult membership.

There is a motif of very long delays in the fulfillment of quests in our story. The longest of these delays is the Benefactor's.

We Go Medieval on the Seventies

The following is an excerpt of an email sent from Will to the group on 4 September 2015.

Detail of The Last Judgment by Hieronymus Bosch

Okay, I think what you've clarified is the intuitive leap we made a while ago between the cults of the seventies and the digital age.

Both speak to the spiritual needs of a culture that has lost God. Farthington is more of a song-and-dance man, an Oz who points people to something larger than himself that isn't really God. He's also a Vernean scientist, though, leading people on wild rides toward proof of something greater than man.

Steffi Humboldt (I just mistyped it Hymboldt!) is basically the digital age. She not only "gets in front of" where Farthington chases (although he chases to get in front of great catastrophes, mainly to be the authority on them), but in our vision of the feminist totalitarian warlord she becomes one with the satellite and absorbs all data into herself, which perhaps makes her the whore of Babylon.

We also have the Benefactor, who doesn't take vacation photos even though she oversees Detroit/America's rise and fall and who ultimately recognizes she must have a showdown with Steffi and lose, kind of like Beowulf vs. The Red Dragon except the dragon doesn't die...it absorbs Beowulf's power. Here we have McLuhan's idea that the global village recalls the patterns of paganism, which I think is the lens through which he read Nietzsche. I remember some outburst of his in which it dawned on him that Nietzsche's "God is dead" refers to the Newtonian god of "everything in its proper place."

Speaking of proper place, McLuhan would agree with Baudrillard that we retreat to the comfort of bonanzaland rather than live in our own age, but I don't think that's what we're up to. The only part of our project that sentimentalizes the seventies is the music, and I am not using sentimentalizes pejoratively here. I love seventies music unabashedly and you know how much sheer joy I get out of trying to play the difference between a 1974 song and a 1975 song...I'm like a kid in a candy store.

But outside of that very necessary indulgence, we are upending everything else that is warm and fuzzy about the past. In our own way, we've gone medieval on the seventies, like a Bosch painting! Our seventies slouches toward Bethlehem and eviscerates American history and the digital age through the tale of the lodestone. The only comfy place we're offering in our upcoming efforts is the album, and it's hard to call an album of prophecies calming. In fact, the prospect of a Trump presidency is making "Hey Rome" feel especially prescient, like we are this close to the lodestone revealing America for what we are. I'm tempted to vote for him, except that I'd feel like Judas, who may have betrayed Christ to see Him manifest his power.

At any rate, I also remember McLuhan saying he has no point of view because electronic culture made being grounded impossible, which is why our project examines from all viewpoints and resists just being a book or a musical or a series or even just being written. It's why it can be an 18th-century autopsy of 20th- and 21st-century culture, and my favorite, a 14th-century morality play with a postmodern take on memento mori.