Watson, McLuhan (& Lewis): Conscious (Modernist) Solitudes, Challenging Canadians
Bibliographic record
Abstract
As early as 1914, Canadian Vorticist Wyndham Lewis wrote: “Men have a loathsome deformity called self; affliction got through discriminate rubbing against their fellows: social excrescence. Their being regulated by exigencies of this affliction. Only one operation can cure it: the suicide’s knife.” (The Enemy of the Stars). To react to such a numbness-inducing form of corporatism – for which new media were deemed to be in part responsible –, the artist becomes the enemy of all accepted ideas; he becomes a self-displaced human being, a permanent ‘transient’ who counter-attacks kulchur through harsh satire. Marshall McLuhan and Sheila Watson were Canadian artists who explored ways to counterblast kulchur. The artist, McLuhan wrote, is the man (and the woman) “in any field, scientific or humanistic” of integral awareness, capable to grasp “the implications of his [her] actions and of new knowledge in his own time” (Understanding Media, 1964). Consistently, both McLuhan and Watson dedicated their ‘artistic lives’ to explore ways to respond to ‘the mental vacuum, that is Canada’ (McLuhan, Letters). Wyndham Lewis stood as a common intellectual ground, offering insights into both the avant-garde and the media world. This paper explores how McLuhan and Watson came to elaborate their own ‘poetics’, by poetic assuming here Umberto Eco’s definition in La definizione dell’arte (The Definition of Art, 1990): it is the operative project which pervades a specific work and that leads to a given form, at once original and traditional, that is linked to other pre-existing forms. While sharing the operative project, McLuhan and Watson elaborated their own original forms, in turn inscribed in the tradition of the liberal arts and of Modernist explorations. Through their different achievements, as well as through their troubled popularity, McLuhan and Watson proved that literature is not a ‘subject’ but ‘a function inseparable from communal existence” (McLuhan, Letters).
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.003 | 0.002 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.002 | 0.001 |
| Research integrity | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.001 | 0.001 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; both teacher heads agree on what is shown here.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".