Wyndham Lewis’s Theory of Mass Culture

In The Art of Being Ruled Wyndham Lewis argues that modern masses are governed through media manipulation, and specifi cally through “the hypnotism of cinema, wireless, and press” (148). This argument motivates Lewis’s various criticisms of press freedom and mass cultural production, and these criticisms, in turn, are often cited as evidence of an authoritarian bias in his cultural and political orientations. Let us take one recent example from Hal Foster’s Prosthetic Gods. The desire to embrace technology, to accelerate its transformation of bodies and psyches, is hardly bound to reactionary modernists or to the cultural politics of the right. At different times such fi gures as Antonio Gramsci, Siegfried Kracauer, and Walter Benjamin also advocated this embrace, in a “left-Fordist” position that can hardly be confused with the political posture of Marinetti or Lewis. The fundamental difference here is between a primarily Marxist project to overcome technological self-alienation dialectically and a potentially fascist desire to elevate this self-alienation into an absolute value of its own. The latter is a . . .form of ego armoring (this is the gist of “the new egos” proposed by Lewis before the war). (149) Here and elsewhere, Foster aligns Lewis with Marinetti, a curious fact considering the several polemics Lewis wrote against Marinetti and Futurism generally. Moreover, Foster never considers the possibility that “ego armoring” might allow the average individual to resist the hypnotic spell of mass culture, thereby retaining a capacity to criticize and overcome technological self-alienation dialectically. If this is what Lewis is aiming at, then he is much more in line with Gramsci, Kracauer, and Benjamin than with Marinetti. In this essay, I will piece together a general theory of mass culture from Lewis’s autobiographical and critical works. Along the way, I will link this theory with his impulse toward “ego armoring” in order to demonstrate that both are directed toward libertarian ends and are therefore not the products of an authoritarian who espouses the cultural politics of