The wired visionary

Ernest Reid and Karl Leschinsky
Culture and Technology Department
While being York’s foremost expert on Marshall McLuhan, B.W. Powe also specializes in visionary traditions. He teaches a year-long Honours seminar at York on visionary literature, exploring writers from Dante to Bob Dylan. Excalibur asked B.W. Powe: what is the visionary’s place in the age of the Internet?
Marshall McLuhan informs Powe’s approach to the visionary tradition. A visionary in his own right, McLuhan tried to awaken the world to the effects of technology on identity. At the centre of our technological change was the identity quest. For him, all breakthroughs of new technology come with breakdowns of old identities.
McLuhan’s message was the “mess age”, foreseeing an age of no single voice or vision. He calls this era a “garbage apocalypse,” a massive effort to scrap the old and usher in the new, reprocessing all human knowledge.
“I am an apocalyptic only,” McLuhan said. He thought we were asleep at the wheel, waiting to wake up. “Our only hope is apocalypse…We are on the verge of apocalypse. In fact, we are living it.”
McLuhan uses ‘apocalypse’ in the original Greek sense, meaning “the lifting of the veil”. Powe reflects on what this means in the 21st century.
“An opening time, opening to new forms of being,” he says. “With this, comes breakdown and seizures… [the] shutting down of the senses, of possibility.” Powe points to Hollywood’s recent successes. Consider the last Harry Potter or Transformers films and “notice how all these [popular] films are war movies. Sign of [a] deep-rooted conflict,” he says.
McLuhan wrote that technologies extend our mental and physical selves, altering our perceptions. Powe hints that we all have visionary potential in the Internet age.
“Visionary conditions [are] automatically conferred by the prosthesis and telepathy capacities of electronic extensions”, he writes to Excalibur. Our technology becomes an extension of us and allows us to see beyond.
Technology seperates the contemporary visionary from their predecessors. McLuhan saw this in the 1970s. “Electric technology offers,” he begins, “for the first time, a means of dealing with the environment  as a direct instrument of vision.”
Powe agrees something is different. “We are feeling the world and each other to unprecedented degrees,” Powe comments. He references symbolist poet and teenage visionary Arthur Rimbaud. “What [he] sought through the alchemy of the word is available to us every day in the derangements […] of electronic media.”
How does the Internet generation become a visionary one? Powe waxes poetic over email: “we train […] our senses to be open […] to recognize patterns[…] to be readers and scanners of the books of identity and creation and technological extension and electronic, the metamorphic texts whose letters and figures are unstill and fiery.”
“Education is part of this,” Powe continues. Visionary abilities can be trained through the study of art forms, “but education comes in many forms and experiences.” Above all, the visionary must hone his technique.
“All spiritual experiences,” he emphasizes, “require deep practice.”
Powe has a caveat. “Some people see more and more deeply than others,” he writes, “they have the mission…to relay back what they’ve found.” The visionary is the one who alters their senses “enough to see that many realities coexist [and] coincide.”
He says technologies are always experienced in complements.  “This is Blakean double vision,” referring to poet William Blake, “dark satanic mills can become illuminating wheels […] to an innocent eye of vision.” The eye of experience reverts them back to mills.  The trick is to “see them both ways, at once,” Powe explains.
The Internet automates and speeds up the double vision. On the Internet, Powe explains, the user receives speeding images of life and suffering simultaneously. Only a visionary will notice this as they look behind their screen.
Powe’s latest work asks what happens when that world looks back. In These Shadows Remain: A Fable, cartoons have been looking back at us all these years. They cross out of the screen world into our meat-space for war. It is a darkly cataclysmic Who Framed Roger Rabbit?
Powe is working on another book, Opening Time: On the Energy Threshold, an exegesis of his concept of ‘neuro-romanticism’. Powe has a sense that we live “on the cusp, of a vast shift into new consciousness.” He foresees humanity “heightened by synthesis with machines,” with an “extension of body and mind into avatar conditions of perpetual plug in.”
“People have called me a visionary,” he says, “but you’ll have to tell me what ‘visionary’ means.” He pauses. “The question you want to ask me is have I had any visions and that,” he smiles, “I can’t answer.”
With files from B.W. Powe’s dissertation and The Essential McLuhan, from Anansi Press