The Tale of the Tribe
May 24, 2022
The Tale of the Tribe was the title of Robert Anton Wilson’s unfinished last book. It was advertised by New Falcon press as “coming soon,” for many years. However, the only portion Wilson produced was a prologue for the book that described its major themes. Wilson, moving like an intellectual DJ, dug through the historical crates and presented a theory stating that Marshal McLuhan, James Joyce and Ezra Pound shaped the look and feel of today’s internet more than most of us realize. If we open our trembling ear holes and listen to the breathing substrate beneath the digital code, then maybe we can find our own ways on how to navigate the Digi-swamps that increasingly invade the Internet like barnacles beneath a steamship traversing the dangerous tides of deep treacherous waters far beyond our intellectual comfort zones.
Wilson’s prologue for Tale of the Tribe presented a “cast of characters,” like McLuhan, Joyce, and Pound, and the thinkers who influenced them. People like Giordano Bruno, the medieval Italian hermeticist who was burned at the stake in 1600 for suggesting that space was infinite. Another fellow of influential heft was Nicolas of Cusa, a medieval German cleric who suggested the notion of the “union of opposites.” One last influence on Joyce was Giambattista Vico, who among many things, suggested a trajectory of humankind that he called the Four Ages of Man. (More on all three of these thinkers in future posts.) Wilson also invoked the work of Claude Shannon, whose 1948 article, A Mathematical Theory of Communication sparked the “Information Age.” Another thinker Wilson presented along with Shannon was Norbert Weiner, who was one of the inventors of “Cybernetics,” which stated how feedback helps complex systems behave, creating a new metaphor to think about topics within the social sciences. (More on Shannon and Weiner later)
Since Wilson’s death in 2007, no other documents have been uncovered regarding his unfinished book. At the moment, it appears as if Wilson never wrote anything besides that prologue. However, he did host a class at his Maybe Logic Academy in 2005 called The Tale of the Tribe that discussed the themes and characters of his unfinished symphony. I was a participant in this course. In all there were approximately 23 students taking the class. Others I remember off the top of my head were: Steve Fly Agaric, Toby Philpot (aka BogusMagus), Philippe Borsky Vermeersch, Nick Helweg-Larsen, Bobby Campbell, Oz Fritz, Eric Wagner, Eva David, Mike Gathers, Stein Leirvik, and a few others.
Over ten weeks, Wilson unpacked his ideas behind the book that he was working on before he died. A book that had the promise to be one of Wilson’s finest. A book that was perhaps not completely his story to tell, for it is the Tale of the Tribe, after all. A story that we must all tell together.
Recently, there has been renewed interest in the Tale of the Tribe course hosted at the MLA all those years ago. In order to add on to the conversation growing around Wilson’s work, I have dug into my files and uploaded the original assignments from the class. Presented below is the first week’s assignment in RAW’s ToTT course:
