McLuhan's 1970 book — the late sequel to The Mechanical Bride, ads read once more for the culture in them. Bob mines it for a single load-bearing line about perception and, in the Peterson discussion, for a 1970 forecast of the "visual values" he sees returning. New to it — start with dialogue 24 for "sensory input is not experience."
Across the dialogues
Enters through one line — "sensory input is not experience" — the photon shaped into meaning the instant it strikes the eye
Bob takes the book's line as its core — raw sensory input is not yet experience; the photon is shaped into meaning the moment it strikes the eye, "immediately transformed" through the rearview mirror.
"sensory input is not experience."
Turned forward to Peterson — the 1970 forecast of neoconservative "visual values," the tribal-literate flip McLuhan is said to have predicted
Bob reads the 1970 book as forecasting neoconservatism — the return of "visual values" (his gloss, "with Reagan") that Peterson now meets as a tribal figure "putting on the literate."
"McLuhan had predicted in 1970 in Culture Is Our Business that we were going to flip into visual values again."
The rearview-mirror core quoted — p.104's decision-makers "totally out of touch," power monopolized by "people from the previous time," beside the book's last line that there is no finish line
The page-104 line Bob makes the book's rearview-mirror axis — every ruler drawing on a Byzantine history of earlier powers, so being out of touch (which for McLuhan is tactility) is structural rather than personal failure.
"Surely it is not unbelievable that decision makers are totally out of touch with the world they live in."
The title turned inside out — Cameron reads it past commodification into a standing task, the "real business" being to find out what culture is, a transpersonal ground we enact unknowingly, its phrase traced back to a 1950s essay
Cameron reads the title against its commercial surface — the "business" of the phrase is not commodification but the standing, non-commercial task of figuring out what culture is, a transpersonal force that "shapes how people see and how they feel" while we propagate it unconsciously.
"So the real business that we have to get down to is figuring out what culture is."
Connections
McLuhan's 1970 sequel to The Mechanical Bride — ads read again, the source of Bob's "sensory input is not experience."
Bob reads the book's 1970 forecast of "visual values" and neoconservatism as the felt need Peterson later meets.