McLuhan's 1946 phrase for what the sailor in Poe's maelstrom discovers inside his own paralysis — and, on Cameron McEwen's reading, one more name for pre-tribal awareness. The interest of dialogue 66 is that the sentence finally gets finished: the power of detached observation "becomes a 'scientific' interest," and that is what provides the means of escape. Read whole, the phrase stops being about distance from the storm and becomes the earliest statement of the second science. Bob objects that the 1946 formula is one-sided; Cameron answers that detachment never meant uninvolvement.
Across the dialogues
Read to its end for the first time — the 1946 phrase turns out not to stop at detachment but to run on into "a 'scientific' interest," which makes it the earliest appearance of the second-science program rather than a stray formula about distance
Bob's objection sets the problem the section solves — taken alone, "detached observation" reads as exactly the visual bias McLuhan spent his career dismantling.
"that's limited, because later he would say detached and involved. He refined that."
The answer is to pluralize the term rather than replace it — which of its meanings is in play is itself a question about the environment doing the observing.
"we can't say that detached observation has only one meaning. It has a Gutenbergian meaning. It has a tribal meaning. It has an electronic meaning."
The double negative is doing the work — involvement is not the opposite pole to detachment but the condition detachment is exercised inside, so the 1946 phrase never excluded it.
"You cannot not be involved in the maelstrom."
The question that organizes the rest of the session, and the one the essay's last sentence turns out to have answered in 1946.
"if you are always already involved, if you're always already in the rearview mirror, where is the possibility of escape?"
The identification that folds the 1946 phrase into the series' running argument — it names not a stance one adopts but the moment-to-moment remaking every perception already performs.
"the power of detached observation is simply creativity."
The clause nobody in the archive had read to its end — the power does not stay contemplative; it turns into an interest McLuhan is careful to put inside quotation marks.
"So we say in this very paralysis, there is another fascination which emerges, a power of detached observation, which becomes a scientific, in quotation mark, interest in the action of the strom."
The punctuation is the evidence — the scare quotes mark the word as borrowed from first science, which is why the same essay can be read as the first gesture toward a second one.
"He put scientific in quotes."
Connections
Cameron identifies the power the Poe sailor exercises with creativity, and creativity with the pre-tribal pole.
Read to its end, the 1946 phrase turns into "a 'scientific' interest" — the earliest gesture toward the second science.