The eighteenth-century Neapolitan whose New Science enters the series in dialogue 62 as the text Cameron McEwen brings back after three weeks' work on the question dialogue 61 left open. One paragraph does the work — 1097, on giants stopped by thunder and driven into caves — and it is read in two incompatible ways within ten minutes: as a portrait of solitary man before the tribe, and as evidence that no such portrait is possible. Vico also turns out to be a figure McLuhan was reading heavily in the late 1940s, and the ambition Cameron attributes to him — overcoming the difference between ancients and moderns — is offered as McLuhan's own. New to it — start with the cave passage, then the exchange on whether "before" names a date.
Across the dialogues
Enters the series as the text that was supposed to settle an argument and instead reopens it — the passage Cameron brings as corroboration becomes the occasion for him to withdraw the historical reading the previous session had built, so Vico arrives less as an authority than as the pivot on which the series' account of pre-tribal awareness turns
The passage the whole session is built on arrives as a reading-aloud — providence uses weather, not argument, because thunder is the only instrument that reaches a creature with no civil order to appeal to.
"This commonwealth conceived by Plato was brought into being by providence from the first beginnings of the nations, for it ordained that men of gigantic stature, stronger than the rest, who were to wander on the mountain heights, as do the beasts of stronger natures, should at the first thunder collapse after the universal flood take refuge in the caves of the mountains, subject themselves to a higher power which they imagined as Jove,"
The etymology is what makes Vico usable here — naming the cave-dwellers by the act of entering sets up the reversal that follows, where the same root names a place that cannot be entered.
"the men who entered caves were troglodytes. Troglo is cave, dytes, enterers."
Cameron's own gloss, read back to him — civilization begins in a self-limitation, an interior kept unoccupied, which is the structural form the session will later find in the medium itself.
"So men entered caves to become civilized, but they could become civilized only by not taking possession of all of the cave. This was the place of the higher power."
Vico is enlisted as McLuhan's precedent rather than his source — what transfers is not a doctrine but a programme, treating past biases as a live range of options instead of a superseded stage.
"One of the things that he found so attractive in Vico was that he says Vico tried to overcome the difference between the ancients and the moderns. And that's what McLuhan was trying to do."
The dating places Vico inside the reading that produced the cinematic reading of Innis — Vico, Mallarmé and Eisenstein arriving together as McLuhan reworks his early criticism.
"So in the late 40s, when McLuhan was reading a lot of Vico, he was reading a lot of Mallarmé, he was rethinking his earlier work in terms of these guys."
Connections
Cameron dates McLuhan's heavy Vico reading to the late 1940s, alongside Mallarmé and the Russian filmmakers.
The cave of paragraph 1097 supplies the dyt root that carries the session into the not-to-be-entered chamber.
Bob reads the cave passage as a portrait of pre-tribal man; Cameron refuses the historical reading outright.