McLuhan's pair for the two things humans do with meaning — make it, or match it against something already given — used by Cameron McEwen as the hinge of his account of modernity. What interests him is not the distinction but its instability: the moment humans notice they are making, matching stops being available, and meaning starts to look like nothing. Dialogue 78 carries the fullest statement, alongside Bob's own version of the same oscillation as blocking and merging.
Across the dialogues
Stops being a pair of terms and becomes a historical problem — Cameron runs it forward from Nietzsche into the present as the question of whether anything made can also be a ground, which is the form the series' nihilism question takes here
The pair is presented as a permanent oscillation rather than a choice, which is what makes any account resting on making alone unstable from the start.
"The dialectic between making and matching is always going on. Humans seem unable to exist only with making."Cameron McEwen, The Resonant Interval, Dialogue 78 (16 Nov 2023), 32:37
The self-cancelling structure named — awareness of making does not enrich meaning but voids it, so becoming conscious is the injury rather than the cure.
"with Nietzsche and then with the men of 1914, when humans become conscious of their own role in the making of meaning, that makes them lose meaning."Cameron McEwen, The Resonant Interval, Dialogue 78 (16 Nov 2023), 32:54
The question stated in the form Cameron says we are still inside, which reframes a century of nihilism as an unsolved technical problem rather than a mood.
"How can it be that something that is made is true for us and can provide ground for us?"Cameron McEwen, The Resonant Interval, Dialogue 78 (16 Nov 2023), 33:23
McLuhan is cast as answering Nietzsche rather than succeeding him, which gives the media work a philosophical assignment it is not usually credited with.
"McLuhan, at least as I read him, takes up that problem from Nietzsche and the Men of 1914 and attempts to show that making is not the end of meaning, it's the birth of meaning."Cameron McEwen, The Resonant Interval, Dialogue 78 (16 Nov 2023), 33:33
Bob maps his own 1999 pair onto Cameron's, which lets the same oscillation be described socially and technically at once without either vocabulary having to yield.
"So I'm applying my distinction of blocking and merging. Merging is analog, blocking is digital, and those are two instincts in humans."Bob Dobbs, The Resonant Interval, Dialogue 78 (16 Nov 2023), 26:59
The pair generalized past media into a claim about expression as such, dated to a conversation the two had in 1999 — which is how a working distinction becomes the series' organizing thesis.
"all human expression... takes place as some modulation of exactly that split between analog and digital."Cameron McEwen, The Resonant Interval, Dialogue 78 (16 Nov 2023), 28:26
Connections
Bob's blocking-and-merging is the same oscillation described from the social side.
Cameron dates the crisis of making to Nietzsche and the men of 1914 — the moment knowing you make meaning starts to destroy it.