Canadian media theorist and the figure the entire dialogue orbits — nearly every Concept and Work in this archive is, at bottom, a reading of McLuhan. Bob Dobbs and Cameron McEwen come at him from every side: the private occultist, the Catholic who put Jung above Thomas, the mid-career shapeshifter, the switchboard who could talk to anyone in any field. This page holds the man and his method; the doctrine itself — acoustic space, the cul-de-sac and light through / light on, the drama of cognition, the Wake read as media ecology — lives on its own Concept and Work pages, reached through the relations below. New here: start with the mask (dialogue 02), then the demonstration trap (dialogue 08) for the tragedy of his method.
Across the dialogues
The thesis — all of McLuhan after 1951 reads as a justification of Finnegans Wake
Bob's master thesis about the man — everything McLuhan wrote after about 1951 is, in effect, a justification of Finnegans Wake.
"It's incredible that all his writings are sentences justifying Finnegans Wake and the way it's done."
The mask — "Here Comes Everybody," and the man who put on roles and took them off as "the heart of the matter"
For McLuhan, refusing to fix on any single role — putting a mask on and taking it off — was "the heart of the matter": a working method, not a quirk of personality.
"McLuhan could not fixate himself to a certain mask, a certain role. He couldn't be just an academic, just a business consultant, or just the father in a family. For him, the putting on of a mask and taking off the mask and going to another mask was the heart of the matter."
Nevitt and Maurice McLuhan dedicated Who Was Marshall McLuhan? to HCE — Humphrey Chimpden Earwicker, "Here Comes Everybody" — because McLuhan was exactly that: an "advisor to everybody" who moved through every world like a newspaper's cross-section.
"He was HCE. Here comes everybody. He figured out how to circulate in all the worlds of society, like a newspaper — the cross-section of society."
The occult McLuhan — the private psychic, Edgar Cayce, the Evergreens medium, and "electronics as ESP"
On the tape of a November 1974 Callwood interview — the part she cut from her article — McLuhan privately described himself as psychic, citing a friend in New Guinea whose thoughts he could read "daily."
"In the recording, he goes on about how he has ESP and what a problem it is. And he says, for example: I have a friend who's in New Guinea, and I know exactly what they're thinking and what they're experiencing — daily."
The occult ran through his private counsel too — advising Bob on diet in 1974 he cited Edgar Cayce, "the sleeping prophet," and McLuhan himself sat with the Evergreens medium in 1976.
"I mentioned something about my diet. He says, well, I don't think you should eat too many bananas. Edgar Cayce says that's not good. He quotes Edgar Cayce, for God's sake."
In print he said it openly — "mysticism is tomorrow's science, dreamed today" (Playboy), and Take Today's "electronics as ESP" — recasting the occult as the ground state of the electric age.
"Mysticism is tomorrow's science, dreamed today. I think that's in Playboy magazine."
The Catholic ground — Jung over Thomas, and the autonomous subjectivities beneath the media theory
Cameron's reading of the Catholic ground beneath the media theory — as early as 1944 McLuhan told his Jesuit friends that Jung's analytic psychology mattered more than Thomas Aquinas for the Church, the "autonomous subjectivities" question that would become the trivial arts.
"So when he says to his Jesuit friends in 1944 that more important than Thomas for the Catholic Church is to understand analytic psychology, that is to say Jung, that's what he's talking about. He's saying if we're going to get a new direction for the church, we have to understand these autonomous subjectivities."
The backflip — Lewis' mid-career doctrine, and the angry 40s writer who became the 50s guru
McLuhan took Lewis' Blasting and Bombardiering doctrine literally — a total mid-career backflip — turning the "crazy personality writer, pissed-off person of the 40s" (as Clinton Ignatov found in the sealed archives) into the relaxed guru of the 50s.
"He loves Lewis's doctrine that at mid-career you have to do a total backflip and become something else. So he does that between the 40s and 50s. He does the backflip and becomes another person, which shocked people that knew him back then."
The demonstration trap — how the demand to "demonstrate this" damn near killed him and got away from his second sight
Cameron's tragedy of the method — pressed by colleagues for "how can we demonstrate this," McLuhan gave in "through weakness or weariness" and spent a decade chasing a "Königsbergian demonstration" that "damn near killed him."
"Through weakness or through weariness or through sort of an inability to see through all this sort of stuff, gave into them. And he spent a large part of the next decade trying to think how sort of Königsbergian proof, Königsbergian demonstration might be made. And that was absurd. He damn near killed himself."
The cost was intellectual, not just physical — chasing a demonstration drove McLuhan out of the ambiguity that was his real method, trading the perceptual "second sight" of his late-1950s breakthrough for a rigor that deadened the thinking it was meant to prove.
"All of this attempt to demonstrate completely screwed up his thought, because it got away from ambiguity. It got away from the second-sight insights that he had in his crucial period in the late 1950s."
After 1971 he withdrew by design — no more books, no lectures outside Toronto — making himself a local "anti-environment" to the global tactility of the age; Bob reads it as his Christian self, "just being a regular guy helping people."
"McLuhan was not accepting any lecture assignments or anything outside of Toronto. They wanted to act locally. He made a conscious attempt to be an anti-environment to the increasing tactility of people's lives."
The man in the world — British Columbia, the 1958 UBC "medium is the message," and the PBS series cut short by the stroke
The origin of his lifelong "second sight" — as a boy McLuhan travelled to British Columbia with his mother to stay with her brother Ray, who ran a BC-government experimental farm north of Victoria; the beauty of it "sparked something in him."
"She had two brothers, and one of them was the head of an experimental farm for the BC government just outside of Sidney, which is just north of Victoria. And so they went out to stay with the brother."
It was at a UBC summer session in 1958 — not in a book — that McLuhan first said "the medium is the message"; he took his whole family west and, letters show, considered relocating to California.
"He lectured twice in summer sessions at UBC. One was 1957 and the second was 1958 — and it was in the 1958 summer session that he first talked about the medium as the message."
His last project (1976–79) was a PBS series in the mould of Kenneth Clark's Civilisation, set up through David Greenberg, Mary's partner — mapped out and ready when the September 1979 stroke ended it.
"This guy comes up with what McLuhan would love to do — a TV series. So they map it out, and everything gets set, and it's going to be maybe on the LA PBS station, because this guy had the connections to do this. And then he had the stroke. And so it didn't happen."
The switchboard — putting on the Innis mask, a poet of ideas in the Pound mold
McLuhan told Bob, through the Evergreens, that Innis was a mask he could put on and take off — an authoritative Canadian anchor he "squeezed for all I could get," satirizing him "in the long run."
"I, you know, squeezed him for all I could get."
The method and the meaning — his painterly day-to-day practice, and his retort to a critic's "meaninglessness" with Second Sight
Cameron's image of McLuhan's method — a painter deciding daily whether to start a new picture or add a few strokes, revealing a new sense of the psyche.
"I think he was like an artist who had his studio, and he would get up every day, and he would have to decide, am I going to make a new picture today?"
Against a French critic's "meaninglessness everywhere," McLuhan replied that he finds meaning everywhere — integrated thinking alive with Second Sight.
"I find meaning everywhere."
Invoked as acupuncture and "rhizome," and for the late insight that "all technologies are words"; his "Media and the Inflation Crowd" Sputnik passage re-read
Bob's late-McLuhan insight — McLuhan "realized… all technologies are words," the word-process the linguistic anti-environments carry out.
"He said he realized, wow, all technologies are words. And he would italicize words."
Cameron maps McLuhan's late category "rhizome" onto the acupuncture meridians — a subterranean spread running through the central nervous system.
"Like the meridians that acupuncture through the body, you know, the rhizome, the subterranean spreading out of the strawberry plant is in the central nervous system."
The summit of the method — "the technique of how not to have a point of view," read out of the 1948–52 essays Cameron takes as pivotal
Reading McLuhan's 1961 "Humanities and the Electronic Age," Cameron reaches the summit of the method — the achievement is not tolerance of other views but "the technique of how not to have a point of view," which McLuhan finds in Innis' suspended judgment.
"not the willingness to admit other points of view, but the technique of how not to have a point of view."
Cameron dates the pivotal turn to 1948–52 — a 1951 "explosion" of literary essays raising time, pattern recognition, and education, written while McLuhan was corresponding heavily with Pound.
"In 1951, there was kind of an explosion of articles. He published maybe five or six articles that year, most of them literary essays, but all of them raising questions of time…"
The long arc traced — from the 1934 Cambridge letter on Eliot to "the medium is the message" (Vancouver, 1958) and Köhler's figure/ground, all in search of a "common focus" as decisive as the chemical elements
The germ, dated to a 1934 Cambridge letter home — the twenty-two-year-old already sees Eliot holding surface and depth together without remove, "the material stuff" that is itself "the chemistry," where Dos Passos gives only the surface.
"Eliot supplies both ordinary life and what's going on in that ordinary life without separating them,"
The breakthrough dated and placed — Cameron pins the slogan's first utterance to a 1958 Vancouver talk, reading it as McLuhan's bid for the "common focus" chemistry's elements gave the physical world.
"1958 in Vancouver is where he first says the medium is the message."
Reading Köhler's Gestalt Psychology just after finishing Understanding Media (~June 1964), McLuhan finds the ground spectrum he'd been missing — "the equivalent of the first intuitions of the chemical element in 1800" — and resolves to rebuild his whole system on it.
"And he says, I've been really reading Kohler, and now I have to recast everything in these terms."
McLuhan the comedian — the USC "I'm a comedian," the put-on he shared with Rabelais and Shakespeare, "amusement is the only possible strategy," and the practical proposals the world ignored
The self-identification the pair make load-bearing — Cameron supplies the verifiable moment (USC, ~1962, on a tape Rich Altman holds in Winnipeg) where McLuhan called himself a comedian; Bob makes it "a great actor" whose audiences "didn't know he was acting," a deliberate mask "dropped in there for us to discover," and Cameron folds it into the Shakespearean "put-on" McLuhan shared with Rabelais.
"Rich Altman in Winnipeg has a tape of him saying, I'm a comedian."
Bob's superlative, which Cameron immediately qualifies into the tragedy of the practical McLuhan — he "made practical proposals all the time, and nobody paid any attention," telling General Electric it was "in the business of information" decades before its decline; being "the most right," Cameron answers, only put him among those who "reported what was going on that nobody else could see."
"It's like McLuhan was the most right human being in recorded history."
"the medium is the message" relocated to its 1950s school-reform lectures — education "the same in school as out of school," practicality as his own test — plus the "practical mystic" (1936), Halifax origins, and the "second sight" that saw seventy years ahead
Bob places "the medium is the message" in its original setting — 1950s lectures on school reform ("education the same in school as out of school," the "classroom without walls") — so the slogan is a practical claim about learning before it is a theory, and practicality was always McLuhan's own test of whether a study was "worth doing."
"the context of him saying the medium is the message were a bunch of educational lectures that he gave from the middle 50s until, let's say, 1960."
Read through the quotations "generally not used in McLuhan research" — the 1961 "how not to have a point of view" set beside Russell's suspended judgment, and the book's two epigraphs staged as arrogance-above-analysis
The McLuhan line Bob makes his book's opening epigraph — media study begins in "arrogant superiority" and detachment, which Cameron reads as taking flight above one's object, "always happening anyway" though we don't notice it.
"the road to understanding media effects begins with arrogant superiority… It would be like an octopus attacking the Great Pyramid."
Read as the fish caught in the net — the great communicator who "died without fulfilling his mission," whose not-knowing (how to reach a world where communication had broken down, even his own children) is a confusion deeper than the one everyone blames him for
Cameron’s image of the late McLuhan — "a fish caught in a net," trying mask after mask to reach a world that could not understand him, who "died without being able to fulfill his mission."
"And so he became like a fish caught in a net. And he tried all sorts of masks."
The Tech Body’s verdict, which Bob endorses — McLuhan "didn’t know either," but his critics were "one face back," never grasping what he actually didn’t know.
"McLuhan wasn't clarified. He didn't know either. That becomes the standard of what everybody's complaining about."
Made the origin point of the whole tech-body apparatus — Bob traces the Android Meme and the Tech Body back to McLuhan's own account of the anti-environment's takeover and the need to "unhinge," so the newest cosmology is cast as an extension of laws McLuhan already laid down
McLuhan cast as the source the tech-body cosmology only extends — Bob roots the Android Meme and the Tech Body in McLuhan's own account of how the anti-environment "takes us over" and must be escaped, making the newest apparatus a further development of laws McLuhan already "laid out."
"statements plural by McLuhan about our interaction with the environment and how it takes us over and how we've got to figure out ways to unhinge yourselves from it."
The 1970s McLuhan recovered — the thinker who, past cliché-to-archetype, took tactility itself as the content "no one talks about," confused because he was juggling percepts no language could hold, yet judged "completely right"
Bob's recovery of a late, unread McLuhan — after From Cliché to Archetype he began working tactility "as an object," "in the market" and the futures market ("A Media Approach to Inflation," 1974), a development the "McLuhan industry" never followed; Cameron grants he was "confused" but "completely right," since juggling "deep percepts" leaves only confusion between them.
"There's a McLuhan that develops past cliché to archetype in the 70s that no one knows about, no one talks about."
The private cost totalled — his impersonality taken from Eliot and his "knowing" traced to the agent intellect, both set against the one room the method failed in, his own family, where his son Michael's growing up became the barometer of the age
The tragedy of ep. 21 driven all the way home — the failure to reach even his own household (its drift from Catholicism the evidence) is read not as circumstance but as the deepest test of the method, with his son Michael's growing up the "barometer" McLuhan spent the 60s and 70s trying to read.
"He was not able, within his own family, to bring his thought to any kind of understanding."
The counterweight to that failure — where the age's authorities have abandoned even the pretense of knowing, McLuhan's whole project was to restore knowing itself, the "agent intellect" of his 1950 talk, "rational, not logical," which Bob equates with the third position.
"The present-day sages and economists and commentators don't even pretend to know what's going on."
Mirrored in Peterson and totalled once more — the retrospective thinker who "walked backwards into the future," whose 1969 confession ("I already did it… it didn't work") and post-1960 fame that "did him no good" become the measure of the mirror-figure who would now "win"
McLuhan's method as retrospection — he taught poems as movies with "cuts" because it worked pedagogically, then "only understood something after he had talked about it," so "the effects precede the causes"; Bob's 1969 archival find sharpens it — asked for "a Jordan Peterson kind of thing," McLuhan told the University of Toronto's leaders his mediator role was already tried and "it didn't work," and his post-1960 fame "did him no good."
"he walked backwards into the future."
The coach house McLuhan seen from the doorway — the isolated late-1970s teacher remembered by his silent archivist, and the private thinker recovered underneath the public one — the Catholic proselytizer who wanted everyone converted, the theorist of the covert "manhunt" and its triggermen, and the author of the 1971 "Hijacking of Cities, Nations, and Planets"
The hidden agenda named — McLuhan held that rigorous thought led inexorably to Catholicism (not necessarily Roman), so his mentoring carried a standing invitation to convert, pressed on Barry Nevitt ("Why aren't you a Catholic, Barry?") and, by letter, aimed at Carpenter.
"if you thought hard enough about what you were doing then you would become a catholic"
McLuhan's private vocabulary recovered — against the "information hunt," the "manhunt" named the top-down search for who had hijacked the anti-environment, a term he kept out of his articles and let slip only on television because "the medium determined what he would say."
"And the manhunt was his term for the top-down big brother CIA world."
The hijacking thesis anchored to a text — the 1971 University of Toronto Varsity Graduate piece where McLuhan generalized crime into a universal, so that real estate, business, even medieval bells become hijackings of common space along a spectrum "which on one end is crime and on the other end is a kind of liturgy."
"he has that great article in 71, The Hijacking of Cities, Nations, and Planets."
The memoirist’s McLuhan closes the tech-body reading — the "esoteric observer" who is neither optimist nor pessimist, "the medium is the message" recovered as an aside rather than a headline, and the cool mind that outlasts Mailer’s hot
Bob’s recovery of the famous line — "the medium is the message" was meant as an aside, not "a blaring headline," so a reader who hears a slogan has already misheard it.
"it could be said as an aside, the medium is the message."
The dialogue turns into sustained McLuhan memoir and exposition — the figure-ground "monster," the dollar moved at light-speed as E=mc² inflation, and the elegy for a man who "tried this way and that way" to make people focus and never did
McLuhan's economics rendered as physics — inflation is an E=mc² effect, mass acquired when the smallest unit is moved at light speed, the "monster" Bob reads into markets and dates to the 1974 New York Times op-ed.
"you move a dollar at the speed of light, it'll become inflationary."
Cameron's elegy for the whole project — a quarter-century of method-hopping to make people attend, which "not only did it not happen in his lifetime, it hasn't happened since," the failure that frames the memoir.
"he just tried this way and that way and this other way to try to get people to focus."
The memoir turns doctrinal — McLuhan the "Einstein of the second half of the 20th century" whose two schools of art frame the whole Trump reading, and whose 1958 "medium is the message" is diagnosed as the right answer he could never hand on
Cameron dates both the breakthrough and its tragedy — the 1949–55 struggle with solipsism resolves in 1958 into "the medium is the message," the formula for how a mediated relation to reality can still be direct, which McLuhan then "couldn't hand on."
"He understood by 1958 that the answer to his problems from 49 to 55 was the medium is the message."
The political McLuhan surfaces as the book is read from the front — the surveillance vision the received reading calls apolitical, run from the 1951 Pound letter through Big Brother's move inside to the presidential nobody
The book's governing correction of the received McLuhan — against the "conventional bullshit wisdom" that he "missed politics," Bob reads the whole surveillance vision, from the 1951 Pound letter to Big Brother going inside, as covert statecraft, the intelligence agencies already operating "as if the medium was the message."
"His whole vision was darkly political."
Read against a French rival — McLuhan's media-as-strategy set beside Baudrillard's dead end, "the medium is the message" recast as the structural gap Baudrillard collapses, and "McLuhan research" faulted for never finding the one code able to investigate all codes
Cameron's correction of literalist McLuhan reception — naming "TV sets or radio" as a medium in the 1950s was never an identification of the literal object but a way of reading effects, pointing to "what letters did to the Greeks or what Gutenberg did to the Renaissance."
"So it was a strategy for communication."
The deepest demand the reading places on McLuhan scholarship — the investigator must not only know the codes that generate experience but hold "the one code that is able to investigate all codes," and failing to is "exactly one of the places where McLuhan research fails."
"That one code that is able to investigate all codes."
Enlisted as the man who got there first — the session bends his late Catholic and interview remarks into evidence that he named the medium/message collapse and the Tech Body before the French did
Bob's priority claim — reading a 1971 Father Peyton interview where McLuhan says "it's hard to know now where the medium begins and where it ends," Bob dates the collapse of the medium/message distinction to McLuhan years before Baudrillard began circling it.
"He recognized that the medium and the message aren't distinguishable anymore."
Seen defining gods as technologies — the move by which he "gets into Finnegans Wake," offered by Bob as proof there is "no reductionism in McLuhan"
Bob relays McLuhan's identification of the gods with technologies — the reading by which he "gets into Finnegans Wake" — insisting it is "not a one-way street," proof there is "no reductionism in McLuhan."
"And McLuhan defined gods as he thought they were technologies."
Read as the reluctant guru and the shocked witness — the electronic age makes it possible to grasp "what a medium is," the Wake is set beside him again as the indispensable key, and Cameron dates to the early 1950s his shock at finding society unbalanced on purpose
The electronic age's gift, in McLuhan's account — only now, with the medium thrown into relief by acceleration, does it become possible to grasp "what a medium is," understanding being the better word than seeing.
"the possibility in the electronic age of seeing what a medium is."
Bob's forty-year reading rule — McLuhan is unreadable without the Wake open beside him, because he is "constantly bouncing off" it; the book is the ground he thinks against.
"you've got to have Finnegans Wake beside you because he is contemplating bouncing off Finnegans Wake, at least in the book level, in the Gutenberg world"
McLuhan's guru image placed as a mask — under satellite and celebrity conditions the individual becomes an icon, so McLuhan "put on that persona," and "not entirely comfortably."
"he put on that persona."
Cameron dates McLuhan's decisive shift — in the early 1950s he grasped that society was being unbalanced not by impersonal drift but "intentionally," by financed, militaristic bodies, a shock his art-since-Coleridge writings register as self-portrait.
"1950s was the idea that people were intentionally trying to unbalance society."
Recast as a glorious failure — the arc turns from seer to communicator, Cameron's verdict that he "never" figured out how to communicate the probes, a sick man after 1967 mining the quadrivium he could not hand on
Cameron's governing thesis for the session — McLuhan's genius and his failure are one thing: a peerless prober who never solved how to communicate the probes, the "glorious failure" the dialogue keeps circling back to.
"I think he probed things in really interesting ways and opened up new ways of understanding the world. But he didn't figure out how to communicate it."
The servant of language — his 1950 "second conversion" from master to servant of language, the numbed Gutenberg tactility left behind, and the word that "has become a drug"
The pivot Cameron dates to 1950 — McLuhan "thought he was the master of language until about 1950," then "realized he was the servant of language," the "second conversion" that made coming to terms with "the limitations of making, as opposed to matching," the motor of the 1950s work; Bob pairs it with McLuhan's 1951 line to Pound that "the word has become a drug."
"he realized he was the servant of language and had to figure out what that meant."
The deliberate celebrity and its late audit — the ~1960 choice to "become famous" as a probe (fame "easy if you are properly grounded"), and the late-70s reopening of his own ledger, the prophet second-guessing his own instruments
The fame recast as a chosen probe — the ~1960 decision Cameron voices in McLuhan's mouth, licensed by the boast to his Jesuit friends that it is "very easy to become famous and to more or less take over the world if you are properly grounded"; the self-amplification "in an absurd way" a way of saying "look at all of the great prophets and see how stupid they are."
"I'm going to become famous."
The late audit — around 1978 McLuhan reopens his own ledger, wondering whether he "emphasized the acoustics too much as opposed to the visual" and that "we should have gone with the analog computer, not the digital," coming back to his insistence that "unless you talk in terms of ratios you're not going to get anywhere."
"maybe I've gone wrong by emphasizing the acoustics too much as opposed to the visual."
The prophet-programmer read whole — the Playboy "global thermostat" that would orchestrate the media environment of whole populations, offered as inoculation rather than control, and heard after the surgery as either detachment or damage
The Playboy interview's core defense of the "global thermostat" — McLuhan reframes computer-orchestrated programming of "a complete service environment" not as Pavlovian brainwashing but as inoculation, the study of media effects as a "civil defense" against a fallout the panicking public can otherwise only suffer blindly; the same proposal Cameron insists is "precisely not fascism" but the opening of transparent social dialogue.
"But an understanding of media's effects constitutes a civil defense against media fallout."
The artist as broken instrument — the 1958–60 breakthrough dated as the discovery that broke his brain, the weather-vane affected by every new technology, and the surfer's balance named as the ideal he himself failed to keep
The cost of the 1958–60 breakthrough — McLuhan's "most important ideas" arrived in the two years he first said "the medium is the message," and Cameron dates his literal blackouts to them, "a symbolic representation of… the implication of his ideas."
"And the crazy thing is that his brain broke as a result of those discoveries."
The emblem of McLuhan's ideal and its failure — the surfer riding on top of the changes at the close of The Medium Is the Massage is the poise Cameron calls learning "to dance on top of these changes," yet Bob says McLuhan "failed at that," and Cameron grants it was "a great failure."
"the image of the surfer at the end of the medium is the massage."
The analyst of the collective — his own trade named as "corporate psychiatry," the media fast installed as its clinical method, and the language-mad family (the elocutionist mother, the storyteller father's equanimity) offered as the ground that made him
The move that makes McLuhan an analyst of the collective rather than the couch — his work took world history itself for the patient, the same operation he prized in Joyce's Finnegans Wake, which is why the media fast reads as its clinical method rather than a lifestyle tip.
"He had a phrase for it, corporate psychiatry. That was his term about what he was doing as opposed to Jung and Freud or anybody else in the therapy world."
The media themselves become the art form — the Forces 1973 "avant-garde is not in hockey" reading set beside the recovered 1977 "media are characters in Finnegans Wake," and McLuhan credited with one-upping Jung's archetype by relocating it into the technologies
A rarely-seen line Bob recovers from the 1977 interview shown in the ABC's 2011 centenary — McLuhan casts the media not as tools but as the dramatis personae of Finnegans Wake, the content of Understanding Media turned into characters warring in "brothers' broil."
"The media are characters in Finnegans Wake."
Bob's account of how McLuhan overwrote Jung — the archetype relocated from a dream-symbol in the private psyche to the technologies themselves, "the archetypes of the social unconscious," a move Bob says only Frank Zingrone noticed.
"McLuhan took on the Jung meme and came up with a different definition of archetype, which was technologies are the archetypes."
The private religious stake surfaced from an obscure 1974 interview and then immediately re-read — what Bob takes as a warning about discarnation Cameron turns into a portrait of a man at peace with mortality, so the same phrase carries the series' two readings of him at once
A rare passage in which McLuhan states the religious stake of discarnation directly rather than through media analysis, which is why Bob treats the obscure 1974 interview as carrying more of the private agenda than the famous books do.
"the theology of discarnate man, I should think, is going to be extremely transcendental and Gnostic. It's not going to have much place for the human being as an incarnate spirit."
Cameron answers the Gnostic reading with its opposite number — a theology of the carnate rather than the discarnate man, whose whole content is fallibility, smell, and death accepted without alarm, and he puts McLuhan himself on that side of the split.
"So the theology of the carnate man is the theology of a person that knows they make mistakes, knows they smell, knows that they're going to die."
The corpus gains a doctrine it was never read as having — a series of scattered letters and notes is assembled into a consistent claim that literacy retrieved a pre-tribal individual, which puts the retribalization McLuhan is famous for on top of something older that nobody has had to account for
The 1970 letter to Joe Keogh supplies the missing half of McLuhan's own record — what literacy retrieves is dated before the tribe, which puts an individualism prior to tribal life into the corpus and leaves the famous retribalization thesis without its starting point.
"Havelock's preface to Plato shows how the phonetic alphabet scrapped tribal man, but retrieved the primordial role of individual and pre-tribal awareness."
An unpublished letter to Lynn White, surviving only in a thesis, gives the doctrine its name — pre-tribal metaphysical man — and Bob treats the fact that it never reached print as the reason no reader of McLuhan has had to reckon with it.
"The liquidating of the tribal encyclopedia of the bards... dot dot dot was done by phonetic literacy but there was retrieved something of great antiquity namely pre-tribal metaphysical man"
Cameron converts the standing complaint about McLuhan's terminology into a methodological commitment, and states the choice as a choice — which is what licenses the session to read metaphysical and individual differently in adjacent quotations without calling it inconsistency.
"As we said before, McLuhan constantly used words in more than one sense. So you can think that maybe he was not very precise, or you can think that his thinking was very pregnant. And I choose to regard him in the latter way."
Against Bob's claim to be first, Cameron enters the likelihood that the Catholicism was discussed at the time by people qualified to discuss it, and the disagreement is left standing rather than resolved.
"he had a lot of dealings with some very smart Catholics, including some very smart priests."
Recast twice in one night — the pre-tribal awareness the previous session located in deep time is relocated to the genesis of every perception, and the comic technique that had been treated as personality is argued to be a deliberate communication strategy he invented a decade before the comedians credited with it; the session leaves him a thinker whose two great failures, to define his terms and to be understood, are taken up as the work still to be done
The correction that reorganizes two sessions of argument — read synchronically, McLuhan's "way back" stops being a claim about prehistory and becomes a claim about the structure of any present moment.
"I think what he was talking about is synchronic history, that is to say, simultaneous history."
Pre-tribal awareness given a positive content for the first time in the series — not a condition once inhabited but the enabling condition of becoming human at all, which is why an infant is the proper illustration rather than a caveman.
"their pre-tribal awareness would be the spark of creativity that allows human beings to become human beings."
The premise underwriting the whole Innis critique — if communication is artistic in kind, then ignorance of the arts is not a gap in a scholar's range but a disqualification.
"the secret to human communication is to realize that all communication is artistic. So for McLuhan, in order to understand human communication, you had to understand the arts."
The session's boldest historical claim, and the one both speakers say has never been made — McLuhan as originator rather than beneficiary of a comic form, with the anti-comedy routine dated a decade before its usual inventor.
"McLuhan read in some of his lectures he went on and on and on with quotations and this was 10 or 15 years ahead of Andy Kaufman but nobody seems to have realized that McLuhan invented this routine"
The wig anecdote converted into doctrine — wearing something badly on purpose is a demonstration of the only thing humans distinctively do, so the joke and the theory are the same act.
"What he was doing was putting on a world. So this reverts back to what we were saying earlier about the distinctive act of human being is to put on a world, to be creative in a way that other beings are not."
The clearest statement in the series of what McLuhan was for rather than against — not a critic of scientific method but a proposer of a second one, defined by its opposite relation to bias.
"The distinctive thing about McLuhan is that he was saying that a new science is possible. And the old science was science that tried to understand everything as much as possible aside from bias."
The formula the session's whole second half rests on — since the planet is now something manufactured and seen from instruments we built, there is no unbiased nature left for the old method to address.
"the new science doesn't understand nature aside from bias, it understands nature as bias."
Read as the man who tabulated what the modernists isolated — the periodic-chart level of a revolution he never drew, with the 1943 Nashe sentence recovered as the seed of the 1970 letters
Cameron's flattest biographical summary in the archive, offered to correct the celebrity image — illness, professional mockery, family distance and two decades of rejection, assembled as the cost of the work rather than as pathos.
"He was a bulldog who was very sick for the last 20 years of his life and who was mocked by many of his colleagues and was not able to talk to his own children whose books were, up until the middle 60s, his books were always rejected by people. So McLuhan had a much more difficult life than is generally known."
The first of the difficulties Cameron says defeats every attempt at a new science, and the one he treats as nearly untrainable — the turn from requiring the world to accord with you to according with what arrives.
"The direction of illumination is to us, not from us."
The correction that keeps McLuhan's developmental language from collapsing into a timeline — his stages are retrieval and replay, which is why the 1943 sentence and the 1970 letters can be the same thought rather than a progression.
"So the key word in what you just said is stages. Yeah. And, um, it occurs to people sort of automatically that stages or phases must be chronological. But in McLuhan, they're exactly not chronological."
The session's closing defence, and a deliberately modest one — not that McLuhan is right but that he repays attention, offered against the three stock dismissals Cameron has just called nuts.
"one of the best things about McLuhan is that when you make a bet, that he's going to help you understand something, that bet almost always pays off."
Given a private counterweight to the public certainty — an overheard remark that his own understanding collapsed on a monthly cycle, which Bob makes the key to the "certain encouragement" McLuhan never defined
The most consequential thing McLuhan says in this session he said to nobody — an aside after a Monday night seminar that Bob has carried since 1979 and now offers as the answer to McLuhan's own unanswered question: the encouragement is the recognition that certainty is cyclical.
"Every time there's a full moon, it all falls apart."
Cameron states the failure flatly in the session's third minute and then spends two hours refusing to soften it — the New Science was needed "even for survival," and it did not arrive.
"at least so far, all of his work has come to nothing."
His least-read theme promoted to the centre — the mystery of the subject stops being an occasional odd sentence and is named the corpus's most important topic, with "the art formula" identified as his own word for it
The largest claim the series has made about him — the theme Bob's quotations keep surfacing is not marginalia but the centre of the corpus, and everything else is downstream of it.
"In my view, this ties into the pre-tribal awareness that we were talking about a couple of conversations ago. And I think it is actually McLuhan's most important topic."
What is new for Cameron is not the question but the discovery that McLuhan worked on it — and that Bob's quotations are the evidence.
"what I didn't realize is that McLuhan has actually addressed the question of that subjectivity, or at least he attempted to address it."
The obscurity is diagnosed as a communication failure rather than a doctrine — he kept restating the same thing in new ways because no restatement landed, which is why the theme looks scattered.
"here's a guy trying to communicate something. But he doesn't know how to do it. All he knows is when he says stuff, people's eyes glaze over. They have no idea what he's talking about. And this includes his closest associates."
The 1954 Christian humanism lecture supplies the strongest form of the thesis — art is not a department of experience but the structure of any experience whatever.
"McLuhan says, look, this is the great mystery that all human cognition is artistic."
Mined for two words rather than a doctrine — mini-states for the bureaucratized media past, module for the meme, so the session's own vocabulary keeps turning out to be already his
The term that names the whole first hour — the music industry, the military, intelligence, Rotary each a mini-state, which is where the bureaucratized scapes come from.
"He started talking about mini-states in the late 60s."
The answer to what Take Today's closing "recently achieved forms of consciousness" are — Nevitt said Finnegans Wake, which makes the Wake the unconscious large enough that the same book says does not exist.
"What are the recently achieved forms of consciousness? And I asked Barry Nevitt, and he said, Finnegans Wake."
Turned from a thinker with inconsistencies into a performer with a technique — the postures are re-read as acting, and his private admission that he miscalculated global management becomes the one place he concedes an error
The postures stop being a defect and become a craft — if the global theatre made everyone an actor, then McLuhan's shifting masks are the one response adequate to it, and the reading Bob has been building all series arrives at a job title.
"So I just wrote something lately that McLuhan was the greatest actor of his day because he was conscious of the need for actors and how the global theater turned everybody into actors."
The reception is turned into evidence for the method — if the books were built to look confused on a quick reading, then the critics' complaint is the technique working rather than failing.
"An early and persistent complaint by his critics, which proved the success of the technique."
The refusal is given a reason rather than treated as haste — revision meant being locked into print mode, so the unrevised sentence is a formal commitment and not a lapse of care.
"McLuhan always refused to revise his writing, it was once it was out, it was out."
A reading protocol follows from the refusal — the depth and the roughness arrive together, which is why getting a handle on him for the purpose of communicating it defeated even McLuhan.
"I'm saying that he needs to be read as somebody who has something very deep to say, but someone who is saying it in an unrevised form."
Connections
The authoritative Canadian anchor McLuhan "put on as a mask" — and, he told Bob, satirized "in the long run."
Source of the "total backflip" doctrine (Blasting and Bombardiering) McLuhan used to remake himself at mid-career.
His Manitoba philosophy professor; Lodge's threefold — idealism, realism, pragmatism — seeded McLuhan's method.
Joyce's Wake was McLuhan's lifelong key; Bob's thesis is that all his post-1951 writing justifies it.
Read "the world of kook" and alchemy together in the early 1950s; Theall's 1950–51 reading group drew McLuhan deeper into the Wake.
Co-author of From Cliché to Archetype; recipient of the October 1964 "world engineers" letter.
With Maurice McLuhan, co-authored Who Was Marshall McLuhan? — dedicated to HCE, "Here Comes Everybody."
Called McLuhan "a poet of ideas and scenarios," a switchboard figure in the Pound mold.
The Santa Barbara connection — McLuhan lectured at UCSB c.1960 while Kenner was on sabbatical in Europe.
McLuhan inverts Whitehead's "fallacy of misplaced concreteness" — particulars doing the work of abstractions, not abstractions mistaken for particulars.
The 1958 New York encounter that seeded McLuhan's perceptual answer to the cul-de-sac.
Dylan named McLuhan (with Mailer) as a guide to understanding the 1960s — and, Bob suggests, to surviving fame.
McLuhan wrote to Ong in 1944 that Jung might matter more to the church than Aquinas — for the individual–collective tension.
A devoted follower who became close to the McLuhan family and steered the Innis Herald toward McLuhan.
One of the three Winnipeg men (with McLuhan and Easterbrook) at the core of the 1953–55 Ford "Explorations" seminar.
McLuhan's final significant collaborator — proposed a PBS series on the scale of Kenneth Clark's Civilisation before the 1979 stroke.
A McLuhan successor at Toronto whose emphasis on literacy and the individual Bob extends to the digital flip.
McLuhan quoted Cayce to Bob on diet in summer 1974 — one thread of his lifelong, half-hidden interest in the psychic.
McLuhan reads the post-war crowd through Canetti — depreciation, humiliation, and the drive to massive retaliation.
McLuhan's 1953–54 Gnosticism correspondent; his "definitive statement" on Gnosticism closes the 1955 Kenner-on-Lewis review.
One of the "men of 1914"; McLuhan judged Pound (with Lewis and Joyce) to be on a wrong path — only the religion-turning Eliot on the right track.
His 1971 Family Theater interview with McLuhan holds the line Bob calls "the quotation that got me to today."
Architecture student who took courses with McLuhan; wrote the 1969 paper on the Japanese term "ma" (gap/interval) that Cameron credits with fitting tactility together with McLuhan's notions of gap and resonance.
Ran the Antigonish Review and championed a "Digital McLuhan" project, with Corinne McLuhan's backing, that never came off.
Administrator of McLuhan's coach-house seminars and, from around 1972, his first aide — succeeding Marshall's brother Maurice in the role.
McLuhan is said to have hated Four Arguments for the Elimination of Television.
McLuhan is said to have gone "further than Krishnamurti," carrying the same process-discipline past the chemical body into the electric anti-environments.
One of McLuhan's greatest correspondents in the archives; helped edit The Gutenberg Galaxy as a student.
McLuhan's "mirror image" — another Alberta-born Toronto professor working the media interval, but from the opposite side.
Interviewed McLuhan in November 1974 and cut his off-record ESP remarks from the published article; Bob obtained the recording.
Cameron reads Schwab's ambition as a crude attempt to "program the anti-environment" — the very thing McLuhan said could not be managed that way.
The "Gutenberg" / "mayor" against McLuhan the "Marconi" — the print-age administrator versus the electronic revolutionary.
Bob relays that McLuhan, channeled through the Evergreens after her death, "congratulated her on the Kennedy assassination."
McLuhan's trusted secretary at the University of Toronto; managed his office during Understanding Media and, later, a channel of household stories to Bob.
McLuhan used her phrase, the law of the situation, once or twice.
A student in McLuhan's 1951–52 class; gave Bob firsthand testimony of McLuhan's teaching.
The "existential hero" whose fixed point of view is the structural opposite of McLuhan's amoral, value-free cool.
Cameron reads McLuhan's 1940s "ancient quarrel" as a revitalization of Plato's threefold image.
Author of McLuhan in Space and Remediating McLuhan; Cameron and Bob both find his reading of acoustic/tactile space insufficient.
Dilworth reads and paraphrases McLuhan — the 1973 St. Basil's Seminary talk against the evolutionists, and the acoustic-space passage on the sphere "without margin or center."
McLuhan's Manitoba engineering classmate (1928) and lifelong friend — who disagreed with him his whole life long.
McLuhan's "Notes on Burroughs" (Dec 1964) followed their joint appearance in the Times Literary Supplement that August.