Cameron McEwen's name for the science McLuhan said he wanted to start and never got anyone else to see — the phrase that gives Cameron's blog, McLuhan's New Sciences, its title. Across the archive it names the alternative to "old science": an investigation whose object is the invisible environment rather than the objects inside it. Dialogue 63 is the entry point — the session where Cameron lays out what a new science would have to be, using the chemical revolution of 1800 as the working analogy.
Across the dialogues
Promoted from a phrase the two men trade to the session's whole object of study — Cameron gives it a genus, a history, an entry condition and a failure mode, and the chemistry of 1800 becomes the standing model for how one arrives
Cameron converts Bob's nuclear-reactor announcement into the session's premise, treating the device as the symptom of a science rather than its content — the move that displaces two hours of talk from the machine onto the environment that would make it thinkable.
"Essentially, the ground is New Science. Yes, that's right. The box itself is an effect of the New Science,"
Against Bob's hunch that McLuhan was only "hinting at it," Cameron supplies the bibliography — the term is explicit, late, and concentrated in the two posthumous books, which makes New Science a documented McLuhan project rather than a reader's inference.
"McLuhan talked about New Science in those words a lot in the 1970s, and his writings and lectures on it from that time are preserved in The Global Village and in Laws of Media. So in those two posthumous books, he speaks over and over again about New Science and contrasts it to old science."
The reflexive turn that makes the topic unusual — a discussion of how environments become visible cannot be conducted from outside the environment it is about, so the dialogue is itself an instance of what it describes.
"The very conversation about this takes place in New Science."
New Science is dated backwards — the pre-Socratics had a premonition of it that classical Greece then buried, so what is called new is a recovery, and the whole progressive ordering of the two sciences inverts.
"of New Science that was lost in the development of old science. So in this sense, the new came before the old."
The programme stated as archaeology rather than invention, which is why Plato and Aristotle can be called "far deeper and far wiser than anybody today" without nostalgia — they stood across the pre-literate/literate divide the way the Elizabethans did.
"And one way to think about the attempt to get into New Science is the attempt to recover what those guys knew."
The formulation that binds the chemistry analogy to the McLuhan vocabulary — a new science is not a new activity but the illumination of one already being performed, so its practitioners are always retroactively identified.
"So when people were discovering the chemical elements, they were operating in New Science and in tactile space, but they didn't know that."
Cameron's own datum for the failure mode — his attempts to raise it in the European seminars found no purchase at all, which he offers not as grievance but as evidence that the obstacle is structural rather than argumentative.
"but the whole idea that there could be a New Science of these kinds of ideas was just met with... stony silence."
Cameron gives the project an unpublished working name, still confined to drafts, which marks dialogue 63 as ahead of his own blog on the point.
"lately my post... are all about what I call a new genus of sciences."
The taxonomic argument that raises the stakes — what is proposed is not another discipline alongside physics and sociology but a different order of family altogether, which is why it cannot be assimilated by the disciplines it stands beside.
"a new species of science would be a sibling to existing sciences. But for McLuhan, all of the existing sciences belong to a single genus."
The entry condition, stated as a paradox and meant literally — because the different senses of time it involves cannot be reached by argument, the science propagates only among people who already possess it, which is Cameron's explanation for why this conversation works and the 1998 one did not.
"The way this New Science works is that you cannot come to understand it without already understanding it. This is another one of the difficulties involved."
Given the obstacle that defers it indefinitely — it was to rest on configurations of the senses, but the word "sense" would only become usable after the revolution the New Science was supposed to be
The programme restated in order to be undermined — McLuhan was not using "sense" as the visual, audio or tactile that listeners assume, so the foundation is a term nobody yet possesses.
"McLuhan often said that the New Science would be based on configurations of the senses."
The circularity named exactly — the New Science needs the understanding it was meant to produce, which is why sixty years of media ecology built on "identifiable" senses and media is, on Cameron's account, not McLuhan's project at all.
"the New Science was going to be based on a revolution in our understanding after which we would understand what configuration of the senses is."
Its penultimate sentence made the session's text for the present — the unchartable milieu read by Bob as McLuhan losing hold of his own formula, and by Cameron as the condition for an identity that arises in flux
The book's last word before its close is taken as its most current — the demand is for a skill rather than a model, which is why no concept can be handed on.
"As the information that constitutes the environment is perpetually in flux, so the need is not for fixed concepts, but rather for the ancient skill of reading that book, for navigating through an ever uncharted and unchartable milieu."
He refuses the defeatist reading — unchartable names the kind of identity available, not the absence of one.
"uncharted and unchartable both have many meanings. So if it turns out that the human experience is subject to collective probing and collective investigation, that can give rise to... a new kind of identity, but it's an identity that arises in flux."
Given its two-storey structure and its lineage — first science looks at first nature, second science at second nature, and the warrant runs back through Vico and Bacon; a science of media because all human action is mediated
The program gets a two-storey structure and a name for its ground floor, which stops it reading as a rival to physics rather than a second one built beside it.
"the traditional science is first science, and then what he proposes is second science."
The lineage is claimed rather than invented — second nature is an old idea, and McLuhan's move is to notice that nobody built the science that would answer to it.
"So then what McLuhan says is, wait a minute, let's go back to Vico and to Bacon and let's realize that part of what's going on in the world is human action."
The single inference that makes media the subject matter — not because media are important, but because there is no unmediated human action for the science to be about instead.
"the reason that that's a science of media is that all human action is mediated."
Cameron marks the term's textual footing as uncertain even while using it, which is the standing epistemic habit of his side of the dialogue.
"It's possible that I'm extrapolating from second nature."
The correction to Eric's proposal — vetting inventions one at a time is a committee; a science does it as a matter of course, because everything in its domain is already what it investigates.
"this question of going over an invention and figuring out what effects it might have and all that sort of stuff, this is the automatic work of science."
The test for whether the thing has arrived is not agreement but proliferation — a real science spawns fields, and this one has not yet.
"when a fundamental science becomes possible, it always generates subsidiary sciences."
The dialogue names its own purpose — the sessions are not commentary on a science that exists but an attempt to start one.
"Which hasn't happened yet. That's what we're trying to instigate here."
Given its method rather than its warrant — the route in is the varieties of tactility, and its governing law is stated as an expanding ignorance, which makes not-knowing a result of the science instead of a limit on it
The science is reached by a specific procedure — surveying the varieties of tactility — which converts a programmatic hope into a stated method.
"And when you look at the different varieties of tactility, then you can see an order of human experience that amounts to a New Science."
Its distinguishing law: unlike a first science, progress here enlarges the unknown, which is why the dialogue form suits it and why completion is not the goal.
"just as with any science, the more you discover about this New Science, the more you discover that you don't know."
Turns from a programme into a refusal — offered governance by committee as the practical answer to a world that cannot be run, Cameron rules the whole political register out and leaves this as the only alternative to extinction, then names what blocks it not as difficulty but as a decision the West has already made the other way
The Mendeleev analogy stops being illustrative and becomes the specification — defining media is the scientific revolution, not a preliminary to it.
"And the way that that happens is that we have to be able to define what media are in the same way as we learn to define what chemical elements are."
Its decisive political consequence — the science is not a better instrument of governance but the thing that makes governance beside the point, which is Cameron's answer to Bob's committee proposal.
"then it won't be a committee running the world, or it won't be a king running the world, we'll be, for the first time, we'll be using science on our own experience, and that will change the world."
What the science would cost the man who called for it — under a genuinely collective identity McLuhan himself becomes unreadable except as history of science, so its arrival is measured by his disappearance.
"No scientist will be believed because of his or her name."
The alternatives stated without a third term, which is what converts the whole programme from an intellectual preference into a survival condition.
"So according to McLuhan, either we get to that New Science, which is going to change the world, or we're going to exterminate ourselves."
The taxonomic point the series keeps returning to, put in one line — nothing inside the existing sciences can be extended into this, because the difference is of kind.
"So it's a new genus of science, not a new species of science."
The obstacle relocated from capacity to will — nothing is missing that discovery could supply, which is why the science has been available and unstarted for the whole series.
"the big thing is that people have to decide to do the New Science in some sort of collective way."
The sharpest indictment the archive gives the term — the West is not incapable of collective research but has already committed it everywhere except where it would matter, making the failure an allocation rather than a lack.
"And what's happened in Western civilization is that we have decided to do collective research in everything that's not very important."
Connections
The existing sciences form a single genus, which McLuhan called the Gutenberg Galaxy; a new science would have to be a different genus, not a sibling species.
Cameron's working image for what a new science would produce is a Mendeleev's table of the elementary ways human experience unfolds.
Cameron locates McLuhan's explicit New Science writing in the two posthumous books, The Global Village and Laws of Media.
Read to its end, the 1946 phrase turns into "a 'scientific' interest" — the earliest gesture toward the second science.