The pole of McLuhan's thought that his popular reception drops — the private half of "a close liaison between private and corporate awareness," and the thing Cameron McEwen argues is his most important topic. It is prior to language, culture and technology, never appears except inside something corporate, and is the same structure Cameron calls the art formula and the stem cell of consciousness. Its contemporary form, in Bob's reading, is not enlightenment but the collectivized isolation of the Android meme. New to it — start with dialogue 65, where the claim is first made in full.
Across the dialogues
Raised from a phrase in a Rolling Stone quotation to the claim that it is McLuhan''s most important topic — the private pole that every popular reading of him drops
The term is promoted from a passing phrase in Bob's quotations to the organizing claim of the session and of the reading project around 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."
The identification that does the work — McLuhan's own words on p.131 are read as naming this, which supplies the textual evidence the claim needs.
"what he calls private awareness there is exactly pre-tribal awareness, or it's the art formula."
Its mode of existence stated precisely — it is never encountered alone, which is why it reads as absent rather than as prior.
"the interesting thing about private awareness or pre-tribal awareness or essential intuition, all these things, what's interesting about them is that they only appear in something corporate, but they have their origin in something that's before the corporate, that's pre-tribal."
The blunt textual proof Bob brings — retrieval of the pre-tribal, not the tribal, stated by McLuhan in a mass-circulation interview and never taken up.
"the quote from Rolling Stone, where he just blatantly says we're witnessing retrieval of pre-tribal awareness. I say it cites the ancient individual by himself. We are becoming like that."
Its contemporary pathology — the pole is being retrieved technologically and one-sidedly, which produces isolation rather than the recovered subject Bob is after.
"They're getting stuck in pre-tribal awareness. Okay, they're forgetting the other side."
The correction that limits the term — since no one is ever purely pre-tribal, what the present retrieves is a trend toward the pole, never arrival at it.
"I would prefer there to say it's the tactile awareness."
The concession Cameron will make at the close in place of Bob's larger claim — not that McLuhan has been revitalized, but that nothing else will carry him.
"If McLuhan is going to be communicated, the idea of pre-tribal awareness, I think, is essential to that."
Stops being McLuhan's alone — Wittgenstein's 'thought community' and McLuhan's own 'primordial feeling' are read as the same pole under other names, so the term becomes a thing to find in other corpora rather than a reading of one
The term acquires an outside witness — a sentence from Wittgenstein's Zettel that describes the pole exactly, written by someone with no access to McLuhan's vocabulary.
"The philosopher is not a citizen of any thought community. This is what makes him into a philosopher."
One substitution does the whole job — read "thought community" as tribe and the definition falls out, which is what lets the term travel beyond the archive that coined it.
"The philosopher is not a citizen of any tribe. So that means that the philosopher exercises pre-tribal awareness."
Its position in the sequence is fixed — it is what the retracing of perception arrives at, not a state to be entered but the floor every act of perception already stands on.
"when you retrace the labyrinth of human perception, you come down to creativity, which is to say pre-tribal awareness."
A second alias inside McLuhan's own corpus — the 1967 Medium is the Massage passage supplies the term for the years Bob had thought were silent.
"what he calls here the primordial feeling is pre-tribal awareness."
The caution the whole series turns on — retrieval is not comprehension, and the second science exists to close exactly that gap.
"pre-tribal awareness or as Kroker says post-information society yeah but it's one thing to be back there it's another thing to understand where you are so and how you got there"
Given its shortest positive definition yet, and a partner — no longer only the pole that popular McLuhan drops, it is named as the original creativity that meets collective possibility, and identified with the merging-and-blocking rhythm of miming
Stated as a necessary condition rather than a rare capacity — which is what forecloses the reading of the term as a historical stage that could be left behind.
"Because you cannot have human experience without exercising pre-tribal awareness."
The definition the series had been approaching obliquely: not a faculty and not a period, but the meeting point where individual origination reaches something held in common.
"It's the original creativity that engages some collective possibility."
The term is promoted from a property humans have to the description of what a human is, which is why it can then absorb language, tribalism, and mimesis as special cases.
"humans are the coming together of individual creativity with collective possibility."
Promoted from shared vocabulary to the one named fault line between the hosts — asked to restate the synchrony/diachrony difference after two years, Cameron locates the whole of it here, so the term stops being a reading the two share and becomes the hinge the disagreement turns on
After conceding that Bob's charts were synchronic all along, Cameron narrows two years of methodological disagreement to this single term — which makes it the load-bearing point of the whole series rather than one topic among its concerns.
"The only place where we have a marked difference is in what Marshall McLuhan calls pre-tribal awareness."
The synchronic reading stated against Bob's diachronic one — not a stage humanity passed through but the continuously operating condition of there being any experience at all, which is why no history can contain it.
"I say that pre-tribal awareness is how experience gets generated at every moment of time, by every human, qua being a human being."
The premise that makes Bob's prehistory impossible — if language and humanity are coextensive, there is no interval in which pre-linguistic beings could later acquire the pole.
"the ability to use language and the fact of human being, those are the same things."
The conclusion drawn on Bob's own image — his Zappa-derived grunt people cannot be the term's origin story, because anything isolated enough to qualify would not yet be human.
"There's no such thing as an isolated grunt being that is already a human."
Connections
Cameron identifies the two: the private awareness of the page-131 sentence is the art formula.
The retribalization McLuhan is famous for is the pole this one is defined against.
Bob's separateness passages are read as the same pole approached from the isolation side.