Marshall McLuhan's term, taken up by both speakers, for the condition that phonetic writing is said to have retrieved rather than created — a pre-tribal isolation of the individual that the electric and digital environments are now restoring at a different scale. It is the counter-theme to the fusion and retribalization that made McLuhan famous, and it turns on a grammatical point Cameron presses in dialogue 61: the separateness of man is not man's separateness but a separateness of which man is the object. New to it — dialogue 61 is the sustained treatment; dialogue 15 has the anchoring Counterblast line.
Across the dialogues
Promoted from a recurring word to the organizing concept of a whole session — Cameron's grammatical reading turns it from a property people have into a relation people are the object of, and Bob assembles five scattered McLuhan passages into a single doctrine the series can now argue with
The whole reading turns on a point of grammar — treating the genitive as possessive makes separateness a human property, which is exactly the misreading that lets the term be domesticated as loneliness or individualism.
"It's very important that the separateness of man not be thought of as a subjective genitive. That is to say, the separateness... doesn't belong to man."
Separateness is relocated from persons to the seam itself — the same interval the Orthodox sanctuary is built around, running between concealment and disclosure rather than between one person and another.
"So the separateness, if we think back for a minute what we're saying about the Orthodox Church, the separateness from what is hidden to what is apparent, to what is not said to what is said, to what is not tasted."
The term is placed beyond description by its own logic: what conditions the difference between shown and hidden cannot itself appear on either side of it.
"That separateness can never be shown, can never be described, because it's what makes the separateness between the hidden and the shown possible."
Bob refuses the available typologies — the digital form of the condition cannot be sorted into visual or acoustic space, which is why he reaches for the five-bodied vocabulary instead.
"But it's not a literate separateness or acoustic, it's a multi-level, weird, complex, five-bodied separateness,"
The Christological argument is pressed into service as a structural one — the heresies failed by choosing a side, and separateness likewise fails as soon as it is read as the opposite of union rather than its inner condition.
"So the separateness of man is both. It's the fission that is a part of the fusion."
Determination is dated to the first act of any faculty, which makes recovery structurally impossible from inside experience and turns McLuhan's retrieval into a demand rather than a programme.
"So the separateness of man is that we are always already separated. And the only way in which we can regain our wholeness is to go back before we began."
Pressed by Cameron on his habitual "we," Bob concedes the pronoun is the casualty — his own term names precisely the collective that separateness is in the act of dissolving.
"That's the Anthropomorphic Physical and that's the separateness is the we cancelled out by the separateness."
Given its paradox — separateness is no longer one pole against merger but something the technology distributes to everyone at once, a "collectivized" isolation neither speaker can assign to individuals
The formulation Bob has been circling for pages arrives from the other side of the table — isolation as a shared condition, which dissolves the usual private/social opposition.
"Are you saying that they are swamped by a new technological environment, and this technological environment isolates them, but strangely the isolation is collective?"
He raises the paradox from an observation to the thing the book is for — what would change if it were seen is the perception that the violence around us is antisocial.
"This could be the key thing to put out there is what people are missing that they have collectivized a separateness. It's an incredible paradox."
Connections
The anchor text is the 1954 line "bless the locomotives whistling on the prairies, proclaiming the separateness of man," which Bob makes one of five quotations on the same theme.
Set directly against the fusion reading of McLuhan that dominated the 1960s — fission is prior, and the tribal is what separateness is retrieved from.
Bob's own term for the surviving citadel is where separateness lands — the "we" cancelled out by the separateness.
Bob's separateness passages are read as the same pole approached from the isolation side.