McLuhan's name for touch not as a fifth sense but as contrast — the interplay of the merging and the abruptly interrupting — which Bob makes the ground term of his whole media reading. It runs from the earliest dialogues ("the electric age is nothing but extended tactility") to its dialogue-40 upgrade, "tactility squared," where the single TV screen's tactility is raised to the whole Global Theater. New to it — start here in dialogue 40, where the abrasive-confrontational half is argued to be the part everyone drops.
Across the dialogues
Gets its own page as the session's ground term — tactility read as contrast rather than touch, and "squared" from the single TV screen up to the whole global-theater node, the hinge on which Bob turns the book's globalism, solar government, and God self
Cameron places tactility as the generative engine beneath everything, not one sense among five — the reason it can be both abrasive and merging at once.
"tactility is the secret generator of all things."
Read from Carpenter citing McLuhan — tactility is a relation rather than a fixed sense-object, so it always carries its own interruption within it.
"tactility is the interplay of the merging and abruptly interrupting tendencies, not a hard and fast sense or object."
The abrasive-confrontational pole is not optional — idealizing tactility as pure merged flow loses it, which is why the globalist "merged" bias could not see the confrontational return coming.
"You must include the abrasive confrontational."
The resonant node with no visual marker points is "tactility squared" — the global-theater intensification of the lone TV screen's tactility, the same move as "understand tactility, you have to understand tactility."
"The solar government is not outer space. It's a more extreme version of your interior landscape. It's a resonating node with no... no visual marker points, which is tactility squared."
The both/and given a knot — Cameron's demonstration that a genuine both/and must hold either/or inside it, so tactility is "knotted," not a smooth fusion; and Bob's reach back to it as "tactility squared… popularly known as Wall Street"
Bob's most compressed definition — tactility is "both and" with the "and" italicized, the "big now" that "doesn't get cut off" and "includes everything" — the merged, all-inclusive reading Cameron immediately complicates.
"a good definition of tactility is both and, and and is italicized."
Cameron ties the knot in Bob's definition — a genuine both/and must contain either/or, or it collapses into mere merging; the abrasive-confrontational pole is what makes tactility "a very knotted concept," not the smooth fusion "both and" alone suggests.
"in order for tactility to be both and, it must include either or."
Pushed to its ontological floor — argued to be no quality you can point to but a structure that surfaces as opposite manifestations (a car's gloss, a TV show's crudeness), and then renamed outright as "mind," the old word for the nothing that organizes sense into consciousness
Cameron's carbon-and-graphite move — the sleek car and the crude TV show are not tactility but its manifestations, so tactility is a structure that can express itself as opposite qualities rather than any surface you could point to.
"if it appears smooth, for example, on a car or if it appears crude as on some sort of television show, those are not tactility itself. What they are is manifestations of tactility."
Bob's flat identification — "mind" is only the literate word for tactility; the ineffable non-sensory interplay that organizes sense-data into consciousness is what the old vocabulary called mind, now updated as "the nothingness of tactility."
"But the blankness, the nothingness of tactility is mind."
Read as leveled, not timed — Cameron's counter that the quadrivium is a higher level of tactility rather than tactility changing with time, and Bob's flat "not a sense… interplay" restated as the ground of the whole electric anti-environment, not just the TV screen
Cameron reframes the Trivium→Quadrivium ladder as levels of tactility — the Quadrivium is not a departure from tactility but a higher-order form of it, his standing objection to Bob's "tactility cubed" reading it as something that changes with time.
"I believe that the quadrivium is a higher level type of tactility."
Bob's compressed session-definition — tactility is no sense at all but interplay, the reading that lets the whole interacting anti-environment, not only the TV screen, count as tactile.
"It's not a sense. McLuhan defines it as interplay."
Folded into virtual reality — Bob's overnight equation that McLuhan's touch-as-interplay simply is what the age calls VR, Cameron grounding it in the digital's border between poles, so virtuality is shown to be old and born of limitation rather than an escape from it
Bob's ep47 headline discovery — virtual reality renamed as tactility itself, "something you can't touch," so McLuhan "had already encompassed it by emphasizing tactility in all the 20th century technologies," decades before the "Gutenberg merchants" needed the word.
"All that we mean by virtual reality is McLuhan tactility."
Cameron grounds Bob's equation — VR "begins with the digital form," the electric back-and-forth "that can only exist by having a border between the poles," so virtuality comes "from a limitation," the parenthesis again rather than an escape.
"Virtual reality is the expression of the digital."
Given the question that makes it historical rather than perennial — if tactility can be obsolesced, and if putting it to use falsifies it, then the present is the first environment that can lose it
Bob names the unprecedented thing — tactility was the ground beneath every earlier reversal, so an environment that can obsolesce it has no remaining ground to retrieve.
"It's been obsolesced. How could you obsolesce tactility? That's the newness of our situation."
Cameron's distinction, which he calls imperial — use falsifies, so the Tech Body's "engineering of tactility" is not an extension of tactility but its counterfeit.
"There's a big difference between tactility itself and tactility being put to use."
Placed structurally rather than sensuously — named as what sits between the faculty and its extension, and then offered as the correction to "pre-tribal", since no one is ever purely pre-tribal
The term is given its most compressed definition in the series — not a sense among senses but the movement by which any structure gets expressed.
"tactility is the dynamism."
Located precisely on the stem-cell diagram — the interval between the originary capability and any particular actualization of it.
"It's what's always in between the faculty and the extension of the faculty."
He substitutes his own term for Bob's at the point it matters most — since humans always need words and a body in a place, the pole Bob calls pre-tribal is only ever approached, never occupied.
"I would prefer there to say it's the tactile awareness."
Given a documented pedigree — the term stops being McLuhan's coinage and becomes an inheritance, traced back through art criticism of the 1900s and 1910s to a chain of seven names the session assembles on air
The sentence that converts tactility from a McLuhan term into an inherited one — he is quoting a lineage, not announcing a discovery.
"The art historian Heinrich Wölfflin taught the Hildebrand stress on visual forms as haptic or tangible tactile."
Tactility dated as a period discovery rather than an individual one — several critics arriving at it at once, which is the pattern the whole session treats as evidence of a media cause.
"and that's another guy discovering this tactile factor. The word had a bit of vogue in the teens, I guess, right?"
Tactility's structural office named — not a third sense beside the other two but the term that lets them be thought at once, which is why it arrives late and reorganizes everything before it.
"he had to learn in the 1960s that the acoustic and the visual needed to be thought together via tactility."
The chain is built by accretion in real time, each name admitted as it is remembered — which is what makes the final count of seven a result of the conversation rather than a thesis brought to it.
"So we have to put him in there."
Connections
McLuhan's sense of touch as interplay — merging and interrupting — not a fifth sense; Bob reads it via Carpenter's They Became What They Beheld.
"tactility squared" — the global-theater interplay of computer-and-satellite anti-environment — is Bob's bridge from TV tactility to technology coming live as the Android Meme.
The echo oscillates between two poles precisely because it will not settle in the interval between them, which is where tactility lives.
Cameron reads the vanishing point as another name for the crossing into tactility or electricity, where words find their meaning.