The title of Cameron's February 2021 blog essay and his name — after McLuhan — for the move at the center of his whole reading: living in the gap between moments, points of view, and orders of perception rather than fixing on any one of them. McLuhan says the Romantics "could not discover" it; Cameron argues it is what all experience already does unconsciously, and that making it conscious is the beginning of a science of media. New to it — start with dialogue 19, where Cameron reads it out of McLuhan's 1961 essay The Humanities in the Electronic Age to "set the table" for Bob's Trump book.
Across the dialogues
Unfolded from its source — McLuhan's 1961 essay and Russell's suspended judgment — reframed as the always-already structure of experience the Romantics lived unconsciously and electric media force into the open
The phrase is McLuhan's, and its point is a lack — the Romantics took flight (the gap between one work and the next) without knowing they did, which is why their fixed aesthetic moment is a failure of consciousness, not of feeling.
"He says that the romantics could not discover the technique of flight."
The flight is the gap — the interval between works is "the fundamental thing," and it is by exploring that instability that electricity gets discovered and the nineteenth century's whole crisis unfolds.
"It means that between poems or between pictures painted by a romantic artist is a gap."
Flight is not a special faculty but the standing structure of experience — as unconscious as the grammar of a language; the new stability has to come from consciousness of it, which for Cameron is what "the medium is the message" isolates.
"that human beings already are taking flight between moments and they're taking flight over the possibilities of experience and experience can be seen as growing out of this process."
Connections
McLuhan's phrase — the Romantics "could not discover the technique of flight"; Cameron builds it out of the 1961 essay The Humanities in the Electronic Age and Russell's "technique of suspended judgment."
The flight is the "third place" above the gapped Gutenberg and Marconi identities — Cameron's account of why the cul-de-sac is not a necessary trap.
Where the Romantics fixed experience in the aesthetic moment, Joyce's Wake is the "double fixation" (subject and artist) exploded — flight made conscious.