Three weeks after their first recorded dialogue, Bob Dobbs and Cameron McEwen reconvene to work through Bob’s newly published 187-page essay on McLuhan and the “Tech Body” — written over three months and posted October 31, 2020 . Cameron has read it closely, with sticky notes, and brings a set of questions about voice, time, and the essay’s operating mode . The conversation turns into a sustained meditation on what it means to think rigorously about media at all .
Key Topics
- Bob wrote the essay after watching Paolo Granata’s COVID-era McLuhan webinars and finding the scholars’ treatment of McLuhan devoid of vitality — his goal was to make McLuhan genuinely relevant to 2020 by surfacing obscure quotes and relating them to his concept of the “Tech Body.”
- Cameron’s central gloss on arrogant superiority : not a personal attitude but the always-present, variable modulation between figure and ground, cliché and archetype — a marking that humanities scholars have refused to acknowledge and which prevents rigorous thinking.
- McLuhan as HCE — Here Comes Everybody — the Finnegans Wake figure Barry Nevitt and Maurice McLuhan chose to dedicate Who Was Marshall McLuhan? to ; Cameron argues the mask-switching McLuhan performed was not a personal quirk but the heart of what he was describing.
- “The medium is the message” is not an aphorism but a phatic aside — McLuhan said so himself on an album — and Cameron traces its first appearance to May 1958 at a UBC radio conference , then the NAEB conference in Washington DC, where it was embedded in the project that became Understanding Media and Gutenberg Galaxy.
- Cameron’s framework for reading Bob’s essay: it operates simultaneously in multiple registers — technical, satirical, prophetic poetry, complex clairvoyance — and any given statement must be read through the question of which register is active.
Notable Quotes
"The road to understanding media effects begins with arrogant superiority. If one lacked this sense of superiority, this detachment, it would be quite impossible to write about them. It would be like an octopus attacking the Great Pyramid."
"McLuhan didn't mind going into that vacuum. He didn't mind that sort of anxiety. So one of the reasons that people turn out to be terrible readers of McLuhan is that it's forbidden for them to go into the no man's land where his thought is located."
Outline
- 0:00:01 — Opening: Bob’s essay, its context and structure
- 0:01:28 — Cameron’s framing: voices, times, and modes in the essay
- 0:08:06 — Paolo Granata’s COVID webinars and the motivation to write
- 0:17:24 — The punchline: “every financial transaction drips blood” (Take Today)
- 0:22:05 — The opening quote: arrogant superiority and the David Sohn interview
- 0:27:57 — Cameron’s gloss: arrogant superiority as variable figure/ground modulation
- 0:31:35 — McLuhan as HCE — Here Comes Everybody
- 0:32:33 — The medium between the masks
- 0:35:24 — Phatic communion, masks, and self-convinced faces
- 0:39:36 — The cul-de-sac of thought and exploring ignorance
- 0:47:24 — “The medium is the message” as phatic aside
- 0:48:05 — Father Patrick Peyton and the key quote in Bob’s essay
- 0:50:22 — Origin of “the medium is the message”: UBC 1958, NAEB, Project 69
- 0:52:40 — Harry Skornia as McLuhan’s essential sounding board
Mentioned Resources
Works by McLuhan
- Take Today — c. p. 210: “every financial transaction drips blood” (on Catch-22)
- McLuhan/Gerald Stearn interview (“Hot and Cool”) — arrogant superiority quote
- McLuhan/David Sohn interview — unpublished transcript; obtained by Bob from Marge Stewart via George Thompson
- The Medium is the Massage (album) — McLuhan describes “the medium is the message” as “an aside”
- “The Case of the Missing Anecdote” (1940s, unpublished) — the anecdote/aside as the heart of communication
- Understanding Media (1960 / 1964) — the NAEB “Project 69”
- The Gutenberg Galaxy (1962) — developed in tandem with Project 69, 1958–1964
Other Works
- Barry Nevitt and Maurice McLuhan, Who Was Marshall McLuhan? — dedicated to HCE
- James Joyce, Finnegans Wake — HCE (Humphrey Chimpden Earwicker / Here Comes Everybody)
- Baudelaire, Les Fleurs du Mal (1857) — “Hypocrite lecteur”
People
- Paolo Granata (organized COVID McLuhan webinars, 2020)
- Bert Hill (Zurich; co-produced conversational track of Bob’s essay)
- David Sohn (American businessman who interviewed McLuhan)
- Father Patrick Peyton (Catholic priest; Family Theater interview with McLuhan, 1971)
- Harry Skornia (McLuhan’s key NAEB collaborator; “perfect sounding board”)
- Maurice McLuhan (Marshall’s brother; co-edited Who Was Marshall McLuhan?)
Closing
This dialogue is a masterclass in what it looks like to read a text seriously — Cameron’s questions about voice, time, and register don’t just illuminate Bob’s essay, they demonstrate the very arrogant superiority McLuhan said was required to think about media at all.
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