Resuming mid-conversation from the previous session, Cameron finishes his account of the NAEB years and then reads McLuhan’s whole intellectual formation — from Muller-Thym and the epyllion form through Kuhn to Skornia — as the slow making of a Kuhnian revolution in the humanities, unlocked one interlocutor at a time. The through-line is perception itself: McLuhan’s uncanny “second sight,” the ability to see what is coming without knowing who, when, or where — and Cameron’s closing insistence that percepts are never private invention but collective inheritance, so that what a hunter reads in a footprint is everything anyone has ever seen in it .
Key Topics
- The NAEB correspondence with Skornia was McLuhan at “the top of his game” — 1959 brings the first blackouts, 1960 a near-fatal stroke — a man reaching into the future through letters: “A letter isn’t something where you inform somebody what you know. You’re reaching into the future and finding stuff there that’s a little bit indistinct, but putting it down on paper to help bring it into useful distinction.”
- Cameron maps McLuhan’s intellectual network through a sequence of crucial sounding boards: Muller-Thym (1939), Giedion and MIT cybernetics (1940s), Kenner (1946), Don Theall and cybernetics (1950–53), the Explorations Group as acknowledged failure (1952–56), then Skornia (1958) — each unlocking a new phase of thought.
- The epyllion form — the “little epic” — was circulating at Toronto when McLuhan arrived in 1946 through Eric Havelock’s work , and McLuhan eventually applied it to structure his two major books: Gutenberg Galaxy as Book I (studying the past as art form), Understanding Media as Book II (exploring the present).
- Cameron’s claim: McLuhan’s project was a Kuhnian revolution in the humanities and social sciences analogous to chemistry after 1800 ; Cameron may have introduced McLuhan to Kuhn’s book after studying with Kuhn himself at Princeton in 1964–65.
- McLuhan’s “second sight” — the ability to see what is coming without knowing who, when, or where : the prime example is McLuhan in 1970 saying “when you are at a loss for words, you tend to resort to gestures and grunts… have you not noticed that language is disappearing very rapidly?” — not knowing he was describing his own condition in 1979.
- Cameron’s percepts-vs-concepts analysis through the hunter: perception is not private invention but collective inheritance — what the hunter reads in a footprint is everything that has ever been seen in it. “Percepts are what people have already seen. And in fact includes maybe what they didn’t already see, but they could have seen. And so the hunter, when he’s looking at these footprints, he’s flipping over in his mind all of the different ways in which this has been seen.”
Notable Quotes
"In order really to understand McLuhan, you need to exercise a little bit of second sight yourself."
Outline
- 0:01:44 — NAEB continuation: Skornia pronunciation correction and the nature of McLuhan’s letters
- 0:04:33 — McLuhan’s goal: founding a science of media, the chemistry analogy
- 0:05:12 — McLuhan and Thomas Kuhn: revolutionary vs. normal science
- 0:12:05 — Funding the NAEB project: defence budgets and education research
- 0:14:37 — 1958–59 at the top of his game: juggling ideas until the safe clicks open
- 0:24:10 — The epyllion: Havelock at Toronto, cybernetics at MIT, two layers
- 0:26:56 — McLuhan’s intellectual network: Muller-Thym, Giedion, Kenner, Theall
- 0:41:21 — Bob’s essay: what Skornia adds; tactility and the gap
- 0:43:33 — Skornia vs. the Explorations Group: friction and Gutenbergian minds
- 0:46:20 — Second sight: “A Garbage Apocalypse” (1970) and McLuhan’s 1979
- 0:52:35 — McLuhan’s ESP: June Callwood interview (1974) and Edgar Cayce
- 0:57:14 — Cameron: McLuhan and psychics as data; science vs. science fiction
- 0:57:43 — Numbness, cancer as a lifestyle, Hans Selye
- 01:01:51 — “Mysticism is tomorrow’s science dreamed today”
- 01:11:03 — The hunter analogy: percepts as the common being of human beings
- 01:17:31 — Crick/Watson and the media elements: physical vs. mental elements
- 02:07:51 — The turn of 1900: Planck, Freud, and the bursting of old molds
- 02:08:47 — Teilhard de Chardin: electricity as a biological event
- 02:10:03 — The missing link: the gap in 19th-century science and quantum mechanics
- 02:11:29 — Art tends toward science, science toward art in the 20th century
- 02:12:09 — Closing: a worse cul-de-sac today; civil war looming
Mentioned Resources
Works by McLuhan
- Report on Project in Understanding New Media (1960) — McLuhan’s NAEB report, which he sometimes called “Project 69” and sometimes titled “Understanding Media”
- Understanding Media (1964) — Bob cites p. 6 on the numbing factor of technology
- The Gutenberg Galaxy (1962) — Book I of the epyllion; Teilhard de Chardin on electricity as biological event
- Take Today — “ESP is old hat”; “old is new and new is old” (table of contents / how the book ends)
- ‘Verbi Voco Visual’ in Explorations #8, 1957 — the essay “electronics as ESP”
- War and Peace in the Global Village (1968) — “language is fading out, speech is fading out”
- Cliché to Archetype — Thomas More’s Utopia as epyllion structure; c. p. 100
- “A Garbage Apocalypse” (1970) — Art Critics Conference, Ottawa; found by Bob in Dennis Young’s library; Cameron digitized from image PDF
- McLuhan/Father Peyton interview, Family Theater (1971) — “I’m not sure what’s the difference anymore”
- Counterblast — Bob suggests McLuhan’s engagement with Kuhn appears here
- Playboy interview — “Mysticism is tomorrow’s science dreamed today”
- McLuhan letter to Pound, Jan 5, 1951 (Letters 217–218) — “I don’t know whether you have heard about the present crowd at Mass. Inst. of Tech.? They show more promise than all the literary blokes on this continent. They are what you and Lewis used to refer to as ‘serious characters’.”
- Tetrad for verbum (ETC magazine) — Bob’s favorite Tetrad
Other Works
- Thomas Kuhn, The Structure of Scientific Revolutions (1962)
- T.S. Eliot, Dante essay (1919) — “Poetry communicates before understanding”
- Eric Havelock, essay on epyllion (1939; 1945–46)
- Norbert Wiener, The Human Use of Human Beings / Cybernetics — Don Theall brought these to McLuhan
- Hans Selye, The Stress of Life
- James Joyce, Finnegans Wake — the letter as ground; “reaching into the future”
- Julian Jaynes (book) — McLuhan’s review notes he misses the formal causality of the phonetic alphabet
People
- Harry Skornia (McLuhan’s key NAEB collaborator; corrected pronunciation)
- Sigfried Giedion (architectural historian; friend at MIT; conduit to cybernetics)
- Eric Havelock (epyllion at Toronto)
- Don Theall (brought cybernetics to McLuhan, 1950; daily meetings 1950–53)
- Hugh Kenner (Yale PhD under Brooks; first McLuhan to encourage the PhD)
- Thomas Kuhn (Cameron’s Princeton advisor 1964–65)
- June Callwood (journalist; deleted McLuhan’s ESP remarks from her article)
- Edgar Cayce (“the sleeping prophet”; quoted by McLuhan on diet)
- Fred Thompson (architecture student; paper on Japanese “ma” / gap, 1969 — not William Irwin Thompson)
- Teilhard de Chardin (electricity as biological event)
- Hans Selye (stress of life; important to McLuhan)
- Cleanth Brooks and W.K. Wimsatt (Yale New Critics; both read McLuhan’s PhD)
Closing
This is the conversation where the epistemological stakes of the entire series become explicit: Cameron argues that understanding McLuhan isn’t a matter of knowing more facts about media theory, but of exercising the same kind of second sight McLuhan exercised — which means being willing to see something you can’t yet name.
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