In their fifth and longest session — nearly two and a half hours — Bob and Cameron press deeper into the cul-de-sac than anywhere else in the series. Cameron hardens it into a genuine metaphysical trap: if everything said about media is itself shaped by media, and we have always already started, renewal can come from no vantage outside the regress . Against that, Bob sets the most radical proposal McLuhan ever made — a rarely read 1949 essay on “psychological decentralization,” which locates renewal not above the situation but in millions of individual acts of will . From there the conversation widens into phatic communion, quantum mechanics and Finnegans Wake, McLuhan’s frustrated inner life, and the 1940s-to-1950s “backflip” — Étienne Gilson’s catalysing role in it — that produced “the medium is the message.”
Key Topics
- Cameron frames the cul-de-sac as a problem of infinite regress: everything said about media is also shaped by media — and McLuhan’s project is to find a way to stop or sidestep that regress, not from above (there is no above) but from within the plurality of time itself.
- Al-Ghazali: “If you are looking for something that’s already there, then it becomes lost and can never be found.” The cul-de-sac is not a temporary condition to be escaped but something we’re already both inside and outside simultaneously.
- Bob reads McLuhan’s “Psychopathology of Time and Life” (Neurotica, 1949): “The process of renewal can’t come from above. It can only take the form of reawakened critical faculties. The untrancing of millions of individuals by millions of individual acts of the will. Psychological decentralization.” — followed by the famous provisional image of suspending all media for six months.
- Phatic communion originated with Bronisław Malinowski; McLuhan used it as early as 1944. Cameron reads the key passage from McLuhan’s “Joyce, Mallarmé, and the Press” placing the Chinese ideogram at the midpoint between “our abstract written tradition and the plenary oral tradition with its stress on speech as gesture and gesture as phatic communication.”
- Don Theall’s observation: Joyce satirized the quantum perspective — reading Finnegans Wake, you can’t pursue linear meaning (time) without being pulled into the spatial hole of each word’s possibilities. You’re forced to experience the quantum dilemma on every page.
Notable Quotes
"If you are looking for something that's already there, then it becomes lost and can never be found."
"The process of renewal can't come from above. It can only take the form of reawakened critical faculties. The untrancing of millions of individuals by millions of individual acts of the will. Psychological decentralization."
"The energy and the agony of McLuhan was the attempt to do justice to all of these voices, including how to communicate what they could give us if we could understand what was going on with them."
Outline
- 0:00:01 — The infinite regress problem: everything said about media is shaped by media
- 0:03:43 — “Always already started”: the cul-de-sac as an ontological condition
- 0:05:12 — Re-words: retrieval, recognition, replay — the clutch in experience
- 0:05:40 — Al-Ghazali: if you’re looking for something already there, it becomes lost
- 0:08:53 — Multiple voices: the electric age as the unleashed unconscious
- 0:24:27 — Phatic communion: Malinowski, Richards, and McLuhan’s 1944 use
- 0:29:01 — McLuhan reads from “Joyce, Mallarmé, and the Press” on the Chinese ideogram
- 0:34:05 — “Psychological decentralization”: the 1949 Neurotica essay
- 0:38:13 — Cameron: the provisional image — not literally turning off media
- 0:54:44 — Quantum mechanics and Finnegans Wake: Don Theall’s observation
- 01:00:02 — Bob: “People have trouble projecting to me, and I have trouble projecting to them”
- 01:01:55 — The cul-de-sac in McLuhan’s own life: frustration, family, “walking cul-de-sac”
- 01:03:11 — McLuhan’s family: the rosary, stomping on Eric’s toys, Mary and Corinne
- 01:08:11 — Étienne Gilson, Maritain, and the path to “medium is the message”
- 01:13:46 — The backflip: Lewis’ mid-career doctrine; McLuhan’s transformation between the 40s and 50s
- 01:24:02 — Bob’s essay applied to Donald Trump: the six phases leading to the Tech Body
- 01:43:07 — Inclusion vs. exclusion: McLuhan’s method is inclusive valuation
- 01:43:30 — “Television kills telephony in brothers’ broil. The eyes demand their turn.”
- 01:46:35 — Cameron’s animated fates: Rumpelstiltskin → Android Meme → Tech Body
- 01:59:33 — James Hillman and re-visioning psychology; Cameron’s visit to University of Dallas
- 02:08:32 — Jung between Freud and McLuhan: from personal to collective to technical archetypes
- 02:19:03 — Edible spaceships: inner trip vs. the satellite taking Earth with it
- 02:23:58 — Closing: “We don’t know where we’re going, but we’re well on our way” (Harry Lauder)
Mentioned Resources
Works by McLuhan
- “Psychopathology of Time and Life” (1949) — Neurotica vol. 5; reprinted in Scene Before You (Reinhardt)
- “Joyce, Mallarmé, and the Press” (c. 1951, pub. Sewanee Review ~1953) — phatic communion passage
- “Richards and Leavis” (1944) — earliest use of “phatic”
- From Cliché to Archetype (with Wilfred Watson) — p. 297: “recently achieved forms of consciousness” = Finnegans Wake
- Understanding Media — “edible spaceships”; electric anti-environments are “live and organic”
- War and Peace in the Global Village (1968) — electric anti-environments living
- Voices of Literature (with Richard J. Schoeck, 1964-65) — two volumes; third never appeared
- Blasting and Bombardiering (Wyndham Lewis) — the “backflip at mid-career” doctrine
- Essay on Wyndham Lewis (1953) — “god-obsessed mania” in Lewis
Other Works
- Al-Ghazali — “If you are looking for something that’s already there, it becomes lost”
- Bronisław Malinowski, appendix in The Meaning of Meaning (Richards and Ogden, 1923)
- James Hillman, Re-Visioning Psychology (1975)
- James Hillman, Emotion (1960) — McLuhan quoted this
- Martin Heidegger, Being and Time (1927) — Cameron: plurality of time is central to McLuhan
- James Joyce, Finnegans Wake p. 52 — “Television kills telephony in brothers’ broil”
People
- Al-Ghazali (Arab philosopher; quoted by Cameron)
- Bronisław Malinowski (coined phatic communion; The Meaning of Meaning appendix)
- Étienne Gilson (French Thomist; key influence on McLuhan c. 1940 and 1950s)
- Jacques Maritain (lectured with Gilson in Washington on art)
- James Hillman (post-Jungian; Cameron knew personally)
- Mary McLuhan (Marshall’s daughter; died July 2019)
- Eric McLuhan (Marshall’s son; died 2018; Electric Language)
- Harold Channer (New York McLuhan enthusiast; sang the Harry Lauder song, post-surgery)
- Neil Compton (Montreal critic; shocked at 1960s McLuhan vs. Mechanical Bride McLuhan)
- Don Theall (quantum/FW observation)
Closing
The dialogue ends where it begins — in the cul-de-sac, having circled back from edible spaceships to digestion to infinite regress. Cameron’s final observation: in order to assess masks, you need a mask; in order to digest everything, you need a stomach that must itself be digested. Bob’s last word: “We don’t know where we’re going, but we’re well on our way.” McLuhan’s Harry Lauder song is still playing.
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