Their sixth session opens the formal reading of Bob’s essay What We/You Didn’t Know About Trump, but its most consequential thread is a genealogy: “the medium is the message” as the residue of a failure, not an aphorism. Cameron traces it to Sigfried Giedion’s orchestra — gather the best minds from every faculty to voice the common truth they already share — which McLuhan carried into the culture-and-technology seminar; when that seminar collapsed, the phrase was what was left standing . Around it sit the Winnipeg boys who invaded Toronto together from the prairie and, at the close, McLuhan and Jordan Peterson read as structural opposites entering the cul-de-sac from opposite ends.
Key Topics
- Cameron traces “the medium is the message” to Giedion’s early 1940s orchestra idea: Western civilization’s crisis is a product of specialization; the solution is for best minds to find the common truth they already have but don’t know. McLuhan took this to the University of Chicago in 1946–47, asked for too much, got rejected , ran the idea through the Explorations Group seminar in 1953–55, watched it fail — and two years later came up with the medium is the message.
- The Winnipeg trio — McLuhan, David Carlton Williams (known as Carl), and W.T. Easterbrook — are shown to be lifelong interlocutors who invaded Toronto together from the prairie , each eventually excelling in ways the dull Toronto establishment hadn’t expected. Easterbrook, who disagreed with everything McLuhan said his whole life, admitted after McLuhan died that he regretted it.
- Cameron’s key translation of Bob’s six phases into all-at-once mode: the sequence is actually a “breathing in and out” — synesthetic (global village) → co-anesthetic satellite/interval (Global Theater) → back to synesthetic but enhanced (Global Membrane) → and so on. The hyphen in “co-anesthetic” is the interval, always already there but not yet known.
- Cameron’s philosophical core: making is not making from scratch. When we see truth, we see it as making, not matching. Making is fully capable of true perception — but only when it keeps faith with what is given. When making is “dislodged from an allegiance to what is given, then making gets out of control.”
- McLuhan and Jordan Peterson as structural opposites from University of Toronto: McLuhan coming out of visual space to diagnose its disappearance; Peterson coming from the other end to ask if visual space can be saved. Both misinterpreted, both fell ill with the same symptoms (akathisia).
Notable Quotes
"It's not the case that humans have perceptions. Perceptions have humans. And perceptions are alive and are controlling and are huge."
"When making is dislodged from an allegiance to what is given, then making gets out of control."
Outline
- 0:00:01 — Opening: sixth session; beginning to read Bob’s essay formally
- 0:03:33 — The letter to Morgan (McLean Hunter); analytic vs. intuitive man
- 0:06:35 — Maurice McLuhan told a panel that Marshall was “an only child” — the Irish bull
- 0:11:02 — David Carlton Williams, Easterbrook, and the Winnipeg trio
- 0:42:58 — Giedion’s orchestra idea: the common truth already held but not known
- 0:45:08 — McLuhan’s 1946–47 proposal to the University of Chicago; the seminar fails
- 0:45:23 — The failure of the seminar → “the medium is the message”
- 0:50:27 — Joyce and Giedion; Lewis before Giedion (1936 vs. 1943)
- 0:54:13 — McLuhan as always looking for a team; Harry Skornia as the solution
- 0:56:27 — Cameron: translating the six phases into all-at-once mode
- 0:58:03 — Co-anesthetic (Don Theall’s term); the satellite as the interval made known
- 01:02:31 — Breathing in and out: synesthetic → co-anesthetic → Global Membrane
- 01:05:24 — Perceptions have humans, not vice versa
- 01:06:40 — The way out of the cul-de-sac: if percepts are plural, the cul-de-sac isn’t necessary
- 01:25:24 — Making vs. matching: making dislodged from the given gets out of control
- 01:27:30 — Consumer mania vs. producer mania; sense-making and the Intellectual Dark Web
- 01:28:32 — McLuhan and Jordan Peterson: opposite University of Toronto figures
- 01:33:24 — Akathisia: Peterson’s and McLuhan’s identical symptoms
- 01:40:34 — Canada as the Switzerland of the solar government
- 01:45:35 — Cameron: Bob is doing the phenomenology of mind brought up to date (Hegel)
Mentioned Resources
Works by McLuhan
- Letters of Marshall McLuhan (ed. William Toye) — Morgan letter, analytic vs. intuitive man
- The Mechanical Bride — celebrates Giedion’s interdisciplinary mind
- Take Today — “recently achieved forms of consciousness”; hardware/software dialectic on back sleeve
- “Notes on Burroughs” (1964) — “the Egyptian stance”; Lewis as Pontifex Maximus
Other Works
- Sigfried Giedion, Space, Time and Architecture — = Finnegans Wake in architectural form
- Speaking of Winnipeg (Finkelman interview) — McLuhan and Easterbrook together; the meadowlark; Irish bull dynamic
- Richard Maurice Bucke, Cosmic Consciousness — earliest use of “percepts” Bob found, 19th century
- G.W.F. Hegel, Phenomenology of Spirit (1807) — Cameron: Bob doing its update
- Judith Fitzgerald’s McLuhan book — description of post-1960 stroke McLuhan as frenetic/akathisic
People
- Sigfried Giedion (orchestra idea; Joyce’s friend; interdisciplinary studies)
- W.T. Easterbrook (Winnipeg; engineering class; lifelong disagreer; regretted it)
- David Carlton Williams (Winnipeg; Western University president 1967–77)
- Jacqueline Tyrwhitt (Giedion’s editor/translator; Explorations Group)
- E.J. Carpenter (marine; Nuremberg; anti-CIA in anthropology)
- Edgar Friedenberg (The Vanishing Adolescent; Bob sat in on his classes at Dalhousie)
- Wilson Bryan Key (Subliminal Seduction; McLuhan backed him; Williams didn’t help)
- Jordan Peterson (University of Toronto; Jungian; McLuhan’s structural opposite)
- Richard Maurice Bucke (psychologist; mentor to Whitman; Cosmic Consciousness)
Closing
The dialogue ends mid-essay, with Cameron’s last word being that Bob is doing — in his own “odd fellow” way — what Hegel did for the 19th century: showing how mind comes to terms with itself through its dead ends, contradictions, and riddles, one phase at a time.
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