Recorded on Christmas Eve 2020, this is the longest and most philosophically dense session yet. Cameron opens on a fresh image of the cul-de-sac — a landscape of canyons, where what you need is always just over the ridge in the next canyon, and the human condition is nothing but the crossing between them . From there the hosts bend toward a single wager: that consciousness is being turned inside out. Cameron reads McLuhan’s Prospect essay as the exteriorization of consciousness — the interior landscape about to be studied the way the exterior was after 1800 — and presses it to the edge where even originality dissolves into quotation, creativity nothing but the hop from one cliché to the next.
Key Topics
- Trump’s shamanic quality: he didn’t understand himself, but “he somehow impersonated beyond himself something that was alive now in the world, and was not really grasped by anybody, but they were in the grasp of it.” McLuhan: new art is ugly ; the stutterer creates involvement; Trump is the ultimate frontier figure who creates a new identity every day because he doesn’t acknowledge what he said yesterday.
- After reading Wolfgang Köhler’s Gestalt Psychology in 1964, everything is figure and ground for McLuhan — his third way past the vertical and horizontal schools. Neither is the ground; rather there is a dynamic range of variation, and any phenomenon encountered takes up some possible position in that range. And: figure and ground is itself subject to figure and ground.
- The Prospect essay (1962) is “one of his deepest and darkest essays” : “And I think it is this multiplicity of media that is now enabling man to free himself from media for the first time in history… because of the sheer multiplicity of them, he is beginning to awaken, because he can’t live with them all.” Cameron: McLuhan lived through a decade of madness before arriving at this — he is talking about himself.
- Cameron’s central claim: the exteriorization of consciousness means the study of the interior landscape will develop analogously to chemistry after 1800 — with comparable institutional infrastructure, comparable complications, and comparable surprises. “We know about the interior landscape about as much as people in 1800 knew about the exterior landscape.”
- “It’s impossible to do anything but quote. The only thing that human beings do is they go from one type of quote to another type of quote.” Gutenberg was glue — between person and identity, person and God, person and values. Modern history is the refusal to give up that glue.
- Cameron on orientation in the electric world: where pre-electric cultures oriented by fixed positions and nationalisms, the electric world orients through probing and the uncertainty it carries — and that uncertainty is the only route back to revivifying our traditions. “In the electric world, orientation comes through probing, investigation, which involves a certain kind of uncertainty.”
Notable Quotes
"He somehow impersonated beyond himself something that was alive now in the world, and was not really grasped by anybody, but they were in the grasp of it."
"It's impossible to do anything but quote. The only thing that human beings do is they go from one type of quote to another type of quote."
Outline
- 0:02:02 — Canyons: the cul-de-sac as adjacent problem; the Trump fog
- 0:03:14 — Trump as shaman: Bob’s 2017 piece; Pryde’s Inuit book
- 0:08:51 — Vertical vs. horizontal schools; McLuhan’s disagreement with both
- 0:10:15 — Köhler’s Gestalt Psychology (1964): figure and ground as the third way
- 0:20:12 — Five stomachs: synchronic or diachronic?
- 0:22:13 — Technologies as words: speech implies the rest
- 0:30:25 — The stutterer creates involvement: Trump and Biden
- 0:47:26 — The Prospect essay (1962): multiplicity frees us, but with pain
- 0:51:26 — Understanding Media (1964): the technological simulation of consciousness
- 0:52:47 — What McLuhan scholarship misses about exteriorization
- 0:59:00 — McLuhan in a cul-de-sac: people have trouble projecting to him and he to them
- 01:06:00 — The interior landscape as undiscovered country; chemistry as model
- 01:14:26 — Richards, Empson, and ambiguity: disorienting McLuhan in Winnipeg c. 1930
- 01:18:10 — Where did McLuhan get “extensions”? Wright, Emerson, Hall, his father
- 01:22:42 — McLuhan writes through quotations as challenges to himself (Ruskin example)
- 01:29:47 — Everything is a quote; Gutenberg as glue
- 01:31:00 — Cliché to Archetype: “an archetype is a quoted extension”
- 01:44:23 — Making and matching as carbon valence; the complete map of experience
- 01:49:27 — Gombrich, Rosenberg, Maritain and Gilson: 7 years of art theory (1955-62)
- 02:08:08 — The Dominion software and the Tech Body running the 2016 election
- 02:11:04 — Global Membrane vs. Global Theater
- 02:35:12 — Cameron’s closing: probing as the only orientation in the electric world
Mentioned Resources
Works by McLuhan
- “Prospect” (1962) — “one of his deepest and darkest essays”; multiplicity enables awakening
- Understanding Media (1964) — “the technological simulation of consciousness”
- Cliché to Archetype (with Wilfred Watson, 1970) — archetype as “a quoted extension”
- ‘Verbi Voco Visual’ in Explorations #8, 1957 — section on figure/ground in 16th-17th century literature
- “Notes on Burroughs” (1964) — “global membrane”; first use of the term
Other Works
- Wolfgang Köhler, Gestalt Psychology — McLuhan read in 1964; source of figure/ground
- William Empson, Seven Types of Ambiguity (1930) — inherent ambiguity in language; McLuhan read c. 1930 in Winnipeg
- Pryde, book on the Inuit (Victoria Island/Cambridge Bay) — shamans and the transition to modern technology
- Harold Rosenberg — art critic; celebrated the new break from the past
- E.H. Gombrich — art theorist; part of the Washington lecture series; source of making/matching
People
- Wolfgang Köhler (Gestalt Psychology; source of figure/ground for McLuhan)
- William Empson (Seven Types of Ambiguity; McLuhan read in Winnipeg)
- I.A. Richards (The Meaning of Meaning; inherent linguistic ambiguity)
- Harold Rosenberg (art critic celebrating the new)
- Wright (Manitoba author; McLuhan’s annotated copy in Toronto; likely source of “extensions”)
- Pryde (P-R-Y-D-E; Inuit ethnographer; book on shamans)
- Claude Bernard (interior of the body; analogous to interior landscape)
Closing
The dialogue ends mid-essay again — “there’s no finish line,” Bob says — with Cameron’s argument that the Tech Body can consume any thinker who confuses broadcasting with investigating. The only way out is the way McLuhan himself pointed: step aside from your stock figures, and probe.
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