The Tiny Note Chart gets its send-off, and the session turns, for its long middle, to a single contested word. Bob has used “Esperanto” for years to name what McLuhan was after; Cameron, who has always resisted it, tracks down McLuhan’s one mention — visual form as “an unused Esperanto at everybody’s command” — and reads it as a doorway rather than a destination. From there the conversation becomes a patient reconstruction of how McLuhan reached “the medium is the message”: the search for a “common focus” as decisive for perception as the chemical elements were for the physical world . It ends where it can wrap up the chart — Bob’s fullest single account of the Android Meme .
Key Topics
- Cameron argues that visual form is “a world without walls” — a light bulb “you don’t need to bring anything with you” to understand — but photography and comics “needed to be explained, not things that you could use to explain with,” so an Esperanto can’t be what McLuhan was after.
- McLuhan turned Wyndham Lewis’ ineffectual “H-bomb set off in the desert” into a criterion: real analysis, like science, must have effect and stay cool, “impersonal in a Richards sense” and held at a “certain remove.”
- Reading Lewis’ “medium (the political and social atmosphere)” sent McLuhan back to Whitehead’s unexamined classifications; he “takes the unthought as the way to tackle the problem,” with Innis supplying “the importance of effects.”
- “1958 in Vancouver is where he first says the medium is the message” — reaching for the “common focus” the chemical elements gave the physical world — while the germ is a 1934 Cambridge letter on Eliot, who renders “both ordinary life and what’s going on in it” without remove.
- McLuhan’s “mere recognition of the existence of the subliminal… seems of itself to create fear and insecurity,” because studying media “threatens their identity.”
- Bob reads McLuhan’s quoted “software” as memes and calls the Android Meme the bridge to the “Tech Body,” while Cameron counters that it is “by definition plural,” “a weather of memes” with no single animus ; against that media-embedded body Bob sets the Anthropomorphic Physical — the chart’s Dobbs quadrant, “something like the citadel of consciousness” — and leaves open whether it survives once “the extensions of man” leave it.
Notable Quotes
"Even the unframed has a drama of cognition behind it."
"The mere recognition of the existence of the subliminal in ordinary human experience seems of itself to create fear and insecurity."
Outline
- 0:00:26 — Is prediction the chart’s value?
- 0:05:31 — The afterimage of the Android Meme
- 0:17:17 — Turning to the book: “unused” McLuhan
- 0:24:33 — The unused Esperanto: visual form as a world without walls
- 0:32:05 — Having effect: the cool remove and the classroom without walls
- 0:44:26 — The medium as the unthought: Lewis, Whitehead, Innis
- 0:51:38 — Meeting greatness: ambition, poise, and power
- 0:57:15 — “The medium is the message”: chemistry, Köhler, and 1934
- 1:08:37 — The subliminal and the threat to identity
- 1:13:06 — McLuhan the child, the family, and Maurice
- 1:36:57 — The bottom of the chart: the dancing quadrants
- 1:43:44 — The Android Meme: from verbal module to the Tech Body
Mentioned Resources
Works by McLuhan
- Explorations — his first issue, source of the “unused Esperanto at everybody’s command” line
- Understanding Media (1964) — the book that “explains the framework to the unframed”
- Counterblast — the 1954 “separateness of man” line and the 1969 edition’s p. 135 on “the citadel of individual consciousness”
- Take Today — its jacket, where McLuhan’s quoted “software” prompts Bob’s reading of memes
- From Cliché to Archetype — source of “verbal modules” and the “American bias” (p. 136)
- “Subliminal Projection Project” (~1957, Canadian Forum) and a September 1959 Project 69 presentation in the NAEB files
Other Works
- Wyndham Lewis, America and Cosmic Man (~1948) — the “great book” that “had no effect whatsoever”
- Alfred North Whitehead, Science and the Modern World (1925) — classifications “never thought about, just used”
- Wolfgang Köhler, Gestalt Psychology — read ~1964, giving McLuhan the ground spectrum
- Norman Mailer, The Naked and the Dead (~1948) — the “F-U-G” McLuhan echoes
- Arthur Kroker, Spasm, The Possessed Individual, and Data Trash (1994) — source of the “Android Meme processor”
- James Joyce, A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man — “the citadel of the soul had not fallen”
- Charles Reich, The Greening of America (~1970) — occasion for “the user is the content”
People
- Marshall McLuhan (media theorist at the center of the dialogue)
- Wyndham Lewis (painter and novelist whose America and Cosmic Man is McLuhan’s doorway to “the medium”)
- Ezra Pound (recipient of McLuhan’s letter on Lewis’ book)
- Harold Innis (who taught McLuhan “the importance of effects”)
- Alfred North Whitehead (source of the unexamined “classifications”)
- Wolfgang Köhler (Gestalt psychologist who gave McLuhan figure and ground)
- T.S. Eliot (the 1934 model of surface-with-remove)
- Étienne Gilson and Rupert Lodge (the medieval and Manitoba influences behind McLuhan’s method)
- Arthur Kroker, Lyndon LaRouche, and William Irwin Thompson (the chart’s other figures)
- Louis Armstrong (whose jazz McLuhan later called “an acoustic Esperanto”)
- Maurice McLuhan (Marshall’s brother, co-author of Who Was Marshall McLuhan?)
- Sigfried Giedion, Edmund Carpenter, and Donald Theall (met or recalled from the 1943–53 years)
- Barrington Nevitt (McLuhan’s student and Maurice’s co-author)
Closing
Stripped of its prophecy, the session is a rare, patient map of how McLuhan’s central slogan was built — from a boy’s letter on Eliot to a scientist’s dream of a “common focus” — and why Bob’s Android Meme claims to be its afterimage.
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