The seventeenth session opens on the vertical dimension of the Tiny Note Chart . Bob reads it through McLuhan’s ratio car is to movie as airplane is to TV and the “air perspective on the human scene” , but Cameron keeps pulling the chart toward a harder question: is it a shareable method, or only Bob’s private instrument? That question becomes the dialogue’s real argument once Cameron lays out his “new science” — centers, or “clinics,” where people who believe they touch truth in their own fields would define the elements of human experience the way chemistry once defined the elements of matter — while Bob answers with his own cosmology of Five Bodies and the Android Meme. They close on the metaphysics both can share: the ground spectrum as a “cloud of implication,” the “one insight” McLuhan spent twenty years refining.
Key Topics
- The chart images the Android Meme at the instant it flipped from hidden ground (1960–1990) to figure “as the Internet.”
- Working McLuhan’s car is to movie as airplane is to TV, Cameron reads the airplane as “automobile-like freedom on the human sensorium,” and Bob makes TV a “reverse tetrad” that breaks the “tactile barrier” the way pushing the stick backward broke the sound barrier.
- Bob defends the chart’s bias as a “correct fallacy” — “the only way you could get a perspective” before you “move yourself away from the chart” — while Cameron presses that it never became something “learned in school and applied out of school… like chemistry.”
- After reading Köhler’s Gestalt Psychology in 1964, figure and ground became McLuhan’s “main conceptual tool,” and the earlier “computer patterning of sensory thresholds” (Daniel Capon’s project) he came to see as “all cul-de-sac.”
- Cameron’s counter-program: fund “centers” like McLuhan’s 1946 proposal to Robert Hutchins (“taken right from Sigfried Giedion”), where scientists, an Aristotle scholar, even nuns work out “what enables something like truth” across their fields.
- The metaphysics both accept: “there’s absolutely nothing… that doesn’t have a place in this figure and ground spectrum” — a “cloud of implication” — which McLuhan “found in Köhler a way of talking about” but first met as Innis’ “center and margin.”
Notable Quotes
"The elementary structures of human experience are what need to be defined in order to open a new era of the investigation of experience."
"It couldn't be without bias because the topic was biases."
"You can know somebody by their fruits, and his fruits were accurate."
Outline
- 0:00:23 — The vertical dimension: the big now vs linear time
- 0:04:26 — Car : movie :: airplane : TV; the air perspective
- 0:13:28 — The fifth point of view: distance and identity
- 0:15:44 — Platonists, Aristotelians, and the rough categories
- 0:18:47 — Hot/cool ditched; Köhler’s 1964 Gestalt; the sensory-threshold cul-de-sac
- 0:23:02 — Managing the anti-environment: Playboy and the six-month hiatus
- 0:27:49 — Inflation as Jungian compensation; the social unconscious
- 0:32:06 — Finnegans Wake: “lead kindly foul,” hamartia, the cloud of implication
- 0:37:51 — The bias of a piece of paper; is the chart shareable?
- 0:42:32 — The Five Bodies and the Thompson quadrant: ecology and iON
- 0:46:51 — The how and the what: the Munsell sphere and the nested spheres
- 0:50:52 — Monad to Pentad; structures vs illustrations
- 01:05:21 — Cameron’s new science and the clinics of truth
- 01:39:23 — The chemist’s elements: silver, the Tech Body, decentralization
- 01:54:27 — The global city vs the global village: Wyndham Lewis
- 02:02:23 — McLuhan completed sociology; the practical mystic and second sight
- 02:13:18 — Metaphysics: figure and ground, center and margin, the one insight
Mentioned Resources
Works by McLuhan
- War and Peace in the Global Village (1968) — the “global city,” and the inventory of favored Finnegans Wake quotes
- Counterblast (1969) — “the archetypes of the social unconscious are the anti-environment” (p. 31)
- Understanding Media (1964) — after which he ditched “hot and cool” and read Köhler
- From Cliché to Archetype — where he moved next, with Wilfred Watson
- The 1970s New York Times inflation articles — inflation as Jungian compensation
- “The Practical Mystic” (1936), the Explorations “bird’s point of view” (no. 8), the Take One ratio essay (1967), and the Playboy interview
Other Works
- Wyndham Lewis, America and Cosmic Man — the argument for “rootlessness” and the “cosmic mass”
- Finnegans Wake — the “cloud of implication” and “lead kindly foul”
- Wolfgang Köhler, Gestalt Psychology — read in 1964
- The Limits to Growth / the Club of Rome — the Thompson quadrant’s ecology
- Tom Wolfe, The Right Stuff — Chuck Yeager and the sound barrier
- The Munsell color sphere; The King of Comedy (1982); the McLuhan’s Wake documentary (narrated by Laurie Anderson)
People
- Marshall McLuhan (Canadian media theorist, the figure the dialogue orbits)
- Cameron McEwen and Bob Dobbs (the two hosts)
- Wyndham Lewis (painter, novelist, and Vorticist McLuhan engaged all his life)
- Harold Innis (the political economist behind “center and margin”)
- Sigfried Giedion (art historian; source of the “centers” idea)
- Wolfgang Köhler (Gestalt psychologist)
- Carl Jung (whose account of inflation McLuhan reworked)
- Daniel Capon (executed McLuhan’s sensory-threshold project)
- William Irwin Thompson, LaRouche, Kroker (the chart’s other figures)
- Ezra Pound, James Joyce, Thomas Kuhn, Ted Carpenter, Eric McLuhan, Plato (figures invoked across the session)
- Robert Hutchins, Chuck Yeager, Laurie Anderson (named in passing)
Closing
The dialogue stages the dialogue’s deepest disagreement — Bob’s chart as a finished mirror of the moment versus Cameron’s call for a slow, shared science of experience — and finds their common ground in figure and ground, the “one insight” McLuhan spent twenty years refining.
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