Before opening his own Trump book, Bob hands the session to Cameron, whose February 2021 essay “The Technique of Flight” becomes a lens for reading McLuhan through a rarely-cited 1961 article and Bertrand Russell’s “technique of suspended judgment” . The paradox at its center — “how not to have a point of view” — runs from the Romantics, who fixed experience in the aesthetic moment, through the Cubist destruction of the single viewpoint, to electric media that make the unconscious “flight” between moments visible. Only in the last third do the two turn to the book itself, reading its epigraphs as a contemporaneous rather than chronological pair, before closing on Trump as the “somebody” who violated the presidency’s “superlative nobody” .
Key Topics
- Cameron reads McLuhan’s footnote contrasting Caspar David Friedrich’s Wanderer Above the Sea of Fog (1818) with Juan Gris’s Cubist Portrait of Josette (1916) — a hundred years in which the privileged point of view is destroyed, the First World War its end .
- Every utterance sits on “the spectrum of possibilities,” which Cameron likens to “a kind of piano that gets played” — and “the great question is, who plays the piano? And that’s a kind of nobody” , a nobody Zappa and Beckett had already found .
- The Romantics “could not discover the technique of flight” — the gap between one poem or picture and the next that they lived but never saw; exploring that gap is where electricity gets discovered .
- Because of its “low-res experience” Canada is “a picture of how experience works,” while America “cannot let go of being number one” — the “going out to be alone” that lets identity form only from the inside .
- The book’s two epigraphs are staged spatially: the 1967 quote sits above the 1978 one, arrogance and detachment above the analysis it makes possible — a chronological pair that is also “all at once” .
- Trump is “like Gulliver being tied down,” unable to move the bureaucracy , yet “the ugly American” who “exposes this multiplicity behind the mask” — a signal of a gap widening “like the San Andreas Fault” .
Notable Quotes
"The road to understanding media effects begins with arrogant superiority… It would be like an octopus attacking the Great Pyramid."
"The great question is, who plays the piano? And that's a kind of nobody."
"The automated presidential surrogate is a superlative nobody."
Outline
- 0:00:12 — Setting the table: the Technique of Flight
- 0:02:31 — The 1961 essay: Russell’s suspended judgment
- 0:05:57 — Friedrich vs Gris: the death of the point of view
- 0:15:16 — Romantic discontinuity and the cinematic aesthetic
- 0:22:33 — How not to have a point of view: the spectrum and the piano
- 0:28:25 — The nobody: Zappa, Beckett, the ball game
- 0:31:50 — The technique of flight: living in the gap
- 0:34:49 — Media vs mediums; Cubism as “multi-location” art
- 0:39:10 — Flight, the bird’s-eye view, and the movie as container
- 0:43:21 — Canadian quadrophrenia and plenary awareness
- 0:47:02 — Low-res Canada vs high-res America
- 0:51:46 — Thomism, the labyrinth, and the transcendentalist quarrel
- 0:53:48 — The American paradox; going out to be alone
- 1:00:31 — Masks, the Lone Ranger, and privacy
- 1:06:39 — Into the book: applying McLuhan
- 1:14:28 — The book’s two epigraphs
- 1:27:10 — Cancel culture, Trump, and being tied down
- 1:33:19 — The inscrutable West; Trump exposes the multiplicity
- 1:40:18 — Biden and the end of the presidency
- 1:45:22 — Closing: a bow on the cul-de-sac
Mentioned Resources
Works by McLuhan
- “The Humanities in the Electronic Age” (1961) — the “bulletin to Canada” Cameron reads for the technique of suspended judgment
- From Cliché to Archetype (1970) — p.136’s “national plenary awareness”
- Take Today (1972) — “the automated presidential surrogate is a superlative nobody”
- McLuhan: Hot & Cool (1967, ed. Gerald Stearn) — the interview behind the first epigraph, and the “Munsell sphere” image
- Interview with David Sohn (1978, unpublished) — the second epigraph, on espionage and conflict of interest
Other Works
- Bertrand Russell, The ABC of Relativity — source of the “technique of suspended judgment”
- Caspar David Friedrich, Wanderer Above the Sea of Fog (1818) — the Romantic point of view
- Juan Gris, Portrait of Josette (1916) — the Cubist destruction of it
- T.S. Eliot, “Tradition and the Individual Talent” — a new work changing the whole past
- Wyndham Lewis, America and Cosmic Man — the rare singular “medium”
- Finnegans Wake — the Romantic “double fixation” exploded
- Bob Dobbs, What We/You Didn’t Know About Trump — the book under discussion
People
- Marshall McLuhan (media theorist at the center of the dialogue)
- Bertrand Russell (philosopher; the “technique of suspended judgment”)
- Caspar David Friedrich (Romantic painter of the Wanderer Above the Sea of Fog)
- Juan Gris (Cubist painter of the Portrait of Josette)
- T.S. Eliot (poet-critic; “Tradition and the Individual Talent”)
- Frank Zappa (composer; the band where “nobody knows who the drummer is”)
- Samuel Beckett (playwright “writing his plays about nobody”)
- Stéphane Mallarmé (symbolist who took language as object and subject)
- Wyndham Lewis (author of America and Cosmic Man)
- Gerald Stearn (editor and interviewer behind the 1967 epigraph)
- David Sohn (interviewer of the unpublished 1978 epigraph)
Closing
Read this way, the two quotes stop being a preface and become a method: take the “arrogant superiority” of flight above the field, and the year’s politics resolve into a single pattern — the nobody every institution now conscripts, and the somebody who broke the frame.
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