For once the essay stays closed. This is “a different kind of conversation” — no reading of the tech-body interview, but a running argument over whether the Tech Body is even negative. Cameron’s answer organizes the session: what looks like technology “taking away the power” is really a “giving away” of it , and the only way from the first two positions into the third is “to interrogate the black power” . Around that turn cluster a long history of Menippean satire, the test of the “alive mind,” and Cameron’s centerpiece — that the scattered memes must “become science.”
Key Topics
- Bob reopens last week’s cut-off ending on the “third position” — tactility as the interval between acoustic and visual space; around 1960, Cameron notes, McLuhan began correlating “the relation between the subject and the object and the nature of the object,” so the third position “arises when a person releases him or herself from fixation on either” and goes over to what “tactility” defines.
- The Tech Body should not be pre-judged: “we shouldn’t decide in advance if the Tech Body is positive or negative” , because the interval “appears only negative” yet is “what enables who you are and what the world is” — and the power is not taken from us but given, as “the Jews gave their power to the Ark of the Covenant.”
- Bob reconstructs the history of Menippean satire — Varro recovering the text of Menippus, Dryden’s “Varronian,” Bakhtin and Kristeva, and Eric McLuhan’s thesis that the form “is always a response to the changing effects in the medium,” renewing roughly every four hundred years down to the Electric-Age Cantos and Finnegans Wake.
- Cameron refuses the timeline as “way too linear,” preferring “different chords on the piano of perceptual possibility” ; his carbon-to-diamonds analogy yields not a straight line but the chart’s “epicycles and vortices and all sorts of crazy contortions of time.”
- Seriousness is the test: a live mind can “go up and go down and go from one side to the other side” , but the economy “harnesses” it, and entertainment “degrades people… touching them inappropriately, and they don’t even know that they’re being touched.”
- The constructive turn: the memes “are not in contact with reality,” so “what is necessary is for all of the memes together to become science” — knowing as “the agent intellect,” against Postman’s “amusing ourselves to death,” which misses that “we’re not amusing ourselves” but “exploring the cul-de-sac with no help.”
Notable Quotes
"What you call taking away the power, in an important sense, is a giving away of the power."
"What is necessary is for all of the memes together to become science."
Outline
- 0:00:44 — The third position: tactility as the interval
- 0:11:01 — Don’t decide the Tech Body is negative
- 0:16:56 — Menippean vs. Varronian satire
- 0:24:56 — “Way too linear”: chords on the piano
- 0:28:43 — The Anthropomorphic Physical meme; the great thinkers
- 0:32:21 — Kierkegaard, and the scale of seriousness
- 0:36:42 — Memes as bubbles; the cul-de-sac
- 0:42:35 — iON absorbs the human it talks to
- 0:46:59 — The horror, and seriousness as the test
- 0:51:14 — The alive mind and its harnessing
- 0:56:58 — Making the memes become science
- 1:04:01 — “Sensory input is not experience”; the “we” party
- 1:16:41 — Knowing, the agent intellect, and Postman
- 1:28:41 — The black body: black mirror, black hole
Mentioned Resources
Works by McLuhan
- Culture Is Our Business — cited for “sensory input is not experience”
- Take Today: The Executive as Dropout — the hardware/software passages read closely
- The Interior Landscape — the essay on Joyce that finds Joyce “a lot more fun” than Lewis
- McLuhan: Hot & Cool (ed. Gerald Emanuel Stearn) — the anthology whose p. 106 states “the integrity of the interval / the integrity of the object”
Other Works
- Eric McLuhan, The Role of Thunder in Finnegans Wake (1997) — and his PhD on the history of Menippean satire
- Donald Theall, The Medium Is the Rear View Mirror: Understanding McLuhan (1971) — Menippean satire and Frank Zappa
- Julia Kristeva, Desire in Language (late 1960s) — popularizing “Menippean satire”
- Mikhail Bakhtin on Rabelais — the retrieval of “Menippean”
- Neil Postman, Amusing Ourselves to Death — the thesis Bob and Cameron accept but correct
- Alfred Thayer Mahan, The Influence of Sea Power upon History — Cameron’s first four-hundred-page argument
- Finnegans Wake and Pound’s Cantos — the Electric-Age instances of Menippean satire
People
- Marshall McLuhan (media theorist at the center of the dialogue)
- Eric McLuhan (his son and intellectual heir, scholar of Menippean satire)
- Donald Theall (McLuhan’s closest early-1950s interlocutor)
- Menippus, Varro, and John Dryden (the ancient satiric lineage)
- Mikhail Bakhtin and Julia Kristeva (who returned “Menippean” to modern criticism)
- Wyndham Lewis and James Joyce (Theall’s Menippean and Varronian temperaments)
- Frank Zappa (the Mothers of Invention, Theall’s modern Menippean case)
- Søren Kierkegaard and Alfred Thayer Mahan (Cameron’s models of sustained argument)
- Aristotle and Plato (the “great minds” and the source of the agent intellect)
- T.S. Eliot, I.A. Richards, William Empson, and F.R. Leavis (the serious “we”)
- G.K. Chesterton and Étienne Gilson (the medieval accord brought to McLuhan)
- Jiddu Krishnamurti (the “pathless” truth), Joseph Conrad (“the horror”), and Ezra Pound (the “we party” letter)
- Neil Postman and Tony Schwartz (the media critics and recordings of the closing dispute)
- Carolyn Dean (the physician iON’s medicine came from)
Closing
By setting the essay aside, the session states the project’s wager plainly: the Tech Body is not to be feared but interrogated, and the only exit from the meme is to make it, at last, into science.
← The Tech Body’s ‘Based Reality’: Furry Lint, the Two Robots, and the Protein of the Interior Landscape · Without Ezra Pound There Is No McLuhan: the Bland Condition, the Peterson Mirror, and Giving Away the Power →