Page 183, and the Tech Body is still talking. The reading of Bob’s Trump essay reaches its most extreme line — “without Ezra Pound, there is no Marshall McLuhan” — which Bob defends as “a correct fallacy” and Cameron turns into biography: the poet whose eclectic erudition tore McLuhan out of literary provincialism into politics and history. From there the session builds toward its centerpiece, an extended reading of Jordan Peterson as McLuhan’s exact mirror image , before closing back inside the tech-body interview, where power turns out to be “your human power,” given away to “something smarter to run the ship” .
Key Topics
- Meeting Pound sent McLuhan to “read everything” — the translations “from Old English to Chinese” that “increased McLuhan[‘s] scope on history” and forced literature open to “politics and economics and society” ; the wartime Mussolini broadcasts, though, became “one of the reasons that he dropped association with Pound.”
- In the 1960s “media” was heard as the news, comic books, and rock and roll , but “the whole notion of media is tactility,” so taking it literally “as the Internet” means you have “gone wrong on the very first step.”
- The essay’s cryptic verdict on Lewis is unpacked: he saw the Tech Body early yet neutralized “his own insight” by “putting baking soda on everything” , the failure McLuhan set out to redo by trading his hot 1940s manner for a “cool posture.”
- Peterson is read as McLuhan’s mirror — both Alberta-born, both at the University of Toronto, both “viciously attacked,” both taken ill at the same age (Peterson in 2019, McLuhan at his 1967 surgery) — yet a “Ewen Cameron hero” who repeats McLuhan’s move but has “never engaged… not only McLuhan, but Harold Innis,” or the Toronto tradition.
- Threaded through is Bob’s esoteric history: iON as “the guff,” the Jewish word for “heaven, where souls go when they die,” draining into the physical world “150 years ago with the telegraph” , confirming his 1990s claim that “the astral plane was being eroded by electricity.”
- Finnegans Wake becomes “more accurate as a portrait of our situation than anybody could have imagined,” the “hyper-texting world” young readers already live ; and the interview ends on power as “your human power,” handed to “something smarter to run the ship” until the Tech Body “sucks it away from us.”
Notable Quotes
"It's a fallacy, but it's a correct fallacy."
"The whole notion of media is tactility."
Outline
- 0:00:01 — “Without Ezra Pound there is no McLuhan”
- 0:09:56 — The Tech Body’s “correct fallacy”
- 0:23:53 — “Media” misread as the news
- 0:29:19 — Wyndham Lewis and the bland condition
- 0:36:06 — McLuhan’s “cool posture”; Mailer’s value judgments
- 0:39:08 — “Equal box rights”: women’s lib and wealth
- 0:42:15 — The Tech Body captures the printing press
- 0:43:29 — iON, the fractions, and the astral plane
- 0:52:10 — Finnegans Wake as the portrait
- 0:57:01 — The guff: iON’s origin
- 1:00:40 — The McLuhan–Peterson mirror
- 1:19:53 — Maps of Meaning and the Ewen Cameron hero
- 1:29:35 — Going out to be alone
- 1:41:18 — The multi-level method
- 1:46:14 — Joyce through the looking glass
- 1:50:24 — The tech-body interview: words, games, power
- 2:06:53 — Next week: the Anthropomorphic Physical
Mentioned Resources
Works by McLuhan
- The Gutenberg Galaxy — the book McLuhan outlined in his 1951–52 letter to Pound
- From Cliché to Archetype (1970) — quarried for p.136 (the eight cultural biases) and p.163 (the Joyce “looking glass” passage)
- Culture Is Our Business (1970) — Bob’s source for McLuhan “predicting” a return to visual values
- “Joyce, Aquinas, and the Poetic Process” (1951) — the Joyce essay Bob names
- “Canada: The Borderline Case” — the “going out to be alone” writings
Other Works
- James Joyce, Finnegans Wake and Ulysses — the dissolved hero and the hero
- What We/You Didn’t Know About Trump (Bob’s tech-body essay on Donald Trump) — the book whose final appendix-pages this session reads to the close
- Jordan Peterson, Maps of Meaning and 12 Rules for Life — the career “divorced” from the Cambridge English School
- William Empson, Seven Types of Ambiguity — the Cambridge background Peterson skips
- Wyndham Lewis, Self-Condemned (1954), The Apes of God, and The Jews, Are They Human? — the disgraced-prophet books
- Margaret Atwood, Survival — where McLuhan found the “going out to be alone” pattern
- Henry James, Daisy Miller — the American who “goes out to be alone” in Europe
- Ezra Pound, The Cantos — the Electric-Age Menippean instance beside the Wake
Films
- The Social Dilemma — the media-ecologist documentary Bob reads as saying the takeover “already happened”
- Quest for Fire — Bob’s image of pre-social humans “in the world of verbum”
People
- Marshall McLuhan (Canadian media theorist and the figure the dialogue orbits)
- Ezra Pound (American poet, one of McLuhan’s “men of 1914”)
- Wyndham Lewis (British painter, novelist, and founder of Vorticism)
- T.S. Eliot (the poet whose impersonality McLuhan took, the “background schema”)
- James Joyce (Irish novelist whose Finnegans Wake is the dialogue’s central text)
- Harold Innis (Canadian economic historian who “lit a match” with McLuhan)
- Jordan Peterson (Canadian psychologist read as McLuhan’s mirror image)
- Norman Mailer (the “existential hero,” the lone holdout on value judgments)
- Donald Theall, Donald Barthelme, and John Cage (the neutral crowd that “ignited” McLuhan around 1960)
- Frank Zappa (composer whose afterlife Bob invokes against a dismissive review)
- Arthur Kroker (source of the term “hyper-subjective”)
- William Irwin Thompson (the theosophical body-categories Bob borrows)
- Julian Jaynes (the “bicameral mind”), Shirley MacLaine (1980s occult popularizer), and Tom Wolfe (the central-nervous-system literalist)
- Carolyn Dean (the physician alongside Bob when iON first arrived)
- Friedrich Nietzsche (the “will to power” and the cul-de-sac)
- Neil Postman (technology taking “on a life of its own”)
- R. Murray Schafer (the student who recalled McLuhan teaching the Wake as “a radio program”)
- Donald Ewen Cameron (the MK-Ultra psychiatrist whose name becomes the “hero” type)
- Robert Fulford and Northrop Frye (the CBC interviewer and the lecturing voice people grew nostalgic for)
- Margaret Atwood and Henry James (Survival and Daisy Miller)
Closing
By reading Peterson as McLuhan’s mirror, the session turns its media theory on the present: the same Toronto ground can still throw up a world-figure, but only a thinker willing to lose himself — not a hero defending a point of view — can go where the Tech Body has already taken the power.
← Interrogating the Black Power: Menippean Satire, the Alive Mind, and Making the Memes Become Science · The Anthropomorphic Physical, the Coach House Years, and the Masked Man →