Ten sessions deep in the end of Bob’s Trump book, the pair finally turn to its front page — and immediately snag on a single word. Cameron’s correction of Bob’s “conceptual/perceptual” pairing opens onto the session’s real subject: the communication problem, the 2,500-year failure of great perceivers to hand on what they saw. They trace it through the cul-de-sac and its “resonating gap” , Nietzsche on nihilism and morality, and McLuhan’s insistence that radio and television are effects mistaken for causes — before a long detour into how iON first “showed up” and Bob’s decades with the Evergreens, and a close on Trump as a Menippean “talking ass” and Finnegans Wake read as a hologram.
Key Topics
- Cameron corrects Bob’s slip of pairing the ethical school with “the conceptual” and the cognitive with “the perceptual”: for McLuhan “there is nothing that is not already perceptual,” and the paired opposites he seems to trade in “are dualisms that he ultimately rejects.”
- The cul-de-sac is reframed as a gift — the exit is not crossing its “resonating gap” to the other side (which “would be just one more dualism”) but seeing the dead end’s own “promise,” a task McLuhan’s atomic century made urgent.
- McLuhan’s “science of causes” gets its sharpest critique: naming radio and television as causes is like “holding up a gold bar and saying this is an element” — they are “the effects of causes,” the underlying form being tactility and electricity.
- The Gutenbergian mode predates print — “what Gutenberg did was kind of amplify literacy,” making it “a perpetual possibility” — while electricity supplies the “bipolar” vision to grasp reality as “plural… gapped, but not dualistic.”
- On saving the book: reading is “Gutenbergian by nature” because the anti-environment is mediated, yet Finnegans Wake — McLuhan’s antidote to the LSD fad — can be read as a hologram whose every section “is a reproduction of the whole.”
- The perceptual reading of Trump lands as Menippean satire — Trump is “a talking ass” whose deeper communication “is what you want to say about Trump nobody knew.”
Notable Quotes
"If McLuhan is read deeply, then he doesn't do dualisms. He explicitly rejects them."
"If you see the book properly, we're saved. If you see the book improperly, we're doomed."
"He's a communicating ass. And he has not stopped communicating. He's more prominent now than he was when he was president."
Outline
- 0:00:01 — Reading the Trump book from the front
- 0:02:39 — The conceptual/perceptual mistake; dualisms are Gutenbergian
- 0:06:43 — McLuhan rejects dualisms; the constraint of the book
- 0:11:05 — Zen, Plato’s seventh letter, and the two problems
- 0:14:17 — The cul-de-sac and its resonating gap
- 0:17:08 — 1945, McLuhan’s difference, and Eliot’s Quartets
- 0:20:40 — Why McLuhan became a phenomenon: the NAEB
- 0:22:17 — Plato’s Thoth, Innis, and Nietzsche
- 0:25:40 — Effects, causes, and the gold bar
- 0:29:17 — Tactility, electricity, and the plural ground
- 0:32:46 — Derrida, text, and the transitive gap
- 0:49:14 — Lawrence, Kansas, and the Evergreens
- 01:03:16 — The Five Bodies and the hexadic body
- 01:09:04 — Electricity as ground, and the vision
- 01:28:14 — Loud vs. quiet: talking louder to the blind
- 01:34:12 — Trump the talking ass; Menippean satire
- 01:38:28 — Kostelanetz: concepts to get a grip on reality
- 01:44:36 — Saving the book; Finnegans Wake as hologram
- 01:51:20 — Zingrone, Theall, and making vs matching
- 02:09:22 — The archetype book: Unshackled
Mentioned Resources
Works by McLuhan
- The Gutenberg Galaxy and Understanding Media — the later books whose “dialectics or doubles” readers mistake for dualism
- The Interior Landscape (1969) — the collected essays; the 1953 Joyce essay quoted at the front of Bob’s book
- Explorations — invoked as the work that undermines any dualism read as definitive
- Report to the National Association of Educational Broadcasters (NAEB, 1960) — the hinge to McLuhan’s prominence
Other Works
- James Joyce, Finnegans Wake — read as a hologram and as McLuhan’s antidote to the LSD fad
- T.S. Eliot, Four Quartets — the poems McLuhan and Hugh Kenner read closely in the late 1940s
- Dante, Divina Commedia (The Divine Comedy) — paired with the Quartets as a work that “ends with a vision”
- Plato, Seventh Letter and the Thoth story — writing as the origin of the communication problem
- Captain Beefheart, Trout Mask Replica — “Steal Softly Thru Snow” and “Dachau Blues,” Bob’s figure for quiet versus loud
- Scott Woods and Phil Dellio, Unshackled: The Dustbin of Donald Trump (2017) — Trump as “the consolidation of the archetype”
- Richard Kostelanetz, The New York Times interview (January 29, 1967) — “people need concepts to get a grip on reality”
People
- Marshall McLuhan (media theorist at the center of the dialogue)
- Friedrich Nietzsche (on nihilism, morality, and the Gutenbergian perspective)
- Plato (the seventh letter and the Thoth myth of writing)
- T.S. Eliot (the Four Quartets McLuhan read with Kenner)
- Hugh Kenner (McLuhan’s collaborator on Eliot)
- Harold Innis (the printing-press equivalent of Plato’s warning)
- Jacques Derrida (critiqued for seeing “a non-transitive gap”)
- John O’Neill (the kind interlocutor at the 1980 Kansas hermeneutics conference)
- Ramon Llull (the “blind guy” behind McLuhan’s talking-louder parable)
- Don Theall (the “brightest student” Bob says slightly misunderstood McLuhan)
- Frank Zingrone (the source of “pentad” and the Fordham divide on Finnegans Wake)
- R. Murray Schafer (recalled McLuhan calling Finnegans Wake “a radio program”)
- Richard Kostelanetz (the young journalist McLuhan told “people need concepts”)
- Eric McLuhan (whose “faith is a percept” Cameron finds says nothing)
- Michael Blake Read (the medium through whom Bob reached the Evergreens)
- Captain Beefheart (composer of the loud/quiet songs Bob invokes)
- Donald Trump (the “talking ass” and “consolidation of the archetype”)
Closing
Reading the book from its front turns the whole series into a single wager: that the communication that has failed since Plato — matching “impossible… because everything is mediated” — might yet come through making, if the cul-de-sac can be seen as a gift rather than a trap.
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