“Such a service environment can liquidate or terminate its beneficiaries as naturally as it sustains them” — the Take Today line Cameron reads to open the session turns the “relative peace” of nuclear overkill into its own deadliest danger, and sets the word he returns to all hour: balance. McLuhan the Catholic holds that “balance is the last word,” but only ever as a teeter-totter, balanced by unbalance . The rest of the dialogue tests that conviction against the changing meanings of “medium” and, at length, a 1960 argument over whether uncertainty disables or enables thought .
Key Topics
- Reading Take Today p.152, Cameron reframes nuclear overkill as a “form of peace” whose “relative peace” is “very, very dangerous” and “could easily precipitate the opposite of any kind of peace.”
- Balance is McLuhan’s Catholic “last word,” addressed to “an environment that’s 99% unbalanced,” yet it can only ever be balanced by its opposite.
- Cameron interrogates “anarchy at the top” through Nietzsche, for whom anarchy is self-dissolving — once interrogated it “dissipates into nihilism” and the cul-de-sac.
- Nam June Paik, who distorted the TV image to “correct” McLuhan, is judged to have taken the medium “literally” and so “automatically fallen into the Gutenbergian world.”
- Baudrillard, whom Cameron has “never read,” is assessed through Bob’s quotations as capturing “only an incidental piece” of McLuhan, a “characteristic vision of the Gutenberg Galaxy.”
- At a 1960 economics conference, Easterbrook took uncertainty to be “disabling” of intelligibility, while McLuhan took bias to enable it.
Notable Quotes
"It's the society that's already been created. That's the medium."
"The great thing about McLuhan is that he kept in mind the big goal. And what was the big goal? Survival."
"Outside of McLuhan's family, there's probably nobody in the world that knew McLuhan as well as Easterbrook."
Outline
- 0:01:22 — “The peace that passes all technology”
- 0:06:01 — Tactility, the answer, and the cul-de-sac
- 0:10:41 — Balance as the last word
- 0:15:51 — Aboriginal cultures and the question of wisdom
- 0:21:43 — Anarchy at the top: Nietzsche and nihilism
- 0:31:12 — Education, poetry, and what listeners learn
- 0:44:08 — The meanings of “medium”: Nam June Paik
- 0:55:20 — Baudrillard and the transition out of the medium
- 01:02:05 — Explorations, Carpenter, and the failure of communication
- 01:22:59 — Who thinks with McLuhan
- 01:34:51 — America, protest, and the sensory question
- 01:46:48 — Easterbrook, Innis, and uncertainty
- 02:02:18 — Feminists, Menippean satire, and the genderless Tech Body
Mentioned Resources
Works by McLuhan
- Take Today (with Barrington Nevitt, 1972) — the p.152 “liquidate or terminate its beneficiaries” line that opens the session
- “Effects of the Improvements of Communication Media” (1960) — McLuhan’s paper at the History of Economics Association
- The Interior Landscape — the early essays on Tennyson, Joyce, and Poe named as the place McLuhan first works on “language”
Other Works
- Bob’s iON / Trump book — the book undergoes line-by-line reading, from roughly p.17
- Jean Baudrillard — quoted from iON as “the transition out of the medium of TIME”
- Speaking of Winnipeg — the “little book” carrying an Easterbrook–McLuhan dialogue
- Explorations — the Carpenter–McLuhan journal that Barthes and Derrida subscribed to
People
- Marshall McLuhan (media theorist at the center of the dialogue)
- Nam June Paik (Korean video artist, part of Fluxus and the John Cage circle)
- Jean Baudrillard (French theorist of the collapse of medium and message)
- Amazing Polly (independent video researcher featured on Bob’s website)
- Friedrich Nietzsche (source of anarchy as self-dissolving nihilism)
- Harold Innis (economic historian of communication and bias)
- W.T. “Tom” Easterbrook (economic historian and McLuhan’s lifelong friend)
- Ted Carpenter (McLuhan’s Explorations collaborator)
- Eric Havelock (classicist on the dating of literacy)
- George Sanderson (had “a sixth sense about McLuhan”)
- Richard Cavell (McLuhan scholar Cameron faults for making Art the “ground”)
- Richard Altman and Jim Paterson (independent minds Cameron values)
- Jacques Derrida (influenced by Explorations in ways he “played down”)
- I.A. Richards, Ezra Pound, T.S. Eliot, James Joyce, Wyndham Lewis, Plato (figures invoked across the session)
- Don Theall (whose prefix, “para”, Bob prefers for naming the science of today — “Para-media Ecology”)
Closing
Under the reading of “medium,” the hour keeps returning to one wager — … that “balance” survives even total annihilation only if it is held, like everything in McLuhan, as a question rather than an answer.
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