Reading the bottom of p.79, Cameron stops Bob on a single word: if the Quadrivium is “a higher level type of tactility,” then tactility cannot be something that “changes with time” . From that objection the session builds Bob’s decade chart of Marshall McLuhan — the 1940s Trivium, the 1950s Quadrivium, the 1960s Satellite-and-Cyborg anti-environment — and runs out past the chart to the Android Meme, the Five Bodies, and the Tech Body . Under all of it is the question the two keep circling: McLuhan named what media do but “didn’t figure out how to communicate it” , a glorious failure Cameron sets himself, and Bob, to finish.
Key Topics
- Tactility recast as interplay rather than a sense — “McLuhan defines it as interplay” — against Cameron’s counter that the Quadrivium is a higher level of tactility, not tactility changing over time.
- Bob’s decade chart: the 1940s Trivium plus Advertising and Comics, the 1950s Quadrivium (three Copernican Revolutions, non-Euclidean Geometry, Nielsen Ratings), and the 1960s Quadrivium plus Satellite, Cyborg, and Mixed-Corporate Media.
- McLuhan’s letters to Ezra Pound — “I’ve wasted 20 years on English studies,” “the word is a drug” — and Cameron’s dating of the surrender of the literate point of view to around 1949–50.
- The Android Meme dated as Ground from 1960 to 1990, the 1990s Internet as its afterimage, and its collapse and “flip into the Tech Body.”
- Percepts versus concepts through the Richard Kostelanetz interview (“books create the effect of the concept”), and McLuhan’s late books read as the same ideas repackaged for different audiences.
- Cameron’s foundation argument — McLuhan wrote Eric Voegelin that “everything is everything else,” so only a “level that holds,” reached through the maelstrom, escapes the search for a false foundation.
Notable Quotes
"It's not a sense. McLuhan defines it as interplay."Bob Dobbs, The Resonant Interval, Dialogue 43 (23 Dec 2021), 4:38
"He probed things in really interesting ways and opened up new ways of understanding the world. But he didn't figure out how to communicate it."Cameron McEwen, The Resonant Interval, Dialogue 43 (23 Dec 2021), 12:16
"If you want to find a foundation that holds, you have to go through the maelstrom."Cameron McEwen, The Resonant Interval, Dialogue 43 (23 Dec 2021), 1:14:14
"I think there's very, very great thinkers — Plato, Aristotle, Hegel, Heidegger. These are tremendous people, but I think that McLuhan may have a better chance of being communicable than they did."Cameron McEwen, The Resonant Interval, Dialogue 43 (23 Dec 2021), 1:17:52
Outline
- 0:01:00 — Tactility, the Trivium, and the Quadrivium
- 0:10:04 — Bob’s chart: the decades
- 0:22:38 — The Android Meme: Ground and Afterimage
- 0:26:39 — The last gasp of the individual
- 0:37:12 — The Five Bodies
- 0:44:22 — The maelstrom, percepts, and the repackaged books
- 0:50:24 — P.80: the article’s neglect
- 0:52:24 — The 1970s: the Tetrad, Hendiadys, and the Public Agent
- 0:56:53 — Cameron’s digital McLuhan
- 01:00:12 — Hendiadys, the Pentad, and the Archetype
- 01:06:19 — Media as the unconscious
- 01:09:02 — A new way to be a Christian
- 01:16:01 — Communicating the solution
- 01:38:16 — Tactility squared and the Tech Body
Mentioned Resources
Works by McLuhan
- Understanding Media (1964) — cited for “the desire for more money is a tactile expression” and media as probes we think through.
- Culture Is Our Business (1970) — the “supernova of all the arts” after the individual artist’s last gasp.
- Take Today — the manager and corporation “imploded”; carrying “the same hidden ground” as Finnegans Wake.
- From Cliché to Archetype — McLuhan’s collaboration with Wilfred Watson, and Howard Gossage’s last-word/cliché/art-form/archetype pattern.
- Through the Vanishing Point — words that “only have meaning on the other side of the vanishing point.”
- Laws of Media — where McLuhan and Eric make “a big deal of Popper’s” falsifiability.
- War and Peace in the Global Village, City as Classroom, Counterblast, The Medium is the Massage — the same ideas repackaged for different audiences.
Other Works
- Wyndham Lewis, America and Cosmic Man — “a hydrogen bomb set up in the desert with effect nil.”
- Gerald Stearn, McLuhan: Hot and Cool — source of Howard Gossage’s media-metamorphosis pattern and McLuhan’s “talk back.”
- James Joyce, Finnegans Wake — the sensibility McLuhan said was “not in anybody’s awareness yet.”
People
- Marshall McLuhan (Canadian media theorist at the center of the reading)
- Ezra Pound (poet whose letters McLuhan answered; “a really important influence”)
- Thomas Kuhn (Cameron’s Princeton professor, historian of scientific revolutions)
- Eric McLuhan (Marshall’s son and collaborator on the chart of correspondences)
- Jean Baudrillard (who called McLuhan “a musician”)
- Richard Kostelanetz (the young critic McLuhan told “people need concepts to get a grip on reality”)
- Howard Gossage (adman whose last-word-to-archetype pattern Bob adopts)
- Wilfred Watson (McLuhan’s co-author on From Cliché to Archetype)
- William Irwin Thompson (whose genealogy of the unconscious Bob completes with “the archetypes of media”)
- Eric Voegelin (recipient of McLuhan’s 1953 “everything is everything else”)
- Julian Assange (Cameron’s example of language with “zero meaning”)
- Jordan Peterson (offered as the “pretty weak” contrast to McLuhan)
- Mao Zedong, Henry Kissinger, Aldo Moro (the Little Red Book, the “tetrad manager,” the Vatican’s terrorist crisis)
- Plato, Aristotle, Hegel, Heidegger (the “tremendous” thinkers McLuhan’s issues lead back to)
Closing
The session turns McLuhan’s own arc — from the Trivium to the Quadrivium to a communication he never solved — into the wager the two co-hosts are making: that the failure can be finished.
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