A single line at the top of p.82 — McLuhan’s “connubium of a superterrestrial kind” — sets the whole session spiraling. What opens as a portrait of McLuhan the “musician” turns into an inquiry into “the numb,” the missing factor Bob Dobbs and Cameron McEwen take to be the real discovery buried under the media theory , and closes by recasting McLuhan himself as the “servant of language” .
Key Topics
- The synaesthete and the co-anaesthete: McLuhan read as a “musician” of imploded media, from LSD-era synaesthesia to the Web 2.0 “director’s chair.”
- Duke Ellington’s visits to McLuhan open onto “the numb” and Adolphe (David) Jonas’s Irritation and Counter-Irritation, the buried source of “self-amputation.”
- Barry Nevitt’s “there aren’t any — they’re process patterns” becomes Bob’s reading of a news world dissolved into the “participation mystique”
- Tom Dilworth’s paraphrase of a March, 1973, St. Basil’s talk grounds McLuhan’s mockery of the evolutionists and his “spherical” acoustic man.
- McLuhan’s 1950 “second conversion”: the turn from master to servant of language, “making” set against “matching.”
- “The numb” named as “a defense against plurality,” and the fine line between numbness and peace.
Notable Quotes
"Objects are unobservable. Only relationships among objects are observable."
"The medium always was the message, but the Gutenberg Galaxy is numbed to that reality."
"Peace is the belonging together of the absolutely different."
Outline
- 0:00:02 — P.82, the connubium, the numbness factor
- 0:02:14 — McLuhan the musician: apophenia and paradox
- 0:05:57 — Synaesthesia, the co-anaesthetic, and the director’s chair
- 0:11:22 — Duke Ellington, jazz, and quadrophrenia
- 0:13:18 — “The numb”, self-amputation, and Jonas
- 0:20:07 — “First of all,” retracing, and the grammar of media
- 0:24:38 — Quadrophrenia: the Trivium, the Quadrivium, and the Ontic
- 0:30:55 — Figure and Ground, process patterns, and the Nevitt quote
- 0:35:26 — The news as process, and turning the anti-environment off
- 0:39:57 — The Tech Body and the alienation of hauntology
- 0:46:22 — Play, interplay, replay: multiple times and McLuhan the Catholic
- 0:52:13 — Dilworth’s St. Basil’s paraphrase and McLuhan against evolution
- 0:56:12 — “The medium is the message only under electronic conditions”
- 01:00:07 — Exploring ignorance, Socrates, and the cloud of unknowing
- 01:05:00 — The obsolescence of McLuhan, Trump, and the real McLuhan
- 01:10:18 — Going backwards, the R-E words, and Corinne McLuhan
- 01:14:03 — 1950: consulting, St. Mike’s, and the second conversion
- 01:16:24 — Sex, violence, the obscene, and Wilson Bryan Key
- 01:28:33 — Part two: the book’s architecture, and science vs. pseudoscience
- 01:39:15 — Nature incorporated, and numb versus peace
- 01:42:24 — Supervene, and the peace of absolute difference
- 01:47:49 — Closing: Global Theater and the servant of language
Mentioned Resources
Works by McLuhan
- Understanding Media — the book after which McLuhan turned to Jonas’s Irritation and Counter-Irritation
- The Gutenberg Galaxy — read here as “numbed to that reality”
- The Mechanical Bride — where, Cameron argues, McLuhan “could have said all of this” in the 1940s
- War and Peace in the Global Village — its last page (190) supplies the “connubium of a superterrestrial kind”
- Foreword to Subliminal Seduction — McLuhan on sex, violence, and “good news and bad news”
Other Works
- Donald Theall, Beyond the Word (1995) — cited for the synaesthete/co-anaesthete distinction
- Adolphe (David) Jonas, Irritation and Counter-Irritation — the source of “self-amputation”
- Wilson Bryan Key, Subliminal Seduction — advertising subliminals, with a McLuhan foreword
- At the Speed of Light There’s Only Illumination — conference papers carrying Tom Dilworth’s McLuhan paraphrase
- Neil Postman, Amusing Ourselves to Death — cited (and set aside) for the Trump era
- Cameron McEwen, “Connubium of Being” — a post on his blog, McLuhan New Sciences
People
- Bob Dobbs (co-host; media theorist and author of the book under discussion)
- Cameron McEwen (co-host; Princeton-trained philosopher and McLuhan scholar)
- Marshall McLuhan (the media theorist at the center of the dialogue)
- Jean Baudrillard (first, per Bob, to call McLuhan “a musician”)
- Donald Theall (McLuhan’s early confidant; author of Beyond the Word)
- Frank Zappa (the “musical Para-Media Ecologist” paired with McLuhan)
- Duke Ellington (jazz composer who visited McLuhan in the early 1970s)
- Adolphe (David) Jonas (physician behind Irritation and Counter-Irritation)
- Teilhard de Chardin (evolutionist McLuhan says “fell into the trap” of direction)
- Barry Nevitt (McLuhan collaborator; source of the “process patterns” quote)
- Marge Stewart (McLuhan’s secretary, whose diary recorded Ellington’s visits)
- Tom Dilworth (paraphraser of McLuhan’s 1973 St. Basil’s talk)
- Wilson Bryan Key (author of Subliminal Seduction)
- Neil Postman (media critic; Amusing Ourselves to Death)
- Andrew Sarris (critic who framed the “auteur theory”)
- Ezra Pound and Wyndham Lewis (the poets in McLuhan’s Quadrivium)
Closing
Circling one buried word, the session recovers a stranger McLuhan — musician, Catholic, “servant of language” — for whom “the numb”, not the medium, is the discovery that still needs communicating.
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