P.87 turns the book into Part Two, and with it the global village becomes the Global Theater — not a later stage, Cameron McEwen argues, but a derivative of the village, the same all-at-once ground seen as an art form. The session’s master figure is the “eleven” — iON’s “11-11,” which Cameron reads as two strokes divided by an irreducible gap, the gap that also underlies death, communication, and the war three weeks old in Ukraine. It ends in close quotation on the “sacred page 137,” where McLuhan writes that causes become effects via concepts.
Key Topics
- The “eleven” read through prime numbers: iON’s “11-11” as two “emphasis strokes” separated by a gap, the gapped “villagers” of the connubium of being.
- McLuhan’s tragedy and the “famous McLuhan gambit”: the near-fatal stroke around 1960, the failed talking-head bid, the 1971 retreat, and the websites that still “miss this gap.”
- The war read past good and evil — the Manichaean frame “prevents understanding,” so the confusion between fundamentals becomes a labyrinth to transverse.
- Jacques Lusseyran, the blind author of And There Was Light, and McLuhan’s safe-cracker feeling for the tumblers — groping into a future the rearview mirror can’t show.
- The epyllion versus the epic, and consciousness as “electronic process” (Barry Nevitt): cliché speeding into archetype not by blur but by quantum leap.
- The global-theater paragraph as roles and perspectives, and Take Today’s “extension of the planet” tied back to the connubium.
Notable Quotes
"Causes become effects via concepts, whereas effects merge with causes... via percepts."
"There is no such thing as perfect success for humans."
"You go from what could be called a live blindness to a dead blindness."
Outline
- 0:00:01 — St. Patrick’s Day, iON’s anniversary, and the six-phase map
- 0:03:27 — Synchronic McLuhan: the Global Theater as overlay
- 0:08:03 — The eleven: prime numbers, two strokes, and the gap
- 0:17:09 — iON’s origin: the dodecahedron, the Guf, and zillions
- 0:20:39 — The Connubium of Being and the DEW Line Global Theater
- 0:25:04 — The war in Ukraine: the Manichaean fallacy and the gap
- 0:29:17 — Fundamentals, Aristotle’s cycle, and the failure to apply
- 0:35:57 — McLuhan’s tragedy: the stroke, the talking head, and the 1971 retreat
- 0:41:47 — The McLuhan mask, the websites, and the missing gap
- 0:46:09 — The war coverage: Nietzsche, morality, and the moral animal
- 0:49:50 — Not engaging the coverage; death and the new transformation
- 0:54:07 — Jacques Lusseyran, the blind man, and the safe-cracker’s tumblers
- 0:56:44 — The men of 1914, Derrida, and explaining vs. exploring
- 01:02:43 — The global-theater paragraph: roles, perspectives, and the global city
- 01:09:01 — Success, finitude, and the eleven as two strokes
- 01:14:08 — Bearing the tension, Constantinople 1453, and no finish line
- 01:22:25 — Poe’s maelstrom and the mariner
- 01:25:50 — Consciousness as electronic process; the epyllion vs. the epic
- 01:33:03 — Speeding up as quantum leap: Lavoisier, Priestley, and oxygen
- 01:36:02 — Intermedia, the flip points, and p.137
- 01:50:38 — The extension of the planet: Take Today p.294 and the connubium
- 01:56:37 — The “Great Reset”, the outbreeder, and harmonizing the spheres
Mentioned Resources
Works by McLuhan
- War and Peace in the Global Village (1968) — its last page (190) supplies the “connubium,” and the DEW Line newsletter of that year the phrase “global theater”
- From Cliché to Archetype (1970) — the book sleeve on “intermedia action,” McLuhan’s statement “since Understanding Media”
- Take Today: The Executive as Dropout (1972) — the “sacred page 137” and p.294’s “extension of the planet”
- Culture Is Our Business — its last line, “there is no finish line”
- City as Classroom — with Kathryn Hutchon and Eric McLuhan, on clichés that flip into archetypes
- Counterblast (1954) — “a lighting up of the night of the world”
- Letters to Jacqueline Tyrwhitt (December 1960) and Walter Ong (1954) — the “global city” and the “sensus communis”
Other Works
- Barrington Nevitt, ABC of Prophecy (1980) — consciousness as “speeding up cliché to archetype”
- Jacques Lusseyran, And There Was Light — the blind author McLuhan kept invoking
- Aristotle, Politics — the cycle of governments, good forms decaying into bad
- Edgar Allan Poe, “A Descent into the Maelström” — the mariner who sees the whirlpool the brothers cannot
- Arthur Kroker, The Postmodern Scene — following his 1984 book on McLuhan, Grant, and Innis
- Cameron McEwen, “The 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; philosopher and McLuhan scholar)
- Marshall McLuhan (the media theorist at the center of the dialogue)
- Harold Innis (the communications theorist whose “series” frames the reading)
- Donald Theall (McLuhan’s early confidant; his 1971 book among the “bad press”)
- Jacques Lusseyran (blind author of And There Was Light, died 1971)
- Eric Havelock (classicist; source of McLuhan’s “epyllion”)
- Barrington Nevitt (McLuhan collaborator; ABC of Prophecy, Take Today)
- Friedrich Nietzsche (who foresaw morality gone “super abundant” once the word died)
- Arthur Kroker (theorist of “the postmodern scene”)
- Jacqueline Tyrwhitt (planner and McLuhan correspondent on the “global city”)
- Walter Ong (Jesuit scholar; the 1954 “sensus communis” letter)
- Eric McLuhan and Kathryn Hutchon (co-authors of City as Classroom)
- Jacques Derrida (whose “mark or the trace” Cameron weighs and sets aside)
- James Joyce (whose Finnegans Wake “explodes” the origin point)
- Wyndham Lewis, Ezra Pound, T. S. Eliot, and W. B. Yeats (the “men of 1914”)
- Maurice McLuhan (Marshall’s brother, who relayed the 1971 “retreat”)
Closing
Reading the global village into the Global Theater, the session recovers McLuhan’s hardest lesson — that understanding is a blind groping across a gap, and that “causes become effects via concepts” only when we forget it.
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