At the bottom of p.97 waits McLuhan’s oddest reassurance — that automation and cybernation could “smooth the transition” out of the convulsions of 1968 — and the session turns it into a quarrel about what could possibly change at all. The hinge is a distinction Cameron keeps redrawing: people do change, but that is not the same as the disappearance of the eternals, so the laws of media are eternal only the way Galileo’s laws are — the weather unstable, the laws beneath it knowable . From there the talk drifts through the dissolution of Ground and a long biographical middle on the minds each host has known, before closing on an old argument: whether Wyndham Lewis ever really reached Harold Innis, or only ever through McLuhan .
Key Topics
- Automation and the “modulation of the senses” — Bob reads it literally, which Cameron calls a “Gutenbergian view,” against his own “electric” reading where “everything is art because everything is making.”
- Change versus the disappearance of the eternals: the laws of media are dynamic and unstable like the physical world, “but the laws underneath those transformations we can know,” as with Galileo and Lavoisier.
- The dissolution of Ground and the “super-civilized” person who must learn “to dance on top of these changes” — the surfer at the end of The Medium Is the Massage that McLuhan is said to have “failed at.”
- The “wandering gypsy scholars”: McLuhan’s 1970 phrase for the TV generation, which Cameron generalizes into the figure of the un-ruled scholar who performs without a defined context.
- McLuhan the weather-vane artist whose “brain broke” in the 1958–60 breakthrough behind “the medium is the message” — discoveries that arrived, Cameron says, with “literal blackouts.”
- The disputed influence: Bob’s claim that McLuhan gave Innis “the poison of Lewis,” against Cameron’s rebuttal that Innis was “well on his way to communications theory” in 1946, before he had “met or heard of McLuhan.”
Notable Quotes
"Automation and cybernation can play an essential role in smoothing the transition to the new society."
"It's not that there is no change. It's that we have to understand change. And when we understand change, then the whole world can change."
"Posthuman society is dependent upon wanderers, people that go beyond defined context to redefine and to retrieve human solidarity in the face of these recurrent collapses."
Outline
- 0:00:01 — P.97 and the 1969 Playboy interview
- 0:07:43 — Automation, cybernation, and the modulation of the senses
- 0:14:20 — Presenting McLuhan as a poem of balance
- 0:21:15 — Change and the eternals: the laws beneath the dynamics
- 0:36:02 — The dissolution of Ground and the super-civilized
- 0:40:20 — Poise, suffering, and the highbrow solution
- 0:46:11 — Hanging out with McLuhan; Gadamer, Kuhn, and Heidegger
- 0:55:10 — The brain drain and Canadianism
- 01:06:53 — Wandering gypsy scholars
- 01:11:37 — McLuhan the weather-vane artist and the broken brain
- 01:23:23 — Don Theall: schizoid, the Rear View Mirror, and Finnegans Wake
- 01:31:55 — John Grierson and the Canadian fountainhead
- 01:48:31 — Innis, Lewis, and the disputed influence
Mentioned Resources
Works by McLuhan
- The 1969 Playboy interview (March 1969) — the “convulsive changes” and “global thermostat” passages, read from p.97
- Culture Is Our Business — the source Bob gives for Nixon having “hung out his bare face”
- The Medium Is the Massage — the closing image of the surfer
- The McLuhan DEW-Line newsletter — dated to July 1968, “first issue”
- Laws of Media — the Tetrad “as an example of how complicated every single idea is”
Other Works
- Donald Theall, The Medium Is the Rear View Mirror — written in the hospital around 1970
- Donald Theall, The Virtual Marshall McLuhan — the book reviewers read as a personal vendetta
- Harold Innis, Empire and Communications and The Bias of Communication
- Stewart Brand, The Media Lab — the book that sparked Theall’s Finnegans Wake “flash”
- Walter Lippmann, Public Opinion — which Grierson “read and agreed with”
- James Joyce, Finnegans Wake and Ulysses — the wandering of Bloom and Stephen
- Wyndham Lewis, The Art of Being Ruled and Time and Western Man — quoted in McLuhan’s 1944 essay
- Paul Tiessen, “From Literary Modernism to the Tantramar Marshes” — the essay on Canada’s pre-McLuhan media thinkers
- Robert Flaherty, Moana — the 1926 film Grierson reviewed when he coined “documentary”
- Arthur Kroker’s latest book — adding Cochrane and Macpherson to the Toronto School
People
- Marshall McLuhan (Canadian media theorist, the figure the dialogue orbits)
- Cameron McEwen (McLuhan scholar, editor of the McLuhan’s New Sciences blog)
- Bob Dobbs (author of the Tech-Body book under discussion)
- Eric Norden (the Playboy interviewer who, Bob says, could not follow McLuhan)
- Harold Innis (Canadian political economist and communications theorist)
- Wyndham Lewis (modernist writer and painter, McLuhan’s ambivalent source)
- Ezra Pound (poet whose “antenna of the race” and ideogram shaped McLuhan)
- Donald Theall (McLuhan’s early-1950s graduate student and loyal double agent)
- Arthur Kroker (postmodern theorist of the Canadian mind)
- Hans-Georg Gadamer (German philosopher of hermeneutics whom Cameron knew)
- John Grierson (Scottish documentary pioneer and NFB founder)
- Eric Havelock (classicist of oral culture, “booted out of Canada”)
- Ted Carpenter (McLuhan collaborator on the Pound influence)
- Nina Sutton (biographer to whom McLuhan spoke of his Manitoba crisis)
- Sergei Eisenstein (filmmaker whose ideogram theory McLuhan read with Pound)
- Robert Park (Chicago sociologist Grierson crossed, cited by McLuhan and Innis)
- Graham Spry (Canadian broadcasting advocate married to Innis’ associate)
- Paul Tiessen (Wilfrid Laurier scholar of the pre-McLuhan Canadian tradition)
- Martin Heidegger (the philosopher Cameron went to Meßkirch to study)
Closing
Beneath the archive gossip and the biography, the session is really about one distinction — that the world can be utterly transformed and still run on laws we can come to know — and it is that conviction, not any single influence, that Bob and Cameron are still defending when they refuse to let McLuhan be reduced to any one thing.
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