How do you understand a medium you are living inside? Session 50 takes McLuhan’s blunt answer — the media fast — and works it from a crank’s practical stunt into a method. Reading the 1969 Playboy interview at the bottom of p.98, Bob Dobbs and Cameron McEwen follow McLuhan’s proposal to program societies with “a network of global thermostats” and his small-town experiment of switching off radio or TV for a couple of weeks , which Cameron reframes as a methodological demand — the gap a person or society must step into to see the media environment at all. The talk spirals out to the aesthetic moment as a maelstrom, McLuhan’s language-mad childhood, the Irish writers who took London, and a long detour through Bob’s Finnegans Wake forum, before landing on light pollution and the stars.
Key Topics
- Reading the Playboy passage, McLuhan holds that computers “can and doubtless will program entire environments to fulfill the social needs and sensory preferences of communities and nations” — with content italicized because form and message have merged.
- Cameron corrects Bob’s sense that the “massage” has stopped: it is “always happening,” and the only question is how, and what our consciousness of it is.
- Defined properly, the media fast is not cancelling subscriptions but “the gap into which the person and individuals and society must enter in order to begin to understand what media are.”
- The aesthetic moment, or “arrest,” is recast as a maelstrom — a death of orientation escaped only by “studying the pattern of the whirlpool” and riding the wreckage, the way McLuhan read Poe, Pound, and Joyce.
- McLuhan’s own name for his project was “corporate psychiatry,” the psychoanalysis of society and world history, set against the individual therapy of Freud, Jung, and Adler.
- The session closes on light pollution — Cameron’s proposal that every town keep one lightless day a month to regain “access to the Milky Way” — and on Muller-Thym’s 1940s anticipation of surveillance capitalism.
Notable Quotes
"What a media fast is, is the gap into which the person and individuals and society must enter in order to begin to understand what media are."
"Computer technology can and doubtless will program entire environments to fulfill the social needs and sensory preferences of communities and nations."
"There is no human activity that does not have these multiple levels to it."
Outline
- 0:00:01 — Page 98 and the “Programming the Planet” passage
- 0:02:55 — McLuhan had been saying this for twenty years
- 0:16:51 — Radio and TV as new languages; the massage is always happening
- 0:22:12 — Global tactility and the satellite proscenium arch
- 0:25:38 — The aesthetic moment, the labyrinth, and the interior landscape
- 0:28:50 — McLuhan’s small-town experiment and the meaning of “solution”
- 0:36:28 — The media fast as methodological demand
- 0:42:20 — Outer space, sidereal consideration, and the Global Membrane
- 0:45:52 — Why McLuhan couldn’t communicate
- 0:49:07 — Freud, the family, and corporate psychiatry
- 0:56:46 — Not a new Caesar: conspiracy and Ellul
- 01:01:11 — Carpenter’s “New Language” and sleep
- 01:04:00 — Joyce, the Irish, and the exile
- 01:13:41 — The Reading Finnegans Wake forum
- 01:30:27 — The maelstrom, Poe, and the symbolists
- 01:36:43 — Back to the book: programming and the italicized “content”
- 01:41:25 — Retreats, conferences, and the etymology of metaphor
- 01:50:45 — Light pollution, the stars, and surveillance capitalism
Mentioned Resources
Works by McLuhan
- “Prospect” (1962) — the essay, published in a Canadian art magazine, whose “new languages” passage and anxiety quote anchor the first half.
- Take Today: The Executive as Dropout — pages 102 and 11, on Joyce’s “verbal universe” and the merging of figure and ground.
- Understanding Media — read here as the phrase naming the meta-language “key to peace.”
- The Mechanical Bride — recalled as “a new kind of science fiction.”
- From Cliché to Archetype — mentioned in passing among the McLuhan quote-sources.
- The Gutenberg Galaxy — the literate order the media fast withdraws from.
- City as Classroom — invoked as the “classroom without walls” for the interior landscape.
- The 1969 Playboy interview — the running text, read from Bob’s book, on programming the planet.
Other Works
- James Joyce, Finnegans Wake — the session’s central reference; the page-18 “organized ignorance” passage and the “Reading Finnegans Wake” forum.
- James Joyce, Ulysses — cited by the forum’s Joyce scholar for its chapter-by-chapter structures.
- Edward “Ted” Carpenter, “The New Language(s)” (1956) — the Explorations essay reframing media as languages.
- Edward Bulwer-Lytton, The Coming Race — glanced at for the “virtual economy.”
People
- Marshall McLuhan (media theorist; the session’s subject, read and expounded throughout)
- Bob Dobbs (co-host, reading his own book’s gloss on the Playboy interview)
- Cameron McEwen (co-host, McLuhan scholar and author of the “New Sciences” blog)
- James Joyce (author of Finnegans Wake, McLuhan’s lifelong key)
- Eric Norden (the Playboy interviewer who “can’t believe” McLuhan)
- Stéphane Mallarmé (symbolist poet of the “aesthetic moment” turned inward)
- Edgar Allan Poe (put “on the level of Leonardo da Vinci” for the maelstrom)
- Charles Baudelaire (the symbolist who took Poe seriously)
- Cleanth Brooks (New Critic and scholar of Poe and the American South)
- Charles Darwin (the parallel withdrawal into a “service environment of evolution”)
- Sigmund Freud, Carl Jung, and Alfred Adler (the therapists McLuhan studied and set his “corporate psychiatry” against)
- Buckminster Fuller (one who “thought he had the answer”)
- Frank Zingrone (media ecologist quoted on business as conspiracy)
- Jacques Ellul (on propaganda as the machines, not the messages)
- George Bernard Shaw, Oscar Wilde, and W.B. Yeats (the Irish writers who “took over” London)
- Ezra Pound, T.S. Eliot, and Gertrude Stein (the Americans with the Irish “distance”)
- Wyndham Lewis (born in Nova Scotia, “such an odd character”)
- Bernard Muller-Thym (McLuhan’s friend whose 1940s market analysis anticipated surveillance capitalism)
- Edward “Ted” Carpenter (McLuhan’s Explorations collaborator, author of “The New Language(s)”)
- Joseph Conrad (quoted on fog “more blinding than the night”)
- Jerry Lewis (the French “documentary of American life,” Bob’s analogy for Poe)
Closing
Session 50 turns McLuhan’s most-mocked proposal — turn the media off — into a rigorous method for seeing the environments we cannot otherwise perceive, from a lightless mountainside to the italicized word that hands the future back to us.
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