The McLuhan research community, Cameron opens, is “more than a little ironic” — a heritage industry with “almost no dialogue” — and that paradox launches a sprawling sixth reading session that finally reaches the book’s destination. Between p.103 and the Android Meme, the talk passes through a new Catholic reading of McLuhan, the Vancouver avant-garde that lets Bob solve a decades-old mystery about who brought McLuhan — and Gerd Stern — to a 1964 festival , Murray Schafer’s soundscape, and the claim that McLuhan “one-upped Jung” by moving the archetype out of the skull and into the environment we have gone numb to. Bob caps it with a find: the word discarnate sits at the exact center of Finnegans Wake , the physical middle of the book McLuhan spent a lifetime reading.
Key Topics
- Dialogue is treated as an ontological reality — for McLuhan “dialogue was everywhere,” which means “respect[ing] the inability of people or communities not to dialogue,” an openness Cameron later calls “the very heart of McLuhan Catholicism.”
- A new book by a devout Catholic, Nick Ripatrazone’s Digital Communion, argues that McLuhan’s deep Catholicism gave him “a spiritual vision of the virtual age” and makes him “the perfect translator” of the digital condition.
- Murray Schafer, a student in McLuhan’s early-1950s class, built the soundscape from a McLuhan seed — “the cityscape is already music,” the noise itself dialogue between sounds — the same lesson behind “Finnegans Wake was not a book, it was a radio program.”
- Page 103’s thesis is that McLuhan altered the archetype itself: where Jung placed it in the collective unconscious, McLuhan made it the environment “we become numb to,” a move Frank Zingrone was “smart enough to notice.”
- Reading Warhol, Bob distinguishes an art form that offers perception from one that does not — Warhol “made an art form out of his present” but “is an effect,” where McLuhan “came up with a way to offer perception.”
- The climb ends on McLuhan’s line that “the book of the world becomes a kind of Orphic hymn of revelation,” which Cameron parses as objective and subjective genitive and Bob routes toward “psychic ecology” and the Android Meme’s “phase one.”
Notable Quotes
"The future of government lies in the area of psychic ecology and can no longer be considered on a merely national or international basis."
"The McLuhan industry is dedicated to forgetting about McLuhan as fast as it can."
"The only way out of that cul-de-sac is to go deeper into the dumb, to explore our ignorance."
Outline
- 0:00:01 — The ethic of universal dialogue
- 0:10:59 — Ripatrazone’s Digital Communion: McLuhan’s Catholicism
- 0:14:58 — The Vancouver avant-garde: Finding Nothing and the Gerd Stern mystery
- 0:31:54 — McLuhan the poet; art forms and the capital-F Form
- 0:48:32 — Murray Schafer, the soundscape, and the city as music
- 0:57:12 — The environment as unconscious: McLuhan past Jung
- 01:05:50 — The new woke: Finnegans Wake as ordinary awareness
- 01:13:33 — The battle of traditions: light-on vs light-through
- 01:18:04 — Intellectual dumbing-down and the cul-de-sac of identity
- 01:26:11 — The Android Meme: the end of solutions and living environments
- 01:33:53 — Discarnate at the center of Finnegans Wake
- 01:40:30 — The Orphic hymn of revelation and psychic ecology
- 01:54:46 — “All news is fake news”: the Warner Troyer clash
- 02:00:42 — Nationalist vs globalist: psychic ecology and Android Meme phase one
Mentioned Resources
Works by McLuhan
- War and Peace in the Global Village (1968) — the “electric information systems are living environments” and “connubium of a superterrestrial kind” passages
- Take Today (1972) — p.227, “the future of government lies in the area of psychic ecology”
- Understanding Media — “the endowing of each plastic form with a kind of nervous system of its own”
- From Cliché to Archetype — the archetype–cliché reversibility behind the Jung discussion
- Culture Is Our Business — McLuhan’s read on businessmen “interested in ideas”
- The DEW-Line newsletter (vol. 2, no. 3) — the November 1969 “end of solutions” poster
- The 1970 Playboy interview — written out because “Eric Norden couldn’t understand him”
Other Works
- Nick Ripatrazone, Digital Communion: Marshall McLuhan’s Spiritual Vision for a Virtual Age (2022)
- Greg Betts, Finding Nothing — a micro-history of the Vancouver avant-garde, 1959–75
- Don Theall, The Virtual Marshall McLuhan
- Wyndham Lewis, Time and Western Man — cited beside the Finnegans Wake center
- James Joyce, Finnegans Wake and Ulysses
- Neil Postman, Amusing Ourselves to Death (1985)
People
- Marshall McLuhan (Canadian media theorist, the pair’s central subject)
- Bob Dobbs (co-host; author of the Trump book being read)
- Cameron McEwen (co-host; McLuhan scholar)
- Carl Jung (Swiss psychologist of the archetype)
- Gerd Stern (poet and USCO mixed-media artist, “the Forrest Gump of the art world”)
- Murray Schafer (Canadian composer, creator of the “soundscape”)
- Don Theall (McLuhan student; author of The Virtual Marshall McLuhan)
- Nick Ripatrazone (Catholic writer; author of Digital Communion)
- Greg Betts (professor and poet; author of Finding Nothing)
- John Brockman (literary agent of the Edge series)
- Frank Zingrone (McLuhan collaborator; co-editor of The Essential McLuhan)
- William Irwin Thompson (cultural philosopher quoted on “all-at-onceness”)
- Northrop Frye (Toronto critic, longtime reader of Jung)
- Andy Warhol (pop artist; McLuhan’s example of “effect” without perception)
- John Cage (composer linked to the soundscape and Project 69)
- Neil Postman (media critic, Amusing Ourselves to Death)
- Wyndham Lewis (author of Time and Western Man)
- Andrew Sarris (archives researcher who vouched for Bob; used “the later McLuhan” in his PhD)
- Eric Norden (Playboy interviewer who had McLuhan write out his answers)
- George Sanderson (founder of the 1994 McLuhan mailing list)
- Warner Troyer (CBC journalist in the 1969 “all news is fake news” clash)
- Alvin Malkind (identified as the man who invited McLuhan and Stern to Vancouver in 1964)
- Bill Bissett and bpNichol (Vancouver concrete poets)
- Earle Birney (older Canadian poet in the Vancouver scene)
- M.C. Richards (Black Mountain poet who passed Stern the “Project 69” text)
- Stewart Brand (Whole Earth founder, friend of Brockman and Stern)
- Mark Stahlman (member of Bob’s “nonlinear circle”)
- Harold Bloom (critic of the “Western canon”)
- Sigmund Freud, Claude Lévi-Strauss, Gregory Bateson (figures in Thompson’s “all-at-onceness” list)
- Ezra Pound and T.S. Eliot (poets in McLuhan’s Menippean line and Playboy letter)
Closing
Fifty-two sessions in, the pair reach the halfway mark of Bob’s book — “Android Meme phase one” — having turned a heritage industry’s silence into a working model of the universal dialogue McLuhan said the whole enterprise was for.
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