A cliché, pushed far enough, flips into an archetype — and back. That figure, read off the 1977 City as Classroom , sets the session’s method: every pair Bob works with is one McLuhan eventually collapses. Cameron opens by refusing the most familiar explanation of why McLuhan contradicts himself, calling probing “an invention” made to excuse “something that doesn’t need excusing” . What replaces it is a pair of vocabularies for the same predicament — Bob’s mythic stages and Cameron’s shortcut — which meet in the maelstrom, the only place either will say thought actually happens.
Key Topics
- Bob’s coinage mythic stages: myth not as falsehood but as “a complex implosion into a suitable capsule,” each environment a stage you leap off of.
- Read out of the Laws of Media Tetrad, the credit card turns out to be the literal stage of the Global Theater — an “electronic pulse grabber” you use to hop between technological cultures.
- Cameron’s counter-figure: all technologies are shortcuts that “always leave stuff out,” so “the way up and the way down is the law that rules all of this stuff.”
- The Take Today surveillance passage, where the police state has been “relegated to the world of popular entertainment,” prompts Bob’s distinction between “software” and “information” — and Cameron’s argument that McLuhan’s scare quotes withdraw the very linearity they appear to assert.
- The session’s central distinction: two senses of exposed — the curtain pulled back, versus a new environment that exposes by arriving — which Bob maps onto HCE and ALP on his own formula chart.
- Against Bob’s four worlds Cameron insists the fourth must mean the cultures that survived, so Bob adds a fifth for the Tech Body ; later, history becomes a player piano whose roll someone designed.
- A closing turn on chart — through Latin charta to card, tarot and the I Ching — set against the last line of Laws of Media, that the present environment cannot be charted at all.
Notable Quotes
"Charting is inherently a Gutenbergian activity, right?"Cameron McEwen, The Resonant Interval, Dialogue 56 (15 Sep 2022), 1:34:49
"It was not a novel. It was a guide to what was going on in the world."Bob Dobbs, on Finnegans Wake, The Resonant Interval, Dialogue 56 (15 Sep 2022), 1:00:36
"There's two senses of 'exposed', right? Somebody can pull a curtain back and expose what's behind the curtain. Or a new environment can come along and it exposes something."Cameron McEwen, The Resonant Interval, Dialogue 56 (15 Sep 2022), 51:54
Outline
- 0:00:14 — Reading p.113: cliché, archetype, and the merge
- 0:03:23 — Probing as an invention: contesting the Madison Avenue McLuhan
- 0:10:17 — “Mythic stages”, myth as encapsulation, and the credit card
- 0:12:28 — The shortcut and the final shortcut
- 0:15:11 — Take Today: surveillance and the police state as work of art
- 0:17:46 — All the world’s a stage, flipped; pluralizing
- 0:27:55 — The maelstrom: where thought occurs
- 0:31:20 — Software is not information
- 0:42:02 — Identity as cliché-probe
- 0:51:54 — The two exposures
- 01:00:30 — Folklore come alive: the Wake as guide
- 01:08:11 — The four worlds, and a fifth
- 01:18:09 — “The men of 1914” as an effect of radio
- 01:24:00 — The player piano and pattern recognition
- 01:33:49 — The unchartable: Laws of Media’s last line
- 01:38:00 — Chart: charta, card, tarot, I Ching
- 01:43:25 — Ascension, Heraclitus, and an unfinished word
Mentioned Resources
Works by McLuhan
- City as Classroom (1977) — source of the cliché/archetype formulation Bob reads at the top of the session
- Take Today: The Executive as Dropout (1972), with Barrington Nevitt — the cover passage on surveillance, and p.11 on man and technology merging
- Laws of Media — the credit-card Tetrad, and the closing line on the unchartable media environment
- The Medium is the Massage — “a willingness to not think, but to contemplate”
- Counterblast — p.31, source of “the social unconscious”
- War and Peace in the Global Village — p.190, the media as the new animals
- From Cliché to Archetype; “Catholic Humanism and Modern Letters”; “A Media Approach to Inflation”
Other Works
- James Joyce, Finnegans Wake — the session’s constant reference: the twin brothers, the park, the chart in the last book
- James Joyce, Ulysses — for which Joyce also kept charts
- Hugh Kenner, The Mechanic Muse — the pre-electric contraptions of levers, strings and pulleys
- Aldous Huxley, Brave New World — invoked for soma and engineered passivity
- James Frazer, The Golden Bough — the king killed by his successor
People
- Marshall McLuhan (Canadian media theorist whose work the series reads line by line)
- James Joyce (author of Finnegans Wake, treated here as a guide to media rather than a novelist)
- Carl Jung (psychologist of the persona, the self, and the collective unconscious)
- Hugh Kenner (literary critic; his machine of string and pulleys becomes the session’s figure for hyper-connection)
- Heraclitus (pre-Socratic philosopher of “the way up is the way down”)
- Plato and Aristotle (whose dynamic forms Cameron makes the hidden impulse of Western civilization)
- Eric Voegelin (political philosopher invoked on the Western tradition)
- Arthur Kroker (theorist whose “sacrificial violence” and “dark tetrad” Bob borrows)
- Ezra Pound, Wyndham Lewis, T. S. Eliot (with Joyce, McLuhan’s “men of 1914”)
- Barrington Nevitt (McLuhan’s co-author on Take Today)
Closing
This is the session where the archive’s habit of reading scandal as structure gets its clearest statement — and, in Cameron’s insistence that charting is a Gutenbergian reflex, its sharpest limit.
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