Half a page of Take Today has more scare quotes than sentences, and Bob’s claim is that the punctuation is the argument: there is no hardware age, no haves or have-nots, nobody under surveillance . Cameron will not let the reading settle there. Where Bob folds McLuhan’s “hang-up” straight into the cul-de-sac, Cameron insists the word is polyvalent and points somewhere — a dead end and a doorway read from different sides. What resolves the argument is not a better definition but a second text: McLuhan’s 1974 op-ed on inflation, where the interval itself turns out to be the thing being traded .
Key Topics
- The Take Today cover passage read word by word — “the police state is now a work of art, a bureaucratic ballet of undulated sirens” — with every quoted term marking a category the electric environment has voided.
- Cameron’s etymology governs the session: undula is Latin for wave, so the sirens are riding a cresting sea rather than dancing, and the undulation is finally “the way things are.”
- Limited situations are “the way that the undulation expresses itself” — redundant and irrelevant only when taken by themselves, not when seen against the background of their possibility.
- Cameron’s formulation on thinking: you either become subservient to the thought going through you or you steer it, “and the latter is not thinking.”
- Bob dates and defends his coinage radical non-extension, planted in a Flipside column as a deliberate disruptor — and keeps it even after Cameron shows the Android Meme does extend, within itself .
- A closing footnote reroutes McLuhan’s genealogy: Eric Havelock and McLuhan were both students of I.A. Richards, and the Parry-Lord orality thesis behind The Gutenberg Galaxy’s opening was running at Harvard all along.
Notable Quotes
"It is the peculiar character of the gambler that he seeks to exploit this very nothing or interval as a situation with its own laws."
"You could not have tactility by itself. Tactility needs to be between things."
"It's talking among its machinic parts."
Outline
- 0:00:04 — Page 115: the Take Today cover quote
- 0:03:42 — Hang-up: cul-de-sac or doorway
- 0:07:47 — Deliberate mistakes: Wyndham Lewis and McLuhan’s composition
- 0:12:33 — Eric McLuhan, George Sanderson, and the Laws of Media assembly
- 0:23:49 — The police state as work of art
- 0:27:09 — Undulated sirens: the etymology and the ontology
- 0:37:24 — Monday night football, the haves and the have-nots
- 0:40:46 — Watergate, Canada as the great artist
- 0:45:12 — Ted Carpenter and the art world
- 0:49:29 — Conversion, and whether you can think without steering
- 0:55:04 — No secrets: Nevitt’s afterlife and the Global Membrane
- 01:00:38 — Gutenbergian categories
- 01:09:41 — Media ecologists by default: form, not content
- 01:18:27 — The gyroscope, and two styles on the page
- 01:23:55 — Page 116: the participant consumer-producer
- 01:32:36 — Genetic engineers: the Kroker panel
- 01:37:31 — The Matrix, Baudrillard, and Keanu Reeves
- 01:39:53 — A Media Approach to Inflation (September 21, 1974)
- 01:47:57 — Kissinger as triggerman, and the four worlds
- 01:50:03 — Palimpsest and radical non-extension
- 01:53:49 — The instant replay Tetrad
- 01:55:25 — Radical non-extension as a deliberate disruptor
- 01:59:34 — Laughing at the effects before they happen
- 02:08:55 — Footnote: I.A. Richards, Havelock, and the Parry-Lord thesis
- 02:15:23 — Sociology as the last gasp of Gutenberg
- 02:24:26 — The media ecology Tetrad and Bob’s own flip
- 02:27:13 — Eschatology and the closeness to death
Mentioned Resources
Works by McLuhan
- Take Today: The Executive as Dropout (1972), with Barrington Nevitt — the back-cover passage on surveillance read across pages 115 and 116
- “A Media Approach to Inflation” (New York Times, September 21, 1974) — read nearly in full; the gambler, the interval, Russian roulette and the four worlds
- The Global Village (1989), with Bruce Powers — p.176, the instant-replay Tetrad
- The Gutenberg Galaxy — “Big Brother went inside,” and the Parry-Lord thesis at its opening
- From Cliché to Archetype — “espionage is our daily activity”
- The Mechanical Bride — the tribal hunter wearing the skin of the animal he fears
- Laws of Media — assembled from Marshall’s notes by Eric McLuhan
- Letter to Ezra Pound, June 22, 1951 — “a distraction on the sidelines for the triggermen”
- Lecture at the 92nd Street Y, New York (1966) — “Canada never had anything but a 19th century”
Other Works
- Wyndham Lewis, The Lion and the Fox — the first of six books cut from a 1,500-page manuscript
- Arthur Kroker and Michael Weinstein, Data Trash
- Eric McLuhan, The Lost Tetrads — source of the media ecology Tetrad
- I.A. Richards, The Meaning of Meaning (1922); In His Honor (1973), his Festschrift
- The Matrix (1999) — which Bob reads as a late glimpse of what McLuhan was describing
People
- Bob Dobbs (media theorist, author of the Trump / Tech Body pamphlet under discussion)
- Cameron McEwen (McLuhan scholar, author of the McLuhan’s New Sciences blog)
- Marshall McLuhan (the subject of the series)
- Barrington Nevitt (McLuhan’s co-author on Take Today)
- Eric McLuhan (Marshall’s son and collaborator, assembler of Laws of Media)
- Corinne McLuhan (Marshall’s widow)
- George Sanderson (editor of the Antigonish Review, McLuhan publisher)
- Ted Carpenter (anthropologist, McLuhan’s Explorations collaborator)
- Wyndham Lewis (novelist and painter, McLuhan’s early mentor)
- I.A. Richards (McLuhan’s Cambridge teacher, author of The Meaning of Meaning)
- Eric Havelock (classicist of Greek orality, fellow student of Richards)
- Milman Parry and Albert Lord (originators of the Parry-Lord thesis of oral composition)
- Henry Kissinger (diplomat, named in McLuhan’s op-ed as “the current triggerman”)
- Jean Baudrillard (theorist who declined to write for the Matrix sequels)
- Arthur Kroker (theorist, co-author of Data Trash)
- Derrick de Kerckhove (McLuhan Program successor, contrasted with Bob’s own practice)
- George Meredith (the 19th-century novelist of McLuhan’s Manitoba thesis)
- Keanu Reeves (actor, reported seeking McLuhan in a Santa Monica bookstore)
Closing
The session’s two readings converge on one claim: once the interval is what gets traded, surveillance, wealth and identity are all quotations of categories that no longer hold — and the only honest response is to read the text on the other side of the page.
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