A circle you can leave only by entering another one — Humboldt’s figure for language, quoted by McLuhan around p.30 of the Gutenberg Galaxy — is what Cameron builds an entire method on here. If every medium you name turns into a message needing a further medium, the regress has no floor — and his answer is that the regress is the exit, not the trap, refused only because entering it costs you your orientation. Against that runs Bob’s counter-track, a working device he will not describe, which Cameron ends up granting is the one thing that might do what argument cannot. The page they were meant to be reading gets minutes; the rest goes to what a science of media would have to be.
Key Topics
- Cameron restates McLuhan’s whole project as one methodological extension — survival depends on psychological nature, not only physical nature, becoming “subject to common study.”
- The magic circle is welded to McLuhan’s maelstrom: the vortex is a set of circles, and the mariner gets out of one only by entering the next.
- The interior landscape is read as a chemistry-in-waiting, with Priestley and Lavoisier as the model — a science that begins indistinct and works at making itself distinct, a century before Mendeleev’s table.
- Bob reads his own sentence back without recognising it, and Cameron rebuilds “post-tactile, xenochronous” from Greek — xenos plus chronos, strange time, linearity and simultaneity in dynamic interplay rather than one defeating the other.
- Silence gets a second edge — “there’s silence in silence,” and moving into it as the opposite of talk is itself a Gutenbergian move rather than an escape from one.
- Arthur Kroker’s The Will to Technology is read aloud and then taken apart — excellent at stating the problem, locked inside the description of it.
Notable Quotes
"There's no escape from this."
"It's radioactive. And this radioactivity is what has generated Western civilization, and it needs to be understood."
"The only possible answer is to quit being the steersman of the process and allow the process to dominate you."
Outline
- 0:00:02 — The science of magic circles
- 0:18:01 — Gutenberg thought, electric weapons
- 0:30:09 — Roots, bases, and the Dagwood essay
- 0:38:30 — The box
- 0:43:17 — The interior landscape as chemistry
- 01:06:49 — Gutenbergian media ecology and government by committee
- 01:21:18 — Post-tactile, xenochronous
- 01:26:44 — Silence
- 01:39:43 — Fission precedes fusion
- 01:48:06 — Through with books: Cliché to Archetype
- 01:56:14 — Kroker: The Will to Technology
- 02:13:30 — The steersman and the dominations
- 02:18:31 — Kaminomichi: thinking from the elements
Mentioned Resources
Works by McLuhan
- The Gutenberg Galaxy (1962) — the Humboldt “magic circle” quotation, around p.30
- Understanding Media (1964) — the book the 1970 blurb is measured against
- From Cliché to Archetype (1970) — with Wilfred Watson; the cover calls it his most important work since Understanding Media
- The Interior Landscape (1969) — source of the 1951 line “in art as in physics, fission preceded fusion”
- Take Today: The Executive as Dropout (1972) — hardware and software in quotation marks on the cover
- The Mechanical Bride (1951) — the book McLuhan later said was made in a book environment for book people
- Laws of Media — raised on whether “laws” and “principles” mean the same thing
- “Dagwood’s America” (1942) — the earliest form of the roots problem
- Playboy interview (1969) — where McLuhan dates his break with books to 1949
Other Works
- Arthur Kroker, The Will to Technology and the Culture of Nihilism (2004) — read aloud at length in the last third
- Wilhelm von Humboldt on language as a magic circle — reached only through McLuhan’s quotation
- Take One magazine (Toronto) — the 1969 “I’m through with books” interview
People
- Marshall McLuhan (the Canadian media theorist whose work the whole series reads)
- Cameron McEwen (the McLuhan scholar behind the McLuhan blog, author of the cul-de-sac framework)
- Bob Dobbs (media theorist and performer, author of the Trump and Tech Body book under discussion)
- Wilhelm von Humboldt (Prussian philologist and educational reformer, source of the magic-circle figure)
- Arthur Kroker (Canadian political theorist of technology and nihilism)
- Harold Innis (Toronto School economic historian of communication)
- Donald Theall (McLuhan scholar, source of the non-linear reading of “post”)
- Harold Rosenberg (New York art critic who promoted Understanding Media)
- Barrington Nevitt and Wilfred Watson (McLuhan’s later co-authors)
- Eric McLuhan (McLuhan’s son and collaborator)
- Martin Heidegger and Friedrich Nietzsche (the German lineage Kroker reads forward)
- Joseph Priestley and Antoine Lavoisier (the chemists whose work precipitated the question “what is an element?“)
- Frank Zappa (source of the term xenochrony)
- Walter Cronkite (the newsreader used as the first case of the mouth reading someone else’s script)
Closing
This is the session where the series stops describing media and states its method: a science of magic circles, entered rather than escaped, and a discipline that begins by giving up the steering wheel.
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