A single sentence in a 1970 Rolling Stone report has bothered Bob Dobbs for fifty years: writing “scrapped the old tribal traditions of Homer and Hesiod, but retrieved the private individual man, an ancient form dredged up from way, way back.” Private is supposed to be a literate effect, so what is it doing in the Paleolithic? Between sessions Cameron McEwen went looking and came back not with one corroborating passage but a series, beginning with a 1970 letter on Eric Havelock in which Marshall McLuhan says the alphabet “retrieved the primordial role of individual and pre-tribal awareness.” What follows is a session-long attempt to say what that individual was — and it ends by making the answer inseparable from McLuhan’s Catholicism.
Key Topics
- Cameron isolates the load-bearing words in “loss of individualism invites once again the comfort of tribal loyalties” — take out “once again” and McLuhan is asserting an individualism prior to the tribe, which Bob says is never discussed.
- The session’s method arrives as a formula: whatever McLuhan names here, he names twice — “The whole motor at work, it seems to me in these quotations, is that all of these things are at least two.”
- Asked for the technical name of the hidden chamber behind the Orthodox iconostasis, Cameron supplies the Greek adyton — alpha privative plus the root of deutlich — “what can never be shown, because it’s the source of what is shown.”
- Cameron reads “the separateness of man” as a grammatical trap: not a separateness belonging to man but one of which man is the object, and therefore something that “can never be described.”
- Bob assembles five scattered passages — Prospect, Rolling Stone, the 1954 locomotives, the 1947 Sewanee Review essay, and the 1969 citadel — into one set: “These five separateness quotations above help to illustrate McLuhan’s vision of what’s unfolding toward full development.”
- Cameron asks the question the session has been circling — “do you run together… the holeopathic and the homeopathic in some way?” — and Bob separates them: the holeopathic is the gigantic global hologram, the homeopathic the miniature that keeps its memory.
Notable Quotes
"The citadel of individual consciousness has not fallen, nor is it likely to fall, for it is not accessible to the mass media."
"The separateness between those things is the heart of everything. That separateness can never be shown, can never be described, because it's what makes the separateness between the hidden and the shown possible."
"So the conclusion I came to is that every word in Finnegans Wake is a chapter."
Outline
- 0:00:01 — The Rolling Stone puzzle
- 0:06:22 — The Global Village, Eric, and Bruce Powers
- 0:10:32 — Once again: an individualism before the tribe
- 0:16:16 — Mental gesture and the fall into speech
- 0:19:08 — The guf and the cancelled comfortable death
- 0:21:16 — Acoustic space, tactility, and the Explorations seminar
- 0:28:45 — Imprecision as method
- 0:33:40 — Two lonelinesses
- 0:39:12 — The empty fiction of the subject
- 0:42:44 — McLuhan’s Catholicism
- 0:46:51 — The Mass, the liturgy, and the adyton
- 01:05:35 — Bless the locomotives
- 01:13:07 — Prospect: freeing himself from media
- 01:15:29 — Finnegans Wake as the Tech Body
- 01:22:10 — Isolated individuals and the new narcissism
- 01:32:14 — Christ, heresy, and fission within fusion
- 01:39:28 — Blake and Hollywood: homeopathic means
- 01:48:05 — The superhumanization of humans
- 01:56:47 — The citadel of individual consciousness
- 02:05:45 — The mind as final victim
- 02:10:42 — The Evergreens’ Armageddon
- 02:14:43 — Holeopathic and homeopathic
- 02:19:17 — We, violence, and the concentration camp
- 02:22:48 — McLuhan was not a Catholic
Mentioned Resources
Works by Marshall McLuhan
- Counterblast (1954) — the source of “bless the locomotives whistling on the prairies, proclaiming the separateness of man,” and of “until writing was invented, we lived in acoustic space”
- Counterblast (1969) — p.135, the citadel of individual consciousness that “has not fallen”
- Prospect (1962) — the multiplicity of media “now enabling man to free himself from media for the first time in history”
- “Inside Blake and Hollywood” (Sewanee Review, October 1947) — the unconscious powers struggling “to restore balance and order by homeopathic means”
- The Global Village (1989) — the mid-70s note on “the dark of the mind” and “the world of primordial intuition”
- Letters of Marshall McLuhan — letter 413 to Joe Keogh, July 6, 1970, on Havelock’s Preface to Plato
- Take Today — Joyce making “a whole universe out of one word,” and the closing exchange with Barrington Nevitt
- From Cliché to Archetype — the distinction between Ulysses and Finnegans Wake as archetypes of individual and collective posture
- War and Peace in the Global Village — pain as the great discovery of the twentieth century
- City as Classroom (1977) — dated here, and reclassified by Cameron as assembled rather than written
- Laws of Media (1988) — the book whose date, Bob says, delayed The Global Village by a year
Other Works
- James Joyce, Finnegans Wake — Mutt and Jute at p.16, and the book read as a specification for the Tech Body
- James Joyce, Ulysses — the varieties of human reality distributed across chapters
- Eric Havelock, Preface to Plato — the alphabet scrapping tribal man
- Edmund Carpenter, Eskimo Realities (1959) and Explorations 9 — the tactile evidence from the north
People
- Marshall McLuhan (the Toronto media theorist whose scattered remarks on pre-tribal individuality organize the session)
- Bob Dobbs (co-host, reading his own Trump and Tech Body pamphlet page by page)
- Cameron McEwen (co-host, McLuhan scholar and blogger, who assembled the corroborating quotations)
- James Joyce (novelist, whose Finnegans Wake Bob treats as the anticipation of the Tech Body)
- Eric Havelock (classicist, whose Preface to Plato supplied McLuhan’s formulation)
- Bruce Powers (McLuhan’s co-author on The Global Village, at Niagara University)
- Eric McLuhan (McLuhan’s son and collaborator, co-author of Laws of Media)
- Donald Theall (McLuhan student, cited on the synesthetic and the co-anesthetic)
- Edmund Carpenter (anthropologist and Explorations collaborator)
- David Carlton Williams (Winnipeg psychologist credited with the acoustic space notion)
- Joe Keogh (McLuhan correspondent, recipient of the 1970 letter)
- George Thompson (McLuhan’s daily associate at the Centre for Culture and Technology)
- Barrington Nevitt (McLuhan collaborator and co-author of Take Today)
- William Irwin Thompson (cultural historian, cited on five phases and their victims)
- Wyndham Lewis (writer and painter, cited on two-ness against oneness)
- Frank Zappa (musician, whose “big note” supplies Bob’s analogy for the locomotive whistle)
Closing
Fifty years of a private question get an evidentiary answer here, and the answer turns out to be the least fashionable thing in McLuhan — that something in the human was there before the tribe, and has not fallen yet.
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