A paragraph from Vico’s New Science was supposed to settle the argument the previous session left open. Giants wandering the mountain heights are stopped by the first thunder after the flood, take refuge in caves, and humble themselves before a divinity they imagine as Jove — which Bob Dobbs reads as a portrait of the solitary individual before the tribe. Cameron McEwen, who found the passage, refuses his own earlier reading of it: pre-tribal awareness is not a period in history but “the spark of creativity that allows human beings to become human beings,” present in every infant learning a language and in this conversation right now . What the session gains in exchange arrives by etymology. The dyt of troglodyte, cave-enterer, is the root of adyton, the not-to-be-entered chamber of a Greek temple — and ninety minutes later that becomes the definition of a medium.
Key Topics
- Cameron withdraws the historical reading of pre-tribal awareness and replaces it with synchronic history, so “before” stops naming a date and starts naming a structure present at every moment .
- The medium is given the temple’s shape: you can never enter it, because entering converts it into an object lit by some further medium — “So the medium is inherently dark” .
- The regress that follows is the one that drove Innis to solipsism and pessimism, which Cameron reconstructs as a correct conclusion rather than a mood .
- McLuhan’s answer is that escaping bias was never the task: a new science understands nature as bias rather than aside from it .
- Cameron argues McLuhan built the interminable reading-aloud routine ten or fifteen years before Andy Kaufman, and that nobody has noticed he invented it .
- Asked what he would say from a podium, Cameron describes a studio of half-painted canvases and declines to claim any effect ; his account of what is at stake is Heidegger’s shepherds of being, with being as the landlord rather than the flock .
Notable Quotes
"their pre-tribal awareness would be the spark of creativity that allows human beings to become human beings."
"So the medium is inherently dark."
"These media and ... space satellites ... alter our feelings and sensibilities, especially when they are not attended to."
Outline
- 0:00:01 — Vico at the Internet Archive
- 0:10:03 — Paragraph 1097: troglodytes and the adyton
- 0:13:48 — Not a date but a spark
- 0:15:58 — All communication is artistic
- 0:18:55 — The reversal of nature: insight and hypnosis
- 0:20:22 — Making, not matching, and the fall as gift
- 0:25:42 — Five thousand years of uncommunicated insight
- 0:28:35 — The comfort of tribal communication
- 0:30:09 — Christ and the two Gnosticisms
- 0:32:52 — Religion includes the jokes
- 0:37:50 — The word that makes the market
- 0:41:46 — Warhol, Kaufman, and McLuhan the comedian
- 0:47:32 — Putting on a world
- 0:49:57 — Dropping the guitar
- 0:55:07 — Canadian self-puncture
- 0:59:15 — Especially when they are not attended to
- 01:04:54 — The bias of communication
- 01:11:40 — The one-sided reading
- 01:23:25 — Names used as ideas
- 01:24:49 — Thinking big, perceiving big
- 01:31:20 — Innis was cinematic
- 01:33:06 — The new macrocosm
- 01:39:28 — No human before the tribal; time is plural
- 01:46:44 — The medium is inherently dark
- 01:54:24 — Old science, new nature, new science
- 01:57:19 — Darkness only in relation to light
- 02:00:26 — What is the medium between us?
- 02:04:16 — The dropped baton and the studio of canvases
- 02:08:07 — The shepherds of being
- 02:13:03 — Responsibility and the investigation of bias
- 02:22:18 — Lodge, philosophy, and a better definition
- 02:25:06 — Ping pong
Mentioned Resources
Works by Marshall McLuhan
- War and Peace in the Global Village (1968) — three passages read in sequence: p.21 on the reversal of nature, the media-and-satellites principle, and the last page on the new macrocosm
- The Gutenberg Galaxy (1962) — cited for its title, changed from “the Gutenberg era” in the late 1950s
- The Global Village — p.190 and the connubium of a superterrestrial kind
- Christian Humanism lecture (1954) — the taking up of nature by all human perception, and making rather than matching
Other Works
- Giambattista Vico, New Science — paragraph 1097, the giants driven into caves by thunder
- Harold Innis, The Bias of Communication — read here for the genesis of bias and the late turn to solipsism
- Arthur Kroker, Technologies of the New Real — cited as a recent instance of the one-sided reading
People
- Giambattista Vico (eighteenth-century Neapolitan philosopher whose New Science supplies the session’s central passage)
- Marshall McLuhan (the Toronto media theorist whose pre-tribal awareness the session redefines)
- Bob Dobbs (co-host, pressing the historical reading of the cave passage)
- Cameron McEwen (co-host, McLuhan scholar, who brought the Vico material and withdrew his own earlier reading)
- Harold Innis (political economist, whose ignorance of art is traced to a specific limitation)
- Andy Warhol (artist, credited here with taking the manufactured-fame insight from McLuhan)
- Andy Kaufman (comedian, whose anti-comedy routine is dated after McLuhan’s)
- Soren Kierkegaard (philosopher, source of “dropping the guitar”)
- Martin Heidegger (philosopher, source of the shepherds of being)
- Donald Verene (Vico scholar whose work McLuhan read and quoted)
- Thomas Bergin and Max Fisch (the Cornell translators of the New Science)
- Rupert Lodge (Manitoba philosopher who tried to make McLuhan a philosopher)
- Walter Ong (McLuhan’s student, recipient of the letter on not taking up philosophy)
Closing
Two sessions of argument about what came before the tribe end by dissolving the question, and the term that replaces it — a chamber that cannot be entered without ceasing to be one — turns out to be the most exact thing the series has said about what a medium is.
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