In 1800 the chemical environment was fully active — determining everything in our bodies and in the cosmos to its furthest reaches — and nobody could see it, invisible on McLuhan’s principle precisely because it was the environment . That is the analogy Cameron McEwen lays out end to end in the first session of 2023, at Bob Dobbs’s request, as the working model for what a new science would have to be: not a discovery of new things but a way of focusing old ones that different researchers can share. It pays off at Mendeleev’s table in 1869, and Bob supplies the transposition himself — Joyce, Eliot, Pound and Lewis were “the Lavoisier level,” and “Marshall McLuhan was Mendeleev’s periodic chart level” . Behind the whole argument sits a conversation the two men failed to have at Mark Stahlman’s place in 1998 , which the blog post under discussion turns out to answer twenty-five years late.
Key Topics
- Bob suspects McLuhan was “hinting at” a new science; Cameron corrects him with a bibliography — the term is explicit and frequent in the 1970s lectures preserved in The Global Village and Laws of Media .
- What separates chemistry from alchemy is not insight but cumulability: the alchemists worked hard in laboratories and never produced a common focus .
- Cameron refuses any decline narrative about classical Greece — the advance in insight was real, and “no advance is made without a retreat,” because sharp focus abstracts from things that then build up into a crisis .
- Cameron’s own periodic table is the visual/audile pair crossed with three emphases and two intensities, yielding “a kind of Mendeleev’s table of the elementary ways in which human experience unfolds” — a chart that cannot be drawn, since drawing it visually would contradict it .
- The session’s middle hour reads one sentence McLuhan wrote in 1943, found by accident in the Nashe thesis, clause by clause: nobody invents language, so a window onto the world must exist prior to the one language provides .
- Cameron on why the new science propagates so badly: “you cannot come to understand it without already understanding it” — which is his account of why this conversation works and the 1998 one did not.
Notable Quotes
"But no advance is made without a retreat."
"just as language offers an extensive and complex apprehension of the structure of beings so that faculty which produced the state of language is perpetually operative, an intuitive perception of essentials."
"The way this New Science works is that you cannot come to understand it without already understanding it."
Outline
- 0:00:02 — Five nuclear reactors and the cold play
- 0:10:10 — The ground is New Science
- 0:16:33 — Winnipeg: a free-ranging environment
- 0:18:25 — Mark Stahlman’s place, 1998
- 0:22:26 — Tactile space is not a telephone
- 0:25:33 — Chemistry in 1800: the invisible environment
- 0:28:25 — Before Plato: the new came first
- 0:33:27 — No advance without a retreat
- 0:36:49 — Mendeleev’s table and the refinement of alchemy
- 0:40:50 — The Romantics, progress, and the wider environment
- 0:45:44 — Joyce was Lavoisier; McLuhan was the periodic chart
- 0:48:45 — Kuhn at Princeton
- 0:52:00 — A history, not the history
- 0:53:08 — The medium between the substances
- 0:57:02 — The title of the blog
- 0:57:30 — A new genus of sciences
- 01:00:44 — Sheldrake, the woo-woo, and the material middle
- 01:01:56 — Falling back into the Gutenberg Galaxy
- 01:04:35 — The Marconi Galaxy and inclusive articulation
- 01:08:04 — Three Types of Space: the three quotes
- 01:13:20 — Mendeleev’s table of experience
- 01:16:19 — The bulldog and the difficult life
- 01:22:14 — Marge Stewart and the Coach House
- 01:24:23 — Page 130 and the citadel from Counterblast
- 01:27:07 — The 1943 sentence in the Nashe thesis
- 01:30:06 — Nobody invents language
- 01:33:47 — Logos, big L and small L
- 01:35:22 — Being gives itself up
- 01:39:53 — The incomprehension of 1998
- 01:43:09 — The Joe Keogh letter
- 01:45:18 — The Lynn White letter and Chrystall’s thesis
- 01:49:55 — Counterblast 1954: the well of loneliness
- 01:54:16 — The empty fiction of the subject
- 01:56:09 — Hypnotism has two sides
- 01:57:39 — Speech, literacy, and the mining of orality
- 01:59:55 — Page 130 read aloud
- 02:01:47 — From Cliché to Archetype, p.200
- 02:04:36 — He was not as clear back then
- 02:06:16 — Stages are not chronological
- 02:08:37 — The Rolling Stone report nobody looked at
- 02:11:51 — Coleridge, Wordsworth, and the degree of awareness
- 02:14:31 — The multiplicity of media and the she-he
- 02:17:20 — The caveman and homeopathic means
- 02:19:31 — The Android Meme atomizes every user
- 02:22:35 — Who’s echoing who
- 02:24:47 — Listening to echoes
- 02:30:15 — Primary imagination
- 02:32:43 — Making things with iON
- 02:35:48 — The bet on McLuhan
Mentioned Resources
Works by Marshall McLuhan
- The Global Village (with Bruce Powers) — p.4 and p.13 on the resonant interval, and the chapter note on the electronic society falling into the dark of the mind
- Laws of Media — named with The Global Village as the posthumous home of the New Science material
- Through the Vanishing Point — p.221, touch as a relation “not of connectedness but of interval”
- Counterblast — the 1954 first version on acoustic space and the well of loneliness, and the 1969 edition’s p.135 citadel of individual consciousness
- From Cliché to Archetype — p.200 on the creative process as a repetition of the stages of apprehension
- War and Peace in the Global Village — quoted for the Joyce line about the dear prehistoric scenes
- The Interior Landscape — “Joyce, Mallarmé and the Press” (1954), and a passage on the hand resting limpidly that neither man can locate
- “Innovation Is Obsolete” (1971) — the multiplicity of spaces created by man’s own technologies
- The Nashe thesis (1943) — the sentence on language and the faculty that produced it
- Letters of Marshall McLuhan — p.413, the July 6, 1970 letter to Joe Keogh
Other Works
- Thomas Kuhn, The Structure of Scientific Revolutions (1962) — assigned reading in Cameron’s junior year at Princeton
- Eric Havelock, Preface to Plato — cited by McLuhan on the phonetic alphabet scrapping tribal man
- Eric McLuhan, The Electric Language (1998-99) — on ESP, anti-gravity, and the brain extended by computer
- Andrew Chrystall, doctoral thesis — p.207, the August 17, 1970 letter to Lynn White
- Cameron McEwen, Three Types of Space — the January 2023 blog post the session works through
- Mary Shelley, Frankenstein — named among the Romantic-era registrations of what progress left out
- Prospect magazine (1962) — McLuhan on the multiplicity of media and the servomechanism
- Rolling Stone (1970) — the report on pre-tribal awareness Cameron says nobody else has looked at
People
- Marshall McLuhan (the Toronto media theorist whose New Science the session reconstructs)
- Cameron McEwen (co-host, McLuhan scholar, author of the McLuhan’s New Sciences blog)
- Bob Dobbs (co-host, McLuhan’s former archivist, reading from his own manuscript)
- Antoine Lavoisier (French chemist who found a communicable way of isolating the elements)
- Joseph Priestley (chemist who did comparable work while still inside the phlogiston theory)
- Dmitri Mendeleev (Russian chemist whose 1869 periodic table completes the analogy)
- Thomas Kuhn (historian of science, Cameron’s junior-year advisor at Princeton)
- Eric Havelock (classicist, author of Preface to Plato)
- Oswald Spengler (historian read at Toronto by Frye, McLuhan and Innis for the widest possible environment)
- Northrop Frye (Toronto critic, named among Spengler’s readers)
- Harold Innis (political economist, “a great help to McLuhan to understanding this stuff”)
- Eric McLuhan (McLuhan’s son, whose unpublished Egypt book and 1998-99 book are discussed)
- Corinne McLuhan (McLuhan’s wife, credited with the material basis that kept the work going)
- Marge Stewart (McLuhan’s secretary, credited by Bob with the creativity in the Coach House)
- Joe Keogh (recipient of the July 6, 1970 letter on Havelock and pre-tribal awareness)
- Lynn White (recipient of the August 17, 1970 letter on the tribal encyclopedia of the bards)
- Mark Stahlman (in whose New York apartment the two men first met, in 1998)
- Andrew Chrystall (McLuhan scholar whose thesis carries the Lynn White letter)
- Bruce Powers (McLuhan’s co-author on The Global Village)
- Samuel Taylor Coleridge (poet and critic, source of the primary/secondary imagination distinction)
- William Wordsworth (poet, named with Coleridge among those who would not forget nature)
- Martin Heidegger (philosopher whose late turn to the pre-Socratics Cameron reads as parallel to McLuhan’s)
- Rupert Sheldrake (biologist whose morphogenetic field Bob proposes as an unprepared New Science)
- Barrington Nevitt (McLuhan’s collaborator, called in the middle of the night about breakthroughs)
- Ted Carpenter (anthropologist whose Eskimo work Bob credits with clarifying McLuhan)
- Sigfried Giedion (art historian, named among McLuhan’s early-1940s exposures)
- Tom Wolfe (interviewer, 1973, in the footage Bob reads for McLuhan’s late completion)
- Jordan Peterson (cited in passing on identity loss and violence)
Closing
The dialogue’s real proposal is a criterion rather than a doctrine: a science exists when different people can share a focus and build on each other’s results — which means the question is not whether McLuhan was right but whether anyone has yet found the form in which his work could be worked on.
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