One sentence, emailed between sessions, takes over the whole evening: the very components that make for a divided consciousness can, “with a certain encouragement,” become the means of an inclusive one . Neither man lets the vague phrase stand. Cameron McEwen eventually answers that the encouragement is faith, then immediately knots it — faith cannot come through works, because it must already be there in order to do the work . Bob Dobbs answers earlier and from the other end, out of a remark he says he overheard after a Monday night seminar and has been testing ever since: that certainty collapses on a monthly cycle, and recognizing the pattern is itself the encouragement . Bob’s book, the pair’s nominal subject, is never opened.
Key Topics
- Cameron sets the constraint the session runs under — an inclusive pair must stay two, which is why the yin-yang fails and why Bacon’s achievement was keeping the two pages distinct rather than reconciling them .
- He asks four times where the Tech Body actually is and never gets a location he can use; Bob’s answers arrive as images — the mortar between the stones of a wall, still binding but grown invisible, so people feel most autonomous where they are most propped up — until Cameron folds the whole thing into language instead .
- Bob identifies the Kroker quadrant of his 1995 chart as “tactility squared,” a diagram drawn before he had the term Tech Body at all ; Cameron objects that tactility put to use is falsified, and Bob answers that being able to obsolesce tactility is what is new about the present .
- Cameron reconstructs the 1958–59 NAEB correspondence in which McLuhan insisted you cannot know what a new medium is unless you know what a medium is , lost that argument to the grant application, and — trying to work around the compromise — had his first big stroke .
- The New Science is deferred by its own foundation: it was to rest on configurations of the senses, but “sense” only becomes usable after the revolution the New Science was supposed to be .
- Cameron matches Bob’s chart of five-part “quadrants” to Eliot’s Four Quartets, each of them in five sections , which makes the structure a retrieval rather than an invention.
Notable Quotes
"at least so far, all of his work has come to nothing."
"Every time there's a full moon, it all falls apart."
"It's been obsolesced. How could you obsolesce tactility? That's the newness of our situation."
Outline
- 0:01:10 — The Bacon quote: two pages, one gaze
- 0:03:43 — Hendiadys: two preserved as two
- 0:08:18 — Stubbornness and the citadel
- 0:13:49 — The algorithm as the new specter
- 0:20:16 — Every full moon it all falls apart
- 0:28:01 — 1970: the year something fell apart
- 0:38:05 — Collective psychotherapy on the air
- 0:44:11 — The end of nature
- 0:49:15 — Grace, faith, and the somersault
- 01:06:30 — Where is the Tech Body?
- 01:14:17 — The Kroker quadrant and the 1995 chart
- 01:33:23 — Skornia, the NAEB, and new media singular
- 01:38:20 — The wobbling pivot and the fifth ball
- 01:54:41 — Configurations of the senses
- 01:57:12 — The chart: one, four, and the fifth quadrant
Mentioned Resources
Works by McLuhan
- Understanding Me — the Stephanie McLuhan and David Staines collection the session’s opening quote comes from
- “Towards an Inclusive Consciousness” (1970) — University of Toronto lecture supplying the Bacon passage
- From Cliché to Archetype (1970) — source of the page-131 passage on the formative process of consciousness
- The Gutenberg Galaxy — defended by Cameron as not only negative; supplies the definition of imagination
- War and Peace in the Global Village — the book Bob remembers the “incommensurable” sentence from
- The Global Village (1989) — searched live for that sentence; the incommensurable-yet-complementary passages
- Take Today — read for its closing “recently achieved forms of consciousness”
- Counterblast — its spectre of communism transposed onto “the algorithm”
- “Notes on Burroughs” (1964) — the pharaoh who programs the whole world
- Review of Hugh Kenner’s book on Wyndham Lewis (1955) — the attempt to establish a One
Other Works
- T. S. Eliot, Four Quartets — each quartet in five sections
- James Joyce, Finnegans Wake — and “Finneganese” as the only adequate complexity
- W. B. Yeats, “The Second Coming” — the rough beast
People
- Marshall McLuhan (the media theorist whose 1970 lecture and unanswered question drive the session)
- Francis Bacon (Elizabethan philosopher who read the book of nature and the book of scripture together)
- Harry Skornia (head of the NAEB, McLuhan’s 1958–59 correspondent over the new-media grant)
- Wilfred Watson (McLuhan’s collaborator on From Cliché to Archetype)
- Hugh Kenner (critic whose Lewis book occasioned McLuhan’s account of nihilism)
- Donald Theall (McLuhan student; source of the Illuminati story and of synesthesia/coenesthesia)
- Arthur Kroker (theorist whose name Bob gives to a quadrant of his 1995 chart)
- Sigmund Freud (the analogy Cameron uses for Bob’s work on the air)
- Ezra Pound (supplies the wobbling pivot)
- Jean Baudrillard (supplies “after the orgy” for 1970)
- Bruce Powers (McLuhan’s co-author on The Global Village)
- Barrington Nevitt (source of “prepare very carefully and then do the opposite”)
- Stephanie McLuhan and David Staines (editors of Understanding Me)
Closing
The session is the clearest statement yet of why the New Science has not arrived: it needs the understanding it was meant to produce, and everyone involved — McLuhan included — has to work anyway.
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