Two words in a quotation Bob found — “private awareness” — turn out to name the thing Cameron has been unable to say for years. He arrives with the claim in full: pre-tribal awareness is McLuhan’s most important topic , and what McLuhan was after under that name is the stem cell of human consciousness, a single originary structure that is never met as itself, only in the particular experiences it makes possible . McLuhan’s own word for it, Cameron says, is the art formula . From there the page-131 sentence from From Cliché to Archetype — “a close liaison between private and corporate awareness” — stops being a stray line and becomes the hinge of the corpus, and the back half of the session asks what happens when that private pole is retrieved by machines instead of by anyone.
Key Topics
- Cameron defines the stem cell from biology — polymorphous, expressible as bone or blood or nerve — and Aristotle supplies the defence against the charge of abstraction: it belongs to the ideas to be dynamic, dunamis, inherent self-expression, which Cameron glosses as McLuhan’s extension .
- Coleridge does the decisive work: primary imagination read as the stem-cell faculty that lets an infant acquire a language and still keep an identity , which is why Bob’s page can credit Coleridge with detecting the medium as the message “on a very small scale” — the scale of one consciousness .
- Bob reads the isolation passages of his own book back through it — the Kroker quadrant’s one and four, with analog fragments spinning around the merged pole in schizophrenia, paranoia, panic and ecstasy — and Cameron takes it as a picture of satellites orbiting a subject that keeps mistaking one of them for itself .
- Cameron supplies the mechanism Bob’s voluntary/cloned ESP pair had been missing: the merger draws its power from voluntary ESP precisely when voluntary ESP is forgotten, “blind expression or blind extension” ; later he substitutes his own term, tactile awareness, since no one is ever purely pre-tribal .
- The German idealists are recruited as predecessors working the same problem, the plural absolute requiring tactility between its terms , before Cameron blocks the technological reading — what Fichte and Hegel were thinking was also being worked out in Faraday’s laboratory .
- Television arrives as the monster in the house, the effect derived from the medium itself: a camera that watches continually, so people begin living as if watched , while the Android meme’s endgame is to disappear and let humans believe they are the agency of doing .
- Cameron catches Bob narrating decades in order and offers pattern recognition in place of chronology , then closes by naming what the two of them have been doing all along .
Notable Quotes
"It's the stem cell faculty that humans have that allows them to learn language when they're infants, to grow into a certain society, but to maintain an identity through this generalized experience, generalized language."
"here's a guy trying to communicate something. But he doesn't know how to do it. All he knows is when he says stuff, people's eyes glaze over."
"this is the great mystery that all human cognition is artistic."
Outline
- 0:00:01 — Opening: page 130 and a quote Bob found
- 0:01:37 — Pre-tribal awareness as McLuhan’s most important topic
- 0:02:27 — The stem cell
- 0:05:38 — Structure without time, expressed only in time
- 0:08:48 — The agent intellect and the gold that is never pure
- 0:13:03 — The art formula
- 0:14:28 — Page 131: a close liaison between private and corporate awareness
- 0:24:19 — Coleridge: primary and secondary imagination
- 0:26:31 — The retina that flips the world
- 0:33:13 — Collectivized separateness
- 0:38:01 — The Kroker quadrant: one and four
- 0:41:40 — Voluntary ESP and cloned ESP
- 0:47:57 — Multiplicity of media: the end of conditioning
- 01:01:10 — The citadel that has not fallen
- 01:03:52 — Quotation marks: Take Today and Beckett’s Watt
- 01:11:05 — German idealism: the unity that fragments itself
- 01:18:53 — Page 134: the law of the situation
- 01:32:25 — The camera inside the house
- 01:42:23 — The benching of humans
- 01:47:46 — The uncharted and unchartable milieu
- 01:50:41 — Joyce wrote from the position of the art formula
- 01:59:44 — Fission of the moment of aesthetic awareness
- 02:15:17 — Closing: negative capability
Mentioned Resources
Works by McLuhan
- From Cliché to Archetype (1970) — source of the page-200 passage on the close liaison between private and corporate awareness
- Counterblast — its page 135 supplies the citadel of individual consciousness that mass media cannot reach
- The Gutenberg Galaxy — read for its definition of imagination as not embedded in any sense
- War and Peace in the Global Village — quotes Finnegans Wake on “the dear prehistoric scenes all back again”
- Take Today — its quotation marks read as method, and its line on social identity as a violent process
- Laws of Media / The New Science — the penultimate sentence on the uncharted and unchartable milieu
- “The Aesthetic Moment in Landscape Poetry” (1951) — the fission of the moment of aesthetic awareness
- Explorations 8, “Electronics as ESP” — Bob’s starting point for cloned ESP
- “Prospect: Canadian Art” (1962) — the multiplicity of media and the end of conditioning
- The Nashe thesis — intuitive perception of essentials
- The 1954 Christian humanism lecture — all human cognition is artistic
Other Works
- Samuel Beckett, Watt and Murphy — the single footnote that covers the whole novel
- James Joyce, Finnegans Wake — offered as the map of the unchartable milieu
- Jerry Mander, Four Arguments for the Elimination of Television — the book McLuhan is said to have hated
- Barrington Nevitt on consciousness as an effect of speeding up the cliché–archetype process
People
- Marshall McLuhan (the media theorist whose least-read theme the session promotes to the centre)
- Samuel Taylor Coleridge (Romantic poet whose primary imagination supplies the working definition of the private pole)
- Aristotle (whose reading of Plato supplies dunamis, self-expression as inherent)
- Plato (whose reception as an abstractionist the session defines the stem cell against)
- Hegel (German idealist whose plural absolute is said to require tactility between its terms)
- Johann Gottlieb Fichte (German idealist whose absolute is singular where Hegel’s are plural)
- Friedrich Schelling (German idealist bracketed as too changeable to summarize)
- Immanuel Kant (credited with the second Copernican revolution, the discovery of inner or acoustic space)
- Michael Faraday (experimenter whose electrical work is read as the same thinking as post-Kantian idealism)
- Friedrich Nietzsche (said to complete the idealists, having had thirty years of the telegraph)
- Dmitri Mendeleev (whose table models the plurality of the originary faculty)
- Arthur Kroker (theorist supplying the quadrant, “satellite squared,” and the phrase surplus flesh)
- George Thompson (art student turned McLuhan associate; Bob’s source on Counterblast’s making)
- Harley Parker (McLuhan collaborator, credited by Cameron with Counterblast’s graphics)
- George Sanderson (the third man in Cameron’s Nova Scotia memory of Thompson)
- Barrington Nevitt (the engineer who made McLuhan practical, and missed the mystery)
- Mary Parker Follett (1920s management theorist who coined the law of the situation)
- Tim Berners-Lee (inventor of the HTTP protocols, said to have delivered the internet to the planet of the dead)
- Noam Chomsky (whose manufacture of consensus Bob invokes and then refuses)
- Jean Baudrillard (source of the video recorder that watches television for its owner)
- John Keats (whose negative capability closes the session)
- Wyndham Lewis (subject of the 1953 essay on the formulas of artists and scientists)
- Harold Innis (offered as a help toward the art formula, and overtaken by Mallarmé)
- Samuel Beckett (whose single footnote solves McLuhan’s quotation-mark problem)
Closing
This is the session where the pair stop reading Bob’s book for what it says about media and start reading it for what it says about the reader — and where the series finally gets a name, McLuhan’s own, for the thing it has been circling since dialogue one.
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