A line from a shoebox of unpublished notes turns out to define the term this series has spent five sessions on. Wittgenstein wrote that the philosopher is not a citizen of any thought community; read “thought community” as tribe and the sentence is a definition of pre-tribal awareness composed by someone who had never encountered the phrase. That licence — hunt the same structure under other names — pays out twice more before the session ends: McLuhan’s 1946 “power of detached observation,” read to its last clause at last, turns out to become “a ‘scientific’ interest” , and the “primordial feeling” of The Medium is the Massage turns out to be the private pole named in the very years Bob had taken for silence .
Key Topics
- Cameron reads Wittgenstein’s unpublishable notebooks as a finding rather than a failure — the man could never order his thoughts and came to think that any order would distort what needed doing — and refuses to rank him below McLuhan, since both were grappling with one old problem: that human beings are at once creative and tribal .
- Bob’s objection that “detached observation” is one-sided draws the session’s sharpest correction — detachment has a Gutenbergian, a tribal and an electronic meaning , and in any of them “you cannot not be involved in the maelstrom” , so the power Poe’s sailor exercises is simply creativity .
- The word in scare quotes points at a program: first science studies first nature, second science studies second nature — the world of human action — with the warrant running back through Vico and Bacon , and it is a science of media only because all human action is mediated .
- The page-130 passage from From Cliché to Archetype is worked sentence by sentence to its close on “a close liaison between private and corporate awareness” , with the clause Bob supplies making the balance between them depend entirely on the degree of awareness achieved .
- Answering Bob’s account of the present as a projection into the multi-bodied, Cameron coins the “negative echo” — a shuttle between isolation and merger that cannot rest at either end because both are the same wrong question, the search for matching .
- The Global Village gets its own forgotten definition back: McLuhan called it a simultaneous happening , and simultaneity turns out to name not everything currently going on but the unconscious itself — the piano rather than the songs played on it .
Notable Quotes
"You cannot not be involved in the maelstrom."
"this in turn implies a close liaison between private and corporate awareness."
"There's no getting around obscurity in human beings."
Outline
- 0:00:01 — Opening: Zettel, and sixty boxes
- 0:06:23 — The philosopher is not a citizen of any thought community
- 0:13:12 — The rearview mirror is not escapable
- 0:16:57 — Alan Watts and the rearview mirror
- 0:20:26 — What is at stake is the communication of it
- 0:23:13 — Footprints in the Sands of Crime
- 0:27:15 — First science, second science
- 0:34:18 — The last paragraph
- 0:42:28 — From Cliché to Archetype: the first sentence
- 0:48:59 — The second sentence: an echo in the unconscious
- 0:57:53 — Locking in the one
- 01:06:11 — An update for Eliot
- 01:12:05 — Primordial feeling
- 01:20:46 — Anthropomorphic Physical and the negative echo
- 01:26:27 — Obscurity is not a defect
- 01:35:43 — A simultaneous happening
- 01:41:45 — The sham
- 01:50:46 — The third sentence: private and corporate awareness
- 01:55:22 — Nuclear war as advertising
- 02:04:56 — Closing: perpetual change and the first C
Mentioned Resources
Works by McLuhan
- “Footprints in the Sands of Crime” (1946) — the Sewanee Review essay whose last paragraph supplies “a power of detached observation”; Allen Tate objected to the title and kept it anyway
- From Cliché to Archetype (1970) — the page-130 passage worked through sentence by sentence
- The Medium is the Massage (1967) — the all-at-onceness passage, and “the primordial feeling, the tribal emotions”
- “Five Sovereign Fingers Taxed the Breath” (1954) — the same sentence with 3,000 years of literacy instead of a few centuries
- The Interior Landscape — where “The Ancient Quarrel in Modern America,” a 1944 St. Louis lecture, finally reappears
- Counterblast — p.31, on a rapid series of innovations
- Take Today — “the recently achieved forms of consciousness”
- War and Peace in the Global Village — p.190 on the animals, and the word adjustment
- Culture Is Our Business — where McLuhan calls Alan Watts too simple
- Laws of Media — Cameron’s likely source for “second science”
Other Works
- Ludwig Wittgenstein, Zettel — the posthumous shoebox of notes; §445 supplies the session’s opening line
- James Joyce, Finnegans Wake — the interplay of all subjects, offered as simultaneous happening
- Philip Marchand’s 1989 McLuhan biography — written out of notes taken while inventorying the archive
People
- Ludwig Wittgenstein (Austrian-British philosopher, in the academy trying to think against the academy)
- Marshall McLuhan (the corpus under analysis, read here for the phrases he used only once)
- Samuel Taylor Coleridge (primary and secondary imagination, McLuhan’s model for the stages of apprehension)
- Étienne Gilson (the ordering McLuhan took from him — expression first, the prior force implicated by it)
- Giambattista Vico and Francis Bacon (the lineage behind second nature and a science of human action)
- Alan Watts (claimant to the rearview mirror; corrected for holding that there is only now)
- Stéphane Mallarmé (art as the retracing of perception back to its roots)
- T. S. Eliot (the line about having to use words, and Bob’s addition to it)
- Alexander Pope (“Whatever is, is right”)
- Arthur Kroker (post-information society, the outside synonym at the close)
- Barrington Nevitt (that we did what we never needed to do)
- Eric McLuhan (his proposal that inventions be debated before release)
- Allen Tate (Sewanee Review editor, who disliked the title)
- Marge Stewart (whose inventory preceded Bob’s 1981 reordering of the archive)
- Albert Einstein (E = mc², and McLuhan’s question about the first c)
- George Bernard Shaw (every profession a conspiracy against the layman)
Closing
Read to its end, a phrase from 1946 stops being about standing back from the storm and becomes the first sketch of a science of media — which is why this session spends two hours proving that the same structure keeps surfacing, unrecognized, under other people’s words.
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