A quotation the pair have been working for several sessions finally runs out, and the phrase it ends on turns out to be the door rather than the wall. From Cliché to Archetype closes with “a close liaison between private and corporate awareness” , and Cameron immediately routes it back through Eliot and Richards: what passes between people does so not by a conscious process but by a kind of immersion in which they learn without knowing they are learning . Bob supplies the name for that — Malinowski’s phatic communion — and the term quietly takes over the session, since it is also the title of his own book. What follows is the widest inventory the series has attempted: a grammatical puzzle, a genealogy of everyone who came after McLuhan, and a long second half in which imitation stops being one effect among others and becomes the floor everything else stands on .
Key Topics
- Cameron turns “audience of the intellect” into a question of grammar — which way does the genitive run? — and prefers the reading where the intellect is the object, which makes tolerating McLuhan’s ambiguity a practice in networked identity .
- A friend’s photograph of a basketball crowd staring at phones during the closing minutes yields four simultaneous times running in one room , which Bob identifies without hesitation as a page of Finnegans Wake .
- Page 134’s Anthropomorphic Physical gets its mechanism at last: the Android meme first persuades people that its content is theirs to massage, and then, somewhere around Web 2.0, the massage runs the other way .
- Bob recites his essay on the schools that followed McLuhan — Toronto, then Lotringer’s New York and Semiotext(e), then Kroker’s Concordia, then the diasporic fourth, then the nineties revival — and Cameron objects that the first group was never cohesive enough to be a school .
- Cameron places mimesis at the formal beginning of McLuhan’s thought, in a two-person Cambridge tutorial on Aristotle’s Poetics , and Bob supplies its mechanism: not steady imitation but an oscillation between merging and blocking .
- An article on Joyce’s eye trouble supplies the session’s best image of the same idea — Nora and Lucia reading aloud, their mistakes proving more valuable than their accuracy , which is how a text comes to speak better distorted than undistorted.
Notable Quotes
"They try to answer a Posthuman problem with Gutenbergian means."
"This is why everybody today keeps frantically monitoring their black mirrors."
"Marshall McLuhan foresees that consciousness... will prove to be an effect of speeding up Cliché to Archetype processes in the brain."
Outline
- 0:00:01 — Opening: p.131 and the close liaison
- 0:01:16 — Phatic communion and the tactile interplay
- 0:04:47 — The audience of the intellect
- 0:08:36 — Manitoba, Cambridge, and the plurality of voices
- 0:12:30 — Four different times at the basketball game
- 0:14:21 — Walling off the hive mind
- 0:19:59 — Channeling McLuhan: the TV shows that never were
- 0:22:29 — Reviewing the quotes: multiplicity and Vico’s thunder
- 0:25:16 — The decline of language
- 0:29:52 — The citadel of individual consciousness
- 0:39:36 — The thesis, the Innis letter, and March
- 0:44:31 — Capitalism as afterimage
- 0:48:51 — Two lines out of the Gutenberg Galaxy
- 0:52:59 — Network identity and the mythic stages
- 0:54:57 — Page 134: the Anthropomorphic Physical
- 01:02:17 — Beckett and the command
- 01:09:53 — The six schools of media ecology
- 01:17:18 — Miming: Aristotle, Q, and mimesis
- 01:18:11 — Xenochrony and synarchony
- 01:27:50 — The New Science: knowing and growing
- 01:30:26 — Phatic Communion as a book title
- 01:36:06 — Joyce’s eyes and the seed of the Wake
- 01:41:24 — The Tech Body and the guttural
- 01:45:13 — iON on the non-physical
- 01:48:36 — The sidelining of humans
- 01:53:39 — Creativity, the silent sea, and the church
- 02:01:32 — Ending the book: Laws of Media
- 02:03:53 — Radio, humour, and the canary
- 02:09:11 — Closing: consciousness as a speeding up
Mentioned Resources
Works by McLuhan
- From Cliché to Archetype (1970, with Wilfred Watson) — p.200, whose last sentence closes the multi-session reading
- Counterblast — the 1954 “separateness of man,” and the 1968 citadel of individual consciousness
- War and Peace in the Global Village — where the Finnegans Wake line on the prehistoric scenes is quoted
- Understanding Media — the book at the centre of the New York school’s late arrival
- Take Today — “the recently achieved forms of consciousness”
- The Interior Landscape — around p.32, on Joyce waiting for the slips of speech
- Laws of Media (1988) — the closing sentence on navigating an uncharted milieu, which Bob reads as communicating silence
- “Channeling McLuhan,” Wired, January 1996 — the interview with the four unmade television programmes
Other Works
- Bronisław Malinowski, the appendix to The Meaning of Meaning — where phatic communion enters
- Aristotle, Poetics — the Cambridge tutorial text, and the source of mimesis
- James Joyce, Finnegans Wake — the four-times page, and the level Joyce is said not to have authored
- Arthur Kroker, the 1984 book on Innis, McLuhan and Grant — credited for the Aquinas ratios of the senses
- Barrington Nevitt, ABC of Prophecy — the closing proposition on consciousness as a speeding up
- Truman Capote, In Cold Blood — fact and fiction intertwined past separating
People
- Marshall McLuhan (the corpus under analysis, read here for the training that formed the question)
- Bronisław Malinowski (anthropologist, whose phatic communion supplies the session’s central term)
- I. A. Richards (Cambridge, and the immersion McLuhan only recognised thirty years later)
- William Empson (the other Cambridge influence on the plurality of voices)
- T. S. Eliot (read at Winnipeg before Cambridge; the essay on Dante behind “communicates before understanding”)
- Giambattista Vico (the thunder that interrupts the cave people, run backwards at the far end)
- Harold Innis (the March 1951 letter, matched to the thesis eight years earlier)
- Samuel Taylor Coleridge (the medium is the message detected early, on a very small scale)
- Sylvère Lotringer (founder of Semiotext(e), and the second school of media ecology)
- Arthur Kroker (Concordia, the third school; “surplus flesh”)
- Derrick de Kerckhove, Neil Postman, Bruce Powe, Robert Logan (the fourth, diasporic school)
- Barrington Nevitt, Eric McLuhan, Nelson Thall (the Toronto school of the nineties)
- William Irwin Thompson (also of the diasporic school)
- Samuel Beckett (by what right is the command made)
- Mary Parker Follett (the 1920s consultant behind “the law of the situation”)
- Marcel Duchamp (with Joyce, in the lineage Bob claims for phatic communion)
- Frank Zappa (the studio practice xenochrony is borrowed from)
- Martin Heidegger and his brother Fritz (Coleridge’s silent sea, possibly relayed via Tom Langan)
- John Cage (silence as something other than nothing being heard)
- Tim Berners-Lee (CERN, and the internet delivered to the planet of the dead)
- Wyndham Lewis (The Apes of God, and the doctrine of twoness)
- John Brockman (whose 1977 book of a hundred thinkers puts McLuhan last)
Closing
This is the session where the series names its own subject: the term Bob’s book is titled after finally gets its pedigree, and imitation is promoted from a media effect to the constant beneath every variety of tactility.
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