Three quotations nobody has read carry this session, and not one of them comes from the McLuhan anybody quotes. The first is Barry Nevitt’s, from a booklet printed for a 1980 futurists’ conference: consciousness “will prove to be an effect of speeding up cliché to archetype processes in the brain” . Cameron declines to settle it, opening the sentence into a scientific reading, then a reading pushed back to the first human beings, and leaving both standing. The second is a soundbite McLuhan gave Maclean’s in January 1974 — one voice among ten, asked what was in store for the year, answering “X-ray vision” — which contains what Bob believes is the only time McLuhan ever said centralization would continue. The third, buried in the Letters as an editorial insertion rather than a letter, is the one Bob thinks should have been the headline . Between them the pair work Watergate, detective shows, panels, and the three volumes of McLuhan’s correspondence nobody has read.
Key Topics
- Cameron reads Nevitt’s sentence the way a chemist would read the arrival of chemistry: nothing new was happening, only a new way of focusing on what had always been at work . What consciousness turns out to be is what it always was — the gap between cliché and archetype that lets humans flip one into the other .
- Bob’s Maclean’s find breaks McLuhan’s own pattern. Against a career of decentralization, the 1974 soundbite says electric power will be used “by the old guard of 19th century minds” to further entrench centralized authority — which Cameron reads straight onto the present, where everyone doing their own thing at every passing minute produces not dispersal but its opposite .
- Watergate is where the argument lands: once secrecy is impossible, espionage and manhunting become the principal activity, and the boys in the back room become show business . Cameron catches the second sense — in an electric environment everything becomes the business of showing .
- The detective show is the art form that mimed it. Bob’s formal claim is that a game mimes the main activity of a society , which makes Beretta and Columbo the era’s way of replaying the process of cognition — a form McLuhan traced to Poe, “a major inventor” , and one John Cage saw in McLuhan himself .
- Cameron’s contribution to the Letters is a genuine discovery: the published book is one volume of an original four, the other three sitting with Matie Molinaro’s papers at York, unworked .
- The session ends where the book does, on the ground exposed in its plurality — the problem people thought they had at the level of figure turning out to repeat at the level of ground, with no exit but going into the disorientation .
Notable Quotes
"Electric power will be used by the old guard of 19th century minds to implement even further the patterns of centralized hardware and authority."
"The electric environment reveals, but it does not reveal except through discontinuity."
"We were in a culture of quantum fluctuations where you can only know that you have never seen what you thought you were looking at because you have never really heard what you were listening to."
Outline
- 0:00:01 — Opening: page 135 and Barry Nevitt’s booklet
- 0:01:19 — Barry Nevitt the eccentric
- 0:05:39 — Consciousness will prove to be an effect
- 0:13:36 — The speed-up and the loss of identity
- 0:18:19 — Take Today serialized in an office magazine
- 0:22:32 — The 1974 Maclean’s soundbite: X-ray, Watergate, manhunting
- 0:33:00 — Detective shows as the art form of manhunting
- 0:42:33 — Centralization will continue
- 0:55:37 — Orwell, and a panel at the New School
- 01:00:52 — Panels as the main form of knowing
- 01:07:14 — Wyndham Lewis and the conceptual trap
- 01:13:14 — The 1977 quote: continuity, forgetting, nostalgia
- 01:17:27 — Surface, discontinuity, and the Anthropomorphic Physical
- 01:27:03 — The Letters: Toye, Corinne, and the three unread volumes
- 01:35:22 — Kroker, Trump, and the culture of quantum fluctuations
- 01:40:33 — Nothing old under the sun
- 01:44:20 — The ground exposed in its plurality
- 01:46:21 — Closing: the boundary stone at Android Meme Phase 2
Mentioned Resources
Works by McLuhan
- Take Today: The Executive as Dropout (1972, with Barrington Nevitt) — serialized in Modern Office Procedures in 1976, and promoted on David Frost in 1972
- From Cliché to Archetype (1970) — the book McLuhan told Bob was “way better than Understanding Media”
- Understanding Media — the book the last fifty years have treated as the main work
- The Interior Landscape (1969) — where the 1943 essay on Poe was reprinted
- “A Media Approach to Inflation” (1974) — the op-ed on tactility as figure, and on everything becoming insurable
- Letters of Marshall McLuhan, ed. William Toye — one volume cut from an original four
Other Works
- Barrington Nevitt, ABC of Prophecy (2nd ed. 1985, p.46) — the proposition on consciousness that opens the session
- Arthur Kroker — the culture of quantum fluctuations, and the valuation of values gone excessive
- Maclean’s, January 1974 and March 1977 — the two buried interviews the session is built on
- Bob Dobbs, Phatic Communion with Bob Dobbs — whose subject, it turns out, is the panel
People
- Marshall McLuhan (the corpus under analysis, read here through his least-read decade)
- Barrington Nevitt (McLuhan’s collaborator and co-author; engineer, and the session’s first quotation)
- Arthur Kroker (the postmodernist whose screenal economy Bob reads as a redoing of McLuhan)
- Edgar Allan Poe (named by McLuhan as a major inventor, and the inventor of the detective story)
- Wyndham Lewis (the precursor Bob says McLuhan completed, and Cameron says McLuhan loosened)
- John Cage (who called McLuhan a detective, shortly before the Sherlock Holmes photograph)
- William Toye (editor of the Letters, and the session’s one real disagreement)
- Corinne McLuhan (source of the annotations Toye could not have written)
- Matie Molinaro (McLuhan’s agent, whose papers at York hold the other three volumes)
- Nelson Thall (present for Nevitt’s unchanged lecture to a grade-8 class)
- Paul Ryan (Carpenter’s assistant at Fordham in 1968, met at the same New School panel)
- Ted Carpenter (the Fordham connection Paul Ryan turns out to carry)
- Harold Innis (the angle Christopher Hitchens planned to write about McLuhan through)
- Friedrich Nietzsche (who, on Cameron’s reading, deposited us in the nothing in the 1880s)
Closing
This is the session that catches McLuhan predicting the thing he was supposed to have ruled out — that the old centralized order would not dissolve under electric conditions but be handed a better instrument — and then finds the archive itself three-quarters unread.
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