Bob opens at the top of p.139 — part four, Android Meme Phase 2 — and then sets the book down to ask Cameron to restate the difference the two of them named years ago, Cameron synchrony and Bob diachrony . Cameron answers by taking Bob’s own chart away from him, since the Tiny Note Chart applies all the time , and narrows two years of methodological disagreement to a single term, pre-tribal awareness . What is left standing underneath is the question the whole series has been resting on: whether there is any such thing as going beyond McLuhan, or only a different replay of the same possibilities .
Key Topics
- Cameron does not deny chronology so much as demote it, and every novelty Bob offers gets relocated from the sequence to the structure — there is no novelty in history at the fundamental level, only dynamic forms generating new things that can be understood through the prior forms .
- The New Science gets its sharpest statement in the archive: define media the way chemistry learned to define its elements , a new genus rather than a new species , and a science whose arrival would cost McLuhan his own name .
- What blocks it is named as a decision rather than a difficulty — the same problem Plato had 2,500 years ago — since the West has committed collective research everywhere except where it would matter most .
- Bob’s proposal that a committee take over is turned inside out: the committee is what human beings always come from , it cannot have one member , and what it yields is a civil war of media .
- Rage is given a structure rather than a temperature — arguments cannot be won, so outrage becomes the North Pole people orient themselves by , with Take Today supplying the sentence for it .
- The page, when it finally arrives, defines involuntary ESP as the collective effect of radio and TV and the digital world as the wall that lets you step out of it ; Zingrone’s “content consumes form” becomes “the user is the content” , which Cameron traces straight back to Nietzsche .
Notable Quotes
"The historic difference doesn't mean anything to me. Historic difference is always only a different play of possibilities, a different replay in the global theater."
"No scientist will be believed because of his or her name."
"You can hurt a man's feelings, but you can't hurt his rage."
Outline
- 0:00:04 — Opening: synchrony, diachrony, and the grunt people
- 0:07:49 — The structure of chronological time
- 0:12:09 — Why McLuhan never got across
- 0:20:31 — Coining the Android Meme
- 0:30:09 — The AI panic and talking back to the Tech Body
- 0:36:34 — 1940 Toronto and the realm of shadows
- 0:44:33 — Wyndham Lewis’ The Human Age
- 0:50:01 — The industrialization of outrage
- 0:57:53 — The New Science
- 01:03:12 — The committee and the four expressions of evil
- 01:14:18 — Self-generation and the chemical body
- 01:34:49 — Page 139: voluntary and involuntary ESP
- 01:43:14 — Zingrone: content consumes form
- 02:05:51 — Duchamp looking to the sides
- 02:08:14 — Fragmented voluntary ESP and the audience as employer
- 02:16:16 — Securing content
Mentioned Resources
Works by McLuhan
- Understanding Media — the book Zingrone’s students could not be interested in, and whose difficulty Cameron reads as Shakespeare’s rather than a generation’s
- Take Today: The Executive as Dropout (1972) — p.289 on rage, the audience as employer, and human stubbornness
- Culture Is Our Business — source of the line that civil rights would be a red herring
- The Gutenberg Galaxy — where McLuhan quotes Rabelais demanding readers put down their plows
- Through the Vanishing Point — the passage Cameron says every question in the session requires
- “Ancient Quarrel in Modern America” (1946) — the essay that ends on the hasty accusation and the warm rejoinder
- “A Media Approach to Inflation” (1974) — the New York Times op-ed Bob reads as the follow-through
- McLuhan: Hot & Cool, ed. Gerald Stearn — the interview with “give the media the what’s for,” and the line about communicating on levels people do not recognize
- The 1969 Playboy interview — computer technology will program entire environments, but the content of that programming is in our own hands
Other Works
- Wyndham Lewis, The Human Age — the trilogy Bob has just finished; Childermass in 1928, the remaining volumes in the mid-50s
- Wyndham Lewis, Time and Western Man — the book the Lewis Society keeps finding oddly current
- Wyndham Lewis, The Art of Being Ruled (1926) — Bob’s warrant for letting a committee take over
- Frank Zingrone, The Media Simplex: At the Edge of Meaning in the Age of Chaos — the italicized “content consumes form,” and the fusion principle offered as a fifth law
- Arthur Kroker, Panic Encyclopedia — the name for the condition Bob traces from 1946 forward
- Eric McLuhan, Electric Language — computers as extensions of parts of the brain, which Bob thinks stops short
- Erik Davis, TechGnosis — the interview on helplessness, and his mother’s verdict that we had a good run
- John Lindbergh, Foundations of Social Survival — reviewed by McLuhan in Commonweal, March 1954, and behind his four expressions of evil
People
- Marshall McLuhan (the corpus under analysis, read here for the reversal his readers never noticed)
- Frank Zingrone (the York University scholar whose one italicized sentence carries the session’s second half)
- Wyndham Lewis (the precursor whose trilogy Bob has just read through, and whom McLuhan met in 1944)
- Friedrich Nietzsche (who, on Cameron’s reading, had already said everything the flip is supposed to be new)
- Harold Innis (one of the 1940 Toronto figures who could see the realm of shadows)
- Eric Havelock (named in the same breath, at the same university, in the same year)
- Hegel (source of the realm of shadows, the realm of possibilities)
- Plato (whose problem getting people to do collective research is still the problem)
- Aristotle (who said Plato’s readers had missed that the ideas were dynamic)
- Marcel Duchamp (who would not look at Warhol’s camera, and looked to the sides instead)
- Donald Theall (credited with the affect-versus-effect distinction, from the late 80s)
- Barrington Nevitt (recalled on Reagan’s cabinet being all tribal people)
- Buckminster Fuller (the precedent for a committee, defeated by human stubbornness)
- Jordan Peterson (watched, Bob says, for failing to arrive at anything, because he is using words)
Closing
This is the session where the framework gets examined instead of applied — Bob asks what his own method is, and spends ninety minutes watching it get absorbed into a reading in which nothing is ever new, before the page he came to read turns out to say the same thing.
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