A sentence McLuhan published in 1961 turns out to contain a genealogy neither host had read as one. Cameron produces it while they are talking about something else — the art historian Heinrich Wölfflin taught the Hildebrand stress on visual forms as haptic, and Wölfflin’s pupil Giedion embodied it in Space, Time and Architecture — and Bob begins assembling the names aloud until there are seven of them, a chain of transmission for tactility that runs from art criticism of the 1900s to Carpenter’s Eskimo work . The evening had started somewhere else entirely, on whether media theory could be put to working physicists, and it ends somewhere else again, on the super angel and a long passage from Kroker left deliberately unexplained.
Key Topics
- The body percept is tracked through four phases — humors, pumping station, chemistry factory, and then field theory’s medical counterpart in Hans Selye — in a quote Cameron finds in Explorations , and which Bob has already charted as the fads of ailments that succeeded one another from 1979 onward .
- Cameron’s structural principle runs under everything: you can never understand one mode of experience without understanding them all , so thinking only in acoustic space means not understanding acoustic space — which is why he treats stress as simply another word for medium .
- The tactile eye arrives twice. McLuhan tells Sheila Watson in the mid-60s that what Lewis called “eye” he was actually describing as tactile , and then Cameron reads a passage from 1959–60 saying the same thing years earlier , which turns the letter from a discovery into a disclosure .
- Cameron’s argument about McLuhan’s formation is that it was European and privately tutored — a series of intellectuals who taught him individually, which almost never happened to North American intellectuals of the period — with Phelan as the route to Maritain and Gilson .
- Bob’s objection to Eric McLuhan gets its clearest statement: the computer-extension-of-the-brain is too narrow because it misses the live environment , since the machines are now extending the machines rather than us .
- A phrase Bob has credited to McLuhan since 1968 comes apart on air. “Millenary ecstatics” is not in an essay by McLuhan but in Milton Klonsky’s , appears as a parenthesis that may be Klonsky’s own coinage , and Bob concedes he is no longer sure .
- The super angel is finally given a mechanism rather than an image: the angel can be anywhere but only one there at a time , where the human on the Global Membrane is everywhere simultaneously — which Bob illustrates with a radio broadcast to half a million listeners .
Notable Quotes
"The art historian Heinrich Wölfflin taught the Hildebrand stress on visual forms as haptic or tangible tactile. And Wölfflin's pupil, Siegfried Giedion, embodied it in his Space, Time, and Architecture."
"Stress is actually another word for medium."
"Lewis helps McLuhan understand what the problems are. And Giedion helps McLuhan see how there might be a solution there."
Outline
- 0:00:05 — Opening: physics with McLuhan in mind
- 0:06:23 — The body percept and the fads of ailments
- 0:15:10 — Selye, stress, and the symphony
- 0:22:50 — Black holes and the color of tactility
- 0:26:46 — Plural styles and art theory
- 0:28:31 — Wyndham Lewis, tracker of movements
- 0:34:40 — The software war of 1914
- 0:40:25 — Lewis completed: the cool artist and the tactile eye
- 0:52:42 — The chain: Hildebrand to Carpenter
- 0:57:01 — Giedion, Joyce, and the 1939 Channel
- 01:04:49 — McLuhan’s European tutors
- 01:10:40 — Whether there is a “beyond”
- 01:17:24 — Page 143: Eric McLuhan falls short
- 01:21:50 — Kroker, flesh as surplus, and the AI panic
- 01:25:37 — The democratic Finnegans Wake
- 01:34:27 — Whether anyone found the language
- 01:36:52 — Page 144: the live environment
- 01:41:22 — Kroker and the digital membrane
- 01:43:44 — Millenary ecstatics: a fifty-year misattribution
- 01:54:50 — The super angel and Self-Condemned
- 01:58:38 — The Human Age and the invaded angels
- 02:06:01 — Everywhere simultaneously
- 02:11:46 — Body Drift: the long quote
Mentioned Resources
Works by McLuhan
- “Inside the Five Sense Sensorium” (1961) — the essay carrying the Wölfflin–Hildebrand–Giedion sentence that supplies the whole chain
- Explorations 8 — the essay on stress with the four body images, ending on Hans Selye’s worldview
- War and Peace in the Global Village (1968) — “electric information systems are live environments in the full organic sense,” p.36
- The 1969 Playboy interview — computer technology programming entire environments, and the cultural habitat becoming a living organism
- Understanding Media — the extensions premise Bob says now needs restating
- “Joyce and the poetic process” (c.1950) — the essay opening on the Stephen Hero line about being inside each other
Other Works
- Heinrich Wölfflin, Principles of Art History (1915) — the study of dominance between styles that McLuhan said confirmed what he found about media
- Adolf von Hildebrand, The Problem of Form — the turn-of-the-century source of the “stress on visual forms as haptic”
- Sigfried Giedion, Space, Time and Architecture — where the tactile reading of visual form is embodied
- Wyndham Lewis, Tarr — the Paris novel of interacting artists, later read as a metaphor for pre-1914 Europe
- Wyndham Lewis, Self-Condemned (1954) — the novel whose Professor Ian McKenzie is modeled on McLuhan
- Wyndham Lewis, The Human Age — The Childermass (1928), then Monstre Gai and Malign Fiesta (1955)
- Vincent Sherry, Ezra Pound, Wyndham Lewis, and Radical Modernism — Bob’s source on the men of 1914
- Eric McLuhan, Electric Language: Understanding the Message (1998) — “It remains only to extend the mind itself”
- Arthur Kroker, Body Drift: Butler, Hayles, and Haraway (2012) — the long closing quotation, p.3
- Arthur Kroker and Michael Weinstein, Data Trash (1994) — the book Kroker thought had found the language
- McLuhan: Pro and Con, ed. Raymond Rosenthal (1968) — p.137, where “millinery ecstatics” actually appears
People
- Marshall McLuhan (the corpus under analysis, read here for a genealogy he wrote down and nobody followed)
- Heinrich Wölfflin (Swiss art historian, Giedion’s teacher, the hinge of the tactility chain)
- Adolf von Hildebrand (sculptor and theorist, the name the chain begins from)
- Bernard Berenson (connoisseur of “the tactile aspects of retinal impressions”)
- Bernard Muller-Thym (McLuhan’s St. Louis friend of 1939, the Thomistic source of tactility)
- Sigfried Giedion (architectural historian, Wölfflin’s pupil and McLuhan’s central influence)
- Ted Carpenter (the last name in the chain, where tactility leaves art for anthropology)
- Wyndham Lewis (the precursor who described tactility without recognizing it as tactility)
- James Joyce (whose deeper meanings of Finnegans Wake, in Bob’s account, passed to Giedion)
- Sheila Watson (the correspondent to whom McLuhan reported the tactile-eye insight)
- Peter Drucker (who heard McLuhan in 1941 and recognized the thesis only after it was named)
- Étienne Gilson and Jacques Maritain (the Thomists reached through Gerald Phelan)
- Hans Selye (the endocrinologist whose stress model is the body image proper to field theory)
- Arthur Kroker (the one writer Bob credits with tackling the digital membrane)
- Milton Klonsky (whose essay, not McLuhan’s, holds “millinery ecstatics”)
- Jack Sarfatti (the physicist Bob sent an Android-meme formula in 1999)
- J.G. Ballard (the postmodern terminus of the dystopian line Lewis is said to complete)
Closing
This is the session where an influence turns out to have a paper trail: tactility stops being McLuhan’s own word and becomes something he inherited, wrote down once in 1961, and left for two readers to reassemble sixty years later — on the same night one of his phrases turns out never to have been his at all.
← Synchrony and Diachrony: The New Science, the Committee, and Content Consuming Form · Shrinking the Hologram: Holeopathic Cliché Probes and the Tiny Note →