Dialogue 5 — Transcript

[00:02] Bob Dobbs: Okay,

[00:02] Bob Dobbs: I'm on the line with,

[00:04] Bob Dobbs: or the resonant interval,

[00:05] Bob Dobbs: the electric resonant interval,

[00:07] Bob Dobbs: with Cameron McEwen once again,

[00:10] Bob Dobbs: and we're continuing to find out what the heck I meant in my recent long essay,

[00:16] Bob Dobbs: or book,

[00:17] Bob Dobbs: in quotes.

[00:19] Bob Dobbs: And we're looking at the preface page,

[00:21] Bob Dobbs: where

[00:23] Bob Dobbs: I say the following,

[00:24] Bob Dobbs: I'm making a Marshall McLuhan kit of quotations nobody knows about.

[00:29] Bob Dobbs: Quotations nobody knows about.

[00:31] Bob Dobbs: to get out of this cul-de-sac of

[00:34] Bob Dobbs: 50 stuff that they repeat ad nauseum.

[00:37] Bob Dobbs: Media McLuhan scholars and McLuhan fans have four examples.

[00:42] Bob Dobbs: The Media Misnamesis,

[00:43] Bob Dobbs: the Global Village,

[00:44] Bob Dobbs: Media Ecology,

[00:45] Bob Dobbs: and the Tetrad.

[00:47] Bob Dobbs: I consider them undergraduate McLuhan,

[00:51] Bob Dobbs: and it's time to get and move into postgraduate school,

[00:54] Bob Dobbs: so to speak.

[00:56] Bob Dobbs: And,

[00:56] Bob Dobbs: of course,

[00:57] Bob Dobbs: Cameron...

[00:59] Bob Dobbs: And has made a lot out of the cul-de-sac phenomenon,

[01:02] Bob Dobbs: he's informed me.

[01:04] Bob Dobbs: So we'll let Cameron say some things about the cul-de-sac that we probably haven't heard of before in relation to McLuhan.

[01:13] Bob Dobbs: Okay,

[01:13] Bob Dobbs: you got something?

[01:15] Cameron McEwen: Yes,

[01:18] Cameron McEwen: I think it's distinctive of how I try to read McLuhan that

[01:26] Cameron McEwen: I don't.

[01:28] Cameron McEwen: avoid very deep questions.

[01:33] Cameron McEwen: What I do is I say it's deep questions that give the introduction to McLuhan.

[01:38] Cameron McEwen: So instead of avoiding something like infinite regress once the topic of media is brought up,

[01:48] Cameron McEwen: right,

[01:51] Cameron McEwen: if everything we say is shaped by media then everything

[01:56] Cameron McEwen: that we say about media is shaped by media and everything we say about media about media is shaped by media so you get an infinite regress and the question is uh

[02:12] Cameron McEwen: how McLuhan either stops the infinite regress or doesn't get involved in it somehow it's a deep

[02:23] Cameron McEwen: question that implicates post-modernism,

[02:27] Cameron McEwen: that implicates a lot of classical philosophy.

[02:31] Cameron McEwen: And so I think questions like this are very important for McLuhan.

[02:36] Cameron McEwen: And strangely enough,

[02:39] Cameron McEwen: or tragically enough,

[02:41] Cameron McEwen: they're nearly always avoided.

[02:43] Cameron McEwen: So that ties in with what you were just saying about undergraduate and graduate approaches to the man.

[02:49] Bob Dobbs: Yes,

[02:50] Bob Dobbs: definitely.

[02:51] Bob Dobbs: I thought

[02:52] Bob Dobbs: The cliches,

[02:53] Bob Dobbs: the mediumism,

[02:54] Bob Dobbs: the mass use,

[02:54] Bob Dobbs: global village,

[02:55] Bob Dobbs: media ecology,

[02:55] Bob Dobbs: and the tetrad were not useful anymore.

[02:59] Bob Dobbs: They didn't attract any,

[03:01] Bob Dobbs: say,

[03:01] Bob Dobbs: a younger mind's attention.

[03:04] Bob Dobbs: It just sounded old.

[03:07] Bob Dobbs: And knowing

[03:10] Bob Dobbs: McLuhan was working deeper,

[03:13] Bob Dobbs: as you were just explaining,

[03:16] Bob Dobbs: it was like I'm saying,

[03:17] Bob Dobbs: we've got to start over again.

[03:20] Bob Dobbs: You could say the McLuhan industry,

[03:21] Bob Dobbs: as usual,

[03:22] Bob Dobbs: causes a huge disservice,

[03:25] Bob Dobbs: and the effort of process pattern recognition McLuhan was into in depth is lost.

[03:34] Cameron McEwen: That's right.

[03:37] Cameron McEwen: When you said that it has to start again,

[03:40] Cameron McEwen: that in itself is a very interesting problem.

[03:43] Bob Dobbs: Yes.

[03:43] Cameron McEwen: Because starting again...

[03:48] Cameron McEwen: is a very difficult concept because we've always already started.

[03:53] Cameron McEwen: So in our having already started,

[03:57] Cameron McEwen: how do we start again?

[03:59] Cameron McEwen: And so that comes to implicate tactility,

[04:04] Cameron McEwen: the gap,

[04:05] Cameron McEwen: right?

[04:05] Cameron McEwen: There has to be a kind of backward somersault out of one type of thinking into another,

[04:14] Cameron McEwen: and that's closely related to the cul-de-sac.

[04:17] Bob Dobbs: Yes.

[04:18] Bob Dobbs: Okay,

[04:19] Bob Dobbs: so what do you think the backflip entails?

[04:28] Bob Dobbs: Is there somebody or something you discovered in your studies at McLuhan that provided the backflip for you?

[04:36] Bob Dobbs: Backflip,

[04:37] Bob Dobbs: backflip.

[04:39] Cameron McEwen: How does that work?

[04:40] Cameron McEwen: Well,

[04:40] Cameron McEwen: I think once you begin to think in terms of all-at-onceness,

[04:48] Cameron McEwen: or synchronicity,

[04:51] Cameron McEwen: then the idea of a back flip becomes at once difficult and

[05:02] Cameron McEwen: enlightening because something like a backflip must always already be taking place,

[05:11] Cameron McEwen: right?

[05:11] Cameron McEwen: So when

[05:13] Cameron McEwen: McLuhan loves words like retrieval,

[05:16] Cameron McEwen: recognition,

[05:20] Cameron McEwen: replay,

[05:20] Cameron McEwen: he loves all of these re-words because there's a kind of clutch in experience that is always there.

[05:31] Cameron McEwen: and can't be avoided.

[05:33] Cameron McEwen: So the thing that people are trying to find is already there.

[05:39] Cameron McEwen: And

[05:41] Cameron McEwen: I have a quotation in one of my essays from Al Ghazali,

[05:44] Cameron McEwen: the

[05:45] Cameron McEwen: Arab philosopher,

[05:47] Cameron McEwen: and what he says is,

[05:52] Cameron McEwen: if you are looking for something that's already there,

[05:55] Cameron McEwen: then it becomes lost and can never be found.

[06:00] Bob Dobbs: Wow.

[06:01] Cameron McEwen: That's the situation with McLuhan.

[06:03] Bob Dobbs: Right.

[06:03] Bob Dobbs: Now,

[06:04] Bob Dobbs: you may not know this,

[06:05] Bob Dobbs: but we put re in the beginning of all our products names.

[06:11] Bob Dobbs: Realign,

[06:13] Bob Dobbs: restructure,

[06:14] Bob Dobbs: remite,

[06:15] Bob Dobbs: remake.

[06:17] Cameron McEwen: Yeah,

[06:17] Cameron McEwen: yeah.

[06:19] Bob Dobbs: So you've just given,

[06:20] Bob Dobbs: Carolyn's going to find that fun to hear,

[06:24] Bob Dobbs: that we're in the McLuhan.

[06:27] Bob Dobbs: And I say that Carolyn was one of Marshall's most popular female media colleges.

[06:34] Bob Dobbs: So she's carrying in his tradition with this read.

[06:39] Bob Dobbs: Okay,

[06:39] Bob Dobbs: so we're in this cul-de-sac,

[06:43] Bob Dobbs: and we already are.

[06:45] Bob Dobbs: So that partly means that there is no cul-de-sac.

[06:51] Bob Dobbs: If we're always already in there,

[06:54] Bob Dobbs: then we get out of it somehow or we don't need to get out of it so that cancels the cul-de-sac well I would

[07:03] Cameron McEwen: I would rather say that we're both in it and out of it okay as soon as you get into we're in it and then we're not in it then you're in the linearity and there's a whole bunch of problems that get associated with linearity so

[07:21] Cameron McEwen: they they big

[07:24] Cameron McEwen: Backwards flip,

[07:26] Cameron McEwen: you could say,

[07:26] Cameron McEwen: with McLuhan,

[07:28] Cameron McEwen: has to do with time.

[07:32] Cameron McEwen: If we're involved in a linear sequence,

[07:35] Cameron McEwen: then we can never ever get out of the cul-de-sac.

[07:39] Cameron McEwen: But if time is plural,

[07:41] Cameron McEwen: if there is an all-at-once dimension to time,

[07:47] Cameron McEwen: but also a linear one,

[07:50] Cameron McEwen: then within time itself there's a kind of gap.

[07:54] Cameron McEwen: within time itself to which we are submitted um there is this um recurrence right and it is that um uh this is another tie of McLuhan to

[08:10] Cameron McEwen: um very deep thoughts about things this this gets into Being and Time uh which was heidegger's great book in 1927 and um the idea in

[08:24] Cameron McEwen: being in time is that the coming to terms with the plurality of time is the sort of the essential clue to figuring out what's going on going on with being for

[08:42] Cameron McEwen: the big B.

[08:43] Bob Dobbs: Right do you like the phrase the idea that there's always two conversations going on that's the parallel?

[08:49] Cameron McEwen: Very much yeah but not two.

[08:53] Cameron McEwen: Many,

[08:53] Cameron McEwen: many,

[08:53] Cameron McEwen: many.

[08:54] Cameron McEwen: McLuhan often talks about that in terms of the unconscious and how there's this great background murmur or mumble of all of these voices and what human beings are,

[09:11] Cameron McEwen: both individually and socially,

[09:15] Cameron McEwen: is some selection or some combination of these incoming voices.

[09:23] Bob Dobbs: That's the big shock of the anti-environment.

[09:26] Bob Dobbs: It unleashes that definition of the unconscious.

[09:28] Bob Dobbs: Absolutely.

[09:30] Cameron McEwen: Correct.

[09:32] Bob Dobbs: Which makes Joyce's fitting-its-way,

[09:34] Bob Dobbs: even Ulysses',

[09:35] Bob Dobbs: so appropriate,

[09:36] Bob Dobbs: so accurate mirror of the situation.

[09:40] Bob Dobbs: It's pretty incredible,

[09:42] Bob Dobbs: his genius in showing multiple voices.

[09:45] Bob Dobbs: But then Elliot was in on it too,

[09:47] Bob Dobbs: right?

[09:47] Bob Dobbs: He says somebody does the police in many voices.

[09:51] Cameron McEwen: That's right.

[09:52] Cameron McEwen: That was the original title of the wasteland.

[09:55] Bob Dobbs: Right.

[09:55] Bob Dobbs: Okay.

[09:56] Bob Dobbs: Since we're talking about my essay here,

[09:59] Bob Dobbs: do I get us out of the cul-de-sac or do what's demanded?

[10:05] Bob Dobbs: I do bring in,

[10:06] Bob Dobbs: as you say,

[10:07] Bob Dobbs: many voices.

[10:10] Bob Dobbs: I'm assuming we've got to get out of the cul-de-sac a little bit,

[10:13] Bob Dobbs: or half the story is getting out of it.

[10:16] Bob Dobbs: Do I do it with my paper?

[10:18] Bob Dobbs: What do you think?

[10:19] Cameron McEwen: Well,

[10:20] Cameron McEwen: I would say yes and no.

[10:21] Bob Dobbs: Okay.

[10:23] Cameron McEwen: As you know,

[10:24] Cameron McEwen: the one part of the book that

[10:29] Cameron McEwen: I would argue against is its recourse to linearity a lot.

[10:34] Cameron McEwen: Yeah.

[10:35] Cameron McEwen: then what you say to that is,

[10:37] Cameron McEwen: well,

[10:38] Cameron McEwen: you know,

[10:38] Cameron McEwen: I've got to use words when I'm speaking to people.

[10:42] Bob Dobbs: I've got to use linearity when you're reading me.

[10:46] Cameron McEwen: That's right.

[10:47] Cameron McEwen: Well,

[10:49] Cameron McEwen: a book is linear,

[10:50] Cameron McEwen: right?

[10:50] Cameron McEwen: Yeah.

[10:51] Cameron McEwen: The lines on a page are linear.

[10:53] Cameron McEwen: The letters in a word are linear.

[10:56] Bob Dobbs: Yeah,

[10:56] Bob Dobbs: I was very relaxed about going linear.

[11:00] Cameron McEwen: That's right.

[11:00] Cameron McEwen: Oh,

[11:01] Bob Dobbs: you love linearity.

[11:04] Bob Dobbs: Yes,

[11:05] Bob Dobbs: I have an old

[11:06] Bob Dobbs: P.O.B., I guess,

[11:07] Bob Dobbs: in some way.

[11:09] Bob Dobbs: When I'm not on the radio,

[11:10] Bob Dobbs: I'm an old P.O.B.

[11:13] Bob Dobbs: Well,

[11:13] Cameron McEwen: we have to be.

[11:15] Bob Dobbs: Yeah.

[11:16] Cameron McEwen: That's one of the great failings of McLuhan scholarship,

[11:20] Cameron McEwen: is that it gets itself involved in what he called values.

[11:26] Bob Dobbs: Yes.

[11:26] Cameron McEwen: Right?

[11:27] Cameron McEwen: For McLuhan,

[11:27] Cameron McEwen: it's essential that every possible variant of human experience

[11:35] Cameron McEwen: should be subject to positive evaluation,

[11:41] Cameron McEwen: you could say,

[11:42] Cameron McEwen: or positive signification.

[11:47] Cameron McEwen: There is nothing that human beings experience that is somehow outside the pale.

[11:55] Cameron McEwen: And

[11:56] Cameron McEwen: Joyce, you have that for sure,

[11:58] Cameron McEwen: right?

[11:58] Cameron McEwen: I mean,

[11:58] Cameron McEwen: that's a central principle of what he was doing.

[12:03] Bob Dobbs: Right,

[12:03] Bob Dobbs: you're saying outside valuation?

[12:05] Bob Dobbs: Nothing's outside valuation?

[12:08] Cameron McEwen: Yeah,

[12:08] Cameron McEwen: but I'm using valuation there in a crazy way because I just,

[12:13] Cameron McEwen: on the one hand,

[12:13] Cameron McEwen: I was saying that McLuhan doesn't want to value things above other things.

[12:18] Cameron McEwen: And then I used valuation simply to mean taking everything in and discarding nothing as valueless.

[12:28] Cameron McEwen: But I shouldn't have used...

[12:31] Cameron McEwen: value in two different ways like that.

[12:34] Cameron McEwen: I just meant that for

[12:37] Cameron McEwen: McLuhan you cannot take any experience,

[12:41] Cameron McEwen: be it electronic,

[12:42] Cameron McEwen: be it print,

[12:44] Cameron McEwen: be it primitive,

[12:46] Cameron McEwen: and place it in some kind of linear sequence where one is better than the other.

[12:52] Bob Dobbs: Right.

[12:53] Cameron McEwen: That's why the electronic is a replay or retrieval or a recognition of the primitives.

[12:59] Bob Dobbs: Yes.

[13:00] Bob Dobbs: Okay,

[13:01] Bob Dobbs: so in conversation,

[13:07] Bob Dobbs: I'm sitting with you at a restaurant reading,

[13:10] Bob Dobbs: and I ask you to pass the butter.

[13:13] Bob Dobbs: You could make that into a philosophical question.

[13:18] Bob Dobbs: It's eruption,

[13:21] Bob Dobbs: what philosophers do,

[13:22] Bob Dobbs: or maybe that's a replay,

[13:25] Bob Dobbs: but maybe anybody.

[13:27] Bob Dobbs: To interrupt people in what they're doing is irritating.

[13:33] Bob Dobbs: And to bring up the medium as the message,

[13:36] Bob Dobbs: that's another interruptory proposal.

[13:41] Bob Dobbs: But all philosophers or all thinkers or anti-environment maybe are interrupting.

[13:47] Bob Dobbs: And so in that sense,

[13:48] Bob Dobbs: McLuhan continues the interrupting process,

[13:51] Bob Dobbs: maybe deeper than anybody else of his time.

[13:55] Bob Dobbs: He interrupts more.

[13:57] Bob Dobbs: of what people think they're doing.

[13:59] Cameron McEwen: I agree.

[13:59] Cameron McEwen: That's very important to the cul-de-sac.

[14:02] Cameron McEwen: Yes.

[14:03] Cameron McEwen: Right?

[14:03] Cameron McEwen: If the cul-de-sac is a sort of a fate of modern thought,

[14:11] Cameron McEwen: but not just a modern thought,

[14:13] Cameron McEwen: of modern politics,

[14:15] Cameron McEwen: of modern ecology,

[14:18] Cameron McEwen: if that fate...

[14:22] Cameron McEwen: is one that

[14:24] Cameron McEwen: Nietzsche saw and already in the

[14:26] Cameron McEwen: 1880s Nietzsche saw that we were rushing into a fate that would have a catastrophic end and no one knew a way out that it was

[14:42] Cameron McEwen: like a runaway train that all of Europe and all of the world was on

[14:50] Cameron McEwen: If that's the case,

[14:51] Cameron McEwen: and I think it is the case,

[14:53] Cameron McEwen: then nothing is more necessary than to interrupt the cul-de-sac.

[14:57] Bob Dobbs: Yeah,

[14:58] Bob Dobbs: yeah.

[14:59] Bob Dobbs: What kind of disaster did

[15:02] Bob Dobbs: Nietzsche image?

[15:04] Bob Dobbs: Would World War I be something he was thinking of,

[15:06] Bob Dobbs: or was it more

[15:08] Bob Dobbs: Armageddon or more disease?

[15:10] Bob Dobbs: Well,

[15:11] Cameron McEwen: I don't know that

[15:12] Cameron McEwen: Nietzsche, of course,

[15:14] Cameron McEwen: was in some ways an anti-Christian philosopher.

[15:22] Cameron McEwen: One of his last books was called The Antichrist.

[15:26] Cameron McEwen: So

[15:27] Cameron McEwen: I don't know that he would like to use Christian imagery.

[15:31] Cameron McEwen: But he definitely foresaw world wars and the sort of catastrophic struggles that would be unleashed by what McLuhan might call the end of the book culture and

[15:48] Cameron McEwen: an inability to interrupt that end into something else.

[15:55] Bob Dobbs: Yeah.

[15:57] Bob Dobbs: OK,

[15:58] Bob Dobbs: so.

[16:02] Bob Dobbs: Media ecology is definitely the way McLuhan applied it.

[16:06] Bob Dobbs: By the time of his

[16:07] Bob Dobbs: Playboy interview,

[16:08] Bob Dobbs: he was saying,

[16:09] Bob Dobbs: we need to turn off the Anti-environment for a few weeks.

[16:14] Bob Dobbs: Now,

[16:15] Bob Dobbs: I have a quote in my book,

[16:16] Bob Dobbs: Fatty Communion.

[16:17] Bob Dobbs: He says that in about 1949,

[16:20] Bob Dobbs: that quote in an article.

[16:23] Bob Dobbs: Maybe it's time and life and the psychopathology of time and life.

[16:30] Bob Dobbs: He says,

[16:30] Bob Dobbs: we must stop.

[16:32] Bob Dobbs: turn off this,

[16:32] Bob Dobbs: turn off radio,

[16:34] Bob Dobbs: turn on...

[16:34] Cameron McEwen: Do you know that quote?

[16:36] Cameron McEwen: Yeah,

[16:36] Cameron McEwen: I do.

[16:36] Cameron McEwen: And I know that there's actually quite a few quotes that are like that.

[16:43] Cameron McEwen: We discussed this in a prior conversation a little bit.

[16:47] Cameron McEwen: And my view is that

[16:50] Cameron McEwen: McLuhan is talking there not in very precise,

[16:56] Cameron McEwen: not in very technical terms.

[16:59] Cameron McEwen: He's trying to get

[17:00] Cameron McEwen: people to understand sort of what the new world possibilities are.

[17:07] Cameron McEwen: But these ideas that,

[17:10] Cameron McEwen: you know,

[17:11] Cameron McEwen: we all know what television is,

[17:12] Cameron McEwen: and we all know what a country is,

[17:14] Cameron McEwen: so we'll just turn off the TV in that country.

[17:17] Cameron McEwen: All of these terms are actually useless in electronic environment.

[17:23] Cameron McEwen: And so he's not saying something straightforward there.

[17:26] Cameron McEwen: He's saying something that takes some

[17:30] Cameron McEwen: sophistication to understand what he's up to.

[17:35] Bob Dobbs: Right.

[17:35] Bob Dobbs: So let me see if I can find it.

[17:41] Bob Dobbs: Maybe just turn off.

[17:43] Bob Dobbs: That'll bring it up.

[17:45] Bob Dobbs: I've got all my content here.

[17:51] Bob Dobbs: So I'm trying to find that quote.

[18:00] Cameron McEwen: Should I be talking while you look,

[18:02] Cameron McEwen: or should I let you concentrate?

[18:03] Cameron McEwen: No,

[18:04] Cameron McEwen: it's all right.

[18:04] Bob Dobbs: It would be agonizing,

[18:07] Bob Dobbs: I think he said.

[18:08] Bob Dobbs: So I'm putting that word in to see if that brings it up.

[18:12] Bob Dobbs: No,

[18:12] Bob Dobbs: I didn't do it.

[18:14] Bob Dobbs: I'll just have to scan down here,

[18:17] Bob Dobbs: because it is an interesting statement he makes.

[18:24] Cameron McEwen: That's right.

[18:25] Cameron McEwen: But

[18:25] Cameron McEwen: I would say the important thing to understand there is what he's talking about is

[18:31] Cameron McEwen: How do we situate ourselves in anti-environment?

[18:37] Cameron McEwen: And so then,

[18:39] Cameron McEwen: within anti-environment,

[18:43] Cameron McEwen: what does it mean to begin to have new ways of understanding how human beings act both individually and socially?

[18:59] Cameron McEwen: and what sort of tools will be available to us through this new kind of research,

[19:08] Cameron McEwen: a new kind of understanding in the anti-environment.

[19:13] Cameron McEwen: It would be wrong to think that he thinks that these words like country,

[19:20] Cameron McEwen: thermostat,

[19:21] Cameron McEwen: turning on,

[19:22] Cameron McEwen: turning off,

[19:24] Cameron McEwen: are to be understood literally.

[19:29] Bob Dobbs: You don't think that he meant to do an actual fast,

[19:34] Bob Dobbs: turn something off?

[19:39] Cameron McEwen: The problem is that to turn off has a completely different meaning for book culture and electronic culture.

[19:50] Bob Dobbs: Okay.

[19:51] Cameron McEwen: In electronic culture,

[19:53] Cameron McEwen: to turn something off doesn't mean to...

[20:00] Cameron McEwen: sort of forget about something.

[20:02] Cameron McEwen: In chemistry,

[20:03] Cameron McEwen: for example,

[20:05] Cameron McEwen: if you stop...

[20:08] Cameron McEwen: If you stop an analysis of one material and start a different analysis of another material,

[20:18] Cameron McEwen: you're taking a step within chemistry,

[20:22] Cameron McEwen: right?

[20:23] Cameron McEwen: So you're not turning chemistry off,

[20:25] Cameron McEwen: you're turning off a kind of focus.

[20:28] Cameron McEwen: And it's something like changing your focus within...

[20:35] Cameron McEwen: the same dimension that I believe

[20:38] Cameron McEwen: McLuhan is talking about when he talks about thermostats and turning on and off and stuff.

[20:44] Bob Dobbs: So when he talks about turning off radio for a few weeks in Venezuela because you're getting too heated,

[20:55] Bob Dobbs: I think he means that technically,

[20:57] Bob Dobbs: but what would be the metaphor there?

[21:01] Bob Dobbs: Just saying it.

[21:02] Cameron McEwen: Well,

[21:03] Cameron McEwen: notice that

[21:05] Cameron McEwen: very linear,

[21:06] Cameron McEwen: right?

[21:07] Cameron McEwen: At one moment,

[21:08] Cameron McEwen: you have the radio on and it's causing problems.

[21:12] Cameron McEwen: So then somebody comes along and turns the radio off and then you have it off for a certain length of time and then you turn it on.

[21:20] Cameron McEwen: All of that is structurally print.

[21:25] Cameron McEwen: And that's certainly not what

[21:29] Cameron McEwen: McLuhan had in mind.

[21:32] Cameron McEwen: What he's trying to do there is it's

[21:34] Cameron McEwen: kind of a thought exercise.

[21:36] Cameron McEwen: He wants students and anybody who's listening to him to begin to think about existing in an entirely new understanding.

[21:53] Bob Dobbs: Yes.

[21:54] Bob Dobbs: So he just needs to say it.

[21:57] Bob Dobbs: He just needs to have it applied.

[21:59] Cameron McEwen: Well,

[21:59] Cameron McEwen: it's like you say lots of things.

[22:01] Cameron McEwen: in your book that you say,

[22:03] Cameron McEwen: well,

[22:03] Cameron McEwen: you know,

[22:03] Cameron McEwen: I have to use words.

[22:05] Cameron McEwen: And McLuhan is the same.

[22:08] Cameron McEwen: McLuhan,

[22:09] Cameron McEwen: in many ways,

[22:10] Cameron McEwen: when he talks like that,

[22:11] Cameron McEwen: is talking to himself,

[22:14] Cameron McEwen: because

[22:15] Cameron McEwen: McLuhan often was kind of staggered,

[22:20] Cameron McEwen: is a word he often uses,

[22:22] Cameron McEwen: at the implications of what he can see,

[22:27] Cameron McEwen: right?

[22:27] Cameron McEwen: The implications that are involved in cybernetics.

[22:31] Cameron McEwen: What happens when human beings at a much deeper level than ever happened before begin to assume responsibility for their fate,

[22:43] Cameron McEwen: right?

[22:43] Cameron McEwen: And when he talks about,

[22:45] Cameron McEwen: you know,

[22:45] Cameron McEwen: the world thermostat and all that kind of stuff,

[22:48] Cameron McEwen: that's what he's talking about.

[22:51] Cameron McEwen: It's just sort of the usual lazy...

[22:59] Cameron McEwen: McLuhan industry thinking to assume that,

[23:03] Cameron McEwen: well,

[23:03] Cameron McEwen: we know what Venezuela is,

[23:05] Cameron McEwen: we know what a radio is,

[23:06] Cameron McEwen: we know what turning on and turning off is,

[23:09] Cameron McEwen: we know what two weeks is.

[23:11] Cameron McEwen: And so that's what he was talking about.

[23:15] Cameron McEwen: That just trivializes

[23:17] Cameron McEwen: McLuhan.

[23:18] Bob Dobbs: Okay, interesting.

[23:21] Bob Dobbs: I have it listed in my index of books,

[23:24] Bob Dobbs: but I can't find the quote.

[23:26] Bob Dobbs: So...

[23:28] Bob Dobbs: Maybe I will...

[23:31] Bob Dobbs: Oh,

[23:31] Bob Dobbs: wait,

[23:32] Bob Dobbs: let me do it this way.

[23:34] Bob Dobbs: Your thoughts are very interesting while waiting for me to find this.

[23:39] Bob Dobbs: This is good.

[23:51] Cameron McEwen: So are you looking for something with thermostat?

[23:56] Bob Dobbs: No,

[23:56] Bob Dobbs: I don't think he used that word that early.

[23:59] Bob Dobbs: Oh,

[23:59] Cameron McEwen: you're looking specifically in the late 1940s stuff.

[24:04] Bob Dobbs: Well,

[24:05] Bob Dobbs: I'm using the quotes I have in my own book,

[24:08] Bob Dobbs: Fatty Communion.

[24:10] Bob Dobbs: And

[24:13] Bob Dobbs: I have at the end of the book,

[24:17] Bob Dobbs: and this is a digital presentation of it,

[24:19] Bob Dobbs: I have the articles I quote.

[24:21] Bob Dobbs: So

[24:23] Bob Dobbs: I'm...

[24:24] Bob Dobbs: trying to find where my quote is.

[24:27] Bob Dobbs: Right,

[24:27] Cameron McEwen: right,

[24:27] Cameron McEwen: right.

[24:28] Cameron McEwen: But look at how germane the concept of the phatic is to what I was just saying,

[24:35] Cameron McEwen: right?

[24:37] Cameron McEwen: What I was saying is that if McLuhan says,

[24:41] Cameron McEwen: in Venezuela,

[24:42] Cameron McEwen: we're going to stop the radio for two weeks,

[24:44] Cameron McEwen: now we're going to turn it on and all that stuff,

[24:47] Cameron McEwen: the usual reading just goes from one island...

[24:52] Cameron McEwen: in the archipelago to the next,

[24:55] Cameron McEwen: right?

[24:55] Cameron McEwen: One word that we know very well to the next word we know very well and all that sort of stuff.

[25:00] Cameron McEwen: But it doesn't get to the phatic.

[25:03] Cameron McEwen: And with McLuhan,

[25:05] Cameron McEwen: the whole question is,

[25:08] Cameron McEwen: what's in between?

[25:10] Cameron McEwen: What's in the gap?

[25:13] Cameron McEwen: What is the sense that's at stake here?

[25:18] Bob Dobbs: Yes,

[25:19] Bob Dobbs: I was quite proud of my title,

[25:21] Bob Dobbs: Phatic Communion with Bob Dobbs.

[25:25] Bob Dobbs: It's just like McLuhan drew attention to a word that nobody knew,

[25:29] Bob Dobbs: media.

[25:30] Bob Dobbs: I came up with Phatic.

[25:32] Bob Dobbs: And I organized it and published the book myself in 92.

[25:36] Bob Dobbs: And then I moved to New York City.

[25:38] Bob Dobbs: And one day on the subway,

[25:41] Bob Dobbs: I saw somebody,

[25:42] Bob Dobbs: some kid with a T-shirt that said Phatic something.

[25:48] Bob Dobbs: Phatic Farm,

[25:50] Bob Dobbs: something like that.

[25:51] Bob Dobbs: So it took a while,

[25:52] Bob Dobbs: and I found out that that was an early rap entrepreneur,

[25:58] Bob Dobbs: hip-hop entrepreneur,

[25:59] Bob Dobbs: had started a...

[26:01] Bob Dobbs: store using the word phatic or fat p-h-a-t and then yeah fat yeah yeah and i found out that was the that generation's term for groovy or something fat so i said well look at that i come out of quote high culture and

[26:16] Bob Dobbs: i'm i'm echoing something already in the zeitgeist in low culture you know but um but much more than that bob uh the the whole idea of phatic communication Thank you.

[26:30] Cameron McEwen: the phatic communion,

[26:32] Cameron McEwen: comes from Malinowski.

[26:34] Bob Dobbs: Yes.

[26:35] Cameron McEwen: And so here's Malinowski saying that if you don't understand the phatic in a primitive society,

[26:45] Cameron McEwen: you just can't understand that society.

[26:48] Cameron McEwen: Right.

[26:49] Cameron McEwen: And he was saying this.

[26:50] Bob Dobbs: And that book has a big influence on

[26:53] Bob Dobbs: Joyce, Duchamp,

[26:54] Bob Dobbs: and maybe some others,

[26:56] Bob Dobbs: but,

[26:56] Bob Dobbs: you know,

[26:56] Bob Dobbs: and Macaulay.

[26:56] Cameron McEwen: Absolutely,

[26:57] Cameron McEwen: on Richards.

[26:59] Cameron McEwen: So the Meaning of Meaning by Richards has an essay by Malinowski as one of its appendices.

[27:05] Bob Dobbs: Which they had just met him in 1922.

[27:08] Bob Dobbs: He'd just come back from the Pacific

[27:10] Bob Dobbs: Islands or something.

[27:12] Bob Dobbs: And they were so impressed,

[27:14] Bob Dobbs: they held up the press probably to stick it in there at the end of the book.

[27:18] Bob Dobbs: That's right.

[27:19] Bob Dobbs: And you'll see McLuhan uses

[27:21] Bob Dobbs: phatic communion sparingly,

[27:23] Bob Dobbs: but it's there in early essays.

[27:25] Bob Dobbs: He'll refer to it.

[27:27] Bob Dobbs: Doesn't seem to talk about it,

[27:29] Bob Dobbs: but he'll highlight the importance of the phrase,

[27:32] Bob Dobbs: phatic communication,

[27:33] Bob Dobbs: or phatic communion.

[27:34] Cameron McEwen: I didn't know he ever used the word,

[27:36] Cameron McEwen: so that's interesting.

[27:37] Bob Dobbs: Oh,

[27:37] Bob Dobbs: yeah,

[27:38] Bob Dobbs: interior landscape.

[27:39] Bob Dobbs: Have you got interior landscape there,

[27:42] Cameron McEwen: right handy?

[27:44] Cameron McEwen: No.

[27:45] Bob Dobbs: Okay.

[27:45] Bob Dobbs: It's in,

[27:46] Bob Dobbs: maybe I'll get a chance and get it,

[27:48] Bob Dobbs: but it's in the first couple of pages,

[27:51] Bob Dobbs: I think,

[27:52] Bob Dobbs: in one of the Joyce essays in interior landscape.

[27:57] Bob Dobbs: No,

[27:57] Bob Dobbs: anyways,

[27:58] Bob Dobbs: yeah.

[27:58] Bob Dobbs: No,

[27:59] Bob Dobbs: that's amazing.

[28:01] Bob Dobbs: You know the importance of it,

[28:02] Bob Dobbs: but you didn't know Marshall said it.

[28:03] Bob Dobbs: He also says it in cliché to archetype.

[28:10] Cameron McEwen: No,

[28:12] Cameron McEwen: I knew that

[28:14] Cameron McEwen: McLuhan was acquainted with it.

[28:19] Cameron McEwen: And,

[28:22] Cameron McEwen: yeah,

[28:24] Cameron McEwen: I can see by...

[28:26] Cameron McEwen: Doing a little searching around here,

[28:28] Cameron McEwen: I can see that

[28:30] Cameron McEwen: McLuhan used it already in his

[28:33] Cameron McEwen: Richards and Levis essay in 1944.

[28:38] Bob Dobbs: Yes.

[28:40] Bob Dobbs: What have you got there?

[28:41] Bob Dobbs: You got all of McLuhan works in one little place?

[28:45] Cameron McEwen: Well,

[28:46] Cameron McEwen: I wouldn't say all,

[28:47] Cameron McEwen: but I've got enough that I can do some fairly deep searching.

[28:52] Cameron McEwen: He uses again in

[28:54] Cameron McEwen: Joyce, Miller,

[28:54] Cameron McEwen: May,

[28:54] Cameron McEwen: and the Press.

[28:55] Bob Dobbs: Right there.

[29:01] Cameron McEwen: Now look at that sentence.

[29:02] Bob Dobbs: That's important.

[29:03] Cameron McEwen: The one in that essay?

[29:04] Cameron McEwen: Yeah.

[29:04] Cameron McEwen: Lead into it.

[29:04] Cameron McEwen: All right.

[29:06] Cameron McEwen: I'll have it for you in just a second here.

[29:12] Cameron McEwen: This essay,

[29:14] Cameron McEwen: by the way,

[29:15] Cameron McEwen: was submitted,

[29:17] Cameron McEwen: I believe,

[29:18] Cameron McEwen: already in 1951.

[29:21] Cameron McEwen: And then the

[29:22] Cameron McEwen: Swanee Review took...

[29:24] Bob Dobbs: Two years.

[29:25] Cameron McEwen: Three or four years to get around to publishing it.

[29:27] Bob Dobbs: Yeah,

[29:28] Bob Dobbs: they published it in 53,

[29:29] Bob Dobbs: I'm pretty sure.

[29:29] Bob Dobbs: So two years.

[29:32] Cameron McEwen: Yeah.

[29:33] Cameron McEwen: So he says here the pictographic Chinese culture,

[29:39] Cameron McEwen: for example,

[29:40] Cameron McEwen: would seem to stand midway between the extremes of our abstract written tradition and the plenary oral tradition with its stress on speech as gesture and gesture as static communication.

[29:53] Bob Dobbs: Wow.

[29:54] Cameron McEwen: And it is perhaps this medial position between the non-communicating extremes of print and pictorial technology which attracts us today to the Chinese ideogram.

[30:08] Cameron McEwen: So that's a tip of the hat to pound amongst other things.

[30:12] Bob Dobbs: Yeah,

[30:12] Bob Dobbs: so he doesn't have fatty communion as an interval.

[30:15] Bob Dobbs: It's at the other end,

[30:17] Bob Dobbs: gestural communication.

[30:19] Cameron McEwen: No,

[30:21] Cameron McEwen: He says that it's the interval.

[30:23] Cameron McEwen: He says that it's between the two extremes.

[30:25] Cameron McEwen: It's the medial position,

[30:27] Cameron McEwen: he says.

[30:28] Bob Dobbs: Oh,

[30:28] Bob Dobbs: he says fatty.

[30:30] Bob Dobbs: Doesn't he say?

[30:31] Bob Dobbs: Yeah,

[30:31] Bob Dobbs: just read that carefully.

[30:33] Bob Dobbs: He's saying between.

[30:34] Bob Dobbs: No,

[30:34] Bob Dobbs: no,

[30:34] Cameron McEwen: you're right.

[30:35] Cameron McEwen: You're right.

[30:35] Cameron McEwen: You're absolutely right.

[30:36] Bob Dobbs: Yeah,

[30:37] Bob Dobbs: the abstract and the phatic.

[30:42] Bob Dobbs: Yeah,

[30:42] Bob Dobbs: But gestural includes its definition of ESP,

[30:47] Bob Dobbs: nonverbal mental dance.

[30:49] Cameron McEwen: In this sense,

[30:50] Cameron McEwen: it might,

[30:50] Cameron McEwen: yes.

[30:51] Cameron McEwen: Yeah.

[30:52] Cameron McEwen: And in fact,

[30:53] Cameron McEwen: this highlights what I was,

[30:57] Cameron McEwen: one of the things I learned from our previous conversations is that I had to think more about.

[31:06] Cameron McEwen: the primitive and the replay of the primitive and electronic culture as the incoming of all voices.

[31:14] Bob Dobbs: Yes,

[31:15] Cameron McEwen: which is what you evoked in me

[31:18] Bob Dobbs: 15 minutes ago.

[31:20] Bob Dobbs: The unconscious,

[31:21] Bob Dobbs: the extension of the unconscious is the electric age of multiple voices.

[31:26] Bob Dobbs: And,

[31:26] Cameron McEwen: you know,

[31:27] Bob Dobbs: print made equitone,

[31:30] Bob Dobbs: one voice,

[31:31] Bob Dobbs: univocal.

[31:32] Cameron McEwen: Correct,

[31:33] Cameron McEwen: correct.

[31:34] Cameron McEwen: But I...

[31:36] Cameron McEwen: What we need to avoid and what's very,

[31:39] Cameron McEwen: very hard to do,

[31:41] Cameron McEwen: something that McLuhan racked his brain about for about 40 years,

[31:46] Cameron McEwen: is how to insist on both of those.

[31:51] Cameron McEwen: In order to have the primitive awake,

[31:57] Cameron McEwen: as in

[31:58] Cameron McEwen: Finnegans Wake,

[32:00] Cameron McEwen: then you need to have something like...

[32:04] Cameron McEwen: a unitary consciousness of the plurality.

[32:07] Bob Dobbs: Yeah.

[32:08] Cameron McEwen: Right?

[32:09] Cameron McEwen: And so trying to figure out how to have both together without distorting either side is the trick.

[32:18] Bob Dobbs: Yes.

[32:19] Bob Dobbs: Okay,

[32:19] Bob Dobbs: so I found the quote.

[32:22] Bob Dobbs: Oh,

[32:22] Cameron McEwen: good.

[32:24] Bob Dobbs: So he says,

[32:24] Bob Dobbs: so the process of renewal can't come from above.

[32:27] Bob Dobbs: This is 1949,

[32:29] Bob Dobbs: approximately.

[32:31] Bob Dobbs: So the process of renewal can't come from above.

[32:33] Bob Dobbs: So that's the end of print hierarchical,

[32:37] Bob Dobbs: the cathartic view of art,

[32:41] Bob Dobbs: ethical moral art.

[32:43] Bob Dobbs: The cognitive view is the horizontal symbolism in a wilderness of echoes.

[32:50] Bob Dobbs: So in a way,

[32:51] Bob Dobbs: that means you're in the cul-de-sac.

[32:53] Bob Dobbs: Right here,

[32:54] Bob Dobbs: he's saying.

[32:56] Bob Dobbs: There's no above outside of the cul-de-sac.

[32:58] Cameron McEwen: You get that?

[33:05] Cameron McEwen: Definitely.

[33:06] Cameron McEwen: No,

[33:06] Cameron McEwen: no,

[33:06] Cameron McEwen: that's very important.

[33:07] Cameron McEwen: And that immediately gets us to how to be in the in-between.

[33:17] Cameron McEwen: How to have the vertical and the horizontal together without ending up in only one of them.

[33:24] Bob Dobbs: Right.

[33:25] Bob Dobbs: So the process of renewal can't come from above.

[33:28] Bob Dobbs: It can only take the form of reawakened critical faculties.

[33:32] Bob Dobbs: The untrancing of millions of individuals by millions of individual acts of the will.

[33:37] Bob Dobbs: I'll say it again.

[33:39] Bob Dobbs: The untrancing of millions of individuals by millions of individual acts of the will.

[33:44] Bob Dobbs: Psychological decentralization.

[33:47] Bob Dobbs: A merely provision.

[33:48] Bob Dobbs: Now look at that.

[33:49] Bob Dobbs: There he is.

[33:49] Bob Dobbs: He's got his,

[33:50] Bob Dobbs: quote,

[33:50] Bob Dobbs: values of decentralization.

[33:53] Bob Dobbs: And then he either sees it or he's going to see it quickly.

[33:57] Bob Dobbs: It's anti-environment,

[33:58] Bob Dobbs: decentralization.

[34:00] Bob Dobbs: Which

[34:00] Bob Dobbs: I think is...

[34:01] Cameron McEwen: Remember we were talking about second sight?

[34:05] Bob Dobbs: Yes.

[34:06] Cameron McEwen: McLuhan is talking to himself there.

[34:11] Cameron McEwen: Get away from your centralized view of Roman Catholicism.

[34:15] Cameron McEwen: Get away from your idea of

[34:17] Cameron McEwen: Leavis' tradition.

[34:20] Cameron McEwen: Get away from being a professor of literature.

[34:26] Bob Dobbs: Yeah.

[34:26] Bob Dobbs: Psychological decentralization.

[34:31] Bob Dobbs: Let me see this.

[34:33] Cameron McEwen: How to have psychological decentralization without going mad.

[34:40] Bob Dobbs: Isn't that his critique of Innes?

[34:42] Bob Dobbs: Innes doesn't get the decentralization effect of radio,

[34:47] Bob Dobbs: I think.

[34:48] Bob Dobbs: Do you remember that?

[34:55] Cameron McEwen: I believe he does say that,

[34:57] Cameron McEwen: maybe in the later Innes.

[34:58] Cameron McEwen: essay.

[34:59] Cameron McEwen: Yeah,

[34:59] Bob Dobbs: in 1953,

[35:01] Bob Dobbs: The Queen's Quarterly.

[35:02] Cameron McEwen: Yeah,

[35:02] Cameron McEwen: yeah,

[35:05] Cameron McEwen: yeah.

[35:06] Cameron McEwen: That may be so,

[35:08] Cameron McEwen: right?

[35:08] Cameron McEwen: I mean,

[35:08] Cameron McEwen: Ennis certainly got decentralization as something to be wished,

[35:24] Cameron McEwen: right?

[35:24] Cameron McEwen: So when Ennis looked at the politics of the British Empire and the politics of the American Empire.

[35:34] Cameron McEwen: then what he wanted was decentralization.

[35:36] Cameron McEwen: He wanted a place where Canada would have its own voice.

[35:40] Cameron McEwen: He wanted center and margin to be decentered,

[35:51] Cameron McEwen: you could say.

[35:53] Cameron McEwen: But

[35:55] Cameron McEwen: I don't think he saw that this was necessarily tied to...

[36:03] Cameron McEwen: modern technology and modern art.

[36:06] Cameron McEwen: And McLuhan,

[36:07] Cameron McEwen: I think,

[36:08] Cameron McEwen: believed that,

[36:09] Cameron McEwen: of course,

[36:10] Cameron McEwen: Ennis would see this as soon as he really concentrated on it,

[36:15] Cameron McEwen: but he just didn't have time to do that.

[36:17] Bob Dobbs: Right.

[36:19] Bob Dobbs: Did you know a friend of mine found out that the original meaning or one of the meanings of repentance is to retrace,

[36:28] Bob Dobbs: to look back at what you've done?

[36:31] Bob Dobbs: So the re,

[36:31] Bob Dobbs: and McLuhan makes so much out of retracing the stage of apprehension.

[36:36] Bob Dobbs: That's repentance.

[36:39] Cameron McEwen: Yeah.

[36:40] Bob Dobbs: Okay,

[36:40] Bob Dobbs: let's see.

[36:41] Cameron McEwen: That's one more re complex.

[36:46] Bob Dobbs: Yes.

[36:48] Bob Dobbs: Okay,

[36:48] Bob Dobbs: so he says psychological decentralization.

[36:51] Bob Dobbs: That's one sentence.

[36:55] Bob Dobbs: Or two words make up a sentence.

[36:56] Bob Dobbs: That's not.

[36:58] Bob Dobbs: grammatically correct for the style of writing in criticism back then,

[37:02] Bob Dobbs: would it?

[37:03] Bob Dobbs: You wouldn't just go psychological decentralization,

[37:06] Bob Dobbs: period.

[37:07] Bob Dobbs: Isn't that a bit different for the time?

[37:12] Cameron McEwen: Yes,

[37:13] Cameron McEwen: I think so.

[37:14] Cameron McEwen: It's certainly a mark of McLuhan coming loose himself from the way that he used to write,

[37:24] Cameron McEwen: for sure.

[37:25] Bob Dobbs: Yeah,

[37:25] Bob Dobbs: he's being oral there.

[37:28] Bob Dobbs: Psychological decentralization.

[37:30] Bob Dobbs: A merely provisional image of how it might,

[37:33] Bob Dobbs: not how it should occur,

[37:35] Bob Dobbs: so a merely image of how it might occur,

[37:37] Bob Dobbs: could be formed by supposing every mechanical agency of communication in the world to be suspended for six months.

[37:45] Bob Dobbs: No press,

[37:46] Bob Dobbs: no radio,

[37:47] Bob Dobbs: no movies.

[37:49] Bob Dobbs: Okay,

[37:50] Bob Dobbs: nobody's supposed to do this.

[37:54] Bob Dobbs: He's just telling you,

[37:55] Bob Dobbs: and most people probably hadn't even thought of this,

[37:58] Bob Dobbs: Though maybe old late grandmothers said,

[38:00] Bob Dobbs: this is too much,

[38:01] Bob Dobbs: you know,

[38:01] Bob Dobbs: I wish they'd turn the radio off,

[38:03] Bob Dobbs: you know,

[38:03] Bob Dobbs: that kind of thing.

[38:04] Cameron McEwen: But read the start of that sentence.

[38:08] Bob Dobbs: A merely provisional image of how it might occur could be formed.

[38:12] Bob Dobbs: Stop,

[38:12] Bob Dobbs: stop.

[38:12] Bob Dobbs: Oh,

[38:12] Bob Dobbs: I see,

[38:12] Bob Dobbs: yeah,

[38:13] Bob Dobbs: I see,

[38:13] Bob Dobbs: yeah.

[38:13] Cameron McEwen: A merely provisional image.

[38:16] Cameron McEwen: That's what I was trying to talk about before.

[38:18] Bob Dobbs: That's good.

[38:19] Bob Dobbs: Not how it should,

[38:20] Bob Dobbs: yes,

[38:21] Bob Dobbs: not how it should.

[38:22] Bob Dobbs: How it might occur could be formed by supposing these.

[38:27] Bob Dobbs: his age disease be suspended for six months.

[38:31] Bob Dobbs: Just people finding out who lives near them,

[38:34] Bob Dobbs: forming small communities within big cities.

[38:37] Bob Dobbs: It would be agony.

[38:39] Bob Dobbs: All psychological drugs cut off.

[38:42] Bob Dobbs: No capsulated thoughts or melodies.

[38:45] Bob Dobbs: Okay,

[38:45] Bob Dobbs: he is talking about it happening,

[38:48] Bob Dobbs: but if it's a thought,

[38:50] Bob Dobbs: he's telling you the thoughts you're going to have if you contemplated doing this merely provisional turnoff.

[38:58] Bob Dobbs: Did you get that?

[39:01] Bob Dobbs: He's talking about it did happen,

[39:04] Bob Dobbs: and certain things unfold.

[39:06] Bob Dobbs: All psychological drugs cut off.

[39:08] Bob Dobbs: Are you there?

[39:09] Bob Dobbs: I don't hear you responding.

[39:10] Bob Dobbs: Yeah,

[39:10] Bob Dobbs: yeah,

[39:10] Bob Dobbs: I'm here.

[39:11] Bob Dobbs: Okay.

[39:12] Bob Dobbs: All psychological drugs cut off.

[39:14] Bob Dobbs: No encapsulated thoughts or melodies.

[39:18] Bob Dobbs: To say that anything like this could never happen,

[39:21] Bob Dobbs: or that it should never be allowed to happen,

[39:24] Bob Dobbs: is a remark worthy of those mesmerized practical men

[39:27] Bob Dobbs: who are efficiently arranging for the obsequies of our world's mind and body alike.

[39:33] Bob Dobbs: You know,

[39:33] Bob Dobbs: the world's funeral,

[39:36] Bob Dobbs: the burying.

[39:37] Bob Dobbs: Isn't that amazing?

[39:38] Bob Dobbs: If something like this doesn't happen,

[39:40] Bob Dobbs: it's quite plain,

[39:41] Bob Dobbs: what will happen?

[39:45] Bob Dobbs: There's your trade collision.

[39:48] Cameron McEwen: Which essay is that from?

[39:49] Bob Dobbs: The Psychopathology,

[39:50] Bob Dobbs: look it up.

[39:51] Bob Dobbs: I think it's exactly called The Psychopathology of Time and Life.

[39:56] Bob Dobbs: Let me scroll down just a second,

[40:00] Bob Dobbs: get the exact...

[40:00] Cameron McEwen: Yeah,

[40:01] Cameron McEwen: that was an essay that he published in like three or four different places.

[40:06] Bob Dobbs: Yeah,

[40:07] Bob Dobbs: first published...

[40:07] Cameron McEwen: So he regarded it as important.

[40:10] Bob Dobbs: First published in Neurotica,

[40:11] Bob Dobbs: that's a bunch of Burroughs,

[40:13] Bob Dobbs: art guys down in New York,

[40:15] Bob Dobbs: right?

[40:15] Bob Dobbs: Neurotica,

[40:17] Bob Dobbs: issue volume 5,

[40:18] Bob Dobbs: or issue 5,

[40:19] Bob Dobbs: 1949.

[40:21] Bob Dobbs: And it was reprinted in a book

[40:25] Bob Dobbs: Reinhardt put out called

[40:27] Bob Dobbs: Scene Before You,

[40:28] Bob Dobbs: colon,

[40:29] Bob Dobbs: A New Approach to American Culture.

[40:31] Bob Dobbs: And it's called Psychopathology of Time and Life,

[40:34] Bob Dobbs: and time and life are in quotes and supposed to represent

[40:38] Bob Dobbs: the two magazines.

[40:40] Bob Dobbs: Psychopathology of Time.

[40:42] Bob Dobbs: Endless news that time and life did.

[40:45] Bob Dobbs: They would never stop.

[40:52] Bob Dobbs: What a great quote or great section.

[40:57] Bob Dobbs: It's merely provisional to think that you would do it but then he must shift to the other side to continue the thought experiment to make it

[41:13] Cameron McEwen: Real and imply that he does want to do that.

[41:13] Cameron McEwen: Well,

[41:14] Cameron McEwen: he does want to do something like that.

[41:17] Bob Dobbs: Yeah.

[41:17] Cameron McEwen: Right?

[41:17] Cameron McEwen: That's where the provisional comes in.

[41:20] Cameron McEwen: Right?

[41:22] Cameron McEwen: What McLuhan is trying to talk about is a new way for human beings individually and collectively to exist in the world.

[41:31] Cameron McEwen: Right?

[41:32] Cameron McEwen: So then you have the problem of if it's a new way of...

[41:36] Cameron McEwen: existing individually and socially in a new world,

[41:40] Cameron McEwen: how do you use language to indicate the way from one world to this other world?

[41:48] Cameron McEwen: And that's why this provisional comes in.

[41:50] Cameron McEwen: It's a very difficult problem.

[41:54] Cameron McEwen: You could say it's

[41:55] Cameron McEwen: McLuhan central problem.

[41:57] Cameron McEwen: You often quote him as saying that communication is a miracle.

[42:02] Cameron McEwen: And communication is a miracle because of

[42:05] Cameron McEwen: exactly this problem of trying to talk across the gap between worlds.

[42:11] Bob Dobbs: Yeah,

[42:11] Bob Dobbs: this is the cul-de-sac once again that we're in.

[42:15] Cameron McEwen: Sure,

[42:16] Cameron McEwen: absolutely,

[42:16] Cameron McEwen: absolutely.

[42:18] Cameron McEwen: The problem of talking across worlds is that you get yourself involved in a cul-de-sac that doesn't have the reach that you're attempting to extend.

[42:30] Bob Dobbs: Right,

[42:30] Bob Dobbs: so I want to just read it again quickly,

[42:33] Bob Dobbs: impact people.

[42:34] Bob Dobbs: So the process of renewal can't come from above.

[42:37] Bob Dobbs: It can only take the form of reawakened critical faculties.

[42:41] Bob Dobbs: The untrancing of millions of individuals by millions of individual acts of the will.

[42:45] Bob Dobbs: Psychological decentralization.

[42:48] Bob Dobbs: A merely provisional image of how it might,

[42:50] Bob Dobbs: not how it should occur,

[42:52] Bob Dobbs: could be formed by supposing every mechanical agency of communication in the world to be suspended for six months.

[42:57] Bob Dobbs: No press,

[42:58] Bob Dobbs: no radio,

[42:59] Bob Dobbs: no movies.

[42:59] Bob Dobbs: Just people finding out who lived near them.

[43:02] Bob Dobbs: forming small communities within big cities.

[43:06] Bob Dobbs: It would be agony.

[43:07] Bob Dobbs: All psychological drugs cut off.

[43:09] Bob Dobbs: No capsulated thoughts or melodies.

[43:12] Bob Dobbs: To say that anything like this could never happen or that it should never be allowed to happen is a remark worthy of those mesmerized practical men who are efficiently arranging for the obsequies of our world's mind and body alike.

[43:24] Bob Dobbs: If something like this doesn't happen,

[43:26] Bob Dobbs: it's quite plain what will happen.

[43:28] Bob Dobbs: Now,

[43:30] Bob Dobbs: each new medium,

[43:31] Bob Dobbs: say TV,

[43:32] Bob Dobbs: computer,

[43:33] Bob Dobbs: satellite,

[43:34] Bob Dobbs: is another interruption of the agenda that he's hoping people to focus on.

[43:41] Bob Dobbs: We get distracted by a anti-environment and maybe the novelty of it,

[43:48] Bob Dobbs: we don't find it such a problem at first or such an irritation.

[43:52] Bob Dobbs: But after

[43:53] Bob Dobbs: 25 years of movies and radio and magazines and cars,

[43:59] Bob Dobbs: all the media that he's...

[44:00] Bob Dobbs: dealing with in the late 40s,

[44:02] Bob Dobbs: it's irritable.

[44:03] Bob Dobbs: He's almost asking for a new medium to come in so we could forget the cul-de-sac,

[44:12] Bob Dobbs: the repetition of the hot media anti-environment the 30s and

[44:16] Bob Dobbs: 40s.

[44:18] Cameron McEwen: Yeah, you see,

[44:21] Cameron McEwen: when you say we could forget,

[44:24] Cameron McEwen: what you're talking about is something that's new.

[44:28] Cameron McEwen: And he is talking about...

[44:30] Cameron McEwen: something that's new.

[44:31] Cameron McEwen: He is talking about renewal and all of this.

[44:35] Cameron McEwen: But once you put that into an all-at-once context,

[44:41] Cameron McEwen: then what he's talking about here becomes complicated.

[44:51] Cameron McEwen: And it becomes complicated in that what he's looking for isn't

[44:57] Cameron McEwen: a new situation with a new medium.

[45:00] Cameron McEwen: It's a new way of existing with media.

[45:05] Bob Dobbs: New critical faculty.

[45:06] Bob Dobbs: Reawaken.

[45:07] Bob Dobbs: There it is again.

[45:07] Bob Dobbs: Reawaken critical faculty.

[45:11] Cameron McEwen: Exactly,

[45:12] Cameron McEwen: exactly.

[45:14] Cameron McEwen: Right.

[45:14] Cameron McEwen: And so the key to this would be trying to understand how human beings are always from every moment of their lives,

[45:26] Cameron McEwen: they are going through a process of reawakening.

[45:31] Cameron McEwen: That is to say,

[45:34] Cameron McEwen: reinstalling a new mask,

[45:36] Cameron McEwen: a new role,

[45:37] Cameron McEwen: a new perception.

[45:40] Cameron McEwen: but without knowing it.

[45:42] Cameron McEwen: And so human beings through this process of kind of automating their roles,

[45:53] Cameron McEwen: just become robots.

[45:57] Bob Dobbs: Yeah,

[45:58] Bob Dobbs: now is there anybody who did this,

[46:07] Bob Dobbs: who took on the media environment?

[46:09] Bob Dobbs: The way McLuhan is in previous times,

[46:14] Bob Dobbs: was it always the same questioning,

[46:17] Bob Dobbs: same effort to reawaken critical faculties,

[46:19] Bob Dobbs: but only on smaller scales,

[46:21] Bob Dobbs: smaller media anti-environment?

[46:24] Cameron McEwen: Well,

[46:26] Cameron McEwen: my view is that the great thinkers like Plato and Aristotle as two great examples were always doing this.

[46:34] Cameron McEwen: And so it's not that it hasn't been done.

[46:37] Cameron McEwen: It's certainly not that it

[46:39] Cameron McEwen: can't be done.

[46:40] Cameron McEwen: It's just that we,

[46:42] Cameron McEwen: as a species,

[46:44] Cameron McEwen: we haven't found a way of going from the great insight of people like Plato and Aristotle to practical application.

[46:55] Cameron McEwen: And so we have what might be called a distorted application that leads us to weapons of mass destruction and ecological disaster.

[47:08] Cameron McEwen: that is enabled by the partial application of these ideas without the application of their wisdom side.

[47:17] Bob Dobbs: Right,

[47:17] Bob Dobbs: and so

[47:19] Bob Dobbs: McLuhan original view is that we've got to position a cul-de-sac where we can actually see what we're doing to ourselves.

[47:30] Bob Dobbs: And he often said that about the 20th century.

[47:33] Bob Dobbs: It was the first time we could see what we were doing to ourselves with our main tools.

[47:37] Bob Dobbs: anti-environment.

[47:39] Cameron McEwen: Exactly.

[47:40] Bob Dobbs: In that way,

[47:41] Bob Dobbs: he's original.

[47:41] Cameron McEwen: We're forced to do it.

[47:43] Cameron McEwen: We're forced to do it because electronic media and advanced transportation have forced us into conjunction with other peoples in a way that we can no longer ignore.

[47:58] Cameron McEwen: And at the same time,

[47:59] Cameron McEwen: in the anti-environment,

[48:01] Cameron McEwen: especially in anthropology and psychology,

[48:06] Cameron McEwen: word.

[48:07] Cameron McEwen: learning and sociology,

[48:09] Cameron McEwen: we're learning how we can't sort of stand aside and above societies,

[48:17] Cameron McEwen: primitive people,

[48:19] Cameron McEwen: insanity.

[48:20] Cameron McEwen: We have to understand these things from the inside.

[48:24] Cameron McEwen: And so once we encounter people in space that are not us,

[48:29] Cameron McEwen: and once we encounter conditions of human being within us that are not us.

[48:37] Cameron McEwen: Then we have this whole new situation where we suddenly understand what it means to be in a world of voices.

[48:52] Bob Dobbs: Okay.

[48:53] Cameron McEwen: Notice that McLuhan then,

[48:56] Cameron McEwen: when he puts out his anthology with his colleagues Schoeck and Surluck,

[49:04] Cameron McEwen: I think it's in the

[49:05] Cameron McEwen: 1950s, could be the

[49:06] Cameron McEwen: 60s. It's called Voices of Literature,

[49:09] Cameron McEwen: right?

[49:09] Bob Dobbs: Yeah,

[49:09] Bob Dobbs: that's 64 or 65,

[49:11] Bob Dobbs: and he did a couple of volumes.

[49:14] Cameron McEwen: Right,

[49:15] Cameron McEwen: right.

[49:15] Cameron McEwen: They were supposed to do a third,

[49:16] Cameron McEwen: but it never appeared.

[49:17] Bob Dobbs: Yeah,

[49:19] Bob Dobbs: so why are you bringing up those texts?

[49:22] Bob Dobbs: They were for school.

[49:24] Cameron McEwen: Yeah,

[49:25] Cameron McEwen: well,

[49:25] Cameron McEwen: because of the title of the book,

[49:26] Cameron McEwen: Voices of Literature,

[49:28] Cameron McEwen: Voices.

[49:29] Bob Dobbs: Right.

[49:29] Cameron McEwen: Right,

[49:29] Cameron McEwen: so it's a way.

[49:30] Cameron McEwen: You could say the title,

[49:32] Cameron McEwen: Voices of Literature,

[49:33] Cameron McEwen: is a way of going beyond literature to the voices that literature incarnates.

[49:45] Bob Dobbs: Right,

[49:45] Bob Dobbs: so you're gradually supporting how great your statement was that my book has many voices in it.

[49:55] Bob Dobbs: I was part of a tradition.

[49:57] Cameron McEwen: Absolutely,

[49:58] Cameron McEwen: absolutely.

[49:59] Cameron McEwen: Well,

[49:59] Cameron McEwen: that's one of your interesting qualities in life,

[50:04] Cameron McEwen: you know,

[50:05] Cameron McEwen: as reflected in all of the different...

[50:08] Cameron McEwen: things you have going on on the radio,

[50:11] Cameron McEwen: on the website,

[50:12] Cameron McEwen: and all that sort of stuff,

[50:13] Cameron McEwen: is that you are different voices.

[50:16] Cameron McEwen: There is no such thing as

[50:18] Cameron McEwen: Bob Singular.

[50:20] Bob Dobbs: I even coined a psychological state.

[50:22] Bob Dobbs: Psychological decentralization is quadrophrenia.

[50:26] Cameron McEwen: Correct.

[50:27] Bob Dobbs: So let's look at the beginning.

[50:30] Bob Dobbs: I'm interested in what you find in the book.

[50:32] Bob Dobbs: We wanted to sort of go back and start.

[50:35] Cameron McEwen: That's right.

[50:36] Cameron McEwen: But one thing that I...

[50:38] Cameron McEwen: I really don't understand very well and that you could help me with is what you think about the cul-de-sac.

[50:46] Cameron McEwen: I mean,

[50:47] Cameron McEwen: were you just throwing that out or is there a background to that?

[50:53] Bob Dobbs: I was trying to show that there was a paralysis and I was thinking of it as a temporary condition that could be broken.

[51:03] Bob Dobbs: I certainly wasn't thinking that it is our fate.

[51:06] Bob Dobbs: to be forever in the cul-de-sac the way you're taking it i don't think i meant it that way uh the all and another thing the voices the anti-environment of simonson 80 is so important uh absolutely you know in the 20th century so

[51:23] Cameron McEwen: yeah um and let me just say something about that for a second the um what happens let's say between 1900 and 1927 them.

[51:36] Cameron McEwen: physics is that it comes to be understood that you cannot specify elementary particles and

[51:51] Cameron McEwen: in fact you can't specify anything by taking a point of view on it.

[51:58] Cameron McEwen: The only way you can understand particles is to understand them

[52:03] Cameron McEwen: as a range of possibilities which get specified in various ways,

[52:12] Cameron McEwen: but not specified ever in a way that definitively locates the particle.

[52:21] Cameron McEwen: You can have the particle in space,

[52:22] Cameron McEwen: but you can't have it in time.

[52:24] Cameron McEwen: Or you can have it in time,

[52:25] Cameron McEwen: but you can't have it in space.

[52:26] Cameron McEwen: And the way around that is to take all of the...

[52:33] Cameron McEwen: possibilities of the particle as a kind of incoming information and then say that to understand the laws of this particle,

[52:44] Cameron McEwen: you understand it as a specification of the range of possibilities.

[52:53] Cameron McEwen: Well,

[52:53] Cameron McEwen: that's what

[52:54] Cameron McEwen: McLuhan and others like Elliot were saying about literature.

[53:00] Cameron McEwen: They were saying that.

[53:03] Cameron McEwen: The meaning of meaning,

[53:04] Cameron McEwen: you could say,

[53:05] Cameron McEwen: is that words have a vast range of possible meanings,

[53:12] Cameron McEwen: and in a poem,

[53:13] Cameron McEwen: the poet takes that vast range of possible meanings into consideration and then uses the word in some precise way where

[53:29] Cameron McEwen: precision has to do with

[53:31] Cameron McEwen: how the word was selected out of that range of possibility.

[53:36] Bob Dobbs: Yeah,

[53:37] Bob Dobbs: now,

[53:38] Bob Dobbs: go ahead.

[53:40] Cameron McEwen: Well,

[53:41] Cameron McEwen: this relates to what we were talking about a few weeks ago with light through and light on.

[53:50] Bob Dobbs: Yes.

[53:51] Cameron McEwen: Right?

[53:51] Cameron McEwen: And so in physics and in literature,

[53:54] Cameron McEwen: you have a reversal,

[53:56] Cameron McEwen: and the reversal goes from instead of us...

[54:00] Cameron McEwen: directing a light on and illuminating out of our great genius,

[54:07] Cameron McEwen: we turn around and we say the light is coming towards us and our role is one of understanding those possibilities.

[54:19] Bob Dobbs: Right,

[54:19] Bob Dobbs: now here's what I want to say.

[54:22] Bob Dobbs: Don Thiel,

[54:23] Bob Dobbs: I just want to get this in there because it applies.

[54:27] Bob Dobbs: Don Thiel described

[54:28] Bob Dobbs: how you read Finnegans Wake or what happens.

[54:31] Bob Dobbs: Okay,

[54:32] Bob Dobbs: so you take a couple lines of Finnegans Wake and there's no real continuity.

[54:37] Bob Dobbs: Each word,

[54:38] Bob Dobbs: each syllable is a rabbit hole of suggestions,

[54:41] Bob Dobbs: multilingual suggestions.

[54:43] Bob Dobbs: So he says,

[54:45] Bob Dobbs: Joyce satirized the quantum perspective.

[54:48] Bob Dobbs: As you read along the page,

[54:50] Bob Dobbs: looking for linear connections to get the general drift and meaning of the sentence,

[54:56] Bob Dobbs: you're hobbled by...

[54:59] Bob Dobbs: potholes where each word takes you away from some direction you're going,

[55:04] Bob Dobbs: maybe the time,

[55:05] Bob Dobbs: and

[55:06] Bob Dobbs: throws you down a spatial hole of possibilities just within the seven or eight letters.

[55:13] Bob Dobbs: So you can't figure out the linear meaning or the larger picture when you're reading,

[55:21] Bob Dobbs: especially with the wake,

[55:22] Bob Dobbs: he shows you're missing,

[55:24] Bob Dobbs: you can't do the space and the time at the same time.

[55:28] Bob Dobbs: Or he writes so that you are experiencing the quantum dilemma.

[55:33] Cameron McEwen: Correct.

[55:34] Bob Dobbs: Isn't that amazing?

[55:35] Bob Dobbs: Yes,

[55:36] Cameron McEwen: absolutely.

[55:37] Bob Dobbs: It's a wonderful way to describe the experience of Finnegans Wake.

[55:40] Bob Dobbs: You go along and you can,

[55:43] Bob Dobbs: so you have these outlines of Finnegans Wake,

[55:45] Bob Dobbs: which have nothing to do with the content of the book and the millions of stories in each page,

[55:51] Bob Dobbs: and,

[55:51] Bob Dobbs: you know,

[55:51] Bob Dobbs: 50 languages.

[55:53] Bob Dobbs: So to make a simple outline is to emphasize,

[55:55] Bob Dobbs: I guess,

[55:56] Bob Dobbs: the position of the particle and missing the spaces of the particle.

[56:03] Bob Dobbs: And so Joyce showed that.

[56:07] Bob Dobbs: in the way he presented the sentence in fitting his weight.

[56:10] Cameron McEwen: That's right,

[56:11] Cameron McEwen: yeah.

[56:13] Bob Dobbs: So that's something that's a very rare,

[56:15] Bob Dobbs: I don't know anybody else who's ever said that.

[56:17] Bob Dobbs: Thiel said it.

[56:19] Bob Dobbs: I like to tell people that idea,

[56:21] Bob Dobbs: so I took advantage of this situation to put that in here in the recording.

[56:25] Cameron McEwen: Right,

[56:26] Cameron McEwen: but

[56:26] Cameron McEwen: I think that

[56:27] Cameron McEwen: Thiel took the idea from Joyce himself.

[56:30] Cameron McEwen: I think Joyce was...

[56:33] Cameron McEwen: thinking along those...

[56:34] Cameron McEwen: Well,

[56:34] Bob Dobbs: that's what he's saying.

[56:36] Bob Dobbs: He's saying that's what Joyce wanted to show.

[56:39] Bob Dobbs: That's why Einstein is a big enemy or contrast or competitor for Joyce while writing it.

[56:48] Bob Dobbs: Well,

[56:49] Bob Dobbs: he actually told me through the evergreens that he was trying to counter Einstein,

[56:55] Bob Dobbs: one of his goals.

[56:57] Bob Dobbs: He didn't think that the insights of Einstein were as important as what he had to say.

[57:01] Bob Dobbs: And McLuhan agreed because he said Joyce tackled problems that scientists didn't even know existed yet within each way.

[57:11] Cameron McEwen: Yeah,

[57:11] Cameron McEwen: there's,

[57:16] Cameron McEwen: how can I say this?

[57:18] Cameron McEwen: We always need to keep in mind with McLuhan that figure can become ground and ground can become figure.

[57:25] Bob Dobbs: Yeah.

[57:25] Cameron McEwen: Right.

[57:25] Cameron McEwen: So when he talks,

[57:27] Cameron McEwen: there's an inherent dynamic.

[57:31] Cameron McEwen: going on that's very important to respect.

[57:35] Cameron McEwen: But there's a certain sense in which you can say that science in the 20th century can be seen as a figure and ground of deeper problems.

[57:47] Cameron McEwen: Yeah.

[57:49] Cameron McEwen: Right?

[57:49] Cameron McEwen: But the reverse is also true.

[57:52] Bob Dobbs: But what is the reverse?

[57:56] Cameron McEwen: The reverse is that the deeper problems...

[58:00] Cameron McEwen: can be seen as figure and ground of science.

[58:04] Bob Dobbs: Okay.

[58:05] Bob Dobbs: All right.

[58:07] Bob Dobbs: Let's see.

[58:10] Bob Dobbs: Why did we get into this particular point,

[58:12] Bob Dobbs: the quantum?

[58:13] Bob Dobbs: Why you brought up the quantum thing?

[58:17] Cameron McEwen: Well,

[58:18] Cameron McEwen: we were talking about cul-de-sac,

[58:19] Cameron McEwen: and then I asked you what you meant,

[58:22] Cameron McEwen: and then you were talking about...

[58:31] Cameron McEwen: you got into

[58:32] Cameron McEwen: Joyce.

[58:35] Bob Dobbs: Well, let me say this.

[58:36] Bob Dobbs: I'll do it again.

[58:39] Bob Dobbs: The cul-de-sac,

[58:41] Bob Dobbs: and you're getting us into the metaphysics of it in a way,

[58:44] Bob Dobbs: or something like that,

[58:45] Bob Dobbs: something deeper.

[58:47] Bob Dobbs: I wanted to insult the cliches of McLuhan.

[58:51] Bob Dobbs: Correct.

[58:52] Bob Dobbs: cul-de-sac to me is not a desirable condition.

[58:55] Bob Dobbs: So I wanted to say we got ourselves into a serious problem here with these cliches that all the people know about McLuhan.

[59:03] Cameron McEwen: Right.

[59:05] Bob Dobbs: So I was doing it for rhetorical effect,

[59:07] Bob Dobbs: I guess.

[59:07] Bob Dobbs: Right?

[59:08] Cameron McEwen: Right.

[59:09] Cameron McEwen: Yeah,

[59:09] Cameron McEwen: yeah.

[59:09] Cameron McEwen: So then one question I have is that you've also talked about,

[59:18] Cameron McEwen: not in this book,

[59:19] Cameron McEwen: but elsewhere,

[59:20] Cameron McEwen: you talk about disappearance.

[59:22] Cameron McEwen: And I wonder if you bring disappearance together with the cul-de-sac.

[59:28] Bob Dobbs: Yeah,

[59:28] Bob Dobbs: certainly.

[59:30] Bob Dobbs: The disappearance,

[59:31] Bob Dobbs: it's interesting.

[59:32] Bob Dobbs: I talked about it,

[59:34] Bob Dobbs: and then I found out that this writer,

[59:36] Bob Dobbs: French writer Lyotard,

[59:37] Bob Dobbs: L-Y-O-T-A-R-D,

[59:40] Bob Dobbs: wrote a book,

[59:40] Bob Dobbs: The Aesthetics of Disappearance.

[59:41] Bob Dobbs: He was going on and on about it.

[59:43] Bob Dobbs: And I said,

[59:44] Bob Dobbs: wow.

[59:44] Bob Dobbs: So I looked at his book,

[59:45] Bob Dobbs: and of course,

[59:46] Bob Dobbs: it's all abstract.

[59:47] Bob Dobbs: It's not anti-environment thing.

[59:50] Bob Dobbs: And I meant anti-environment thing.

[59:52] Bob Dobbs: We can't see where we're going.

[59:54] Bob Dobbs: And McLuhan used to say that he walked around by feeling,

[59:58] Bob Dobbs: you know,

[59:59] Bob Dobbs: the blind man with a stick trying to see where to go.

[1:00:03] Bob Dobbs: And he totally said,

[1:00:04] Bob Dobbs: we are invisible.

[1:00:06] Bob Dobbs: We are not visible.

[1:00:10] Bob Dobbs: Even Bucky Fuller pointed it out somewhere that he said most of the developments in the 20th century are in the realm of the invisible.

[1:00:18] Bob Dobbs: So technically,

[1:00:19] Bob Dobbs: you know,

[1:00:19] Bob Dobbs: we've disappeared in our anti-environment and in our knowledge systems.

[1:00:24] Bob Dobbs: And it's very helpful for a high school student to be told this properly and to get it.

[1:00:33] Bob Dobbs: It would clear up a lot of muddleness because they're trying to visualize what wasn't visualizable.

[1:00:40] Bob Dobbs: You know,

[1:00:42] Bob Dobbs: I like the way McLuhan is very simple sometimes.

[1:00:44] Bob Dobbs: You know,

[1:00:45] Bob Dobbs: we're talking about this philosophical cul-de-sac,

[1:00:47] Bob Dobbs: but he also was,

[1:00:48] Bob Dobbs: at the other conversation,

[1:00:50] Bob Dobbs: he provided good wrap-up statements about what knowledge had come to.

[1:00:56] Bob Dobbs: So it was a very practical ending to modernism,

[1:01:02] Bob Dobbs: or to the vortices,

[1:01:04] Bob Dobbs: what he offered.

[1:01:05] Bob Dobbs: So,

[1:01:06] Bob Dobbs: okay,

[1:01:06] Bob Dobbs: that's one side of the conversation.

[1:01:08] Bob Dobbs: But the other side is,

[1:01:09] Bob Dobbs: well,

[1:01:09] Bob Dobbs: no,

[1:01:09] Bob Dobbs: it didn't work.

[1:01:12] Bob Dobbs: Nobody got it,

[1:01:13] Bob Dobbs: you know.

[1:01:14] Bob Dobbs: And then you bring back the cul-de-sac.

[1:01:17] Bob Dobbs: Do you do think McLuhan was in a cul-de-sac personally?

[1:01:22] Bob Dobbs: Was he a frustrated person?

[1:01:25] Cameron McEwen: Oh,

[1:01:25] Cameron McEwen: I think so.

[1:01:26] Cameron McEwen: I think so.

[1:01:27] Bob Dobbs: Okay,

[1:01:27] Bob Dobbs: well,

[1:01:28] Bob Dobbs: I spent more time with him than you did,

[1:01:30] Bob Dobbs: and he was quite relaxed all the time.

[1:01:36] Bob Dobbs: So is there a different kind of frustration you're talking about?

[1:01:41] Cameron McEwen: I think so.

[1:01:42] Cameron McEwen: I mean,

[1:01:44] Cameron McEwen: the relaxation you're talking about,

[1:01:46] Cameron McEwen: I find it's one of the really amazing things in McLuhan.

[1:01:50] Cameron McEwen: Maybe he got it from his father.

[1:01:52] Bob Dobbs: Yeah.

[1:01:52] Cameron McEwen: Maybe it was his

[1:01:53] Cameron McEwen: Irish side.

[1:01:55] Cameron McEwen: Because,

[1:01:56] Cameron McEwen: I mean,

[1:01:56] Cameron McEwen: here's a guy whose inability to communicate,

[1:02:01] Cameron McEwen: right?

[1:02:01] Cameron McEwen: He often talked about how he'd only had a handful of...

[1:02:06] Cameron McEwen: graduate students in his whole life that understood anything about what he was talking about,

[1:02:11] Cameron McEwen: right?

[1:02:11] Cameron McEwen: And then you think about his family,

[1:02:14] Cameron McEwen: the only one that remained

[1:02:17] Cameron McEwen: Catholic was Eric,

[1:02:19] Cameron McEwen: and

[1:02:20] Cameron McEwen: McLuhan wasn't entirely sure that

[1:02:24] Cameron McEwen: Eric understood Catholicism the way he did,

[1:02:27] Cameron McEwen: and so he's got his kids assembled.

[1:02:33] Cameron McEwen: to pray the rosary or something like this,

[1:02:36] Cameron McEwen: and he knows that they all hate it,

[1:02:38] Cameron McEwen: that none of them understand it,

[1:02:41] Cameron McEwen: that he's being,

[1:02:43] Cameron McEwen: he's forcing it on them from above,

[1:02:46] Cameron McEwen: the sort of stuff that he hates elsewhere in life,

[1:02:49] Cameron McEwen: right?

[1:02:50] Cameron McEwen: And so he's,

[1:02:51] Cameron McEwen: you would think that this is a person who's just tied up in all kinds of knots and anxieties.

[1:03:01] Cameron McEwen: But then he comes across,

[1:03:02] Cameron McEwen: as you say,

[1:03:03] Cameron McEwen: as somebody without a care in the world.

[1:03:05] Bob Dobbs: That's right.

[1:03:06] Bob Dobbs: I've got a couple of anecdotes to supplement this.

[1:03:09] Bob Dobbs: Mary,

[1:03:09] Bob Dobbs: who I got to know quite well,

[1:03:11] Bob Dobbs: his daughter,

[1:03:12] Bob Dobbs: one of his daughters talked about how horrible it was growing up in his house.

[1:03:18] Bob Dobbs: They had to pray.

[1:03:19] Bob Dobbs: They had to do this.

[1:03:20] Bob Dobbs: They had to do everything at dinner.

[1:03:21] Bob Dobbs: They had an incredibly strict world that people in the rest of suburbia didn't experience anymore,

[1:03:28] Bob Dobbs: really.

[1:03:29] Bob Dobbs: You know what I mean?

[1:03:29] Bob Dobbs: Unless they were crazy.

[1:03:31] Bob Dobbs: I don't know,

[1:03:32] Bob Dobbs: fundamentalists or something,

[1:03:33] Bob Dobbs: the people,

[1:03:33] Bob Dobbs: the extremists.

[1:03:35] Bob Dobbs: Nobody knew that McLuhan was an extremist back at home.

[1:03:42] Cameron McEwen: Yeah,

[1:03:42] Cameron McEwen: so he was struggling to communicate something.

[1:03:48] Cameron McEwen: He was struggling to communicate with himself what it meant to be a Catholic in this anti-environment.

[1:03:56] Cameron McEwen: He was struggling to communicate with his children.

[1:04:01] Cameron McEwen: what it meant to be a Catholic at all,

[1:04:04] Cameron McEwen: right?

[1:04:04] Cameron McEwen: He was struggling to communicate a kind of calling to remember a past world that wasn't really past,

[1:04:15] Cameron McEwen: right?

[1:04:15] Cameron McEwen: All worlds were present.

[1:04:18] Cameron McEwen: And so he was struggling exactly with this question of language that we talked about earlier,

[1:04:24] Cameron McEwen: where he was trying to communicate with the family,

[1:04:28] Cameron McEwen: with his students,

[1:04:29] Cameron McEwen: how to go from one world to another world,

[1:04:32] Cameron McEwen: and the language was failing.

[1:04:34] Bob Dobbs: That's right.

[1:04:36] Cameron McEwen: The language was failing,

[1:04:39] Cameron McEwen: and that failure was the cul-de-sac,

[1:04:41] Cameron McEwen: was the fate.

[1:04:43] Bob Dobbs: Right.

[1:04:43] Bob Dobbs: Two more points.

[1:04:45] Bob Dobbs: I think it's in that June Caldwell,

[1:04:47] Bob Dobbs: Caldwood interview,

[1:04:48] Bob Dobbs: November 74,

[1:04:50] Bob Dobbs: Global Mail,

[1:04:50] Bob Dobbs: where he talks about having ESP.

[1:04:53] Bob Dobbs: He may say it there.

[1:04:54] Bob Dobbs: It's around this time.

[1:04:55] Bob Dobbs: He says,

[1:04:56] Bob Dobbs: people have trouble projecting to me.

[1:04:59] Bob Dobbs: And I have trouble projecting to them.

[1:05:01] Bob Dobbs: Now,

[1:05:02] Bob Dobbs: this is the great communicator.

[1:05:06] Bob Dobbs: Oh,

[1:05:06] Bob Dobbs: but then they'd say,

[1:05:07] Bob Dobbs: who couldn't communicate?

[1:05:08] Bob Dobbs: So,

[1:05:09] Bob Dobbs: boy,

[1:05:09] Bob Dobbs: he was a walking cul-de-sac.

[1:05:11] Bob Dobbs: And let me see,

[1:05:12] Bob Dobbs: was there another point?

[1:05:13] Bob Dobbs: So Mary talked about how painful it was being,

[1:05:16] Bob Dobbs: oh,

[1:05:16] Bob Dobbs: and.

[1:05:18] Bob Dobbs: Carolyn met a woman,

[1:05:20] Bob Dobbs: well,

[1:05:20] Bob Dobbs: student in the 70s who grew up in high school or whatever with the McLuhan kids.

[1:05:26] Bob Dobbs: And she brought up McLuhan and they get talking.

[1:05:28] Bob Dobbs: And this sort of family acquaintance said,

[1:05:31] Bob Dobbs: boy,

[1:05:31] Bob Dobbs: he really wrecked his kids,

[1:05:33] Bob Dobbs: though.

[1:05:34] Bob Dobbs: He ruined his kids.

[1:05:36] Bob Dobbs: This was the jargon of some of the people in their peer group.

[1:05:41] Bob Dobbs: You know what I mean?

[1:05:41] Bob Dobbs: Yeah.

[1:05:43] Bob Dobbs: I don't know what Barry and Terry were doing,

[1:05:45] Bob Dobbs: but...

[1:05:46] Bob Dobbs: It's interesting the confusion around him.

[1:05:49] Bob Dobbs: And then

[1:05:51] Bob Dobbs: Corinne says,

[1:05:51] Bob Dobbs: Marshall,

[1:05:52] Bob Dobbs: he loved the idea of family.

[1:05:55] Bob Dobbs: He wasn't really a good family man.

[1:05:57] Bob Dobbs: And Mary said all he did was sit on the couch reading poetry,

[1:06:00] Bob Dobbs: and Corinne ran the family or created a sense of familiness.

[1:06:04] Bob Dobbs: He was in love with the idea of family.

[1:06:06] Bob Dobbs: And then they go back to what I told you the last time.

[1:06:08] Bob Dobbs: He wanted to infiltrate decent society.

[1:06:11] Bob Dobbs: He was a loner,

[1:06:13] Bob Dobbs: eccentric artist.

[1:06:14] Bob Dobbs: in the cliche way we think of the history of artists,

[1:06:17] Bob Dobbs: trying to look bourgeois for some reason.

[1:06:20] Bob Dobbs: He knew that the underground wasn't possible anymore.

[1:06:24] Bob Dobbs: You just end up stranded and isolated.

[1:06:27] Bob Dobbs: He didn't want to do that because he wanted to communicate to people.

[1:06:32] Bob Dobbs: He really loved to communicate.

[1:06:34] Cameron McEwen: Notice that you're using communication there as a kind of stretching between roles.

[1:06:44] Cameron McEwen: So

[1:06:45] Cameron McEwen: McLuhan wanted to be an artist,

[1:06:47] Cameron McEwen: but he also wanted to be a father with six children.

[1:06:51] Cameron McEwen: And almost nobody else could do that,

[1:06:55] Cameron McEwen: right?

[1:06:55] Cameron McEwen: He wanted to be a revolutionary,

[1:06:58] Cameron McEwen: but also an academic.

[1:07:00] Cameron McEwen: So

[1:07:01] Cameron McEwen: McLuhan whole sort of thrust of thought is to embody and to be these different voices.

[1:07:12] Bob Dobbs: Right.

[1:07:13] Bob Dobbs: I was just thinking,

[1:07:15] Bob Dobbs: he was very impressive with Louis.

[1:07:18] Bob Dobbs: He even said he dedicated his life work to Louis.

[1:07:22] Bob Dobbs: Maybe he wanted to do Louis better since Louis had some personality failings and caused problems with his paranoia.

[1:07:29] Bob Dobbs: He said,

[1:07:30] Bob Dobbs: okay,

[1:07:30] Bob Dobbs: I got to do Louis better.

[1:07:32] Bob Dobbs: You know what I mean?

[1:07:33] Bob Dobbs: I don't want to be isolated.

[1:07:34] Bob Dobbs: That might have been his strategy.

[1:07:37] Bob Dobbs: Well,

[1:07:38] Cameron McEwen: I mean,

[1:07:40] Cameron McEwen: at other times he was very critical.

[1:07:42] Cameron McEwen: of Lewis.

[1:07:45] Cameron McEwen: Right?

[1:07:45] Cameron McEwen: Too vertical,

[1:07:47] Cameron McEwen: too print-oriented,

[1:07:49] Cameron McEwen: too papal,

[1:07:51] Cameron McEwen: you could say.

[1:07:51] Bob Dobbs: Didn't know what tactility was.

[1:07:54] Bob Dobbs: Yeah.

[1:07:58] Cameron McEwen: He certainly felt a debt of gratitude to

[1:08:04] Cameron McEwen: Lewis and expressed that in ways that he didn't do so much for other people.

[1:08:11] Cameron McEwen: Yeah.

[1:08:12] Cameron McEwen: He owed a tremendous amount to Gilson.

[1:08:16] Cameron McEwen: Usually when he talked about Gilson,

[1:08:17] Cameron McEwen: it was critical.

[1:08:20] Cameron McEwen: But Gilson is the person he cites more than anybody else in the thesis.

[1:08:26] Cameron McEwen: And Gilson was the guy that kind of gave him a central clue in the

[1:08:34] Cameron McEwen: 1950s. But

[1:08:35] Cameron McEwen: Gilson had given him some essential clues around

[1:08:39] Cameron McEwen: 1940 for how he was.

[1:08:42] Cameron McEwen: going to apply his Catholicism.

[1:08:45] Cameron McEwen: And then in the

[1:08:46] Cameron McEwen: 50s,

[1:08:47] Cameron McEwen: McLuhan was in a cul-de-sac and trying to get out.

[1:08:50] Cameron McEwen: And

[1:08:51] Cameron McEwen: Gilson gave the art lectures in

[1:08:56] Cameron McEwen: Washington. I forget their name,

[1:08:58] Cameron McEwen: but both Gilson and Maritain did that.

[1:09:01] Cameron McEwen: And that led

[1:09:03] Cameron McEwen: McLuhan into a new understanding of art and a new understanding of media.

[1:09:11] Cameron McEwen: So that just a year or two after Gilson and Maritain had lectured in

[1:09:17] Cameron McEwen: Washington on art and turned McLuhan on to

[1:09:23] Cameron McEwen: Gombrich and to Ivins and to other people in the world of art theory,

[1:09:31] Cameron McEwen: he then comes up with the idea of medium as the message and goes on from there.

[1:09:36] Bob Dobbs: Right.

[1:09:39] Bob Dobbs: Okay.

[1:09:40] Bob Dobbs: Sorry.

[1:09:41] Cameron McEwen: No,

[1:09:41] Bob Dobbs: that's good.

[1:09:42] Bob Dobbs: But I just was thinking about many people saw him as incredibly energized and happy and,

[1:09:49] Bob Dobbs: you know,

[1:09:50] Bob Dobbs: full of fun.

[1:09:52] Bob Dobbs: Yeah.

[1:09:53] Cameron McEwen: Huge energy,

[1:09:54] Cameron McEwen: no question about it.

[1:09:55] Bob Dobbs: Right.

[1:09:55] Bob Dobbs: So he's got all this energy,

[1:09:57] Bob Dobbs: yet people thought that his message in the 60s was very cold,

[1:10:03] Bob Dobbs: you know,

[1:10:03] Bob Dobbs: inhuman,

[1:10:04] Bob Dobbs: Postman.

[1:10:06] Bob Dobbs: That's when he got up on the podium,

[1:10:07] Bob Dobbs: I guess.

[1:10:08] Bob Dobbs: So then he's doing the monologue,

[1:10:11] Bob Dobbs: and he's being one-directional.

[1:10:15] Bob Dobbs: Not his style,

[1:10:15] Bob Dobbs: but his effect.

[1:10:17] Bob Dobbs: But in...

[1:10:19] Bob Dobbs: Daily interaction,

[1:10:20] Bob Dobbs: collegial and a fun guy.

[1:10:23] Bob Dobbs: I'm just trying to think,

[1:10:25] Bob Dobbs: when was he mean?

[1:10:26] Bob Dobbs: When was he depressed?

[1:10:30] Bob Dobbs: I can't think of it.

[1:10:34] Bob Dobbs: He never ended a lecture on a depressing point.

[1:10:38] Bob Dobbs: He's,

[1:10:38] Bob Dobbs: quote,

[1:10:39] Bob Dobbs: an optimist in effect.

[1:10:41] Bob Dobbs: He said,

[1:10:41] Bob Dobbs: we can do something about this.

[1:10:43] Bob Dobbs: All we have to do is understand me.

[1:10:48] Bob Dobbs: That we're okay.

[1:10:48] Bob Dobbs: So

[1:10:49] Bob Dobbs: I was just thinking about that,

[1:10:51] Bob Dobbs: the range of depression and mania.

[1:10:56] Cameron McEwen: I think the clue there is to think of them not as dominance,

[1:11:02] Cameron McEwen: right?

[1:11:04] Cameron McEwen: McLuhan read a lot of Jung in the

[1:11:07] Cameron McEwen: 1930s and 40s,

[1:11:09] Cameron McEwen: and he was familiar with the idea that we don't have moods and we don't have...

[1:11:16] Cameron McEwen: things like depression and mania they have us right so this this uh was one of the clues to McLuhan that uh voices are incoming yes and um so um when

[1:11:31] Cameron McEwen: he comes to understand the electronic anti-environment is it will be as a plurality of voices that are incoming as opposed to the book culture of one voice that's outgoing.

[1:11:46] Cameron McEwen: When he understands this plurality of voices that are incoming and that include things like depression and mania,

[1:11:56] Cameron McEwen: then you can see that in his own personality,

[1:12:01] Cameron McEwen: there could be something like depression,

[1:12:05] Cameron McEwen: but not as a single dominant.

[1:12:08] Bob Dobbs: Right.

[1:12:09] Cameron McEwen: It was a component voice of the...

[1:12:14] Cameron McEwen: spectrum that was incoming.

[1:12:17] Cameron McEwen: So you could say the energy and the agony of McLuhan was the attempt to do justice to

[1:12:31] Cameron McEwen: all of these voices,

[1:12:34] Cameron McEwen: including how to communicate what they could give us if we could understand what was going on with them.

[1:12:43] Bob Dobbs: And then on top of that,

[1:12:45] Bob Dobbs: what was unique is to see the whole situation you're describing.

[1:12:48] Bob Dobbs: It was anti-environment.

[1:12:50] Bob Dobbs: Yeah,

[1:12:51] Cameron McEwen: anti-environment,

[1:12:52] Cameron McEwen: plural.

[1:12:53] Bob Dobbs: Yeah,

[1:12:53] Bob Dobbs: anti-environment,

[1:12:54] Bob Dobbs: plural.

[1:12:54] Bob Dobbs: Two things.

[1:12:56] Bob Dobbs: In his essay on Lewis in 53,

[1:12:58] Bob Dobbs: he talks about Lewis being a god,

[1:13:00] Bob Dobbs: having a genius as a god-obsessed mania.

[1:13:04] Bob Dobbs: I think that phrase is in there.

[1:13:07] Cameron McEwen: That makes sense.

[1:13:09] Cameron McEwen: But he wouldn't have intended that.

[1:13:12] Cameron McEwen: As a compliment,

[1:13:13] Cameron McEwen: I don't think.

[1:13:13] Bob Dobbs: No,

[1:13:14] Bob Dobbs: but he recognized it and he suffered it himself.

[1:13:18] Cameron McEwen: Yes,

[1:13:19] Cameron McEwen: absolutely.

[1:13:20] Cameron McEwen: As one of the voices,

[1:13:21] Cameron McEwen: yeah,

[1:13:21] Cameron McEwen: absolutely.

[1:13:22] Bob Dobbs: And

[1:13:23] Bob Dobbs: I don't know what the other point was for right now.

[1:13:25] Bob Dobbs: So let's go.

[1:13:27] Cameron McEwen: Let me just say in regard to that essay that

[1:13:30] Cameron McEwen: I don't think that much of that was new in 1953.

[1:13:36] Cameron McEwen: I think what he did was take a bunch of stuff that he'd written earlier,

[1:13:39] Cameron McEwen: maybe even in the

[1:13:41] Cameron McEwen: 1940s.

[1:13:42] Cameron McEwen: and sort of chucked it together into an essay.

[1:13:47] Bob Dobbs: Well,

[1:13:47] Bob Dobbs: this is what Clinton's is discovering.

[1:13:50] Bob Dobbs: He's gotten access to stuff we can't see.

[1:13:54] Bob Dobbs: You've got to get special permission.

[1:13:56] Bob Dobbs: And he's just shocked at the crazy personality writer,

[1:14:01] Bob Dobbs: pissed-off person of the

[1:14:03] Bob Dobbs: 40s compared to the relaxed guy of the

[1:14:05] Bob Dobbs: 50s.

[1:14:07] Bob Dobbs: You know,

[1:14:08] Bob Dobbs: that's what

[1:14:08] Bob Dobbs: Clinton is shocked at.

[1:14:12] Bob Dobbs: So we get,

[1:14:13] Bob Dobbs: he reads little excerpts to us,

[1:14:15] Bob Dobbs: so it's pretty amazing.

[1:14:18] Bob Dobbs: So yes,

[1:14:19] Bob Dobbs: a lot of what's in Mechanical Bride,

[1:14:25] Bob Dobbs: which many older,

[1:14:27] Bob Dobbs: let's say angry people like Mechanical Bride.

[1:14:30] Bob Dobbs: It's old-fashioned peak.

[1:14:34] Bob Dobbs: But there's so much of it in the

[1:14:36] Bob Dobbs: 40s. Mechanical Bride was an outline,

[1:14:39] Bob Dobbs: a watered-down...

[1:14:40] Bob Dobbs: distillation of uh yeah very uh productive writing in the 40s in this temper you know that phrase temper ill temper uh superiority complex there was a guy obsessed or possessed by something uh in the 40s personal uh

[1:15:03] Bob Dobbs: personal possession um that may be all genius is somebody's got a

[1:15:10] Bob Dobbs: Allergy to stuff that most people aren't allergic to.

[1:15:13] Cameron McEwen: Correct.

[1:15:14] Cameron McEwen: Absolutely.

[1:15:15] Cameron McEwen: Absolutely.

[1:15:16] Cameron McEwen: But just think of...

[1:15:18] Cameron McEwen: McLuhan there,

[1:15:18] Cameron McEwen: he's got an allegiance to the church.

[1:15:22] Cameron McEwen: He's got an allegiance to his family.

[1:15:26] Cameron McEwen: But those conflict in a way that by teaching in a Catholic institution,

[1:15:35] Cameron McEwen: he's not making any money.

[1:15:38] Cameron McEwen: So he's crapping on his family in a certain way.

[1:15:44] Cameron McEwen: He's forcing a certain life on Corinne.

[1:15:47] Cameron McEwen: that isn't very comfortable.

[1:15:50] Cameron McEwen: I think somebody says somewhere that she didn't even have a vacuum cleaner,

[1:15:56] Cameron McEwen: right?

[1:15:58] Cameron McEwen: So he's got this large family to which he owes affection and allegiance,

[1:16:10] Cameron McEwen: and he somehow has to bring that into some kind of orchestration.

[1:16:18] Cameron McEwen: with his calling to be an artist.

[1:16:21] Cameron McEwen: And at the same time,

[1:16:22] Cameron McEwen: he really doesn't know what the hell he's doing.

[1:16:26] Cameron McEwen: He's got to find a whole new personality,

[1:16:28] Cameron McEwen: a whole anti-environment,

[1:16:31] Cameron McEwen: both for himself and for the family and for his students.

[1:16:36] Cameron McEwen: And he's wondering if he should even remain an academic.

[1:16:39] Cameron McEwen: Maybe he should throw in with Muller-Thym and become some sort of business guy,

[1:16:46] Cameron McEwen: right?

[1:16:47] Cameron McEwen: So there's a cauldron going on inside McLuhan that he has to try to orchestrate.

[1:16:55] Bob Dobbs: And then he loves Lewis's doctrine in brass that at mid-career you have to do a total backflip and become something else.

[1:17:03] Bob Dobbs: So he does that between the 40s and

[1:17:05] Bob Dobbs: 50s. He does the backflip and becomes another person,

[1:17:08] Bob Dobbs: which shocked people that knew him back then.

[1:17:13] Bob Dobbs: There was a famous critic in Montreal.

[1:17:15] Bob Dobbs: I went to his lecture.

[1:17:16] Bob Dobbs: in the late 60s at McGill and

[1:17:19] Bob Dobbs: Neil Compton or one of those other guys that are in Hot and Cool,

[1:17:24] Bob Dobbs: I think,

[1:17:24] Bob Dobbs: or Pro and Con.

[1:17:25] Bob Dobbs: And he was shocked at what the

[1:17:28] Bob Dobbs: 60s McLuhan was compared to the moralistic outrage guy of what he thought in the Mechanical Bride era.

[1:17:35] Bob Dobbs: He just thought,

[1:17:35] Bob Dobbs: what the hell?

[1:17:36] Bob Dobbs: He dropped all his morals.

[1:17:37] Bob Dobbs: He's accepting too much around him,

[1:17:39] Bob Dobbs: hanging out with

[1:17:42] Bob Dobbs: Hubert Humphrey.

[1:17:43] Bob Dobbs: This is what

[1:17:44] Bob Dobbs: Ted Carver objected to.

[1:17:47] Bob Dobbs: But McLuhan had found a way to be a flow,

[1:17:50] Bob Dobbs: to flow through all the different anti-environment.

[1:17:54] Bob Dobbs: He communicated on a broader scale.

[1:17:59] Bob Dobbs: I was told by Jim Stewart,

[1:18:02] Bob Dobbs: Marge Stewart's husband,

[1:18:03] Bob Dobbs: that when Eric was young,

[1:18:05] Bob Dobbs: if Eric was playing with little trucks and toys,

[1:18:08] Bob Dobbs: Marshall would come out and tromp on them.

[1:18:11] Bob Dobbs: He was so upset about some kid becoming a gadget lover.

[1:18:19] Cameron McEwen: Now,

[1:18:20] Cameron McEwen: that's very violent.

[1:18:22] Cameron McEwen: You know what I mean?

[1:18:24] Cameron McEwen: Yeah.

[1:18:24] Cameron McEwen: Absolutely.

[1:18:24] Cameron McEwen: By the way,

[1:18:24] Cameron McEwen: we brought up Mary a while back.

[1:18:27] Cameron McEwen: I meant to point out that the best man at McLuhan wedding was

[1:18:35] Cameron McEwen: Muller-Thym.

[1:18:37] Cameron McEwen: And then when Eric was born,

[1:18:41] Cameron McEwen: Muller-Thym was Eric's godfather.

[1:18:43] Bob Dobbs: Yeah.

[1:18:44] Cameron McEwen: And then when the twins were born.

[1:18:46] Cameron McEwen: They needed to run around and find grandparents,

[1:18:49] Cameron McEwen: and so

[1:18:50] Cameron McEwen: Muller-Thym was also the godfather of Mary.

[1:18:53] Bob Dobbs: Oh,

[1:18:53] Bob Dobbs: wow.

[1:18:55] Cameron McEwen: Yeah.

[1:18:56] Bob Dobbs: He was such an important person.

[1:18:57] Cameron McEwen: She died just a couple of years ago,

[1:18:59] Cameron McEwen: right?

[1:19:00] Bob Dobbs: She died on July 30th,

[1:19:01] Bob Dobbs: 31st,

[1:19:01] Bob Dobbs: 2019.

[1:19:05] Bob Dobbs: And

[1:19:06] Bob Dobbs: I hadn't talked to her in about six months,

[1:19:09] Bob Dobbs: and then I was away through July and August.

[1:19:11] Bob Dobbs: I got back on August 12th,

[1:19:13] Bob Dobbs: you know,

[1:19:14] Bob Dobbs: last year,

[1:19:14] Bob Dobbs: 2019.

[1:19:15] Bob Dobbs: And on the phone,

[1:19:17] Bob Dobbs: I have an old-fashioned phone,

[1:19:20] Bob Dobbs: you know,

[1:19:21] Bob Dobbs: it takes voicemails and landline stuff.

[1:19:26] Bob Dobbs: And she was asking me to get in touch with her.

[1:19:31] Bob Dobbs: And that was

[1:19:32] Bob Dobbs: July 25th.

[1:19:34] Bob Dobbs: And she said she wanted to discuss something.

[1:19:37] Bob Dobbs: So then I go and check my email,

[1:19:40] Bob Dobbs: and there's an announcement that Mary died five days later on July

[1:19:45] Bob Dobbs: 30th.

[1:19:46] Bob Dobbs: So I failed to meet my appointment with her before she died.

[1:19:52] Bob Dobbs: And then Eric had died just a year,

[1:19:56] Bob Dobbs: just a little over a year before,

[1:19:57] Bob Dobbs: in 2018.

[1:20:01] Bob Dobbs: So,

[1:20:02] Bob Dobbs: and

[1:20:04] Bob Dobbs: I would say Mary was very opposite to Eric.

[1:20:08] Bob Dobbs: They were very strong opposite personalities.

[1:20:12] Cameron McEwen: Correct.

[1:20:14] Bob Dobbs: And,

[1:20:14] Bob Dobbs: you know,

[1:20:14] Bob Dobbs: Eric was the son who remained a Catholic,

[1:20:17] Bob Dobbs: and...

[1:20:18] Bob Dobbs: took on his father's work and mary was the one that everybody in the family said was marshall's favorite among the girls yeah so uh the two favorite kids uh were quite um well eric was not extreme mary was mary was outgoing eric was more um

[1:20:38] Bob Dobbs: introverted i guess at least i saw him that way uh he may not have been that way i think he was i think he was yeah

[1:20:48] Bob Dobbs: But he was a jazz musician or played the piano.

[1:20:53] Cameron McEwen: Yeah,

[1:20:54] Cameron McEwen: one of the things about

[1:20:55] Cameron McEwen: Eric, I didn't know Eric as well as you did,

[1:20:57] Cameron McEwen: I would think,

[1:20:58] Cameron McEwen: but I knew him personally.

[1:20:59] Cameron McEwen: And one of the interesting things about Eric was that he could punctuate conversation or punctuate his life with surprising things,

[1:21:14] Cameron McEwen: surprising observations or a jump.

[1:21:17] Cameron McEwen: and that aspect of McLuhan he had.

[1:21:20] Bob Dobbs: Yeah.

[1:21:22] Bob Dobbs: Well,

[1:21:25] Bob Dobbs: Mary eventually,

[1:21:27] Bob Dobbs: well,

[1:21:27] Bob Dobbs: I visited her in 2013 up in Oregon.

[1:21:31] Bob Dobbs: She was living in some town that begins with M.

[1:21:36] Cameron McEwen: Ashland.

[1:21:37] Bob Dobbs: No,

[1:21:38] Bob Dobbs: she was in Ashland,

[1:21:38] Bob Dobbs: and then she moved to Medford or something.

[1:21:41] Bob Dobbs: Oh,

[1:21:41] Cameron McEwen: Medford,

[1:21:41] Cameron McEwen: yeah.

[1:21:42] Bob Dobbs: Yeah,

[1:21:42] Bob Dobbs: maybe Medford.

[1:21:43] Cameron McEwen: That's in the general area.

[1:21:46] Cameron McEwen: south of Oregon.

[1:21:47] Bob Dobbs: Yes,

[1:21:48] Bob Dobbs: and she told me that it was a drug dealing center for years.

[1:21:54] Bob Dobbs: Major drug dealers were there.

[1:21:56] Bob Dobbs: Anyways,

[1:21:57] Bob Dobbs: she had two friends acquaintances cleaning her house and this and that,

[1:22:02] Bob Dobbs: and after an evening of me interacting with her and the quote,

[1:22:07] Bob Dobbs: maids,

[1:22:09] Bob Dobbs: guy and girl,

[1:22:11] Bob Dobbs: she said to me the next day,

[1:22:13] Bob Dobbs: she said,

[1:22:13] Bob Dobbs: you know,

[1:22:13] Bob Dobbs: you're exactly like my father.

[1:22:15] Bob Dobbs: You can talk to anybody.

[1:22:17] Bob Dobbs: She was very impressed with how

[1:22:18] Bob Dobbs: I could talk to these two people,

[1:22:20] Bob Dobbs: who of course didn't know anything about what I was interested in,

[1:22:24] Bob Dobbs: and

[1:22:25] Bob Dobbs: Mary observed this.

[1:22:26] Bob Dobbs: So I thought that was interesting that

[1:22:29] Bob Dobbs: I had a bit of,

[1:22:30] Bob Dobbs: I understood Marshall's,

[1:22:33] Bob Dobbs: his going out and being congenial and interviewing everybody.

[1:22:37] Bob Dobbs: You know what I mean?

[1:22:38] Bob Dobbs: He would talk to people all over the place.

[1:22:40] Cameron McEwen: Yeah,

[1:22:40] Cameron McEwen: that's what I said earlier,

[1:22:42] Cameron McEwen: is that there is no one Bob.

[1:22:45] Bob Dobbs: Yeah.

[1:22:45] Cameron McEwen: A million different ones.

[1:22:47] Bob Dobbs: Yeah.

[1:22:48] Bob Dobbs: Hippocrite Lecter.

[1:22:49] Bob Dobbs: Hippocrite social,

[1:22:50] Bob Dobbs: what would it be for social mixing?

[1:22:52] Bob Dobbs: Hippocrite social mixer.

[1:22:56] Bob Dobbs: You know that quote from

[1:22:57] Bob Dobbs: Baudelaire? Hippocrite Lecter?

[1:22:59] Bob Dobbs: Yeah,

[1:22:59] Bob Dobbs: of course.

[1:22:59] Bob Dobbs: Yeah,

[1:23:00] Cameron McEwen: yeah,

[1:23:00] Cameron McEwen: yeah.

[1:23:01] Bob Dobbs: Okay,

[1:23:01] Bob Dobbs: I want you to go into the beginning of the book.

[1:23:04] Bob Dobbs: I want to see how you try to go somewhere with the beginning.

[1:23:13] Bob Dobbs: How do we get out of the cul-de-sac or how I attempt to do it?

[1:23:19] Cameron McEwen: Well,

[1:23:19] Cameron McEwen: I mean,

[1:23:20] Cameron McEwen: I think that's something that you should enlighten me on,

[1:23:23] Cameron McEwen: not me enlighten you,

[1:23:24] Bob Dobbs: but your book.

[1:23:28] Bob Dobbs: Let's see.

[1:23:29] Cameron McEwen: You start off by talking about arrogant superiority.

[1:23:34] Bob Dobbs: Yes.

[1:23:35] Cameron McEwen: And we've talked a little bit today about...

[1:23:40] Cameron McEwen: the refusal of the vertical.

[1:23:44] Cameron McEwen: And so then the question becomes,

[1:23:47] Cameron McEwen: how do we understand these things together?

[1:23:52] Cameron McEwen: How can you have arrogant superiority without sort of throwing your allegiance onto verticality?

[1:24:00] Cameron McEwen: Right.

[1:24:02] Bob Dobbs: And remember,

[1:24:03] Bob Dobbs: this is all applied to understanding Donald Trump.

[1:24:08] Cameron McEwen: Yeah.

[1:24:09] Bob Dobbs: That's what the book's called,

[1:24:10] Bob Dobbs: What We Slash You Didn't Know About Trump.

[1:24:14] Cameron McEwen: Right.

[1:24:15] Bob Dobbs: And there is this,

[1:24:16] Bob Dobbs: have you seen that other article by someone none of us know,

[1:24:21] Bob Dobbs: who wrote about

[1:24:23] Bob Dobbs: Trump reading McLuhan interview in Playboy when Trump was 23,

[1:24:29] Bob Dobbs: and what a quick mind or quick whatever it was that he had,

[1:24:34] Bob Dobbs: maybe acquiring knowledge superficially.

[1:24:38] Bob Dobbs: But he got key points from McLuhan that created his public personality when he went into politics.

[1:24:48] Bob Dobbs: Have you seen that essay?

[1:24:50] Cameron McEwen: No.

[1:24:51] Cameron McEwen: Is it that

[1:24:52] Cameron McEwen: New Explorations or where is it?

[1:24:54] Bob Dobbs: No,

[1:24:55] Bob Dobbs: it's online.

[1:24:57] Bob Dobbs: It's just

[1:24:58] Bob Dobbs: Playboy, McLuhan and Trump.

[1:25:01] Bob Dobbs: I can send it to you,

[1:25:02] Bob Dobbs: but it's something called Windows.

[1:25:06] Cameron McEwen: Okay,

[1:25:07] Cameron McEwen: I know that guy,

[1:25:08] Cameron McEwen: yeah.

[1:25:09] Cameron McEwen: I mean,

[1:25:10] Cameron McEwen: I know of him.

[1:25:11] Cameron McEwen: I certainly don't know who he is or where he is,

[1:25:13] Cameron McEwen: but no,

[1:25:14] Cameron McEwen: I know that website.

[1:25:15] Cameron McEwen: I'll look it up.

[1:25:16] Bob Dobbs: Yeah,

[1:25:17] Bob Dobbs: but you haven't read that article.

[1:25:20] Bob Dobbs: Yeah,

[1:25:20] Bob Dobbs: like the way Trump is discontinuous,

[1:25:24] Bob Dobbs: he saw

[1:25:25] Bob Dobbs: McLuhan sort of talking about it probably as a value,

[1:25:29] Bob Dobbs: Trump interpreted it as,

[1:25:31] Bob Dobbs: in the Playboy interview,

[1:25:33] Bob Dobbs: and a whole bunch of other factors.

[1:25:35] Bob Dobbs: And I noticed the guy quoted a couple of quotes that I'm probably the only one who puts out there.

[1:25:42] Bob Dobbs: So he may have been influenced,

[1:25:44] Bob Dobbs: my essay,

[1:25:45] Bob Dobbs: on McLuhan as a quadrophrenia person,

[1:25:48] Bob Dobbs: quadrophrenia.

[1:25:50] Bob Dobbs: So,

[1:25:50] Bob Dobbs: anyways,

[1:25:51] Bob Dobbs: I wanted to do a better version of that guy's essay.

[1:25:56] Bob Dobbs: You know what I mean?

[1:25:58] Bob Dobbs: Make it broader and bigger and bring it up to the present.

[1:26:02] Bob Dobbs: So

[1:26:03] Bob Dobbs: I'm going to explain Trump by going through the six phases,

[1:26:08] Bob Dobbs: global village,

[1:26:09] Bob Dobbs: global theater,

[1:26:09] Bob Dobbs: global membrane,

[1:26:10] Bob Dobbs: or Android Meme phase one,

[1:26:12] Bob Dobbs: Android Meme phase two,

[1:26:14] Bob Dobbs: then the answer for market physical,

[1:26:16] Bob Dobbs: and then the tech body.

[1:26:21] Bob Dobbs: And so once again,

[1:26:25] Cameron McEwen: the big difference between us is that

[1:26:29] Cameron McEwen: I always want to know how these things are contemporaneous.

[1:26:34] Cameron McEwen: And with you,

[1:26:36] Cameron McEwen: they're more linear.

[1:26:38] Cameron McEwen: And we are driving a nonlinear personality,

[1:26:42] Bob Dobbs: Trump,

[1:26:44] Bob Dobbs: nonlinear world.

[1:26:46] Bob Dobbs: But I have to.

[1:26:47] Bob Dobbs: I don't normally write something,

[1:26:51] Bob Dobbs: okay?

[1:26:52] Bob Dobbs: So it's a minor sidebar for me to go linear.

[1:26:57] Bob Dobbs: So I don't think I should be criticized as that's me.

[1:27:00] Bob Dobbs: I'm not a linear person.

[1:27:03] Cameron McEwen: I'm not criticizing.

[1:27:05] Cameron McEwen: What I'm trying to do is put my finger on something that's very difficult.

[1:27:13] Cameron McEwen: to understand.

[1:27:14] Cameron McEwen: It doesn't matter if we're talking about McLuhan or anything else.

[1:27:18] Cameron McEwen: And that is that it's not the case that there's only all-at-onceness.

[1:27:24] Cameron McEwen: And it's not the case that there's only linearity.

[1:27:28] Cameron McEwen: It's that there's both.

[1:27:30] Cameron McEwen: And the whole calling of human beings is to try to understand that duplicity between times.

[1:27:42] Bob Dobbs: Okay,

[1:27:42] Bob Dobbs: but I would say the Gutenberg Galaxy made people reduce it to those two.

[1:27:50] Bob Dobbs: Pre-literate people like Julian James was trying to say,

[1:27:53] Bob Dobbs: multiple voices,

[1:27:55] Bob Dobbs: they had more conflict than the eye versus the ear,

[1:27:58] Bob Dobbs: say,

[1:27:59] Bob Dobbs: or discontinuity versus linear.

[1:28:03] Bob Dobbs: That could be only seen and experienced by Gutenberg people.

[1:28:11] Bob Dobbs: What do you think?

[1:28:13] Cameron McEwen: I'm not sure I understand.

[1:28:16] Bob Dobbs: You're saying the two conversations,

[1:28:19] Bob Dobbs: eye and ear,

[1:28:20] Bob Dobbs: and he puts that in his books,

[1:28:22] Bob Dobbs: but those are books.

[1:28:23] Bob Dobbs: See,

[1:28:23] Bob Dobbs: when he puts eye,

[1:28:24] Bob Dobbs: comma,

[1:28:24] Bob Dobbs: ear,

[1:28:25] Bob Dobbs: visual space,

[1:28:26] Bob Dobbs: all these dialectics,

[1:28:27] Bob Dobbs: he emphasizes them in books because the book is dialectical,

[1:28:33] Bob Dobbs: and it splits things.

[1:28:34] Bob Dobbs: So he mimes the method of the book or the bias of the book.

[1:28:39] Bob Dobbs: So you think it's an eye versus ear,

[1:28:41] Bob Dobbs: but it's the other senses that he's dealing with when he's not writing,

[1:28:45] Bob Dobbs: when he's talking or teaching or walking around or performing in various happenings.

[1:28:51] Bob Dobbs: He's dealing with the proprioceptive,

[1:28:53] Bob Dobbs: the kinetic,

[1:28:54] Bob Dobbs: the osmic,

[1:28:56] Bob Dobbs: the tactile,

[1:28:58] Bob Dobbs: the synesthetic.

[1:28:59] Bob Dobbs: You know,

[1:29:00] Bob Dobbs: he's not a dialectician.

[1:29:03] Cameron McEwen: Correct.

[1:29:03] Cameron McEwen: And I like the...

[1:29:12] Cameron McEwen: I don't want to say the direction you're going with this,

[1:29:14] Cameron McEwen: but I will say it.

[1:29:16] Cameron McEwen: The direction you're going with that,

[1:29:17] Cameron McEwen: I think,

[1:29:18] Cameron McEwen: is very interesting,

[1:29:20] Cameron McEwen: right?

[1:29:20] Cameron McEwen: Because it leads to exactly the ball of problems that I was just speaking about.

[1:29:30] Bob Dobbs: Yeah.

[1:29:31] Cameron McEwen: Of the linear and the nonlinear and trying to do justice to both.

[1:29:38] Bob Dobbs: The third thing,

[1:29:39] Bob Dobbs: the in-between thing is the tactile,

[1:29:41] Bob Dobbs: the phatic,

[1:29:42] Bob Dobbs: the ESP,

[1:29:43] Bob Dobbs: the second sight.

[1:29:44] Bob Dobbs: That's maybe what I'm saying outside of the books.

[1:29:48] Cameron McEwen: Yeah,

[1:29:49] Cameron McEwen: no,

[1:29:49] Cameron McEwen: I think that's exactly what you're saying,

[1:29:51] Cameron McEwen: and it's very interesting.

[1:29:56] Cameron McEwen: We could even go to Joyce here and say that human beings are called to a certain kind of...

[1:30:06] Cameron McEwen: justice between all these different voices,

[1:30:10] Cameron McEwen: but at the same time are incapable of that justice.

[1:30:15] Bob Dobbs: Right.

[1:30:15] Bob Dobbs: Is that in that actual quote?

[1:30:18] Cameron McEwen: No,

[1:30:18] Cameron McEwen: no.

[1:30:19] Bob Dobbs: Okay.

[1:30:19] Bob Dobbs: No,

[1:30:19] Cameron McEwen: no,

[1:30:19] Cameron McEwen: no.

[1:30:19] Bob Dobbs: You're summarizing.

[1:30:21] Cameron McEwen: Yeah,

[1:30:21] Cameron McEwen: it's like the fall of man.

[1:30:23] Cameron McEwen: Right.

[1:30:24] Cameron McEwen: Then again,

[1:30:25] Cameron McEwen: it takes place through that dynamic.

[1:30:29] Bob Dobbs: Yeah.

[1:30:32] Bob Dobbs: When McLuhan said in Hot and Cool,

[1:30:34] Bob Dobbs: I think it was,

[1:30:34] Bob Dobbs: that communication on the matching level was very rare.

[1:30:40] Bob Dobbs: Did anybody else ever say something like that?

[1:30:44] Bob Dobbs: They talked maybe in terms of values,

[1:30:46] Bob Dobbs: sin or something.

[1:30:48] Bob Dobbs: People just aren't tolerant enough or they don't listen enough.

[1:30:52] Bob Dobbs: But McLuhan said,

[1:30:53] Bob Dobbs: no,

[1:30:54] Bob Dobbs: communication is very hard.

[1:30:56] Bob Dobbs: It's innate.

[1:30:57] Cameron McEwen: Right.

[1:30:59] Bob Dobbs: You know?

[1:30:59] Cameron McEwen: Yes.

[1:31:00] Cameron McEwen: Yeah.

[1:31:00] Cameron McEwen: Imagine something being innate that was hard,

[1:31:04] Cameron McEwen: right?

[1:31:06] Cameron McEwen: That's a conundrum right there.

[1:31:07] Bob Dobbs: Innate that was hard,

[1:31:09] Bob Dobbs: did you say?

[1:31:10] Bob Dobbs: H-A-R-D?

[1:31:11] Cameron McEwen: Yeah.

[1:31:12] Bob Dobbs: Yeah.

[1:31:12] Cameron McEwen: So,

[1:31:12] Cameron McEwen: for example,

[1:31:13] Cameron McEwen: you could say breathing is innate to humans.

[1:31:17] Bob Dobbs: Yeah.

[1:31:18] Cameron McEwen: But therefore,

[1:31:19] Cameron McEwen: it's not hard,

[1:31:20] Cameron McEwen: right?

[1:31:21] Cameron McEwen: But what McLuhan is talking about is something that's innate that is hard.

[1:31:25] Bob Dobbs: Right.

[1:31:25] Bob Dobbs: And in the final,

[1:31:28] Bob Dobbs: one of the final,

[1:31:29] Bob Dobbs: maybe the final recorded interview,

[1:31:31] Bob Dobbs: Nelson found it from somebody.

[1:31:33] Bob Dobbs: He's out there in

[1:31:35] Bob Dobbs: Las Vegas or someplace at a conference in like May

[1:31:39] Bob Dobbs: 79. So he's going to have his stroke in a couple of months.

[1:31:43] Bob Dobbs: And he was telling the interviewer that he was more involved in.

[1:31:47] Bob Dobbs: suffering,

[1:31:48] Bob Dobbs: not happiness.

[1:31:49] Bob Dobbs: He says,

[1:31:49] Bob Dobbs: I am not desiring to be happy.

[1:31:53] Bob Dobbs: And he went on about his suffering and struggle that way.

[1:31:58] Bob Dobbs: Maybe that's an acknowledgement of the herd.

[1:32:01] Cameron McEwen: Absolutely.

[1:32:03] Cameron McEwen: His whole life long,

[1:32:04] Cameron McEwen: he said that happiness was not something that he cared about and wasn't aiming for a professor.

[1:32:17] Cameron McEwen: A professor

[1:32:19] Cameron McEwen: I once had wrote an essay called,

[1:32:22] Cameron McEwen: Happiness is for Pigs.

[1:32:25] Bob Dobbs: For pigs.

[1:32:25] Cameron McEwen: Herman Tennyson.

[1:32:28] Bob Dobbs: Okay,

[1:32:29] Bob Dobbs: but it's not a sentiment among people.

[1:32:32] Bob Dobbs: I mean,

[1:32:32] Bob Dobbs: the whole educational culture is to make you find your role,

[1:32:35] Bob Dobbs: your job,

[1:32:36] Bob Dobbs: to make you happy,

[1:32:37] Bob Dobbs: right?

[1:32:38] Bob Dobbs: That's the whole bias of,

[1:32:40] Bob Dobbs: I don't know,

[1:32:40] Bob Dobbs: bourgeois culture or something.

[1:32:42] Cameron McEwen: But imagine if you're a father of four kids.

[1:32:47] Cameron McEwen: then five kids,

[1:32:48] Cameron McEwen: then six kids.

[1:32:51] Cameron McEwen: One of the most important things you have to do in life is instill a sense of happiness in your children.

[1:33:01] Cameron McEwen: Yeah.

[1:33:02] Cameron McEwen: Right?

[1:33:02] Cameron McEwen: Yeah.

[1:33:03] Cameron McEwen: And you have to do this not only for them,

[1:33:05] Cameron McEwen: but for your wife.

[1:33:06] Bob Dobbs: Yeah.

[1:33:07] Cameron McEwen: And for her relationship to the children and stuff like that,

[1:33:10] Cameron McEwen: right?

[1:33:10] Cameron McEwen: So the tensions in McLuhan as a result of...

[1:33:16] Cameron McEwen: what we're talking about here,

[1:33:17] Cameron McEwen: not caring at all about happiness.

[1:33:20] Cameron McEwen: And yet,

[1:33:21] Cameron McEwen: having to have that as one of the main goals in your life as regards your kids and your wife,

[1:33:28] Cameron McEwen: that's a difficult situation.

[1:33:30] Bob Dobbs: Yeah,

[1:33:30] Bob Dobbs: so when he breaks Eric's toys,

[1:33:33] Bob Dobbs: he's not concerned about Eric's happiness.

[1:33:37] Bob Dobbs: He wants to wake Eric up.

[1:33:39] Bob Dobbs: In a sense,

[1:33:40] Bob Dobbs: he didn't think children were incapable of developing critical faculties.

[1:33:46] Bob Dobbs: Right.

[1:33:48] Cameron McEwen: But as you said before,

[1:33:50] Cameron McEwen: I mean,

[1:33:51] Cameron McEwen: this is almost insane,

[1:33:52] Cameron McEwen: right?

[1:33:53] Bob Dobbs: Yeah.

[1:33:54] Cameron McEwen: How do you bring up a child to be,

[1:34:00] Cameron McEwen: you know,

[1:34:00] Cameron McEwen: sort of a happy participant in the world by stomping on their toys?

[1:34:09] Bob Dobbs: You know,

[1:34:10] Bob Dobbs: but that's the cliche.

[1:34:13] Bob Dobbs: Genius is very close to madness.

[1:34:15] Bob Dobbs: I like what I said a little earlier.

[1:34:17] Bob Dobbs: They've got an allergy.

[1:34:19] Bob Dobbs: Mozart's got an ear allergy,

[1:34:21] Bob Dobbs: right?

[1:34:21] Bob Dobbs: He can't take normal soundscapes,

[1:34:24] Bob Dobbs: so he has to beautify it somehow or fix it.

[1:34:27] Bob Dobbs: I think Zappa was like that too.

[1:34:30] Bob Dobbs: But,

[1:34:30] Bob Dobbs: you know,

[1:34:30] Bob Dobbs: any sense,

[1:34:31] Bob Dobbs: and then you have a genius of that sense and their art forms,

[1:34:35] Bob Dobbs: they're allergic to it.

[1:34:38] Bob Dobbs: McLuhan has at the end of War and Peace...

[1:34:41] Bob Dobbs: uh they asked mozart you know what music do you like and he said no music they actually an artist is someone who invades a particular sense modality and fuck with it they don't like it they want to ruin it for other people yeah

[1:35:00] Cameron McEwen: well i mean that's a if you if you think of uh mozart on one end of a spectrum and modern art on the other end of the spectrum then

[1:35:10] Cameron McEwen: You have somebody who almost instinctively can bring delight to anybody.

[1:35:19] Cameron McEwen: And that's Mozart.

[1:35:20] Cameron McEwen: And then on the other end,

[1:35:22] Cameron McEwen: you have people who are repulsed by delight.

[1:35:27] Bob Dobbs: Yes.

[1:35:28] Cameron McEwen: And there we are.

[1:35:29] Bob Dobbs: I just read a quote by that recently died,

[1:35:35] Bob Dobbs: or he died maybe 10 years ago,

[1:35:36] Bob Dobbs: Wallace or

[1:35:37] Bob Dobbs: David somebody.

[1:35:38] Bob Dobbs: He was the best novelist for the

[1:35:44] Bob Dobbs: Generation X.

[1:35:45] Bob Dobbs: David somebody

[1:35:46] Bob Dobbs: Wallace or something.

[1:35:47] Bob Dobbs: Forget his name.

[1:35:50] Bob Dobbs: he was a very popular novelist for his generation then he died but he said the writer uh is um really desiring to be liked but at the same time he hates the reader so

[1:36:07] Bob Dobbs: that would tend to make you a manipulant writer you're trying to get people to like you and what you're writing but at the same time you hate the reader now that sounds uh

[1:36:17] Bob Dobbs: That's McLuhan and maybe most artists.

[1:36:21] Bob Dobbs: They hate their medium.

[1:36:24] Bob Dobbs: They're very divided.

[1:36:25] Bob Dobbs: Okay,

[1:36:26] Bob Dobbs: so if humans are always divided and conflicted,

[1:36:30] Bob Dobbs: the genius is someone who takes some aspect of the human faculties and heightens,

[1:36:35] Bob Dobbs: exaggerates the division,

[1:36:38] Bob Dobbs: the contradiction,

[1:36:39] Bob Dobbs: the battle.

[1:36:40] Cameron McEwen: Well,

[1:36:41] Cameron McEwen: I mean,

[1:36:42] Cameron McEwen: that's one,

[1:36:43] Cameron McEwen: you could say,

[1:36:44] Cameron McEwen: one way to get out of the cul-de-sac.

[1:36:46] Cameron McEwen: is what you're describing,

[1:36:48] Cameron McEwen: to attempt that.

[1:36:49] Bob Dobbs: Yeah.

[1:36:50] Cameron McEwen: Right?

[1:36:51] Cameron McEwen: But

[1:36:51] Cameron McEwen: McLuhan way to get out of the cul-de-sac is different from that.

[1:36:58] Cameron McEwen: And that's because what you're talking about there is,

[1:37:03] Cameron McEwen: let's say you have a conflict between the vertical and the horizontal,

[1:37:07] Cameron McEwen: you're saying,

[1:37:07] Cameron McEwen: well,

[1:37:09] Cameron McEwen: we'll just emphasize the horizontal or we'll just emphasize the vertical,

[1:37:14] Cameron McEwen: right?

[1:37:14] Cameron McEwen: You're saying that...

[1:37:16] Cameron McEwen: The artist is going to take some definitive position on some sense or some medium.

[1:37:24] Cameron McEwen: But

[1:37:25] Cameron McEwen: McLuhan answer is to see the cul-de-sac as one voice,

[1:37:33] Cameron McEwen: or at least as the result of one voice,

[1:37:37] Cameron McEwen: or perhaps you could say of a certain number of voices,

[1:37:42] Cameron McEwen: but that are optional.

[1:37:46] Cameron McEwen: were able to get away from those voices,

[1:37:49] Cameron McEwen: not by denying them,

[1:37:51] Cameron McEwen: but by seeing the wider spectrum in which they have their role.

[1:37:56] Bob Dobbs: Well,

[1:37:57] Bob Dobbs: seeing it as anti-environment which hadn't been seen before.

[1:38:03] Bob Dobbs: So he sees anti-environment,

[1:38:07] Bob Dobbs: doesn't get him out of the cul-de-sac.

[1:38:09] Cameron McEwen: Yeah,

[1:38:10] Cameron McEwen: it does,

[1:38:10] Cameron McEwen: because what

[1:38:14] Cameron McEwen: McLuhan...

[1:38:15] Cameron McEwen: insists in his conversations with

[1:38:18] Cameron McEwen: Harry Skornia is that there's no such thing as a medium.

[1:38:25] Cameron McEwen: All there is is media and if you want to understand the medium,

[1:38:29] Cameron McEwen: you have to understand its relationship to media.

[1:38:33] Cameron McEwen: And it's the same thing anti-environment.

[1:38:35] Cameron McEwen: There is no such thing as anti-environment.

[1:38:38] Cameron McEwen: Everything that McLuhan writes about from the very beginning to the very end has to

[1:38:44] Cameron McEwen: to do with multiple approaches,

[1:38:47] Cameron McEwen: you could say,

[1:38:48] Cameron McEwen: multiple anti-environment.

[1:38:50] Cameron McEwen: And the idea is that you can only understand one of them by understanding their family.

[1:39:00] Cameron McEwen: So if you want to understand what some dialectician says in the

[1:39:07] Cameron McEwen: 1200s, you have to understand that dialectical text.

[1:39:13] Cameron McEwen: against the trivium.

[1:39:17] Bob Dobbs: Say it again,

[1:39:18] Bob Dobbs: the dialectical text against the trivium?

[1:39:21] Cameron McEwen: Yeah,

[1:39:21] Cameron McEwen: you have to understand it as a kind of selection,

[1:39:25] Cameron McEwen: not necessarily a conscious selection,

[1:39:27] Cameron McEwen: but if you want to understand dialectics in any text,

[1:39:32] Cameron McEwen: you have to understand that a series of choices have been made to get to that point.

[1:39:40] Cameron McEwen: A series of not necessarily

[1:39:42] Cameron McEwen: Conscious choices and certainly not linear choices.

[1:39:49] Cameron McEwen: Choices that are synchronic and largely unconscious have brought somebody from the possibilities of the trivium to the particular concentration on dialectics.

[1:40:04] Cameron McEwen: And that way of looking at things is pretty much a constant for McLuhan from 1940 to...

[1:40:12] Cameron McEwen: 1980.

[1:40:13] Bob Dobbs: Yeah,

[1:40:13] Bob Dobbs: now you said you're seeing the service of the univocal?

[1:40:17] Bob Dobbs: Did you suggest that in there?

[1:40:19] Bob Dobbs: a couple of minutes ago?

[1:40:22] Cameron McEwen: I didn't use that phrase,

[1:40:24] Cameron McEwen: but it certainly is closely related to what I'm talking about.

[1:40:28] Bob Dobbs: Okay,

[1:40:28] Bob Dobbs: so in the early

[1:40:29] Bob Dobbs: 50s, maybe in Explorations,

[1:40:32] Bob Dobbs: he wrote about what's the role of the book in our culture.

[1:40:36] Bob Dobbs: I think he figured out how to rejuvenate the book.

[1:40:40] Bob Dobbs: He felt that he found a new thing to write about in a different way that got people reading again.

[1:40:48] Bob Dobbs: or reading intensely.

[1:40:52] Bob Dobbs: So when he said,

[1:40:53] Bob Dobbs: you know,

[1:40:55] Bob Dobbs: he doesn't say that I solved the problem,

[1:40:57] Bob Dobbs: but he says,

[1:40:58] Bob Dobbs: what is the role of the book?

[1:40:59] Bob Dobbs: It's obviously obsolete in so many ways,

[1:41:02] Bob Dobbs: obsolete in the different meanings of obsolete,

[1:41:06] Bob Dobbs: and it's not constitutive.

[1:41:08] Bob Dobbs: So why have a book?

[1:41:09] Bob Dobbs: Why do books?

[1:41:11] Bob Dobbs: I think he felt he had solved,

[1:41:12] Bob Dobbs: that's the E equals MC squared question or whatever.

[1:41:16] Bob Dobbs: He came up with a formula.

[1:41:18] Bob Dobbs: of how to use books to probe people and be long-lasting,

[1:41:24] Bob Dobbs: to be,

[1:41:25] Bob Dobbs: well,

[1:41:25] Bob Dobbs: I guess,

[1:41:26] Bob Dobbs: enter the world of philosophy or the classical questions.

[1:41:30] Bob Dobbs: So what do you think of that idea,

[1:41:32] Bob Dobbs: that he saw the role of the book?

[1:41:34] Cameron McEwen: No,

[1:41:34] Cameron McEwen: I think that's very,

[1:41:35] Cameron McEwen: very important,

[1:41:36] Cameron McEwen: and

[1:41:37] Cameron McEwen: I would rephrase it in the following way.

[1:41:41] Cameron McEwen: McLuhan saw the book as central to

[1:41:44] Cameron McEwen: Western civilization.

[1:41:46] Cameron McEwen: He saw Western civilization as central to private identity,

[1:41:51] Cameron McEwen: democracy,

[1:41:54] Cameron McEwen: everything that we hold dear.

[1:41:56] Bob Dobbs: Yeah,

[1:41:56] Bob Dobbs: and Christianity.

[1:41:59] Cameron McEwen: So then,

[1:42:01] Cameron McEwen: if the book is that central to our civilized lives,

[1:42:10] Cameron McEwen: and if the book is dying,

[1:42:13] Cameron McEwen: then if we want to protect

[1:42:16] Cameron McEwen: our civilization and rejuvenate it,

[1:42:19] Cameron McEwen: then we have to find what you just called a new role for the book.

[1:42:24] Cameron McEwen: And how do we find a new role for the book?

[1:42:26] Cameron McEwen: Well,

[1:42:26] Cameron McEwen: we find that the meaning of the book derives from the spectrum of media.

[1:42:38] Cameron McEwen: And by understanding that spectrum of media,

[1:42:42] Cameron McEwen: and by understanding the virtues of...

[1:42:46] Cameron McEwen: the different components of the spectrum,

[1:42:50] Cameron McEwen: we come to value the book in a whole new way.

[1:42:53] Cameron McEwen: It's not an exclusive valuation anymore.

[1:42:56] Cameron McEwen: It's an inclusive valuation.

[1:43:02] Cameron McEwen: Inclusive in McLuhan always means two-sided that are in dialogue.

[1:43:07] Cameron McEwen: That's what inclusion is.

[1:43:09] Cameron McEwen: An exclusion is two-sided,

[1:43:12] Cameron McEwen: not in dialogue.

[1:43:16] Bob Dobbs: Okay,

[1:43:16] Bob Dobbs: so he felt...

[1:43:18] Bob Dobbs: Oh,

[1:43:18] Bob Dobbs: okay,

[1:43:18] Bob Dobbs: you want to say some more?

[1:43:20] Cameron McEwen: No,

[1:43:20] Cameron McEwen: no,

[1:43:20] Cameron McEwen: go ahead.

[1:43:21] Cameron McEwen: I coughed.

[1:43:22] Cameron McEwen: Oh,

[1:43:22] Cameron McEwen: okay.

[1:43:23] Cameron McEwen: Excuse me.

[1:43:24] Bob Dobbs: Okay,

[1:43:25] Bob Dobbs: so he saw Finnegans Wake solve that problem,

[1:43:29] Bob Dobbs: but he had to translate it.

[1:43:31] Bob Dobbs: But he indicated that Joyce thought he solved it on page 52 where it says,

[1:43:36] Bob Dobbs: television kills...

[1:43:38] Bob Dobbs: This is in Finnegans Wake.

[1:43:38] Bob Dobbs: Television kills telephony and brothers' broil.

[1:43:41] Bob Dobbs: The eyes demand their turn.

[1:43:43] Bob Dobbs: The book demands its turn.

[1:43:45] Bob Dobbs: Let them be seen.

[1:43:47] Bob Dobbs: So McLuhan wrote a book about what the book does to the eyes and the act of seeing and showing you how the eyes are seen.

[1:43:56] Bob Dobbs: So let them,

[1:43:58] Bob Dobbs: the eyes demand their turn.

[1:43:59] Bob Dobbs: Let them be seen.

[1:44:01] Bob Dobbs: That's a statement of what I was just talking about,

[1:44:03] Bob Dobbs: solving the book problem.

[1:44:05] Cameron McEwen: Correct.

[1:44:05] Cameron McEwen: We were both talking about that.

[1:44:07] Bob Dobbs: Yeah.

[1:44:07] Cameron McEwen: Because just as I was talking about the book as a component of the spectrum of media.

[1:44:14] Cameron McEwen: So is the eye a component of the sensory spectrum?

[1:44:19] Cameron McEwen: And the way to value the eye,

[1:44:21] Cameron McEwen: according to McLuhan,

[1:44:23] Cameron McEwen: is not to see it as the dominant sense or the sacred sense or something like that.

[1:44:32] Cameron McEwen: It's to see it in terms of the spectrum where it has its particular use.

[1:44:39] Cameron McEwen: If we think in terms of chemistry,

[1:44:41] Cameron McEwen: it's absurd to think that

[1:44:44] Cameron McEwen: Some elements are better than another,

[1:44:46] Cameron McEwen: but it's not absurd to think that for some purposes an element is better.

[1:44:52] Cameron McEwen: If you want to breathe,

[1:44:55] Cameron McEwen: I'd advise you to get some oxygen.

[1:44:59] Bob Dobbs: Have you seen the quote?

[1:45:03] Bob Dobbs: Actually,

[1:45:03] Bob Dobbs: I just forgot what it was.

[1:45:05] Bob Dobbs: Let me think for a second.

[1:45:08] Bob Dobbs: We were just talking about the

[1:45:10] Bob Dobbs: I and the value of the

[1:45:12] Bob Dobbs: I.

[1:45:15] Bob Dobbs: I may have lost it.

[1:45:17] Cameron McEwen: The rare quote.

[1:45:18] Cameron McEwen: Spectrum or in relation to the book.

[1:45:21] Cameron McEwen: The role of the eye.

[1:45:28] Cameron McEwen: You were talking about the quote out of,

[1:45:31] Cameron McEwen: I think it was from Counterpast,

[1:45:32] Cameron McEwen: about

[1:45:33] Cameron McEwen: brothers' broil.

[1:45:35] Bob Dobbs: Well,

[1:45:35] Bob Dobbs: that's from page 52 of Finnegans Wake,

[1:45:37] Bob Dobbs: but he quotes it a lot throughout the years.

[1:45:39] Cameron McEwen: Yeah,

[1:45:39] Cameron McEwen: but it's quoted by McLuhan.

[1:45:41] Bob Dobbs: Yeah,

[1:45:42] Bob Dobbs: it's almost his favorite quote from Finnegans Wake.

[1:45:45] Bob Dobbs: The eyes demand their turn,

[1:45:47] Bob Dobbs: let them be seen.

[1:45:48] Bob Dobbs: Okay,

[1:45:48] Bob Dobbs: I can't remember right now.

[1:45:49] Bob Dobbs: It'll probably come back.

[1:45:51] Bob Dobbs: So

[1:45:52] Bob Dobbs: I'm looking at my book and

[1:45:55] Bob Dobbs: I'm going to explain the tech body,

[1:45:58] Bob Dobbs: which refers to something no one knows about,

[1:46:02] Bob Dobbs: unless they talk to ION.

[1:46:04] Bob Dobbs: ION came up with the term and to keep it part of the mysterious,

[1:46:09] Bob Dobbs: I'm not even going to explain what ION is.

[1:46:12] Bob Dobbs: The point is,

[1:46:13] Bob Dobbs: I want to show that McLuhan predicted the tech body.

[1:46:20] Bob Dobbs: Which is what I said,

[1:46:21] Bob Dobbs: that McLuhan,

[1:46:22] Bob Dobbs: his greatest achievement was predicting the tech body.

[1:46:25] Bob Dobbs: Yeah,

[1:46:25] Bob Dobbs: but nobody knows what the tech body is unless you listen to my impression.

[1:46:32] Cameron McEwen: This is a side of your thought that I really don't know much about.

[1:46:35] Cameron McEwen: But my impression is that you've always had a series of what might be called animated fates.

[1:46:47] Cameron McEwen: Right.

[1:46:47] Cameron McEwen: So animated what?

[1:46:50] Cameron McEwen: Fates?

[1:46:51] Cameron McEwen: Fate.

[1:46:52] Cameron McEwen: F-A-T-E.

[1:46:53] Cameron McEwen: Fate.

[1:46:54] Cameron McEwen: Animated fates.

[1:46:56] Cameron McEwen: Some people have an understanding of what a fate might be like,

[1:47:00] Cameron McEwen: but they don't think of it in terms of animation.

[1:47:03] Bob Dobbs: Right.

[1:47:04] Cameron McEwen: Whereas you very much like the idea of what might be called a non-human animation.

[1:47:14] Bob Dobbs: Okay.

[1:47:15] Bob Dobbs: Yeah.

[1:47:15] Cameron McEwen: Right.

[1:47:15] Cameron McEwen: And it seems to me that...

[1:47:19] Cameron McEwen: Back in the 80s already,

[1:47:22] Cameron McEwen: I think you were talking about

[1:47:24] Cameron McEwen: Rumpelstiltskin. Yep.

[1:47:25] Cameron McEwen: Right?

[1:47:26] Cameron McEwen: And then you were talking about the Android Meme.

[1:47:29] Bob Dobbs: Yes.

[1:47:30] Cameron McEwen: And I see the tech body as sort of...

[1:47:34] Bob Dobbs: The later development.

[1:47:36] Cameron McEwen: Yeah,

[1:47:37] Cameron McEwen: exactly.

[1:47:38] Bob Dobbs: So I want to show that

[1:47:41] Bob Dobbs: McLuhan anticipated that because Ion said that.

[1:47:44] Bob Dobbs: So

[1:47:44] Bob Dobbs: I'm going through the quotes or what I...

[1:47:48] Bob Dobbs: can find of McLuhan work that would lead to that.

[1:47:52] Bob Dobbs: And what helps me bridge to the Ed Roy meme from normal machines,

[1:47:59] Bob Dobbs: though I think the Lusin-Quattari,

[1:48:01] Bob Dobbs: they call it machinic,

[1:48:02] Bob Dobbs: that was an attempt to bring in what McLuhan is saying in two things.

[1:48:07] Bob Dobbs: In Understanding Media,

[1:48:08] Bob Dobbs: he's saying electric environments are organic as opposed to mechanical and stiff,

[1:48:15] Bob Dobbs: say.

[1:48:16] Bob Dobbs: but

[1:48:16] Bob Dobbs: In 1968,

[1:48:17] Bob Dobbs: in War and Peace in the Gold Village and in his Playboy interview,

[1:48:20] Bob Dobbs: which he uttered around the same time,

[1:48:23] Bob Dobbs: he's saying that the new electric anti-environment a living,

[1:48:26] Bob Dobbs: organic phenomenon.

[1:48:29] Bob Dobbs: He's beginning to see the Hal of 2001,

[1:48:33] Bob Dobbs: you know,

[1:48:33] Bob Dobbs: that this thing,

[1:48:34] Bob Dobbs: the computer technology that is a common paranoid vision today,

[1:48:40] Bob Dobbs: that technology is out of control,

[1:48:42] Bob Dobbs: it's in charge and taken over.

[1:48:44] Bob Dobbs: And there is a big...

[1:48:46] Bob Dobbs: documentary very popular called the social dilemma which intuits that and deals with that problem have you heard of that i've heard of it but i haven't bothered seeing it yeah um but um let me just interject uh bob uh notice how this relates to a lot of what we've talked about today and

[1:49:05] Cameron McEwen: even uh before today and that is that um McLuhan uh in the

[1:49:13] Cameron McEwen: 1940s uh

[1:49:14] Cameron McEwen: Basically had to come away from the idea of his mind or the mind of the critical theorist as a kind of searchlight that illuminates

[1:49:29] Cameron McEwen: the Western tradition through its questioning and stuff.

[1:49:34] Cameron McEwen: He had to come away from that to a notion of incoming voices,

[1:49:42] Cameron McEwen: only one of which.

[1:49:44] Cameron McEwen: was like that searchlight.

[1:49:46] Bob Dobbs: Yes.

[1:49:47] Cameron McEwen: And some of this was from Jung,

[1:49:53] Cameron McEwen: because

[1:49:54] Cameron McEwen: Jung sees the different possible manifestations of personality as collective and as animated,

[1:50:09] Cameron McEwen: as different kinds of gods,

[1:50:12] Cameron McEwen: right?

[1:50:13] Cameron McEwen: Yeah.

[1:50:13] Cameron McEwen: So

[1:50:14] Cameron McEwen: McLuhan had this notion of

[1:50:20] Cameron McEwen: what might be called superhuman animation and as an incoming animated voice.

[1:50:33] Cameron McEwen: He had this in his consciousness from the late

[1:50:38] Cameron McEwen: 1930s, but he wasn't able to integrate it with his critical thinking for maybe 15 years or something.

[1:50:50] Cameron McEwen: That was sort of what was going on in his mind in the early

[1:50:55] Cameron McEwen: 1950s.

[1:50:56] Cameron McEwen: And then he had to find,

[1:50:57] Cameron McEwen: once he had some notion of this,

[1:51:03] Cameron McEwen: how to integrate these things,

[1:51:05] Cameron McEwen: he then had to find some way to communicate it.

[1:51:09] Cameron McEwen: And it was here that art theory and film theory came to intrigue him.

[1:51:14] Cameron McEwen: And so he developed a way of talking about these things out of...

[1:51:20] Cameron McEwen: art theory and film theory that led to The Medium is the Message in 1958.

[1:51:28] Cameron McEwen: So that's just the McLuhan background of what I hear you saying about the development of the tech body.

[1:51:36] Bob Dobbs: Yeah,

[1:51:37] Bob Dobbs: and the Mechanical Bride,

[1:51:38] Bob Dobbs: he tells his mother,

[1:51:40] Bob Dobbs: is a new kind of science fiction.

[1:51:44] Bob Dobbs: He was a science fiction writer.

[1:51:48] Bob Dobbs: Theo was the first to tell me that he thought,

[1:51:50] Bob Dobbs: you know,

[1:51:52] Bob Dobbs: Wyndham Lewis more obviously is a science fiction writer,

[1:51:54] Bob Dobbs: but that Finnegans Wake was an incredible science fiction.

[1:52:00] Bob Dobbs: And so McLuhan going to translate Finnegans Wake and update it.

[1:52:06] Bob Dobbs: And he's going to update all media,

[1:52:09] Bob Dobbs: including the book.

[1:52:10] Bob Dobbs: So you're right to say the book is only one-fifth of the project.

[1:52:15] Bob Dobbs: He's going to update what's happening to humans,

[1:52:17] Bob Dobbs: what's happening to machines,

[1:52:19] Bob Dobbs: how they're evolving.

[1:52:21] Bob Dobbs: And so my thesis is that Donald Trump is,

[1:52:25] Bob Dobbs: I don't want to say Postman,

[1:52:27] Bob Dobbs: inhuman,

[1:52:28] Bob Dobbs: non-human,

[1:52:30] Bob Dobbs: whatever other hyphenated things.

[1:52:32] Bob Dobbs: He is the tech body,

[1:52:33] Bob Dobbs: and the tech body created the strange situation in 2016 and is creating the strange situation we have today.

[1:52:43] Bob Dobbs: It's taken over the news.

[1:52:44] Bob Dobbs: You could say the news came alive.

[1:52:46] Bob Dobbs: It's orchestrating everything.

[1:52:48] Bob Dobbs: This is what

[1:52:50] Bob Dobbs: ION says.

[1:52:51] Bob Dobbs: So

[1:52:52] Bob Dobbs: I was trying to make McLuhan,

[1:52:56] Bob Dobbs: you know,

[1:52:56] Bob Dobbs: to bring McLuhan up to what's happening today,

[1:52:59] Bob Dobbs: which a lot of young people perceive naturally.

[1:53:02] Bob Dobbs: The things I'm saying when I bring it up with kids,

[1:53:05] Bob Dobbs: they have no problem that the anti-environment alive and messing with us.

[1:53:09] Bob Dobbs: They sort of maybe are intrigued with it,

[1:53:11] Bob Dobbs: you know,

[1:53:12] Bob Dobbs: they're not,

[1:53:14] Bob Dobbs: they know it's there and they're figuring out how to live with it.

[1:53:17] Bob Dobbs: Whereas previous generations,

[1:53:19] Bob Dobbs: they can't imagine it's there yet.

[1:53:21] Bob Dobbs: And they do this in the social dilemma.

[1:53:25] Bob Dobbs: They say,

[1:53:25] Bob Dobbs: well,

[1:53:26] Bob Dobbs: our worst fears about technology taking over from us,

[1:53:31] Bob Dobbs: people think hasn't happened yet.

[1:53:33] Bob Dobbs: They try to say it has happened.

[1:53:35] Bob Dobbs: Our worst nightmares have arrived.

[1:53:39] Bob Dobbs: I'm showing it in the news,

[1:53:43] Bob Dobbs: in the phenomenon of Donald Trump.

[1:53:45] Bob Dobbs: And I'm saying McLuhan saw that.

[1:53:48] Cameron McEwen: Definitely,

[1:53:49] Cameron McEwen: when he said the bomb anti-environment.

[1:53:52] Bob Dobbs: Yeah,

[1:53:52] Bob Dobbs: the way he talks about the bomb was incredible.

[1:53:54] Bob Dobbs: That's probably the first thing I read back in the 60s that I didn't understand.

[1:53:59] Bob Dobbs: You know what I mean?

[1:54:00] Bob Dobbs: Like,

[1:54:00] Bob Dobbs: what is he saying?

[1:54:01] Bob Dobbs: The bomb's anti-environment?

[1:54:03] Bob Dobbs: That was a difficult one to figure out.

[1:54:07] Bob Dobbs: Did you have any problems with it?

[1:54:11] Cameron McEwen: I put it this way,

[1:54:11] Cameron McEwen: that the reason somebody like McLuhan is interesting to read is exactly why Aristotle is interesting to read or Plato.

[1:54:23] Cameron McEwen: And that is that they constantly say things that you don't understand.

[1:54:29] Bob Dobbs: Right.

[1:54:29] Cameron McEwen: And so if you want to be acute in your thinking.

[1:54:39] Cameron McEwen: You have to be able to say in the face of a thinker that

[1:54:47] Cameron McEwen: I don't know what's going on here.

[1:54:49] Cameron McEwen: I'm a dumb guy.

[1:54:53] Cameron McEwen: And that's what's interesting.

[1:54:55] Cameron McEwen: And so what I...

[1:54:58] Bob Dobbs: Okay,

[1:54:58] Bob Dobbs: so yeah,

[1:54:59] Bob Dobbs: education is supposed to teach you something and then you know something.

[1:55:02] Bob Dobbs: But the better educators make you feel stupid.

[1:55:06] Cameron McEwen: Correct.

[1:55:07] Cameron McEwen: And feelings...

[1:55:08] Cameron McEwen: stupid is a it can be a pleasure yeah and it's certainly a it's certainly a guideline a what guideline did you say

[1:55:19] Cameron McEwen: Guideline,

[1:55:19] Cameron McEwen: yeah.

[1:55:20] Cameron McEwen: When somebody is a good thinker,

[1:55:22] Cameron McEwen: and I think McLuhan was,

[1:55:24] Cameron McEwen: then precisely when you don't understand something,

[1:55:29] Cameron McEwen: there's something to be learned.

[1:55:31] Cameron McEwen: It's like science.

[1:55:33] Cameron McEwen: What could make somebody happier?

[1:55:35] Cameron McEwen: If you're a chemist,

[1:55:36] Cameron McEwen: let's say,

[1:55:37] Cameron McEwen: and you're doing some kind of experiment,

[1:55:42] Cameron McEwen: and there's something about that experiment that doesn't make sense.

[1:55:47] Cameron McEwen: That tells you that there's something there that's really important.

[1:55:52] Bob Dobbs: Yeah,

[1:55:52] Bob Dobbs: that's...

[1:55:52] Cameron McEwen: And that when you make sense of that,

[1:55:54] Cameron McEwen: you'll be able to make a contribution to the science.

[1:55:57] Cameron McEwen: Well,

[1:55:57] Cameron McEwen: that's just the same with McLuhan or with anybody,

[1:56:01] Cameron McEwen: with anybody good.

[1:56:02] Bob Dobbs: Yeah,

[1:56:02] Bob Dobbs: they discovered with Darwin the missing link.

[1:56:06] Bob Dobbs: What the hell?

[1:56:06] Bob Dobbs: How did this happen?

[1:56:07] Bob Dobbs: You know,

[1:56:08] Bob Dobbs: that was...

[1:56:09] Bob Dobbs: Darwin made everybody feel stupid.

[1:56:11] Bob Dobbs: But the propagandists pretend they know what it means,

[1:56:14] Bob Dobbs: and they want...

[1:56:15] Bob Dobbs: And they want everybody to match with what they think the meaning of it is.

[1:56:18] Bob Dobbs: No,

[1:56:19] Bob Dobbs: it's just another question that they're coming up with.

[1:56:22] Bob Dobbs: Okay,

[1:56:22] Bob Dobbs: two points.

[1:56:23] Bob Dobbs: Jung,

[1:56:25] Bob Dobbs: McLuhan expresses interest he's talking to Ong or somebody in the

[1:56:29] Bob Dobbs: 40s, right?

[1:56:29] Bob Dobbs: And he says,

[1:56:30] Bob Dobbs: we've got to look into this Jung character.

[1:56:33] Bob Dobbs: Now,

[1:56:35] Bob Dobbs: one of the main competitions of Joyce is Jung because the architecture.

[1:56:40] Bob Dobbs: that Jung's dealing with are in the mind,

[1:56:43] Bob Dobbs: in the interior landscape,

[1:56:44] Bob Dobbs: and Joyce started to see the anti-environment were archetypal,

[1:56:47] Bob Dobbs: or Jungian.

[1:56:48] Cameron McEwen: No,

[1:56:49] Cameron McEwen: no,

[1:56:50] Cameron McEwen: that's exactly what Jung is not about.

[1:56:53] Cameron McEwen: Well,

[1:56:54] Bob Dobbs: as I was saying,

[1:56:56] Bob Dobbs: Joyce came up with a different view.

[1:56:58] Cameron McEwen: No,

[1:56:58] Cameron McEwen: no,

[1:56:58] Cameron McEwen: but in Jung,

[1:57:00] Cameron McEwen: the archetypes are what he calls collective,

[1:57:03] Cameron McEwen: so they're necessarily beyond the individual.

[1:57:07] Bob Dobbs: Right.

[1:57:08] Bob Dobbs: But they're still within the Anthropomorphic Physical sort of,

[1:57:11] Bob Dobbs: or they're still within the human.

[1:57:12] Bob Dobbs: We were talking about this a couple of talks ago about the ESP level,

[1:57:16] Bob Dobbs: or where does a meme come from?

[1:57:18] Bob Dobbs: So

[1:57:19] Bob Dobbs: Jung is tapping into the meme aspects,

[1:57:23] Bob Dobbs: common to all cultures.

[1:57:24] Bob Dobbs: Well,

[1:57:25] Bob Dobbs: these memes get externalized anti-environment,

[1:57:28] Bob Dobbs: and these anti-environment are memic,

[1:57:31] Bob Dobbs: but they're more archetypal because they come from our senses,

[1:57:35] Bob Dobbs: and our senses are archetypal.

[1:57:38] Bob Dobbs: So anyways,

[1:57:40] Bob Dobbs: I saw,

[1:57:40] Bob Dobbs: now Joyce doesn't fully spell that out.

[1:57:44] Bob Dobbs: You have to read McLuhan and know that McLuhan is going beyond Jung as he tries to show in From Cliché to Archetype,

[1:57:53] Bob Dobbs: but he got the impetus to go past Jung from

[1:57:56] Bob Dobbs: Joyce's attempt to go past Jung or deeper than Jung.

[1:58:00] Bob Dobbs: That's what I'm saying.

[1:58:02] Bob Dobbs: And so you're saying that Jung is very important.

[1:58:06] Bob Dobbs: Yes.

[1:58:07] Bob Dobbs: But if he's important to McLuhan,

[1:58:09] Bob Dobbs: he has to be toppled.

[1:58:11] Bob Dobbs: I don't know,

[1:58:11] Bob Dobbs: on behalf of Thomism or understanding,

[1:58:15] Bob Dobbs: just understanding.

[1:58:17] Cameron McEwen: Yeah,

[1:58:18] Cameron McEwen: so toppling is an interesting thing to think about.

[1:58:24] Cameron McEwen: If you think about wrestling,

[1:58:26] Cameron McEwen: let's say.

[1:58:27] Bob Dobbs: Yeah.

[1:58:28] Cameron McEwen: You're trying to topple your opponent,

[1:58:32] Cameron McEwen: but the toppling...

[1:58:36] Cameron McEwen: is embedded in an agon,

[1:58:40] Cameron McEwen: a contest between the two sides.

[1:58:45] Cameron McEwen: So reading somebody has to do with toppling them,

[1:58:50] Cameron McEwen: but at the same time appreciating the dialogue that you're involved in with them.

[1:58:56] Cameron McEwen: So

[1:59:00] Cameron McEwen: Jung is a rather surprising guy.

[1:59:03] Cameron McEwen: He's a little bit like McLuhan in a way,

[1:59:05] Cameron McEwen: about

[1:59:06] Cameron McEwen: So he says a lot of things that are a little bit dumb or a little bit crude,

[1:59:13] Cameron McEwen: you could say.

[1:59:14] Cameron McEwen: But he's got a lot of insights,

[1:59:18] Cameron McEwen: a lot of sudden illuminations and stuff.

[1:59:22] Cameron McEwen: And so it can be a happy experience reading

[1:59:28] Cameron McEwen: Jung.

[1:59:29] Cameron McEwen: And by the way,

[1:59:30] Cameron McEwen: Jung was kind of taken forward by a guy by the name of

[1:59:33] Cameron McEwen: James Hillman.

[1:59:34] Bob Dobbs: I know.

[1:59:35] Bob Dobbs: And McLuhan quotes them.

[1:59:37] Cameron McEwen: Yeah,

[1:59:37] Cameron McEwen: exactly.

[1:59:38] Cameron McEwen: Exactly.

[1:59:39] Cameron McEwen: He read

[1:59:40] Cameron McEwen: Hillman's early book,

[1:59:42] Cameron McEwen: Emotion,

[1:59:43] Cameron McEwen: and quotes that a lot.

[1:59:45] Cameron McEwen: Unfortunately,

[1:59:46] Cameron McEwen: he didn't.

[1:59:47] Cameron McEwen: Oh,

[1:59:47] Cameron McEwen: I guess McLuhan died before

[1:59:50] Cameron McEwen: Hillman wrote

[1:59:51] Cameron McEwen: Revisioning Psychology.

[1:59:53] Cameron McEwen: But

[1:59:54] Cameron McEwen: Revisioning Psychology is a great,

[1:59:56] Cameron McEwen: great book.

[1:59:57] Cameron McEwen: I'd recommend it to you if you haven't read it.

[1:59:59] Cameron McEwen: I think it would go well with a lot of...

[2:00:04] Cameron McEwen: the thinking you do.

[2:00:08] Cameron McEwen: He extricates psychology from human beings and talks about the reanimation of the world,

[2:00:18] Cameron McEwen: which is very,

[2:00:21] Cameron McEwen: very important.

[2:00:22] Cameron McEwen: I knew Hillman.

[2:00:23] Cameron McEwen: He was a difficult guy.

[2:00:26] Bob Dobbs: How did you know him?

[2:00:27] Bob Dobbs: You were a student of him?

[2:00:30] Cameron McEwen: Well,

[2:00:30] Cameron McEwen: it was like McLuhan again.

[2:00:33] Cameron McEwen: I thought...

[2:00:34] Cameron McEwen: that might be interesting to study with

[2:00:36] Cameron McEwen: Hillman. Hillman,

[2:00:38] Cameron McEwen: as you may know,

[2:00:40] Cameron McEwen: went to the University of Dallas,

[2:00:44] Cameron McEwen: which

[2:00:46] Cameron McEwen: McLuhan went to later.

[2:00:48] Bob Dobbs: In 75.

[2:00:50] Cameron McEwen: That's right.

[2:00:51] Cameron McEwen: So Hillman wasn't there at the University of

[2:00:54] Cameron McEwen: Dallas yet,

[2:00:56] Cameron McEwen: but he would come in the early 80s.

[2:01:00] Cameron McEwen: And I was...

[2:01:03] Cameron McEwen: I had read a lot of Jung and read a lot of Hillman,

[2:01:05] Cameron McEwen: and I knew that he was in Dallas,

[2:01:08] Cameron McEwen: so I went down and had a little bit of the same experience with Hillman that I already had with McLuhan.

[2:01:17] Cameron McEwen: I was amazed at how

[2:01:20] Cameron McEwen: Hillman was not open to ways in which

[2:01:27] Cameron McEwen: I thought he should be open.

[2:01:30] Bob Dobbs: Well,

[2:01:31] Bob Dobbs: you were a man on a mission.

[2:01:32] Bob Dobbs: You actually had some epiphanies you were trying to upgrade McLuhan and Hillman with.

[2:01:38] Cameron McEwen: Well,

[2:01:39] Cameron McEwen: I...

[2:01:41] Cameron McEwen: Generally,

[2:01:42] Cameron McEwen: when

[2:01:44] Cameron McEwen: I thought there was something to be learned,

[2:01:47] Cameron McEwen: I tried to go to the source.

[2:01:49] Bob Dobbs: Yeah.

[2:01:50] Cameron McEwen: And so Jung was already dead.

[2:01:55] Cameron McEwen: And then

[2:01:57] Cameron McEwen: I thought it would be interesting to study with Hillman,

[2:02:01] Cameron McEwen: but that didn't work out any more than the idea of studying with McLuhan did.

[2:02:05] Bob Dobbs: Well,

[2:02:05] Bob Dobbs: okay.

[2:02:06] Bob Dobbs: So you encounter a guy whose closed mind is about your idea.

[2:02:09] Bob Dobbs: Did you?

[2:02:10] Bob Dobbs: Did he have other eccentricities or it was just a conversation you had with him?

[2:02:15] Cameron McEwen: No,

[2:02:15] Cameron McEwen: no.

[2:02:16] Cameron McEwen: Hillman was well known to be extremely combative,

[2:02:21] Cameron McEwen: an extremely difficult person.

[2:02:23] Bob Dobbs: An emotional person.

[2:02:26] Cameron McEwen: Well,

[2:02:26] Cameron McEwen: I guess so.

[2:02:28] Cameron McEwen: A lot of people thought he was mean or that he enjoyed hurting people or something.

[2:02:35] Cameron McEwen: I didn't know him that well.

[2:02:38] Cameron McEwen: I just met him.

[2:02:41] Cameron McEwen: a few times and had conversations with them and tried to judge if

[2:02:47] Cameron McEwen: I would study with them or maybe even undergo analysis.

[2:02:53] Cameron McEwen: I had that thought at one point.

[2:02:58] Bob Dobbs: The problem is that there's just too much disagreement about basics or something that you know you're not going to get something out of them.

[2:03:10] Cameron McEwen: Yeah,

[2:03:10] Cameron McEwen: just that with McLuhan,

[2:03:16] Cameron McEwen: I just may have hit him at a bad time because of his operation and all that sort of stuff.

[2:03:21] Cameron McEwen: With Hillman,

[2:03:22] Cameron McEwen: I just thought that he didn't have the kind of elasticity to him that I thought was sort of basic to thought.

[2:03:35] Cameron McEwen: and therefore that...

[2:03:39] Cameron McEwen: I wouldn't be able to get anything out of studying with him.

[2:03:45] Cameron McEwen: I thought his idea of education was to impose on people his personality and his view.

[2:03:53] Cameron McEwen: And to me,

[2:03:53] Cameron McEwen: that was a contradiction to what he was writing,

[2:03:56] Cameron McEwen: where the whole point is to appreciate exterior views in their independent animation.

[2:04:05] Bob Dobbs: Yeah.

[2:04:07] Bob Dobbs: I was just thinking,

[2:04:08] Bob Dobbs: I wonder if you basically have a Canadian sensibility,

[2:04:12] Bob Dobbs: and you're encountering the kinetic bias,

[2:04:14] Bob Dobbs: manipulatory bias,

[2:04:15] Bob Dobbs: McLuhan says in page 136 of the Cliché to archetype,

[2:04:19] Bob Dobbs: the sensory bias of Americans,

[2:04:20] Bob Dobbs: the manipulatory kinetic bias,

[2:04:23] Bob Dobbs: is,

[2:04:23] Bob Dobbs: and I don't know if that was in McLuhan,

[2:04:25] Bob Dobbs: but as a Canadian,

[2:04:27] Bob Dobbs: you're a different sensibility than this American guy.

[2:04:31] Cameron McEwen: Yeah,

[2:04:31] Cameron McEwen: I think so.

[2:04:32] Cameron McEwen: Canadians are allergic to imperialism.

[2:04:35] Bob Dobbs: Yeah.

[2:04:37] Cameron McEwen: It doesn't matter if it's English or American or Chinese or whatever the hell it is.

[2:04:43] Cameron McEwen: And now I'm a Western Canadian,

[2:04:46] Cameron McEwen: and I can tell you that Western Canadians are getting sick and tired of Eastern Canadian imperialism.

[2:04:52] Bob Dobbs: Yes,

[2:04:52] Bob Dobbs: yeah.

[2:04:55] Bob Dobbs: Do you think McLuhan had the same bias as a

[2:05:01] Bob Dobbs: Western Canadian?

[2:05:02] Bob Dobbs: He was sick of

[2:05:04] Bob Dobbs: Ontario.

[2:05:06] Cameron McEwen: imperialism he pretended he did in that one interview with the cbc guy yeah that i mean McLuhan was a guy that uh he loved masks he could put them on and take them off so

[2:05:21] Cameron McEwen: um he didn't mind being a Wittgenstein uh in some context and other contexts uh he liked being the uh guru from Toronto.

[2:05:32] Bob Dobbs: Right.

[2:05:33] Bob Dobbs: So when I...

[2:05:35] Bob Dobbs: In 76,

[2:05:36] Bob Dobbs: I was with him and some Italian women came over and they wanted him to perform in a play.

[2:05:42] Bob Dobbs: And

[2:05:43] Bob Dobbs: I talked to them later and they said they couldn't believe how bad of an actor he was.

[2:05:47] Bob Dobbs: Now,

[2:05:47] Bob Dobbs: this would be a univocal play,

[2:05:49] Bob Dobbs: right?

[2:05:50] Bob Dobbs: A visually framed play.

[2:05:54] Bob Dobbs: I would say,

[2:05:54] Bob Dobbs: and I've said it later,

[2:05:55] Bob Dobbs: McLuhan was one of the greatest actors of our time.

[2:05:58] Bob Dobbs: But he didn't operate just in a little square theater box.

[2:06:02] Bob Dobbs: He operated in the Global Theatre and created all these masks and roles and performances.

[2:06:07] Bob Dobbs: It's right in that essay,

[2:06:08] Bob Dobbs: Roles,

[2:06:09] Bob Dobbs: Performances,

[2:06:10] Bob Dobbs: and Masks,

[2:06:10] Bob Dobbs: isn't it?

[2:06:11] Bob Dobbs: Early 70s,

[2:06:12] Bob Dobbs: that essay,

[2:06:13] Bob Dobbs: and the voices of literature.

[2:06:15] Cameron McEwen: It's everywhere in his work.

[2:06:17] Bob Dobbs: And I would say that he was training people on the new desire requirement for people in the Global Theatre to put on Quadrophrenia,

[2:06:27] Bob Dobbs: and he was showing you,

[2:06:28] Bob Dobbs: like he said about Joyce,

[2:06:29] Bob Dobbs: he could go into any culture.

[2:06:31] Bob Dobbs: and adopt its assumptions and put it on and work well with the culture.

[2:06:37] Bob Dobbs: So he was a great actor that way.

[2:06:40] Cameron McEwen: Sure.

[2:06:41] Cameron McEwen: And that's what he said was sort of the great lesson of modern anthropology,

[2:06:47] Cameron McEwen: that modern anthropology was no longer sitting in a library somewhere in London reading about reports of missionaries and stuff.

[2:06:58] Cameron McEwen: It was you got on a boat like Malinowski and you went to the

[2:07:03] Cameron McEwen: Melanesian Islands and you lived there and you understood their phatic customs.

[2:07:10] Bob Dobbs: Right.

[2:07:11] Bob Dobbs: Now,

[2:07:11] Bob Dobbs: that's the other point.

[2:07:12] Bob Dobbs: Another point I was going to bring up is that Young is a product of anthropology and McLuhan is a product of a later science.

[2:07:19] Bob Dobbs: He called it the student of media communications.

[2:07:23] Bob Dobbs: That's the that's where Joyce's archetypes go beyond anthropology.

[2:07:30] Bob Dobbs: And McLuhan does.

[2:07:31] Bob Dobbs: And that's where Young is limited to anthropology.

[2:07:36] Bob Dobbs: I guess that's what I would say.

[2:07:39] Cameron McEwen: I would say.

[2:07:40] Cameron McEwen: If I would argue against that,

[2:07:41] Cameron McEwen: I would say that

[2:07:44] Cameron McEwen: Jung, like his colleague and mentor Freud,

[2:07:53] Cameron McEwen: was able to do sort of individual anthropology.

[2:07:59] Cameron McEwen: The great turn of modern psychology was to learn how to inhabit.

[2:08:10] Cameron McEwen: neuroses and psychoses and try to understand them from within.

[2:08:15] Bob Dobbs: Okay,

[2:08:17] Bob Dobbs: to enter the culture in the person's personality.

[2:08:20] Cameron McEwen: Correct.

[2:08:21] Bob Dobbs: Right,

[2:08:22] Bob Dobbs: okay.

[2:08:23] Bob Dobbs: Okay,

[2:08:23] Bob Dobbs: but that's the individual.

[2:08:24] Bob Dobbs: That's what he says in Cliché to archetype.

[2:08:26] Bob Dobbs: That's Ulysses,

[2:08:28] Bob Dobbs: the literate individual,

[2:08:29] Bob Dobbs: say,

[2:08:31] Bob Dobbs: where spinning his weight deals with collectivities.

[2:08:33] Bob Dobbs: Jung is in the interval between Freud doing personal exorcism

[2:08:38] Bob Dobbs: And the collectivities of McLuhan,

[2:08:40] Bob Dobbs: Jung's in between.

[2:08:42] Bob Dobbs: He gets to the collective archetypes,

[2:08:44] Bob Dobbs: but not the technical collective archetypes,

[2:08:49] Bob Dobbs: which are anti-environment.

[2:08:51] Cameron McEwen: Maybe,

[2:08:52] Cameron McEwen: maybe.

[2:08:52] Cameron McEwen: I tend to see these things as sort of more complicated.

[2:08:56] Cameron McEwen: Oh,

[2:08:56] Cameron McEwen: okay,

[2:08:57] Bob Dobbs: so I'm being linear there?

[2:09:00] Cameron McEwen: Well,

[2:09:00] Cameron McEwen: it's just that

[2:09:02] Cameron McEwen: I have the same kind of respect for somebody like Jung that I have for McLuhan.

[2:09:08] Cameron McEwen: I know that he's very,

[2:09:10] Cameron McEwen: very complicated.

[2:09:11] Cameron McEwen: And most of these people,

[2:09:13] Cameron McEwen: we could spend a lifetime trying to sort of inhabit their thinking and to try to understand how much further they thought than we can.

[2:09:27] Cameron McEwen: So,

[2:09:28] Cameron McEwen: for example,

[2:09:28] Cameron McEwen: if you think about

[2:09:30] Cameron McEwen: Freud, Freud talks about civilization and its discontents.

[2:09:35] Cameron McEwen: So this is far beyond.

[2:09:37] Cameron McEwen: individual psychology or dream interpretation,

[2:09:42] Cameron McEwen: right?

[2:09:42] Cameron McEwen: And

[2:09:44] Cameron McEwen: Jung was constantly talking about civilizations and fates,

[2:09:54] Cameron McEwen: right?

[2:09:54] Cameron McEwen: So

[2:09:57] Cameron McEwen: I think you're going in a good direction with many of the things that you're saying.

[2:10:03] Cameron McEwen: It's just that I'm not so sure that they can be Selye that.

[2:10:07] Cameron McEwen: I don't think we can use somebody like Jung as a marker and then say,

[2:10:13] Cameron McEwen: well,

[2:10:13] Cameron McEwen: he's in the middle between

[2:10:15] Cameron McEwen: Freud and McLuhan.

[2:10:19] Cameron McEwen: Pretty soon,

[2:10:22] Cameron McEwen: we're in the sort of graduate student mode where we know how to set out all of

[2:10:34] Cameron McEwen: Western civilization.

[2:10:35] Cameron McEwen: in terms of a bunch of names,

[2:10:38] Cameron McEwen: right?

[2:10:39] Cameron McEwen: Instead of being able to actually think what any one of these names actually entail.

[2:10:47] Bob Dobbs: Okay,

[2:10:47] Bob Dobbs: so on the parallel private citadel or citadel of consciousness,

[2:10:52] Bob Dobbs: that's true.

[2:10:54] Bob Dobbs: But on the social manners,

[2:10:58] Bob Dobbs: which one night a lady coming in to the Monday seminar writing an update of Emily Post's manners,

[2:11:04] Bob Dobbs: McLuhan pointed to her that that's what he did.

[2:11:07] Bob Dobbs: He studied manners.

[2:11:08] Bob Dobbs: So he kind of,

[2:11:09] Bob Dobbs: you know,

[2:11:09] Bob Dobbs: we think of manners as kind of superficial,

[2:11:13] Bob Dobbs: bourgeois activities or niceties or violations of it.

[2:11:19] Bob Dobbs: And you don't think of media as manners.

[2:11:22] Bob Dobbs: That's too superficial.

[2:11:24] Cameron McEwen: Well,

[2:11:25] Cameron McEwen: no,

[2:11:26] Cameron McEwen: I think you're absolutely right.

[2:11:28] Cameron McEwen: McLuhan used the word decorum,

[2:11:30] Cameron McEwen: right?

[2:11:30] Cameron McEwen: Yeah.

[2:11:32] Cameron McEwen: He got that.

[2:11:32] Cameron McEwen: from

[2:11:33] Cameron McEwen: Maurice McNamee,

[2:11:34] Cameron McEwen: who is writing a thesis on bacon.

[2:11:39] Cameron McEwen: McLuhan was writing his thesis in the early

[2:11:43] Cameron McEwen: 1940s. So a lot of McLuhan quote-unquote thinking in his thesis was just transcriptions of

[2:11:51] Cameron McEwen: McNamee talking about Bacon.

[2:11:54] Bob Dobbs: Right.

[2:11:54] Cameron McEwen: And one of the ways that McNamee talked about Bacon was in terms of decorum.

[2:12:01] Cameron McEwen: And then so at the end of the

[2:12:04] Cameron McEwen: 1940s, McLuhan has his essay on Eliot.

[2:12:09] Cameron McEwen: and what Elliot's historical decorum,

[2:12:12] Cameron McEwen: I think it's called.

[2:12:14] Cameron McEwen: And that essay is very,

[2:12:16] Cameron McEwen: very important.

[2:12:18] Cameron McEwen: Right.

[2:12:19] Bob Dobbs: But when he said that he reduces media study to manners,

[2:12:25] Bob Dobbs: that's the citadel of consciousness that's not affected by media speaking.

[2:12:31] Bob Dobbs: He's on that side.

[2:12:32] Bob Dobbs: And media are silly,

[2:12:34] Bob Dobbs: trivial.

[2:12:34] Bob Dobbs: They're just arguing over manners.

[2:12:37] Bob Dobbs: And then...

[2:12:38] Cameron McEwen: new media committee what i don't think no no no manners are not something trivial and stupid okay i was taking it that way it seems odd uh that he uh reduced his work to uh you know updating emily post uh yeah

[2:12:57] Cameron McEwen: but i don't think he was reducing it i think he's i think that's it's um that's related to a whole bunch of things that we've talked about

[2:13:07] Cameron McEwen: I mean,

[2:13:07] Cameron McEwen: when McLuhan is relating to his children,

[2:13:10] Cameron McEwen: especially when the children are really young,

[2:13:14] Cameron McEwen: what he's trying to communicate with them is manners,

[2:13:21] Cameron McEwen: is etiquette,

[2:13:22] Cameron McEwen: is a certain way of relating anti-environment.

[2:13:26] Cameron McEwen: And the difficulty he has is that he is not sure himself how to go to how to.

[2:13:35] Cameron McEwen: go about it both as his way of being and as his way of teaching.

[2:13:41] Cameron McEwen: Yeah.

[2:13:41] Cameron McEwen: Okay?

[2:13:43] Cameron McEwen: So the whole question of manners and etiquette,

[2:13:47] Cameron McEwen: that's just another way of saying,

[2:13:50] Cameron McEwen: how do

[2:13:50] Cameron McEwen: I inhabit anti-environment?

[2:13:55] Bob Dobbs: Right.

[2:13:55] Bob Dobbs: Now,

[2:13:56] Bob Dobbs: he says to Michael Horniansky in 76,

[2:13:59] Bob Dobbs: one of the rare times he defines his Manipian satire,

[2:14:02] Bob Dobbs: he says,

[2:14:03] Bob Dobbs: presenting a ludicrous image of the surface manners of society or of life.

[2:14:09] Bob Dobbs: That's where he indicates manners at surface.

[2:14:12] Bob Dobbs: I know the lady was shocked that she was being told that McClure was in the same field.

[2:14:20] Bob Dobbs: She didn't believe that.

[2:14:23] Bob Dobbs: But yeah,

[2:14:24] Bob Dobbs: he was giving the ground manners,

[2:14:27] Bob Dobbs: the ground gestures to her surface gestures,

[2:14:30] Bob Dobbs: her fashionable concerns.

[2:14:33] Bob Dobbs: about how people set their table in the

[2:14:35] Bob Dobbs: 70s as opposed to the

[2:14:37] Bob Dobbs: 60s.

[2:14:39] Bob Dobbs: But that's significant.

[2:14:41] Bob Dobbs: Now,

[2:14:41] Bob Dobbs: I want to add something.

[2:14:43] Bob Dobbs: Jung,

[2:14:48] Bob Dobbs: an example of the disgusting state of the McLuhan industry,

[2:14:54] Bob Dobbs: and I don't know if this guy was a McLuhan,

[2:14:56] Bob Dobbs: but it was said to another McLuhan,

[2:15:00] Bob Dobbs: someone who promotes McLuhan.

[2:15:03] Bob Dobbs: He was shocked when he looked at my essay,

[2:15:05] Bob Dobbs: and I don't know how much he read of it.

[2:15:07] Bob Dobbs: How could I put McLuhan and Trump in the same sentence?

[2:15:12] Bob Dobbs: Obviously,

[2:15:12] Bob Dobbs: despicable Trump is a scumbag,

[2:15:15] Bob Dobbs: and McLuhan was a high priest of wonderfulness.

[2:15:18] Bob Dobbs: I never thought,

[2:15:19] Bob Dobbs: that's the stupidest thing I've ever heard,

[2:15:22] Bob Dobbs: that you can't put the thinker in the same sentence as what's thought about.

[2:15:30] Bob Dobbs: You see how crazy that is?

[2:15:33] Bob Dobbs: How could

[2:15:34] Bob Dobbs: I discuss Trump in the same paragraph with McLuhan?

[2:15:39] Bob Dobbs: I wasn't saying Trump was equal to McLuhan.

[2:15:42] Bob Dobbs: I was using McLuhan to explain Trump.

[2:15:45] Cameron McEwen: Yeah,

[2:15:46] Cameron McEwen: yeah.

[2:15:47] Bob Dobbs: But that's the most recent intellectual stupidity I've ever heard in a long time.

[2:15:54] Bob Dobbs: I mean,

[2:15:55] Bob Dobbs: ridiculous.

[2:15:58] Bob Dobbs: When I was told this,

[2:16:00] Bob Dobbs: I...

[2:16:01] Bob Dobbs: And the person that was told this is,

[2:16:02] Bob Dobbs: yeah,

[2:16:02] Bob Dobbs: beats me.

[2:16:03] Bob Dobbs: Why,

[2:16:03] Bob Dobbs: Bob,

[2:16:04] Bob Dobbs: does that?

[2:16:04] Bob Dobbs: So I swore to call him a fucking idiot.

[2:16:09] Bob Dobbs: That was my response to him to even engage and not,

[2:16:13] Bob Dobbs: you know,

[2:16:14] Bob Dobbs: chastise the idiot who said that.

[2:16:17] Bob Dobbs: Can you believe that?

[2:16:19] Cameron McEwen: Well,

[2:16:19] Cameron McEwen: I think

[2:16:20] Cameron McEwen: I think the person was not making an intellectual point.

[2:16:25] Cameron McEwen: It was just like saying,

[2:16:27] Cameron McEwen: how can you mention these?

[2:16:29] Cameron McEwen: two in the same breath.

[2:16:31] Bob Dobbs: Or maybe he means he's a high culture literate snob,

[2:16:35] Bob Dobbs: and he doesn't understand the cognitive school that you look at popular culture.

[2:16:41] Bob Dobbs: So he was the ethical,

[2:16:43] Bob Dobbs: cathartic,

[2:16:43] Bob Dobbs: you know,

[2:16:44] Bob Dobbs: Matthew Arnold school,

[2:16:47] Bob Dobbs: which quote I begin with in my essay.

[2:16:50] Bob Dobbs: I quote McLuhan talking about the two views,

[2:16:53] Bob Dobbs: the ethical view of art,

[2:16:55] Bob Dobbs: which is cathartic,

[2:16:56] Bob Dobbs: and the cognitive view.

[2:16:58] Cameron McEwen: That's how actually we started our conversation today.

[2:17:02] Cameron McEwen: Maybe what we should do is we're coming up now to,

[2:17:06] Cameron McEwen: I think we're almost at three hours.

[2:17:09] Cameron McEwen: Yeah,

[2:17:09] Cameron McEwen: we're almost at three hours.

[2:17:11] Cameron McEwen: So what we might do is stop for this week.

[2:17:15] Bob Dobbs: Okay.

[2:17:15] Cameron McEwen: At the point that...

[2:17:17] Bob Dobbs: Well,

[2:17:17] Cameron McEwen: at the beginning of my book.

[2:17:20] Cameron McEwen: That's right.

[2:17:21] Cameron McEwen: And so what we could do is take up...

[2:17:23] Cameron McEwen: Next time we can take up the very same starting point but attempt to make a different kind of progress.

[2:17:30] Bob Dobbs: Now there's the cul-de-sac.

[2:17:32] Bob Dobbs: We are manifesting.

[2:17:33] Cameron McEwen: That's right.

[2:17:34] Bob Dobbs: Yeah.

[2:17:35] Bob Dobbs: Every conversation is,

[2:17:36] Bob Dobbs: we're in the cul-de-sac once again.

[2:17:39] Cameron McEwen: You know,

[2:17:41] Bob Dobbs: a guy I knew in New York,

[2:17:42] Bob Dobbs: Harold Channer,

[2:17:47] Bob Dobbs: when McLuhan came out of his long surgery in 67,

[2:17:51] Bob Dobbs: he said he had these songs going on in his head.

[2:17:55] Bob Dobbs: And it was some famous guy,

[2:17:57] Bob Dobbs: Harry somebody of the

[2:17:59] Bob Dobbs: 30s.

[2:18:00] Cameron McEwen: Yeah, probably Harry Lauder.

[2:18:02] Bob Dobbs: I think that's who it was,

[2:18:02] Bob Dobbs: yes.

[2:18:03] Bob Dobbs: So

[2:18:05] Bob Dobbs: Harold Channer,

[2:18:05] Bob Dobbs: out of the blue,

[2:18:07] Bob Dobbs: known him in New York for many years,

[2:18:08] Bob Dobbs: he started singing a Harry Louder song.

[2:18:10] Bob Dobbs: And I thought,

[2:18:11] Bob Dobbs: that was McLuhan core melody or core rhythmic conditioning.

[2:18:18] Bob Dobbs: And the song he sang was,

[2:18:20] Bob Dobbs: Well,

[2:18:20] Bob Dobbs: we're on our way,

[2:18:22] Bob Dobbs: we're on our way.

[2:18:23] Bob Dobbs: No,

[2:18:23] Bob Dobbs: no,

[2:18:23] Bob Dobbs: sorry,

[2:18:23] Bob Dobbs: sorry.

[2:18:25] Bob Dobbs: It goes,

[2:18:27] Bob Dobbs: what is it?

[2:18:27] Bob Dobbs: We're on our way.

[2:18:29] Bob Dobbs: Yeah,

[2:18:30] Bob Dobbs: well,

[2:18:30] Bob Dobbs: we don't know where we're going.

[2:18:32] Bob Dobbs: We don't know where we're going,

[2:18:33] Bob Dobbs: but we're well on our way.

[2:18:34] Bob Dobbs: Well on our way.

[2:18:37] Bob Dobbs: That's the cul-de-sac.

[2:18:39] Cameron McEwen: Yeah.

[2:18:39] Bob Dobbs: We're going somewhere.

[2:18:41] Bob Dobbs: We're well on our way going somewhere,

[2:18:42] Bob Dobbs: but don't know where we're going.

[2:18:45] Bob Dobbs: Okay,

[2:18:46] Bob Dobbs: so when I attempt to be linear and start creating a direction,

[2:18:52] Bob Dobbs: I'm aware that it's going to break down pretty quickly.

[2:18:56] Cameron McEwen: Right.

[2:18:58] Bob Dobbs: That remained in the cul-de-sac.

[2:19:01] Bob Dobbs: So

[2:19:02] Bob Dobbs: I leave you with this.

[2:19:04] Bob Dobbs: What the heck did McLuhan mean?

[2:19:06] Bob Dobbs: In Understanding Media,

[2:19:07] Bob Dobbs: when he said edible spaceships,

[2:19:09] Bob Dobbs: we're going to have soon edible spaceships.

[2:19:13] Cameron McEwen: Yeah,

[2:19:13] Cameron McEwen: good question.

[2:19:15] Bob Dobbs: Spaceships as a means of ejecting,

[2:19:17] Bob Dobbs: you know,

[2:19:17] Bob Dobbs: out of the cul-de-sac,

[2:19:20] Bob Dobbs: and they're edible.

[2:19:22] Cameron McEwen: Yeah,

[2:19:23] Cameron McEwen: yeah.

[2:19:23] Cameron McEwen: So

[2:19:26] Cameron McEwen: I don't want to talk at great lengths here,

[2:19:28] Cameron McEwen: but the satellite takes the Earth with it,

[2:19:34] Cameron McEwen: right?

[2:19:35] Cameron McEwen: And so,

[2:19:37] Cameron McEwen: in a certain sense,

[2:19:38] Cameron McEwen: the satellite has to be edible.

[2:19:42] Cameron McEwen: Just like the Earth is the source of everything edible,

[2:19:48] Cameron McEwen: so the new Earth of a satellite needs to be the source of everything edible,

[2:19:55] Cameron McEwen: or actually be edible.

[2:19:58] Bob Dobbs: All right.

[2:19:59] Bob Dobbs: The other meaning is it's a psychedelic mushroom.

[2:20:05] Cameron McEwen: Yeah,

[2:20:05] Cameron McEwen: so the inner trip.

[2:20:08] Bob Dobbs: You took the outer trip route.

[2:20:10] Bob Dobbs: I was implying the inner trip route.

[2:20:13] Bob Dobbs: Anyway,

[2:20:14] Bob Dobbs: so that,

[2:20:14] Bob Dobbs: I mean,

[2:20:15] Bob Dobbs: I pretended rhetorically,

[2:20:16] Bob Dobbs: I didn't know what it meant,

[2:20:17] Bob Dobbs: but that's,

[2:20:19] Bob Dobbs: I take it as the inner trip.

[2:20:20] Bob Dobbs: But your way of saying that you're consuming the previous environment,

[2:20:24] Bob Dobbs: you're eating the previous environment,

[2:20:26] Bob Dobbs: is that what you're saying?

[2:20:27] Cameron McEwen: Well,

[2:20:28] Cameron McEwen: no,

[2:20:28] Cameron McEwen: I'm,

[2:20:28] Cameron McEwen: well,

[2:20:30] Cameron McEwen: there is that sense,

[2:20:31] Cameron McEwen: but the sense I was talking about is that

[2:20:37] Cameron McEwen: The way anti-environment is inhabited is that anti-environment is edible in a whole series of different ways.

[2:20:49] Cameron McEwen: So with the satellite,

[2:20:54] Cameron McEwen: with the exploration of outer space,

[2:20:58] Cameron McEwen: the anti-environment that are created by humans,

[2:21:04] Cameron McEwen: need to be edible in an analogous way to the way that the old physical anti-environment.

[2:21:13] Cameron McEwen: And so there,

[2:21:15] Cameron McEwen: what I would take McLuhan to be talking about is not spaceships going out from the Earth or drugs going into the anti-environment,

[2:21:27] Cameron McEwen: but the new consciousness that is possible of anti-environment,

[2:21:32] Cameron McEwen: plural.

[2:21:34] Cameron McEwen: and what we can learn about being human beings.

[2:21:43] Cameron McEwen: derived from that plurality.

[2:21:48] Bob Dobbs: Right.

[2:21:49] Bob Dobbs: And what was I going to say?

[2:22:02] Bob Dobbs: Oh,

[2:22:02] Bob Dobbs: yeah.

[2:22:02] Bob Dobbs: In his Burroughs article,

[2:22:05] Bob Dobbs: he quotes Joyce's Stephen Hero.

[2:22:09] Bob Dobbs: I think it's in that book.

[2:22:11] Bob Dobbs: Where the common thing among humans,

[2:22:12] Bob Dobbs: between a Chinese person and other cultures and races,

[2:22:17] Bob Dobbs: is the digestive system.

[2:22:19] Bob Dobbs: Now there's a lot of food eating in Finnegans Wake,

[2:22:22] Bob Dobbs: and that's a metaphor of media eating each other,

[2:22:26] Bob Dobbs: and

[2:22:27] Bob Dobbs: I think of that,

[2:22:27] Bob Dobbs: that's the archetype.

[2:22:30] Bob Dobbs: The digestive system is the basic process,

[2:22:34] Bob Dobbs: and we have grown new stomachs.

[2:22:37] Bob Dobbs: Not just the chemical body stomach,

[2:22:39] Bob Dobbs: but the digital stomach,

[2:22:40] Bob Dobbs: the TV stomach.

[2:22:43] Bob Dobbs: That's a thought that occurs to me based on what you were saying.

[2:22:48] Cameron McEwen: Yeah,

[2:22:48] Cameron McEwen: no,

[2:22:48] Cameron McEwen: we could talk about that for a long time because the digestive system,

[2:23:03] Cameron McEwen: as you suggest,

[2:23:04] Cameron McEwen: is not singular but plural.

[2:23:06] Bob Dobbs: Yeah.

[2:23:07] Cameron McEwen: And that gets us exactly into where we started this conversation,

[2:23:12] Cameron McEwen: because it suggests an infinite regress,

[2:23:16] Cameron McEwen: right?

[2:23:18] Cameron McEwen: If we always wear a mask,

[2:23:20] Cameron McEwen: if we always have a certain digestive system,

[2:23:24] Cameron McEwen: then any attempt to sort of have a definitive mask or to have the definitive stomach is always going to fail because a...

[2:23:36] Cameron McEwen: In order to assess masks,

[2:23:39] Cameron McEwen: you need a mask.

[2:23:41] Cameron McEwen: In order to digest everything,

[2:23:45] Cameron McEwen: you need a stomach,

[2:23:47] Cameron McEwen: which needs to be digested in turn.

[2:23:50] Cameron McEwen: And so we've come full circle back to the sorts of questions that are raised by the very start of your book.

[2:23:59] Bob Dobbs: Right,

[2:23:59] Bob Dobbs: and it seems to me resonates with the modern dilemma of what to do with masks today.

[2:24:06] Bob Dobbs: Should we wear them or not?

[2:24:08] Bob Dobbs: Do they protect you?

[2:24:10] Cameron McEwen: Absolutely.

[2:24:11] Cameron McEwen: I didn't think of that connotation,

[2:24:14] Cameron McEwen: but it's absolutely right.

[2:24:15] Bob Dobbs: It fits.

[2:24:17] Bob Dobbs: Okay.

[2:24:18] Bob Dobbs: All right.

[2:24:18] Bob Dobbs: So that's a good point,

[2:24:19] Bob Dobbs: Dan Don.

[2:24:20] Bob Dobbs: This is my point,

[2:24:21] Bob Dobbs: right?

[2:24:23] Cameron McEwen: Yeah.

[2:24:24] Bob Dobbs: You had last week's point.

[2:24:28] Cameron McEwen: No,

[2:24:28] Cameron McEwen: that was a good one.

[2:24:29] Cameron McEwen: That was a good one.

[2:24:30] Bob Dobbs: Yeah.

[2:24:30] Bob Dobbs: I just hope it got all recorded.

[2:24:32] Cameron McEwen: Game to Mr.

[2:24:33] Cameron McEwen: Dobbs.

[2:24:34] Bob Dobbs: What'd you say?

[2:24:36] Cameron McEwen: game to mr.

[2:24:37] Cameron McEwen: yeah that's right so look up that Harry Lauder song we don't know where we're going but we're well on our way okay my grandparents were both born in Scotland and so they were great fans of

[2:24:53] Bob Dobbs: Harry Lauder oh he was a Scottish singer yes so how come Americans heard him well the 30 not have

[2:25:07] Cameron McEwen: Was this an American or was this a Canadian?

[2:25:08] Cameron McEwen: Yeah,

[2:25:09] Bob Dobbs: Harold Chandler's an American,

[2:25:10] Bob Dobbs: true American.

[2:25:11] Cameron McEwen: Okay,

[2:25:12] Cameron McEwen: yeah,

[2:25:12] Cameron McEwen: I'm sorry,

[2:25:13] Cameron McEwen: I've seen your interview with him.

[2:25:15] Bob Dobbs: Yes,

[2:25:16] Bob Dobbs: yes.

[2:25:16] Bob Dobbs: He's a McLuhan.

[2:25:17] Bob Dobbs: He's an interesting McLuhan.

[2:25:20] Cameron McEwen: Well,

[2:25:21] Cameron McEwen: I don't know where exactly

[2:25:24] Cameron McEwen: Harry Lauder is a singer.

[2:25:27] Cameron McEwen: He may have been in the United States.

[2:25:29] Cameron McEwen: I think he was originally from Scotland,

[2:25:32] Cameron McEwen: but I don't know if he maybe...

[2:25:35] Cameron McEwen: He came across and became a person in New York.

[2:25:40] Cameron McEwen: We can look that up.

[2:25:42] Bob Dobbs: Yes,

[2:25:42] Bob Dobbs: we have wonderful anti-environment around us,

[2:25:45] Bob Dobbs: surrounding us.

[2:25:45] Cameron McEwen: That's right.

[2:25:46] Bob Dobbs: Give us the

[2:25:47] Bob Dobbs: ESP immediately.

[2:25:50] Cameron McEwen: There you go.

[2:25:52] Bob Dobbs: Okay,

[2:25:52] Bob Dobbs: let's hope this is recorded.

[2:25:53] Bob Dobbs: So you hang up,

[2:25:55] Bob Dobbs: and I'll bring it home.

[2:25:58] Cameron McEwen: All right,

[2:25:58] Cameron McEwen: Bob.

[2:25:58] Cameron McEwen: Thank you.

[2:25:59] Bob Dobbs: Okay,

[2:25:59] Bob Dobbs: thanks a lot,

[2:26:00] Bob Dobbs: Cameron.

[2:26:00] Bob Dobbs: It was a great talk.

[2:26:02] Cameron McEwen: You too.

[2:26:02] Cameron McEwen: Bye-bye.

[2:26:03] Bob Dobbs: Bye.