Dialogue 8 — Transcript

[00:03] Bob Dobbs: Okay,

[00:03] Bob Dobbs: I'm here with Cameron McEwen again.

[00:06] Bob Dobbs: This is session number eight,

[00:08] Bob Dobbs: I think,

[00:09] Bob Dobbs: and we're looking at my pamphlet,

[00:13] Bob Dobbs: my broadside,

[00:14] Bob Dobbs: or booklet,

[00:16] Bob Dobbs: and we ended up last session talking about the interior landscape,

[00:23] Bob Dobbs: and Cameron would like to see if he could define it some more.

[00:27] Bob Dobbs: So,

[00:28] Bob Dobbs: what would you say,

[00:29] Bob Dobbs: Cameron?

[00:31] Cameron McEwen: Yeah,

[00:31] Cameron McEwen: so...

[00:33] Cameron McEwen: First,

[00:34] Cameron McEwen: I just want to mention that when McLuhan came in 1969 to collect his early literary criticism,

[00:43] Cameron McEwen: he called it the interior landscape.

[00:46] Cameron McEwen: So one of the things that signals is that the interior landscape is nothing sort of interior to the body.

[00:53] Cameron McEwen: It's nothing physiologic.

[00:56] Cameron McEwen: It's an attempt to see if there's some way

[01:03] Cameron McEwen: to utilize the plurality of media to get a new sort of orientation.

[01:16] Bob Dobbs: Did you know that Don Thiel objected to Tom Wolfe's description of the nervous system,

[01:24] Bob Dobbs: the biological,

[01:26] Bob Dobbs: whatever the term is,

[01:27] Bob Dobbs: the physiological,

[01:29] Bob Dobbs: and he said that missed McLuhan point?

[01:31] Bob Dobbs: Sounds like Thiel was agreeing with you.

[01:34] Cameron McEwen: Yeah,

[01:35] Cameron McEwen: to me,

[01:37] Cameron McEwen: that sounds right.

[01:38] Cameron McEwen: I'm not familiar with that in feel,

[01:40] Cameron McEwen: but

[01:41] Cameron McEwen: I think that's absolutely correct.

[01:44] Cameron McEwen: We have to understand that something is at stake in McLuhan,

[01:49] Cameron McEwen: that he constantly compares to the advent of literacy in Athens in

[01:59] Cameron McEwen: 400 BC,

[02:00] Cameron McEwen: approximately,

[02:01] Cameron McEwen: and to the advent of Prince in the middle of the 50s.

[02:04] Cameron McEwen: 15th century,

[02:04] Cameron McEwen: 1,500 years later,

[02:07] Cameron McEwen: no,

[02:08] Cameron McEwen: 2,000 years later.

[02:11] Cameron McEwen: And what he sees as happening is the revelation of a whole new world on the basis of technological developments comparable to those two events.

[02:27] Bob Dobbs: Yeah,

[02:27] Bob Dobbs: I just want to say,

[02:27] Bob Dobbs: I think I said McLuhan agrees with you.

[02:29] Bob Dobbs: I meant Thiel.

[02:30] Bob Dobbs: Don Thiel agrees with you.

[02:32] Cameron McEwen: Correct.

[02:33] Bob Dobbs: Yeah.

[02:34] Bob Dobbs: Okay.

[02:36] Cameron McEwen: Inversely,

[02:38] Cameron McEwen: I agree with Theo.

[02:39] Cameron McEwen: He was there before me and is more familiar with McLuhan than me.

[02:46] Bob Dobbs: Yeah,

[02:46] Bob Dobbs: he did a whole chapter criticizing Tom Wolfe in his book,

[02:51] Bob Dobbs: The Virtual Marshall McLuhan,

[02:53] Bob Dobbs: I think,

[02:53] Bob Dobbs: one of his books.

[02:54] Bob Dobbs: I think it was that one.

[02:55] Bob Dobbs: He made a point of this.

[02:57] Bob Dobbs: He actually.

[02:58] Bob Dobbs: In a way,

[02:59] Bob Dobbs: he agreed with you.

[03:00] Bob Dobbs: He didn't think anybody who was known as a McLuhan expert or a McLuhan or a writer on McLuhan got close to what McLuhan was about.

[03:10] Cameron McEwen: Right,

[03:11] Cameron McEwen: right.

[03:11] Cameron McEwen: And it's not even a question of being close,

[03:14] Cameron McEwen: because close is a term that implicates continuity and is therefore a

[03:25] Cameron McEwen: Gutenberg galaxy.

[03:27] Cameron McEwen: notion.

[03:28] Bob Dobbs: Yes.

[03:29] Cameron McEwen: So what's needed is a revolution and when we're talking about interior landscape we're talking about what kind of revolution does he think is both possible and necessary.

[03:42] Cameron McEwen: So he spoke constantly about us needing to come up with a what he called a survival strategy and his

[03:56] Cameron McEwen: notion of the interior landscape has to do with how he thought it might be possible for human beings and human civilization to survive.

[04:10] Bob Dobbs: Yeah,

[04:11] Bob Dobbs: now,

[04:12] Bob Dobbs: was he trying to get it back to the ancient philosophers'

[04:17] Bob Dobbs: idea,

[04:18] Bob Dobbs: say Plato,

[04:18] Bob Dobbs: Aristotle,

[04:19] Bob Dobbs: or people before them,

[04:21] Bob Dobbs: or was it unique what he was coming up with?

[04:24] Cameron McEwen: No,

[04:25] Cameron McEwen: no,

[04:25] Cameron McEwen: not unique.

[04:28] Cameron McEwen: As you have brought out in previous conversations,

[04:32] Cameron McEwen: it was critical for McLuhan that all of a sudden we had multimedia,

[04:38] Cameron McEwen: that we were bombarded by media,

[04:41] Cameron McEwen: and that allowed for the first time to understand the field of media.

[04:49] Cameron McEwen: That might be called the interior landscape,

[04:51] Cameron McEwen: by the way.

[04:52] Cameron McEwen: So the field of media.

[04:54] Cameron McEwen: includes everything that has ever been thought or experienced.

[05:01] Cameron McEwen: including everything that could have been thought or experienced.

[05:08] Cameron McEwen: And to understand that,

[05:09] Cameron McEwen: you just have to think of chemistry for a minute.

[05:11] Cameron McEwen: When chemistry began around 1800,

[05:17] Cameron McEwen: what was at stake was everything that had ever happened physically and everything that could have happened physically.

[05:26] Cameron McEwen: So there had never been...

[05:29] Cameron McEwen: an atomic explosion,

[05:32] Cameron McEwen: for example.

[05:34] Cameron McEwen: But even though that was going to be new,

[05:37] Cameron McEwen: it would be explained in terms of what had always been going on.

[05:41] Bob Dobbs: Yeah.

[05:43] Bob Dobbs: And that's your basic thesis you told me and Mark in 98,

[05:48] Bob Dobbs: your chemical elements point.

[05:50] Bob Dobbs: That's correct.

[05:51] Bob Dobbs: Right?

[05:52] Cameron McEwen: That is correct.

[05:53] Cameron McEwen: And that basically,

[05:55] Cameron McEwen: when I use chemistry in relationship to McLuhan,

[05:58] Cameron McEwen: What I'm talking about is the possibility of pattern recognition in a multimedia environment.

[06:07] Cameron McEwen: And the confirmation that pattern recognition is possible is rigorous investigation of the field.

[06:15] Cameron McEwen: So

[06:16] Cameron McEwen: Hegel already,

[06:19] Cameron McEwen: in the first decades of the

[06:22] Cameron McEwen: 19th century,

[06:23] Cameron McEwen: said that there is only one proof for the possibility.

[06:27] Cameron McEwen: of science and that is the actuality of it.

[06:34] Cameron McEwen: He pointed out that it's useless to talk about maybe there's science or the possibility of science is this and that.

[06:44] Cameron McEwen: People have claimed that forever.

[06:47] Cameron McEwen: The only real test is what happened with chemistry in the

[06:51] Cameron McEwen: 19th century and that is that industrialists began to use chemistry.

[06:57] Cameron McEwen: to produce paint,

[06:59] Cameron McEwen: right,

[06:59] Cameron McEwen: or to produce gunpowder.

[07:01] Cameron McEwen: So then it became built into the economy that pattern recognition of a certain kind directed to the physical world produced practical results.

[07:16] Cameron McEwen: And that is,

[07:17] Cameron McEwen: in my opinion,

[07:18] Cameron McEwen: that's what McLuhan was aiming at.

[07:21] Cameron McEwen: You know,

[07:21] Cameron McEwen: when he,

[07:22] Cameron McEwen: you often bring up the idea of but...

[07:25] Cameron McEwen: turning down the thermostat,

[07:27] Cameron McEwen: the media thermostat in different areas.

[07:30] Cameron McEwen: And for me,

[07:32] Cameron McEwen: what's at stake there is the practical application of pattern recognition within the multimedia field.

[07:43] Cameron McEwen: But in order to understand the interior landscape better,

[07:48] Cameron McEwen: what I'd like to do is talk first just a minute about the The X.

[07:55] Cameron McEwen: exteriorization of chemistry,

[07:58] Cameron McEwen: right?

[07:59] Cameron McEwen: And so in 1800,

[08:01] Cameron McEwen: when people began to discern a new way of recognizing what was going on in the physical world,

[08:12] Cameron McEwen: this could be called the exteriorization of chemistry,

[08:16] Cameron McEwen: although nothing in the history of the universe had ever not been chemistry.

[08:22] Cameron McEwen: So what happened with the X?

[08:24] Cameron McEwen: exteriorization of chemistry was that it became theorized and then once it was theorized over the next 200 years coming up to where we are now a whole new world evolved a new world in which those

[08:44] Cameron McEwen: patterns that were recognized were used for practical effect in economics and

[08:53] Cameron McEwen: They were used to design courses at the university.

[09:00] Cameron McEwen: They were used for patents.

[09:04] Cameron McEwen: And a whole new world was developed on the basis of what had always been the case.

[09:13] Cameron McEwen: So a new world in medicine,

[09:14] Cameron McEwen: a new world in biology,

[09:16] Cameron McEwen: a new world in genetics.

[09:18] Cameron McEwen: All of this depended upon...

[09:20] Cameron McEwen: the initial pattern recognition of people like Priestley and Lavoisier just before

[09:28] Bob Dobbs: 1800. Did you come up?

[09:32] Bob Dobbs: Oh,

[09:32] Bob Dobbs: no,

[09:32] Bob Dobbs: I'll let you finish.

[09:33] Bob Dobbs: Go ahead.

[09:35] Cameron McEwen: Well,

[09:35] Cameron McEwen: I just wanted to say that the exteriorization of consciousness is a parallel to that.

[09:43] Cameron McEwen: So the exteriorization of consciousness isn't like the blob from outer space.

[09:49] Cameron McEwen: space or something like this,

[09:50] Cameron McEwen: although there's a certain insight in science fiction and in surrealism.

[10:00] Cameron McEwen: about what this new field is like,

[10:02] Cameron McEwen: but the exteriorization of consciousness is something that has not even begun yet because pattern recognition hasn't been directed to the field

[10:18] Cameron McEwen: of multimedia and the practical results,

[10:24] Cameron McEwen: which would be the only proof of that pattern recognition,

[10:28] Cameron McEwen: have not at all.

[10:30] Cameron McEwen: been discerned or utilized.

[10:33] Bob Dobbs: Right.

[10:35] Bob Dobbs: I wanted to ask you,

[10:37] Bob Dobbs: did you come up with this notion by yourself,

[10:42] Bob Dobbs: or were you reading something about Lavoisier or Priestley?

[10:46] Bob Dobbs: Where did this notion about reality being arrived at with chemistry,

[10:52] Bob Dobbs: where did you get that from?

[10:55] Cameron McEwen: Well,

[10:55] Cameron McEwen: when you say reality being arrived at with chemistry,

[10:58] Cameron McEwen: Um,

[11:00] Cameron McEwen: I think

[11:01] Cameron McEwen: I'm not sure that that's exactly right.

[11:03] Cameron McEwen: I mean,

[11:09] Cameron McEwen: chemistry gets at what's going on in the field of physical reality,

[11:15] Cameron McEwen: but at the leading edge of science,

[11:20] Cameron McEwen: there are always unknowns,

[11:22] Cameron McEwen: and science works through unknowns.

[11:25] Cameron McEwen: So it's not the case that we come to a sudden illumination.

[11:30] Cameron McEwen: Instead,

[11:31] Cameron McEwen: we learn how to use obscurity in a new way.

[11:37] Cameron McEwen: And that's similar with the multimedia environment,

[11:42] Cameron McEwen: where all that's wanted is a way of looking at the interior landscape,

[11:53] Cameron McEwen: a way of recognizing its patterns,

[11:55] Cameron McEwen: which allows research to take off.

[11:59] Cameron McEwen: Now,

[12:01] Cameron McEwen: and then once it takes off,

[12:02] Cameron McEwen: there'll be all sorts of new findings,

[12:04] Cameron McEwen: new sciences,

[12:05] Cameron McEwen: but the edge of those sciences will always be a certain obscurity that actually provides a way forward for those sciences.

[12:17] Cameron McEwen: So when we look at it that way and ask the question you asked,

[12:22] Cameron McEwen: then the two professors that I had at Princeton were formative for these ideas.

[12:28] Cameron McEwen: first.

[12:29] Cameron McEwen: Thomas Kuhn,

[12:31] Cameron McEwen: who wrote The Structure of Scientific Revolutions,

[12:35] Cameron McEwen: and he was my advisor just a couple of years after the first appearance of that book.

[12:41] Cameron McEwen: So from Kuhn,

[12:41] Cameron McEwen: I had the idea that scientific revolution is possible and that it needs to be.

[12:57] Cameron McEwen: differentiated sharply from what he called normal science.

[13:02] Cameron McEwen: And

[13:03] Cameron McEwen: I also had the idea with

[13:05] Cameron McEwen: Kuhn, and this was an idea he didn't like.

[13:07] Cameron McEwen: I had the idea that in the present state of knowledge,

[13:17] Cameron McEwen: and of the,

[13:19] Cameron McEwen: you know,

[13:20] Cameron McEwen: I didn't call anything the field of multimedia in those days.

[13:26] Cameron McEwen: But the state of thought,

[13:28] Cameron McEwen: you could say,

[13:31] Cameron McEwen: I thought was very obscure and that this obscurity might be,

[13:39] Cameron McEwen: if we interrogated it,

[13:40] Cameron McEwen: it might be the sort of obscurity that's on the leading edge of science.

[13:46] Cameron McEwen: Or if science hasn't begun yet,

[13:48] Cameron McEwen: it could be like the initiation of science.

[13:51] Cameron McEwen: So

[13:53] Cameron McEwen: Kuhn didn't.

[13:54] Cameron McEwen: Kuhn thought,

[13:54] Cameron McEwen: you know,

[13:55] Cameron McEwen: the guy's an idiot.

[13:56] Cameron McEwen: He's,

[13:58] Cameron McEwen: you know,

[13:58] Cameron McEwen: 20 years old.

[14:00] Cameron McEwen: He doesn't know anything about what we're talking about.

[14:03] Cameron McEwen: So the sooner he forgets that stuff and gets into the real history of science,

[14:08] Cameron McEwen: the better we'll be.

[14:10] Bob Dobbs: He told you that?

[14:12] Cameron McEwen: No,

[14:12] Cameron McEwen: well,

[14:12] Cameron McEwen: I mean...

[14:13] Bob Dobbs: Politely.

[14:14] Cameron McEwen: In so many words,

[14:16] Cameron McEwen: he did.

[14:17] Cameron McEwen: I mean,

[14:18] Cameron McEwen: he basically said,

[14:19] Cameron McEwen: look,

[14:20] Cameron McEwen: these are big ideas.

[14:22] Cameron McEwen: Why don't you learn how to detail them,

[14:27] Cameron McEwen: right?

[14:27] Cameron McEwen: Get your hands dirty,

[14:29] Cameron McEwen: get into the workings of science.

[14:33] Cameron McEwen: And basically,

[14:35] Cameron McEwen: he said to me the same thing as the other professor,

[14:38] Cameron McEwen: and that was

[14:39] Cameron McEwen: Richard Rorty.

[14:41] Cameron McEwen: And

[14:42] Cameron McEwen: Richard Rorty in those days was quite a young faculty member and often was the leader of

[14:52] Cameron McEwen: what are called precept or preceptorial.

[14:58] Cameron McEwen: meetings at Princeton.

[14:59] Cameron McEwen: So Princeton doesn't have tutors like Oxford does,

[15:04] Cameron McEwen: but it does have preceptors.

[15:06] Cameron McEwen: And preceptors have meetings with like five students,

[15:13] Cameron McEwen: let's say,

[15:13] Cameron McEwen: or six.

[15:14] Cameron McEwen: Or at least it did in those days.

[15:16] Cameron McEwen: I don't know if they have this system now or not.

[15:18] Cameron McEwen: But so when you were taking any sort of course,

[15:23] Cameron McEwen: it could be Greek philosophy,

[15:24] Cameron McEwen: pragmatism,

[15:27] Cameron McEwen: linguistic philosophy,

[15:28] Cameron McEwen: whatever,

[15:30] Cameron McEwen: Rorty would often be one of the preceptors.

[15:34] Cameron McEwen: So in those days,

[15:36] Cameron McEwen: he was known as an analytic philosopher,

[15:40] Cameron McEwen: but

[15:41] Cameron McEwen: I had him for courses on Sartre and Nietzsche and

[15:46] Cameron McEwen: Wittgenstein and all sorts of stuff that Rorty became known for only a decade or two later.

[15:54] Bob Dobbs: Yeah,

[15:54] Bob Dobbs: when you were a student of him,

[15:57] Bob Dobbs: He wasn't famous.

[15:59] Cameron McEwen: Right.

[16:00] Bob Dobbs: Yeah,

[16:00] Bob Dobbs: because you were a student of two professors who,

[16:03] Bob Dobbs: you could say,

[16:04] Bob Dobbs: became more famous than McLuhan.

[16:07] Cameron McEwen: Oh,

[16:08] Cameron McEwen: I think that's for sure.

[16:09] Bob Dobbs: Yeah.

[16:09] Bob Dobbs: That's amazing.

[16:10] Cameron McEwen: Definitely more famous than McLuhan.

[16:12] Bob Dobbs: Were they challenging as teachers?

[16:15] Cameron McEwen: Absolutely,

[16:16] Cameron McEwen: absolutely.

[16:17] Cameron McEwen: I did all kinds of papers for Rorty because...

[16:23] Cameron McEwen: The way that these preceptorial sessions would work often was you would be assigned a paper to do,

[16:32] Cameron McEwen: could be in one week or two weeks or something,

[16:35] Cameron McEwen: often based on a book or a chapter in a book,

[16:38] Cameron McEwen: and then the preceptor would ask questions on the basis of those papers,

[16:48] Cameron McEwen: and if you were lucky,

[16:50] Cameron McEwen: the preceptor would give you back your paper.

[16:53] Cameron McEwen: and would have marked it up in various ways.

[16:56] Cameron McEwen: And the papers I would get back from

[17:01] Cameron McEwen: Rorty would often have the sorts of questions that analytic philosophers were famous for in those days,

[17:09] Cameron McEwen: questions like,

[17:11] Cameron McEwen: what do you mean here?

[17:15] Cameron McEwen: Do you know what this word really means?

[17:18] Cameron McEwen: Things like that.

[17:19] Cameron McEwen: And come to find out,

[17:22] Cameron McEwen: that's the...

[17:23] Cameron McEwen: sort of question that

[17:27] Cameron McEwen: McLuhan took up in the late stages of his University of Wright Manitoba education and then took it up in spades with

[17:37] Cameron McEwen: Richards and Levis and Empson in

[17:40] Cameron McEwen: Cambridge, where the great question was how can we treat the ambiguity of language?

[17:52] Cameron McEwen: That is instructive.

[17:55] Cameron McEwen: How can how can ambiguity be treated in a way that isn't fatally ambiguous itself and becomes sort of useless as a overview?

[18:10] Bob Dobbs: Right now,

[18:12] Bob Dobbs: you're the point that

[18:15] Bob Dobbs: Kuhn thought was ridiculous.

[18:16] Bob Dobbs: You stuck to that.

[18:18] Bob Dobbs: Did you decide he was wrong?

[18:21] Bob Dobbs: that you had a relevant question?

[18:25] Bob Dobbs: Well,

[18:25] Cameron McEwen: sort of.

[18:26] Cameron McEwen: I just knew that

[18:27] Cameron McEwen: I was studying

[18:30] Cameron McEwen: Nietzsche. I did my undergraduate thesis on Nietzsche and

[18:35] Cameron McEwen: I had the notion from Nietzsche that we were in a cul-de-sac and that we needed to find some way to get out of that cul-de-sac.

[18:46] Cameron McEwen: And so

[18:47] Cameron McEwen: I more or less dedicated my life for the next

[18:52] Cameron McEwen: 10 or 15 years to the question of is it possible to get out of this cul-de-sac and if it is how is it?

[19:03] Bob Dobbs: That would be in the

[19:04] Bob Dobbs: 80s and 90s?

[19:07] Cameron McEwen: No,

[19:08] Cameron McEwen: that was in the,

[19:11] Cameron McEwen: I graduated in 66 so from

[19:16] Cameron McEwen: 66 until

[19:18] Cameron McEwen: let's say,

[19:19] Cameron McEwen: 78,

[19:20] Cameron McEwen: sometime around there,

[19:22] Cameron McEwen: that's all I was doing was thinking about that one question about the cul-de-sac.

[19:27] Bob Dobbs: Right.

[19:28] Bob Dobbs: Is that when you went to seminars,

[19:30] Bob Dobbs: summer workshops and things?

[19:32] Bob Dobbs: I remember you telling me you did that.

[19:34] Bob Dobbs: Maybe that was later?

[19:35] Cameron McEwen: Yeah,

[19:36] Cameron McEwen: that was a few years later when I had the crazy idea.

[19:39] Cameron McEwen: Once I had the notion that it might be possible to get out of the cul-de-sac and how,

[19:47] Cameron McEwen: Then I got the idea that,

[19:48] Cameron McEwen: well,

[19:48] Cameron McEwen: I'll just start going to seminars and

[19:52] Cameron McEwen: I'll just go and meet with people.

[19:53] Cameron McEwen: I would make appointments with people.

[19:55] Cameron McEwen: For example,

[19:56] Cameron McEwen: John

[19:58] Cameron McEwen: Robinson.

[20:00] Cameron McEwen: as the guy that was doing the Nag Hammadi

[20:03] Cameron McEwen: Gnostic manuscripts.

[20:07] Cameron McEwen: He was a professor at Claremont,

[20:09] Cameron McEwen: which is not too far from LA,

[20:11] Cameron McEwen: and I was living in LA at the time.

[20:14] Cameron McEwen: And so I made an appointment with him,

[20:16] Cameron McEwen: and I went out and I tried to show how the

[20:19] Cameron McEwen: Gnostic Gospels lead into cul-de-sacs,

[20:22] Cameron McEwen: but don't have any way to get out.

[20:25] Cameron McEwen: And

[20:26] Cameron McEwen: I tried to show him that um

[20:29] Cameron McEwen: You know,

[20:30] Cameron McEwen: there was a way to get out of these things,

[20:33] Cameron McEwen: but you had to take the Gospels as a plurality.

[20:37] Cameron McEwen: But he didn't,

[20:39] Cameron McEwen: I don't know if he didn't understand or he was very non-communicative about the whole thing.

[20:48] Cameron McEwen: He just sort of dismissed what I was trying to talk to him about and indicated that he didn't want to take these things further.

[20:59] Cameron McEwen: And that was it for my,

[21:00] Cameron McEwen: you know,

[21:01] Cameron McEwen: I had an hour,

[21:01] Cameron McEwen: an hour and a half or something with him.

[21:03] Cameron McEwen: And that was it.

[21:05] Cameron McEwen: But,

[21:05] Cameron McEwen: you know,

[21:06] Cameron McEwen: I began to visit other people like McLuhan,

[21:10] Cameron McEwen: like James Hillman in

[21:13] Cameron McEwen: Dallas, like John O'Neill in Toronto.

[21:16] Cameron McEwen: And

[21:18] Cameron McEwen: John was very helpful to me because he was one of the few people that said,

[21:25] Cameron McEwen: this is interesting stuff.

[21:28] Cameron McEwen: If you go to

[21:29] Cameron McEwen: Merrill Ponte,

[21:30] Cameron McEwen: I think you'll find some related stuff.

[21:33] Cameron McEwen: So why don't you go to him and then get back to me on the basis of his books.

[21:40] Cameron McEwen: And I did.

[21:41] Cameron McEwen: And John indicated that that was interesting and that if I approached his books in that spirit,

[21:52] Cameron McEwen: that I might find it helpful,

[21:53] Cameron McEwen: et cetera.

[21:55] Cameron McEwen: So...

[21:57] Bob Dobbs: You were saying Merleau-Ponty,

[21:59] Bob Dobbs: that's how I say it.

[22:01] Cameron McEwen: Yeah.

[22:01] Bob Dobbs: Yeah.

[22:01] Cameron McEwen: Well,

[22:02] Cameron McEwen: Merleau.

[22:02] Cameron McEwen: Merleau,

[22:03] Cameron McEwen: yeah.

[22:03] Bob Dobbs: Merleau-Ponty?

[22:06] Bob Dobbs: Okay,

[22:06] Bob Dobbs: so you...

[22:07] Cameron McEwen: With the French...

[22:08] Bob Dobbs: Go ahead.

[22:09] Cameron McEwen: Well,

[22:09] Cameron McEwen: the French just call him Merleau.

[22:11] Cameron McEwen: Oh,

[22:11] Bob Dobbs: okay.

[22:12] Bob Dobbs: So you...

[22:13] Bob Dobbs: I went to his grave in 2016 in

[22:17] Bob Dobbs: Pierre Lachaise,

[22:18] Bob Dobbs: is it?

[22:19] Bob Dobbs: In Paris?

[22:21] Bob Dobbs: The famous cemetery.

[22:22] Bob Dobbs: I'm pretty sure he was there.

[22:23] Bob Dobbs: Yeah.

[22:25] Bob Dobbs: Yeah.

[22:25] Bob Dobbs: But...

[22:26] Bob Dobbs: You visit McLuhan in 70,

[22:28] Bob Dobbs: that's four years after 66,

[22:30] Bob Dobbs: so this pursuit,

[22:32] Bob Dobbs: this focus on this question includes the meeting with McLuhan that early.

[22:38] Cameron McEwen: Absolutely,

[22:39] Cameron McEwen: absolutely,

[22:40] Bob Dobbs: yeah.

[22:44] Bob Dobbs: So by the late 70s,

[22:45] Bob Dobbs: did something change?

[22:46] Bob Dobbs: When did you get into McLuhan seriously?

[22:51] Cameron McEwen: Well,

[22:52] Cameron McEwen: I had always been reading his books,

[22:55] Cameron McEwen: and so

[22:58] Cameron McEwen: I had ideas from McLuhan that were kind of percolating in the back of my brain.

[23:07] Cameron McEwen: So

[23:09] Cameron McEwen: I didn't really appreciate what was going on with McLuhan until maybe in the

[23:17] Cameron McEwen: 1980s.

[23:18] Cameron McEwen: I had read the books,

[23:19] Cameron McEwen: the ideas were percolating,

[23:22] Cameron McEwen: but I hadn't sort of fit them into what I thought was going on.

[23:27] Cameron McEwen: with different people.

[23:28] Cameron McEwen: And then in the

[23:31] Cameron McEwen: 80s, I got the idea that his notions could be aligned with stuff that I had from Hegel or Plato.

[23:41] Cameron McEwen: And that was already related to the chemistry idea.

[23:48] Cameron McEwen: And so by the time we met and talked in the late 90s,

[23:52] Cameron McEwen: I already had

[23:56] Cameron McEwen: sort of figured out how

[23:58] Cameron McEwen: I wanted to speak about this in terms of McLuhan.

[24:03] Bob Dobbs: Right.

[24:03] Bob Dobbs: So do you think the incredible for the

[24:07] Bob Dobbs: 80s or for people coming out of the 70s,

[24:09] Bob Dobbs: the multimedia anti-environment the

[24:12] Bob Dobbs: 80s, I call it mixed corporate media,

[24:15] Bob Dobbs: you know,

[24:17] Bob Dobbs: MTV,

[24:19] Bob Dobbs: CNN,

[24:20] Bob Dobbs: all these things,

[24:21] Bob Dobbs: do you think that brought you back into thinking about McLuhan?

[24:27] Cameron McEwen: It's certainly possible.

[24:29] Cameron McEwen: A lot of the stuff that goes on with thought is not intentional.

[24:37] Cameron McEwen: McLuhan constantly talks about how media do not affect us through ideas and thought.

[24:47] Cameron McEwen: They affect the perception that is sort of below thought.

[24:54] Bob Dobbs: Yes.

[24:56] Cameron McEwen: And so I don't discarnate what you're saying at all.

[25:00] Cameron McEwen: McLuhan whole idea was that since,

[25:04] Cameron McEwen: let's say,

[25:04] Cameron McEwen: 1900,

[25:06] Cameron McEwen: in all kinds of fields,

[25:09] Cameron McEwen: the idea from the

[25:13] Cameron McEwen: Gutenberg galaxy that there was one sort of rationality and one way that all sciences were headed was just nonsense.

[25:27] Cameron McEwen: People,

[25:28] Cameron McEwen: say from the time of Baudelaire at least,

[25:31] Cameron McEwen: had recognized that rationality was a natural plurality and that if we were really to understand human

[25:45] Cameron McEwen: beings we had to understand them across the whole spectrum of their possibilities.

[25:53] Cameron McEwen: So not just

[25:55] Cameron McEwen: the great thinkers in the universities,

[25:58] Cameron McEwen: but the laborer walking through Paris.

[26:03] Bob Dobbs: Yeah,

[26:03] Bob Dobbs: now,

[26:04] Bob Dobbs: what is your meaning for plurality?

[26:06] Bob Dobbs: You use that a lot.

[26:08] Cameron McEwen: That's right.

[26:09] Cameron McEwen: And the reason for that is that if plurality is basic,

[26:21] Cameron McEwen: if you can never get around the plurality of media,

[26:25] Cameron McEwen: Never get around the plurality of perceptions.

[26:30] Cameron McEwen: That means that there is something special about the border between and defining this natural plurality,

[26:43] Cameron McEwen: right?

[26:44] Cameron McEwen: If there weren't something special about the border of media,

[26:52] Cameron McEwen: something...

[26:53] Cameron McEwen: that's fundamentally real about the border between media,

[26:58] Cameron McEwen: then they wouldn't be plural.

[27:00] Cameron McEwen: Ultimately,

[27:01] Cameron McEwen: they would be singular.

[27:03] Bob Dobbs: Right.

[27:04] Cameron McEwen: Right.

[27:04] Bob Dobbs: Okay,

[27:05] Bob Dobbs: have you ever looked at Zingroni's book,

[27:07] Bob Dobbs: The Media Simplex?

[27:10] Cameron McEwen: No.

[27:11] Bob Dobbs: He talks about the pre-conscious a lot.

[27:14] Bob Dobbs: He had a friend in the Psychoanalytic North American Association,

[27:19] Bob Dobbs: and I think he learned a lot about the pre-conscious.

[27:22] Bob Dobbs: Does that strike you as something that maybe you're talking about rather than unconscious?

[27:29] Cameron McEwen: Yeah,

[27:30] Cameron McEwen: there's a big danger there,

[27:31] Cameron McEwen: and that is that the whole way the Gutenberg Galaxy operates is that it tries to find something singular that it can identify that lacks ambiguity,

[27:48] Cameron McEwen: and then it can explain ambiguity.

[27:51] Cameron McEwen: in terms of that singularity.

[27:54] Cameron McEwen: So,

[27:56] Cameron McEwen: you know,

[27:56] Cameron McEwen: the pre-conscious is dangerous in that if it's not seen as ambiguous,

[28:06] Cameron McEwen: then it's going to be useless for coming to terms with the anti-environment because the electric anti-environment fundamentally ambiguous.

[28:16] Cameron McEwen: So that's one of the markers of the Gutenberg Galaxy.

[28:21] Cameron McEwen: McLuhan always says it's continuous.

[28:28] Cameron McEwen: Let me just see if I have a decent quote here for you.

[28:33] Bob Dobbs: Well,

[28:34] Bob Dobbs: it's continuous,

[28:35] Bob Dobbs: sequential,

[28:36] Bob Dobbs: homogeneous,

[28:37] Bob Dobbs: uniform.

[28:37] Bob Dobbs: Yeah,

[28:38] Cameron McEwen: exactly.

[28:38] Bob Dobbs: He had a bunch of words he'd repeat all the time.

[28:41] Cameron McEwen: That is exactly right.

[28:43] Bob Dobbs: Yeah.

[28:43] Cameron McEwen: And if the preconscious is allowed to be a kind of fixed,

[28:50] Cameron McEwen: marker,

[28:52] Cameron McEwen: then everything that is explained via that fixed marker is going to be continuous with it in some way.

[29:00] Cameron McEwen: And you end up with a sort of crystal palace overview of whatever you're investigating,

[29:08] Cameron McEwen: Innis case,

[29:09] Cameron McEwen: McLuhan.

[29:10] Cameron McEwen: And this is going to be completely different from what McLuhan was talking about.

[29:15] Bob Dobbs: Although,

[29:17] Cameron McEwen: we must say that...

[29:18] Cameron McEwen: One of the interesting things in both Joyce and McLuhan is that they insist that you cannot have a fundamental plurality without accounting for sin,

[29:35] Cameron McEwen: without accounting for false views,

[29:37] Cameron McEwen: without accounting for the deep reality of fundamental mistakes.

[29:47] Cameron McEwen: If you want to have multimedia as your sort of your basis,

[29:53] Cameron McEwen: then part of your fundament

[29:58] Cameron McEwen: is how human beings constantly go wrong.

[30:05] Bob Dobbs: Yeah,

[30:05] Bob Dobbs: now,

[30:06] Bob Dobbs: McLuhan regarded poetry as,

[30:09] Bob Dobbs: traditional poetry,

[30:11] Bob Dobbs: last,

[30:12] Bob Dobbs: say,

[30:12] Bob Dobbs: 500 years,

[30:14] Bob Dobbs: as introducing,

[30:15] Bob Dobbs: retrieving ambiguity in juxtaposition to the scientists.

[30:20] Bob Dobbs: Would you agree?

[30:24] Cameron McEwen: Yes,

[30:24] Cameron McEwen: but

[30:25] Cameron McEwen: I think that...

[30:28] Cameron McEwen: When McLuhan is at his best,

[30:32] Cameron McEwen: then he would insist that there is no such thing as the poetry of the last 500 years,

[30:39] Cameron McEwen: and there's no such thing as science like that.

[30:44] Cameron McEwen: If we want to fundamentally come to grips with the anti-environment,

[30:50] Cameron McEwen: we have to let all terms be ambiguous,

[30:54] Cameron McEwen: and we have to let ambiguity be our fundamental.

[30:58] Cameron McEwen: clue.

[31:00] Bob Dobbs: Right,

[31:00] Bob Dobbs: so

[31:04] Bob Dobbs: Carpenter and them in the explorations,

[31:08] Bob Dobbs: they had their fields,

[31:09] Bob Dobbs: but McLuhan field was poetry,

[31:12] Bob Dobbs: they would say,

[31:13] Bob Dobbs: and he thought that was the deeper field than theirs.

[31:19] Bob Dobbs: Is poetry,

[31:20] Bob Dobbs: I mean,

[31:21] Bob Dobbs: excellent poetry or serious poetry,

[31:24] Bob Dobbs: is that part of the Gutenberg galaxy?

[31:28] Bob Dobbs: printed poetry in the sense that they're pointing out it's pointing out ambiguity in language to counter the precision of the calculus the mathematicians and the scientists and the chemists well

[31:43] Cameron McEwen: you see bob i i just think that all when uh we talk like that the danger is to think that we can fix what uh great poetry is or what even what calculus is

[31:58] Cameron McEwen: or what science is.

[32:00] Cameron McEwen: And

[32:00] Cameron McEwen: McLuhan, at his best,

[32:02] Cameron McEwen: doesn't work like that at all.

[32:04] Cameron McEwen: What McLuhan does is say that there is a natural ambiguity to everything.

[32:11] Bob Dobbs: Okay.

[32:12] Cameron McEwen: For example,

[32:13] Cameron McEwen: figure and ground.

[32:14] Bob Dobbs: Right.

[32:15] Cameron McEwen: And what McLuhan does,

[32:17] Cameron McEwen: he says,

[32:18] Cameron McEwen: let's take figure and ground and apply that to poetry and science,

[32:25] Cameron McEwen: which you were just talking about.

[32:26] Bob Dobbs: Yeah.

[32:27] Cameron McEwen: And he'll say at one extreme we have poetry as ground and science as figure.

[32:37] Cameron McEwen: And here,

[32:41] Cameron McEwen: at this extreme,

[32:42] Cameron McEwen: anything that's valuable in science as figure is going to have its ground in poetry.

[32:50] Cameron McEwen: And then he's going to go to the other extreme where science is the ground and poetry is the figure.

[32:57] Cameron McEwen: And here,

[32:57] Cameron McEwen: anything that's valuable in poetry is going to have its ground in science.

[33:03] Cameron McEwen: And between these two extremes,

[33:05] Cameron McEwen: there is what McLuhan calls a myriad of other possibilities.

[33:10] Cameron McEwen: But they're all figure and ground possibilities.

[33:13] Cameron McEwen: And they have to do with what he sometimes calls the stress,

[33:17] Cameron McEwen: sometimes calls the preference,

[33:19] Cameron McEwen: sometimes calls the weight of how the figure and ground are configured.

[33:27] Cameron McEwen: So this is not only a critique of how people work in the humanities,

[33:33] Cameron McEwen: it's also a guide to how that work can actually be done.

[33:40] Cameron McEwen: It takes advantage of ambiguity,

[33:43] Cameron McEwen: but says that ambiguity itself has a pattern that can be recognized.

[33:49] Cameron McEwen: And the recognized pattern of ambiguity is the spectrum between these two.

[33:56] Cameron McEwen: extremes that we just mentioned.

[33:59] Bob Dobbs: Right.

[33:59] Bob Dobbs: So the term Gutenberg Galaxy has to be ambiguous.

[34:05] Cameron McEwen: Absolutely.

[34:07] Cameron McEwen: It is a sign of the Gutenberg Galaxy that it is always double,

[34:13] Cameron McEwen: but double in a kind of a derivative way.

[34:17] Cameron McEwen: If the Gutenberg Galaxy,

[34:20] Cameron McEwen: and we shouldn't call the Gutenberg Galaxy

[34:24] Cameron McEwen: as a singular thing,

[34:26] Cameron McEwen: right?

[34:26] Cameron McEwen: It was for hundreds of years,

[34:30] Cameron McEwen: there were people thinking and doing very different things,

[34:34] Cameron McEwen: but subject to a recognizable pattern that is the Gutenberg Galaxy.

[34:40] Cameron McEwen: But the pattern of the Gutenberg Galaxy is always to see something doubled that has a singular reality.

[34:51] Cameron McEwen: So the

[34:52] Cameron McEwen: Figure and ground that is at work in the Gutenberg Galaxy is a figure and ground configuration that wants to give itself up.

[35:02] Cameron McEwen: And some overwhelming question,

[35:05] Cameron McEwen: as

[35:06] Cameron McEwen: Krufrock says.

[35:07] Bob Dobbs: Yeah.

[35:08] Cameron McEwen: Right?

[35:09] Cameron McEwen: The Gutenberg Galaxy is all of those ways of attempting to find closure that either begin or end in singularity.

[35:20] Cameron McEwen: So it's not that the Gutenberg Galaxy lacks ambiguity.

[35:24] Cameron McEwen: It's got ambiguity in space.

[35:26] Cameron McEwen: However,

[35:28] Cameron McEwen: it always attempts to find some.

[35:32] Cameron McEwen: ground that can overwhelm its figure or conversely some figure that can overwhelm its ground.

[35:42] Cameron McEwen: So McLuhan,

[35:43] Cameron McEwen: or I should say maybe Eric especially,

[35:46] Cameron McEwen: liked to talk about figures without ground.

[35:50] Bob Dobbs: Yes.

[35:52] Bob Dobbs: When

[35:52] Bob Dobbs: Marshall said this can be shown by empirical means,

[35:56] Bob Dobbs: the way he used the word empirical is that what you're trying to say about the elements of chemistry?

[36:02] Cameron McEwen: Absolutely,

[36:03] Cameron McEwen: absolutely.

[36:04] Cameron McEwen: McLuhan trying to say that these spectra of ambiguity can be seen to be at work anytime anything is said or written or whatever.

[36:19] Cameron McEwen: And if we were serious about what we were doing,

[36:25] Cameron McEwen: we would start with this range of ambiguity and see how it worked.

[36:31] Cameron McEwen: And seeing how it works is what he meant by empiricism.

[36:35] Bob Dobbs: Right.

[36:36] Bob Dobbs: Okay,

[36:38] Bob Dobbs: so the next thought was,

[36:42] Bob Dobbs: I don't know of any sentence that he wrote that you say,

[36:48] Bob Dobbs: five minutes ago you said,

[36:50] Bob Dobbs: McLuhan was pointing to the multiple possibilities,

[36:56] Bob Dobbs: blah,

[36:58] Bob Dobbs: Where did he actually say those words?

[37:02] Cameron McEwen: Oh,

[37:02] Cameron McEwen: he constantly was talking about that.

[37:04] Cameron McEwen: For example,

[37:06] Cameron McEwen: when he talks about the unconscious,

[37:09] Cameron McEwen: what he's talking about there is everything that could possibly be experienced by human beings.

[37:19] Bob Dobbs: Right,

[37:19] Bob Dobbs: but he never,

[37:20] Bob Dobbs: I don't recall him saying the word possibilities ever.

[37:26] Cameron McEwen: No,

[37:26] Cameron McEwen: but I think you're probably right.

[37:29] Cameron McEwen: I'll try and find something.

[37:33] Bob Dobbs: Near that.

[37:33] Cameron McEwen: Yeah,

[37:34] Cameron McEwen: but what he does talk about all the time is the dynamics,

[37:41] Cameron McEwen: right?

[37:42] Cameron McEwen: So he talks about a dynamic world,

[37:44] Cameron McEwen: or sometimes he talks about the drama,

[37:48] Cameron McEwen: for example,

[37:48] Cameron McEwen: the drama of cognition.

[37:50] Bob Dobbs: Yes.

[37:50] Cameron McEwen: And the whole concept of dynamics goes back to Aristotle.

[37:59] Cameron McEwen: And it was

[38:01] Cameron McEwen: Aristotle's attempt to show that people weren't understanding his teacher Plato correctly when they thought of the forms of thought being somehow abstracted from the world or up

[38:18] Cameron McEwen: in the sky and the clouds like in

[38:22] Cameron McEwen: Aristophanes' play The Clouds.

[38:27] Cameron McEwen: Aristotle tried to show is that the forms of thought have an inherent need to outer themselves,

[38:41] Cameron McEwen: to empty themselves,

[38:43] Cameron McEwen: to make themselves real,

[38:46] Cameron McEwen: you could say.

[38:48] Cameron McEwen: And so what

[38:51] Cameron McEwen: Aristotle was pointing to here is that you can imagine...

[38:57] Cameron McEwen: the world as having its reality in ideas that are completely separated from the world.

[39:04] Cameron McEwen: Or you can think about the world having its reality in terms of matter that is completely separated from the ideas.

[39:14] Cameron McEwen: Or in the third place,

[39:16] Cameron McEwen: you can think about ideas as inherently needing to realize themselves.

[39:23] Cameron McEwen: And that's what the dynamic is.

[39:27] Cameron McEwen: Dynamic is the push,

[39:29] Cameron McEwen: if you will,

[39:32] Cameron McEwen: of a form to be realized.

[39:37] Cameron McEwen: So you can see here that there are three different types of realities that

[39:47] Cameron McEwen: Plato already talked about and that

[39:50] Cameron McEwen: Aristotle then again talked about following.

[39:56] Cameron McEwen: Plato.

[39:57] Cameron McEwen: And in these three types of realities,

[40:00] Cameron McEwen: you have the extreme of

[40:03] Cameron McEwen: Ideas without relation to matter,

[40:07] Cameron McEwen: you have matter without relation to ideas,

[40:11] Cameron McEwen: and then in the middle,

[40:12] Cameron McEwen: you have ideas that are constantly realizing themselves in matter.

[40:19] Cameron McEwen: And you can see that 2,500 years later,

[40:25] Cameron McEwen: when chemistry is born,

[40:27] Cameron McEwen: the whole idea of chemical elements is that...

[40:33] Cameron McEwen: They're not at all abstracted from matter,

[40:36] Cameron McEwen: and matter isn't at all abstracted from chemical elements,

[40:39] Cameron McEwen: but that chemical elements are matter.

[40:43] Cameron McEwen: But on the one hand,

[40:44] Cameron McEwen: they're ideas that can be formulated strictly in theory,

[40:50] Cameron McEwen: and on the other hand,

[40:51] Cameron McEwen: they're realized in everything all around us.

[40:54] Cameron McEwen: So

[40:55] Cameron McEwen: McLuhan, when McLuhan talks about dynamics and when he talks about drama,

[41:02] Cameron McEwen: he's...

[41:02] Cameron McEwen: He's talking about something that's vertical,

[41:05] Cameron McEwen: not horizontal.

[41:08] Cameron McEwen: And when something is vertical,

[41:14] Cameron McEwen: then it's the drama of cognition that issues from media into reality.

[41:26] Cameron McEwen: And the two can be separated in thought,

[41:29] Cameron McEwen: the media on the one hand and the reality on the other.

[41:31] Cameron McEwen: But when they are separated,

[41:36] Cameron McEwen: that's a secondary thing.

[41:38] Cameron McEwen: The primary thing is that media have this urge to realize themselves.

[41:45] Cameron McEwen: And that's what happens in the drama of cognition,

[41:50] Cameron McEwen: and it's what happens in anything in the psychological field whatsoever.

[41:56] Bob Dobbs: Right.

[41:57] Bob Dobbs: Now,

[41:57] Bob Dobbs: the three approaches you said...

[42:00] Bob Dobbs: three minutes ago.

[42:02] Bob Dobbs: Can you map the trivium on each one?

[42:09] Cameron McEwen: Yeah,

[42:10] Cameron McEwen: I mean,

[42:10] Cameron McEwen: that's what

[42:11] Cameron McEwen: McLuhan tried to do,

[42:14] Cameron McEwen: right?

[42:15] Cameron McEwen: If we think about McLuhan career,

[42:19] Cameron McEwen: he started off studying at the University of Wright Manitoba,

[42:24] Cameron McEwen: and by 1930 or so,

[42:26] Cameron McEwen: he had already decided that...

[42:30] Cameron McEwen: Rupert Lodge in philosophy was the guy that he needed to work with.

[42:36] Cameron McEwen: And he worked closely with Lodge for several years.

[42:41] Cameron McEwen: And

[42:43] Cameron McEwen: Lodge's primary idea was that philosophy comes in three flavors,

[42:49] Cameron McEwen: idealism,

[42:50] Cameron McEwen: realism,

[42:51] Cameron McEwen: and pragmatism.

[42:53] Cameron McEwen: And so McLuhan had this notion of a threefold reality.

[43:00] Cameron McEwen: from

[43:02] Cameron McEwen: Lodge and then reading philosophers with Lodge like

[43:10] Cameron McEwen: Hegel, that became reinforced.

[43:15] Cameron McEwen: And so then when

[43:18] Cameron McEwen: 10 years later he's writing his thesis on the trivium,

[43:24] Cameron McEwen: the rhetoric

[43:29] Cameron McEwen: becomes the material side.

[43:33] Cameron McEwen: It's how words are materialized in,

[43:44] Cameron McEwen: let's say,

[43:45] Cameron McEwen: politics or in any practical field.

[43:51] Cameron McEwen: Rhetoric is exercised.

[43:52] Bob Dobbs: Yeah.

[43:54] Cameron McEwen: And then dialectic is the idealistic side where...

[44:01] Cameron McEwen: Whatever is going on has a conceptual reality to it and then grammar is in the middle and grammar is the study of how things

[44:17] Cameron McEwen: are to be understood.

[44:19] Cameron McEwen: That is to say you're going to use ideas like dialectic does but you're going to be applying them and deriving them from the practical world.

[44:29] Cameron McEwen: And so in his

[44:31] Cameron McEwen: PhD thesis,

[44:33] Cameron McEwen: he is still very much involved with his professor

[44:43] Cameron McEwen: Lodge influence,

[44:45] Cameron McEwen: and he's trying to see if there is a way of applying that threefold to the world.

[44:55] Cameron McEwen: And the great question he's going to ask is,

[44:58] Cameron McEwen: interrogate all during the

[45:00] Cameron McEwen: 1940s is

[45:03] Cameron McEwen: It's one thing to say that there is a threefold that can be applied to the world and all this sort of stuff,

[45:09] Cameron McEwen: but this will only work if you can find a rigorous way of identifying what is rhetoric,

[45:17] Cameron McEwen: what is dialectic,

[45:18] Cameron McEwen: and what is grammar.

[45:21] Cameron McEwen: And so then if we fast forward from 1942,

[45:28] Cameron McEwen: let's say,

[45:28] Cameron McEwen: when he was writing up his thesis,

[45:31] Cameron McEwen: His PhD thesis on Nash.

[45:33] Cameron McEwen: We fast forward to 1958 when he's talking with

[45:41] Cameron McEwen: Harry Skornia about his project that they're going to try and finance through the federal government.

[45:48] Cameron McEwen: McLuhan writes a paper that was never published,

[45:52] Cameron McEwen: but it's available online in the

[45:56] Cameron McEwen: NAEB files,

[45:58] Cameron McEwen: and it's called The Grammars of Media.

[46:01] Cameron McEwen: And what McLuhan has come to the idea over,

[46:06] Cameron McEwen: this is

[46:07] Cameron McEwen: 16 or 17 years later,

[46:10] Cameron McEwen: he's come to the idea that we need to,

[46:13] Cameron McEwen: if we want to rigorously define what he was trying to get at with the trivium,

[46:20] Cameron McEwen: we need to look at all of the different media,

[46:26] Cameron McEwen: but we have to look at them as if each were a language.

[46:30] Cameron McEwen: with its own grammar and that becomes that's 1958 he's going to live for another 20 years that becomes his sort of leading thought if we're really dealing with grammars of media how

[46:45] Cameron McEwen: do we specify what a grammar is and using that how do we specify what a medium is and then that sort of unlocks

[46:58] Cameron McEwen: everything and gets us out of the cul-de-sac.

[47:02] Bob Dobbs: Yeah.

[47:03] Bob Dobbs: What about Aquinas'

[47:05] Bob Dobbs: idea of the form is assuming the opposite before it becomes itself?

[47:12] Bob Dobbs: Remember he used to quote that a lot,

[47:14] Bob Dobbs: that something is becoming,

[47:16] Bob Dobbs: well,

[47:16] Bob Dobbs: the day is becoming day while it is night.

[47:22] Cameron McEwen: Correct.

[47:23] Cameron McEwen: So the...

[47:23] Cameron McEwen: Um,

[47:23] Cameron McEwen: um,

[47:28] Cameron McEwen: Is that part of ambiguity?

[47:32] Cameron McEwen: Well,

[47:32] Cameron McEwen: yes.

[47:33] Cameron McEwen: It shows,

[47:34] Cameron McEwen: it's an illustration of the natural ambiguity of things.

[47:38] Cameron McEwen: But it also,

[47:40] Cameron McEwen: when McLuhan quoted stuff like that,

[47:43] Cameron McEwen: he was largely interested in the question of multiple times.

[47:48] Cameron McEwen: Because it turns out that if you want to look at the dynamics of thought,

[47:54] Cameron McEwen: which is to say the drama of cognition,

[47:56] Cameron McEwen: which is to say the vertical genesis of thought,

[48:02] Cameron McEwen: then you need to have a plural notion of time because you need to have the idea that perception is generated in a different time from

[48:18] Cameron McEwen: linear chronology,

[48:19] Cameron McEwen: right?

[48:21] Cameron McEwen: When we're generating our thoughts,

[48:22] Cameron McEwen: it's not as if we

[48:25] Cameron McEwen: go from moment to moment thinking up some way of looking at the world.

[48:31] Cameron McEwen: Some way of looking at the world has always already happened.

[48:36] Cameron McEwen: We can't get at it through a linear chronology.

[48:42] Cameron McEwen: We need to imagine that there is a different kind of time in which perception is generated.

[48:51] Cameron McEwen: And that then

[48:56] Cameron McEwen: brings forward multiple questions like who does this right and where is it done if there's multiple times and there must be multiple spaces and there must be some shadowy

[49:11] Cameron McEwen: kind of entity that operates Innis region but it's not what

[49:20] Cameron McEwen: I am it's it's prior to my identity

[49:23] Cameron McEwen: And so by the end of his life,

[49:25] Cameron McEwen: McLuhan will say,

[49:26] Cameron McEwen: well,

[49:27] Cameron McEwen: that's the nobody.

[49:29] Cameron McEwen: That's,

[49:30] Cameron McEwen: you know,

[49:30] Cameron McEwen: and that's the dropout.

[49:32] Cameron McEwen: Yeah.

[49:35] Cameron McEwen: That's the peculiar entity that is between media,

[49:40] Cameron McEwen: right?

[49:41] Cameron McEwen: And it's because media are inherently plural with this strange gap between them,

[49:49] Cameron McEwen: which you would call the gap of tactility or...

[49:54] Cameron McEwen: the haptic gap.

[49:58] Cameron McEwen: In that gap,

[50:00] Cameron McEwen: there is a kind of frontiersman.

[50:03] Cameron McEwen: This is the frontier between media,

[50:06] Cameron McEwen: and in that frontier,

[50:07] Cameron McEwen: everybody is a nobody,

[50:10] Cameron McEwen: but you can see how this relates to the map of ambiguity that we were talking about before.

[50:15] Cameron McEwen: There's this spectrum of ambiguity,

[50:18] Cameron McEwen: and in between the various figure and ground configurations,

[50:23] Cameron McEwen: in fact,

[50:24] Cameron McEwen: even between figure and ground,

[50:26] Cameron McEwen: there is a peculiar gap.

[50:30] Cameron McEwen: And what McLuhan will say,

[50:31] Cameron McEwen: and this is...

[50:32] Cameron McEwen: goes way back to Plato and perhaps even back to Egypt,

[50:37] Cameron McEwen: the navigator of these gaps is,

[50:43] Cameron McEwen: or being the navigator of these gaps,

[50:46] Cameron McEwen: is what human being is.

[50:50] Bob Dobbs: Yes.

[50:50] Bob Dobbs: Now,

[50:50] Bob Dobbs: would you say the Marconi Galaxy,

[50:56] Bob Dobbs: when we move into that,

[50:57] Bob Dobbs: say 150 years ago,

[51:00] Bob Dobbs: is that...

[51:01] Bob Dobbs: mean a new emphasis on the quadrivium?

[51:07] Cameron McEwen: Maybe.

[51:08] Cameron McEwen: I know this is an idea that you like,

[51:10] Cameron McEwen: and it appears in your book,

[51:12] Cameron McEwen: actually.

[51:13] Bob Dobbs: Yes.

[51:13] Cameron McEwen: But

[51:15] Cameron McEwen: I'm not sure about that.

[51:17] Cameron McEwen: I think,

[51:19] Cameron McEwen: from my way of thinking about it,

[51:21] Cameron McEwen: the trivium is inherently plural,

[51:26] Cameron McEwen: and it wouldn't be plural if there was only the trivium,

[51:30] Cameron McEwen: right?

[51:30] Cameron McEwen: So they...

[51:31] Cameron McEwen: the whole notion of inherent plurality is one that is explosive,

[51:36] Cameron McEwen: right?

[51:37] Cameron McEwen: For McLuhan,

[51:38] Cameron McEwen: it's explosive in the way that it generates plurality,

[51:42] Cameron McEwen: but it's implosive related to the

[51:45] Cameron McEwen: Gutenberg Galaxy because it blows up the crystalline closures of the

[51:54] Cameron McEwen: Gutenberg Galaxy.

[51:57] Bob Dobbs: Yes,

[51:57] Bob Dobbs: but so

[52:00] Bob Dobbs: I suspect...

[52:00] Bob Dobbs: I suspect your understanding of interior landscape comes in here.

[52:04] Cameron McEwen: Yeah,

[52:08] Bob Dobbs: absolutely.

[52:08] Bob Dobbs: When I say we move into the quadrophrenia,

[52:11] Bob Dobbs: which is music,

[52:13] Bob Dobbs: and he said we live entirely by music,

[52:15] Bob Dobbs: mathematics is number,

[52:17] Bob Dobbs: or arithmetic is number,

[52:18] Bob Dobbs: which he said it was tactile,

[52:20] Bob Dobbs: geometry is visual,

[52:22] Bob Dobbs: and astronomy may be visual.

[52:25] Cameron McEwen: No,

[52:26] Cameron McEwen: he makes a big point of...

[52:29] Cameron McEwen: saying that the geometry is visual only for the Gutenberg Galaxy.

[52:36] Bob Dobbs: Yes.

[52:37] Cameron McEwen: So you don't have geometry prior to literacy.

[52:41] Cameron McEwen: But what happens in the

[52:43] Cameron McEwen: 19th century is that Poland and other places,

[52:47] Cameron McEwen: the geometry of the straight line between points is blown up.

[52:55] Bob Dobbs: Yeah.

[52:56] Cameron McEwen: And you...

[52:58] Cameron McEwen: You have a whole series of geometries plural,

[53:01] Cameron McEwen: and that plurality is the signature of the

[53:05] Cameron McEwen: Marconi era.

[53:07] Bob Dobbs: Right.

[53:08] Bob Dobbs: So we have a different meaning for geometry in the Marconi era.

[53:17] Bob Dobbs: arithmetic,

[53:17] Bob Dobbs: geometry can be non-visual.

[53:20] Bob Dobbs: Then astronomy,

[53:22] Bob Dobbs: does that get into kinetics?

[53:26] Bob Dobbs: Absolutely,

[53:27] Cameron McEwen: absolutely.

[53:28] Cameron McEwen: Look,

[53:30] Cameron McEwen: what happens in 1900 with Planck,

[53:33] Cameron McEwen: Constance,

[53:34] Cameron McEwen: and then shortly thereafter with Einstein's papers,

[53:38] Cameron McEwen: is that the whole idea of astronomy,

[53:42] Cameron McEwen: as it had been thought,

[53:44] Cameron McEwen: gets blown up.

[53:46] Cameron McEwen: Right.

[53:47] Cameron McEwen: And interestingly enough,

[53:49] Cameron McEwen: it gets what leads to these problems is what was called the black body.

[53:56] Cameron McEwen: problem and it was that the chemistry and physics of the

[54:03] Cameron McEwen: 19th century couldn't account for discrepancies that seemed to happen when you heated up a body and you and then it started to cool off and you tried to figure out how the cooling process worked the

[54:20] Cameron McEwen: numbers didn't come out right and

[54:24] Cameron McEwen: So that was an indication,

[54:26] Cameron McEwen: this black body theory.

[54:28] Cameron McEwen: My teacher,

[54:29] Cameron McEwen: Thomas Kuhn,

[54:31] Cameron McEwen: one of his books after the structure of scientific revolution is on black body theory.

[54:39] Cameron McEwen: So when the black body problem was interrogated,

[54:49] Cameron McEwen: that led to a revolution in astronomy.

[54:56] Bob Dobbs: Yes,

[54:56] Bob Dobbs: you're supporting my case that the Marconi Galaxy is more quadrophrenia than trivial.

[55:05] Cameron McEwen: You see,

[55:05] Cameron McEwen: I don't like notions of more than and stuff.

[55:07] Cameron McEwen: That gets into continuity and linearity and homogeneity.

[55:14] Bob Dobbs: People talk about McLuhan emphasis on the trivium.

[55:17] Bob Dobbs: Never talk about the quadrivium.

[55:19] Bob Dobbs: So I'm emphasizing the quadrivium to bring that back into at least an equal contender in categorizing McLuhan,

[55:27] Bob Dobbs: which may not be true.

[55:27] Bob Dobbs: Yeah,

[55:28] Bob Dobbs: yeah.

[55:28] Bob Dobbs: And

[55:29] Cameron McEwen: I agree with what I see is...

[55:33] Cameron McEwen: Lying behind your emphasis on that is that you're insisting on a plurality.

[55:40] Cameron McEwen: You're insisting that if you start with something like the trivium and say that's what McLuhan is all about,

[55:47] Cameron McEwen: then you simply haven't understood that for him ambiguity is fundamental.

[55:53] Cameron McEwen: The trivium is not one thing.

[55:56] Cameron McEwen: So if you imagine the figure and ground spectrum,

[56:00] Cameron McEwen: then you can imagine the trivium as figure and the quadrivium as ground,

[56:06] Cameron McEwen: and then at the other extreme,

[56:07] Cameron McEwen: the opposite.

[56:09] Cameron McEwen: And if you haven't taken account of that inherent ambiguity,

[56:15] Cameron McEwen: then you have remained in the Gutenberg galaxy.

[56:18] Cameron McEwen: And what I am in the process of arguing,

[56:23] Cameron McEwen: and what I'm going to argue more pointedly going forward,

[56:28] Cameron McEwen: is that all McLuhan scholarship up until now has had no other function but to attempt to haul him back into the Gutenberg galaxy.

[56:37] Bob Dobbs: I agree.

[56:39] Cameron McEwen: It's ridiculous.

[56:40] Bob Dobbs: Do you see what I'm trying to say in my book,

[56:44] Bob Dobbs: always in quotes,

[56:46] Bob Dobbs: it's in alignment to your purpose?

[56:50] Cameron McEwen: Yes,

[56:50] Cameron McEwen: I think so.

[56:51] Cameron McEwen: I mean,

[56:52] Cameron McEwen: one of the things that

[56:54] Cameron McEwen: I have to learn better from you

[56:58] Cameron McEwen: is that McLuhan certainly did speak about the displacement of media.

[57:11] Cameron McEwen: So that when you have a new medium,

[57:14] Cameron McEwen: it displaces all of the media before.

[57:18] Cameron McEwen: And that mechanism for McLuhan...

[57:23] Cameron McEwen: It's very important in trying to understand what a medium is,

[57:27] Cameron McEwen: and it's also very important in trying to understand what is going on in our history,

[57:37] Cameron McEwen: let alone,

[57:37] Cameron McEwen: you know,

[57:39] Cameron McEwen: the history of the past.

[57:41] Cameron McEwen: So

[57:42] Cameron McEwen: I see your work as dedicated to that side of McLuhan,

[57:49] Cameron McEwen: and it's something that's definitely there.

[57:52] Cameron McEwen: And it's,

[57:55] Cameron McEwen: you're able in your Bob-like way to come up with ways of talking about this that are,

[58:05] Cameron McEwen: you know,

[58:05] Cameron McEwen: they're enjoyable and they're more or less unique to you.

[58:11] Bob Dobbs: Yeah.

[58:12] Cameron McEwen: And

[58:12] Cameron McEwen: I find them very revealing.

[58:15] Cameron McEwen: So when we keep going through your book.

[58:22] Cameron McEwen: I think we'll find illustrations of you doing this over and over again.

[58:28] Bob Dobbs: Yes.

[58:31] Bob Dobbs: So you flipped me off there talking about me,

[58:38] Bob Dobbs: but just before that we were talking.

[58:44] Bob Dobbs: Oh,

[58:44] Bob Dobbs: so the Gutenberg Galaxy creates a tendency to move towards singular precision.

[58:51] Bob Dobbs: And the electric age creates a tendency to move to the pluralities,

[58:57] Bob Dobbs: the multiple levels.

[58:58] Bob Dobbs: Now,

[58:58] Bob Dobbs: these are tendencies,

[59:00] Bob Dobbs: and that might be the meteorological,

[59:03] Bob Dobbs: that's the ground,

[59:06] Bob Dobbs: and

[59:08] Bob Dobbs: McLuhan can show all these fields and human endeavors have the aspect of the

[59:16] Bob Dobbs: Marconi atmosphere.

[59:20] Bob Dobbs: as opposed to the Gutenberg atmosphere.

[59:22] Bob Dobbs: So when does that become practical,

[59:26] Bob Dobbs: that notion?

[59:28] Bob Dobbs: Or what he's trying to show us,

[59:31] Bob Dobbs: is it only practical in the sense that,

[59:33] Bob Dobbs: well,

[59:33] Bob Dobbs: we know it's going to keep going this way,

[59:35] Bob Dobbs: and even stranger ways,

[59:36] Bob Dobbs: we better do a stop,

[59:41] Bob Dobbs: a retreat,

[59:43] Bob Dobbs: that might get us out of the cul-de-sac of always going to new...

[59:47] Bob Dobbs: anti-environment and missing what's going on.

[59:50] Bob Dobbs: And another aspect is the word,

[59:53] Bob Dobbs: when he says the medium is the messiest,

[59:54] Bob Dobbs: the medium is all the technologies that we know.

[1:00:00] Bob Dobbs: And the new technology,

[1:00:02] Bob Dobbs: which is a figure,

[1:00:03] Bob Dobbs: is...

[1:00:05] Bob Dobbs: causes changes,

[1:00:06] Bob Dobbs: we start to notice that the medium starts to be stirred up,

[1:00:10] Bob Dobbs: because the medium is all the past institutions.

[1:00:14] Bob Dobbs: See?

[1:00:14] Bob Dobbs: But most people thought that when he said the medium is the message,

[1:00:17] Bob Dobbs: the word medium was a word for television or satellites.

[1:00:21] Bob Dobbs: When actually,

[1:00:22] Bob Dobbs: and I lay this out where he kind of says that,

[1:00:26] Bob Dobbs: in the mid-70s,

[1:00:27] Bob Dobbs: changes the surface meaning of medium to mean all that was already there.

[1:00:33] Bob Dobbs: We can only notice something news of foot when there's disturbances in the past or the medium we're using and are used to.

[1:00:41] Cameron McEwen: Yes,

[1:00:43] Cameron McEwen: that's all correct.

[1:00:44] Cameron McEwen: The only thing is you cannot get to

[1:00:54] Cameron McEwen: McLuhan suggestions by thinking that there is some way of kind of freezing what you're talking about.

[1:01:02] Cameron McEwen: It's not the case that we can take,

[1:01:06] Cameron McEwen: quote-unquote,

[1:01:07] Cameron McEwen: all media and freeze it as ground,

[1:01:09] Cameron McEwen: and then take some medium and say,

[1:01:12] Cameron McEwen: well,

[1:01:12] Cameron McEwen: that's the iPhone,

[1:01:14] Cameron McEwen: and stick that as the figure.

[1:01:16] Cameron McEwen: No.

[1:01:18] Cameron McEwen: For

[1:01:19] Cameron McEwen: McLuhan, this spectrum of figure and ground can never be got around.

[1:01:28] Cameron McEwen: Everything is inherently ambiguous.

[1:01:30] Cameron McEwen: And there only are laws of media because of that ambiguity.

[1:01:35] Cameron McEwen: And when people...

[1:01:36] Cameron McEwen: Sorry,

[1:01:37] Cameron McEwen: go ahead.

[1:01:37] Bob Dobbs: Yeah,

[1:01:38] Bob Dobbs: and so that's what the McLuhan industry does.

[1:01:41] Bob Dobbs: They don't get that.

[1:01:42] Bob Dobbs: Oh,

[1:01:43] Cameron McEwen: absolutely.

[1:01:44] Bob Dobbs: They try to say,

[1:01:45] Bob Dobbs: well,

[1:01:45] Bob Dobbs: no,

[1:01:45] Bob Dobbs: this is precise,

[1:01:46] Bob Dobbs: or do the opposite of what you're saying.

[1:01:49] Bob Dobbs: They move away from ambiguity.

[1:01:52] Bob Dobbs: And they think that,

[1:01:53] Bob Dobbs: well,

[1:01:53] Bob Dobbs: there is a point McLuhan saying,

[1:01:55] Bob Dobbs: it's hard to figure out...

[1:01:57] Bob Dobbs: And if you don't make an aside,

[1:01:58] Bob Dobbs: say,

[1:01:58] Bob Dobbs: well,

[1:01:58] Bob Dobbs: it's hard to figure out because it's ambiguous.

[1:02:00] Bob Dobbs: If you drop that and just say,

[1:02:02] Bob Dobbs: no,

[1:02:02] Bob Dobbs: here it is.

[1:02:04] Bob Dobbs: So

[1:02:04] Bob Dobbs: I was just thinking as you were talking there that the voice takes over the role of the book and becomes precise or appears to be precise when we're into the Postman media,

[1:02:17] Bob Dobbs: multiple spaces we're in.

[1:02:19] Bob Dobbs: So the oral retrieval is a content.

[1:02:26] Bob Dobbs: We're not oral.

[1:02:28] Bob Dobbs: We're not an oral society today because we use morality too much to pretend to seem to get precise.

[1:02:39] Cameron McEwen: Right,

[1:02:39] Cameron McEwen: but just remember that morality is not one thing and precision is not one thing.

[1:02:45] Cameron McEwen: So

[1:02:46] Cameron McEwen: McLuhan whole suggestion is that if we give up singularities,

[1:02:51] Cameron McEwen: then we can begin to research.

[1:02:54] Cameron McEwen: And we can't.

[1:02:56] Cameron McEwen: say what that research is going to realize.

[1:02:59] Cameron McEwen: All we can do is say that that research will revolutionize the world just as literacy once did or just as print once did.

[1:03:08] Cameron McEwen: The whole point is to start,

[1:03:10] Cameron McEwen: but we cannot start if we insist on singularities.

[1:03:15] Bob Dobbs: And so what in popular culture is a major term that people use more and more the last 10-15 years is singularity.

[1:03:24] Bob Dobbs: They're all talking about the singularity.

[1:03:26] Cameron McEwen: Correct.

[1:03:27] Bob Dobbs: They think the world is imploding to a singularity.

[1:03:30] Bob Dobbs: And you just established it.

[1:03:32] Bob Dobbs: No,

[1:03:32] Bob Dobbs: it's the incorrect word,

[1:03:34] Bob Dobbs: unless you have an ambiguous meaning for it.

[1:03:37] Cameron McEwen: No,

[1:03:37] Cameron McEwen: and even in physics,

[1:03:40] Cameron McEwen: singularity is often seen to be a plural.

[1:03:44] Bob Dobbs: Oh,

[1:03:44] Bob Dobbs: is it?

[1:03:46] Cameron McEwen: Absolutely,

[1:03:47] Cameron McEwen: because if you ask a singularity...

[1:03:51] Cameron McEwen: is like a black hole,

[1:03:54] Cameron McEwen: is where physical laws leave off.

[1:03:57] Cameron McEwen: And we inherently don't know what's going on in a black hole simply because the physical laws break down.

[1:04:08] Cameron McEwen: But now we know that there's a whole bunch of different black holes and it's one theoretical path in physics.

[1:04:20] Cameron McEwen: It's the idea of multiple universes and then other paths in science and physics have to do with the possibility of wormholes and all this sort of stuff.

[1:04:32] Cameron McEwen: So it's increasingly recognized that singularities are plural and that maybe that gives us an important clue to what's going on.

[1:04:46] Bob Dobbs: Yes,

[1:04:46] Bob Dobbs: so we have people.

[1:04:48] Bob Dobbs: saying,

[1:04:49] Bob Dobbs: overusing the word singularity,

[1:04:51] Bob Dobbs: and it's the correct word if you know the meaning you just outlined.

[1:04:56] Bob Dobbs: But people probably don't mean that meaning.

[1:04:59] Bob Dobbs: They just think it means...

[1:05:00] Bob Dobbs: No,

[1:05:00] Cameron McEwen: that's right.

[1:05:01] Bob Dobbs: What did you say?

[1:05:03] Cameron McEwen: No,

[1:05:04] Cameron McEwen: you're absolutely right.

[1:05:05] Cameron McEwen: What you're doing is you're saying,

[1:05:07] Cameron McEwen: isn't there something important about people going wrong?

[1:05:12] Bob Dobbs: Yeah.

[1:05:12] Cameron McEwen: About people talking about a singularity which ultimately doesn't make sense.

[1:05:21] Cameron McEwen: And that's,

[1:05:23] Cameron McEwen: in both Joyce and McLuhan,

[1:05:24] Cameron McEwen: there is this notion that unless you can account for,

[1:05:30] Cameron McEwen: not in the sense of some...

[1:05:32] Cameron McEwen: unbreakable law or something but an account for in their terms means something like talk sensibly about learn how to value so if we if we learn how to value singularity in the wrong sense what

[1:05:50] Cameron McEwen: we can say is that the culture is attempting to digest the disintegration of the Gutenberg Galaxy

[1:06:01] Cameron McEwen: And the Gutenberg Galaxy is the temptation to go from ambiguity to some sort of closure,

[1:06:08] Cameron McEwen: to some sort of singularity,

[1:06:11] Cameron McEwen: right?

[1:06:11] Cameron McEwen: So you have people chewing.

[1:06:14] Cameron McEwen: The culture is in the process of chewing the whole notion of singularity until it can finally digest it.

[1:06:23] Cameron McEwen: And when it digests it,

[1:06:25] Cameron McEwen: it will see that it is subject to the same...

[1:06:29] Cameron McEwen: laws of ambiguity that we've already talked about.

[1:06:34] Bob Dobbs: Yeah,

[1:06:35] Bob Dobbs: I think what I was trying to say about the voice taking over as content,

[1:06:40] Bob Dobbs: McLuhan actually gave us a summary of sociological,

[1:06:43] Bob Dobbs: psychological studies and aesthetic studies,

[1:06:47] Bob Dobbs: and he actually got it right.

[1:06:49] Bob Dobbs: The medium is the message is probably the most valuable thing to teach to high school kids or even younger.

[1:06:57] Bob Dobbs: That finally gave the voice something to say.

[1:07:00] Bob Dobbs: We now know the medium is the message,

[1:07:03] Bob Dobbs: which is like an elemental chemical rule.

[1:07:07] Bob Dobbs: But again,

[1:07:08] Bob Dobbs: that flips into ambiguity because we're not limited to the vocal,

[1:07:14] Bob Dobbs: verbal anymore.

[1:07:16] Bob Dobbs: So we have a great renaissance.

[1:07:19] Bob Dobbs: So a lot of people think they're getting epiphanies,

[1:07:23] Bob Dobbs: and they're actually just realizing what the Gutenberg Galaxy was.

[1:07:28] Bob Dobbs: And that's not the epiphany for the present.

[1:07:32] Cameron McEwen: Correct.

[1:07:32] Cameron McEwen: When you say realizing,

[1:07:34] Cameron McEwen: I have to note the ambiguity of that word.

[1:07:38] Bob Dobbs: Yeah.

[1:07:38] Cameron McEwen: Right?

[1:07:39] Cameron McEwen: You can realize something in the sense of bring it to form,

[1:07:44] Cameron McEwen: right?

[1:07:45] Cameron McEwen: And if you realize your potential,

[1:07:49] Cameron McEwen: what you do is you enable things that are within you in some sort of...

[1:07:57] Cameron McEwen: a practical way.

[1:07:59] Cameron McEwen: And then another meaning of realize is to come to consciousness of.

[1:08:06] Cameron McEwen: And those are two very different ideas of realize.

[1:08:09] Cameron McEwen: So what's going on in popular culture is a realization of the Gutenberg Galaxy in the sense of bringing its potential to form,

[1:08:24] Cameron McEwen: but it's not at all.

[1:08:25] Cameron McEwen: realization in the sense of coming to consciousness of.

[1:08:29] Cameron McEwen: That's what it's attempting to do,

[1:08:31] Cameron McEwen: but it's not succeeding.

[1:08:33] Cameron McEwen: And when you say that we now understand the medium as a message,

[1:08:38] Cameron McEwen: we don't understand that in McLuhan terms.

[1:08:41] Cameron McEwen: In McLuhan terms,

[1:08:42] Cameron McEwen: the only way to understand the medium as a message is to begin rigorous investigation on its basis.

[1:08:51] Cameron McEwen: And we have none of That's right.

[1:08:55] Bob Dobbs: What you were just saying.

[1:09:02] Bob Dobbs: Oh,

[1:09:02] Bob Dobbs: realize.

[1:09:03] Bob Dobbs: R-E-A-L-E-Y-E-S.

[1:09:07] Bob Dobbs: We think we've arrived at real eyes,

[1:09:09] Bob Dobbs: real sight.

[1:09:12] Bob Dobbs: A pun,

[1:09:12] Bob Dobbs: a Finnegans Wake on your word there.

[1:09:14] Bob Dobbs: Yeah,

[1:09:15] Bob Dobbs: yeah,

[1:09:15] Bob Dobbs: yeah.

[1:09:15] Cameron McEwen: It's like personal

[1:09:17] Cameron McEwen: O'Reilly. Right.

[1:09:20] Bob Dobbs: That's Innis Wake,

[1:09:21] Bob Dobbs: for those who don't know.

[1:09:23] Bob Dobbs: Page 44.

[1:09:28] Bob Dobbs: and for those who don't for those that don't know percy is per se that's right and o'reilly is the real yeah and o'reill is here french for here and then there's windham percy Wyndham Lewis in there but

[1:09:43] Bob Dobbs: the so then the next thought was oh what now what's in light of all you've said talk about interior landscape

[1:09:55] Bob Dobbs: We start off with.

[1:09:57] Cameron McEwen: That's correct.

[1:09:58] Cameron McEwen: So let me,

[1:09:59] Cameron McEwen: I think the way to do this.

[1:10:01] Cameron McEwen: to go back to the quotation from Joyce Aquinas in the poetic process that you often bring up that ends up with digestion.

[1:10:14] Cameron McEwen: So let me just quickly read what McLuhan has to say here.

[1:10:19] Cameron McEwen: First,

[1:10:20] Cameron McEwen: he makes a quotation from

[1:10:23] Cameron McEwen: Stephen Hero or Stephan Hero.

[1:10:25] Cameron McEwen: For Stephan,

[1:10:27] Cameron McEwen: art was neither a copy nor an imitation of nature.

[1:10:31] Cameron McEwen: The artistic process was a natural process,

[1:10:34] Cameron McEwen: a veritably sublime process of one's own nature,

[1:10:38] Cameron McEwen: which had a right to examination and open discussion.

[1:10:42] Cameron McEwen: So that's the quotation from Joyce.

[1:10:45] Cameron McEwen: And Stephen Hero,

[1:10:46] Cameron McEwen: by the way,

[1:10:47] Cameron McEwen: for those who don't know,

[1:10:48] Cameron McEwen: is the early book of

[1:10:51] Cameron McEwen: Joyce that he completed in Trieste,

[1:10:54] Cameron McEwen: and that one night in drunken disgust,

[1:10:59] Cameron McEwen: he threw it in the fire.

[1:11:01] Cameron McEwen: And

[1:11:02] Cameron McEwen: Nora was able to rescue some of it.

[1:11:04] Cameron McEwen: No,

[1:11:04] Cameron McEwen: his sister.

[1:11:05] Bob Dobbs: His sister.

[1:11:06] Cameron McEwen: Oh,

[1:11:06] Cameron McEwen: it was his sister?

[1:11:07] Bob Dobbs: I'm pretty sure.

[1:11:08] Bob Dobbs: Yeah,

[1:11:09] Cameron McEwen: it could be.

[1:11:10] Cameron McEwen: I don't know.

[1:11:10] Cameron McEwen: But some of it was rescued,

[1:11:14] Cameron McEwen: and it was eventually published shortly after his death in the early

[1:11:20] Bob Dobbs: 1940s. But it was the first version of the portrait of the artist as a young man.

[1:11:25] Cameron McEwen: Correct.

[1:11:26] Bob Dobbs: Yeah.

[1:11:26] Cameron McEwen: Correct.

[1:11:27] Cameron McEwen: Yeah.

[1:11:27] Cameron McEwen: Yeah.

[1:11:28] Cameron McEwen: So,

[1:11:28] Cameron McEwen: um...

[1:11:30] Bob Dobbs: So you gave us a quote from Stephen Hero.

[1:11:34] Cameron McEwen: I gave you a quote from Stephen Hero.

[1:11:37] Cameron McEwen: And then McLuhan comments that this process is that of ordinary apprehension is made plain.

[1:11:45] Cameron McEwen: So then he makes another quote from Joyce,

[1:11:48] Cameron McEwen: right?

[1:11:48] Cameron McEwen: And also from Stephen Hero.

[1:11:51] Cameron McEwen: What we symbolize in black,

[1:11:52] Cameron McEwen: the Chinaman may symbolize in yellow.

[1:11:55] Cameron McEwen: Each has his own tradition.

[1:11:57] Cameron McEwen: Greek beauty laughs at Coptic beauty and the American Indian derives both.

[1:12:03] Cameron McEwen: It is almost impossible to reconcile all tradition,

[1:12:06] Cameron McEwen: whereas it is by no means impossible to find the justification of every form of beauty that has ever been adored on earth by an examination of the mechanism of aesthetic apprehension,

[1:12:20] Cameron McEwen: whether it be dressed in red,

[1:12:22] Cameron McEwen: white,

[1:12:22] Cameron McEwen: yellow,

[1:12:23] Cameron McEwen: or black.

[1:12:25] Cameron McEwen: And I'll just make an interjection here.

[1:12:29] Cameron McEwen: There's only one more sentence to go from Joyce,

[1:12:34] Cameron McEwen: and he hasn't talked at all about physiological digestion.

[1:12:39] Cameron McEwen: He's talked about perception,

[1:12:43] Cameron McEwen: and he's going to relate that to digestion,

[1:12:46] Cameron McEwen: but the whole quotation has to do with psychological digestion,

[1:12:52] Cameron McEwen: with perception.

[1:12:54] Cameron McEwen: So now he...

[1:12:55] Cameron McEwen: completes his thought by saying we have no reason for thinking that the Chinaman has a different system of digestion from that which we have though our diets are quite dissimilar and then the final conclusion drawn by Joyce is the

[1:13:13] Cameron McEwen: apprehensive faculty not the digestion the physiological digestion but the apprehensive faculty must be scrutinized in action

[1:13:25] Cameron McEwen: So then McLuhan says,

[1:13:26] Cameron McEwen: very,

[1:13:27] Cameron McEwen: very importantly,

[1:13:28] Cameron McEwen: it is impossible to exaggerate the importance of this last phrase,

[1:13:34] Cameron McEwen: right?

[1:13:35] Cameron McEwen: And that last phrase,

[1:13:36] Cameron McEwen: again,

[1:13:36] Cameron McEwen: the apprehensive faculty must be scrutinized in action.

[1:13:42] Cameron McEwen: So if we think of the trajectory of McLuhan project,

[1:13:47] Cameron McEwen: he begins around 1930 with working with Professor Lodge.

[1:13:52] Cameron McEwen: And Lodge says that...

[1:13:54] Cameron McEwen: Philosophy comes in three flavors,

[1:13:57] Cameron McEwen: and

[1:13:59] Cameron McEwen: McLuhan in his master's thesis brings up the idea that it's not just philosophy that comes in flavors,

[1:14:09] Cameron McEwen: literature does as well.

[1:14:12] Cameron McEwen: And he brings up the idea in that master's thesis that we need to understand the types of

[1:14:25] Cameron McEwen: philosophy and literature in ways that go back to Coleridge.

[1:14:31] Cameron McEwen: And Coleridge,

[1:14:32] Cameron McEwen: he quotes Coleridge as saying everybody is born either a Platonist or an Aristotelian.

[1:14:39] Cameron McEwen: And

[1:14:40] Cameron McEwen: McLuhan brings this up as indicating a kind of task,

[1:14:46] Cameron McEwen: an interrogation that has to be made.

[1:14:49] Cameron McEwen: So here he is in 1951.

[1:14:52] Cameron McEwen: And the essay that we're just quoting were McLuhan,

[1:14:56] Cameron McEwen: Seitz,

[1:14:56] Cameron McEwen: Steffen Hero,

[1:14:58] Cameron McEwen: and the

[1:15:00] Cameron McEwen: The idea is that the apprehensive faculty must be scrutinized in action,

[1:15:04] Cameron McEwen: says Joyce,

[1:15:05] Cameron McEwen: and McLuhan says it's impossible to exaggerate the importance of this last phrase.

[1:15:11] Cameron McEwen: And we realize that here is McLuhan at age 40,

[1:15:15] Cameron McEwen: 1951,

[1:15:18] Cameron McEwen: and he's looking back to how his intellectual life started in 1930,

[1:15:26] Cameron McEwen: And he's looking ahead to...

[1:15:28] Cameron McEwen: 1958 that is to say seven or eight years after this essay when he will say the medium is the message and the medium as a message says but if we want to examine the apprehensive faculty in action we

[1:15:45] Cameron McEwen: want to scrutinize it we have to look at the its medium and if we want to look at its medium then we have to understand the meaning of media plural

[1:15:58] Cameron McEwen: Because no medium can be understood by itself.

[1:16:03] Cameron McEwen: It needs to be understood in the complete spectrum of possible mediums.

[1:16:09] Bob Dobbs: Right.

[1:16:10] Bob Dobbs: And so what that last sentence points to,

[1:16:14] Bob Dobbs: Marshall develops on pages 31,

[1:16:16] Bob Dobbs: 32,

[1:16:16] Bob Dobbs: 33 of the Interior landscape.

[1:16:20] Bob Dobbs: It's the second Joyce essay.

[1:16:22] Bob Dobbs: And he goes into using the phrase,

[1:16:25] Bob Dobbs: stages of apprehension,

[1:16:26] Bob Dobbs: the dram of cognition,

[1:16:28] Bob Dobbs: the quiddity of the moment,

[1:16:32] Bob Dobbs: and the art form.

[1:16:34] Bob Dobbs: I've reread those pages for

[1:16:37] Bob Dobbs: 40, 50 years.

[1:16:40] Bob Dobbs: Do you find them appropriate to what we're saying?

[1:16:43] Bob Dobbs: Oh,

[1:16:43] Cameron McEwen: absolutely.

[1:16:43] Cameron McEwen: Absolutely.

[1:16:44] Cameron McEwen: But the single most important thing in what you were just saying is the reconceptualization.

[1:16:54] Cameron McEwen: the replay,

[1:16:55] Cameron McEwen: the reimagination of what stages means.

[1:17:00] Cameron McEwen: If stages is taken in linear fashion,

[1:17:04] Cameron McEwen: then the drama of cognition can never be understood for a whole bunch of reasons,

[1:17:12] Cameron McEwen: one of which is it has no phenomenological reality,

[1:17:17] Cameron McEwen: right?

[1:17:18] Cameron McEwen: We don't,

[1:17:20] Cameron McEwen: in perceiving the world,

[1:17:22] Cameron McEwen: there's no...

[1:17:23] Cameron McEwen: stages,

[1:17:24] Cameron McEwen: momentary stages that we're aware of.

[1:17:29] Cameron McEwen: Instead,

[1:17:30] Cameron McEwen: what's being,

[1:17:31] Cameron McEwen: we have to think about stages in terms of a vertical time,

[1:17:37] Cameron McEwen: which is not a conscious verbal time,

[1:17:42] Cameron McEwen: but it's a time that's implicated,

[1:17:45] Cameron McEwen: right?

[1:17:45] Cameron McEwen: The word implicate is to fold in etymologically.

[1:17:49] Cameron McEwen: Right.

[1:17:50] Cameron McEwen: Placate is the...

[1:17:53] Cameron McEwen: Latin

[1:17:54] Cameron McEwen: P often becomes F in the German languages like,

[1:17:59] Cameron McEwen: you know,

[1:17:59] Cameron McEwen: Greek pyre and our fire or

[1:18:02] Cameron McEwen: Greek poos for foot,

[1:18:05] Cameron McEwen: etc.,

[1:18:05] Cameron McEwen: etc.

[1:18:05] Cameron McEwen: So in implicate,

[1:18:09] Cameron McEwen: we're talking about an infolding and it's a word that goes across the Indo-European languages,

[1:18:17] Cameron McEwen: but it's often disguised.

[1:18:19] Cameron McEwen: We don't see that.

[1:18:20] Cameron McEwen: Cayce and fold is actually the same word so this when we're looking at the implicated stages we have to understand that this is a vertical time not a horizontal time number one and number two we have to understand that stage is never used by

[1:18:40] Cameron McEwen: McLuhan in a way that excludes the theatrical stage so what happens in the drama of cognition

[1:18:48] Cameron McEwen: Is that the possible roles that are brought forth on the stage are in some way reviewed and then are brought into reality,

[1:19:02] Cameron McEwen: right?

[1:19:02] Cameron McEwen: So in the stages of cognition,

[1:19:05] Cameron McEwen: stages of the drama,

[1:19:07] Cameron McEwen: keyword of cognition,

[1:19:11] Cameron McEwen: there's some mysterious process that's carried out by the nobody.

[1:19:16] Cameron McEwen: It has to do with an evaluation of roles,

[1:19:20] Cameron McEwen: and in that examination of roles,

[1:19:26] Cameron McEwen: one is selected in some mysterious way and becomes manifest.

[1:19:33] Cameron McEwen: So now we're back to what we were talking about of dynamics in McLuhan,

[1:19:40] Cameron McEwen: which ultimately comes from Aristotle.

[1:19:43] Bob Dobbs: Yeah,

[1:19:43] Bob Dobbs: now...

[1:19:44] Bob Dobbs: McLuhan says some words back in the

[1:19:47] Bob Dobbs: 50s and 60s that students think in levels.

[1:19:51] Bob Dobbs: Now that's the stages,

[1:19:56] Bob Dobbs: the way you're saying.

[1:19:58] Bob Dobbs: That's not what McLuhan meant.

[1:20:00] Bob Dobbs: So he's showing that the students are 19th century minds.

[1:20:03] Bob Dobbs: They've got the literate habit.

[1:20:05] Bob Dobbs: So they think in levels.

[1:20:06] Bob Dobbs: And in popular culture or just

[1:20:10] Bob Dobbs: TV interviews with people or talk shows,

[1:20:12] Bob Dobbs: you'll say,

[1:20:13] Bob Dobbs: well,

[1:20:14] Bob Dobbs: their new Postman insight is that there's levels.

[1:20:21] Bob Dobbs: It's a complex society.

[1:20:23] Bob Dobbs: More and more people now...

[1:20:26] Bob Dobbs: you know,

[1:20:26] Bob Dobbs: collapse in front of the complexities.

[1:20:29] Bob Dobbs: But see,

[1:20:29] Bob Dobbs: that's the linear idea of stages and levels.

[1:20:35] Cameron McEwen: Well,

[1:20:37] Cameron McEwen: it can be a Gutenberg idea,

[1:20:41] Cameron McEwen: but it can also be a Marconi idea.

[1:20:43] Bob Dobbs: Right.

[1:20:44] Cameron McEwen: We can't solidify the meaning of levels.

[1:20:49] Bob Dobbs: Right,

[1:20:49] Bob Dobbs: but MacMillan shows when he critiques the students,

[1:20:54] Bob Dobbs: he shows their limitations.

[1:20:55] Bob Dobbs: He means the Gutenberg meaning of levels or stages.

[1:20:59] Bob Dobbs: Right,

[1:20:59] Cameron McEwen: because nearly always when McLuhan talks about levels,

[1:21:04] Cameron McEwen: he talks about multi-levels,

[1:21:07] Cameron McEwen: and multi-levels for McLuhan are inherently vertical.

[1:21:11] Bob Dobbs: Well,

[1:21:12] Bob Dobbs: they're puns,

[1:21:13] Bob Dobbs: visual and acoustic.

[1:21:16] Bob Dobbs: It's a moire,

[1:21:18] Bob Dobbs: a term that William Empson.

[1:21:19] Bob Dobbs: Thompson used to use a lot.

[1:21:22] Bob Dobbs: I don't know why you say it's vertical.

[1:21:25] Bob Dobbs: What does that mean?

[1:21:26] Cameron McEwen: Because everything is figure and ground.

[1:21:31] Cameron McEwen: Everything has some relation to a medium.

[1:21:38] Cameron McEwen: And so that means that multi-level is a correlate of the tactility of ambiguity.

[1:21:53] Cameron McEwen: The tactility of ambiguity is a way of saying that everything is subject to the spectrum of figure and ground possibilities.

[1:22:07] Cameron McEwen: And every figure and ground possibility is a multi-level structure.

[1:22:15] Bob Dobbs: I think figure and ground,

[1:22:16] Bob Dobbs: as I pointed out last time,

[1:22:18] Bob Dobbs: is a literate bias.

[1:22:21] Bob Dobbs: Now,

[1:22:21] Bob Dobbs: when McLuhan says the world is flat up against your face,

[1:22:26] Bob Dobbs: that's where we're at today.

[1:22:27] Bob Dobbs: No perspective.

[1:22:30] Bob Dobbs: I don't see the verticality in that.

[1:22:33] Bob Dobbs: You have to close your eyes to maneuver in that situation that visually everything is on one frontal plane up against your face.

[1:22:42] Bob Dobbs: You remember him talking about that?

[1:22:45] Cameron McEwen: Yeah,

[1:22:45] Cameron McEwen: sure.

[1:22:45] Cameron McEwen: But the problem is,

[1:22:49] Cameron McEwen: Bob,

[1:22:50] Cameron McEwen: that

[1:22:53] Cameron McEwen: What you're trying to do is you're trying to find something that can be fixed in order to explain other stuff.

[1:23:01] Cameron McEwen: And

[1:23:02] Cameron McEwen: McLuhan always refuses that.

[1:23:06] Cameron McEwen: Yeah.

[1:23:10] Cameron McEwen: What McLuhan is thinking about,

[1:23:13] Cameron McEwen: if you say the world is flat up against our face,

[1:23:19] Cameron McEwen: is that something that is...

[1:23:22] Cameron McEwen: bad?

[1:23:23] Cameron McEwen: Is that something that's a sort of a literal fact that we need to accept?

[1:23:30] Cameron McEwen: What is that?

[1:23:31] Cameron McEwen: Well,

[1:23:31] Cameron McEwen: I mean,

[1:23:32] Cameron McEwen: one of McLuhan reflex actions is to go to the world of art.

[1:23:38] Cameron McEwen: And what happens to art around 1900 is that it goes flat.

[1:23:46] Cameron McEwen: Art is saying that there is something in a flat

[1:23:52] Cameron McEwen: canvas that is important to say that a more three-dimensional canvas can't say,

[1:24:01] Cameron McEwen: right?

[1:24:02] Cameron McEwen: And so when McLuhan says,

[1:24:05] Cameron McEwen: okay,

[1:24:05] Cameron McEwen: the world is flat up against your face,

[1:24:08] Cameron McEwen: one of the things he's saying is that there's something to be seen there that isn't being seen.

[1:24:14] Cameron McEwen: And that's nearly always his reflex,

[1:24:17] Cameron McEwen: right?

[1:24:18] Bob Dobbs: It's always what?

[1:24:19] Cameron McEwen: It's always reflex.

[1:24:21] Cameron McEwen: his reflex yes his reflex is always to try to show where there is ambiguity that hasn't been seen and the the great problem that McLuhan ran into when he became um you know a talking head um

[1:24:37] Cameron McEwen: in the

[1:24:39] Cameron McEwen: 1960s was that um he he kept saying things because he had to use words um that he kind of regretted because

[1:24:50] Cameron McEwen: um

[1:24:51] Cameron McEwen: He would say them and then people would take them as singularities or something fixed or something.

[1:24:57] Cameron McEwen: And he would have to take them back.

[1:25:00] Bob Dobbs: Yeah.

[1:25:00] Cameron McEwen: Right?

[1:25:00] Cameron McEwen: And he was always in the position of saying,

[1:25:03] Cameron McEwen: well,

[1:25:04] Cameron McEwen: try this,

[1:25:04] Cameron McEwen: but actually don't try this.

[1:25:08] Cameron McEwen: Right?

[1:25:08] Bob Dobbs: Yeah.

[1:25:09] Bob Dobbs: He would say,

[1:25:10] Bob Dobbs: he'd say something about cliché to archetype and then he'd say,

[1:25:12] Bob Dobbs: well,

[1:25:12] Bob Dobbs: I may have gotten that backwards.

[1:25:14] Bob Dobbs: Exactly.

[1:25:16] Cameron McEwen: Exactly.

[1:25:17] Cameron McEwen: Because of this,

[1:25:18] Cameron McEwen: the inherent ambiguity.

[1:25:20] Bob Dobbs: Yeah.

[1:25:21] Cameron McEwen: Right?

[1:25:21] Cameron McEwen: So that the,

[1:25:23] Cameron McEwen: you know,

[1:25:24] Cameron McEwen: you were talking before about singularities,

[1:25:27] Cameron McEwen: and then you talked about levels,

[1:25:29] Cameron McEwen: and then you talked about the world sort of coming right up to people's face.

[1:25:34] Bob Dobbs: Yeah.

[1:25:35] Cameron McEwen: And so all of these may be seen as problems because they are,

[1:25:41] Cameron McEwen: in a certain way,

[1:25:42] Cameron McEwen: they're not realizing ambiguities that are there.

[1:25:47] Bob Dobbs: Yeah.

[1:25:47] Cameron McEwen: But for Joyce and McLuhan.

[1:25:50] Cameron McEwen: The reflex is to say,

[1:25:52] Cameron McEwen: well,

[1:25:52] Cameron McEwen: wait a minute.

[1:25:53] Cameron McEwen: Can something really be without ambiguity?

[1:25:58] Cameron McEwen: Can something be only bad,

[1:26:00] Cameron McEwen: right?

[1:26:01] Cameron McEwen: Or conversely,

[1:26:01] Cameron McEwen: can something be only good?

[1:26:04] Cameron McEwen: And their answer is no.

[1:26:06] Cameron McEwen: Any attempt at fixation is laughable,

[1:26:10] Cameron McEwen: right?

[1:26:10] Cameron McEwen: And

[1:26:11] Cameron McEwen: McLuhan says,

[1:26:12] Cameron McEwen: I forget which essay it is,

[1:26:14] Cameron McEwen: where he's talking about the misguided missile of existence and the

[1:26:18] Cameron McEwen: and the submarine that doesn't work in some way um he says the only answer to this stuff is laughter yes now what how does the word vertical come in here then well it comes in it comes in through the fact that in

[1:26:36] Cameron McEwen: the interior landscape what we're talking about is a uh a world that is prior to uh perception in a certain way but it's not

[1:26:48] Cameron McEwen: prior in terms of a linear chronology.

[1:26:52] Cameron McEwen: A linear chronology always expresses some way of looking at the world,

[1:26:57] Cameron McEwen: some role,

[1:26:59] Cameron McEwen: some cliche.

[1:27:01] Cameron McEwen: But the becoming of that perception of the world is what needs to be interrogated.

[1:27:08] Cameron McEwen: That's what we're just saying in this quotation from

[1:27:12] Cameron McEwen: Joyce. Yeah.

[1:27:14] Cameron McEwen: um

[1:27:15] Cameron McEwen: Apprehensive faculty must be scrutinized in action.

[1:27:19] Cameron McEwen: And that's what McLuhan says in regards to all problems,

[1:27:24] Cameron McEwen: right?

[1:27:25] Cameron McEwen: If something is too much up against the face,

[1:27:29] Cameron McEwen: if it's too singular,

[1:27:31] Cameron McEwen: if it's insisting on levels in a stupid way,

[1:27:36] Cameron McEwen: we need to look at these things as clues,

[1:27:39] Cameron McEwen: right?

[1:27:40] Cameron McEwen: In chemistry,

[1:27:40] Cameron McEwen: for example,

[1:27:42] Cameron McEwen: chemistry wouldn't be chemistry.

[1:27:45] Cameron McEwen: If it said,

[1:27:46] Cameron McEwen: well,

[1:27:46] Cameron McEwen: there's certain things that have nothing to do with elements.

[1:27:52] Cameron McEwen: There's certain things that we don't bother to explain,

[1:27:55] Cameron McEwen: right?

[1:27:55] Cameron McEwen: That would be ridiculous.

[1:27:57] Cameron McEwen: The whole point of chemistry is that there's nothing that isn't chemical.

[1:28:01] Cameron McEwen: And if we don't know an answer,

[1:28:03] Cameron McEwen: that's a great finding.

[1:28:05] Cameron McEwen: That points to something that we can learn.

[1:28:09] Cameron McEwen: So in the interior landscape,

[1:28:12] Cameron McEwen: if something is stupid,

[1:28:14] Cameron McEwen: then that points to something about,

[1:28:17] Cameron McEwen: well,

[1:28:17] Cameron McEwen: why is it there?

[1:28:18] Cameron McEwen: And what can it tell us?

[1:28:20] Cameron McEwen: And why is it valuable to know that?

[1:28:24] Bob Dobbs: Right.

[1:28:24] Bob Dobbs: Now,

[1:28:24] Bob Dobbs: two points.

[1:28:27] Bob Dobbs: Remember in Explorations,

[1:28:29] Bob Dobbs: I think it might be his first essay,

[1:28:32] Bob Dobbs: what,

[1:28:32] Bob Dobbs: Culture Without Literacy,

[1:28:34] Bob Dobbs: Volume 1?

[1:28:36] Bob Dobbs: He has a sentence in there tending towards,

[1:28:38] Bob Dobbs: I think,

[1:28:38] Bob Dobbs: near the end,

[1:28:40] Bob Dobbs: that

[1:28:41] Bob Dobbs: He's saying,

[1:28:41] Bob Dobbs: well,

[1:28:42] Bob Dobbs: our seminar is exploring here,

[1:28:44] Bob Dobbs: and we have the right of self-correction.

[1:28:47] Bob Dobbs: Do you remember that?

[1:28:48] Cameron McEwen: Absolutely.

[1:28:49] Cameron McEwen: Well,

[1:28:49] Cameron McEwen: I don't remember it,

[1:28:50] Cameron McEwen: but that's an important thing that he would always say.

[1:28:55] Cameron McEwen: And that was directed against his fellow seminarians,

[1:28:59] Cameron McEwen: right?

[1:29:00] Bob Dobbs: Yes.

[1:29:01] Cameron McEwen: That

[1:29:02] Cameron McEwen: McLuhan felt that even though these were old buddies of his from Winnipeg and the Maine,

[1:29:08] Cameron McEwen: plus Carpenter that he was a good friend of and Tyrwhitt that he respected,

[1:29:15] Cameron McEwen: he didn't think that any of them really understood ambiguity.

[1:29:20] Bob Dobbs: Right.

[1:29:20] Cameron McEwen: And they weren't able to self-correct in a way that would lead them to understand what the seminar was trying to do.

[1:29:30] Bob Dobbs: Yes.

[1:29:31] Bob Dobbs: And the second point.

[1:29:34] Bob Dobbs: All that he says on pages 31,

[1:29:35] Bob Dobbs: 32,

[1:29:36] Bob Dobbs: 33 in Interior landscape in the second Joyce essay,

[1:29:41] Bob Dobbs: he drops in where you like to think around the late 50s,

[1:29:46] Bob Dobbs: and he finally sees tactility.

[1:29:48] Bob Dobbs: The art form he's thinking about is not...

[1:29:52] Bob Dobbs: Gutenberg art,

[1:29:53] Bob Dobbs: he's talking about major anti-environment are the art forms.

[1:29:56] Bob Dobbs: So you could apply those sentences to the new media anti-environment the art form which has equidity,

[1:30:05] Bob Dobbs: but I think they are inadequate,

[1:30:07] Bob Dobbs: those sentences.

[1:30:09] Bob Dobbs: And he actually said to me through the Evergreens,

[1:30:12] Bob Dobbs: the medium that he experienced,

[1:30:16] Bob Dobbs: through Michael Blake Read,

[1:30:17] Bob Dobbs: he said,

[1:30:18] Bob Dobbs: I read some of that stuff to him,

[1:30:20] Bob Dobbs: those pages,

[1:30:21] Bob Dobbs: He says,

[1:30:22] Bob Dobbs: yes,

[1:30:22] Bob Dobbs: there's a little of a confusion there.

[1:30:25] Bob Dobbs: I didn't have it exact enough or precise,

[1:30:28] Bob Dobbs: or I was not happy with that,

[1:30:30] Bob Dobbs: which was interesting because something happens,

[1:30:34] Bob Dobbs: and people notice in the late 50s,

[1:30:35] Bob Dobbs: early 60s,

[1:30:36] Bob Dobbs: he drops his Gutenberg concerns.

[1:30:39] Bob Dobbs: And in 1971,

[1:30:40] Bob Dobbs: he says,

[1:30:40] Bob Dobbs: I'm not writing any more books.

[1:30:42] Bob Dobbs: He actually could have said that in 1959,

[1:30:48] Bob Dobbs: 60,

[1:30:48] Bob Dobbs: 61.

[1:30:49] Bob Dobbs: But then...

[1:30:50] Bob Dobbs: He had to write a few books because other people were crowding into the media world and getting some new positioning,

[1:30:57] Bob Dobbs: and he knew they had it wrong,

[1:30:59] Bob Dobbs: so to speak,

[1:31:00] Bob Dobbs: or it was limited.

[1:31:01] Bob Dobbs: So he had to...

[1:31:02] Cameron McEwen: Well,

[1:31:04] Cameron McEwen: he also knew that there was a certain amount of money that could be derived from the media field,

[1:31:10] Cameron McEwen: and he didn't want others to have that money when he and Skornia might have it.

[1:31:14] Bob Dobbs: That's right,

[1:31:16] Bob Dobbs: and that's why he said,

[1:31:17] Bob Dobbs: you know,

[1:31:17] Bob Dobbs: help unify junkyards.

[1:31:19] Bob Dobbs: throw something lovely away today.

[1:31:21] Bob Dobbs: So understanding meeting Gutenberg gals here are things thrown away.

[1:31:26] Bob Dobbs: And then he's collaborating after that.

[1:31:29] Bob Dobbs: And that's the important point.

[1:31:31] Bob Dobbs: You know,

[1:31:31] Bob Dobbs: he's Marconian.

[1:31:33] Bob Dobbs: He's not a Gutenberg solo operation.

[1:31:38] Bob Dobbs: But if he could actually get his computer thing going,

[1:31:44] Bob Dobbs: studying sensory thresholds,

[1:31:45] Bob Dobbs: it would have been interesting.

[1:31:46] Bob Dobbs: He does say,

[1:31:47] Bob Dobbs: apparently,

[1:31:47] Bob Dobbs: in Marchand's biography,

[1:31:48] Bob Dobbs: that they kind of made mistakes with it,

[1:31:51] Bob Dobbs: with Daniel Capon and that.

[1:31:53] Bob Dobbs: Now,

[1:31:53] Bob Dobbs: I have a letter where

[1:31:54] Bob Dobbs: Capon stole some of the money,

[1:31:56] Bob Dobbs: so that's why we never hear of Capon after the late

[1:32:00] Bob Dobbs: 60s. And yet he was the guy qualified to do the statistics and whatever computer-type thing they were using.

[1:32:09] Bob Dobbs: But it would have been interesting if he could have...

[1:32:14] Bob Dobbs: better colleagues or better understanding of what they could do if they could analyze sensory thresholds around the world,

[1:32:20] Bob Dobbs: which you think is just a thought experiment.

[1:32:22] Bob Dobbs: But if he could do it,

[1:32:25] Bob Dobbs: you know,

[1:32:25] Bob Dobbs: acting it out could still be a thought experiment,

[1:32:28] Bob Dobbs: you know,

[1:32:28] Bob Dobbs: actually doing it empirically.

[1:32:31] Bob Dobbs: It would have been interesting whether he would do that,

[1:32:33] Bob Dobbs: or did he realize in his manifesto in the Dueling Newsletter around 1970 that it was a whole new ball game and those kind of management techniques.

[1:32:43] Bob Dobbs: didn't work and we're moving into an apocalyptic situation where

[1:32:48] Bob Dobbs: Christ is 24-7 and no one with any sane perspective would get the attention.

[1:32:58] Cameron McEwen: Right.

[1:32:59] Cameron McEwen: I think that's a really interesting theme to examine.

[1:33:07] Cameron McEwen: I personally think that when

[1:33:11] Cameron McEwen: McLuhan

[1:33:12] Cameron McEwen: first came to his mature ideas,

[1:33:16] Cameron McEwen: which he did in sort of 1956,

[1:33:21] Cameron McEwen: 57,

[1:33:22] Cameron McEwen: 58,

[1:33:22] Cameron McEwen: in that time period.

[1:33:26] Cameron McEwen: I'll just say,

[1:33:27] Bob Dobbs: Cameron,

[1:33:28] Bob Dobbs: in that period he produced a lot of articles which are very important to read because he spells out that completion.

[1:33:35] Bob Dobbs: He defines everything.

[1:33:37] Bob Dobbs: You get some of the definitions you don't find later in the 60s.

[1:33:41] Bob Dobbs: But it's all spelled out in those articles.

[1:33:45] Cameron McEwen: Remember that he's no spring chicken.

[1:33:49] Cameron McEwen: This is a man who's coming up to his

[1:33:54] Cameron McEwen: 50th birthday,

[1:33:56] Cameron McEwen: and he does not have his ideas in order.

[1:34:02] Cameron McEwen: They're very chaotic.

[1:34:04] Bob Dobbs: Yeah.

[1:34:05] Cameron McEwen: So when he begins to first...

[1:34:10] Cameron McEwen: set out these ideas,

[1:34:13] Cameron McEwen: the reflex he gets from people every time is,

[1:34:18] Cameron McEwen: Marshall,

[1:34:19] Cameron McEwen: these ideas sound very interesting.

[1:34:24] Cameron McEwen: How can we put them into practical effect?

[1:34:27] Cameron McEwen: How can we make a curriculum in secondary school?

[1:34:32] Cameron McEwen: How can we,

[1:34:33] Cameron McEwen: in the psychology department,

[1:34:34] Cameron McEwen: how can we test them and stuff?

[1:34:37] Cameron McEwen: And I think

[1:34:38] Cameron McEwen: McLuhan,

[1:34:40] Cameron McEwen: I...

[1:34:40] Cameron McEwen: through weakness or through weariness or through sort of an inability to see through all this sort of stuff,

[1:34:52] Cameron McEwen: gave into them.

[1:34:54] Cameron McEwen: And he spent a large part of the next decade trying to think how sort of Königsbergian proof,

[1:35:06] Cameron McEwen: Königsbergian demonstration might be made.

[1:35:11] Cameron McEwen: And that was absurd.

[1:35:12] Cameron McEwen: That was,

[1:35:12] Cameron McEwen: you know,

[1:35:14] Cameron McEwen: he damn near killed himself.

[1:35:17] Cameron McEwen: He was having his blackouts and many strokes and all of this sort of stuff.

[1:35:22] Cameron McEwen: and he had already

[1:35:24] Cameron McEwen: had severe health problems in 1960.

[1:35:28] Cameron McEwen: And so for the next 20 years of his life,

[1:35:31] Cameron McEwen: it was just a horrible record of health.

[1:35:35] Cameron McEwen: And the guy just kept on sort of slogging along.

[1:35:41] Cameron McEwen: But he allowed himself to become mislaid by the ever-repeated demand for how can we demonstrate this.

[1:35:51] Cameron McEwen: And when people said that they were always coming from the Gutenberg galaxy and

[1:35:57] Cameron McEwen: McLuhan tried to answer their concerns and therefore he threw out a kind of sheet anchor for his progress.

[1:36:08] Cameron McEwen: All of this attempt to demonstrate completely screwed up his thought because it got away from ambiguity.

[1:36:17] Cameron McEwen: It got away from the...

[1:36:21] Cameron McEwen: second-sight insights that he had Innis crucial period in the late

[1:36:28] Cameron McEwen: 1950s.

[1:36:30] Bob Dobbs: Right.

[1:36:31] Bob Dobbs: Now, Ted Carpenter says,

[1:36:34] Bob Dobbs: and he really,

[1:36:35] Bob Dobbs: you know,

[1:36:35] Bob Dobbs: he's got pretty good understanding of McLuhan,

[1:36:38] Bob Dobbs: at least early McLuhan.

[1:36:39] Bob Dobbs: He said he got away from McLuhan when McLuhan went into the meteorological,

[1:36:44] Bob Dobbs: the global thermostat stuff.

[1:36:47] Bob Dobbs: So

[1:36:47] Bob Dobbs: Carpenter...

[1:36:49] Bob Dobbs: Maybe

[1:36:50] Bob Dobbs: Intuited that this was the wrong direction the way you're saying it and he knew not to hang around with McLuhan anymore So he disappeared went to California and he dropped it now the other thing though is

[1:37:05] Bob Dobbs: McLuhan trying to help the literate guy was an act as a Christian

[1:37:13] Bob Dobbs: That was his game.

[1:37:14] Bob Dobbs: He said

[1:37:15] Bob Dobbs: You know,

[1:37:15] Bob Dobbs: we really can't have Christianity anymore if we keep up with this electronic implosion.

[1:37:22] Bob Dobbs: But I will try to help my fellow literate guys who are unconscious Christians and explain the crisis.

[1:37:30] Bob Dobbs: So his sort of,

[1:37:32] Bob Dobbs: what do you call that,

[1:37:34] Bob Dobbs: amiability,

[1:37:35] Bob Dobbs: his general willing to help kind of guy,

[1:37:41] Bob Dobbs: you know,

[1:37:41] Bob Dobbs: he could be in a soup kitchen.

[1:37:44] Bob Dobbs: What you were describing,

[1:37:46] Bob Dobbs: these mistaken things,

[1:37:47] Bob Dobbs: was his Christian self trying to stop being a Maritain the way he was in the 40s,

[1:37:52] Bob Dobbs: actually just being a regular guy helping people,

[1:37:56] Bob Dobbs: which might have been a reaction to the fame he got and the alienation of that in the

[1:38:02] Bob Dobbs: 60s.

[1:38:03] Bob Dobbs: So he became local.

[1:38:05] Bob Dobbs: And actually,

[1:38:05] Bob Dobbs: I just remember Maurice McLuhan told me in 71 that

[1:38:10] Bob Dobbs: McLuhan was not accepting any

[1:38:12] Bob Dobbs: lecture assignments or anything outside of Toronto.

[1:38:16] Bob Dobbs: They did not want to be on an international scale anymore,

[1:38:19] Bob Dobbs: which was the 60s.

[1:38:20] Bob Dobbs: They wanted to act locally.

[1:38:22] Bob Dobbs: And I guess the Spadina Express was an expression of that.

[1:38:25] Bob Dobbs: But he made a conscious attempt to be an anti-environment to the increasing tactility of people's lives.

[1:38:32] Bob Dobbs: You know,

[1:38:32] Bob Dobbs: there were jets flying all over the place.

[1:38:35] Bob Dobbs: He wanted to be a counter to the Global Village Global Theatre.

[1:38:39] Bob Dobbs: So

[1:38:40] Bob Dobbs: Don Thiel pointed out that,

[1:38:41] Bob Dobbs: you know,

[1:38:42] Bob Dobbs: fundamentalists or maybe even Calvinists would celebrate McLuhan because he was accommodating to their visual bias as a Christian.

[1:38:53] Cameron McEwen: Well,

[1:38:54] Cameron McEwen: we were talking earlier about how if there really is a rigorous way of interrogating the interior landscape,

[1:39:03] Cameron McEwen: then there's nothing that it can't engage with.

[1:39:10] Cameron McEwen: Just as chemistry needs to engage everything,

[1:39:12] Cameron McEwen: and if it finds something that it can't engage,

[1:39:16] Cameron McEwen: then that's a great moment.

[1:39:18] Cameron McEwen: You get a Nobel Prize for that.

[1:39:20] Cameron McEwen: So then for McLuhan,

[1:39:23] Cameron McEwen: engaging with everything is completely natural.

[1:39:28] Cameron McEwen: If he calls it Christian,

[1:39:31] Cameron McEwen: I don't think he would say that,

[1:39:35] Cameron McEwen: except if he were trying to

[1:39:38] Cameron McEwen: you know,

[1:39:39] Cameron McEwen: influence somebody.

[1:39:42] Cameron McEwen: It's a pagan.

[1:39:45] Cameron McEwen: Yeah,

[1:39:45] Cameron McEwen: I mean,

[1:39:46] Cameron McEwen: it is a Christian impulse,

[1:39:48] Cameron McEwen: but to say that really goes Königsbergian.

[1:39:53] Bob Dobbs: I know.

[1:39:56] Bob Dobbs: In the mid-70s,

[1:39:57] Bob Dobbs: I think he does that essay for the abortion book.

[1:40:02] Bob Dobbs: I forget what it was called,

[1:40:03] Bob Dobbs: but he ends talking about the true church is salvation.

[1:40:08] Bob Dobbs: What the heck is the true church?

[1:40:10] Bob Dobbs: Sometimes I think that he was the prophet of the true church.

[1:40:15] Bob Dobbs: He was seeing how to be a Christian in a new way.

[1:40:20] Bob Dobbs: You have to look at these media anti-environment as your clothing.

[1:40:23] Bob Dobbs: And no one had got to that level of how to be ethical.

[1:40:30] Cameron McEwen: I think that's right,

[1:40:31] Cameron McEwen: but

[1:40:32] Cameron McEwen: I would urge you to resist the temptation to find some sort of closure there.

[1:40:38] Cameron McEwen: As if

[1:40:40] Cameron McEwen: McLuhan thought that we could already discern the face of the new church.

[1:40:47] Cameron McEwen: He didn't.

[1:40:49] Cameron McEwen: He thought it was very important.

[1:40:52] Cameron McEwen: to admit that we can't see where we ought to go.

[1:40:59] Bob Dobbs: Yes,

[1:41:00] Bob Dobbs: and everybody,

[1:41:00] Bob Dobbs: the literate people all around,

[1:41:02] Bob Dobbs: they could not dare encounter that question.

[1:41:08] Cameron McEwen: Absolutely,

[1:41:09] Cameron McEwen: absolutely,

[1:41:10] Cameron McEwen: because their identity,

[1:41:13] Cameron McEwen: what they had done with their whole life,

[1:41:16] Cameron McEwen: hung on it.

[1:41:17] Bob Dobbs: Yeah.

[1:41:18] Cameron McEwen: So,

[1:41:18] Cameron McEwen: um...

[1:41:19] Cameron McEwen: You know,

[1:41:19] Cameron McEwen: this gets back into

[1:41:22] Cameron McEwen: McLuhan whole relation to his own family.

[1:41:26] Cameron McEwen: Imagine having this kind of strange relationship with your own identity,

[1:41:35] Cameron McEwen: and you want to relate to your family in a supportive and sort of...

[1:41:48] Cameron McEwen: educational way.

[1:41:50] Cameron McEwen: You want to bring them up so that they're whole and happy.

[1:41:56] Cameron McEwen: And you're kind of caught between your own sort of very loose way of relating to the world and what they need.

[1:42:09] Bob Dobbs: Yes.

[1:42:10] Cameron McEwen: And the same thing happens with him and his students or with him and his colleagues.

[1:42:18] Cameron McEwen: He's always in a difficult position of wanting to relate to them directly,

[1:42:25] Cameron McEwen: but knowing that all direct relation is ultimately indirect.

[1:42:32] Bob Dobbs: Well,

[1:42:32] Bob Dobbs: he was being dangerous.

[1:42:34] Bob Dobbs: You know,

[1:42:35] Bob Dobbs: Socrates got killed for that.

[1:42:38] Bob Dobbs: Remember,

[1:42:38] Bob Dobbs: he was censured in Parliament by the Governor General.

[1:42:43] Bob Dobbs: I think his name was Vanier,

[1:42:45] Bob Dobbs: V-A-N-I-E-R.

[1:42:47] Bob Dobbs: He made a statement in

[1:42:50] Bob Dobbs: Ottawa, in the Parliament,

[1:42:51] Bob Dobbs: that McLuhan was a dangerous man,

[1:42:54] Bob Dobbs: and we need to sort of put a stop to him.

[1:42:58] Bob Dobbs: Are you aware of that?

[1:42:59] Cameron McEwen: No,

[1:42:59] Cameron McEwen: I'm not.

[1:43:00] Cameron McEwen: I'd be interested to see that.

[1:43:02] Cameron McEwen: But remember that

[1:43:03] Cameron McEwen: Vanier headed up a royal commission,

[1:43:07] Cameron McEwen: and McLuhan was very critical of it,

[1:43:10] Cameron McEwen: wrote a long article about it in the Varsity newspaper.

[1:43:14] Cameron McEwen: In 1951,

[1:43:17] Cameron McEwen: I think that was.

[1:43:18] Cameron McEwen: The Vanier Commission,

[1:43:22] Cameron McEwen: what was it on?

[1:43:24] Cameron McEwen: Culture in Canada?

[1:43:25] Cameron McEwen: Yeah,

[1:43:26] Cameron McEwen: he says in it,

[1:43:27] Bob Dobbs: a major cultural activity in Canada is having royal commissions.

[1:43:32] Cameron McEwen: Correct,

[1:43:33] Bob Dobbs: correct.

[1:43:34] Cameron McEwen: So that was a critique of the Vanier thing,

[1:43:38] Cameron McEwen: but it was also a backhanded statement to Innis.

[1:43:43] Cameron McEwen: Because Innis spent the last 10 years of his life being on multiple royal commissions,

[1:43:49] Cameron McEwen: including one in Winnipeg.

[1:43:51] Bob Dobbs: Yes,

[1:43:52] Bob Dobbs: and he also was at the Center for the Study of Democratic Institutions.

[1:43:57] Bob Dobbs: And

[1:43:58] Bob Dobbs: I have in my archives a pamphlet from that.

[1:44:00] Bob Dobbs: Yeah,

[1:44:03] Cameron McEwen: I have that somewhere,

[1:44:04] Cameron McEwen: too.

[1:44:04] Bob Dobbs: Yeah,

[1:44:05] Bob Dobbs: early 50s.

[1:44:06] Bob Dobbs: And members of the committee of this...

[1:44:09] Bob Dobbs: place includes an Italian prince who attempted a coup in Italy in 1970.

[1:44:17] Bob Dobbs: Forget the guy's name.

[1:44:21] Bob Dobbs: And then McLuhan is making fun of the Club of

[1:44:24] Bob Dobbs: Ruin, the Club of Rome,

[1:44:26] Bob Dobbs: which is the same

[1:44:28] Bob Dobbs: P2 secret society guys that even Innis was dealing with back in 1950.

[1:44:35] Bob Dobbs: So it's interesting when you get on the commissions,

[1:44:37] Bob Dobbs: there's always going to be...

[1:44:39] Bob Dobbs: One of these Chardin establishment guys,

[1:44:42] Bob Dobbs: you know,

[1:44:43] Bob Dobbs: in there.

[1:44:44] Bob Dobbs: Oh,

[1:44:44] Bob Dobbs: absolutely.

[1:44:44] Cameron McEwen: Absolutely.

[1:44:47] Bob Dobbs: Oh,

[1:44:47] Bob Dobbs: and the other point was...

[1:44:49] Bob Dobbs: Carpenter,

[1:44:50] Bob Dobbs: I was saying,

[1:44:51] Bob Dobbs: you know,

[1:44:51] Bob Dobbs: he left because he saw McLuhan was going awry.

[1:44:55] Bob Dobbs: But the point you're making is that everybody becomes part of the dialogue.

[1:44:59] Bob Dobbs: Carpenter objected to McLuhan hanging out with Hubert Humphrey,

[1:45:02] Bob Dobbs: the vice president during the Vietnam War.

[1:45:05] Bob Dobbs: And was it vice president?

[1:45:07] Bob Dobbs: Yeah,

[1:45:07] Bob Dobbs: vice president.

[1:45:08] Bob Dobbs: And he took an ethical stance as McLuhan is getting too close to the beast by doing that.

[1:45:15] Bob Dobbs: But what Carpenter didn't understand is.

[1:45:19] Bob Dobbs: The chemical body was obsolescent.

[1:45:20] Bob Dobbs: It didn't matter who anybody was,

[1:45:23] Bob Dobbs: what authority or institution they were with,

[1:45:25] Bob Dobbs: they were obsolescent.

[1:45:26] Bob Dobbs: So McLuhan had sympathy for them.

[1:45:29] Bob Dobbs: He's willing to talk to them.

[1:45:31] Bob Dobbs: You see what I'm saying?

[1:45:32] Bob Dobbs: Sure.

[1:45:34] Bob Dobbs: Carpenter missed the generosity trend in McLuhan of including everybody.

[1:45:41] Cameron McEwen: But when

[1:45:44] Cameron McEwen: Carpenter takes that kind of stance,

[1:45:48] Cameron McEwen: Then what he's saying is there are certain things in the world that demand that we let go of ambiguity,

[1:45:58] Cameron McEwen: right?

[1:45:58] Cameron McEwen: So it's a very Königsbergian stance.

[1:46:01] Cameron McEwen: For McLuhan,

[1:46:05] Cameron McEwen: if there is to be an ethics,

[1:46:07] Cameron McEwen: it's an ethics that is grounded in ambiguity.

[1:46:11] Cameron McEwen: And by and large,

[1:46:12] Cameron McEwen: people cannot understand that.

[1:46:15] Cameron McEwen: And so the...

[1:46:17] Cameron McEwen: Sort of the modern history of the world is that we're in a

[1:46:23] Cameron McEwen: Marconi anti-environment 99.9%

[1:46:28] Cameron McEwen: of the happenings are attempts to drag us back into the Gutenberg era.

[1:46:33] Bob Dobbs: Yeah.

[1:46:34] Bob Dobbs: All the Davos Conference,

[1:46:36] Bob Dobbs: the Bilderbergers,

[1:46:37] Bob Dobbs: the Eric Havelock Commission,

[1:46:38] Bob Dobbs: they're all attempts to do that.

[1:46:40] Cameron McEwen: Absolutely.

[1:46:43] Bob Dobbs: So,

[1:46:43] Bob Dobbs: what's that point I wanted to make?

[1:46:45] Cameron McEwen: That's it.

[1:46:47] Cameron McEwen: shows us why the tactility of science that Hegel already talked about,

[1:46:54] Cameron McEwen: right?

[1:46:54] Cameron McEwen: The idea that it's useless to talk about the possibility of science.

[1:47:01] Cameron McEwen: The only way to prove that science is possible in any field is to practice that science,

[1:47:08] Cameron McEwen: to make it actual,

[1:47:10] Cameron McEwen: right?

[1:47:10] Cameron McEwen: So for

[1:47:12] Cameron McEwen: McLuhan failure is really the same failure that

[1:47:17] Cameron McEwen: Everybody who can think has always had.

[1:47:21] Cameron McEwen: And that is that there has been a general inability to communicate the fact that human beings can

[1:47:36] Cameron McEwen: know about the plural potentials of every human being.

[1:47:46] Cameron McEwen: And on the basis of that,

[1:47:49] Cameron McEwen: can know what it means to found a city,

[1:47:52] Cameron McEwen: to found a society,

[1:47:54] Cameron McEwen: to found a civilization.

[1:47:56] Cameron McEwen: So the fact that no thinker has been able to communicate that is sort of our fate.

[1:48:05] Cameron McEwen: And it's a fate that when somebody thinks in the

[1:48:10] Cameron McEwen: 20th century,

[1:48:11] Cameron McEwen: if they really think,

[1:48:12] Cameron McEwen: then they have to enter that fate.

[1:48:15] Cameron McEwen: They have to.

[1:48:17] Cameron McEwen: Enter the faith that they are not going to think anything different from what somebody like Plato already thought.

[1:48:25] Cameron McEwen: And maybe Plato didn't think anything different from what the Egyptians thought 2,500 years before that,

[1:48:32] Cameron McEwen: right?

[1:48:33] Cameron McEwen: But Innis whole vast field of human experience,

[1:48:43] Cameron McEwen: all that we've done is create...

[1:48:46] Cameron McEwen: weapons of mass destruction without understanding the human being that lies behind all that.

[1:48:55] Bob Dobbs: I like iON's statement.

[1:48:57] Bob Dobbs: It's not a thinking man's game.

[1:49:02] Bob Dobbs: It's just today.

[1:49:04] Cameron McEwen: Well,

[1:49:04] Cameron McEwen: McLuhan often talked about that.

[1:49:07] Cameron McEwen: And that actually reminds me of a point I wanted to make.

[1:49:11] Cameron McEwen: And that is that sometimes

[1:49:15] Cameron McEwen: Both of us talk about processes that are nonverbal,

[1:49:20] Cameron McEwen: right?

[1:49:20] Cameron McEwen: So

[1:49:21] Cameron McEwen: McLuhan often talked about how media affects us nonverbally.

[1:49:25] Bob Dobbs: Yes.

[1:49:27] Cameron McEwen: And what he meant by that is that it's not something that we think about.

[1:49:31] Cameron McEwen: It's not something that we're aware of.

[1:49:34] Cameron McEwen: It's not something that we consciously accede to.

[1:49:40] Cameron McEwen: But when he uses nonverbal in that sense,

[1:49:47] Cameron McEwen: We have to understand that.

[1:49:49] Cameron McEwen: Everything that is going on in those processes is verbal in another sense.

[1:49:57] Cameron McEwen: And the other sense of verbal is close to tactility.

[1:50:04] Cameron McEwen: That is to say that there's nothing that goes on in human beings that isn't communicative in some way.

[1:50:13] Cameron McEwen: Human beings are always presenting themselves to the world.

[1:50:19] Cameron McEwen: in some role that already reflects communication in the interior landscape.

[1:50:28] Cameron McEwen: There's already been a staged presentation of possible roles and a selection made and that role then realized in the world and in being

[1:50:43] Cameron McEwen: realized in the world there is

[1:50:47] Cameron McEwen: inherent relationship to other people's roles and to things and to everything that's happening in the world and all of that is verbal in the sense that the transition the stages that are reflected in that is

[1:51:03] Cameron McEwen: what can be called tactility it's communicative it's interrelationship multi-level etc what What do you think of the word psychological decentralization?

[1:51:15] Cameron McEwen: Yeah,

[1:51:15] Cameron McEwen: well,

[1:51:18] Cameron McEwen: I don't know that he would say that,

[1:51:21] Cameron McEwen: but that's close to what the interior landscape is.

[1:51:29] Cameron McEwen: When we come to speak,

[1:51:31] Cameron McEwen: we have always already gone through a process of role selection,

[1:51:38] Cameron McEwen: and the process of role selection is subverbal in one sense.

[1:51:44] Cameron McEwen: But in another sense,

[1:51:46] Cameron McEwen: it's verbal.

[1:51:47] Cameron McEwen: Because there's a communication going on.

[1:51:51] Cameron McEwen: So we can say that things like when people talk about singularity,

[1:52:01] Cameron McEwen: that's inherently tactility.

[1:52:05] Cameron McEwen: But built into the impetus to speak about a singularity is tactility.

[1:52:15] Cameron McEwen: So all of these words like the verbal or the tactile or communication.

[1:52:23] Cameron McEwen: All the non-verbal.

[1:52:25] Cameron McEwen: Correct.

[1:52:25] Cameron McEwen: All of these things are subject to ambiguity and therefore to this spectrum of ambiguity that goes from one extreme of figure and ground to the other.

[1:52:42] Bob Dobbs: Right.

[1:52:42] Bob Dobbs: Now,

[1:52:43] Bob Dobbs: what about the phrase,

[1:52:44] Bob Dobbs: the inner voice?

[1:52:45] Bob Dobbs: A lot of religious people,

[1:52:47] Bob Dobbs: literate religious people talk about,

[1:52:49] Bob Dobbs: follow the inner voice.

[1:52:51] Bob Dobbs: Is that subverbal?

[1:52:52] Bob Dobbs: Is that mental gesture?

[1:52:55] Cameron McEwen: All of the above.

[1:52:57] Cameron McEwen: Everything is subject to this ambiguity.

[1:52:59] Cameron McEwen: So in the Gutenberg Galaxy,

[1:53:02] Cameron McEwen: the inner voice was often used to achieve closure,

[1:53:09] Cameron McEwen: right?

[1:53:12] Cameron McEwen: I'm going to be directed by this thing that is bigger than me and that knows the way I'm supposed to go and that's my inner voice,

[1:53:23] Cameron McEwen: end of story.

[1:53:25] Cameron McEwen: But the problem is that people have different inner voices and they may lead in different directions.

[1:53:35] Cameron McEwen: And from that insight,

[1:53:38] Cameron McEwen: you can go to the fact that every...

[1:53:41] Cameron McEwen: person is possibly different persons.

[1:53:46] Cameron McEwen: McLuhan thinking was often influenced by his mother who would go on stage and she would impersonate different people,

[1:53:54] Cameron McEwen: different voices.

[1:53:55] Cameron McEwen: So there's always a variety of voices we could be and therefore the inner voice is possibly a kind of ridiculous closure.

[1:54:11] Cameron McEwen: that should not be made.

[1:54:13] Cameron McEwen: But on the other hand,

[1:54:14] Cameron McEwen: the inner voice can well be a plural gesture.

[1:54:20] Cameron McEwen: Somebody can say,

[1:54:22] Cameron McEwen: for example,

[1:54:23] Cameron McEwen: the church directs something through a papal bull,

[1:54:27] Cameron McEwen: and somebody says,

[1:54:30] Cameron McEwen: no,

[1:54:31] Cameron McEwen: my inner voice will not allow me to make the modernity oath.

[1:54:38] Cameron McEwen: that the Catholic Church put forward in the

[1:54:41] Cameron McEwen: 1880s, I believe it was.

[1:54:46] Cameron McEwen: The inner voice,

[1:54:47] Cameron McEwen: like everything else,

[1:54:49] Cameron McEwen: is subject to this range of ambiguities.

[1:54:53] Bob Dobbs: Yeah,

[1:54:53] Bob Dobbs: so look at the tetrad for verbum,

[1:54:56] Bob Dobbs: V-E-R-B-U-M,

[1:54:58] Bob Dobbs: he has in

[1:55:01] Bob Dobbs: Etcetera magazine.

[1:55:04] Bob Dobbs: Do you have it available?

[1:55:08] Cameron McEwen: I can find it fairly readily,

[1:55:11] Cameron McEwen: I believe.

[1:55:11] Bob Dobbs: Yeah,

[1:55:11] Bob Dobbs: see if you got it,

[1:55:13] Bob Dobbs: because I think I wanted to say something else.

[1:55:14] Bob Dobbs: So verbum.

[1:55:16] Bob Dobbs: Okay,

[1:55:16] Bob Dobbs: so if humans are eternal,

[1:55:22] Bob Dobbs: then the inner voice,

[1:55:26] Bob Dobbs: the psychological decentralization,

[1:55:29] Bob Dobbs: the constant communication that's going on,

[1:55:31] Bob Dobbs: not necessarily in your native language,

[1:55:34] Bob Dobbs: that is what's constant,

[1:55:37] Bob Dobbs: or the citadel of consciousness,

[1:55:40] Bob Dobbs: the private citadel of awareness.

[1:55:43] Bob Dobbs: I'm just thinking that what people think.

[1:55:46] Bob Dobbs: as they're in different communicative situations,

[1:55:51] Bob Dobbs: is it includes the verbum,

[1:55:54] Bob Dobbs: which is grunting and mumbling,

[1:55:56] Bob Dobbs: and maybe phatic gestures.

[1:55:59] Bob Dobbs: There's something in all those communication styles that's constant,

[1:56:05] Bob Dobbs: and that's what a baby may be thinking without knowing words yet,

[1:56:12] Bob Dobbs: but maybe that's what people mean by knowing.

[1:56:15] Bob Dobbs: So just as we were talking there,

[1:56:17] Bob Dobbs: I started to think of this constant knowing that people are communicating.

[1:56:23] Cameron McEwen: But don't,

[1:56:23] Cameron McEwen: Bob,

[1:56:25] Cameron McEwen: when the word constant falls off your lips,

[1:56:30] Cameron McEwen: don't you automatically think,

[1:56:31] Cameron McEwen: oops,

[1:56:32] Cameron McEwen: that's the Gutenberg Galaxy?

[1:56:34] Bob Dobbs: Of course,

[1:56:35] Bob Dobbs: yes,

[1:56:35] Bob Dobbs: but I can't keep interrupting myself.

[1:56:39] Bob Dobbs: I'd end up like...

[1:56:41] Bob Dobbs: unable to communicate even in syllables.

[1:56:46] Cameron McEwen: Right,

[1:56:46] Cameron McEwen: well

[1:56:48] Cameron McEwen: I mean before we are talking about the fate of lack of communication

[1:56:57] Cameron McEwen: I mean it's not a the world is going to hell in a handbasket because of this failure of communication and it's a

[1:57:10] Cameron McEwen: a non-trivial,

[1:57:12] Cameron McEwen: non-quadrivial problem,

[1:57:13] Cameron McEwen: you could say.

[1:57:15] Cameron McEwen: Yeah.

[1:57:15] Cameron McEwen: I sympathize with what you're saying.

[1:57:19] Cameron McEwen: We have to have words to speak to each other.

[1:57:22] Cameron McEwen: That's right.

[1:57:24] Cameron McEwen: So

[1:57:24] Cameron McEwen: McLuhan whole effort can be seen as one more attempt to communicate what has never been communicated.

[1:57:33] Cameron McEwen: So far,

[1:57:35] Cameron McEwen: he hasn't succeeded,

[1:57:37] Cameron McEwen: and maybe the role that I have,

[1:57:40] Cameron McEwen: And part of the role you have is to see if we can't help him to succeed now that he's been dead 40 years.

[1:57:50] Bob Dobbs: Yes,

[1:57:51] Bob Dobbs: help him.

[1:57:53] Bob Dobbs: We attended the lecture nobody attended,

[1:57:55] Bob Dobbs: and McLuhan got it right in that lecture.

[1:57:59] Bob Dobbs: And we're trying to recall it.

[1:58:01] Cameron McEwen: That's right,

[1:58:02] Cameron McEwen: that's right.

[1:58:03] Bob Dobbs: So now,

[1:58:04] Bob Dobbs: of course,

[1:58:05] Bob Dobbs: and here...

[1:58:07] Bob Dobbs: If you do that,

[1:58:09] Bob Dobbs: you will break through into a new territory in some way.

[1:58:15] Bob Dobbs: Just like

[1:58:16] Bob Dobbs: Eliot went beyond the symbolist,

[1:58:17] Bob Dobbs: Joyce went beyond

[1:58:19] Bob Dobbs: Aquinas or something,

[1:58:21] Bob Dobbs: McLuhan went beyond Joyce,

[1:58:24] Bob Dobbs: Lewis went beyond

[1:58:26] Bob Dobbs: Bergson or somebody.

[1:58:28] Bob Dobbs: I was just thinking,

[1:58:29] Bob Dobbs: I certainly feel very confident that I've arrived at that point and my bride of 50.

[1:58:36] Bob Dobbs: three years and I are actually going to pull it off and get,

[1:58:40] Bob Dobbs: and get to this new level of completing it.

[1:58:44] Bob Dobbs: But you have to,

[1:58:44] Bob Dobbs: you have to wait for that.

[1:58:47] Cameron McEwen: I wish,

[1:58:47] Cameron McEwen: I wish you ever,

[1:58:48] Bob Dobbs: every life.

[1:58:52] Cameron McEwen: I don't,

[1:58:52] Cameron McEwen: I don't believe in the diachronic for one thing.

[1:58:55] Bob Dobbs: Yeah.

[1:58:55] Cameron McEwen: I don't.

[1:58:56] Cameron McEwen: And secondly,

[1:58:57] Cameron McEwen: I don't believe that we come to a point.

[1:59:00] Cameron McEwen: I believe what happens is that a way of

[1:59:05] Cameron McEwen: thinking about ambiguity is realized in both senses of realization such that we kind of go through a door through which we can understand

[1:59:21] Cameron McEwen: human being in a whole new way.

[1:59:23] Cameron McEwen: Yeah.

[1:59:25] Cameron McEwen: It's when we this new way we recognize is something that Plato already saw it or ever saw it.

[1:59:35] Cameron McEwen: So we're not being sort of new geniuses or something.

[1:59:41] Cameron McEwen: All that we're doing by opening that door,

[1:59:43] Cameron McEwen: by seeing that the door is open,

[1:59:46] Cameron McEwen: is going through it and saying,

[1:59:52] Cameron McEwen: oh,

[1:59:52] Cameron McEwen: let's re-hear,

[1:59:54] Cameron McEwen: replay,

[1:59:55] Cameron McEwen: revisit,

[1:59:56] Cameron McEwen: retrieve what they already knew,

[2:00:00] Cameron McEwen: which in our stupidity...

[2:00:03] Cameron McEwen: we forgot or overlooked.

[2:00:08] Bob Dobbs: Yeah,

[2:00:08] Bob Dobbs: okay.

[2:00:08] Bob Dobbs: So I think I've always wanted to say this,

[2:00:10] Bob Dobbs: didn't have any opportunities to say it.

[2:00:14] Bob Dobbs: Traditional poetic vision,

[2:00:17] Bob Dobbs: people,

[2:00:19] Bob Dobbs: I guess romantic poetry,

[2:00:21] Bob Dobbs: highlight this a lot.

[2:00:23] Bob Dobbs: They see a vision of beauty or symmetry or something,

[2:00:27] Bob Dobbs: and all the world is right.

[2:00:32] Bob Dobbs: I think

[2:00:33] Bob Dobbs: Alexander Pope ends his essay on man with the phrase,

[2:00:38] Bob Dobbs: you know,

[2:00:38] Bob Dobbs: whatever is right is right.

[2:00:41] Bob Dobbs: Or whatever is,

[2:00:42] Bob Dobbs: is right.

[2:00:43] Bob Dobbs: Now,

[2:00:43] Bob Dobbs: many people say that's a satirical statement.

[2:00:46] Bob Dobbs: But

[2:00:47] Bob Dobbs: I like to think that McLuhan was presenting an epiphany,

[2:00:52] Bob Dobbs: a vision of ecology that was happening.

[2:00:56] Bob Dobbs: Have you ever...

[2:00:57] Bob Dobbs: Yeah,

[2:00:58] Cameron McEwen: I agree with that.

[2:00:59] Bob Dobbs: Yeah.

[2:01:00] Bob Dobbs: You know what I mean?

[2:01:01] Bob Dobbs: He saw that things were interacting according to the laws of media,

[2:01:07] Bob Dobbs: with the different sensory modalities and the extensions,

[2:01:11] Bob Dobbs: and he was blessed with a vision of harmony in the world,

[2:01:17] Bob Dobbs: even though it was a world that was plagued by new problems,

[2:01:21] Bob Dobbs: new questions that no one ever admitted to before.

[2:01:24] Bob Dobbs: And he was in the middle discussing those problems.

[2:01:27] Bob Dobbs: But if you look at,

[2:01:28] Bob Dobbs: he wasn't what he was saying.

[2:01:30] Bob Dobbs: He had a perspective like we imagine the great poets had.

[2:01:37] Bob Dobbs: And he actually said that through the evergreens.

[2:01:39] Bob Dobbs: It was taught with the stage of apprehension.

[2:01:41] Bob Dobbs: And then he explained why he didn't get it right.

[2:01:44] Bob Dobbs: And he said something like,

[2:01:46] Bob Dobbs: and,

[2:01:46] Bob Dobbs: you know,

[2:01:46] Bob Dobbs: someday I could play it.

[2:01:49] Bob Dobbs: But he says,

[2:01:51] Bob Dobbs: it's a vision.

[2:01:54] Bob Dobbs: He didn't say,

[2:01:54] Bob Dobbs: I had a vision.

[2:01:55] Bob Dobbs: He says,

[2:01:56] Bob Dobbs: it's a vision.

[2:01:58] Bob Dobbs: He had a vision of that,

[2:02:02] Bob Dobbs: the integrative part of people's brains.

[2:02:06] Bob Dobbs: occasionally have.

[2:02:09] Bob Dobbs: They have a kind of serendipity.

[2:02:15] Bob Dobbs: He has a quote,

[2:02:18] Bob Dobbs: which I can't find,

[2:02:19] Bob Dobbs: but he talks about the tactility of the limp wrist.

[2:02:23] Bob Dobbs: Does that remind you of anything?

[2:02:28] Bob Dobbs: A sentence.

[2:02:29] Bob Dobbs: I think he's quoting somebody.

[2:02:31] Bob Dobbs: The tactility of the limp,

[2:02:33] Bob Dobbs: dangling hand and wrist.

[2:02:35] Bob Dobbs: You've got to find that,

[2:02:37] Bob Dobbs: because that's how he,

[2:02:39] Bob Dobbs: I think he was pointing to this experience of the poetic vision.

[2:02:44] Cameron McEwen: Yeah,

[2:02:44] Cameron McEwen: well,

[2:02:48] Cameron McEwen: I agree with the impetus of what you're talking about.

[2:02:56] Bob Dobbs: Yeah,

[2:02:56] Bob Dobbs: what I'm trying to get to.

[2:02:58] Cameron McEwen: Yeah,

[2:02:59] Cameron McEwen: but the whole problem is that if you talk about it in terms of vision,

[2:03:03] Cameron McEwen: in terms of a perspective,

[2:03:05] Cameron McEwen: Then the problem is that it's...

[2:03:10] Bob Dobbs: No,

[2:03:10] Bob Dobbs: that's not what it is.

[2:03:12] Bob Dobbs: That's why it's the limp wrist.

[2:03:15] Bob Dobbs: Vision,

[2:03:15] Bob Dobbs: the way he said it,

[2:03:17] Bob Dobbs: you know,

[2:03:17] Bob Dobbs: it was rich.

[2:03:18] Bob Dobbs: It was tactile.

[2:03:19] Bob Dobbs: It was haptic.

[2:03:20] Bob Dobbs: It was not eyeball vision.

[2:03:24] Cameron McEwen: Right,

[2:03:24] Cameron McEwen: right.

[2:03:25] Cameron McEwen: So,

[2:03:26] Cameron McEwen: I mean,

[2:03:26] Cameron McEwen: that's why I say that

[2:03:27] Cameron McEwen: I agree with what you're saying,

[2:03:29] Cameron McEwen: but what you're saying inherently has problems to it.

[2:03:34] Cameron McEwen: In the same way as all of the great insights of the great thinkers and great artists have for thousands and thousands of years had problems.

[2:03:45] Cameron McEwen: That is to say that it's one thing to see harmony in the world.

[2:03:53] Cameron McEwen: And remember that if there is a spectrum of ambiguities,

[2:04:00] Cameron McEwen: then that spectrum.

[2:04:02] Cameron McEwen: is a kind of harmony.

[2:04:04] Bob Dobbs: Yeah.

[2:04:04] Cameron McEwen: It's a,

[2:04:05] Cameron McEwen: it's,

[2:04:06] Cameron McEwen: you're recognizing a pattern in the world that it's wildly dynamic,

[2:04:13] Cameron McEwen: but it's also a center of calm.

[2:04:20] Bob Dobbs: Yeah.

[2:04:20] Cameron McEwen: Because it's,

[2:04:21] Cameron McEwen: what you've done is you've gone from something that is wildly opaque

[2:04:31] Cameron McEwen: to a vision that excludes nothing and yet is somehow centered.

[2:04:40] Cameron McEwen: So I often,

[2:04:41] Cameron McEwen: in the blog,

[2:04:42] Cameron McEwen: I often...

[2:04:42] Bob Dobbs: Would you say somehow sentenced?

[2:04:45] Bob Dobbs: What's that word?

[2:04:45] Cameron McEwen: Centered.

[2:04:46] Cameron McEwen: Centered.

[2:04:47] Cameron McEwen: Centered,

[2:04:48] Cameron McEwen: yeah.

[2:04:49] Cameron McEwen: Centered,

[2:04:49] Cameron McEwen: yeah.

[2:04:49] Cameron McEwen: So in the blog,

[2:04:51] Cameron McEwen: I often talk about gyroscopes.

[2:04:54] Bob Dobbs: Yes.

[2:04:55] Cameron McEwen: And so you have something that is centered in the fact that it's...

[2:05:02] Cameron McEwen: standing like a top,

[2:05:04] Cameron McEwen: but it's also dynamic.

[2:05:07] Bob Dobbs: Yeah.

[2:05:07] Cameron McEwen: And the goal is to be able to articulate that standing dynamic,

[2:05:16] Cameron McEwen: as it might be called,

[2:05:18] Cameron McEwen: in such a way as to generate practical research and practical solutions for problems in the world that seem

[2:05:31] Bob Dobbs: insoluble right you have that phrase dynamic symmetry of tensions among proportions yields the golden section correct and this if you go back to

[2:05:42] Cameron McEwen: Heraclitus when he says that you can never enter the same river twice the river is there but it's dynamic hey so this this this dual vision of

[2:06:00] Cameron McEwen: sort of a dynamic center has been around forever,

[2:06:05] Cameron McEwen: but finding a way to articulate it and communicate it is the big problem.

[2:06:12] Bob Dobbs: Yeah.

[2:06:13] Bob Dobbs: Have you ever heard Barry Nevitt?

[2:06:14] Bob Dobbs: He added to the point about the river.

[2:06:16] Bob Dobbs: He said,

[2:06:17] Bob Dobbs: you can't even step in at once.

[2:06:21] Bob Dobbs: That was Barry's upgrade of that.

[2:06:24] Bob Dobbs: Now,

[2:06:24] Bob Dobbs: the world has come media-wise to a point

[2:06:27] Bob Dobbs: Where everybody is face-to-face with the abyss or with something or with the vision,

[2:06:33] Bob Dobbs: and they've got to make a choice that would appear as pressuring people,

[2:06:37] Bob Dobbs: and they get schizoid about making the choice,

[2:06:39] Bob Dobbs: but...

[2:06:40] Bob Dobbs: There's something unique about,

[2:06:42] Bob Dobbs: okay,

[2:06:42] Bob Dobbs: if everybody's been talking the same thing,

[2:06:46] Bob Dobbs: we now have arrived at a collective consciousness where anybody can see that in the world,

[2:06:54] Bob Dobbs: the way the media imploded.

[2:06:55] Bob Dobbs: It's just like 9-1-1 was a dramatic performance,

[2:06:59] Bob Dobbs: but the world had to have the internet first so everybody could have it,

[2:07:03] Bob Dobbs: right?

[2:07:04] Bob Dobbs: And

[2:07:06] Bob Dobbs: McLuhan said once.

[2:07:08] Bob Dobbs: after he died that 911 was obvious.

[2:07:11] Bob Dobbs: That was from the perspective of the astral plane.

[2:07:14] Bob Dobbs: He said anybody should have seen that coming.

[2:07:17] Bob Dobbs: So there's a perfect...

[2:07:21] Bob Dobbs: Remember he talks about the perfection of communication today,

[2:07:24] Bob Dobbs: back in the

[2:07:25] Bob Dobbs: 50s, means that it is hard to reject any cultural claims.

[2:07:32] Bob Dobbs: Correct.

[2:07:32] Bob Dobbs: Something like that.

[2:07:34] Cameron McEwen: And it closes.

[2:07:36] Bob Dobbs: Beg your pardon?

[2:07:38] Cameron McEwen: Any closure.

[2:07:39] Bob Dobbs: Right.

[2:07:39] Cameron McEwen: That's what we've been talking about.

[2:07:41] Bob Dobbs: Yes.

[2:07:42] Bob Dobbs: So we have really come to a perfection of communication today with,

[2:07:51] Bob Dobbs: you know,

[2:07:52] Bob Dobbs: that people can be incredible broadcasters and Kroker and Kroker and broadcatchers.

[2:08:00] Bob Dobbs: There's your tetrad or the four levels.

[2:08:04] Bob Dobbs: At the same time,

[2:08:05] Bob Dobbs: there's this ongoing...

[2:08:07] Bob Dobbs: dialogue of the world.

[2:08:10] Bob Dobbs: Presently,

[2:08:11] Bob Dobbs: it became imploded around one character,

[2:08:15] Bob Dobbs: which was more than before.

[2:08:18] Bob Dobbs: There was the Cold War and all that.

[2:08:20] Bob Dobbs: So we have one face that makes the word of the market happen.

[2:08:26] Bob Dobbs: And you know what that face is.

[2:08:29] Bob Dobbs: And then everybody projects their cultural values or biases on that face.

[2:08:35] Bob Dobbs: And that face...

[2:08:37] Bob Dobbs: was nominated as the most admired man in America,

[2:08:41] Bob Dobbs: right when the media is saying he's actually nuts,

[2:08:44] Bob Dobbs: as he works out the last three weeks of his administration.

[2:08:49] Cameron McEwen: Yeah,

[2:08:50] Cameron McEwen: yeah.

[2:08:50] Cameron McEwen: I've been thinking a little bit about

[2:08:52] Cameron McEwen: Trump because of your book.

[2:08:55] Bob Dobbs: Yes.

[2:08:56] Cameron McEwen: And one thing that you might want to add at some point is the following idea.

[2:09:06] Cameron McEwen: One of the things that really gets people energized is

[2:09:12] Cameron McEwen: Trump Hotel,

[2:09:14] Cameron McEwen: Trump Golf Course,

[2:09:15] Cameron McEwen: Trump this,

[2:09:16] Cameron McEwen: Trump that.

[2:09:19] Cameron McEwen: He's tried to stamp his name on the world,

[2:09:24] Cameron McEwen: you could say.

[2:09:28] Cameron McEwen: The people that hate Trump hate that,

[2:09:29] Bob Dobbs: right?

[2:09:30] Cameron McEwen: And especially Canadians,

[2:09:32] Cameron McEwen: you know,

[2:09:32] Cameron McEwen: Canadians are...

[2:09:34] Cameron McEwen: are people that are kind of inherently social and inherently against selfishness.

[2:09:42] Cameron McEwen: Yeah,

[2:09:42] Bob Dobbs: they're like the most Christian literate people.

[2:09:45] Cameron McEwen: That's right.

[2:09:46] Cameron McEwen: Even while they're going about being very selfish.

[2:09:48] Cameron McEwen: Yeah,

[2:09:50] Cameron McEwen: yeah.

[2:09:50] Cameron McEwen: So it occurred to me that when

[2:09:54] Cameron McEwen: Trump labels the whole world as Trump,

[2:10:00] Cameron McEwen: one of the things he's doing is miming.

[2:10:04] Cameron McEwen: what everybody's doing.

[2:10:06] Cameron McEwen: Everybody has labeled everything in the world with their stamp,

[2:10:12] Cameron McEwen: if you will,

[2:10:13] Cameron McEwen: through the drama of cognition.

[2:10:17] Cameron McEwen: The cognition wouldn't have a drama if it was singular.

[2:10:22] Cameron McEwen: We don't come into the world and just,

[2:10:24] Cameron McEwen: there it is.

[2:10:25] Cameron McEwen: Instead,

[2:10:27] Cameron McEwen: how the world is,

[2:10:29] Cameron McEwen: is a result of how we have stamped it.

[2:10:32] Cameron McEwen: And so,

[2:10:33] Cameron McEwen: The world out there in

[2:10:37] Cameron McEwen: Maui, it's got Bob Beach and

[2:10:41] Cameron McEwen: Bob's Burgers and

[2:10:44] Cameron McEwen: Bob's Palm Trees.

[2:10:45] Cameron McEwen: Everything is Bob.

[2:10:47] Cameron McEwen: And here in Santa Ana,

[2:10:48] Cameron McEwen: everything I look at is,

[2:10:50] Cameron McEwen: you know,

[2:10:52] Cameron McEwen: Cameron's

[2:10:54] Cameron McEwen: Garbage Bins and

[2:10:57] Cameron McEwen: Cameron's Disneyland and all that shit.

[2:10:59] Cameron McEwen: So everybody does.

[2:11:02] Cameron McEwen: the Trump thing,

[2:11:04] Cameron McEwen: but they do it unconsciously,

[2:11:06] Cameron McEwen: and if it's brought out to them,

[2:11:09] Cameron McEwen: then they hate that.

[2:11:11] Cameron McEwen: They don't want to know about that.

[2:11:12] Bob Dobbs: It's new art.

[2:11:14] Bob Dobbs: It's ugly.

[2:11:15] Cameron McEwen: They don't like anybody that does it,

[2:11:17] Cameron McEwen: right?

[2:11:17] Cameron McEwen: Yeah,

[2:11:17] Bob Dobbs: so Trump is the greatest artist today,

[2:11:20] Bob Dobbs: which was my opening little thing at the beginning of the article.

[2:11:24] Bob Dobbs: He is the art form that appears,

[2:11:28] Bob Dobbs: because it's new and it's about our present,

[2:11:30] Bob Dobbs: he appears ugly.

[2:11:31] Bob Dobbs: to most people.

[2:11:32] Cameron McEwen: That's right.

[2:11:33] Cameron McEwen: But

[2:11:34] Cameron McEwen: McLuhan talks about this all the time in terms of the monster.

[2:11:37] Bob Dobbs: Yes.

[2:11:38] Cameron McEwen: Right.

[2:11:38] Cameron McEwen: And in terms of the Gorgon.

[2:11:41] Cameron McEwen: So

[2:11:43] Cameron McEwen: McLuhan was very interested in horror movies and in cartoon characters that were terribly evil and all this sort of stuff,

[2:11:54] Cameron McEwen: right?

[2:11:55] Bob Dobbs: And the great imposter.

[2:11:57] Bob Dobbs: He loved

[2:11:58] Bob Dobbs: Fred Damaris,

[2:11:59] Bob Dobbs: the great imposter.

[2:12:01] Cameron McEwen: Yeah,

[2:12:02] Cameron McEwen: but I mean,

[2:12:04] Cameron McEwen: to me,

[2:12:04] Cameron McEwen: that's another thing that's worth thinking about.

[2:12:07] Cameron McEwen: But it's not related to the monster.

[2:12:10] Cameron McEwen: For McLuhan,

[2:12:12] Cameron McEwen: the monster is something,

[2:12:15] Cameron McEwen: it's almost like a singularity in the way you were talking about it before.

[2:12:19] Cameron McEwen: The monster,

[2:12:20] Cameron McEwen: or the Gorgon,

[2:12:21] Cameron McEwen: is something that appears in our culture and that horrifies us,

[2:12:26] Cameron McEwen: but it's exactly what we need to interrogate.

[2:12:28] Bob Dobbs: Yes,

[2:12:29] Bob Dobbs: we have to have the guts to put up with it.

[2:12:33] Cameron McEwen: Yeah,

[2:12:33] Cameron McEwen: so Trump,

[2:12:35] Cameron McEwen: in a certain way,

[2:12:37] Cameron McEwen: is everybody's shadow.

[2:12:40] Cameron McEwen: Trump is what everybody is doing,

[2:12:43] Cameron McEwen: but they can't admit that they're doing it.

[2:12:46] Cameron McEwen: And part of their non-admission is that they reflect it into the world.

[2:12:54] Cameron McEwen: And so

[2:12:55] Cameron McEwen: Freud and Jung were very familiar with this kind of mechanism in the psyche,

[2:13:03] Cameron McEwen: right?

[2:13:03] Cameron McEwen: The projection.

[2:13:06] Cameron McEwen: Yeah,

[2:13:06] Cameron McEwen: it's a projection of where...

[2:13:08] Cameron McEwen: something that you have can't be admitted,

[2:13:12] Cameron McEwen: and therefore the other person has to have it.

[2:13:15] Bob Dobbs: Yeah,

[2:13:17] Bob Dobbs: we've never had the anti-environment anti-environment,

[2:13:20] Bob Dobbs: to the degree the White House is the word that makes the market.

[2:13:23] Bob Dobbs: They've never come together.

[2:13:25] Bob Dobbs: And

[2:13:26] Bob Dobbs: McLuhan, when it was first Tetrad,

[2:13:27] Bob Dobbs: he handed out in 74,

[2:13:29] Bob Dobbs: 75,

[2:13:30] Bob Dobbs: was when figure becomes ground,

[2:13:37] Bob Dobbs: it's a monster.

[2:13:39] Bob Dobbs: I think it was the law of etherealization,

[2:13:41] Bob Dobbs: where figure becomes ground.

[2:13:44] Cameron McEwen: Yeah,

[2:13:44] Cameron McEwen: well,

[2:13:45] Cameron McEwen: but what he means by when figure becomes ground is that the figure and ground ambiguity collapses.

[2:13:52] Bob Dobbs: Yeah.

[2:13:53] Cameron McEwen: Right?

[2:13:53] Cameron McEwen: So it's not that figure becomes ground and then,

[2:14:00] Cameron McEwen: how can I put this?

[2:14:04] Cameron McEwen: It's often the case in human experience that figure and ground flip.

[2:14:09] Cameron McEwen: But he's not talking about that.

[2:14:10] Cameron McEwen: What he's talking about is at the extremes of the spectrum,

[2:14:14] Cameron McEwen: figure and ground can collapse into each other.

[2:14:18] Cameron McEwen: And that's the monster,

[2:14:19] Cameron McEwen: the gorgon.

[2:14:19] Bob Dobbs: The Ouroboros.

[2:14:20] Cameron McEwen: You're absolutely right about that.

[2:14:22] Bob Dobbs: The Ouroboros.

[2:14:25] Cameron McEwen: Yeah,

[2:14:25] Cameron McEwen: not only,

[2:14:26] Cameron McEwen: exactly,

[2:14:28] Cameron McEwen: where the snake has got a tail Innis mouth,

[2:14:32] Cameron McEwen: at the two extremes,

[2:14:34] Cameron McEwen: when figure and ground collapse,

[2:14:37] Cameron McEwen: when figure

[2:14:38] Cameron McEwen: is so great that it subsumes the ground,

[2:14:43] Cameron McEwen: or when ground is so great that it eats the figure,

[2:14:47] Cameron McEwen: then the spectrum collapses,

[2:14:51] Cameron McEwen: and the two ends touch each other because it no longer matters which is figure and ground because that difference,

[2:15:03] Cameron McEwen: that figure,

[2:15:03] Cameron McEwen: that structure has collapsed.

[2:15:06] Cameron McEwen: Right.

[2:15:07] Cameron McEwen: McLuhan often talked about how a thing that had never been investigated is why one extreme can become the other extreme.

[2:15:18] Bob Dobbs: Yes.

[2:15:21] Bob Dobbs: Now,

[2:15:23] Bob Dobbs: this exactly describes Trump,

[2:15:24] Bob Dobbs: which is what my book is trying to do.

[2:15:27] Cameron McEwen: Now,

[2:15:28] Bob Dobbs: it also means that AI has become human,

[2:15:31] Bob Dobbs: or human became AI,

[2:15:34] Bob Dobbs: or artificial intelligence,

[2:15:35] Bob Dobbs: or the tech body.

[2:15:36] Bob Dobbs: That's what we're witnessing with Trump.

[2:15:39] Bob Dobbs: There's something inhuman about the situation.

[2:15:42] Bob Dobbs: So

[2:15:42] Bob Dobbs: I go to

[2:15:43] Bob Dobbs: Zingroni, who thought he'd figured out a way to get past McLuhan,

[2:15:50] Bob Dobbs: or the world had changed so much that McLuhan world and knowledge didn't work anymore.

[2:15:55] Bob Dobbs: So he has in his book,

[2:15:56] Bob Dobbs: The Media Simplex,

[2:15:58] Bob Dobbs: subtitled At the Edge of Meaning in the Age of Cayce.

[2:16:02] Bob Dobbs: In other words,

[2:16:02] Bob Dobbs: you don't get to singular meaning.

[2:16:05] Bob Dobbs: Just get the edge of it.

[2:16:06] Bob Dobbs: That's your ambiguity.

[2:16:08] Bob Dobbs: So this came out in 2001,

[2:16:09] Bob Dobbs: page 246.

[2:16:10] Bob Dobbs: He says,

[2:16:11] Bob Dobbs: we want to know whether there is a form slash content relationship that holds true for all media communication.

[2:16:20] Bob Dobbs: An affirmative answer to this question is possible.

[2:16:23] Bob Dobbs: And here's what it is.

[2:16:25] Bob Dobbs: And you've just been describing it.

[2:16:27] Bob Dobbs: And it's in italics.

[2:16:28] Bob Dobbs: He says content consumes form.

[2:16:32] Bob Dobbs: That's where the figure becomes so monstrous.

[2:16:35] Bob Dobbs: And then it collapses into each other.

[2:16:37] Bob Dobbs: And then he says,

[2:16:38] Bob Dobbs: how could the Wizard of Oz,

[2:16:39] Bob Dobbs: Gone with the Wind,

[2:16:40] Bob Dobbs: or La Dolce Vita,

[2:16:42] Bob Dobbs: be imagined apart from their medium's form?

[2:16:45] Bob Dobbs: which is entered and becomes fused with content.

[2:16:49] Bob Dobbs: No matter how spectacular the production values of a film,

[2:16:53] Bob Dobbs: the contents of that film consume it.

[2:16:56] Bob Dobbs: So that could be describing Trump's presidency or Trumpism.

[2:17:02] Cameron McEwen: Wait,

[2:17:03] Cameron McEwen: wait,

[2:17:03] Cameron McEwen: wait.

[2:17:03] Cameron McEwen: The reason that a lot of the stuff that you say about Trump is interesting is that you preserve

[2:17:15] Cameron McEwen: ambiguities.

[2:17:17] Cameron McEwen: Everything you said from Zingrone's book reeks of the Gutenberg galaxy.

[2:17:23] Cameron McEwen: It's diachronic,

[2:17:25] Cameron McEwen: we're going to go beyond McLuhan and notice that there's a million books out there that have to do with beyond McLuhan or beyond Plato or whatever.

[2:17:36] Cameron McEwen: We have all of these diachronic continuous clock time people.

[2:17:45] Cameron McEwen: And they always,

[2:17:46] Cameron McEwen: as we said before,

[2:17:47] Cameron McEwen: they always aim at a singularity.

[2:17:49] Cameron McEwen: And here's

[2:17:50] Cameron McEwen: Cingroni at the end of his book saying that the content eats the form,

[2:17:58] Cameron McEwen: right?

[2:17:59] Cameron McEwen: Yes.

[2:18:00] Cameron McEwen: And therefore becomes singular.

[2:18:03] Bob Dobbs: Yes.

[2:18:03] Cameron McEwen: So it's not interesting.

[2:18:06] Cameron McEwen: It's interesting only as a sample to be investigated for McLuhan.

[2:18:13] Bob Dobbs: Yes.

[2:18:13] Bob Dobbs: Now listen to this.

[2:18:14] Bob Dobbs: So,

[2:18:14] Bob Dobbs: Eliot says,

[2:18:15] Bob Dobbs: you know,

[2:18:16] Bob Dobbs: in Sweeney Agonistes,

[2:18:17] Bob Dobbs: I got to use words when I talk to you.

[2:18:19] Bob Dobbs: Well,

[2:18:19] Bob Dobbs: media has,

[2:18:20] Bob Dobbs: Gutenberg media,

[2:18:21] Bob Dobbs: analog media has become so available to everybody to produce that

[2:18:26] Bob Dobbs: Zingroni is expressing what everybody should be saying.

[2:18:29] Bob Dobbs: The update is,

[2:18:31] Bob Dobbs: I apologize for,

[2:18:33] Bob Dobbs: I've got to use books to communicate with you.

[2:18:38] Bob Dobbs: It's not words.

[2:18:39] Bob Dobbs: That's too easy.

[2:18:40] Bob Dobbs: That's back when...

[2:18:41] Bob Dobbs: 100 years ago when nobody had access to big major media anti-environment.

[2:18:45] Bob Dobbs: Now we do in our digital world.

[2:18:47] Bob Dobbs: So everybody's writing books.

[2:18:49] Bob Dobbs: And a lot of the humanities is just people putting out a book every few years,

[2:18:55] Bob Dobbs: and it's just quotes from their reading in their life as a professor.

[2:19:00] Bob Dobbs: They're just telling you what they read.

[2:19:02] Bob Dobbs: And they try to put in some kind of order which doesn't work or is irrelevant.

[2:19:06] Bob Dobbs: But they've got to use publish and perish.

[2:19:09] Bob Dobbs: They've got to use books to talk to us.

[2:19:10] Bob Dobbs: That's the new totalitarianism.

[2:19:13] Bob Dobbs: Before it used to be language.

[2:19:14] Bob Dobbs: Now it's books and maybe movies and blogs and video.

[2:19:20] Cameron McEwen: Right.

[2:19:21] Cameron McEwen: So just when you're thinking about that stuff,

[2:19:25] Cameron McEwen: keep in mind the fundamental ambiguity.

[2:19:28] Cameron McEwen: So

[2:19:28] Cameron McEwen: McLuhan oftentimes was criticized for saying that we've reached the end of the book.

[2:19:35] Cameron McEwen: And then people would.

[2:19:37] Cameron McEwen: come out with 20 books in their hand and they would say look there's there's more books now than there ever was what are you talking about and McLuhan would then say um just because something is obsolete it doesn't mean that it's completely disappeared it may mean that we have more of them than ever yes you see that in cars or you see that in pollution um

[2:20:01] Cameron McEwen: you you see it in everything it's a law of media that

[2:20:07] Bob Dobbs: Because they are not,

[2:20:08] Bob Dobbs: the key word that you've got to learn from McLuhan is constitutive.

[2:20:15] Bob Dobbs: Books are not constitutive.

[2:20:16] Bob Dobbs: The electronic vortex is what's constitutive in his day.

[2:20:21] Bob Dobbs: You understand?

[2:20:22] Bob Dobbs: It's what shapes the ground.

[2:20:24] Bob Dobbs: Or it's the ground that shapes the medium,

[2:20:26] Bob Dobbs: which is all the past media.

[2:20:29] Bob Dobbs: See?

[2:20:31] Bob Dobbs: Constitutive was his way of saying,

[2:20:33] Bob Dobbs: well,

[2:20:33] Bob Dobbs: this is a more shaping thing than...

[2:20:35] Bob Dobbs: than anything that you're talking about.

[2:20:38] Bob Dobbs: Not you,

[2:20:38] Bob Dobbs: but people in the news.

[2:20:40] Bob Dobbs: The constituent is the 10%

[2:20:42] Bob Dobbs: that's not noticed or not realized how powerful it is.

[2:20:48] Cameron McEwen: The word constitutive points towards the drama of cognition.

[2:20:53] Cameron McEwen: And the drama of cognition,

[2:20:56] Cameron McEwen: people shouldn't think,

[2:20:57] Cameron McEwen: oh,

[2:20:57] Cameron McEwen: that's something that happens to individuals.

[2:21:00] Cameron McEwen: We don't really know much about the drama of cognition.

[2:21:04] Cameron McEwen: but there are certainly social aspects to it.

[2:21:07] Cameron McEwen: There may even be global aspects to it.

[2:21:10] Cameron McEwen: So,

[2:21:12] Cameron McEwen: we need to be able to leave a lot of these terms to an investigation,

[2:21:18] Cameron McEwen: which we hope is going to happen.

[2:21:22] Cameron McEwen: But having said all that,

[2:21:24] Cameron McEwen: the word constitutive automatically points to a lot of the stuff that we've talked about today.

[2:21:32] Cameron McEwen: That is to say that when something happens,

[2:21:36] Cameron McEwen: that something can be a perception or it can become the way the academic universe...

[2:21:45] Cameron McEwen: man's publications and or it can be the event of modern history that we have this superfluity of content and it means nothing great can the

[2:22:02] Cameron McEwen: word constitutive means that all of these things have a history but it's not a diachronic history it's a synchronic history

[2:22:14] Cameron McEwen: a vertical history that has to do with how these things came to be.

[2:22:22] Cameron McEwen: And so really,

[2:22:25] Cameron McEwen: there's a sense in which McLuhan never talks about anything but being,

[2:22:31] Cameron McEwen: right?

[2:22:33] Cameron McEwen: What is the complexity of being such that all these things have come to be?

[2:22:41] Cameron McEwen: What is,

[2:22:42] Cameron McEwen: how can we interrogate

[2:22:44] Cameron McEwen: everything that is so that we understand the fundamental structures of being that lie behind it.

[2:22:53] Cameron McEwen: So this relates to what you were talking about with the vision that poets or philosophers or religious people or whoever have had.

[2:23:04] Cameron McEwen: McLuhan had a certain notion of existence in which harmony or inclusivity,

[2:23:12] Cameron McEwen: as he would...

[2:23:13] Cameron McEwen: probably rather say in which inclusivity is the fundamental law right that you the in the spectrum of ambiguities which

[2:23:30] Cameron McEwen: goes from one figure and ground to another figure and ground in the middle is a notion that figure and ground are fitted to each other and are

[2:23:43] Cameron McEwen: harmony in their difference and so for McLuhan what's necessary is for people to come to that middle and then to articulate it through practical

[2:23:59] Cameron McEwen: applications in the world and he wasn't able to bring that off unfortunately but the

[2:24:11] Cameron McEwen: The tradition and the demand that that happen in the world is something that is very much alive,

[2:24:20] Cameron McEwen: and I see you as one of the people that understands that and is trying to articulate it.

[2:24:27] Bob Dobbs: Yes,

[2:24:29] Bob Dobbs: well,

[2:24:29] Bob Dobbs: I'm glad of that,

[2:24:32] Bob Dobbs: that you see that.

[2:24:34] Bob Dobbs: So,

[2:24:34] Bob Dobbs: I said,

[2:24:35] Bob Dobbs: let's start looking at the...

[2:24:38] Bob Dobbs: quotations in the book.

[2:24:39] Bob Dobbs: So I want to take you to the first quotation.

[2:24:42] Cameron McEwen: That's fine.

[2:24:43] Bob Dobbs: And it's,

[2:24:48] Bob Dobbs: I don't know where,

[2:24:49] Bob Dobbs: oh,

[2:24:49] Bob Dobbs: this comes from

[2:24:51] Bob Dobbs: Stern, I think,

[2:24:52] Bob Dobbs: Hot and Cool.

[2:24:54] Bob Dobbs: Okay,

[2:24:55] Bob Dobbs: so the quote is,

[2:24:56] Bob Dobbs: the first one is,

[2:24:58] Bob Dobbs: in light of all that you've been saying,

[2:25:01] Bob Dobbs: and I've been adding to,

[2:25:04] Bob Dobbs: have you gotten to the first quotation yet?

[2:25:10] Cameron McEwen: Yeah,

[2:25:10] Cameron McEwen: the one about an octopus attacking the Great Pyramids?

[2:25:14] Bob Dobbs: Yeah.

[2:25:14] Bob Dobbs: Yeah.

[2:25:15] Bob Dobbs: The road to understanding media effects begins with arrogant superiority.

[2:25:19] Bob Dobbs: If one lacked this sense of superiority,

[2:25:22] Bob Dobbs: this detachment,

[2:25:23] Bob Dobbs: it would be quite impossible to write about them,

[2:25:26] Bob Dobbs: media effects.

[2:25:27] Bob Dobbs: It would be like an octopus attacking the Great Pyramids.

[2:25:31] Bob Dobbs: So there's his general principle.

[2:25:35] Bob Dobbs: Then it's applied.

[2:25:38] Bob Dobbs: Thirteen years later,

[2:25:40] Bob Dobbs: late 70s is when the second quote comes forth.

[2:25:43] Bob Dobbs: It's an unpublished interview with some guy that I got from George Thompson,

[2:25:48] Bob Dobbs: I think.

[2:25:49] Bob Dobbs: So listen to this.

[2:25:50] Bob Dobbs: Pollster activities are all espionage,

[2:25:53] Bob Dobbs: snooping on publics.

[2:25:55] Bob Dobbs: The whole credit system is based on espionage.

[2:25:58] Bob Dobbs: By the way,

[2:25:59] Bob Dobbs: you can find out all the secret life of anybody by buying it from a crediting agency.

[2:26:03] Bob Dobbs: It is a new kind of activity.

[2:26:06] Bob Dobbs: And it may well undermine our political life because it has been discovered that in every single case of representatives in politics,

[2:26:12] Bob Dobbs: there is a conflict of interest.

[2:26:15] Bob Dobbs: You cannot be a representative of a big sector of the public without having conflicts of interest between your job and your role playing and your private interests.

[2:26:25] Bob Dobbs: And so the discovery of the conflict of interest,

[2:26:27] Bob Dobbs: which is really the whole issue in Watergate,

[2:26:30] Bob Dobbs: has in a sense overturned our political life.

[2:26:33] Bob Dobbs: I know that right here in Canada,

[2:26:35] Bob Dobbs: there's nobody in politics who doesn't have a conflict of interest.

[2:26:39] Bob Dobbs: Many lawyers go into politics,

[2:26:41] Bob Dobbs: and by definition,

[2:26:42] Bob Dobbs: they have a conflict of interest.

[2:26:44] Bob Dobbs: Any lawyer has a conflict of interest in politics.

[2:26:47] Bob Dobbs: He's using his political position to obtain for himself new clients and new connections at all times.

[2:26:53] Bob Dobbs: That's how he gets into politics in the first place.

[2:26:56] Bob Dobbs: Now,

[2:26:56] Bob Dobbs: can you imagine walking into the,

[2:26:59] Bob Dobbs: you know,

[2:26:59] Bob Dobbs: parliament in Ottawa?

[2:27:01] Bob Dobbs: and making this what sounds like an accusation.

[2:27:05] Bob Dobbs: But it's typical of the dangerous statements he'd make that he got away with.

[2:27:11] Bob Dobbs: Either no one knew it,

[2:27:12] Bob Dobbs: this one didn't get published,

[2:27:14] Bob Dobbs: but he is talking about the issues of the 70s right there.

[2:27:19] Bob Dobbs: And he's got the controversial themes of estaminage and snooping and spying,

[2:27:25] Bob Dobbs: and you can buy information and blackmail somebody,

[2:27:28] Bob Dobbs: Because nobody in...

[2:27:30] Bob Dobbs: I like the way he says it,

[2:27:32] Bob Dobbs: representative of a big sector of the public.

[2:27:35] Bob Dobbs: It was a anti-environment.

[2:27:36] Bob Dobbs: Old media doesn't have a conflict of interest.

[2:27:41] Bob Dobbs: What do you say about that quote?

[2:27:44] Cameron McEwen: Well,

[2:27:44] Cameron McEwen: first off,

[2:27:45] Cameron McEwen: I think they're both great quotes.

[2:27:47] Cameron McEwen: I think it's a super way to begin thinking about modern times,

[2:27:55] Cameron McEwen: if you will,

[2:27:56] Cameron McEwen: and understanding what McLuhan might...

[2:27:59] Cameron McEwen: contribute to an understanding of them.

[2:28:04] Cameron McEwen: When he says it would be like an octopus attacking the Great Pyramids,

[2:28:08] Cameron McEwen: one of the things that you might think about is alchemy.

[2:28:15] Cameron McEwen: Alchemy had seeds to it that led to chemistry.

[2:28:23] Cameron McEwen: Those seeds weren't the only thing that led to chemistry,

[2:28:26] Cameron McEwen: but they were important seeds.

[2:28:28] Cameron McEwen: Bye.

[2:28:29] Cameron McEwen: Alchemy ultimately did not have a way of articulating what was going on with physical reality.

[2:28:38] Cameron McEwen: It was like an octopus attacking the Great Pyramid,

[2:28:42] Cameron McEwen: and that had to be straightened out.

[2:28:44] Cameron McEwen: So then you come to the second quote,

[2:28:47] Cameron McEwen: and he's talking about a conflict of interest in politics,

[2:28:51] Cameron McEwen: but he could have just as well have been talking about a conflict of interest in academia.

[2:28:57] Bob Dobbs: Yeah.

[2:28:58] Cameron McEwen: and

[2:29:00] Cameron McEwen: There,

[2:29:02] Cameron McEwen: he did get into trouble.

[2:29:04] Cameron McEwen: He did have huge problems at University of Toronto and eventually almost everywhere.

[2:29:12] Bob Dobbs: Yeah.

[2:29:13] Cameron McEwen: Because the last thing that people wanted to admit was that they had a conflict of interest.

[2:29:21] Cameron McEwen: But the whole point of the way

[2:29:27] Cameron McEwen: McLuhan thought about things.

[2:29:28] Cameron McEwen: He says,

[2:29:29] Cameron McEwen: you cannot be a representative of a big sector of the public without having conflict of interest between your job and your role playing and your private interests.

[2:29:37] Cameron McEwen: So if we take that down to the drama of cognition,

[2:29:42] Cameron McEwen: right,

[2:29:44] Cameron McEwen: everybody is a representative of,

[2:29:48] Cameron McEwen: quote unquote,

[2:29:48] Cameron McEwen: a big sector of the public.

[2:29:50] Cameron McEwen: Everybody is a representative of all of the possible roles that that person could be playing.

[2:29:56] Cameron McEwen: That's what the public is.

[2:29:57] Bob Dobbs: Yeah.

[2:29:58] Cameron McEwen: The public is,

[2:30:00] Cameron McEwen: you know,

[2:30:00] Cameron McEwen: McLuhan always talked about Yeats'

[2:30:01] Cameron McEwen: 1903 short piece on multitude,

[2:30:06] Cameron McEwen: right?

[2:30:07] Cameron McEwen: So every human being is sitting on top of a multitude.

[2:30:12] Bob Dobbs: Yeah,

[2:30:12] Bob Dobbs: and they're not public.

[2:30:13] Bob Dobbs: They're mass manned.

[2:30:16] Cameron McEwen: No,

[2:30:16] Cameron McEwen: no,

[2:30:16] Cameron McEwen: no.

[2:30:16] Cameron McEwen: No,

[2:30:16] Cameron McEwen: no,

[2:30:17] Cameron McEwen: no.

[2:30:17] Cameron McEwen: Well,

[2:30:18] Cameron McEwen: we...

[2:30:19] Cameron McEwen: Remember,

[2:30:20] Bob Dobbs: public is illiterate

[2:30:22] Bob Dobbs: Gutenberg public.

[2:30:24] Cameron McEwen: Yeah,

[2:30:24] Cameron McEwen: yeah,

[2:30:25] Cameron McEwen: yeah.

[2:30:25] Cameron McEwen: Yeah.

[2:30:27] Cameron McEwen: In order to understand the words we're using,

[2:30:30] Cameron McEwen: we have to specify what's figure and ground.

[2:30:35] Cameron McEwen: So what I'm talking about here is the public or the mass man as ground,

[2:30:43] Cameron McEwen: not as figure.

[2:30:45] Cameron McEwen: You were talking about it in terms of figure.

[2:30:47] Cameron McEwen: So what I'm saying is everybody at all times is a representative of the public.

[2:30:54] Cameron McEwen: That is to say,

[2:30:55] Cameron McEwen: they're...

[2:30:56] Cameron McEwen: Everybody is a certain role on top of all of the possible roles that he or she could be playing,

[2:31:07] Cameron McEwen: right?

[2:31:07] Cameron McEwen: So the idea of a representative of the public is what everybody is all the time.

[2:31:14] Cameron McEwen: And there's always a conflict of interest because we want to portray that.

[2:31:24] Cameron McEwen: role-playing and that identity as who we are.

[2:31:28] Cameron McEwen: But that's a private interest,

[2:31:31] Cameron McEwen: as he says,

[2:31:32] Cameron McEwen: imposed on what is a public drama.

[2:31:37] Bob Dobbs: Yeah.

[2:31:38] Cameron McEwen: Right?

[2:31:39] Cameron McEwen: Exactly.

[2:31:40] Cameron McEwen: What he's talking about here,

[2:31:42] Cameron McEwen: in terms of politics,

[2:31:44] Cameron McEwen: could be articulated in terms of academia,

[2:31:49] Cameron McEwen: but it's also what you and I everybody

[2:31:52] Cameron McEwen: is doing at every second.

[2:31:56] Cameron McEwen: So we always have a conflict of interest.

[2:31:59] Cameron McEwen: And most of life goes on in the denial of it.

[2:32:04] Bob Dobbs: Yeah,

[2:32:05] Bob Dobbs: what is it?

[2:32:05] Bob Dobbs: Everybody is crew on spaceship Earth?

[2:32:08] Bob Dobbs: No spectators?

[2:32:10] Cameron McEwen: Yeah,

[2:32:11] Cameron McEwen: but that is a way of,

[2:32:18] Cameron McEwen: that would be a way of actually beginning to admit the conflict of interest.

[2:32:25] Bob Dobbs: You know,

[2:32:26] Bob Dobbs: they say,

[2:32:27] Bob Dobbs: This guy who lives in Washington,

[2:32:29] Bob Dobbs: D.C.

[2:32:29] Bob Dobbs: told me that

[2:32:30] Bob Dobbs: 70% of the public,

[2:32:32] Bob Dobbs: American public,

[2:32:32] Bob Dobbs: doesn't vote.

[2:32:33] Bob Dobbs: They don't follow politics.

[2:32:35] Bob Dobbs: So you've got 30%

[2:32:37] Bob Dobbs: are engaged in it,

[2:32:37] Bob Dobbs: and that's split to 15%,

[2:32:39] Bob Dobbs: so,

[2:32:39] Bob Dobbs: you know,

[2:32:40] Bob Dobbs: a small part of the population determines the figures.

[2:32:45] Bob Dobbs: But I think that 70%

[2:32:47] Bob Dobbs: are people aware of what you just explained,

[2:32:51] Bob Dobbs: and they recognize the conflict of interest,

[2:32:53] Bob Dobbs: so they're not going to specialize and become a politician or something.

[2:32:57] Bob Dobbs: Just the worst become politicians.

[2:33:00] Bob Dobbs: And that's in old-fashioned terms of worst.

[2:33:05] Bob Dobbs: We still would talk to them,

[2:33:07] Bob Dobbs: be sympathetic to their being on the spot.

[2:33:11] Bob Dobbs: But

[2:33:11] Bob Dobbs: I'm trying to say that the public is quite smart,

[2:33:17] Bob Dobbs: or has been forced by default to become smart by such a 24-7 educational environment going on all the time.

[2:33:24] Bob Dobbs: So that...

[2:33:26] Bob Dobbs: By the 50s,

[2:33:26] Bob Dobbs: McLuhan could say we're at the highest decibels of consciousness.

[2:33:29] Bob Dobbs: Well,

[2:33:29] Bob Dobbs: we're really at an incredible level of informed,

[2:33:34] Bob Dobbs: and that's the silent majority.

[2:33:38] Cameron McEwen: But the...

[2:33:39] Bob Dobbs: Not based on values or voting or party membership.

[2:33:42] Bob Dobbs: It is the...

[2:33:43] Bob Dobbs: No,

[2:33:43] Bob Dobbs: no,

[2:33:43] Bob Dobbs: I...

[2:33:44] Bob Dobbs: It's what you were describing,

[2:33:45] Bob Dobbs: our quadrophrenia wearing of all these anti-environment.

[2:33:49] Cameron McEwen: Correct,

[2:33:49] Cameron McEwen: correct.

[2:33:50] Cameron McEwen: So,

[2:33:52] Cameron McEwen: there too,

[2:33:52] Cameron McEwen: we must preserve the...

[2:33:54] Cameron McEwen: ambiguity of all things,

[2:33:56] Cameron McEwen: part of the inherent wisdom of the public,

[2:34:02] Cameron McEwen: and perhaps especially of the 70%

[2:34:05] Cameron McEwen: that doesn't give a shit about politics because politicians are not interested in us,

[2:34:13] Cameron McEwen: right?

[2:34:14] Cameron McEwen: Part of the inherent wisdom of that 70%

[2:34:17] Cameron McEwen: is their roots in tradition.

[2:34:20] Cameron McEwen: They just,

[2:34:22] Cameron McEwen: they know that.

[2:34:25] Cameron McEwen: Change is usually for the worse,

[2:34:27] Cameron McEwen: that great ideas usually lead to bullshit,

[2:34:32] Cameron McEwen: that the less a politician does,

[2:34:39] Cameron McEwen: the better it is,

[2:34:41] Cameron McEwen: the less we pay in taxes,

[2:34:42] Cameron McEwen: the better it is.

[2:34:43] Cameron McEwen: So that wisdom is age old,

[2:34:49] Cameron McEwen: is rooted in the soil,

[2:34:51] Cameron McEwen: and is just what everybody knows.

[2:34:54] Cameron McEwen: Right?

[2:34:54] Bob Dobbs: Yeah.

[2:34:55] Cameron McEwen: And then on the other hand,

[2:34:57] Cameron McEwen: they have what everybody is learning through the new media environment,

[2:35:01] Cameron McEwen: right?

[2:35:02] Cameron McEwen: Which is what you were just talking about.

[2:35:04] Cameron McEwen: So for McLuhan,

[2:35:05] Cameron McEwen: one of the things that his conversion to Catholicism represented is,

[2:35:11] Cameron McEwen: is it possible to bring those together in some way?

[2:35:15] Cameron McEwen: Not in a bare identity,

[2:35:17] Cameron McEwen: but is there a way to think about the ambiguities of all things?

[2:35:24] Cameron McEwen: the co-presence of all media in a way that allows us to say in a new way everything that's good about the old ways.

[2:35:36] Bob Dobbs: Yes.

[2:35:37] Bob Dobbs: What does that entail today?

[2:35:38] Bob Dobbs: Nothing old under the sun and nothing new under the sun.

[2:35:43] Bob Dobbs: Old is new,

[2:35:44] Bob Dobbs: new is old.

[2:35:47] Bob Dobbs: But then again,

[2:35:49] Bob Dobbs: we have to be ambiguous about your statement there because there is...

[2:35:54] Bob Dobbs: Nobody can remember the old traditions unless they are acting them out anyways.

[2:36:00] Bob Dobbs: Can't help it.

[2:36:00] Cameron McEwen: Correct.

[2:36:01] Cameron McEwen: Oh,

[2:36:02] Cameron McEwen: absolutely.

[2:36:02] Cameron McEwen: Absolutely.

[2:36:05] Bob Dobbs: So that's the silent sea.

[2:36:08] Bob Dobbs: We've broken into the silent sea.

[2:36:11] Bob Dobbs: So we have endless communication because it's obsolete.

[2:36:16] Bob Dobbs: In other words,

[2:36:16] Bob Dobbs: there's going to be more and more of it.

[2:36:18] Bob Dobbs: But people are forced to live in silence.

[2:36:21] Bob Dobbs: That's the 70%.

[2:36:23] Bob Dobbs: the silent majority.

[2:36:28] Bob Dobbs: So what would academics teach young people?

[2:36:35] Bob Dobbs: He has in take today that academia is the last mirage of capitalism.

[2:36:46] Bob Dobbs: People competing individualistically for grants.

[2:36:50] Bob Dobbs: The grant-grubbing

[2:36:52] Bob Dobbs: So the academics,

[2:36:53] Bob Dobbs: they say,

[2:36:53] Bob Dobbs: I'm leaving the dirty business world and I'm going to have a leisurely life of study and I'm going to become smarter by doing this and I'll be a model citizen.

[2:37:03] Bob Dobbs: Anti-environment.

[2:37:05] Bob Dobbs: They actually become more what they didn't want to be anymore,

[2:37:09] Bob Dobbs: a businessman in the academic situation.

[2:37:12] Bob Dobbs: So,

[2:37:13] Bob Dobbs: again,

[2:37:14] Bob Dobbs: conflict of life,

[2:37:15] Bob Dobbs: conflict of contradictions,

[2:37:17] Bob Dobbs: conflict of interest.

[2:37:19] Bob Dobbs: So academia is on the spot.

[2:37:21] Bob Dobbs: So we have endless talking heads.

[2:37:25] Bob Dobbs: Academia aspires to get on CNN and be a talking head.

[2:37:28] Bob Dobbs: That's apparently you've arrived when you're like Alan Dershowitz or somebody.

[2:37:34] Bob Dobbs: That's the great hypocrisy of our time.

[2:37:37] Cameron McEwen: Even in the anti-environment,

[2:37:39] Cameron McEwen: you're a talking head,

[2:37:41] Cameron McEwen: right?

[2:37:41] Cameron McEwen: You're a talking head if you're lecturing,

[2:37:44] Cameron McEwen: then you go to a conference and there's a panel,

[2:37:46] Cameron McEwen: and you become a talking head on the panel.

[2:37:51] Cameron McEwen: That's all,

[2:37:51] Cameron McEwen: yeah.

[2:37:52] Cameron McEwen: So,

[2:37:52] Cameron McEwen: yeah,

[2:37:52] Cameron McEwen: just talking heads.

[2:37:54] Cameron McEwen: And obviously,

[2:37:59] Cameron McEwen: the uselessness of that is a huge...

[2:38:04] Cameron McEwen: part of the practical problems of the world.

[2:38:08] Cameron McEwen: So when McLuhan began to speak about the medium as a message,

[2:38:11] Cameron McEwen: this was 1958,

[2:38:15] Cameron McEwen: right away he was saying to Harry Skornia that the problem of the academic world from kindergarten to post-grad is that this is a world that's divided.

[2:38:33] Cameron McEwen: from the practical world,

[2:38:35] Cameron McEwen: right?

[2:38:35] Cameron McEwen: If we do chemistry at any level of education,

[2:38:41] Cameron McEwen: that's not a different chemistry from what is done in research labs and in manufacturing and whatever.

[2:38:49] Cameron McEwen: So in chemistry,

[2:38:53] Cameron McEwen: there is no wall that divides the classroom from the world.

[2:39:00] Cameron McEwen: And the taking down of that you

[2:39:02] Cameron McEwen: wall is the important contribution of chemistry.

[2:39:08] Cameron McEwen: Alchemy still had that wall and was proud of it.

[2:39:11] Cameron McEwen: Chemistry took it down and the world was revolutionized.

[2:39:15] Cameron McEwen: So for McLuhan,

[2:39:17] Cameron McEwen: when he says the medium is the message,

[2:39:19] Cameron McEwen: he says to Harry Skornia at exactly the same time,

[2:39:23] Cameron McEwen: what we have to do is recognize that we also have a classroom without walls.

[2:39:30] Cameron McEwen: The people are learning more outside of the classroom than inside.

[2:39:36] Cameron McEwen: And if we are going to have effective education,

[2:39:40] Cameron McEwen: we must recognize that that wall has fallen and education needs to be directed by an awareness of that fallen wall.

[2:39:53] Cameron McEwen: So the sign for McLuhan...

[2:39:57] Cameron McEwen: that people are going to understand the medium as a message is that what is taught at any level of education is going to be the same thing that's going on in the world at large.

[2:40:10] Cameron McEwen: However,

[2:40:11] Cameron McEwen: that was,

[2:40:12] Cameron McEwen: let's say that was in 1958,

[2:40:16] Cameron McEwen: so that's more than half a century ago.

[2:40:19] Cameron McEwen: The whole academic world has done nothing since that time but attempt to maintain the wall.

[2:40:26] Cameron McEwen: So when you were just talking about capitalism,

[2:40:28] Cameron McEwen: the leisurely study and all this sort of bullshit,

[2:40:32] Cameron McEwen: that is attempts to maintain the wall that can't exist if we are going to have proper education.

[2:40:42] Bob Dobbs: Right.

[2:40:42] Bob Dobbs: Now,

[2:40:43] Bob Dobbs: the poetic visionary thing is that's part of the inevitable fate of the university.

[2:40:48] Bob Dobbs: He said in the dew line,

[2:40:49] Bob Dobbs: it became the new city.

[2:40:53] Bob Dobbs: The inevitable thing is that it is part of the ecology.

[2:40:58] Bob Dobbs: There's so many people not engaging in academia now.

[2:41:03] Bob Dobbs: They're doing other things.

[2:41:04] Bob Dobbs: So there is an underlying harmony in activities.

[2:41:08] Bob Dobbs: It just depends on which part of the public sector you get stuck in and then think you're stuck there.

[2:41:15] Bob Dobbs: Always remember you're discarnate,

[2:41:18] Bob Dobbs: and you're not where you appear to be according to your eyes.

[2:41:22] Bob Dobbs: Like when you read the New York Times,

[2:41:24] Bob Dobbs: it's not a New York paper.

[2:41:26] Bob Dobbs: It's covering the solar system.

[2:41:29] Bob Dobbs: You're not in New York when you're experiencing the New York Times,

[2:41:33] Bob Dobbs: so it's mistitled.

[2:41:40] Cameron McEwen: Yeah,

[2:41:40] Cameron McEwen: well,

[2:41:40] Cameron McEwen: I mean,

[2:41:41] Cameron McEwen: everything's subject to ambiguity,

[2:41:43] Cameron McEwen: right?

[2:41:44] Cameron McEwen: So nothing is more universal than the New York Times,

[2:41:49] Cameron McEwen: and nothing is more local.

[2:41:51] Bob Dobbs: Yes.

[2:41:52] Cameron McEwen: The New York Times has a very parochial view of truth and of journalism.

[2:42:02] Cameron McEwen: And to read the cosmos through the New York Times is to put blinkers on.

[2:42:12] Cameron McEwen: Yes.

[2:42:13] Cameron McEwen: It's to see nothing,

[2:42:15] Cameron McEwen: basically.

[2:42:16] Cameron McEwen: So it's one more thing that's subject to an unacknowledged ambiguity.

[2:42:22] Bob Dobbs: Right.

[2:42:23] Bob Dobbs: What was that quote from the

[2:42:25] Bob Dobbs: 50s, I think,

[2:42:26] Bob Dobbs: about the...

[2:42:28] Bob Dobbs: but it might be in counterblast the later counterblast the baby powder gets in our eyes we're in a new situation and a new cradle and the baby power gets in our eyes i think that's all part of the uh hanging uh to the chandelier by our ears passage isn't it uh

[2:42:47] Cameron McEwen: i don't recall that sentence being part of it but it might be i think it's just one page anyway i know what you're talking about the powder getting in our eyes yep

[2:42:57] Bob Dobbs: Okay,

[2:42:57] Bob Dobbs: so did you ever encounter an educational,

[2:43:02] Bob Dobbs: academic movement of clarity,

[2:43:06] Bob Dobbs: as we're talking about it,

[2:43:07] Bob Dobbs: lucidity?

[2:43:09] Bob Dobbs: Is there any movement of anything,

[2:43:13] Bob Dobbs: maybe pretending to replenish the public,

[2:43:18] Bob Dobbs: that you have ever experienced?

[2:43:21] Cameron McEwen: Well,

[2:43:23] Cameron McEwen: when...

[2:43:24] Cameron McEwen: McLuhan was asked questions like this,

[2:43:26] Cameron McEwen: he would always say,

[2:43:28] Cameron McEwen: you have to understand that opposites flip.

[2:43:31] Cameron McEwen: And what's happened just in the last few years is that it's become painfully obvious that education has only one view.

[2:43:46] Cameron McEwen: You know,

[2:43:48] Cameron McEwen: the Ivy League and the best colleges all.

[2:43:53] Cameron McEwen: force a single view of the world and it sort of contradicts the whole idea of education.

[2:44:02] Cameron McEwen: And yet all of these colleges have huge billion dollar endowments and our businesses,

[2:44:13] Cameron McEwen: capitalism at its worst as you were just saying.

[2:44:19] Cameron McEwen: What seems to be happening is that the

[2:44:23] Cameron McEwen: We're getting a coalescence of kind of insistence on Gutenberg that is so lopsided and so stupid and so unenlightened that at some point it's going to flip.

[2:44:39] Cameron McEwen: And we don't know what's going to happen when it flips.

[2:44:42] Cameron McEwen: It can be a very dangerous thing or it could be something very good.

[2:44:48] Cameron McEwen: But the present situation is unstable.

[2:44:53] Cameron McEwen: And signs of this are that colleges increasingly fund their sciences and defund their humanities.

[2:45:04] Cameron McEwen: So anybody who thinks that they're going to get a PhD in comparative lit and then get a job is nuts.

[2:45:14] Cameron McEwen: There are no jobs.

[2:45:16] Cameron McEwen: People that had jobs in comparative lit are out looking for jobs themselves.

[2:45:21] Cameron McEwen: They're not looking at academia.

[2:45:24] Bob Dobbs: That's right.

[2:45:24] Bob Dobbs: So,

[2:45:26] Cameron McEwen: you know,

[2:45:26] Cameron McEwen: the whole situation is one of,

[2:45:30] Cameron McEwen: we've entered a singularity and we don't know what's going to happen.

[2:45:34] Bob Dobbs: Right.

[2:45:35] Bob Dobbs: And let me end with this.

[2:45:39] Bob Dobbs: So there was this grad student who started a blog and interviewing,

[2:45:45] Bob Dobbs: tended to be,

[2:45:46] Bob Dobbs: media ecology professors.

[2:45:48] Bob Dobbs: I think it was called Figure and ground.

[2:45:51] Bob Dobbs: It was an Argentinian student.

[2:45:53] Cameron McEwen: Yeah,

[2:45:54] Cameron McEwen: yeah,

[2:45:54] Cameron McEwen: a guy at

[2:45:55] Cameron McEwen: Simon Fraser.

[2:45:56] Bob Dobbs: Yes,

[2:45:57] Bob Dobbs: British Columbia,

[2:45:58] Bob Dobbs: yeah.

[2:45:59] Bob Dobbs: So he interviewed me.

[2:46:00] Bob Dobbs: Oh,

[2:46:00] Bob Dobbs: good.

[2:46:02] Bob Dobbs: And my main point was immigrant people coming to the promised land,

[2:46:09] Bob Dobbs: North America,

[2:46:10] Bob Dobbs: hoping to get their kids to have a good education.

[2:46:14] Bob Dobbs: I said,

[2:46:14] Bob Dobbs: that's the biggest scam going.

[2:46:18] Bob Dobbs: I urged them not to.

[2:46:19] Bob Dobbs: to sweat their balls off to raise money,

[2:46:22] Bob Dobbs: save money to send their kids to university,

[2:46:25] Bob Dobbs: that's going to really cause problems.

[2:46:26] Bob Dobbs: So I recommend they don't go to university.

[2:46:29] Bob Dobbs: In other words,

[2:46:30] Bob Dobbs: undermine the vision that was bringing them to there,

[2:46:34] Bob Dobbs: to North America.

[2:46:36] Bob Dobbs: So the guy published it,

[2:46:40] Bob Dobbs: and immediately the regular,

[2:46:42] Bob Dobbs: you know,

[2:46:43] Bob Dobbs: MEA,

[2:46:44] Bob Dobbs: meat ecology gang,

[2:46:46] Bob Dobbs: they'd

[2:46:47] Bob Dobbs: pounced on him and said,

[2:46:48] Bob Dobbs: you cannot have this Innis thing that's talked about as great media colleges and wonderful new world we're describing or studying.

[2:46:57] Bob Dobbs: So if you don't get rid of Bob's interview,

[2:47:01] Bob Dobbs: I will not grant you my interview.

[2:47:04] Bob Dobbs: which was coming,

[2:47:05] Bob Dobbs: or I will tell you to take it down.

[2:47:07] Bob Dobbs: So he stuck to his,

[2:47:09] Bob Dobbs: quote,

[2:47:09] Bob Dobbs: guns and kept it up for a few years.

[2:47:13] Bob Dobbs: And then a few years ago,

[2:47:16] Bob Dobbs: I noticed it wasn't there anymore.

[2:47:18] Bob Dobbs: So I wrote to him,

[2:47:19] Bob Dobbs: emailed him,

[2:47:20] Bob Dobbs: no answer.

[2:47:21] Bob Dobbs: Then I chided him six months later.

[2:47:23] Bob Dobbs: So,

[2:47:23] Bob Dobbs: you know,

[2:47:24] Bob Dobbs: once a year I bug him.

[2:47:25] Bob Dobbs: I said,

[2:47:25] Bob Dobbs: you're a coward.

[2:47:26] Bob Dobbs: But I found out that he got a job teaching somewhere.

[2:47:30] Bob Dobbs: So he had to join the cult.

[2:47:33] Bob Dobbs: So he had to take it off,

[2:47:35] Bob Dobbs: even though while he was a...

[2:47:37] Bob Dobbs: What is McLuhan saying?

[2:47:40] Bob Dobbs: Oh,

[2:47:40] Bob Dobbs: about being?

[2:47:41] Bob Dobbs: That

[2:47:42] Bob Dobbs: 40s essay,

[2:47:42] Bob Dobbs: The Non-Being of Non-Being.

[2:47:48] Cameron McEwen: That was a paper he wrote at the University of Wright Manitoba in 1933.

[2:47:54] Bob Dobbs: Yes,

[2:47:54] Bob Dobbs: so you talk about being.

[2:47:57] Bob Dobbs: There he is,

[2:47:57] Bob Dobbs: Tom,

[2:47:57] Bob Dobbs: with The Non-Being of Non-Being.

[2:47:59] Bob Dobbs: So check that one out.

[2:48:01] Bob Dobbs: But the...

[2:48:05] Bob Dobbs: So he stopped taking a stand,

[2:48:08] Bob Dobbs: fell to,

[2:48:09] Bob Dobbs: what,

[2:48:09] Bob Dobbs: tribal pressure,

[2:48:12] Bob Dobbs: professional pressure,

[2:48:14] Bob Dobbs: hypocrisy,

[2:48:15] Bob Dobbs: and finally had to delete me.

[2:48:17] Bob Dobbs: But as a student,

[2:48:19] Bob Dobbs: McLuhan used to say,

[2:48:20] Bob Dobbs: when you're becoming and you're a young person with potential,

[2:48:23] Bob Dobbs: everybody's interested in you.

[2:48:25] Bob Dobbs: Once you arrive at some place,

[2:48:27] Bob Dobbs: nobody cares about you anymore.

[2:48:29] Bob Dobbs: You've come to the platform of...

[2:48:31] Bob Dobbs: specialization,

[2:48:32] Bob Dobbs: I guess,

[2:48:33] Bob Dobbs: and you're no longer in the process of becoming.

[2:48:36] Bob Dobbs: So don't be ambiguous about arriving.

[2:48:44] Cameron McEwen: Don't be or be.

[2:48:46] Cameron McEwen: I would say he's saying be ambiguous about arriving.

[2:48:50] Bob Dobbs: Yeah,

[2:48:50] Bob Dobbs: that's what I'm saying.

[2:48:51] Bob Dobbs: Be ambiguous about arriving.

[2:48:54] Cameron McEwen: Absolutely.

[2:48:54] Bob Dobbs: So that opens it all up.

[2:48:56] Bob Dobbs: Everybody's four years old,

[2:48:58] Bob Dobbs: and you can talk to anybody.

[2:49:02] Bob Dobbs: don't be a snob unless it's ecologically appropriate,

[2:49:07] Bob Dobbs: depending anti-environment you're in,

[2:49:08] Bob Dobbs: right?

[2:49:09] Bob Dobbs: Maybe if I was caught in an

[2:49:12] Bob Dobbs: ISIS camp,

[2:49:13] Bob Dobbs: a terrorist camp,

[2:49:14] Bob Dobbs: I wouldn't act like a snob.

[2:49:16] Bob Dobbs: I'd hide in the middle.

[2:49:19] Cameron McEwen: Yeah.

[2:49:21] Cameron McEwen: Bob,

[2:49:22] Cameron McEwen: as you were saying,

[2:49:23] Cameron McEwen: we're at a time when we can call it quits for today.

[2:49:28] Bob Dobbs: Yeah.

[2:49:28] Cameron McEwen: But it seems...

[2:49:29] Cameron McEwen: It seems to me that you just brought up a very excellent topic for next week or sometime,

[2:49:38] Cameron McEwen: and that is the destruction of the idea of America as the shining city on a hill.

[2:49:48] Bob Dobbs: Yeah.

[2:49:49] Cameron McEwen: Reagan could say that,

[2:49:51] Cameron McEwen: and most Americans thought that it was appropriate to say it.

[2:49:57] Cameron McEwen: and was an appropriate description of who they were.

[2:50:02] Cameron McEwen: So that was around the time that just after McLuhan died.

[2:50:08] Cameron McEwen: And so in the 40 years since,

[2:50:12] Cameron McEwen: roughly,

[2:50:14] Cameron McEwen: what we've seen is the destruction of that idea.

[2:50:18] Cameron McEwen: And that is one of the sort of fundamental forces at work in...

[2:50:27] Cameron McEwen: American politics and in fact in international politics and if we examine that destruction sort of from a McLuhan angle

[2:50:39] Cameron McEwen: I think we'll be on to something very fruitful and in accord with your book by the way.

[2:50:45] Bob Dobbs: Yes make a note of that or maybe even type it up as we hang up and send me an email so we will remember we got to do that.

[2:50:54] Bob Dobbs: The main statement McLuhan made in the 60s was that America had become a world environment.

[2:50:59] Bob Dobbs: So there's the beginning point.

[2:51:01] Bob Dobbs: We're anti-environment anymore.

[2:51:03] Bob Dobbs: We're something else.

[2:51:04] Cameron McEwen: Yeah.

[2:51:05] Cameron McEwen: Well,

[2:51:06] Cameron McEwen: or a world environment,

[2:51:08] Cameron McEwen: but for the detriment to the world.

[2:51:13] Bob Dobbs: Yeah.

[2:51:14] Cameron McEwen: Right.

[2:51:15] Cameron McEwen: And of course,

[2:51:16] Cameron McEwen: as you know even better than I do,

[2:51:19] Cameron McEwen: this world environment idea of McLuhan.

[2:51:22] Cameron McEwen: came directly from lewis uh cosmic man yeah um and um so McLuhan took lewis's idea which was which was relatively optimistic and um not unhappy with america and

[2:51:39] Cameron McEwen: McLuhan as a more of a canadian than lewis could ever be um um turned that uh on uh on its if not exactly on its head at least

[2:51:52] Cameron McEwen: turned it in an ambiguous way.

[2:51:54] Bob Dobbs: Yep,

[2:51:55] Bob Dobbs: an ambiguous situation.

[2:51:57] Bob Dobbs: And so in that ambiguous situation,

[2:52:00] Bob Dobbs: I became an American citizen.

[2:52:02] Bob Dobbs: three years ago.

[2:52:03] Bob Dobbs: Wow,

[2:52:06] Cameron McEwen: just why to have multiple passports or?

[2:52:09] Bob Dobbs: No,

[2:52:10] Bob Dobbs: so that's because our my bride and I are carrying out a revolution.

[2:52:17] Bob Dobbs: We could be deported at any time.

[2:52:19] Bob Dobbs: So I just wanted to frustrate it by being an American citizen because I don't want to leave Maui.

[2:52:23] Bob Dobbs: Yeah,

[2:52:24] Cameron McEwen: yeah,

[2:52:25] Cameron McEwen: no,

[2:52:25] Cameron McEwen: no,

[2:52:25] Cameron McEwen: I understand.

[2:52:26] Cameron McEwen: Yeah,

[2:52:26] Cameron McEwen: no,

[2:52:26] Cameron McEwen: that's the passport.

[2:52:32] Cameron McEwen: as a way of dealing with deportation,

[2:52:34] Cameron McEwen: I think,

[2:52:35] Cameron McEwen: is an idea I've also had,

[2:52:38] Cameron McEwen: but

[2:52:39] Cameron McEwen: I've never been able to pull the trigger on the idea.

[2:52:44] Bob Dobbs: You never could commit suicide.

[2:52:46] Bob Dobbs: You just couldn't do it.

[2:52:47] Bob Dobbs: Okay.

[2:52:48] Cameron McEwen: That's right.

[2:52:48] Bob Dobbs: We'll see how long you can do that luxurious position.

[2:52:56] Bob Dobbs: Okay,

[2:52:56] Bob Dobbs: so fantastic conversation.

[2:52:59] Bob Dobbs: Awesome.

[2:53:00] Cameron McEwen: All right.

[2:53:00] Cameron McEwen: Well,

[2:53:00] Cameron McEwen: thanks,

[2:53:01] Cameron McEwen: Bob.

[2:53:01] Cameron McEwen: I appreciate the opportunity,

[2:53:03] Cameron McEwen: and I have fun doing it.

[2:53:06] Bob Dobbs: Right.

[2:53:06] Bob Dobbs: And to quote

[2:53:08] Bob Dobbs: Sherman Skolnik,

[2:53:09] Bob Dobbs: the Chicago investigator,

[2:53:11] Bob Dobbs: legend,

[2:53:13] Bob Dobbs: who Joe Keogh,

[2:53:15] Bob Dobbs: who has maybe the greatest correspondence with McLuhan in the archives.

[2:53:18] Bob Dobbs: You know Joe Keogh.

[2:53:20] Cameron McEwen: I know of him,

[2:53:21] Cameron McEwen: but I don't know much about him.

[2:53:23] Bob Dobbs: Yeah,

[2:53:23] Bob Dobbs: he was an incredible correspondent with McLuhan,

[2:53:26] Bob Dobbs: and he helped edit the Gutenberg Galaxy as a student in the early

[2:53:30] Bob Dobbs: 60s.

[2:53:31] Bob Dobbs: But anyways,

[2:53:33] Bob Dobbs: Joe knew and used to listen to Sherman Skolnick in the Chicago area in the late 60s,

[2:53:37] Bob Dobbs: early 70s.

[2:53:39] Bob Dobbs: Skolnick always ended his program with,

[2:53:42] Bob Dobbs: It's been a real pleasure to hear the treasure of your wisdom,

[2:53:45] Bob Dobbs: Cameron.

[2:53:50] Cameron McEwen: As long as we remember the ambiguity to that.

[2:53:53] Bob Dobbs: That's right.

[2:53:54] Bob Dobbs: I'll remember,

[2:53:55] Bob Dobbs: especially after hearing you for two and a half hours go on about it.

[2:53:59] Bob Dobbs: How could I forget?

[2:54:02] Cameron McEwen: Well,

[2:54:02] Cameron McEwen: the key to being able to talk for some time is talking with a knowledgeable interviewer.

[2:54:11] Bob Dobbs: Yes.

[2:54:13] Cameron McEwen: One of the things that people should appreciate when they think of how dangerous or how stupid or how crazy or something your ideas are is that your idea is only one part of

[2:54:29] Cameron McEwen: Bob.

[2:54:29] Cameron McEwen: There's many other parts,

[2:54:31] Cameron McEwen: and one of the parts that's especially valuable is your ability to listen to people in such a way as to conduct a good interview.

[2:54:46] Bob Dobbs: Very good.

[2:54:46] Bob Dobbs: I'm glad you noticed that.

[2:54:48] Bob Dobbs: I am a pretty good interviewer.

[2:54:50] Cameron McEwen: No question about it.

[2:54:51] Bob Dobbs: Okay.

[2:54:52] Bob Dobbs: All right.

[2:54:53] Bob Dobbs: Great.

[2:54:53] Bob Dobbs: We'll talk next week in the new year.

[2:54:56] Bob Dobbs: Yes,

[2:54:56] Cameron McEwen: sir.

[2:54:56] Cameron McEwen: Happy New Year to you.

[2:54:58] Bob Dobbs: Same to you.

[2:54:59] Bob Dobbs: Okay,

[2:54:59] Bob Dobbs: bye