[00:02] Bob Dobbs: Okay,
[00:02] Bob Dobbs: it's Bob and Cameron again.
[00:05] Bob Dobbs: This is the
[00:07] Bob Dobbs: 17th edition,
[00:08] Bob Dobbs: and it is March 11th,
[00:10] Bob Dobbs: 2021.
[00:13] Bob Dobbs: Okay,
[00:14] Bob Dobbs: Cameron,
[00:15] Bob Dobbs: I think you have a couple of points you want to get into right away.
[00:23] Cameron McEwen: Well,
[00:24] Cameron McEwen: when we closed off the last time,
[00:27] Cameron McEwen: I thought we were on a very...
[00:32] Cameron McEwen: fertile topic,
[00:34] Cameron McEwen: namely in talking about the different figures in the Tiny Note chart,
[00:42] Cameron McEwen: we had specified that there was a dimension of what could be called the laws of media,
[00:53] Cameron McEwen: the forms of media,
[00:57] Cameron McEwen: the elementary types of
[01:01] Cameron McEwen: human communication,
[01:04] Cameron McEwen: but then sort of as sidelights or repercussions or ramifications of that,
[01:16] Cameron McEwen: there were questions of how communication can be affected about those forms.
[01:26] Cameron McEwen: How does education work to
[01:30] Cameron McEwen: sort of go through a somersault in order to receive communication about communication.
[01:39] Cameron McEwen: And then another topic was what flows from the forms of communication?
[01:49] Cameron McEwen: What practical applications are there both for good and for ill?
[01:54] Cameron McEwen: And then one last topic that comes
[01:59] Cameron McEwen: from the forms is what are the metaphysics of the forms?
[02:04] Cameron McEwen: What do they imply about reality?
[02:15] Cameron McEwen: What are we able to conceive about the world when there is this kind of reflexivity of communication?
[02:25] Cameron McEwen: And the question arose about the...
[02:29] Cameron McEwen: it seemed like all of the different figures of your chart,
[02:36] Cameron McEwen: including yourself,
[02:38] Cameron McEwen: could be thought of in terms of this sort of dynamic Gestalt.
[02:47] Cameron McEwen: And so then the question came up,
[02:51] Cameron McEwen: if that's a reasonable way of thinking about the chart,
[02:56] Cameron McEwen: How does the chart work in your own mind,
[02:59] Cameron McEwen: especially in its vertical dimension?
[03:02] Cameron McEwen: How does the chart work as a representation of the big now of all at once-ness?
[03:15] Bob Dobbs: Right,
[03:16] Bob Dobbs: and are you thinking of
[03:18] Bob Dobbs: McLuhan's early
[03:20] Bob Dobbs: 50s essays on vertical symbolism versus horizontal symbolism?
[03:25] Bob Dobbs: When you say vertical...
[03:26] Bob Dobbs: No,
[03:28] Cameron McEwen: actually,
[03:29] Cameron McEwen: that actually does come into this,
[03:31] Cameron McEwen: but that's a complicated topic in itself.
[03:39] Cameron McEwen: I was really thinking in terms of contrasting times,
[03:45] Cameron McEwen: the vertical being the all is always now and the horizontal being chronological time.
[03:56] Cameron McEwen: every moment a change from the moment before.
[04:00] Bob Dobbs: Oh,
[04:00] Bob Dobbs: that's interesting.
[04:01] Bob Dobbs: So the vertical is the big now,
[04:03] Bob Dobbs: and horizontal is linear.
[04:06] Cameron McEwen: Correct.
[04:08] Cameron McEwen: And they can be thought of as a set of forms.
[04:13] Cameron McEwen: It is always the case,
[04:15] Cameron McEwen: a little bit like chemical elements,
[04:17] Cameron McEwen: and then the linear dimension being how these forms are expressed.
[04:26] Bob Dobbs: Right,
[04:27] Bob Dobbs: so
[04:28] Bob Dobbs: I definitely meant the Android Meme,
[04:32] Bob Dobbs: which the chart was an image of the ground when it became figure.
[04:37] Bob Dobbs: The Android Meme was ground from 1960 to 1990 and then became figure as the Internet.
[04:45] Bob Dobbs: And that's a big now,
[04:48] Bob Dobbs: a big resonating sphere,
[04:49] Bob Dobbs: the Internet,
[04:51] Bob Dobbs: and maybe even other platonic solids.
[04:57] Bob Dobbs: So...
[04:59] Bob Dobbs: If we use the word vertical for the big dimension,
[05:02] Bob Dobbs: I mean the big now,
[05:05] Bob Dobbs: the linear has happened.
[05:07] Bob Dobbs: The chart is showing that the linearity doesn't happen anymore.
[05:12] Bob Dobbs: There was this sequence of technologies which from ordinary awareness,
[05:17] Bob Dobbs: you know,
[05:18] Bob Dobbs: went from the telegraphs through the various electric media for 150 years,
[05:23] Bob Dobbs: but now it was all mashed into this weird simultaneity.
[05:28] Bob Dobbs: Now...
[05:29] Bob Dobbs: Electricity was simultaneous from the telegraph on,
[05:33] Bob Dobbs: but the media themselves didn't show up,
[05:35] Bob Dobbs: and they almost by decade changed the manners of people's communication from the telegraph through telephone,
[05:44] Bob Dobbs: movie,
[05:45] Bob Dobbs: radio,
[05:47] Bob Dobbs: bulldozers,
[05:49] Bob Dobbs: TV,
[05:50] Bob Dobbs: computer,
[05:50] Bob Dobbs: satellite.
[05:51] Bob Dobbs: That was sequential.
[05:54] Bob Dobbs: The figures of the electric media were...
[05:58] Bob Dobbs: sequential and McLuhan you know had fun playing with different descriptions and ratios between them like he one way he said the movie the
[06:13] Bob Dobbs: manuscript was that the measure was to the movie as the something okay maybe it was movie to airplane as
[06:30] Bob Dobbs: Something else was to something else.
[06:32] Bob Dobbs: This is an article in Take One
[06:35] Bob Dobbs: Film Magazine,
[06:36] Bob Dobbs: 1967.
[06:37] Bob Dobbs: Do you know what I'm referring to?
[06:39] Cameron McEwen: I know what you're referring to,
[06:40] Cameron McEwen: but I don't know the...
[06:40] Cameron McEwen: Airplane.
[06:42] Bob Dobbs: Airplane is to something as something is to movie.
[06:47] Bob Dobbs: What would they be?
[06:49] Bob Dobbs: It's funny,
[06:50] Bob Dobbs: I've forgotten that.
[06:52] Bob Dobbs: When you're maybe television...
[06:55] Bob Dobbs: Airplane...
[06:55] Bob Dobbs: Oh,
[06:56] Bob Dobbs: car is to movie as airplane is to TV.
[07:01] Bob Dobbs: You get that?
[07:02] Bob Dobbs: The car is to movie as the airplane.
[07:07] Bob Dobbs: The airplane had the autonomy to go all over the place and loop and twirl.
[07:12] Bob Dobbs: It wasn't stuck to the road,
[07:15] Bob Dobbs: just like the movie consumer was stuck in a theater.
[07:18] Bob Dobbs: The television could take you everywhere like an airplane.
[07:21] Bob Dobbs: So,
[07:22] Bob Dobbs: do you remember that one?
[07:24] Cameron McEwen: Well,
[07:24] Cameron McEwen: I don't remember it exactly,
[07:26] Cameron McEwen: but it rings true.
[07:29] Cameron McEwen: And I think it's interesting to try to sort of pull what you're saying apart a little bit because there's a lot of interesting aspects to it.
[07:40] Cameron McEwen: For example,
[07:42] Cameron McEwen: a car,
[07:44] Cameron McEwen: you're looking out of a moving vehicle through a screen.
[07:53] Cameron McEwen: So I think you were talking,
[07:54] Cameron McEwen: I think the first comparison was the...
[07:58] Cameron McEwen: car to the movie,
[07:58] Cameron McEwen: right?
[07:59] Bob Dobbs: Yeah.
[08:00] Cameron McEwen: Okay.
[08:01] Cameron McEwen: So in the movie theater,
[08:03] Cameron McEwen: you're sitting still,
[08:04] Cameron McEwen: you're a paraplegic,
[08:05] Cameron McEwen: as he says,
[08:07] Cameron McEwen: and the screen is in front of you.
[08:10] Cameron McEwen: And what you see is more or less enforced.
[08:16] Cameron McEwen: You don't have any role in what you see.
[08:20] Bob Dobbs: Yeah.
[08:21] Cameron McEwen: So you don't have movement either physically or psychologically.
[08:27] Cameron McEwen: Whereas in the car,
[08:30] Cameron McEwen: you have the freedom to go where you want and see what you want.
[08:37] Bob Dobbs: Yeah.
[08:37] Cameron McEwen: And so there's that difference.
[08:39] Cameron McEwen: So now if we look at the airplane,
[08:43] Cameron McEwen: the airplane was to what,
[08:45] Cameron McEwen: the computer or what was the?
[08:47] Bob Dobbs: To television.
[08:49] Cameron McEwen: Television.
[08:49] Cameron McEwen: Okay.
[08:50] Cameron McEwen: So with television,
[08:52] Cameron McEwen: what's happening is that you have the final...
[08:57] Cameron McEwen: mechanization,
[08:58] Cameron McEwen: if you will,
[08:59] Cameron McEwen: of all of the human senses,
[09:02] Cameron McEwen: all of human perceptions,
[09:06] Cameron McEwen: but it's fixed.
[09:08] Cameron McEwen: It's in a box,
[09:10] Cameron McEwen: you could say.
[09:12] Cameron McEwen: And with the airplane,
[09:15] Cameron McEwen: what you have is the ability to look down on,
[09:19] Cameron McEwen: quote unquote,
[09:20] Cameron McEwen: the whole earth.
[09:22] Cameron McEwen: And so if we take the whole earth to be all of
[09:26] Cameron McEwen: human senses and perceptions,
[09:29] Cameron McEwen: the what you have is a kind of automobile like freedom on the human sensorium.
[09:42] Cameron McEwen: That's very much like what the car did to the movie.
[09:46] Bob Dobbs: Yeah.
[09:48] Cameron McEwen: So
[09:49] Cameron McEwen: I have a Postman
[09:52] Cameron McEwen: McLuhan fondness for airplane metaphors and illusions and similes.
[10:01] Cameron McEwen: From even the late
[10:03] Cameron McEwen: 1940s,
[10:05] Cameron McEwen: McLuhan described what he was trying to do as taking an air perspective on the human scene.
[10:17] Cameron McEwen: And that idea of air perspective on the human scene then goes through a lot of changes over the years.
[10:27] Cameron McEwen: And by the 70s,
[10:29] Cameron McEwen: he's very much more concerned with hijacking as his airplane mode than he is some sort of theoretical benefit.
[10:42] Bob Dobbs: Okay,
[10:42] Bob Dobbs: two points.
[10:44] Bob Dobbs: He has an exploration.
[10:47] Bob Dobbs: Number eight,
[10:49] Bob Dobbs: the bird's point of view.
[10:51] Bob Dobbs: That's visual space.
[10:53] Bob Dobbs: In the anti-environment,
[10:54] Bob Dobbs: you couldn't be a bird.
[10:55] Bob Dobbs: So a plane could be seen as a bird,
[10:59] Bob Dobbs: but also it might be inside anti-environment that you can't get perspective on,
[11:06] Bob Dobbs: especially if the pilot starts looping and going in different spirals.
[11:12] Bob Dobbs: So the...
[11:15] Bob Dobbs: McLuhan only did the bird point of view when he used the book.
[11:19] Bob Dobbs: The book provided the bird point of view,
[11:22] Bob Dobbs: but other media did not provide the bird point of view.
[11:26] Bob Dobbs: And then the other thing,
[11:31] Bob Dobbs: talking about birds'
[11:33] Bob Dobbs: views,
[11:38] Bob Dobbs: you brought up hijacking.
[11:41] Bob Dobbs: Oh,
[11:41] Bob Dobbs: yeah,
[11:41] Bob Dobbs: the thing about the airplane.
[11:44] Bob Dobbs: When the guy,
[11:45] Bob Dobbs: it's in the movie,
[11:46] Bob Dobbs: The Right Stuff,
[11:47] Bob Dobbs: I think,
[11:48] Bob Dobbs: that was based on the book by Tom Wolfe,
[11:51] Bob Dobbs: McLuhan friend,
[11:53] Bob Dobbs: the pilots were trying to break the sound barrier,
[11:58] Bob Dobbs: or light barrier,
[11:59] Bob Dobbs: whatever it was.
[12:00] Bob Dobbs: What would it be,
[12:01] Bob Dobbs: the sound barrier?
[12:03] Cameron McEwen: Yeah,
[12:03] Cameron McEwen: the light barrier is pretty hard to break.
[12:05] Bob Dobbs: Yeah,
[12:06] Bob Dobbs: okay,
[12:06] Bob Dobbs: so they're trying to break the sound barrier,
[12:08] Bob Dobbs: and they kept crashing.
[12:10] Bob Dobbs: Finally,
[12:10] Bob Dobbs: somebody pushed the...
[12:14] Bob Dobbs: whatever it was on the handle,
[12:16] Bob Dobbs: whatever they called that,
[12:17] Bob Dobbs: the jockey stick,
[12:18] Bob Dobbs: I guess,
[12:19] Bob Dobbs: pushed the jockey stick backwards,
[12:22] Bob Dobbs: counterintuitive,
[12:24] Bob Dobbs: and it worked.
[12:25] Bob Dobbs: It somehow got through the sound barrier without crashing.
[12:31] Bob Dobbs: Do you know about that?
[12:32] Bob Dobbs: Do you remember McLuhan writing about that?
[12:34] Cameron McEwen: Oh,
[12:34] Cameron McEwen: I know he wrote about it.
[12:36] Cameron McEwen: I think the guy that did it was Chuck Yeager.
[12:39] Bob Dobbs: Yeah.
[12:40] Cameron McEwen: But...
[12:41] Cameron McEwen: I don't remember the counterintuitive use of the jockey stick,
[12:45] Cameron McEwen: no.
[12:45] Cameron McEwen: Yeah.
[12:46] Cameron McEwen: That sounds,
[12:49] Cameron McEwen: McLuhan would like that a lot,
[12:51] Cameron McEwen: taking a kind of reverse view of things.
[12:58] Bob Dobbs: So in television,
[12:59] Bob Dobbs: everything is upside down compared to previous media.
[13:03] Bob Dobbs: You're involved,
[13:05] Bob Dobbs: you're the screen and all that,
[13:07] Bob Dobbs: the viewer's the screen.
[13:08] Bob Dobbs: So this weird flip.
[13:10] Bob Dobbs: that was happening with television,
[13:13] Bob Dobbs: it broke into a new zone.
[13:15] Bob Dobbs: It broke the tactile barrier,
[13:16] Bob Dobbs: you could say,
[13:18] Bob Dobbs: and that was similar to the airplane doing this reverse tetrad on itself to accomplish going faster and breaking the sound barrier.
[13:28] Cameron McEwen: That's very much related to the whole question of the vertical in your chart because in order to...
[13:39] Cameron McEwen: to have a I don't want to use the word grasp,
[13:47] Cameron McEwen: I don't want to use the word view.
[13:50] Cameron McEwen: In order to have an understanding,
[13:52] Cameron McEwen: I guess that's not a bad word.
[13:53] Cameron McEwen: In order to have an understanding of the vertical dimension of the all at once dimension of the now dimension.
[14:01] Cameron McEwen: There has to be a kind of flight that it has that flight has
[14:09] Cameron McEwen: to be one that remains anchored in what is seen.
[14:15] Cameron McEwen: And so the big difficulty of describing the vertical dimension is that the understanding is,
[14:25] Cameron McEwen: on the one hand,
[14:28] Cameron McEwen: it's at a distance from what is understood,
[14:31] Cameron McEwen: namely the possibilities of human perception.
[14:36] Cameron McEwen: But on the other hand,
[14:37] Cameron McEwen: it itself is
[14:38] Cameron McEwen: a possibility.
[14:39] Cameron McEwen: It's a manifestation of a human possibility.
[14:46] Cameron McEwen: And so describing...
[14:49] Cameron McEwen: this distance and identity has been a huge problem in the history of philosophy.
[14:59] Cameron McEwen: It's been known as a problem for at least two and a half millennia,
[15:07] Cameron McEwen: if not more.
[15:09] Cameron McEwen: And it would be interesting to know if you were thinking at all about this sort of stuff in terms of the chart.
[15:17] Cameron McEwen: I mean,
[15:17] Cameron McEwen: it's the...
[15:19] Cameron McEwen: fifth point of view,
[15:20] Cameron McEwen: which is your point of view.
[15:23] Cameron McEwen: Obviously,
[15:24] Cameron McEwen: on the one hand,
[15:25] Cameron McEwen: it is a point of view,
[15:26] Cameron McEwen: and on the other hand,
[15:28] Cameron McEwen: it takes a distance.
[15:31] Cameron McEwen: It's the fifth,
[15:32] Cameron McEwen: not the first,
[15:33] Cameron McEwen: the second,
[15:34] Cameron McEwen: the third,
[15:34] Cameron McEwen: or the fourth.
[15:37] Cameron McEwen: It's something different,
[15:39] Cameron McEwen: but somehow part of the same array.
[15:44] Bob Dobbs: Yeah,
[15:44] Bob Dobbs: so some of the ratios I The...
[15:48] Bob Dobbs: I was thinking of emphasizing the people,
[15:52] Bob Dobbs: McLuhan,
[15:53] Bob Dobbs: LaRouche,
[15:54] Bob Dobbs: Kroker,
[15:55] Bob Dobbs: and Thompson.
[15:56] Bob Dobbs: You had two Americans,
[15:59] Bob Dobbs: LaRouche and Thompson.
[16:01] Bob Dobbs: You had two Canadians,
[16:02] Bob Dobbs: McLuhan and Kroker.
[16:10] Bob Dobbs: LaRouche and Thompson,
[16:11] Bob Dobbs: the Americans,
[16:12] Bob Dobbs: are Platonists.
[16:14] Bob Dobbs: McLuhan an Aristotelian.
[16:17] Bob Dobbs: Kroker wrote about Thomas Aquinas and Aristotelianism,
[16:21] Bob Dobbs: so he's probably neither,
[16:24] Bob Dobbs: but he's closer to Aristotle than Plato in his work.
[16:28] Bob Dobbs: So the two Canadians were Maritain,
[16:32] Bob Dobbs: and the two
[16:34] Bob Dobbs: Americans were Platonists.
[16:36] Bob Dobbs: Then you look at the media of each quadrant.
[16:41] Bob Dobbs: So
[16:41] Bob Dobbs: LaRouche is newspaper,
[16:43] Bob Dobbs: McLuhan is electric media,
[16:44] Bob Dobbs: this is on the chart.
[16:46] Bob Dobbs: Thompson is printed book and Kroker is movie.
[16:50] Bob Dobbs: So newspaper,
[16:52] Bob Dobbs: LaRouche,
[16:53] Bob Dobbs: American,
[16:53] Bob Dobbs: Platonist.
[16:55] Bob Dobbs: Thompson,
[16:56] Bob Dobbs: printed book,
[16:59] Bob Dobbs: and Platonist.
[17:00] Bob Dobbs: So the Americans are Plato,
[17:02] Bob Dobbs: which might resonate with the description of Americans as Kantian.
[17:07] Bob Dobbs: McLuhan in the 40s said all Americans are Kantian.
[17:11] Bob Dobbs: And he was a guy who went into transcendence and inner space.
[17:15] Bob Dobbs: something mystical or metaphysical as an anti-environment to the increasing materialism,
[17:24] Bob Dobbs: I guess,
[17:24] Bob Dobbs: of knowledge around him.
[17:28] Bob Dobbs: So the Americans are newspaper and book,
[17:33] Bob Dobbs: and McLuhan is electric media and movie,
[17:36] Bob Dobbs: which are electric.
[17:38] Bob Dobbs: So those are another bunch of ratios.
[17:44] Cameron McEwen: We need to be,
[17:46] Cameron McEwen: if anybody happens to listen to this,
[17:48] Cameron McEwen: we need to remark that these categories,
[17:53] Cameron McEwen: Platonist,
[17:54] Cameron McEwen: Aristotelian,
[17:57] Cameron McEwen: Kantian,
[17:59] Cameron McEwen: these are very rough,
[18:03] Cameron McEwen: fairly unconsidered categories,
[18:06] Cameron McEwen: right?
[18:07] Cameron McEwen: So they can be used to indicate.
[18:14] Cameron McEwen: sort of rough differences,
[18:16] Cameron McEwen: but once they're probed at all,
[18:21] Cameron McEwen: they're the sort of categories that must be left aside in the search for better ones.
[18:29] Bob Dobbs: Yeah,
[18:30] Bob Dobbs: they're products of the Gutenberg Galaxy.
[18:35] Bob Dobbs: Maybe the alphabet before that,
[18:37] Bob Dobbs: but they're products of visual space,
[18:38] Bob Dobbs: these categories.
[18:40] Bob Dobbs: And so McLuhan only made categories Peace.
[18:43] Bob Dobbs: as ad hoc temporary probes.
[18:46] Bob Dobbs: Yeah,
[18:47] Cameron McEwen: exactly.
[18:48] Bob Dobbs: Yeah.
[18:49] Bob Dobbs: And,
[18:49] Bob Dobbs: you know,
[18:49] Bob Dobbs: Eric said about a year after Understanding Media came out,
[18:53] Bob Dobbs: Marshall said,
[18:54] Bob Dobbs: you know,
[18:54] Bob Dobbs: this hot,
[18:55] Bob Dobbs: cool thing ain't working.
[18:57] Bob Dobbs: We're ditching it.
[18:59] Bob Dobbs: Now,
[19:00] Bob Dobbs: for the public,
[19:01] Bob Dobbs: that's one of the metaphors that attracted people's attention,
[19:05] Bob Dobbs: this hot,
[19:05] Bob Dobbs: cool thing.
[19:06] Bob Dobbs: And they're still debating it,
[19:08] Bob Dobbs: what it means,
[19:09] Bob Dobbs: what was the difference.
[19:11] Bob Dobbs: But McLuhan and Eric.
[19:12] Bob Dobbs: It dropped it,
[19:14] Bob Dobbs: but not if someone brought it up.
[19:16] Bob Dobbs: But
[19:17] Bob Dobbs: Eric did report this,
[19:18] Bob Dobbs: that it wasn't useful.
[19:20] Bob Dobbs: He didn't like it.
[19:21] Bob Dobbs: He found it too mixed up or complicated.
[19:25] Bob Dobbs: So maybe that's when he moved to cliché to archetype with Wilford Watson.
[19:29] Cameron McEwen: Well,
[19:30] Cameron McEwen: I think the year 1964 is significant because just after
[19:40] Cameron McEwen: Understanding Media was
[19:42] Cameron McEwen: published is when he read
[19:44] Cameron McEwen: Kohler Gestalt Psychology.
[19:47] Bob Dobbs: Figure and ground.
[19:48] Cameron McEwen: So,
[19:49] Cameron McEwen: yeah,
[19:49] Cameron McEwen: so he always maintained in the last 15 years of his life,
[19:54] Cameron McEwen: he always maintained that figure and ground was the sort of the main conceptual tool he was working with.
[20:03] Bob Dobbs: Yeah.
[20:04] Cameron McEwen: Cliche and archetype,
[20:07] Cameron McEwen: another opposition that he considered very important,
[20:13] Cameron McEwen: just like eye and ear.
[20:17] Cameron McEwen: McLuhan his whole life long was tended to work with rough oppositions that he didn't want to take as antagonistic or as only antagonistic.
[20:31] Cameron McEwen: He wanted to see their interplay as well.
[20:34] Cameron McEwen: And so how to do that was one of the big questions of his entire career.
[20:43] Bob Dobbs: So what was,
[20:44] Bob Dobbs: and then,
[20:44] Bob Dobbs: you know,
[20:45] Bob Dobbs: he had Daniel Capon designing the computer patterning of sensory thresholds,
[20:52] Bob Dobbs: his goal.
[20:52] Bob Dobbs: Right,
[20:53] Cameron McEwen: right.
[20:53] Bob Dobbs: What would he use as categories in that?
[20:55] Bob Dobbs: Is there anything written on that?
[20:58] Cameron McEwen: That was,
[20:58] Cameron McEwen: he came to realize that that was all cul-de-sac.
[21:03] Cameron McEwen: That wasn't going to get anywhere because the problem with that is that either
[21:11] Cameron McEwen: The senses could be taken literally,
[21:17] Cameron McEwen: or if they were taken not literally,
[21:21] Cameron McEwen: then it was very hard to understand how you would ever get experiments going.
[21:28] Cameron McEwen: So,
[21:28] Cameron McEwen: for example,
[21:30] Cameron McEwen: as soon as you say that
[21:32] Cameron McEwen: TV is ear,
[21:34] Cameron McEwen: not eye,
[21:36] Cameron McEwen: or that symphonic music is eye,
[21:39] Cameron McEwen: not ear,
[21:44] Cameron McEwen: you're beginning to use senses in a non-literal sense,
[21:49] Cameron McEwen: and it becomes very hard to try to deal with them in a mechanistic or experimental way.
[21:58] Cameron McEwen: And
[21:59] Cameron McEwen: I think he saw that fairly early on,
[22:03] Cameron McEwen: maybe between 1958 and 1965,
[22:08] Cameron McEwen: something like that.
[22:11] Cameron McEwen: He was probably bending to everybody's demand for,
[22:15] Cameron McEwen: you know,
[22:17] Cameron McEwen: concrete results and concrete demonstration.
[22:21] Cameron McEwen: And so he was kind of tending in that direction.
[22:24] Cameron McEwen: And I think he finally saw the hell with that.
[22:27] Cameron McEwen: That doesn't make any sense.
[22:29] Bob Dobbs: But he did talk about it.
[22:31] Bob Dobbs: He had to use it to pretend he had some practical application of it.
[22:35] Cameron McEwen: Correct.
[22:36] Bob Dobbs: Correct.
[22:37] Cameron McEwen: Because there were...
[22:40] Cameron McEwen: Well,
[22:40] Cameron McEwen: first off,
[22:41] Cameron McEwen: he had some financing through the CBC and I don't know where else.
[22:47] Cameron McEwen: But people were interested in that question.
[22:50] Cameron McEwen: Yeah.
[22:50] Cameron McEwen: And if they were interested enough to finance it,
[22:54] Cameron McEwen: then he was interested in it,
[22:55] Cameron McEwen: right?
[22:55] Cameron McEwen: Yeah.
[22:57] Cameron McEwen: But not because he thought the question itself was interesting.
[23:00] Cameron McEwen: The financing was interesting.
[23:02] Bob Dobbs: Yeah.
[23:03] Bob Dobbs: And so,
[23:04] Bob Dobbs: yeah,
[23:04] Bob Dobbs: he's talking about it in the Playboy interview.
[23:07] Bob Dobbs: And I always liked his...
[23:08] Bob Dobbs: point.
[23:08] Bob Dobbs: He said,
[23:09] Bob Dobbs: just as we manage economies in a,
[23:13] Bob Dobbs: well,
[23:14] Bob Dobbs: totalitarian way,
[23:16] Bob Dobbs: individual choice was not a,
[23:18] Bob Dobbs: the people didn't vote on how the managers of Keynesian economics managed
[23:24] Bob Dobbs: Wall Street or whatever.
[23:27] Bob Dobbs: He thought,
[23:28] Bob Dobbs: well,
[23:28] Bob Dobbs: let's make it broader.
[23:31] Bob Dobbs: As we manage the economies in visual space and credit I guess
[23:39] Bob Dobbs: They are subject to media dynamics that change the rate of inflation or stagflation,
[23:47] Bob Dobbs: all those things that happen.
[23:49] Bob Dobbs: So he said,
[23:50] Bob Dobbs: why can't we consider the management of media anti-environment as not an infringement of our rights?
[23:58] Bob Dobbs: They're important.
[23:59] Bob Dobbs: So maybe that was a...
[24:02] Bob Dobbs: What?
[24:03] Cameron McEwen: He didn't mean by that that they should be imposed on people.
[24:09] Cameron McEwen: in a sort of totalitarian way,
[24:13] Cameron McEwen: what he meant was that these are things which are dominant in human society and in human individual psychology,
[24:27] Cameron McEwen: and they must be recognized as dominance and researched as dominance,
[24:34] Cameron McEwen: right?
[24:35] Cameron McEwen: Yeah.
[24:37] Cameron McEwen: from his point of view,
[24:38] Cameron McEwen: research could and should involve everybody in the society.
[24:44] Cameron McEwen: We should be probing our ignorance.
[24:46] Cameron McEwen: We should be looking for that one man in a million that might know the answer to some key problem that nobody else does.
[24:56] Cameron McEwen: So all of those things are very far from totalitarian imposition.
[25:02] Cameron McEwen: The totalitarian imposition part just comes up when um
[25:07] Cameron McEwen: when you consider that these things are already imposed but totally unrecognized.
[25:14] Bob Dobbs: Right.
[25:14] Bob Dobbs: Whenever I brought it up with maybe a professor or something,
[25:18] Bob Dobbs: they'd go,
[25:18] Bob Dobbs: that's rather fascist.
[25:20] Bob Dobbs: They thought you should be able to watch TV whenever you wanted to.
[25:23] Bob Dobbs: Correct.
[25:25] Bob Dobbs: McLuhan reasonableness about it all was that television wouldn't be wiped out.
[25:31] Bob Dobbs: It would be only put on hiatus for six months.
[25:34] Bob Dobbs: And then you'd bring it back in.
[25:36] Bob Dobbs: And then you'd see what the effects were.
[25:38] Bob Dobbs: And now you'd be ready to look at them.
[25:40] Bob Dobbs: And then you'd do that for six months.
[25:41] Bob Dobbs: And then you'd maybe turn off radio or newspapers.
[25:45] Bob Dobbs: It would be flexible.
[25:47] Bob Dobbs: You'd be turning on and off the anti-environment.
[25:50] Bob Dobbs: And that's...
[25:53] Bob Dobbs: Complementary to his image that the average person went from radio to newspaper to book to movie to different foods throughout the day.
[26:03] Bob Dobbs: He rotated through media anti-environment.
[26:07] Cameron McEwen: But you and I have a different take on what McLuhan was doing when he was talking about six months of this and six months of that and stuff.
[26:17] Cameron McEwen: I think he was just talking in an attempt for people to begin.
[26:23] Cameron McEwen: sort of kindergarten level to understand that there was something here that needed to be investigated and needed to be managed.
[26:34] Cameron McEwen: I don't think he was talking as if we knew so much about this that we could just go into
[26:42] Cameron McEwen: Venezuela and begin manipulating the media dials or something.
[26:48] Bob Dobbs: Yeah,
[26:49] Bob Dobbs: but he did say it,
[26:50] Bob Dobbs: so that could have been satirical.
[26:52] Bob Dobbs: He was commenting how the economy was done that way.
[26:57] Bob Dobbs: Yeah,
[26:57] Cameron McEwen: but he didn't believe that the economy should be just imposed on people either.
[27:05] Cameron McEwen: His inflation articles in the New York Times in the
[27:09] Cameron McEwen: 70s are about the investigation of inflation and looking at it with new eyes and trying to understand.
[27:21] Cameron McEwen: inflation in a bigger picture.
[27:25] Bob Dobbs: Yeah,
[27:26] Bob Dobbs: and moving it out of Anthropomorphic Physical projection,
[27:30] Bob Dobbs: you know,
[27:31] Bob Dobbs: the Jews did this or the globalists are doing this,
[27:35] Bob Dobbs: you know,
[27:36] Bob Dobbs: get out of the tribal conflicts that were naturally produced and move towards an understanding that might cool people down a bit about...
[27:49] Cameron McEwen: who's who's at wrong and who's exploiting who yeah yeah yeah personally i believe that McLuhan in the
[27:59] Cameron McEwen: 70s talking about inflation is um this is the result of maybe
[28:08] Cameron McEwen: 30 years or more of uh kind of percolating in background mode uh what carl jung uh said
[28:19] Cameron McEwen: about inflation in terms of personal psychology.
[28:25] Cameron McEwen: Back when McLuhan was reading Jung in the late
[28:28] Cameron McEwen: 30s and early
[28:30] Cameron McEwen: 40s, for Jung,
[28:35] Cameron McEwen: inflation is what happens when people identify with archetypes,
[28:42] Cameron McEwen: but they don't identify consciously.
[28:46] Cameron McEwen: They are taken over.
[28:48] Cameron McEwen: by these powers and become inflated.
[28:53] Cameron McEwen: And
[28:54] Cameron McEwen: I think there were various aspects of Jung that
[28:58] Cameron McEwen: McLuhan thought were potentially interesting,
[29:03] Cameron McEwen: but not necessarily in the way that Jung had developed them.
[29:07] Cameron McEwen: And so he kept thinking about these things.
[29:10] Cameron McEwen: And
[29:11] Cameron McEwen: I think his
[29:14] Cameron McEwen: 70s take on inflation and always
[29:17] Cameron McEwen: Something to what he'd read all these decades before in the Jung,
[29:24] Cameron McEwen: where the inflation is a kind of compensation for weaknesses.
[29:32] Cameron McEwen: And in McLuhan inflation articles,
[29:36] Cameron McEwen: he brings out that compensation aspect,
[29:41] Cameron McEwen: the fact that inflation seems like it's something big.
[29:48] Cameron McEwen: but it's actually something small,
[29:51] Cameron McEwen: and it actually is compensating for weaknesses.
[29:57] Cameron McEwen: And that's kind of an interesting application of individual psychology to the social matrix.
[30:10] Bob Dobbs: Yes.
[30:11] Bob Dobbs: So
[30:12] Bob Dobbs: I always thought it was beautiful the way he said,
[30:15] Bob Dobbs: on page 31 in Counterblast,
[30:17] Bob Dobbs: the archetypes of the social unconscious are the anti-environment.
[30:21] Bob Dobbs: So the effect of the archetype...
[30:25] Bob Dobbs: In humans,
[30:26] Bob Dobbs: as an unconscious force anti-environment,
[30:29] Bob Dobbs: he concretized.
[30:31] Bob Dobbs: It wasn't this nebulous stuff about the archetypal male and the archetypal female,
[30:37] Bob Dobbs: though they were there,
[30:38] Bob Dobbs: but that was the older media.
[30:40] Bob Dobbs: He updated Jung to deal with the archetypes of new possessing forces or unconscious processes.
[30:48] Bob Dobbs: I think he really did complete psychology with that.
[30:52] Cameron McEwen: No,
[30:53] Cameron McEwen: I agree with you.
[30:54] Cameron McEwen: That's exactly what he did.
[30:57] Cameron McEwen: He took something that
[31:00] Cameron McEwen: Jung had thought about in one context,
[31:03] Cameron McEwen: and
[31:04] Cameron McEwen: McLuhan continued to think about it,
[31:06] Cameron McEwen: percolating over the years,
[31:08] Cameron McEwen: and eventually it came out in terms anti-environment and in terms of trying to think about the collective in a new way.
[31:22] Cameron McEwen: We talked about this last time.
[31:24] Cameron McEwen: how for thousands of years people tended to think of societies and mobs and collectivities more or less as individuals.
[31:36] Bob Dobbs: Yeah.
[31:37] Cameron McEwen: And one of the interesting aspects of McLuhan is that he tried to get away from that.
[31:46] Cameron McEwen: Joyce was definitely a big influence in that regard.
[31:50] Bob Dobbs: You know the quote that,
[31:53] Bob Dobbs: you know...
[31:54] Bob Dobbs: encapsulates that thought process?
[31:57] Bob Dobbs: What comes to mind in Finnegans Wake?
[32:05] Cameron McEwen: Enlighten us.
[32:06] Bob Dobbs: Yeah,
[32:06] Bob Dobbs: page 112 I think it is.
[32:08] Bob Dobbs: Lead kindly foul.
[32:11] Bob Dobbs: And foul included F-O-U-L-E,
[32:14] Bob Dobbs: French for crowd.
[32:18] Cameron McEwen: Yeah,
[32:19] Cameron McEwen: interesting.
[32:19] Bob Dobbs: Yeah,
[32:19] Bob Dobbs: and he has that quote in War and Peace,
[32:21] Bob Dobbs: I think and maybe in another place.
[32:23] Bob Dobbs: It was one of his favorite quotes,
[32:25] Bob Dobbs: but,
[32:25] Bob Dobbs: you know,
[32:25] Bob Dobbs: lead kindly crowd.
[32:30] Cameron McEwen: But also,
[32:31] Cameron McEwen: I mean,
[32:32] Cameron McEwen: the fowl is the hen,
[32:37] Cameron McEwen: namely the one of Finnegans Wake.
[32:41] Cameron McEwen: But there's also a very interesting thread in McLuhan work talking about the need for the Thank you.
[32:53] Cameron McEwen: Disharmony of the personality,
[32:56] Cameron McEwen: right?
[32:57] Cameron McEwen: He keeps talking about how in
[33:00] Cameron McEwen: Greek tragedy,
[33:03] Cameron McEwen: if you don't have the,
[33:07] Cameron McEwen: what is it,
[33:08] Cameron McEwen: the sin,
[33:09] Cameron McEwen: the fault of the protagonist,
[33:13] Cameron McEwen: then you can't have the unfolding of the tragedy.
[33:17] Cameron McEwen: Oh,
[33:18] Cameron McEwen: you mean
[33:19] Bob Dobbs: Hamartia?
[33:21] Cameron McEwen: Yeah, exactly.
[33:22] Bob Dobbs: Yeah.
[33:24] Cameron McEwen: Without the Hamartia,
[33:25] Cameron McEwen: then there can be no widening of the consciousness.
[33:29] Bob Dobbs: Right.
[33:29] Cameron McEwen: So the fowl also relates to that and through that to Hamlet.
[33:37] Bob Dobbs: How's that in Hamlet?
[33:39] Cameron McEwen: Well,
[33:40] Cameron McEwen: the...
[33:42] Bob Dobbs: Is he the one who says that?
[33:46] Cameron McEwen: About...
[33:47] Bob Dobbs: Lead kindly something?
[33:49] Bob Dobbs: Does Hamlet say that?
[33:50] Cameron McEwen: Oh,
[33:51] Cameron McEwen: that's an interesting question.
[33:52] Cameron McEwen: I don't know the answer to that.
[33:55] Cameron McEwen: I was just thinking that
[33:59] Cameron McEwen: I believe when they're walking on the battlements before the ghost comes,
[34:07] Cameron McEwen: they're talking about the foul air.
[34:10] Cameron McEwen: And
[34:10] Cameron McEwen: I think
[34:12] Cameron McEwen: Hamlet at one point talks about the foul specter,
[34:17] Cameron McEwen: the foul...
[34:18] Cameron McEwen: foul operation or something like that.
[34:20] Cameron McEwen: I'd have to look it up.
[34:22] Cameron McEwen: But
[34:23] Cameron McEwen: I think all of these things kind of hang together,
[34:28] Cameron McEwen: and especially they do for
[34:32] Cameron McEwen: Joyce in
[34:34] Cameron McEwen: Finnegans Wake.
[34:36] Cameron McEwen: So the demand is always to try to clarify these things.
[34:47] Cameron McEwen: through further research,
[34:50] Cameron McEwen: including research into how they hang together.
[34:53] Bob Dobbs: Yeah.
[34:54] Bob Dobbs: The quotes in War and Peace in the Global Village,
[34:57] Bob Dobbs: littered through the book from Finney's Wake,
[34:59] Bob Dobbs: are his favorite quotes.
[35:02] Bob Dobbs: Right.
[35:03] Bob Dobbs: It's an inventory of the quotes that can support his interpretation,
[35:08] Bob Dobbs: translation of Finney's Wake.
[35:11] Bob Dobbs: So they're carefully selected.
[35:15] Bob Dobbs: Yeah.
[35:15] Bob Dobbs: If you...
[35:16] Bob Dobbs: If you memorize those,
[35:18] Bob Dobbs: you know...
[35:20] Bob Dobbs: 30 quotes or whatever is in the book and look up the areas where they are,
[35:25] Bob Dobbs: get to know those areas,
[35:26] Bob Dobbs: you can master Finnegans Wake in a pretty interesting way that would surprise other people who wouldn't know to look at it through that sensory metaphor that McLuhan uses.
[35:39] Bob Dobbs: So
[35:41] Bob Dobbs: I've always recommended to read those Finnegans Wake quotes first if you're just starting to explore the book.
[35:49] Bob Dobbs: Look at the ones that McLuhan highlighted.
[35:51] Bob Dobbs: Right,
[35:54] Cameron McEwen: that's an interesting thought for sure.
[35:58] Cameron McEwen: Have you ever looked up how many of those quotes are misquotes?
[36:02] Bob Dobbs: No.
[36:05] Cameron McEwen: I haven't either,
[36:06] Cameron McEwen: but I'll bet there's a minority of them are probably wrong.
[36:13] Bob Dobbs: Yeah,
[36:13] Bob Dobbs: he was cavalier about that.
[36:15] Bob Dobbs: Absolutely.
[36:17] Bob Dobbs: He'd get things wrong.
[36:18] Bob Dobbs: Say them in the opposite way.
[36:20] Bob Dobbs: And he wouldn't even give attribution sometimes.
[36:23] Cameron McEwen: Correct.
[36:24] Cameron McEwen: Correct.
[36:24] Cameron McEwen: Lots of times.
[36:25] Cameron McEwen: Lots of times.
[36:26] Bob Dobbs: But
[36:27] Bob Dobbs: I think that was intentional.
[36:29] Bob Dobbs: In oral society,
[36:30] Bob Dobbs: you didn't get time to deal with the details.
[36:33] Bob Dobbs: You know,
[36:33] Bob Dobbs: just get the wisdom out there.
[36:36] Cameron McEwen: Maybe.
[36:37] Cameron McEwen: But,
[36:38] Cameron McEwen: you know,
[36:38] Cameron McEwen: Bob,
[36:38] Cameron McEwen: all of this relates to how we started off,
[36:41] Cameron McEwen: talking about the vertical dimension in your chart and then getting into flight.
[36:47] Cameron McEwen: and having an aerial view of the territory,
[36:54] Cameron McEwen: the territory of human possibilities and stuff.
[36:58] Cameron McEwen: So what we're talking about here with
[37:04] Cameron McEwen: Finnegans Wake,
[37:06] Cameron McEwen: with what might be called the cloud of implication that characterizes everything in Finnegans Wake,
[37:16] Cameron McEwen: That relates closely to the whole question of the,
[37:20] Cameron McEwen: I hate to say the word perspective,
[37:24] Cameron McEwen: but the perspective that you take in the Tiny Note chart,
[37:31] Cameron McEwen: the hovering,
[37:32] Cameron McEwen: if you will,
[37:34] Cameron McEwen: relates to these questions of the cloud of implication,
[37:42] Cameron McEwen: the mirror back and forth of
[37:44] Cameron McEwen: Um,
[37:45] Cameron McEwen: understanding the range of understandings.
[37:52] Bob Dobbs: And the bias.
[37:54] Bob Dobbs: It was consciously said,
[37:56] Bob Dobbs: okay,
[37:56] Bob Dobbs: this is on a piece of paper.
[37:58] Bob Dobbs: I would hand out the piece of paper.
[37:59] Bob Dobbs: I did it at a conference in
[38:02] Bob Dobbs: Banff in
[38:03] Bob Dobbs: December
[38:04] Bob Dobbs: 97. This is the bias of a piece of paper,
[38:10] Bob Dobbs: for flattening complex,
[38:12] Bob Dobbs: multi-leveled,
[38:13] Bob Dobbs: Orphic Baroque spirals.
[38:15] Bob Dobbs: And it's similar to McLuhan saying,
[38:19] Bob Dobbs: what's the role of the book in the 50s?
[38:22] Bob Dobbs: What can be the purpose of a book in its new situation?
[38:25] Bob Dobbs: So in the beginning of the final chapter of Finnegans Wake,
[38:31] Bob Dobbs: which becomes the first chapter,
[38:33] Bob Dobbs: circles back,
[38:36] Bob Dobbs: he says it's about this chart.
[38:38] Bob Dobbs: This hand pulls forth a chart.
[38:41] Bob Dobbs: That was the inspiration for me.
[38:44] Bob Dobbs: It's like,
[38:45] Bob Dobbs: lo,
[38:46] Bob Dobbs: the hand and the chart are manifest.
[38:49] Bob Dobbs: Look it up.
[38:50] Bob Dobbs: It's at the beginning of the final chapter,
[38:52] Bob Dobbs: which is going to become the beginning of the book.
[38:56] Bob Dobbs: It's right there.
[38:57] Bob Dobbs: And so Joyce probably referred to his own charts he made,
[39:01] Bob Dobbs: ironically.
[39:04] Bob Dobbs: It was a new heraldry,
[39:05] Bob Dobbs: you know what I mean?
[39:07] Bob Dobbs: A new iconography from medieval perspectives.
[39:13] Bob Dobbs: presented with the bias of it consciously intended and explained.
[39:21] Cameron McEwen: Well,
[39:21] Cameron McEwen: I mean,
[39:23] Cameron McEwen: it couldn't be without bias because the topic was biases.
[39:29] Bob Dobbs: Yes.
[39:31] Bob Dobbs: Right?
[39:31] Cameron McEwen: It would be absurd.
[39:35] Bob Dobbs: Well,
[39:36] Bob Dobbs: it was like me saying,
[39:37] Bob Dobbs: you think my fallacy is wrong.
[39:39] Bob Dobbs: It was a fallacy to put this stuff on a chart.
[39:42] Cameron McEwen: Sure.
[39:43] Bob Dobbs: But you would explain that it was a fallacy.
[39:46] Bob Dobbs: It was a correct fallacy because it was the only way you could get a perspective.
[39:51] Bob Dobbs: You being a literate biased American or
[39:53] Bob Dobbs: Western person,
[39:56] Bob Dobbs: this is your only way to get a handle on what's happening.
[39:59] Bob Dobbs: And then you would move yourself.
[40:00] Bob Dobbs: You'd study the processes of each quadrant,
[40:03] Bob Dobbs: the sensory ratios,
[40:04] Bob Dobbs: and move yourself away from the chart.
[40:08] Cameron McEwen: Yeah,
[40:09] Cameron McEwen: yeah.
[40:12] Cameron McEwen: So maybe what we can do is move.
[40:18] Cameron McEwen: begin to move from there over to your book.
[40:21] Bob Dobbs: Yeah.
[40:24] Cameron McEwen: My take is that the chart is an interesting take,
[40:31] Cameron McEwen: but it's a very personal one.
[40:33] Cameron McEwen: And it didn't leave you with a way of sort of sharing a mode of investigation with others,
[40:47] Cameron McEwen: or if it
[40:48] Cameron McEwen: It maybe was a mode of investigation that you could share with others,
[40:52] Cameron McEwen: but that sharing never eventuated.
[40:56] Bob Dobbs: No,
[40:57] Bob Dobbs: well,
[40:57] Bob Dobbs: no,
[40:59] Bob Dobbs: it's used a lot on my radio show.
[41:02] Bob Dobbs: People say,
[41:02] Bob Dobbs: well,
[41:02] Bob Dobbs: okay,
[41:02] Bob Dobbs: I'm going into the Thompson Quadrant now.
[41:06] Bob Dobbs: People use it.
[41:09] Bob Dobbs: Ion really uses it.
[41:11] Bob Dobbs: He plays with it.
[41:13] Bob Dobbs: Ion said that McLuhan ransacked Innis.
[41:18] Bob Dobbs: And
[41:20] Bob Dobbs: Ion ransacks my chart.
[41:22] Bob Dobbs: He's really good at using it and explaining it or talking about it.
[41:26] Bob Dobbs: So it is used,
[41:30] Bob Dobbs: you know,
[41:30] Bob Dobbs: and people,
[41:31] Bob Dobbs: once they get familiar with it,
[41:33] Bob Dobbs: they like using it.
[41:35] Bob Dobbs: So is that what you mean?
[41:37] Bob Dobbs: So you'd have to say,
[41:38] Bob Dobbs: no,
[41:38] Bob Dobbs: I wasn't aware that it was.
[41:40] Bob Dobbs: Or are you saying it's too personal on another level that can't be used?
[41:44] Bob Dobbs: Well,
[41:46] Cameron McEwen: I think I was saying both.
[41:48] Cameron McEwen: I certainly wasn't aware that it is used by people.
[41:52] Cameron McEwen: There's a difference in how we use the word used,
[41:59] Cameron McEwen: right?
[42:00] Cameron McEwen: What McLuhan was trying to get at was something that could be learned in school and applied out of school,
[42:10] Cameron McEwen: and then between the Thomas Kuhn application and the Innis learning,
[42:14] Cameron McEwen: there would be a kind of back and forth.
[42:17] Cameron McEwen: And in that sense,
[42:18] Cameron McEwen: it would be like chemistry.
[42:20] Bob Dobbs: Yeah.
[42:21] Cameron McEwen: So I don't see that your chart was able to find that kind of use.
[42:32] Cameron McEwen: Okay.
[42:33] Bob Dobbs: Let me say this.
[42:34] Bob Dobbs: So now later when I developed the five bodies,
[42:37] Bob Dobbs: which I don't,
[42:39] Bob Dobbs: I did get the five bodies pretty quickly after the chart a couple years later.
[42:44] Bob Dobbs: But
[42:45] Bob Dobbs: I don't know if I told you the,
[42:47] Bob Dobbs: The chemical body is the LaRouche quadrant.
[42:49] Bob Dobbs: The TV body is the McLuhan quadrant.
[42:51] Bob Dobbs: The astral body is the Thompson quadrant.
[42:54] Bob Dobbs: Kroker is the chip body.
[42:56] Bob Dobbs: And my quadrant is the mystery body,
[42:59] Bob Dobbs: which turned out to be ion.
[43:01] Bob Dobbs: Ion came forth to reveal the interior landscape.
[43:04] Bob Dobbs: So people mix the bodies.
[43:06] Bob Dobbs: So you brought up,
[43:07] Bob Dobbs: before we started recording,
[43:08] Bob Dobbs: the flood here in Maui.
[43:10] Bob Dobbs: Well,
[43:11] Bob Dobbs: somebody posted some news video of it on my Facebook page.
[43:16] Bob Dobbs: And they said,
[43:18] Bob Dobbs: is this Maui in the Thompson quadrant?
[43:24] Bob Dobbs: Because Thompson is the eco-fascism or the ecology thing that comes in between 67 and 72.
[43:34] Bob Dobbs: The Limits to Growth book,
[43:35] Bob Dobbs: he did a lot with that.
[43:36] Bob Dobbs: And the Club of Ruin or the Club of Rome.
[43:40] Bob Dobbs: McLuhan called it the Club of Ruin.
[43:42] Bob Dobbs: But
[43:43] Bob Dobbs: Thompson is a guy concerned.
[43:45] Bob Dobbs: considering dropping out and going back to the land,
[43:48] Bob Dobbs: that part of the counterculture.
[43:52] Bob Dobbs: And he did become,
[43:55] Bob Dobbs: I made him aware of that.
[43:56] Bob Dobbs: Well,
[43:56] Bob Dobbs: you're responding to the Sputnik.
[43:59] Bob Dobbs: You've turned the planet into art form.
[44:02] Bob Dobbs: So that was fun telling him that.
[44:04] Bob Dobbs: And,
[44:05] Bob Dobbs: you know,
[44:05] Bob Dobbs: when,
[44:05] Bob Dobbs: have you ever seen McLuhan Wake?
[44:07] Bob Dobbs: Yeah,
[44:07] Bob Dobbs: I think you've told me.
[44:08] Bob Dobbs: You've seen McLuhan Wake,
[44:10] Bob Dobbs: the
[44:11] Bob Dobbs: Hauntology. Yeah,
[44:12] Bob Dobbs: yeah.
[44:13] Bob Dobbs: film documentary on McLuhan.
[44:15] Bob Dobbs: Well,
[44:16] Bob Dobbs: I attended the New York screening,
[44:18] Bob Dobbs: and the narrator,
[44:21] Bob Dobbs: Laurie
[44:21] Bob Dobbs: Sanderson, is that her name?
[44:23] Bob Dobbs: You know,
[44:23] Bob Dobbs: the musician?
[44:24] Bob Dobbs: Laurie Sanderson.
[44:26] Bob Dobbs: She was on the panel,
[44:28] Bob Dobbs: and after we watched it,
[44:30] Bob Dobbs: she then,
[44:32] Bob Dobbs: first thing she said,
[44:32] Bob Dobbs: she says,
[44:33] Bob Dobbs: that's such a beautiful idea that this planet,
[44:36] Bob Dobbs: that the satellites turned the planet into an art form and brought in ecology.
[44:41] Bob Dobbs: Like,
[44:41] Bob Dobbs: she was really...
[44:42] Bob Dobbs: blown away by that idea.
[44:44] Bob Dobbs: Hadn't thought about it too much,
[44:45] Bob Dobbs: just noticed it while seeing the replay because she had read it in the soundtrack.
[44:52] Bob Dobbs: But so that whole ecological thing,
[44:59] Bob Dobbs: which a lot of the baby boomers were biased towards and liked it.
[45:03] Bob Dobbs: Remember McLuhan said the hippies wore the overalls and jeans and that and beards to get back to their grandfather land.
[45:12] Bob Dobbs: They were trying to become their grandfathers again.
[45:16] Bob Dobbs: And he used to say the hippies went barefoot because they were trying to touch the ground.
[45:22] Bob Dobbs: That would be the nostalgia for the chemical body ground.
[45:26] Bob Dobbs: So
[45:27] Bob Dobbs: Thompson is the focus on first nature and trying to preserve it.
[45:34] Bob Dobbs: And then Ion goes a lot into the Thompson Quadrant.
[45:37] Bob Dobbs: Basically,
[45:39] Bob Dobbs: he interprets the Thompson Quadrant as a fatalism,
[45:42] Bob Dobbs: that we're doomed and we're going into a dark age,
[45:47] Bob Dobbs: a new dark age,
[45:48] Bob Dobbs: which is what Thompson emphasized.
[45:51] Bob Dobbs: I just thought it was inevitable because it happened before,
[45:53] Bob Dobbs: after major technological breakthroughs.
[45:56] Bob Dobbs: So,
[45:58] Bob Dobbs: Ian goes on about how the Thompson Quadrant is too fatalistic.
[46:02] Bob Dobbs: And he has a lot to say about it.
[46:04] Bob Dobbs: And we're actually in the Thompson Quadrant right now.
[46:08] Bob Dobbs: And it's turned the world upside down.
[46:10] Bob Dobbs: But I won't go into all the details.
[46:12] Bob Dobbs: But it's an example of something,
[46:14] Bob Dobbs: and using my chart,
[46:16] Bob Dobbs: and talking about the five bodies.
[46:18] Bob Dobbs: And here's somebody on my...
[46:20] Bob Dobbs: You know,
[46:21] Bob Dobbs: somebody who knows nothing about me or my chart but is looking at my page sees what this flood.
[46:27] Bob Dobbs: Is this the Thompson Quadrant?
[46:30] Bob Dobbs: It's humorous.
[46:31] Bob Dobbs: You know,
[46:32] Bob Dobbs: they're going to say,
[46:32] Bob Dobbs: Bob,
[46:33] Bob Dobbs: who's Thompson and what's a quadrant?
[46:37] Bob Dobbs: Then
[46:38] Bob Dobbs: I got 20 minutes airtime explaining my chart one more time.
[46:42] Bob Dobbs: Sure.
[46:43] Bob Dobbs: So
[46:48] Cameron McEwen: I'd like to bring up the question.
[46:50] Cameron McEwen: of...
[46:51] Bob Dobbs: What about the how and what?
[46:53] Bob Dobbs: Let's go into that too.
[46:55] Bob Dobbs: I'm not sure what you meant,
[46:57] Bob Dobbs: but that was the second question.
[46:59] Bob Dobbs: What is the how and the what?
[47:01] Bob Dobbs: I don't know if it was the chart or what you were referring to.
[47:05] Cameron McEwen: Well,
[47:06] Cameron McEwen: I can't remember,
[47:07] Cameron McEwen: but it's closely related to the question of the vertical because,
[47:15] Cameron McEwen: as we have already said,
[47:18] Cameron McEwen: the vertical is
[47:20] Cameron McEwen: It's a take on something that includes itself,
[47:25] Cameron McEwen: right?
[47:26] Cameron McEwen: It's a take on a spectrum where its take is part of the spectrum.
[47:34] Cameron McEwen: And how to explicate that is difficult.
[47:36] Bob Dobbs: Is that the Munzo color sphere on page,
[47:41] Bob Dobbs: you know,
[47:41] Bob Dobbs: 106,
[47:42] Bob Dobbs: 107,
[47:43] Bob Dobbs: just right beside the page that goes into the golden section,
[47:46] Bob Dobbs: the dynamic symmetry of tensions among proportions?
[47:50] Bob Dobbs: You know that thing about the Munsell,
[47:52] Bob Dobbs: M-U-N-S-E-L-L?
[47:54] Bob Dobbs: Color sphere,
[47:54] Bob Dobbs: where the viewer is inside the sphere?
[47:57] Bob Dobbs: The color spectrum?
[47:59] Cameron McEwen: Yes.
[47:59] Bob Dobbs: That's what you mean?
[48:01] Cameron McEwen: Absolutely.
[48:02] Cameron McEwen: Absolutely.
[48:03] Cameron McEwen: And it's related to the how and the what,
[48:10] Cameron McEwen: because the how comes out of the what,
[48:14] Cameron McEwen: and because the what is plural,
[48:17] Cameron McEwen: being a whole
[48:19] Cameron McEwen: question of the how and the what is the question of the possibility of verticality,
[48:26] Cameron McEwen: you could say.
[48:27] Bob Dobbs: Yeah.
[48:30] Bob Dobbs: Do you remember in
[48:32] Bob Dobbs: Verbi-Voco-Visual Explorations number eight,
[48:37] Bob Dobbs: the picture of spheres vertical going into another sphere?
[48:44] Bob Dobbs: So the first sphere is cut off at the bottom because it's
[48:47] Bob Dobbs: start to merge with the second sphere below it.
[48:50] Bob Dobbs: And I think there's three vertically,
[48:52] Bob Dobbs: three nested spheres.
[48:54] Bob Dobbs: Do you remember that image?
[48:55] Cameron McEwen: Yes.
[48:57] Cameron McEwen: It's not three,
[48:59] Cameron McEwen: one on top of each other.
[49:00] Cameron McEwen: There's sort of two at the bottom and one at the top,
[49:03] Cameron McEwen: and the three of them are interlocked,
[49:06] Cameron McEwen: right?
[49:07] Bob Dobbs: Yes.
[49:08] Bob Dobbs: So what do you think that's about?
[49:15] Cameron McEwen: I think that's about
[49:17] Cameron McEwen: What we're talking about.
[49:19] Bob Dobbs: Right.
[49:23] Cameron McEwen: For example,
[49:24] Cameron McEwen: if we say that the four quadrants of the Tiny Note chart can be related in all kinds of relations
[49:43] Cameron McEwen: of two to two.
[49:46] Bob Dobbs: Yep.
[49:47] Cameron McEwen: right?
[49:50] Cameron McEwen: Then the question becomes,
[49:55] Cameron McEwen: how does the fifth take on these various relations of twos?
[50:06] Cameron McEwen: How does that work?
[50:07] Cameron McEwen: Well,
[50:08] Cameron McEwen: then we have,
[50:09] Cameron McEwen: instead of having five,
[50:11] Cameron McEwen: then we have three,
[50:13] Cameron McEwen: right?
[50:13] Cameron McEwen: Because
[50:15] Cameron McEwen: all of the different ramifications of the twos,
[50:18] Cameron McEwen: those are two different...
[50:20] Cameron McEwen: spheres you could say yeah and so then the fifth sphere is above it so that um one way of uh interpreting the three uh sphere chart is to say that that's a very high level take on
[50:35] Bob Dobbs: the five takes of your yeah the five quadrants yeah that's right very good and that's the Bucke borough spirals okay which is the term for my quadrant
[50:50] Cameron McEwen: And just enlarge on that a little.
[50:53] Bob Dobbs: Well,
[50:53] Bob Dobbs: you look,
[50:53] Bob Dobbs: LaRouche is the monadic,
[50:55] Bob Dobbs: so he's God.
[50:57] Bob Dobbs: Sex is McLuhan,
[50:58] Bob Dobbs: because he's the triad.
[51:04] Cameron McEwen: Why is sex a triad instead of a diad?
[51:09] Bob Dobbs: Because there's always another person in any sexual relationship.
[51:12] Bob Dobbs: There's always,
[51:14] Cameron McEwen: you know what I mean?
[51:16] Cameron McEwen: Yeah,
[51:18] Cameron McEwen: it's possible to say that.
[51:19] Cameron McEwen: Sure.
[51:20] Bob Dobbs: Yeah.
[51:21] Bob Dobbs: As an ideal or a completing of what your partner isn't perfect.
[51:27] Bob Dobbs: So you have a romantic thing,
[51:29] Bob Dobbs: another image that is a,
[51:32] Bob Dobbs: what do you call him?
[51:34] Bob Dobbs: Aphrodisiac,
[51:35] Bob Dobbs: right?
[51:36] Cameron McEwen: Yeah.
[51:37] Bob Dobbs: Anyways,
[51:38] Bob Dobbs: somebody said that.
[51:39] Bob Dobbs: That's what I was thinking of when I brought in there.
[51:42] Bob Dobbs: There's always a third person in any sexual interaction.
[51:46] Bob Dobbs: It's a good quote.
[51:49] Bob Dobbs: you
[51:50] Bob Dobbs: Then Thompson is politics and
[51:53] Bob Dobbs: Kroker is consciousness because the Android Meme forces people to wonder what is consciousness.
[52:00] Bob Dobbs: I like the joke that most of us are just pinheads now.
[52:04] Bob Dobbs: We have a very tidy little bit of consciousness because we don't need much because anti-environment does everything for us,
[52:10] Bob Dobbs: remembers everything.
[52:13] Bob Dobbs: See?
[52:13] Bob Dobbs: So the question of consciousness.
[52:15] Bob Dobbs: And then
[52:16] Bob Dobbs: I'm dealing with the spiraling interaction of nostalgia.
[52:19] Bob Dobbs: of each of the previous four quadrants.
[52:22] Bob Dobbs: So that's why mine's called Orphic Baroque Spirals.
[52:25] Bob Dobbs: And Orphic is the Orphism of the egg,
[52:27] Bob Dobbs: you know,
[52:28] Bob Dobbs: that early alchemical symbol.
[52:32] Bob Dobbs: And Baroque is sort of like the fractal,
[52:35] Bob Dobbs: where it just spreads all over the place,
[52:37] Bob Dobbs: but then it comes back to some repeating pattern.
[52:40] Bob Dobbs: But Baroque is counter,
[52:45] Bob Dobbs: in McLuhan writings,
[52:47] Bob Dobbs: counter to the...
[52:48] Bob Dobbs: Newtonian bias.
[52:50] Bob Dobbs: The Baroque would show up every now and then in art movements to counter too much perspective or linearity or representation and matching.
[52:58] Bob Dobbs: You know what I mean?
[53:00] Cameron McEwen: Kind of a breaking out of the framework.
[53:02] Bob Dobbs: Yeah.
[53:03] Bob Dobbs: And so each one of these media is breaking out of the framework of the Gutenberg Galaxy.
[53:12] Bob Dobbs: Yeah.
[53:14] Cameron McEwen: By the way,
[53:14] Cameron McEwen: I can...
[53:16] Cameron McEwen: I can hear a lot of echoing going on.
[53:18] Cameron McEwen: I don't know if that's okay or not okay.
[53:21] Bob Dobbs: No,
[53:22] Bob Dobbs: it's okay.
[53:22] Bob Dobbs: It's very faint.
[53:25] Bob Dobbs: When ION the radio show,
[53:26] Bob Dobbs: if someone's got a phone line open,
[53:28] Bob Dobbs: it can get really bad,
[53:29] Bob Dobbs: but I hardly hear any echoing.
[53:32] Bob Dobbs: But you might be hearing the other phone we have on,
[53:34] Bob Dobbs: which is across the room,
[53:36] Bob Dobbs: but it's very faint.
[53:37] Bob Dobbs: So
[53:38] Bob Dobbs: I'm not sure what that is.
[53:40] Bob Dobbs: If it is our phones,
[53:42] Bob Dobbs: we can't do anything about it.
[53:44] Bob Dobbs: We can't mute you.
[53:45] Bob Dobbs: And that's what I do on the radio.
[53:47] Bob Dobbs: You mute the guy's phone that's causing the thing temporarily muted.
[53:52] Bob Dobbs: So we just have to put up with it.
[53:56] Bob Dobbs: So as I'm going through these points,
[54:01] Bob Dobbs: I probably will come back to the chart all the time as we go through the book because there's all kinds of other factors in here.
[54:08] Bob Dobbs: For example,
[54:09] Bob Dobbs: I have radio as MONAD and holeopathic television satellite as TRIAD.
[54:15] Bob Dobbs: Then I have the dyad come after the triad because McLuhan said the computer reduces us to a Tyrwhitt wit.
[54:24] Bob Dobbs: So that's partly why Thompson,
[54:27] Bob Dobbs: see,
[54:27] Bob Dobbs: it's using these guys'
[54:28] Bob Dobbs: writings and their ideas and their styles as a metaphor.
[54:32] Bob Dobbs: Thompson was a dialectician,
[54:36] Bob Dobbs: like a Platonist.
[54:37] Bob Dobbs: And so he's two,
[54:39] Bob Dobbs: he's dyad,
[54:41] Bob Dobbs: but it matches up with the computer as Tyrwhitt wit.
[54:45] Bob Dobbs: in that early phase,
[54:46] Bob Dobbs: 67 to 72.
[54:48] Bob Dobbs: You see,
[54:49] Bob Dobbs: there's,
[54:50] Bob Dobbs: you could say those are Bob's subjective things,
[54:53] Bob Dobbs: but
[54:54] Bob Dobbs: I can quote somebody to show that it is a meme out there that is not just my projection.
[55:02] Bob Dobbs: I chose to use it,
[55:03] Bob Dobbs: though.
[55:03] Bob Dobbs: Maybe that's my personal part.
[55:05] Bob Dobbs: But,
[55:06] Bob Dobbs: and then I have Kroker is tetrad.
[55:10] Bob Dobbs: And,
[55:12] Bob Dobbs: but
[55:13] Bob Dobbs: LaRouche.
[55:14] Bob Dobbs: is a
[55:15] Bob Dobbs: Marxist dialectician.
[55:17] Bob Dobbs: So he's a monad,
[55:19] Bob Dobbs: and that's the figure,
[55:20] Bob Dobbs: and his ground is...
[55:24] Bob Dobbs: The dyad.
[55:25] Bob Dobbs: McLuhan is triad,
[55:27] Bob Dobbs: but his ground is tetrad,
[55:28] Bob Dobbs: or reverse.
[55:31] Bob Dobbs: If his Catholicism is really important,
[55:33] Bob Dobbs: then triad is the ground.
[55:35] Bob Dobbs: And paganism is the secular world,
[55:37] Bob Dobbs: and that's four.
[55:39] Bob Dobbs: That's the tetrad.
[55:41] Bob Dobbs: And
[55:41] Bob Dobbs: Kroker, he moves toward technology coming alive and being its old tetrad management.
[55:48] Bob Dobbs: You could say,
[55:49] Bob Dobbs: he used the word algorithm.
[55:51] Bob Dobbs: You know,
[55:51] Bob Dobbs: the algorithms manage the system.
[55:53] Bob Dobbs: he was writing in the 90s so he's a tetrad moving toward the pen Ted and I'm a pen Ted
[55:59] Bob Dobbs: I'm a cyborg in fully involved tech body that's moving out of that into the hex head so you see that each one pushes into the next one each quadrant like
[56:15] Bob Dobbs: I'm
[56:17] Cameron McEwen: I'm much more interested in the structures
[56:23] Cameron McEwen: that you have going on here as opposed to the individual illustrations of the structures.
[56:32] Cameron McEwen: Okay,
[56:32] Bob Dobbs: so what is that?
[56:34] Bob Dobbs: I'm trying to show structures.
[56:35] Bob Dobbs: So what do you mean by structures?
[56:38] Bob Dobbs: If I just was explaining something that's not structural?
[56:45] Cameron McEwen: I don't quite understand what you mean there.
[56:48] Cameron McEwen: I always hear you talking about structures.
[56:51] Bob Dobbs: Okay,
[56:52] Bob Dobbs: yeah.
[56:52] Bob Dobbs: So you're interested in what
[56:55] Cameron McEwen: I'm saying about the chart.
[56:57] Cameron McEwen: Oh,
[56:57] Cameron McEwen: absolutely.
[56:57] Cameron McEwen: Oh,
[56:58] Cameron McEwen: okay.
[56:58] Cameron McEwen: What I am saying is what's,
[57:01] Cameron McEwen: to me at least,
[57:02] Cameron McEwen: what's most interesting about the chart are the structures and the deployment of the structures.
[57:10] Bob Dobbs: Right.
[57:10] Cameron McEwen: And
[57:11] Cameron McEwen: I'm not very interested in how the structures are literally described and ascribed.
[57:23] Cameron McEwen: So that's,
[57:24] Cameron McEwen: I mean,
[57:25] Cameron McEwen: the king of comedy,
[57:29] Cameron McEwen: for example,
[57:30] Cameron McEwen: which I just happened to see that.
[57:33] Cameron McEwen: The king of comedy as an example of something.
[57:39] Bob Dobbs: Are you saying you just happened to see the movie?
[57:42] Cameron McEwen: No,
[57:45] Cameron McEwen: In fact,
[57:45] Cameron McEwen: I don't know that I've ever seen the movie.
[57:47] Bob Dobbs: Oh,
[57:47] Bob Dobbs: it's a fantastic movie.
[57:51] Cameron McEwen: Is that Robert De Niro?
[57:53] Bob Dobbs: Yes,
[57:54] Bob Dobbs: and he wants to replace Johnny Carson,
[57:58] Bob Dobbs: who's played as a
[58:00] Bob Dobbs: Jerry Lewis.
[58:01] Bob Dobbs: So he wants to take over the talk.
[58:03] Bob Dobbs: He wants to become a major talk show person.
[58:06] Bob Dobbs: I think he's a failed comedian,
[58:08] Bob Dobbs: but he wants to get the and all that he goes through to do it,
[58:13] Bob Dobbs: and don't want to ruin it,
[58:14] Bob Dobbs: but it's very interesting what happens.
[58:17] Bob Dobbs: It's really clever.
[58:21] Cameron McEwen: 1982.
[58:22] Cameron McEwen: I don't know.
[58:23] Cameron McEwen: I have to
[58:23] Cameron McEwen: I have to watch the movie for sure.
[58:25] Bob Dobbs: Yeah.
[58:26] Cameron McEwen: But if I go a couple rows beneath that,
[58:34] Cameron McEwen: I come to Gretzky,
[58:35] Cameron McEwen: Magic Johnson.
[58:37] Bob Dobbs: Yes.
[58:38] Cameron McEwen: And there's all sorts of associations I can make with those two great athletes.
[58:47] Cameron McEwen: But my point here would be that if...
[58:53] Cameron McEwen: people try to understand these literal instances of the structures that are going on in your chart they need they will necessarily be misled
[59:10] Cameron McEwen: because it's the the ground of the chart that's trying to be shown yeah and it's structural yeah
[59:22] Cameron McEwen: And so the literal level of the individual ascriptions,
[59:28] Cameron McEwen: like Gretzky,
[59:29] Cameron McEwen: Magic Johnson,
[59:38] Cameron McEwen: it's a kind of dance,
[59:41] Cameron McEwen: a kind of rap on the basis of the structures,
[59:46] Cameron McEwen: but what needs to be understood.
[59:51] Cameron McEwen: is the underlying structure,
[59:56] Cameron McEwen: but always keeping in mind that the structure isn't abstract.
[1:00:04] Cameron McEwen: You know,
[1:00:05] Cameron McEwen: it isn't platonic in the way you're using platonic.
[1:00:09] Cameron McEwen: It's not
[1:00:10] Cameron McEwen: Thompson in the way you're using Thompson.
[1:00:14] Cameron McEwen: The structure necessarily expresses itself.
[1:00:19] Cameron McEwen: It's dynamic.
[1:00:20] Cameron McEwen: It comes out of itself,
[1:00:22] Cameron McEwen: right?
[1:00:22] Cameron McEwen: And so the reason that the
[1:00:26] Cameron McEwen: PENTAD can have a take on the four other
[1:00:31] Cameron McEwen: quadrants is that all of the quadrants come out of themselves.
[1:00:39] Cameron McEwen: And so the fifth quadrant,
[1:00:42] Cameron McEwen: if you will,
[1:00:44] Cameron McEwen: is a kind of gathering of how the other quadrants necessarily express themselves.
[1:00:55] Cameron McEwen: It just needs to go around and pick up their expressions.
[1:01:00] Cameron McEwen: and bring them together.
[1:01:02] Bob Dobbs: That's right.
[1:01:04] Bob Dobbs: Now,
[1:01:04] Bob Dobbs: does it help that,
[1:01:06] Bob Dobbs: do you get a certain mood when you think of Ralph Duby and Johnson?
[1:01:11] Bob Dobbs: You should be thinking of late 80s,
[1:01:14] Bob Dobbs: early 90s.
[1:01:15] Bob Dobbs: Jim Brown is a 70s guy.
[1:01:19] Bob Dobbs: Wilt Chamberlain a
[1:01:21] Bob Dobbs: 60s guy.
[1:01:21] Bob Dobbs: Mickey Mantle,
[1:01:22] Bob Dobbs: Gordie Howe,
[1:01:23] Bob Dobbs: sort of a 60s,
[1:01:24] Bob Dobbs: 50s guy,
[1:01:24] Bob Dobbs: and Mickey Mantle,
[1:01:25] Bob Dobbs: definitely a 50s guy.
[1:01:27] Bob Dobbs: These names are meant to evoke the era.
[1:01:31] Bob Dobbs: like the 47 to 57,
[1:01:34] Bob Dobbs: and it's a radio period.
[1:01:35] Bob Dobbs: It's at the peak of radio,
[1:01:37] Bob Dobbs: so it has a quality,
[1:01:40] Bob Dobbs: a smell to it.
[1:01:43] Cameron McEwen: Right,
[1:01:43] Cameron McEwen: but remember,
[1:01:45] Cameron McEwen: sometimes you say that you're not interested in chronological time,
[1:01:50] Cameron McEwen: and then other times,
[1:01:52] Cameron McEwen: like just now,
[1:01:54] Cameron McEwen: you're trying to specify things in terms of decades and all that sort of stuff.
[1:01:58] Cameron McEwen: Right,
[1:01:59] Bob Dobbs: moods.
[1:02:01] Cameron McEwen: Yeah.
[1:02:01] Cameron McEwen: So,
[1:02:02] Cameron McEwen: I mean,
[1:02:03] Cameron McEwen: era,
[1:02:05] Cameron McEwen: you can think of as a historical time,
[1:02:08] Cameron McEwen: E-R-A,
[1:02:10] Cameron McEwen: or you can think of era with,
[1:02:13] Cameron McEwen: you know,
[1:02:13] Cameron McEwen: A with an umlaut,
[1:02:16] Cameron McEwen: R-A,
[1:02:17] Cameron McEwen: as a kind of air,
[1:02:21] Cameron McEwen: a perfumed air.
[1:02:22] Bob Dobbs: Yeah.
[1:02:24] Cameron McEwen: So
[1:02:27] Cameron McEwen: I would say that if...
[1:02:32] Cameron McEwen: the chart were to be tested,
[1:02:36] Cameron McEwen: you could say,
[1:02:37] Cameron McEwen: in concrete time,
[1:02:40] Cameron McEwen: I think that it wouldn't come out right.
[1:02:44] Cameron McEwen: It's not about what is the true history of
[1:02:49] Cameron McEwen: 1970 to 2000 or something like that.
[1:02:55] Cameron McEwen: It's a chart of the...
[1:03:01] Cameron McEwen: dynamics of structure.
[1:03:05] Cameron McEwen: And the structure has two different axes.
[1:03:13] Cameron McEwen: It has an X axis and a Y axis,
[1:03:16] Cameron McEwen: and one of them is vertical and one of them is horizontal.
[1:03:19] Cameron McEwen: One is all at once and one is chronological or linear time.
[1:03:24] Cameron McEwen: And the whole key to the thing is to understand Thank you.
[1:03:29] Cameron McEwen: The inner relationship of those things.
[1:03:31] Bob Dobbs: Yes.
[1:03:32] Bob Dobbs: Now,
[1:03:33] Bob Dobbs: you know,
[1:03:33] Bob Dobbs: a person today,
[1:03:36] Bob Dobbs: well,
[1:03:37] Bob Dobbs: in the
[1:03:38] Bob Dobbs: 80s, a young person,
[1:03:41] Bob Dobbs: 80s and
[1:03:41] Bob Dobbs: 90s, so they're listening to radio.
[1:03:44] Bob Dobbs: They don't have YouTube yet.
[1:03:46] Bob Dobbs: They hear the Beatles.
[1:03:47] Bob Dobbs: They hear this,
[1:03:48] Bob Dobbs: that,
[1:03:49] Bob Dobbs: and we know the decades are from.
[1:03:51] Bob Dobbs: But the kid doesn't know.
[1:03:53] Bob Dobbs: It's all new.
[1:03:53] Bob Dobbs: It's all part of the same
[1:03:57] Bob Dobbs: 90s experience for them.
[1:03:58] Bob Dobbs: And the variety of the different kinds of music a kid could hear then,
[1:04:03] Bob Dobbs: that's probably what I'm showing.
[1:04:06] Bob Dobbs: That kid doesn't know the music linearly,
[1:04:09] Bob Dobbs: doesn't have the anti-environment that the Beatles represented.
[1:04:13] Bob Dobbs: But once you have YouTube,
[1:04:15] Bob Dobbs: then you get to see the anti-environment.
[1:04:17] Bob Dobbs: So that changes things in the way the kid is having simultaneity,
[1:04:23] Bob Dobbs: right?
[1:04:24] Bob Dobbs: They can listen to any kind of music,
[1:04:25] Bob Dobbs: but they can get a clue.
[1:04:28] Bob Dobbs: to the decade because the YouTube might show.
[1:04:31] Bob Dobbs: At least they'd see the style.
[1:04:33] Bob Dobbs: So maybe they wouldn't know what the decade,
[1:04:35] Bob Dobbs: what a talking heads video,
[1:04:40] Bob Dobbs: they don't know what decade's from,
[1:04:42] Bob Dobbs: but they know it was a different kind of atmosphere than a Nirvana
[1:04:49] Bob Dobbs: YouTube. So we got some mixture there.
[1:04:52] Bob Dobbs: And since you don't find,
[1:04:55] Bob Dobbs: you're not enthusiastic about McLuhan
[1:04:58] Bob Dobbs: media management with the computer.
[1:05:03] Cameron McEwen: Of anti-environment?
[1:05:04] Cameron McEwen: No.
[1:05:07] Bob Dobbs: You are saying we're in the cul-de-sac.
[1:05:10] Bob Dobbs: You don't see McLuhan offering a solution.
[1:05:13] Bob Dobbs: Or you see him offering a solution on some level,
[1:05:17] Bob Dobbs: so maybe you should say what that is.
[1:05:19] Bob Dobbs: See if I'm doing that too.
[1:05:21] Cameron McEwen: We've talked about my solution in past
[1:05:27] Cameron McEwen: conversations.
[1:05:29] Cameron McEwen: But to put it briefly,
[1:05:32] Cameron McEwen: The medium is the message.
[1:05:34] Cameron McEwen: One of the meanings of that is that the elementary structures of human experience are what need to be defined in order to open a new era
[1:05:53] Cameron McEwen: of the investigation of experience.
[1:05:57] Cameron McEwen: And once we are able to investigate human experience,
[1:06:01] Cameron McEwen: in the same way as we can investigate physical materials,
[1:06:06] Cameron McEwen: then that science will revolutionize human history and will do so for the better precisely because the
[1:06:22] Cameron McEwen: lack of an understanding of human experience has led us into...
[1:06:30] Cameron McEwen: an extremely dangerous contemporary situation.
[1:06:36] Bob Dobbs: Okay,
[1:06:37] Bob Dobbs: so you think you're more accurate,
[1:06:43] Bob Dobbs: more appropriate,
[1:06:44] Bob Dobbs: more useful in how you translate McLuhan than any other books or translators in the McLuhan industry.
[1:06:52] Bob Dobbs: So you think you're on the right track,
[1:06:54] Bob Dobbs: or you know what the problem is.
[1:06:56] Bob Dobbs: And you might think that
[1:06:58] Bob Dobbs: I'm an ally.
[1:06:59] Bob Dobbs: with you on that.
[1:07:02] Bob Dobbs: How do we make this a new science?
[1:07:05] Bob Dobbs: You think that your blog is going to become a big deal that will be taught in universities like
[1:07:12] Bob Dobbs: Darwinism is?
[1:07:14] Cameron McEwen: Well,
[1:07:15] Cameron McEwen: not my blog.
[1:07:15] Cameron McEwen: My blog is on the way to a new science.
[1:07:23] Cameron McEwen: It's not the new science itself.
[1:07:26] Bob Dobbs: How do we get to the new science itself?
[1:07:28] Bob Dobbs: What is that?
[1:07:30] Cameron McEwen: Well,
[1:07:32] Cameron McEwen: that's exactly the question.
[1:07:37] Cameron McEwen: We're not going to get there without realizing that we need to get there.
[1:07:44] Cameron McEwen: And the way that we realize that we need to get there is by understanding the implications of the cul-de-sac in which we exist or fail to exist.
[1:08:00] Cameron McEwen: So for me,
[1:08:02] Cameron McEwen: the enormous problems,
[1:08:04] Cameron McEwen: social and political problems of the world,
[1:08:07] Cameron McEwen: and the cul-de-sacs of the intellectual world,
[1:08:12] Cameron McEwen: are signposts of our need to go in a different direction.
[1:08:18] Cameron McEwen: And those signposts are the thing that can kick-start us into a new way of looking at...
[1:08:29] Cameron McEwen: human beings and human experience.
[1:08:32] Bob Dobbs: Do you see any indications that we're getting somewhere on that dream or goal or ambition?
[1:08:41] Cameron McEwen: No.
[1:08:41] Cameron McEwen: I see things as deteriorating.
[1:08:46] Bob Dobbs: Right.
[1:08:47] Bob Dobbs: So if you suddenly were called up by,
[1:08:50] Bob Dobbs: well,
[1:08:50] Bob Dobbs: not Joe Biden.
[1:08:51] Bob Dobbs: He's dead.
[1:08:53] Bob Dobbs: Kamala Harris when she's president.
[1:08:55] Bob Dobbs: And she says,
[1:08:56] Bob Dobbs: I've been reading your blog.
[1:08:58] Bob Dobbs: I think we need to listen to you for a while.
[1:09:00] Bob Dobbs: Would you like to come to the White House and speak to the Cabinet and different things?
[1:09:05] Bob Dobbs: Would you accept that offer?
[1:09:08] Cameron McEwen: Sure.
[1:09:09] Bob Dobbs: And then what would you do?
[1:09:10] Bob Dobbs: What would you start talking about?
[1:09:13] Bob Dobbs: What we're talking about?
[1:09:14] Bob Dobbs: What your blog talks about?
[1:09:17] Cameron McEwen: Yes,
[1:09:17] Cameron McEwen: I think that's right.
[1:09:20] Cameron McEwen: You could talk about the misdirection of funding,
[1:09:24] Cameron McEwen: right?
[1:09:24] Cameron McEwen: I mean,
[1:09:25] Cameron McEwen: if...
[1:09:27] Cameron McEwen: The United States were to spend even a fraction of what it does on supposedly defense,
[1:09:36] Cameron McEwen: if it were to spend that on the sorts of structures that we're talking about,
[1:09:43] Cameron McEwen: that would be a great advance.
[1:09:47] Bob Dobbs: Well,
[1:09:48] Bob Dobbs: what are the structures we're talking about that you could spend on?
[1:09:51] Bob Dobbs: What would we advocate?
[1:09:54] Bob Dobbs: What would the funds be used to?
[1:09:56] Cameron McEwen: implement tactility right so it would need to establish
[1:10:05] Cameron McEwen: the kind of centers that
[1:10:09] Cameron McEwen: McLuhan advocated to
[1:10:12] Cameron McEwen: Robert
[1:10:13] Cameron McEwen: Hutchins when he was president of the University of Chicago in the 40s.
[1:10:17] Cameron McEwen: Yeah,
[1:10:18] Bob Dobbs: 1946,
[1:10:20] Bob Dobbs: yeah.
[1:10:20] Cameron McEwen: That's right.
[1:10:21] Cameron McEwen: And this was taken right from
[1:10:24] Cameron McEwen: Sigfried Giedion.
[1:10:25] Cameron McEwen: And the idea is that there are all sorts of very bright people in different
[1:10:35] Cameron McEwen: aspects of the world who believe in the truth of what they're doing.
[1:10:42] Cameron McEwen: So biologists and geneticists and chemists and just all kinds of mathematicians,
[1:10:51] Cameron McEwen: and there may even be philosophers or sociologists that actually believe in truth in their fields.
[1:11:01] Cameron McEwen: But what's necessary is to understand.
[1:11:05] Cameron McEwen: what is common or what enables something like truth in these various fields.
[1:11:14] Cameron McEwen: And the precipitate of that would be that human beings can know truth and can apply truth.
[1:11:28] Cameron McEwen: And that would change everything because
[1:11:34] Cameron McEwen: At the present juncture,
[1:11:36] Cameron McEwen: our economics and politics and education,
[1:11:41] Cameron McEwen: literally everything,
[1:11:43] Cameron McEwen: is dominated by the idea that human beings can't know truth,
[1:11:48] Cameron McEwen: that everything comes down to the exercise of power,
[1:11:51] Cameron McEwen: the exercise of influence,
[1:11:53] Cameron McEwen: the exercise of greed,
[1:11:57] Cameron McEwen: whatever,
[1:11:58] Cameron McEwen: but not attention to truth and the furtherance of truth.
[1:12:04] Bob Dobbs: So people would open centers and have classes,
[1:12:09] Bob Dobbs: and they'd have to be tested by us to see if they understood how to approach the new curriculum.
[1:12:18] Cameron McEwen: No,
[1:12:20] Cameron McEwen: there's a kind of cybernetics involved in this.
[1:12:25] Cameron McEwen: Once people are assembled who think that they are...
[1:12:34] Cameron McEwen: dealing with truth in their own fields,
[1:12:39] Cameron McEwen: once they begin to talk to each other,
[1:12:46] Cameron McEwen: like the culture and technology seminar,
[1:12:49] Cameron McEwen: we could say,
[1:12:51] Cameron McEwen: then the usual result of that would be that it wouldn't work,
[1:13:01] Cameron McEwen: which is what McLuhan found in the middle 50s.
[1:13:04] Cameron McEwen: So then when he said the medium is the message,
[1:13:07] Cameron McEwen: what he realized is that it's not the case that a bunch of good minds coming together without focus are going to stumble across or somehow
[1:13:26] Cameron McEwen: find the focus that's needed.
[1:13:29] Cameron McEwen: Rather,
[1:13:29] Cameron McEwen: the focus that's needed has to be on the focus.
[1:13:32] Cameron McEwen: to be why they are assembled.
[1:13:35] Cameron McEwen: And so through this reversal,
[1:13:42] Cameron McEwen: the definition of truth in human society comes to be the heart of the matter.
[1:13:52] Cameron McEwen: And
[1:13:53] Cameron McEwen: McLuhan thought that not only could that be defined,
[1:13:58] Cameron McEwen: but that already was defined.
[1:14:01] Cameron McEwen: by the spectrum of figure and ground possibilities.
[1:14:07] Bob Dobbs: So these clinics,
[1:14:12] Bob Dobbs: would they read McLuhan?
[1:14:15] Cameron McEwen: Sure,
[1:14:16] Cameron McEwen: absolutely,
[1:14:16] Cameron McEwen: but not only McLuhan.
[1:14:21] Cameron McEwen: The reason that McLuhan is interesting is that when you read him,
[1:14:25] Cameron McEwen: you are led on through his questions.
[1:14:30] Cameron McEwen: to rethink issues.
[1:14:32] Cameron McEwen: But that's true of Plato,
[1:14:34] Cameron McEwen: that's true of
[1:14:35] Cameron McEwen: Heraclitus, that's true of Aristotle and all sorts of other people.
[1:14:40] Cameron McEwen: So it's certainly not sort of just McLuhan.
[1:14:46] Cameron McEwen: McLuhan is just one indication of what's possible with all kinds of people.
[1:14:53] Bob Dobbs: Yeah,
[1:14:53] Bob Dobbs: but then what would be the,
[1:14:55] Bob Dobbs: then we'd go back to normal university.
[1:14:57] Bob Dobbs: Professors offering different content that they favor,
[1:15:00] Bob Dobbs: different books.
[1:15:01] Cameron McEwen: No,
[1:15:01] Cameron McEwen: no,
[1:15:01] Cameron McEwen: but the,
[1:15:02] Cameron McEwen: yeah,
[1:15:02] Cameron McEwen: but you see the whole idea is that it's,
[1:15:06] Cameron McEwen: if,
[1:15:09] Cameron McEwen: let's say you have a professor who's teaching Aristotle.
[1:15:13] Cameron McEwen: Yeah.
[1:15:14] Cameron McEwen: And he,
[1:15:17] Cameron McEwen: that professor,
[1:15:17] Cameron McEwen: he or she,
[1:15:19] Cameron McEwen: believes that there is...
[1:15:23] Cameron McEwen: something important about reading Aristotle.
[1:15:28] Cameron McEwen: There's something about reading Aristotle and continuing to read Aristotle throughout your life that represents a kind of fulfillment of human life.
[1:15:41] Cameron McEwen: There's some relation between doing this with Aristotle and the truth of human being.
[1:15:52] Cameron McEwen: Ciao.
[1:15:52] Cameron McEwen: If somebody's reading Aristotle just for tenure or for fame or for whatever,
[1:15:59] Cameron McEwen: then they're useless for the kind of center that
[1:16:03] Cameron McEwen: I'm talking about.
[1:16:04] Cameron McEwen: But if somebody is genuinely attached to Aristotle and attached to Aristotle as somebody who was grappling with fundamentals of human life,
[1:16:19] Cameron McEwen: then that person can engage with...
[1:16:22] Cameron McEwen: a chemist who is engaged at the frontiers of chemistry with important truths there.
[1:16:30] Cameron McEwen: And the big question is,
[1:16:32] Cameron McEwen: okay,
[1:16:33] Cameron McEwen: if these people in their different spheres can be engaged with truth,
[1:16:45] Cameron McEwen: how does that apply to all spheres of human living,
[1:16:50] Cameron McEwen: right?
[1:16:50] Cameron McEwen: It's not the case.
[1:16:52] Cameron McEwen: For example,
[1:16:53] Cameron McEwen: if we look at a bunch of nuns in a convent in 1870,
[1:17:01] Cameron McEwen: it's not the case that we've sort of come beyond what they were doing.
[1:17:08] Cameron McEwen: They were dedicating their lives to something that they thought worthy of that dedication.
[1:17:15] Cameron McEwen: Well,
[1:17:16] Cameron McEwen: we have to understand that dedication.
[1:17:21] Cameron McEwen: No less than we have been a dedication to Aristotle or a dedication to chemistry,
[1:17:27] Cameron McEwen: right?
[1:17:29] Cameron McEwen: Human beings throughout history in various ways have been engaged with truth.
[1:17:39] Cameron McEwen: And the great question which the cul-de-sac addresses us with is,
[1:17:49] Cameron McEwen: well,
[1:17:49] Cameron McEwen: is all of that...
[1:17:50] Cameron McEwen: bullshit?
[1:17:51] Cameron McEwen: Are we really,
[1:17:54] Cameron McEwen: at the end of all of this grappling with truth,
[1:17:58] Cameron McEwen: are we really just in a cloud of unknowing,
[1:18:02] Cameron McEwen: in a night of non-truth?
[1:18:06] Cameron McEwen: Or can humans take a fifth perspective,
[1:18:15] Cameron McEwen: as your perspective does on the chart?
[1:18:17] Cameron McEwen: Is it possible to take
[1:18:21] Cameron McEwen: an airplane view of the different human relationships with truth in such a way as that we now understand how human truth operates in all sorts of different ways in human life,
[1:18:38] Cameron McEwen: right?
[1:18:38] Cameron McEwen: How is truth refracted,
[1:18:41] Cameron McEwen: you could say,
[1:18:43] Cameron McEwen: throughout human lives in history?
[1:18:46] Cameron McEwen: And how did we,
[1:18:47] Cameron McEwen: in our stupidity...
[1:18:50] Cameron McEwen: come to overthrow dedication of truth into some kind of wandering around aimlessly,
[1:19:02] Cameron McEwen: except when we blow people up.
[1:19:08] Bob Dobbs: And remember,
[1:19:08] Bob Dobbs: McLuhan said in 1950,
[1:19:10] Bob Dobbs: we're turning people into human bombs.
[1:19:12] Cameron McEwen: Correct.
[1:19:14] Bob Dobbs: Yeah,
[1:19:15] Bob Dobbs: it's not just going and throwing a grenade at them.
[1:19:18] Bob Dobbs: They're walking around in a psychological stress where they suddenly go postal or something.
[1:19:24] Cameron McEwen: Sure.
[1:19:25] Cameron McEwen: And they're also walking around in a sleepwalking that allows the complete mismanagement of human affairs by
[1:19:42] Cameron McEwen: governments and corporations and bureaucracies and universities.
[1:19:50] Bob Dobbs: Okay,
[1:19:50] Bob Dobbs: so...
[1:19:53] Bob Dobbs: So Kamala,
[1:19:54] Bob Dobbs: she'd give you a budget,
[1:19:55] Bob Dobbs: you set up little offices across the country,
[1:20:00] Bob Dobbs: and people could apply to come and be serious and committed to a discussion that would have to have McLuhan books in it,
[1:20:11] Bob Dobbs: but other things,
[1:20:13] Bob Dobbs: movies,
[1:20:13] Bob Dobbs: whatever,
[1:20:15] Bob Dobbs: and they'd be talking.
[1:20:17] Bob Dobbs: I can't see how this does anything.
[1:20:22] Bob Dobbs: When you're saying you get people going into truth,
[1:20:24] Bob Dobbs: how do we know what truth is?
[1:20:26] Bob Dobbs: And how do you know you're doing it?
[1:20:29] Bob Dobbs: Unless you're just saying you're going to emphasize McLuhan as the most important thing that people should focus on.
[1:20:37] Bob Dobbs: And your blog on McLuhan.
[1:20:39] Cameron McEwen: Okay.
[1:20:40] Cameron McEwen: So remember,
[1:20:41] Cameron McEwen: the question is the medium is the message.
[1:20:44] Cameron McEwen: And the medium is the atomic structure of human experience.
[1:20:53] Cameron McEwen: And the presupposition is that the elements of human experience are not less simple somehow than the elements of physical nature.
[1:21:08] Cameron McEwen: So the focus of these centers would be what is the elementary structure of human experience?
[1:21:18] Cameron McEwen: What is the medium that is the message?
[1:21:23] Cameron McEwen: And the idea that
[1:21:27] Cameron McEwen: Kamau is,
[1:21:29] Cameron McEwen: look,
[1:21:30] Cameron McEwen: if we aren't able to do this,
[1:21:33] Cameron McEwen: then our problems are not solvable because all attempts to solve them are
[1:21:49] Cameron McEwen: necessarily self-interested.
[1:21:52] Cameron McEwen: and ultimately violent.
[1:21:57] Cameron McEwen: This is the taking the root of the medium as the message is the only way around the cul-de-sac
[1:22:09] Cameron McEwen: of human enclosure in self-interest.
[1:22:17] Bob Dobbs: Great.
[1:22:18] Bob Dobbs: So you...
[1:22:21] Bob Dobbs: Ever since I first read you in 1999 in the George
[1:22:27] Bob Dobbs: Sanderson forum,
[1:22:29] Bob Dobbs: you would say that there's a fine line between concept and percept.
[1:22:33] Bob Dobbs: As a matter of fact,
[1:22:34] Bob Dobbs: they're intertwined.
[1:22:36] Bob Dobbs: Didn't you say things like that?
[1:22:37] Cameron McEwen: Yes,
[1:22:38] Cameron McEwen: absolutely.
[1:22:39] Bob Dobbs: You don't agree with the way people use McLuhan and say,
[1:22:44] Bob Dobbs: well,
[1:22:44] Bob Dobbs: there's concepts and then there's percepts.
[1:22:46] Bob Dobbs: You don't think it's that precise of a difference.
[1:22:49] Bob Dobbs: Correct.
[1:22:51] Bob Dobbs: Above all,
[1:22:51] Cameron McEwen: I don't think it's that easy.
[1:22:53] Bob Dobbs: Right,
[1:22:54] Bob Dobbs: but I think that's what I'm doing in my chart here.
[1:22:56] Bob Dobbs: I've got people and machines anti-environment,
[1:23:01] Bob Dobbs: and so it could be there's 322 nouns here,
[1:23:05] Bob Dobbs: so 322 figures,
[1:23:08] Bob Dobbs: and the grounds are whatever you think a holeopathic radio satellite is.
[1:23:12] Bob Dobbs: That would be one of the grounds.
[1:23:18] Bob Dobbs: Page 11 of Take Today,
[1:23:20] Bob Dobbs: where man becomes,
[1:23:21] Bob Dobbs: in the present,
[1:23:23] Bob Dobbs: he said,
[1:23:23] Bob Dobbs: electrotechnical environment,
[1:23:25] Bob Dobbs: man becomes both figure and ground.
[1:23:28] Bob Dobbs: We can't tell who is the figure and ground in my chart.
[1:23:36] Bob Dobbs: You know,
[1:23:36] Bob Dobbs: so when you say you're not interested in,
[1:23:38] Bob Dobbs: I don't know,
[1:23:39] Bob Dobbs: the names or what I pick,
[1:23:41] Bob Dobbs: those are personal choices by me,
[1:23:44] Bob Dobbs: you're into the structure.
[1:23:45] Bob Dobbs: Well...
[1:23:46] Bob Dobbs: the interplay of the figure and the structure is pretty ambivalent.
[1:23:50] Cameron McEwen: Correct.
[1:23:51] Cameron McEwen: Correct.
[1:23:52] Cameron McEwen: So remember that I was talking about a spectrum of figure and ground.
[1:23:56] Bob Dobbs: Yeah.
[1:23:57] Cameron McEwen: And the way that works is that,
[1:23:59] Cameron McEwen: according to McLuhan,
[1:24:01] Cameron McEwen: there's no figure without a ground,
[1:24:04] Cameron McEwen: and there's no figure that doesn't become the ground to the new figure which was its ground.
[1:24:15] Cameron McEwen: So the way the spectrum works is that at one end you have all figure,
[1:24:20] Cameron McEwen: and the other end you have all ground,
[1:24:23] Cameron McEwen: and between you have every possible relation of figure and ground,
[1:24:29] Cameron McEwen: including all of the relations of ground to figure.
[1:24:34] Cameron McEwen: So you have a flip.
[1:24:35] Cameron McEwen: So in your chart,
[1:24:39] Cameron McEwen: this gets us back to the whole vertical dimension,
[1:24:42] Cameron McEwen: In your chart,
[1:24:43] Cameron McEwen: there is...
[1:24:44] Cameron McEwen: indeed this flip relation between figure and ground,
[1:24:51] Cameron McEwen: and that's what I was talking about as the instantiation or the psychological decentralization of the structures which necessarily go out from themselves.
[1:25:02] Cameron McEwen: They don't remain just in themselves.
[1:25:07] Cameron McEwen: Ever since Aristotle,
[1:25:09] Cameron McEwen: when Aristotle was talking about the dynamics of the
[1:25:14] Cameron McEwen: Platonic forms,
[1:25:16] Cameron McEwen: what he was trying to say was,
[1:25:18] Cameron McEwen: well,
[1:25:19] Cameron McEwen: if people haven't understood my great master Plato,
[1:25:23] Cameron McEwen: it's because they think the forms are separate from everything.
[1:25:27] Cameron McEwen: But in fact,
[1:25:28] Cameron McEwen: the forms are dynamic.
[1:25:30] Cameron McEwen: They express themselves into everything that we see.
[1:25:34] Cameron McEwen: Yeah.
[1:25:35] Cameron McEwen: We can't think of
[1:25:38] Cameron McEwen: Plato's forms as sort of being out there in a loof only.
[1:25:44] Cameron McEwen: They are also right here.
[1:25:46] Cameron McEwen: So they're like chemical elements that if you understand chemical elements appropriately,
[1:25:51] Cameron McEwen: then you understand that they're both things that have very definite properties.
[1:25:59] Cameron McEwen: They're eminently definable,
[1:26:01] Cameron McEwen: but they're also in this vast array that we see.
[1:26:05] Cameron McEwen: see when we look out the window.
[1:26:10] Bob Dobbs: But I don't see the clinics you create.
[1:26:18] Bob Dobbs: What goes on in them?
[1:26:22] Cameron McEwen: Sorry,
[1:26:22] Cameron McEwen: the what that I create?
[1:26:24] Bob Dobbs: The clinics.
[1:26:25] Bob Dobbs: I'm calling these places,
[1:26:26] Bob Dobbs: classes,
[1:26:26] Bob Dobbs: centers.
[1:26:26] Bob Dobbs: Oh,
[1:26:27] Cameron McEwen: centers.
[1:26:29] Cameron McEwen: Okay,
[1:26:30] Cameron McEwen: good.
[1:26:31] Cameron McEwen: So what goes on is the
[1:26:34] Cameron McEwen: is the attempt to define the structure of human experience.
[1:26:39] Cameron McEwen: What is it that characterizes what's going on with the chemist,
[1:26:45] Cameron McEwen: what's going on with the sociologist,
[1:26:47] Cameron McEwen: what's going on with the poet?
[1:26:50] Cameron McEwen: In my reading of your chart,
[1:26:54] Cameron McEwen: what goes on in these centers is what's going on in your chart.
[1:26:59] Cameron McEwen: You are trying to make systematic sense.
[1:27:03] Cameron McEwen: of a vast array of human experience going from 1840,
[1:27:13] Bob Dobbs: right?
[1:27:13] Cameron McEwen: 1840 to 1900,
[1:27:16] Cameron McEwen: something like that.
[1:27:16] Cameron McEwen: But I mean to 1990.
[1:27:18] Bob Dobbs: Yes.
[1:27:19] Cameron McEwen: Okay.
[1:27:19] Cameron McEwen: And
[1:27:20] Cameron McEwen: I think you'd probably say,
[1:27:23] Cameron McEwen: although there are these hundreds of names and types of things in my chart,
[1:27:30] Cameron McEwen: there's actually nothing.
[1:27:32] Cameron McEwen: that happened between 1840 and 1990 that couldn't be in here in some way.
[1:27:38] Cameron McEwen: Right?
[1:27:39] Cameron McEwen: The chart is comprehensive.
[1:27:41] Bob Dobbs: Yes.
[1:27:42] Cameron McEwen: Right?
[1:27:42] Bob Dobbs: Yes.
[1:27:43] Cameron McEwen: So when I was talking before about the mistake of psychological decentralization,
[1:27:47] Cameron McEwen: what I meant was that you can't take any particular thing,
[1:27:52] Cameron McEwen: like Mickey Mantle,
[1:27:54] Cameron McEwen: and think that that characterizes the Chardin a certain way.
[1:28:00] Cameron McEwen: No,
[1:28:00] Cameron McEwen: it doesn't.
[1:28:02] Cameron McEwen: What it does is it's an example of what could be called the outthrow,
[1:28:09] Cameron McEwen: the utterance,
[1:28:10] Cameron McEwen: the outering of the structure.
[1:28:12] Bob Dobbs: Yeah.
[1:28:13] Cameron McEwen: Okay.
[1:28:14] Cameron McEwen: So in the same way,
[1:28:18] Cameron McEwen: I would say what needs to be done with very big funding and with a great deal of publicity and a great deal of stress on its importance,
[1:28:31] Cameron McEwen: is for people who believe that they're dealing with truth in their own fields to do together exactly what you're trying to do with your chart.
[1:28:43] Bob Dobbs: Yeah.
[1:28:44] Cameron McEwen: To make collective sense of things,
[1:28:47] Cameron McEwen: right?
[1:28:50] Cameron McEwen: Yeah.
[1:28:50] Cameron McEwen: It's like saying either human life in 2020 is lost.
[1:29:00] Cameron McEwen: in a cul-de-sac that can well exterminate human civilization,
[1:29:07] Cameron McEwen: if not the whole biosphere.
[1:29:10] Cameron McEwen: Or there is something going on in human history that,
[1:29:18] Cameron McEwen: number one,
[1:29:19] Cameron McEwen: can be understood,
[1:29:20] Cameron McEwen: and number two,
[1:29:21] Cameron McEwen: can be used as a kind of cybernetics,
[1:29:25] Cameron McEwen: a way of orienting ourselves.
[1:29:29] Cameron McEwen: Aren't you saying those two things with your chart?
[1:29:32] Bob Dobbs: I think so,
[1:29:33] Bob Dobbs: but
[1:29:34] Bob Dobbs: I don't know how to involve other people in the sense of there are professors in different fields who think they're doing what you're saying.
[1:29:46] Bob Dobbs: They wish they had funding and could spread their clinics about with their content emphasis.
[1:29:53] Cameron McEwen: Okay,
[1:29:53] Cameron McEwen: but remember that you're transposing me into the White House and you're saying what would be my suggestion.
[1:30:02] Cameron McEwen: I don't say that my suggestion would be accepted.
[1:30:05] Cameron McEwen: I don't say that there aren't people that think it would be bullshit.
[1:30:10] Cameron McEwen: I don't think that other people wouldn't say,
[1:30:15] Cameron McEwen: give me the money instead of that stupid idiot.
[1:30:18] Cameron McEwen: That could all well happen.
[1:30:20] Cameron McEwen: if
[1:30:21] Cameron McEwen: If I'm transposed to the White House and if
[1:30:25] Cameron McEwen: I'm allowed to finance and direct what I think should be financed and directed,
[1:30:35] Cameron McEwen: then it's a center that attempts more or less what you're attempting in your chart.
[1:30:45] Cameron McEwen: Let me also tell you that at one point...
[1:30:51] Cameron McEwen: I came fairly close to being able to do something like this.
[1:30:57] Cameron McEwen: And that happened in Germany,
[1:31:00] Cameron McEwen: and
[1:31:02] Cameron McEwen: I was able to get people from the church and from very high level of science,
[1:31:11] Cameron McEwen: very high level Voices of Literature,
[1:31:15] Cameron McEwen: to agree to attempt something like this.
[1:31:21] Cameron McEwen: It got derailed rather violently,
[1:31:28] Cameron McEwen: you could say.
[1:31:30] Cameron McEwen: But when
[1:31:34] Cameron McEwen: I've had the opportunity to speak to people about what they might do in this direction,
[1:31:43] Cameron McEwen: then they've been amenable to try.
[1:31:46] Cameron McEwen: And
[1:31:47] Cameron McEwen: I think anybody would.
[1:31:50] Bob Dobbs: Now,
[1:31:50] Bob Dobbs: is this at a convention,
[1:31:53] Bob Dobbs: seminar?
[1:31:54] Bob Dobbs: Where did you do this?
[1:31:56] Cameron McEwen: How did you meet?
[1:31:57] Cameron McEwen: No,
[1:31:57] Cameron McEwen: I don't want to detail that.
[1:31:59] Cameron McEwen: But it would be something like what McLuhan proposed to Hutchins.
[1:32:06] Bob Dobbs: Right.
[1:32:07] Cameron McEwen: It would be either an adjunct to an existing university or a new college,
[1:32:14] Cameron McEwen: and it would have the task of...
[1:32:20] Cameron McEwen: Interrogating whether or not human beings know truth and can direct themselves with truth.
[1:32:32] Cameron McEwen: And really,
[1:32:35] Cameron McEwen: where we are now is we're without truth,
[1:32:37] Cameron McEwen: we're without orientation,
[1:32:40] Cameron McEwen: and if we continue down this road,
[1:32:43] Cameron McEwen: we'll destroy ourselves.
[1:32:45] Cameron McEwen: So another road,
[1:32:47] Cameron McEwen: another possible road.
[1:32:49] Cameron McEwen: is to say,
[1:32:50] Cameron McEwen: well,
[1:32:52] Cameron McEwen: are we really without truth,
[1:32:54] Cameron McEwen: or are we in some way with truth?
[1:32:57] Cameron McEwen: And if we're with truth,
[1:33:01] Cameron McEwen: how can we understand that,
[1:33:08] Cameron McEwen: teach that,
[1:33:08] Cameron McEwen: and apply that?
[1:33:10] Cameron McEwen: And
[1:33:12] Cameron McEwen: I think
[1:33:12] Cameron McEwen: McLuhan answer,
[1:33:13] Cameron McEwen: although it wasn't only McLuhan answer,
[1:33:15] Cameron McEwen: this is what Plato said,
[1:33:17] Cameron McEwen: more than two millennia ago,
[1:33:19] Cameron McEwen: we need to know the forms of human understanding in order to get a handle on this.
[1:33:30] Bob Dobbs: Yeah,
[1:33:30] Bob Dobbs: so you would start a center and you would definitely have McLuhan books and then people would read them and then they would hear you comment on them and they go,
[1:33:46] Bob Dobbs: boy,
[1:33:46] Bob Dobbs: that's not what I got from you.
[1:33:47] Bob Dobbs: from reading it because yours would be way more informed than they are and you've worked out i don't know all the different stages of apprehension or possible angles on these on the thing even seeing McLuhan is is just doing plato or aristotle just the philosopher with
[1:34:05] Bob Dobbs: modern language uh how much would you deviate from talking constantly about McLuhan to other stuff would you go into Giedion and McLuhan favorites.
[1:34:17] Bob Dobbs: fitting his wake in that,
[1:34:18] Bob Dobbs: that would be part of the...
[1:34:20] Cameron McEwen: Absolutely.
[1:34:21] Cameron McEwen: But
[1:34:23] Cameron McEwen: I think you have the wrong idea about what would be attempted.
[1:34:30] Cameron McEwen: First,
[1:34:31] Cameron McEwen: it wouldn't be a center where
[1:34:34] Cameron McEwen: I would try to direct things,
[1:34:36] Cameron McEwen: and it wouldn't be a center that would try to take somebody like
[1:34:39] Cameron McEwen: McLuhan as the single guide.
[1:34:46] Bob Dobbs: Yeah.
[1:34:47] Cameron McEwen: The idea would be to have people who have a notion of the relationship of...
[1:34:54] Cameron McEwen: human beings and human society to truth in their own field and to try to understand what the relationship is between that notion of theirs and an
[1:35:10] Cameron McEwen: analogous relation to truth of people in other fields.
[1:35:17] Cameron McEwen: And it's because the great need
[1:35:24] Cameron McEwen: is to have a notion of the multifarious relationship of human beings to truth.
[1:35:39] Cameron McEwen: It's that multifarious relation to truth that is the goal of these people being brought together.
[1:35:49] Cameron McEwen: And if they're able to...
[1:35:53] Cameron McEwen: define that,
[1:35:55] Cameron McEwen: then that's,
[1:35:57] Cameron McEwen: we're entering into a whole new era of human history.
[1:36:04] Cameron McEwen: That means sometimes you talk about trying to do that yourself.
[1:36:10] Bob Dobbs: Yes,
[1:36:10] Bob Dobbs: I'm interested in your version of me.
[1:36:13] Bob Dobbs: Great.
[1:36:16] Cameron McEwen: My version,
[1:36:17] Cameron McEwen: just as we have a very different
[1:36:21] Cameron McEwen: idea of sort of how the science works,
[1:36:25] Cameron McEwen: right?
[1:36:26] Cameron McEwen: Your science is we already have a rough handle on it and we can begin changing media anti-environment in the world.
[1:36:37] Cameron McEwen: And mine is,
[1:36:38] Cameron McEwen: no,
[1:36:38] Cameron McEwen: there has to be very fine,
[1:36:41] Cameron McEwen: detailed research that is very much like the research of the physical sciences and we solve
[1:36:51] Cameron McEwen: our problems gradually and involving new discoveries and all that sort of stuff.
[1:36:57] Cameron McEwen: So we have that big difference.
[1:36:59] Cameron McEwen: But we also have a difference in that,
[1:37:04] Cameron McEwen: for my way of thinking,
[1:37:05] Cameron McEwen: it's absolutely essential that different ideas of truth be shown as sort of refractions of each other.
[1:37:16] Bob Dobbs: Yeah.
[1:37:17] Cameron McEwen: Right?
[1:37:18] Cameron McEwen: So it's...
[1:37:19] Cameron McEwen: For example,
[1:37:20] Cameron McEwen: in your chart,
[1:37:21] Cameron McEwen: my whole take from it would be that the quadrants aren't overcome by your view.
[1:37:31] Cameron McEwen: They're illuminated,
[1:37:34] Cameron McEwen: if you will,
[1:37:35] Cameron McEwen: by your view,
[1:37:38] Cameron McEwen: but they also illuminate yours.
[1:37:40] Cameron McEwen: And there's this back and forth of illumination.
[1:37:44] Bob Dobbs: Right.
[1:37:45] Cameron McEwen: And this...
[1:37:47] Cameron McEwen: the back and forth of illumination or the in relationship of the vertical and the horizontal.
[1:37:54] Cameron McEwen: These are takes on human life which you regard as true and as
[1:38:11] Cameron McEwen: something that if everybody believed
[1:38:16] Cameron McEwen: that a take like you have in the Tiny Note chart,
[1:38:20] Cameron McEwen: if everybody believed that it were possible to have a truthful view of human life in terms like this,
[1:38:29] Cameron McEwen: not necessarily identical to this,
[1:38:32] Cameron McEwen: but a truthful view of where we are and where we're going,
[1:38:37] Cameron McEwen: that everything would be different,
[1:38:40] Cameron McEwen: right?
[1:38:40] Cameron McEwen: We wouldn't be constantly at war with everybody.
[1:38:43] Cameron McEwen: We wouldn't be spending...
[1:38:45] Cameron McEwen: Massive amounts on armaments and trying to blow everybody up,
[1:38:52] Cameron McEwen: right?
[1:38:52] Cameron McEwen: And then trying to reconfigure society according to somebody's half-assed notion of education or of genetics or of racial stereotypes and all that sort of bullshit,
[1:39:07] Bob Dobbs: right?
[1:39:09] Bob Dobbs: It would be an ongoing turn.
[1:39:12] Bob Dobbs: Education in the clinics would be philosophy.
[1:39:14] Bob Dobbs: They'd be a constant inquiry without looking for solutions but other than inspiration.
[1:39:23] Cameron McEwen: Okay,
[1:39:24] Cameron McEwen: that's true.
[1:39:25] Cameron McEwen: But remember that science and the physical sciences,
[1:39:31] Cameron McEwen: the sciences are an ongoing inquiry.
[1:39:36] Cameron McEwen: It's not up in the air.
[1:39:38] Cameron McEwen: It's not philosophical in the bad sense.
[1:39:41] Cameron McEwen: It's good science.
[1:39:44] Cameron McEwen: has to do with stuff right in front of us,
[1:39:49] Cameron McEwen: right?
[1:39:50] Cameron McEwen: And so the science that's needed...
[1:39:54] Cameron McEwen: For human beings,
[1:39:56] Cameron McEwen: similarly,
[1:39:58] Cameron McEwen: it has to be about everybody's experience in its raw phenomenology,
[1:40:07] Cameron McEwen: the way it is.
[1:40:08] Bob Dobbs: Okay,
[1:40:09] Bob Dobbs: so if I brought our endless electricity box,
[1:40:16] Bob Dobbs: we call Coldplay,
[1:40:18] Bob Dobbs: to the clinic,
[1:40:20] Bob Dobbs: Would people say there would be an inquiry on whether to implement this technology?
[1:40:27] Bob Dobbs: Looking at what effects,
[1:40:29] Bob Dobbs: what disruptions it would cause.
[1:40:32] Bob Dobbs: Would that be a valid inquiry in your sense of what would go on at the clinic?
[1:40:37] Cameron McEwen: Maybe,
[1:40:37] Cameron McEwen: but I don't quite understand your question.
[1:40:41] Cameron McEwen: What kind of box is this?
[1:40:42] Bob Dobbs: This is what we have.
[1:40:45] Bob Dobbs: It's a box,
[1:40:46] Bob Dobbs: metaphorically,
[1:40:47] Bob Dobbs: it's a machine.
[1:40:48] Bob Dobbs: that produces endless electricity.
[1:40:53] Cameron McEwen: Like cold fusion or something.
[1:40:55] Bob Dobbs: Yes,
[1:40:56] Bob Dobbs: we call it cold play because it's not exactly like ponds and placements cold fusion.
[1:41:00] Bob Dobbs: It's a bit different.
[1:41:04] Bob Dobbs: And Ion helped us make it.
[1:41:06] Bob Dobbs: So there it is.
[1:41:07] Bob Dobbs: There's the solution.
[1:41:08] Bob Dobbs: And I am in the middle of it.
[1:41:10] Cameron McEwen: You say it's the solution,
[1:41:13] Cameron McEwen: but when people have cheap...
[1:41:18] Cameron McEwen: energy as it's arguable we already have.
[1:41:23] Cameron McEwen: That doesn't necessarily produce peace and enlightenment.
[1:41:27] Cameron McEwen: Well,
[1:41:27] Bob Dobbs: that's what I'm saying.
[1:41:28] Bob Dobbs: Yes.
[1:41:30] Bob Dobbs: Your clinic would look at this thing and say,
[1:41:33] Bob Dobbs: well,
[1:41:33] Bob Dobbs: what will this produce?
[1:41:34] Bob Dobbs: What would be the effects?
[1:41:37] Bob Dobbs: And we are doing that right now with the Department of Homeland Security.
[1:41:43] Bob Dobbs: They know we got it.
[1:41:44] Bob Dobbs: And they're looking at Texas.
[1:41:47] Bob Dobbs: problems in the grid,
[1:41:48] Bob Dobbs: and they don't have any solutions.
[1:41:50] Bob Dobbs: No one else has come up with anything.
[1:41:51] Bob Dobbs: We have.
[1:41:52] Bob Dobbs: So we're doing it.
[1:41:54] Bob Dobbs: So I'm asking,
[1:41:55] Bob Dobbs: what would you add,
[1:41:56] Bob Dobbs: if we brought you in the Department of Homeland Security,
[1:41:59] Bob Dobbs: what would you add to the conversation that you think you probably feel is not there,
[1:42:06] Bob Dobbs: it's missing,
[1:42:08] Cameron McEwen: because you don't see what you're interested in anywhere?
[1:42:12] Cameron McEwen: I don't think that there's a technological fix.
[1:42:17] Cameron McEwen: to our problems.
[1:42:18] Bob Dobbs: Ah,
[1:42:19] Bob Dobbs: okay.
[1:42:21] Bob Dobbs: So what is it that is a fix?
[1:42:24] Bob Dobbs: Talking about what could be?
[1:42:27] Cameron McEwen: No,
[1:42:27] Cameron McEwen: it's a detailed science of human experience.
[1:42:34] Bob Dobbs: Now,
[1:42:34] Bob Dobbs: McLuhan done a lot of it,
[1:42:35] Bob Dobbs: hasn't he?
[1:42:36] Bob Dobbs: Or Ivins Wake has done it.
[1:42:40] Cameron McEwen: Yeah,
[1:42:40] Cameron McEwen: both of those are avenues of exploration,
[1:42:44] Cameron McEwen: for sure.
[1:42:45] Bob Dobbs: So the inventory of what hasn't been written or said yet would come out of the clinics.
[1:42:57] Bob Dobbs: You'd have a new inventory.
[1:43:00] Cameron McEwen: Well,
[1:43:03] Cameron McEwen: you're looking for the medium of human experience.
[1:43:06] Cameron McEwen: You're trying to define it.
[1:43:08] Cameron McEwen: You're trying to define how human experience...
[1:43:15] Cameron McEwen: is related to truth in a variety of different fields,
[1:43:20] Cameron McEwen: including all of the academic fields,
[1:43:23] Cameron McEwen: but also religion or sports or whatever,
[1:43:28] Cameron McEwen: a little bit like your chart.
[1:43:30] Bob Dobbs: Yeah.
[1:43:33] Cameron McEwen: How are human beings related to truth?
[1:43:38] Cameron McEwen: And below that question,
[1:43:40] Cameron McEwen: well,
[1:43:40] Cameron McEwen: what is the medium of human experience?
[1:43:45] Cameron McEwen: And using the question of what is the medium of human experience as a kind of signpost towards the question of,
[1:44:00] Cameron McEwen: well,
[1:44:01] Cameron McEwen: what is it that's common amongst people engaged in what they consider to be truthful occupations?
[1:44:12] Bob Dobbs: Right.
[1:44:13] Bob Dobbs: And,
[1:44:15] Bob Dobbs: in my book slash pamphlet is defining the new medium or the medium as tech body,
[1:44:23] Bob Dobbs: as the tech body.
[1:44:25] Bob Dobbs: But that may not be what you mean by medium,
[1:44:28] Bob Dobbs: naming the new hidden ground.
[1:44:30] Bob Dobbs: So try to say how my defining the tech body is not your point.
[1:44:39] Bob Dobbs: Distinguish your point from my point.
[1:44:42] Cameron McEwen: Right.
[1:44:42] Cameron McEwen: Well,
[1:44:42] Cameron McEwen: first off.
[1:44:47] Cameron McEwen: The medium of human experience is inherently media,
[1:44:52] Cameron McEwen: plural.
[1:44:53] Bob Dobbs: And that's from gesture to cell phones,
[1:44:58] Bob Dobbs: say.
[1:44:59] Cameron McEwen: Absolutely.
[1:45:01] Cameron McEwen: All of the above.
[1:45:03] Cameron McEwen: But as soon as you say cell phones or as soon as you say a gesture or something,
[1:45:10] Cameron McEwen: that's a psychological decentralization.
[1:45:13] Cameron McEwen: So in the history of the physical sciences,
[1:45:18] Cameron McEwen: people were well aware of things like copper and gold.
[1:45:23] Cameron McEwen: silver and tin and iron,
[1:45:25] Cameron McEwen: all of which are elements.
[1:45:28] Cameron McEwen: But they had to learn the difference between these things as physical metals that they could touch,
[1:45:38] Cameron McEwen: that they could work into all sorts of tools and sculpture and all that sort of stuff.
[1:45:44] Cameron McEwen: They had to learn the difference between that and these things as elements.
[1:45:49] Cameron McEwen: And that was a very,
[1:45:51] Cameron McEwen: very difficult...
[1:45:53] Cameron McEwen: difference to ascertain.
[1:45:56] Cameron McEwen: When that was ascertained,
[1:45:58] Cameron McEwen: it was revolutionary for human life.
[1:46:02] Cameron McEwen: And that occurred,
[1:46:04] Cameron McEwen: you know,
[1:46:06] Cameron McEwen: 1800s.
[1:46:06] Cameron McEwen: Yeah,
[1:46:07] Cameron McEwen: I generally say 1800,
[1:46:09] Cameron McEwen: but the elements began to be identified following maybe 1770,
[1:46:18] Cameron McEwen: around there.
[1:46:19] Bob Dobbs: Yeah.
[1:46:24] Bob Dobbs: What did you say there?
[1:46:29] Cameron McEwen: We were talking about the difference between the medium.
[1:46:32] Bob Dobbs: Right.
[1:46:33] Cameron McEwen: You were saying that the new medium is the tech body.
[1:46:37] Cameron McEwen: And for me,
[1:46:39] Cameron McEwen: the tech body,
[1:46:40] Cameron McEwen: if I understand,
[1:46:41] Cameron McEwen: I'll understand better when we go through your book.
[1:46:43] Cameron McEwen: But if I understand the tech body properly,
[1:46:47] Cameron McEwen: it's the cul-de-sac into which we have gotten ourselves.
[1:46:50] Cameron McEwen: Right.
[1:46:51] Cameron McEwen: not
[1:46:53] Cameron McEwen: because we wanted to get there,
[1:46:56] Cameron McEwen: but that's where we ended up.
[1:46:59] Cameron McEwen: And it's not even run by us anymore.
[1:47:03] Cameron McEwen: Right.
[1:47:04] Cameron McEwen: It's something to which we are subject.
[1:47:08] Cameron McEwen: And the great question is,
[1:47:10] Cameron McEwen: are we able to extricate ourselves?
[1:47:13] Cameron McEwen: And that's my suggestions about the medium is the message are my answer.
[1:47:23] Cameron McEwen: to the question of whether or not its extrication is possible.
[1:47:30] Bob Dobbs: But in the clinic,
[1:47:34] Bob Dobbs: you would start with McLuhan,
[1:47:36] Bob Dobbs: and then you...
[1:47:36] Cameron McEwen: Not necessarily.
[1:47:37] Cameron McEwen: No,
[1:47:37] Cameron McEwen: no,
[1:47:37] Cameron McEwen: not necessarily.
[1:47:38] Cameron McEwen: It could be Plato,
[1:47:39] Cameron McEwen: it could be Aristotle,
[1:47:41] Cameron McEwen: it could be Hegel,
[1:47:41] Cameron McEwen: it could be Heidegger,
[1:47:42] Cameron McEwen: it could be Nietzsche.
[1:47:44] Bob Dobbs: Well,
[1:47:44] Bob Dobbs: it sounds like you're trying to get people back to a philosophical inquiry.
[1:47:49] Bob Dobbs: You don't see it being done anywhere,
[1:47:51] Bob Dobbs: for no reason at all.
[1:47:53] Bob Dobbs: No practical reason.
[1:47:55] Bob Dobbs: No attempt to become famous or make money or something from it.
[1:48:00] Bob Dobbs: Is this what nuns did and monks did?
[1:48:03] Bob Dobbs: Were they doing an inquiry or were they just praying?
[1:48:06] Bob Dobbs: And that wasn't an inquiry.
[1:48:09] Cameron McEwen: Are you saying that
[1:48:11] Cameron McEwen: I'm putting this forward not because I want to become rich or something?
[1:48:18] Cameron McEwen: Yeah,
[1:48:19] Bob Dobbs: you said that that motive doesn't work.
[1:48:24] Bob Dobbs: in what you're asking people to do.
[1:48:26] Bob Dobbs: You want them to inquire.
[1:48:29] Cameron McEwen: Remember that if you,
[1:48:31] Cameron McEwen: for example,
[1:48:32] Cameron McEwen: if somebody is working with silver,
[1:48:35] Cameron McEwen: let's say,
[1:48:36] Cameron McEwen: and you're trying to get that person to understand the difference between silver as something that they work and silver as an element,
[1:48:48] Cameron McEwen: the more they insist on...
[1:48:52] Cameron McEwen: What silver does,
[1:48:53] Cameron McEwen: if you heat it or cool it or hammer it or whatever,
[1:48:57] Cameron McEwen: the less they're understanding that it could also be an element.
[1:49:02] Bob Dobbs: What do you do with it when it's an element?
[1:49:06] Cameron McEwen: Well,
[1:49:06] Cameron McEwen: it revolutionizes the world.
[1:49:12] Cameron McEwen: Once you begin to understand the elementary structures in a field,
[1:49:18] Cameron McEwen: everything is new.
[1:49:21] Cameron McEwen: Everything is...
[1:49:22] Cameron McEwen: up for grabs because it has to be rethought.
[1:49:27] Cameron McEwen: And so if you're talking about the elementary forms of human experience and there's nothing that isn't human experience from,
[1:49:39] Cameron McEwen: you know,
[1:49:39] Cameron McEwen: teaching babies language to debating in the halls of Congress or people.
[1:49:50] Cameron McEwen: talking in the Pentagon or whatever,
[1:49:52] Cameron McEwen: all of that is human experience.
[1:49:55] Cameron McEwen: And right now it's going on in a funhouse,
[1:50:01] Cameron McEwen: in a ship of fools,
[1:50:04] Cameron McEwen: in an insane asylum.
[1:50:10] Cameron McEwen: We don't know what we're doing,
[1:50:12] Cameron McEwen: but there's huge practical effects.
[1:50:15] Cameron McEwen: And that's one of the ways in which McLuhan can be used in these centers slash clinics.
[1:50:23] Cameron McEwen: is that
[1:50:25] Cameron McEwen: McLuhan was intensely conscious of the human comedy.
[1:50:30] Cameron McEwen: But the fact now is that the human comedy can easily destroy us all.
[1:50:37] Bob Dobbs: Yeah.
[1:50:40] Bob Dobbs: But would you just have people talking in the clinic,
[1:50:48] Bob Dobbs: or would they get on the radio and broadcast,
[1:50:50] Bob Dobbs: use modern media,
[1:50:51] Bob Dobbs: make YouTube?
[1:50:52] Bob Dobbs: Sure.
[1:50:52] Cameron McEwen: Absolutely.
[1:50:53] Cameron McEwen: Absolutely.
[1:50:54] Cameron McEwen: And remember that in McLuhan suggestion to
[1:50:58] Cameron McEwen: Hutchins, what he says is these people need to be very well paid.
[1:51:06] Cameron McEwen: We can't presuppose that everybody is going to say,
[1:51:09] Cameron McEwen: well,
[1:51:11] Cameron McEwen: I'm throwing over my family,
[1:51:13] Cameron McEwen: I'm throwing over all my perks,
[1:51:15] Cameron McEwen: I'm throwing over my tenure,
[1:51:17] Cameron McEwen: I'm throwing over all my existing research to go and talk for free.
[1:51:23] Cameron McEwen: to a bunch of other idiots that are doing that.
[1:51:26] Cameron McEwen: According to McLuhan,
[1:51:28] Cameron McEwen: these things need to be very,
[1:51:30] Cameron McEwen: very well paid and very highly publicized as part of stressing how important these questions are for human life,
[1:51:40] Cameron McEwen: right?
[1:51:40] Cameron McEwen: What's happened to modern society is that the most important questions have been defunded,
[1:51:48] Cameron McEwen: right?
[1:51:49] Cameron McEwen: The best minds that we have go into...
[1:51:52] Cameron McEwen: advertising or making movies or doing whatever,
[1:51:57] Cameron McEwen: what they should be doing,
[1:51:59] Cameron McEwen: and if they require great remuneration and great fame,
[1:52:05] Cameron McEwen: then we supply those.
[1:52:07] Cameron McEwen: What they should be doing is wondering about the most important questions for human life,
[1:52:14] Cameron McEwen: namely,
[1:52:15] Cameron McEwen: even modern people are or are not related to truth.
[1:52:22] Bob Dobbs: But universities think they're doing this.
[1:52:25] Bob Dobbs: They offer all kinds of courses,
[1:52:26] Bob Dobbs: and everybody explores truth differently,
[1:52:30] Bob Dobbs: and leads to a lucrative employment.
[1:52:34] Bob Dobbs: That's the carrot.
[1:52:36] Bob Dobbs: Not so much now,
[1:52:37] Bob Dobbs: but occasionally some of them get some worse.
[1:52:41] Bob Dobbs: How are you different from that?
[1:52:43] Cameron McEwen: But they don't,
[1:52:44] Cameron McEwen: well,
[1:52:46] Cameron McEwen: there's sort of two kinds of colleges,
[1:52:48] Cameron McEwen: right?
[1:52:49] Cameron McEwen: There's...
[1:52:52] Cameron McEwen: Colleges that are avowedly religious,
[1:52:56] Cameron McEwen: could be Baptist,
[1:52:57] Cameron McEwen: could be Catholic,
[1:52:59] Cameron McEwen: Anglican,
[1:53:00] Cameron McEwen: whatever.
[1:53:01] Cameron McEwen: And what they say is,
[1:53:02] Cameron McEwen: we teach the classics.
[1:53:06] Cameron McEwen: We have a notion of human experience that is centered on the gospel or is centered on the...
[1:53:22] Cameron McEwen: classics like St.
[1:53:23] Cameron McEwen: John's in
[1:53:25] Cameron McEwen: Maryland.
[1:53:27] Cameron McEwen: But the problem with all of these things is that they're provincial in the way that
[1:53:37] Cameron McEwen: Lewis talks about provinciality in
[1:53:41] Cameron McEwen: American positive.
[1:53:44] Bob Dobbs: They wouldn't necessarily agree that they were provincial?
[1:53:48] Cameron McEwen: No,
[1:53:48] Cameron McEwen: of course not.
[1:53:49] Cameron McEwen: But that's the...
[1:53:53] Cameron McEwen: They are,
[1:53:57] Cameron McEwen: how can I say,
[1:54:00] Cameron McEwen: they have shown themselves as unable to spread whatever version of truth they have to the wider society.
[1:54:11] Cameron McEwen: So they've proven themselves incapable of doing something about the wider predicament.
[1:54:20] Bob Dobbs: Okay,
[1:54:20] Bob Dobbs: so you see...
[1:54:21] Bob Dobbs: see nobody's accomplishing what they're claiming to be in the intellectual class?
[1:54:28] Cameron McEwen: Well,
[1:54:29] Cameron McEwen: as I said,
[1:54:30] Cameron McEwen: there's two kinds of universities.
[1:54:33] Cameron McEwen: There are the universities that claim to have truth and to educate students in truth.
[1:54:42] Cameron McEwen: And then there's the universities that make no such claim.
[1:54:46] Cameron McEwen: And in fact,
[1:54:47] Cameron McEwen: they probably couldn't be funded by the federal government.
[1:54:50] Cameron McEwen: if they made that claim,
[1:54:52] Cameron McEwen: right?
[1:54:54] Cameron McEwen: They are sort of aloof from any claim to truth,
[1:54:59] Cameron McEwen: right?
[1:54:59] Cameron McEwen: But what's interesting about these universities is that nobody doing science or math or physics or biology thinks that they are not doing truth.
[1:55:14] Cameron McEwen: It's only the postmodernists or the crit-lit...
[1:55:19] Cameron McEwen: folks that think they're not doing truth.
[1:55:23] Cameron McEwen: Right?
[1:55:23] Cameron McEwen: So you need to have somebody like Linus Pauling that
[1:55:31] Cameron McEwen: McLuhan talked about all the time.
[1:55:32] Cameron McEwen: You need to have the Linus Pauling and the
[1:55:36] Cameron McEwen: Heisenberg and the,
[1:55:42] Cameron McEwen: I don't know who the leaders are in various fields,
[1:55:45] Cameron McEwen: but people that are doing...
[1:55:49] Cameron McEwen: good work,
[1:55:51] Cameron McEwen: and believe that their work is truthful,
[1:55:54] Cameron McEwen: they need to address the question of how can the truth that we believe that we're living in science,
[1:56:05] Cameron McEwen: how can we generalize that to access to truth for human beings in general?
[1:56:13] Cameron McEwen: Right?
[1:56:13] Cameron McEwen: So it's,
[1:56:15] Cameron McEwen: let me put it this way,
[1:56:17] Cameron McEwen: because I've been
[1:56:19] Cameron McEwen: reading,
[1:56:20] Cameron McEwen: rereading
[1:56:21] Cameron McEwen: American Cosmic Man and thinking about
[1:56:27] Cameron McEwen: Lewis and McLuhan together a little bit.
[1:56:31] Cameron McEwen: In
[1:56:32] Cameron McEwen: American Cosmic Man,
[1:56:35] Cameron McEwen: Lewis mounts an argument for what he explicitly calls
[1:56:43] Bob Dobbs: Human beings are going to become universal in a way,
[1:56:48] Bob Dobbs: or cosmic,
[1:56:50] Bob Dobbs: in a way that roots them out from all of their traditional truths.
[1:56:55] Cameron McEwen: Rootlessness is the word you said.
[1:56:57] Cameron McEwen: Rootlessness.
[1:56:58] Bob Dobbs: Yeah,
[1:56:58] Bob Dobbs: rootlessness and homelessness.
[1:57:01] Bob Dobbs: Right.
[1:57:01] Bob Dobbs: So
[1:57:03] Bob Dobbs: Lewis emerges from this book as a champion of.
[1:57:10] Bob Dobbs: sort of human aimlessness of being part of a great cosmic mass that has no roots in tradition.
[1:57:24] Bob Dobbs: He wants those extirpated.
[1:57:28] Bob Dobbs: And so he and McLuhan get together,
[1:57:31] Bob Dobbs: and every once in a while,
[1:57:33] Bob Dobbs: I guess,
[1:57:33] Bob Dobbs: McLuhan tries to say,
[1:57:35] Bob Dobbs: well,
[1:57:35] Bob Dobbs: you should be a Catholic.
[1:57:38] Bob Dobbs: Um,
[1:57:39] Bob Dobbs: I think that the two of them pissed each other off over that issue.
[1:57:48] Cameron McEwen: Yeah.
[1:57:49] Bob Dobbs: Because it's so fundamentally different from what each of them believed.
[1:57:56] Bob Dobbs: Right.
[1:57:57] Bob Dobbs: So,
[1:57:57] Bob Dobbs: in my view,
[1:57:58] Bob Dobbs: if McLuhan is to be taken seriously,
[1:58:01] Bob Dobbs: if Plato is to be taken seriously,
[1:58:04] Bob Dobbs: if Leibniz is to be taken seriously,
[1:58:07] Bob Dobbs: they need...
[1:58:08] Bob Dobbs: to be taken seriously in a sense that would not avoid
[1:58:17] Bob Dobbs: Lewis's critique.
[1:58:22] Bob Dobbs: They would be trying to show that there is a kind of rootedness and being at home of human beings in
[1:58:35] Bob Dobbs: the truth in a way that is...
[1:58:38] Bob Dobbs: universal.
[1:58:39] Bob Dobbs: It's not subject to the sorts of constraints that Lewis criticizes in his book.
[1:58:51] Cameron McEwen: So you would have to go to places and intervene.
[1:58:55] Cameron McEwen: So I'm thinking that when you met McLuhan in 69,
[1:58:58] Cameron McEwen: 70,
[1:58:59] Cameron McEwen: and heard his case,
[1:59:02] Cameron McEwen: you then proposed,
[1:59:03] Cameron McEwen: well,
[1:59:04] Cameron McEwen: something else,
[1:59:06] Cameron McEwen: and he didn't agree.
[1:59:08] Cameron McEwen: that was your first effort to start your school.
[1:59:11] Cameron McEwen: You would see if McLuhan would go with you or start a dialogue with you.
[1:59:16] Bob Dobbs: Yeah,
[1:59:16] Bob Dobbs: yeah,
[1:59:16] Bob Dobbs: I think that's true.
[1:59:17] Bob Dobbs: I think that's true.
[1:59:18] Bob Dobbs: It's not a bad way of putting it,
[1:59:20] Bob Dobbs: yeah.
[1:59:21] Cameron McEwen: Yeah,
[1:59:22] Cameron McEwen: and you're still trying to do it,
[1:59:24] Cameron McEwen: still trying to get an audience or realize the seriousness.
[1:59:30] Cameron McEwen: But it does seem that you're emphasizing certain course content,
[1:59:35] Cameron McEwen: discussion content,
[1:59:36] Cameron McEwen: Lewis.
[1:59:37] Cameron McEwen: Giedion and that,
[1:59:38] Cameron McEwen: but you allow other people to do whatever they're doing.
[1:59:42] Cameron McEwen: But see,
[1:59:43] Cameron McEwen: you'd have to be the organizer,
[1:59:47] Cameron McEwen: the guy that says something about what's going on.
[1:59:50] Cameron McEwen: Because how could you find the people that are doing the real valuable work today?
[1:59:55] Cameron McEwen: How would you go about doing that?
[2:00:00] Bob Dobbs: Well,
[2:00:01] Bob Dobbs: I mean,
[2:00:03] Bob Dobbs: in a way,
[2:00:03] Bob Dobbs: it's sense-making.
[2:00:05] Bob Dobbs: You have
[2:00:06] Bob Dobbs: MacArthur Fellows,
[2:00:07] Bob Dobbs: for example.
[2:00:08] Cameron McEwen: Right.
[2:00:09] Bob Dobbs: So the MacArthur Foundation selects these people that it sees as doing fundamental work,
[2:00:16] Bob Dobbs: and it funds them.
[2:00:18] Cameron McEwen: Yeah.
[2:00:18] Bob Dobbs: Okay.
[2:00:21] Bob Dobbs: So you go to these people and you say,
[2:00:24] Bob Dobbs: do you understand that there's a dearth of truth in human life and that it is directly related to our problems of...
[2:00:35] Bob Dobbs: war and peace.
[2:00:37] Cameron McEwen: Right.
[2:00:38] Bob Dobbs: All right?
[2:00:40] Bob Dobbs: And,
[2:00:40] Bob Dobbs: of course,
[2:00:42] Bob Dobbs: as you know,
[2:00:42] Bob Dobbs: at the end of
[2:00:44] Bob Dobbs: McLuhan War and Peace and elsewhere,
[2:00:49] Bob Dobbs: what he says is we're in the business of trying to define a global city.
[2:00:57] Bob Dobbs: And the difference between a global city and a global village is that the global village is inherently...
[2:01:04] Bob Dobbs: antagonistic to other villages and is in fact inherently self antagonistic right so the global village is no answer to human problems it's the cause of human problems yeah but a global a global city is
[2:01:20] Bob Dobbs: one where it's a little bit like the cosmic civilization put forward by Lewis except that
[2:01:32] Bob Dobbs: for McLuhan,
[2:01:33] Bob Dobbs: that civilization can be rooted.
[2:01:36] Bob Dobbs: can be truthful.
[2:01:38] Bob Dobbs: It isn't,
[2:01:40] Bob Dobbs: we're going to suddenly become a new society by eradicating all truth.
[2:01:48] Bob Dobbs: McLuhan thinks that's ridiculous,
[2:01:50] Bob Dobbs: but that's what Lewis puts forward in that book.
[2:01:54] Bob Dobbs: Yes,
[2:01:54] Bob Dobbs: it's stupid.
[2:01:55] Bob Dobbs: And it's what
[2:01:56] Bob Dobbs: Pound in his letters with Lewis kept on saying,
[2:01:59] Bob Dobbs: well,
[2:01:59] Bob Dobbs: you know,
[2:02:01] Bob Dobbs: you have the worst kind of fuzzy head.
[2:02:04] Bob Dobbs: You don't see...
[2:02:05] Bob Dobbs: see the economic and social problems and political problems that are right in front of your nose.
[2:02:11] Bob Dobbs: What's wrong with you?
[2:02:14] Bob Dobbs: And Lewis would say,
[2:02:15] Bob Dobbs: well,
[2:02:16] Bob Dobbs: what the hell's wrong with you?
[2:02:17] Bob Dobbs: You have got all these crazy views of your own.
[2:02:21] Bob Dobbs: But they were friends.
[2:02:24] Cameron McEwen: Okay,
[2:02:24] Cameron McEwen: so it seems that you think that McLuhan...
[2:02:30] Cameron McEwen: I was just on a show today with some people So.
[2:02:34] Cameron McEwen: Talking about this,
[2:02:34] Cameron McEwen: and I end up saying that McLuhan completed sociology.
[2:02:38] Cameron McEwen: He came up with some useful principles that all the citizens should know and could use.
[2:02:44] Cameron McEwen: He actually came up with something that maybe moved out of the impractical and became practical.
[2:02:50] Cameron McEwen: Even Mrs.
[2:02:50] Cameron McEwen: McLuhan said that,
[2:02:52] Cameron McEwen: I think,
[2:02:52] Cameron McEwen: in one of the documentaries.
[2:02:54] Cameron McEwen: She says,
[2:02:56] Cameron McEwen: it's hard to make it practical,
[2:02:57] Cameron McEwen: but he is right.
[2:02:59] Cameron McEwen: So someone finally got it correct,
[2:03:00] Cameron McEwen: got right.
[2:03:05] Bob Dobbs: And I was saying that.
[2:03:06] Bob Dobbs: And you're saying that.
[2:03:07] Bob Dobbs: Go ahead.
[2:03:07] Bob Dobbs: In a previous conversation between us,
[2:03:10] Bob Dobbs: I said that's what McLuhan regarded as the mark of identifying the structures he was looking for.
[2:03:17] Cameron McEwen: Yeah.
[2:03:17] Bob Dobbs: And the context of him saying the medium is the message were a bunch of educational lectures that he gave from the middle
[2:03:28] Bob Dobbs: 50s until,
[2:03:29] Bob Dobbs: let's say,
[2:03:30] Bob Dobbs: 1960.
[2:03:32] Bob Dobbs: Yeah.
[2:03:32] Bob Dobbs: And I'll...
[2:03:32] Bob Dobbs: all of them he was trying to talk about what's wrong with schools,
[2:03:37] Bob Dobbs: what can we do practically for schools,
[2:03:41] Bob Dobbs: what is education all about,
[2:03:44] Bob Dobbs: and how has it gone wrong.
[2:03:46] Bob Dobbs: And one of the things that he said repeatedly is that we need to have education that's the same in school as out of school,
[2:03:57] Bob Dobbs: right?
[2:03:57] Bob Dobbs: Just like chemistry is not different in...
[2:04:00] Bob Dobbs: A classroom,
[2:04:01] Bob Dobbs: from what a corporation is doing or a factory is doing,
[2:04:07] Bob Dobbs: we need to be talking about the same thing in and out.
[2:04:12] Bob Dobbs: So classroom without walls.
[2:04:15] Bob Dobbs: And that same thing outside the classroom is what you were just talking about as the practical application.
[2:04:26] Cameron McEwen: Right.
[2:04:27] Bob Dobbs: So there is no application.
[2:04:29] Bob Dobbs: no education that works that isn't practical outside yeah the practical mystic his first essay 1936 so um maybe
[2:04:44] Cameron McEwen: i don't know there was a well there was this Wright Manitoba student paper writings there were writings before that in
[2:04:52] Bob Dobbs: 1936 um but not not in uh
[2:04:58] Bob Dobbs: recognized journals.
[2:05:00] Bob Dobbs: Yeah,
[2:05:00] Bob Dobbs: yeah.
[2:05:01] Bob Dobbs: Student newspapers,
[2:05:02] Bob Dobbs: yeah.
[2:05:02] Cameron McEwen: Right.
[2:05:03] Cameron McEwen: So it seems that you agree with me.
[2:05:06] Bob Dobbs: And that was Halifax.
[2:05:08] Cameron McEwen: Yeah,
[2:05:09] Cameron McEwen: it started in Halifax.
[2:05:11] Cameron McEwen: There's a clue there,
[2:05:12] Cameron McEwen: Cameron.
[2:05:13] Cameron McEwen: There you go.
[2:05:14] Cameron McEwen: The etymology of all this is coming from.
[2:05:17] Cameron McEwen: What?
[2:05:18] Cameron McEwen: The Halifax School of Communication.
[2:05:25] Cameron McEwen: Yeah,
[2:05:25] Cameron McEwen: he presented himself in Halifax,
[2:05:27] Cameron McEwen: and they didn't get it.
[2:05:28] Cameron McEwen: So you had to go somewhere else.
[2:05:29] Cameron McEwen: So you went to the C1E Review.
[2:05:31] Cameron McEwen: You went to many,
[2:05:32] Cameron McEwen: many places and seeds.
[2:05:34] Cameron McEwen: Nobody got it.
[2:05:36] Cameron McEwen: Or at least maybe Ted Carpenter got it.
[2:05:39] Cameron McEwen: Who got McLuhan?
[2:05:42] Bob Dobbs: I don't think anybody yet.
[2:05:44] Cameron McEwen: All right.
[2:05:44] Cameron McEwen: So you were saying,
[2:05:48] Cameron McEwen: so,
[2:05:53] Cameron McEwen: oh,
[2:05:54] Cameron McEwen: yeah.
[2:05:55] Cameron McEwen: So you agree with me McLuhan came up with something practical.
[2:05:58] Cameron McEwen: It's like at the end of
[2:05:59] Cameron McEwen: Western Search,
[2:06:00] Cameron McEwen: he actually came up with something.
[2:06:03] Cameron McEwen: So you think an important point is to make McLuhan a major part of the
[2:06:10] Cameron McEwen: Information Society and properly explained in some way,
[2:06:17] Bob Dobbs: or badly explained,
[2:06:20] Cameron McEwen: but have other people around who know how to correct it,
[2:06:24] Cameron McEwen: correct a bad explanation.
[2:06:27] Bob Dobbs: Remember that...
[2:06:27] Bob Dobbs: We were talking about the forms of experience,
[2:06:31] Bob Dobbs: and then we were talking about how they...
[2:06:33] Bob Dobbs: can get taught the peculiar somersault that's required because the student already has a form or forms of experience,
[2:06:44] Bob Dobbs: and he or she is going to study forms of experience.
[2:06:48] Bob Dobbs: And in order to understand that peculiar kind of dialectic involved,
[2:06:55] Bob Dobbs: there has to be a kind of somersault,
[2:06:58] Bob Dobbs: and that somersault has to go through a kind of free fall.
[2:07:02] Bob Dobbs: And that's a great reason that we haven't been able to learn the lessons that already Plato and
[2:07:11] Bob Dobbs: Aristotle knew 2,500 years ago.
[2:07:16] Bob Dobbs: So that's sort of on the educational side.
[2:07:19] Bob Dobbs: And then there's the metaphysics of those forms,
[2:07:24] Bob Dobbs: and then there's the practical application of those forms.
[2:07:28] Bob Dobbs: And the practical application can be good or bad.
[2:07:31] Bob Dobbs: It's just...
[2:07:32] Bob Dobbs: their application.
[2:07:34] Bob Dobbs: So
[2:07:35] Bob Dobbs: I think that
[2:07:36] Bob Dobbs: McLuhan will be thought a very important thinker exactly for the sort of practicalities that you were just talking about.
[2:07:46] Bob Dobbs: What are those practicalities that he saw?
[2:07:50] Bob Dobbs: Before I was talking about how practicalities for McLuhan were a mark of whether or not studies and education were...
[2:08:03] Bob Dobbs: worth doing,
[2:08:03] Bob Dobbs: really.
[2:08:05] Bob Dobbs: Right?
[2:08:06] Bob Dobbs: Yeah.
[2:08:06] Bob Dobbs: But chemistry is the same in and out,
[2:08:09] Bob Dobbs: and that's the way humanity should be.
[2:08:11] Bob Dobbs: But there's another whole sense of the practicalities of McLuhan that I think will be decisive,
[2:08:18] Bob Dobbs: and that is
[2:08:19] Bob Dobbs: McLuhan was not a great theoretical thinker in the same way that Heidegger was,
[2:08:26] Bob Dobbs: or that
[2:08:27] Bob Dobbs: Husserl was,
[2:08:28] Bob Dobbs: or that Hegel was,
[2:08:29] Bob Dobbs: or that Kant was,
[2:08:30] Bob Dobbs: etc.
[2:08:32] Bob Dobbs: But what he was able to do was he had an inherent feel for how these forms of experience were going to play themselves out.
[2:08:46] Bob Dobbs: So he was able to see in the
[2:08:48] Bob Dobbs: 1950s what would happen to security agencies.
[2:08:54] Bob Dobbs: He was able to see what would happen to politics.
[2:08:58] Bob Dobbs: He was able to see what would happen to entertainment.
[2:09:01] Bob Dobbs: Other people weren't able to see this stuff.
[2:09:03] Bob Dobbs: No matter how great a thinker somebody like Heidegger was,
[2:09:09] Bob Dobbs: he could not see beyond about a week from now or something.
[2:09:13] Bob Dobbs: And here was
[2:09:16] Bob Dobbs: McLuhan thinking
[2:09:17] Bob Dobbs: 70 years ahead,
[2:09:19] Bob Dobbs: and we're able to see that he was able to think 70 years ahead because we're 70 years out.
[2:09:26] Bob Dobbs: Maybe if we were 100 years out or 150 years out,
[2:09:30] Bob Dobbs: There would be other stuff that we would be able to see that now we can't.
[2:09:37] Bob Dobbs: All we know is that McLuhan was able to see what was going to happen with art,
[2:09:43] Bob Dobbs: entertainment,
[2:09:44] Bob Dobbs: politics,
[2:09:45] Bob Dobbs: war,
[2:09:46] Bob Dobbs: security agencies,
[2:09:48] Bob Dobbs: and on and on.
[2:09:49] Bob Dobbs: And somehow he was able to see this sort of stuff by a kind of second sight.
[2:09:58] Bob Dobbs: He knows Sooner.
[2:10:01] Bob Dobbs: saw some medium or some way of thinking,
[2:10:05] Bob Dobbs: then he had sort of had a auto-projection mechanism,
[2:10:12] Bob Dobbs: right?
[2:10:12] Bob Dobbs: And it turned out to be correct.
[2:10:15] Cameron McEwen: Yeah.
[2:10:16] Bob Dobbs: And so I think people are going to say,
[2:10:19] Bob Dobbs: well,
[2:10:22] Bob Dobbs: you can know somebody by their fruits,
[2:10:25] Bob Dobbs: and his fruits were accurate.
[2:10:29] Bob Dobbs: So they're going to want to know how was that possible?
[2:10:34] Bob Dobbs: What was he thinking and how did he think that those projections could be made?
[2:10:40] Cameron McEwen: Right.
[2:10:40] Cameron McEwen: So your blog is explaining how he thought you're answering those questions.
[2:10:45] Bob Dobbs: I'm trying to,
[2:10:45] Bob Dobbs: yeah.
[2:10:46] Cameron McEwen: Yeah.
[2:10:46] Cameron McEwen: So other people who do McLuhan teach it differently.
[2:10:55] Cameron McEwen: Would that matter?
[2:10:59] Cameron McEwen: that is different,
[2:11:01] Cameron McEwen: but they're still emphasizing McLuhan.
[2:11:03] Bob Dobbs: Yeah,
[2:11:04] Bob Dobbs: but the big question that comes out of McLuhan is,
[2:11:09] Bob Dobbs: how are we to do something about these problems?
[2:11:17] Bob Dobbs: And his answer to that is,
[2:11:18] Bob Dobbs: medium is the message,
[2:11:20] Bob Dobbs: or a revolution in education,
[2:11:24] Bob Dobbs: or a new study of media.
[2:11:27] Bob Dobbs: All of these sorts of answers that can be found in McLuhan need to be activated.
[2:11:34] Bob Dobbs: And what the usual study of McLuhan means is not activating what he recommended.
[2:11:41] Bob Dobbs: And it happens through a kind of psychological decentralization.
[2:11:46] Bob Dobbs: If we are going to study media,
[2:11:48] Bob Dobbs: then we study cell phones and headphones and iPhones,
[2:11:53] Bob Dobbs: whatever there is.
[2:11:55] Bob Dobbs: But that's a psychological decentralization,
[2:11:59] Bob Dobbs: whereas McLuhan was trying to look at...
[2:12:02] Bob Dobbs: Well,
[2:12:02] Bob Dobbs: what is the medium there?
[2:12:08] Bob Dobbs: What is the active force that is structuring what is going on there?
[2:12:15] Cameron McEwen: Right.
[2:12:15] Cameron McEwen: So my each quadrant is an attempt to show the medium.
[2:12:20] Bob Dobbs: Yes.
[2:12:21] Bob Dobbs: Right.
[2:12:22] Bob Dobbs: That's what we said before,
[2:12:24] Cameron McEwen: is that your Tiny Note chart is an attempt to think these structures.
[2:12:31] Bob Dobbs: In action.
[2:12:32] Cameron McEwen: Yeah.
[2:12:33] Bob Dobbs: That is to say there's structures going on that have a relationship with each other,
[2:12:39] Bob Dobbs: and there's also a dynamism to the structures that throws out particular examples,
[2:12:49] Bob Dobbs: right?
[2:12:50] Bob Dobbs: And so you have these relationships going on that in their interplay,
[2:13:01] Bob Dobbs: end up showing what the world is.
[2:13:07] Cameron McEwen: Yeah,
[2:13:07] Cameron McEwen: now explain in a sentence,
[2:13:09] Cameron McEwen: then we'll end.
[2:13:12] Cameron McEwen: The metaphysics angle,
[2:13:15] Cameron McEwen: what is that dealing with,
[2:13:16] Cameron McEwen: if you haven't already been talking about it?
[2:13:19] Bob Dobbs: No,
[2:13:19] Bob Dobbs: I haven't already talked about it,
[2:13:20] Bob Dobbs: and that's something that
[2:13:24] Bob Dobbs: I think that
[2:13:26] Bob Dobbs: McLuhan was able to do in one way better than most people.
[2:13:30] Bob Dobbs: folks,
[2:13:31] Bob Dobbs: and in another way,
[2:13:32] Bob Dobbs: wasn't able to do it all.
[2:13:34] Bob Dobbs: So the way that I think he really saw something that's fabulously important,
[2:13:40] Bob Dobbs: maybe we can talk about this next time,
[2:13:42] Bob Dobbs: is the spectrum of figure and ground is kind of like a cloud of implication.
[2:13:52] Bob Dobbs: And my very poor understanding of Finnegans Wake is that
[2:13:59] Bob Dobbs: Joyce
[2:14:00] Bob Dobbs: treats words and sounds as belonging to a cloud of implication.
[2:14:11] Bob Dobbs: So what McLuhan says is there's absolutely nothing that we can think about or study or talk about that doesn't have a place in
[2:14:25] Bob Dobbs: this figure and ground spectrum.
[2:14:28] Bob Dobbs: But that...
[2:14:29] Bob Dobbs: means that if we are going to talk about it precisely,
[2:14:33] Bob Dobbs: we need to understand it in terms of that spectrum.
[2:14:37] Bob Dobbs: In other words,
[2:14:38] Bob Dobbs: what it is not,
[2:14:40] Bob Dobbs: but could be.
[2:14:42] Cameron McEwen: Right.
[2:14:42] Bob Dobbs: And this is kind of...
[2:14:44] Bob Dobbs: Go ahead.
[2:14:45] Cameron McEwen: No,
[2:14:45] Cameron McEwen: no,
[2:14:45] Cameron McEwen: you go ahead.
[2:14:46] Cameron McEwen: This is kind,
[2:14:47] Cameron McEwen: you said.
[2:14:48] Bob Dobbs: Yeah,
[2:14:48] Bob Dobbs: so this is what might be called the depth dimension to Finnegans Wake.
[2:14:54] Bob Dobbs: There's always a dimension of possibility of...
[2:14:59] Bob Dobbs: how a word or a sound gets generated out of a system of possibilities.
[2:15:09] Bob Dobbs: And you have to understand that system of possibilities in order to understand the permutations of the word.
[2:15:20] Bob Dobbs: And through an understanding of the permutations,
[2:15:23] Bob Dobbs: then you come to understand why...
[2:15:26] Bob Dobbs: Joyce has written it the way he wrote it.
[2:15:29] Bob Dobbs: So we talked about that in terms of foul earlier.
[2:15:31] Bob Dobbs: Yeah.
[2:15:32] Cameron McEwen: Cool.
[2:15:33] Cameron McEwen: Yeah.
[2:15:34] Bob Dobbs: Yeah.
[2:15:35] Bob Dobbs: So at that level,
[2:15:37] Bob Dobbs: by insisting on understanding everything in terms of the full range of figure and ground,
[2:15:43] Bob Dobbs: and ground and figure,
[2:15:44] Bob Dobbs: I think
[2:15:45] Bob Dobbs: McLuhan is very good.
[2:15:47] Bob Dobbs: But if you look at McLuhan understanding of,
[2:15:51] Bob Dobbs: I don't know,
[2:15:52] Bob Dobbs: Plato,
[2:15:52] Bob Dobbs: let's say,
[2:15:53] Bob Dobbs: And then compare that to what...
[2:15:57] Bob Dobbs: Heidegger was doing.
[2:15:58] Bob Dobbs: Well,
[2:15:58] Bob Dobbs: I mean,
[2:15:59] Bob Dobbs: it's just laughable.
[2:16:01] Bob Dobbs: But
[2:16:01] Bob Dobbs: McLuhan wasn't trying to be what
[2:16:05] Bob Dobbs: Heidegger was trying to be.
[2:16:07] Bob Dobbs: He was trying to be something different.
[2:16:12] Cameron McEwen: So figure and ground,
[2:16:14] Cameron McEwen: that discovery
[2:16:15] Cameron McEwen: 65, is what you mean by metaphysics?
[2:16:19] Bob Dobbs: That's the main theme.
[2:16:21] Bob Dobbs: He didn't discover um
[2:16:24] Bob Dobbs: his sense of figure and ground in
[2:16:27] Bob Dobbs: Kohler, he just he found in Kohler a way of talking about what he had already discovered,
[2:16:33] Bob Dobbs: and what he was already talking about in terms of center and margin,
[2:16:38] Bob Dobbs: let's say.
[2:16:39] Bob Dobbs: And so
[2:16:41] Bob Dobbs: Innis was already talking about the dynamics of center and margin when he talked about empire.
[2:16:50] Bob Dobbs: And
[2:16:51] Bob Dobbs: Innis was intensely conscious of
[2:16:55] Bob Dobbs: Canada as being subject to the dynamics of center and margin.
[2:17:00] Cameron McEwen: Yeah.
[2:17:02] Bob Dobbs: Between the United States and England,
[2:17:04] Bob Dobbs: you could say.
[2:17:05] Cameron McEwen: Yes.
[2:17:06] Bob Dobbs: So
[2:17:07] Bob Dobbs: McLuhan was always thinking in terms of what might be called dynamic symmetries from the very latest,
[2:17:19] Bob Dobbs: the early
[2:17:20] Bob Dobbs: 50s. But he...
[2:17:22] Cameron McEwen: What happened in the early
[2:17:24] Cameron McEwen: 50s? I missed that.
[2:17:26] Bob Dobbs: Yeah,
[2:17:26] Bob Dobbs: since the early
[2:17:27] Bob Dobbs: 50s. But he did not really understand what was going on with these things until the late 50s,
[2:17:36] Bob Dobbs: and that's what he meant by the medium is the message.
[2:17:39] Bob Dobbs: That is to say the dynamics of these symmetries is the medium.
[2:17:46] Bob Dobbs: And then in 1964,
[2:17:48] Bob Dobbs: when he found Kohler,
[2:17:50] Bob Dobbs: Then he was able to say,
[2:17:51] Bob Dobbs: okay,
[2:17:51] Bob Dobbs: these symmetries,
[2:17:53] Bob Dobbs: we can say,
[2:17:54] Bob Dobbs: are figure and ground.
[2:17:56] Bob Dobbs: And as long as we understand the full spectrum of figure and ground relations,
[2:18:02] Bob Dobbs: then we have something on the basis of which everything in human experience can be understood.
[2:18:12] Cameron McEwen: Right.
[2:18:12] Cameron McEwen: But what happened in the early
[2:18:14] Cameron McEwen: 50s?
[2:18:16] Bob Dobbs: Well, in the early
[2:18:17] Bob Dobbs: 50s, he came to understand that
[2:18:21] Bob Dobbs: literature in the book,
[2:18:23] Bob Dobbs: or the late
[2:18:24] Bob Dobbs: 40s, better,
[2:18:24] Bob Dobbs: I guess,
[2:18:25] Bob Dobbs: the literature in the book could not be taken as ground for human experience,
[2:18:33] Bob Dobbs: that it was just one type of human experience.
[2:18:37] Bob Dobbs: And so he already set out in a letter to pound,
[2:18:39] Bob Dobbs: I believe,
[2:18:40] Bob Dobbs: in
[2:18:41] Bob Dobbs: 52, what he called a book he was doing on the Gutenberg era.
[2:18:45] Bob Dobbs: Yeah,
[2:18:46] Bob Dobbs: and the Gutenberg era was going to
[2:18:48] Bob Dobbs: try to grapple with the different technologies that underlie human expression.
[2:18:59] Bob Dobbs: So then you go from 52 to
[2:19:02] Bob Dobbs: 54, 55,
[2:19:04] Bob Dobbs: when he gets a hold of the notion of acoustic space,
[2:19:11] Bob Dobbs: And then he begins to see how...
[2:19:19] Bob Dobbs: These symmetries can be used not only objectively,
[2:19:27] Bob Dobbs: but also subjectively in terms of ear and eye.
[2:19:32] Bob Dobbs: And so by the end of that decade,
[2:19:35] Bob Dobbs: he's gotten fairly clear in his mind that there are structures that are just as true of human seeing as they are of what...
[2:19:47] Bob Dobbs: human seat.
[2:19:52] Bob Dobbs: He then has 20 years to live,
[2:19:53] Bob Dobbs: and what he tries to do is refine that one insight.
[2:19:58] Cameron McEwen: Right.
[2:19:59] Cameron McEwen: Okay,
[2:19:59] Cameron McEwen: so let's leave it at that,
[2:20:01] Cameron McEwen: because you have to go.
[2:20:03] Cameron McEwen: We went a little over because we started late,
[2:20:05] Cameron McEwen: but we got our usual at least two hours in.
[2:20:09] Bob Dobbs: So,
[2:20:09] Cameron McEwen: very good.
[2:20:11] Cameron McEwen: Again,
[2:20:12] Cameron McEwen: notice how much talking you're doing.
[2:20:15] Bob Dobbs: That's right,
[2:20:15] Bob Dobbs: too much.
[2:20:17] Cameron McEwen: No,
[2:20:17] Cameron McEwen: no,
[2:20:17] Cameron McEwen: it's good.
[2:20:19] Cameron McEwen: All right,
[2:20:20] Cameron McEwen: so thank you very much,
[2:20:22] Cameron McEwen: and we'll continue next week.
[2:20:24] Bob Dobbs: Yeah,
[2:20:24] Bob Dobbs: look forward.
[2:20:25] Bob Dobbs: Thanks,
[2:20:25] Bob Dobbs: Bob.
[2:20:25] Cameron McEwen: Okay,
[2:20:26] Cameron McEwen: Cameron.
[2:20:27] Cameron McEwen: Bye.
[2:20:28] Bob Dobbs: Bye.