[00:02] Bob Dobbs: Hey,
[00:02] Bob Dobbs: this is Cameron McEwen and Bob Dobbs again,
[00:05] Bob Dobbs: and this is our
[00:06] Bob Dobbs: 34th episode,
[00:08] Bob Dobbs: and we're picking up from the Jean Baudrillard article,
[00:11] Bob Dobbs: which we concentrated on last episode,
[00:14] Bob Dobbs: and we're going to start to talk about what I say in my commentary,
[00:20] Bob Dobbs: and see where that leads
[00:23] Bob Dobbs: Ewen Cameron. So I say,
[00:25] Bob Dobbs: put in McLuhan terms,
[00:26] Bob Dobbs: Jean Baudrillard is talking about visual space,
[00:29] Bob Dobbs: visual space in quotes.
[00:30] Bob Dobbs: which creates a fragmented Pryde separation between words.
[00:34] Bob Dobbs: If someone is talking to you,
[00:35] Bob Dobbs: they're slurring and blabbing away.
[00:37] Bob Dobbs: No punctuation.
[00:39] Bob Dobbs: But when you start punctuating and separating words into grammar based on visual book rules,
[00:43] Bob Dobbs: that is a situation that leads to more hypothesis and separations between ideas.
[00:48] Bob Dobbs: Down in the fourth paragraph,
[00:50] Bob Dobbs: Baudrillard says,
[00:52] Bob Dobbs: the whole traditional mode of causality,
[00:54] Bob Dobbs: unquote.
[00:56] Bob Dobbs: Remember,
[00:56] Bob Dobbs: literacy brings in...
[00:58] Bob Dobbs: Literacy brings in causality,
[01:00] Bob Dobbs: and it's being brought into question by the new situation.
[01:03] Bob Dobbs: Not the anti-environment,
[01:04] Bob Dobbs: but later technology,
[01:06] Bob Dobbs: basically genetic and computer patterning,
[01:08] Bob Dobbs: medicine,
[01:09] Bob Dobbs: chemistry,
[01:10] Bob Dobbs: analyzing DNA models.
[01:12] Bob Dobbs: That's the new world of post-literate,
[01:13] Bob Dobbs: Postman simulation.
[01:16] Bob Dobbs: That's Baudrillard's term,
[01:17] Bob Dobbs: simulation.
[01:18] Bob Dobbs: He's reading scientific journals and using their terms,
[01:21] Bob Dobbs: whereas McLuhan used his own terms to talk about the new.
[01:25] Bob Dobbs: Look at the list.
[01:27] Bob Dobbs: quoting Baudrillard,
[01:28] Bob Dobbs: the whole traditional mode.
[01:32] Bob Dobbs: Look at the divisions,
[01:34] Bob Dobbs: the active critical mode,
[01:35] Bob Dobbs: the analytical mode,
[01:37] Bob Dobbs: which actually thinks in terms of causality.
[01:40] Bob Dobbs: There are determining molecules,
[01:42] Bob Dobbs: and there's a perspective.
[01:43] Bob Dobbs: It's all visual space,
[01:44] Bob Dobbs: as McLuhan defines it.
[01:47] Cameron McEwen: So let's just stop there for a minute.
[01:49] Cameron McEwen: So as we were saying when we were looking at the
[01:53] Cameron McEwen: Baudrillard, Um,
[01:56] Cameron McEwen: long quotation,
[01:58] Cameron McEwen: the
[01:59] Cameron McEwen: Baudrillard is trying to think himself out of a problem.
[02:03] Cameron McEwen: And that problem basically is visual space.
[02:07] Cameron McEwen: And the if visual space is sliced and diced and re-sliced and Fritz Senn,
[02:18] Cameron McEwen: it can never be got out of.
[02:23] Cameron McEwen: So the um
[02:25] Cameron McEwen: The problem that
[02:27] Cameron McEwen: Baudrillard is going to have is that if he wants to go deeper and deeper and deeper into visual space,
[02:36] Cameron McEwen: including getting into all of these scientific terms and new science and all that sort of stuff,
[02:42] Cameron McEwen: all he does is get himself deeper into his problem.
[02:46] Bob Dobbs: Yes.
[02:46] Cameron McEwen: So the whole question that is posed by Baudrillard is how does he start again?
[02:55] Cameron McEwen: How does he get to a different starting place where the benefits and the achievements of visual space can be preserved,
[03:09] Cameron McEwen: but the problems of visual space can be dissolved in some way?
[03:15] Bob Dobbs: And he goes on to think he gets out of the cul-de-sac.
[03:20] Cameron McEwen: Well,
[03:20] Cameron McEwen: not in the piece that we read.
[03:23] Bob Dobbs: No.
[03:24] Cameron McEwen: I'd be very interested to know how he thinks that happens.
[03:29] Cameron McEwen: And maybe we could,
[03:31] Cameron McEwen: at some point,
[03:32] Cameron McEwen: we could carefully go through what his answer,
[03:38] Cameron McEwen: his proposal would be.
[03:40] Bob Dobbs: Yeah,
[03:41] Bob Dobbs: I think it's in Simulacrum
[03:43] Bob Dobbs: Simulations, early 80s book.
[03:47] Bob Dobbs: But we had to pull it out and find a quote or two.
[03:50] Bob Dobbs: But anyways,
[03:51] Bob Dobbs: I carry on saying,
[03:52] Bob Dobbs: however,
[03:52] Bob Dobbs: in the new situation,
[03:54] Bob Dobbs: The distinction is between the scientific print-created categories,
[03:59] Bob Dobbs: cause and effect,
[04:00] Bob Dobbs: active and passive,
[04:01] Bob Dobbs: subject and object,
[04:02] Bob Dobbs: ends and means.
[04:04] Bob Dobbs: These are all from
[04:05] Bob Dobbs: Baudrillard. All these dialectics.
[04:09] Bob Dobbs: Then
[04:11] Bob Dobbs: Baudrillard says,
[04:12] Bob Dobbs: it is Innis mode that it could be said,
[04:15] Bob Dobbs: in the old way of visually biased people.
[04:19] Bob Dobbs: Does he put
[04:20] Bob Dobbs: McLuhan in brackets?
[04:21] Bob Dobbs: I guess.
[04:21] Bob Dobbs: TV watches us.
[04:23] Bob Dobbs: TV alienates us,
[04:24] Bob Dobbs: TV manipulates us,
[04:25] Bob Dobbs: TV informs us.
[04:27] Bob Dobbs: And that leads to the paranoia of the electronic man,
[04:30] Bob Dobbs: because they're putting illiterate,
[04:32] Bob Dobbs: fragmented view on a different kind of process that's going on that people don't see.
[04:37] Bob Dobbs: And then Baudrillard says,
[04:38] Bob Dobbs: through all this,
[04:39] Bob Dobbs: one is dependent on the analytical,
[04:42] Bob Dobbs: or visual space conception,
[04:44] Bob Dobbs: is what I add.
[04:45] Bob Dobbs: And then he says,
[04:46] Bob Dobbs: whose vanishing point is the horizon between reality and meaning,
[04:51] Bob Dobbs: end of quote.
[04:52] Bob Dobbs: Then I say,
[04:52] Bob Dobbs: the vanishing point was created by literacy,
[04:55] Bob Dobbs: that's perspective,
[04:56] Bob Dobbs: the artistic renaissance in Florence.
[04:59] Bob Dobbs: Then Baudrillard says,
[05:00] Bob Dobbs: well,
[05:01] Bob Dobbs: I take Baudrillard words,
[05:02] Bob Dobbs: the horizon between reality and meaning.
[05:05] Bob Dobbs: Then I say,
[05:05] Bob Dobbs: literally,
[05:06] Bob Dobbs: people ask,
[05:07] Bob Dobbs: well,
[05:07] Bob Dobbs: what's real and what's meaningful?
[05:09] Bob Dobbs: Then I say,
[05:10] Bob Dobbs: you've got these dialectics,
[05:11] Bob Dobbs: these splits.
[05:13] Bob Dobbs: Baudrillard's inventorying the splits,
[05:15] Bob Dobbs: and he's going to say,
[05:17] Bob Dobbs: quote,
[05:17] Bob Dobbs: none of this applies to where we are today.
[05:21] Bob Dobbs: And that's totally McLuhan,
[05:23] Bob Dobbs: I say.
[05:23] Bob Dobbs: McLuhan is saying the same thing.
[05:25] Bob Dobbs: But McLuhan is talking in the
[05:27] Bob Dobbs: 50s and 60s,
[05:27] Bob Dobbs: like the very first quote I offered.
[05:29] Bob Dobbs: And Baudrillard,
[05:31] Bob Dobbs: a younger academic in Paris,
[05:33] Bob Dobbs: is reading science,
[05:34] Bob Dobbs: and he's looking at the technology of genetic engineering on its own terms and seeing how it's different.
[05:39] Bob Dobbs: Then I go say,
[05:40] Bob Dobbs: now,
[05:40] Bob Dobbs: back to the top,
[05:41] Bob Dobbs: the famous book on the spectacle by Guy Debord,
[05:44] Bob Dobbs: one of the situationists,
[05:45] Bob Dobbs: whose newsletter in the late 60s Baudrillard had edited for these SubGenius guys running around doing the May 68 rebellion and other artistic performance art.
[05:55] Bob Dobbs: They were called situationists.
[05:57] Bob Dobbs: That whole thing that they were looking at and objecting to,
[06:00] Bob Dobbs: society as a movie,
[06:01] Bob Dobbs: television spectacle,
[06:03] Bob Dobbs: was not relevant to the late 70s when the quotation above by Baudrillard is being written.
[06:09] Bob Dobbs: Guy Debord is obsolete.
[06:11] Bob Dobbs: That's what I think Baudrillard realizes.
[06:14] Bob Dobbs: There was the first reality TV show in 1973.
[06:17] Bob Dobbs: Somebody got the brainstorm,
[06:18] Bob Dobbs: quote,
[06:19] Bob Dobbs: let's just film this
[06:21] Bob Dobbs: California family and their daily life,
[06:23] Bob Dobbs: unquote.
[06:24] Bob Dobbs: And it turned out to be a big hit.
[06:26] Bob Dobbs: And one of the Louds family's kids was gay,
[06:30] Bob Dobbs: Lance Loud.
[06:31] Bob Dobbs: He went on to become a New York scene maker in the 70s because he was made famous by this reality show about his family.
[06:38] Bob Dobbs: And Baudrillard says,
[06:39] Bob Dobbs: in the case of the Louds,
[06:41] Bob Dobbs: television is no longer a spectacular medium,
[06:44] Bob Dobbs: unquote.
[06:45] Bob Dobbs: The Louds represent the post-spectacular because television has changed.
[06:50] Bob Dobbs: We're no longer in the society of spectacle,
[06:52] Bob Dobbs: which the situation is talked about in the 60s.
[06:55] Bob Dobbs: Nor are we experiencing,
[06:56] Bob Dobbs: quote from Baudrillard,
[06:58] Bob Dobbs: the specific types of alienation and repression which this implied,
[07:02] Bob Dobbs: Rhyee.
[07:03] Bob Dobbs: Big Brother or imperialism.
[07:05] Bob Dobbs: All those literate Marxist objections to capitalism or imperialism led to alienation and the idea you're being repressed,
[07:12] Bob Dobbs: which the black people,
[07:13] Bob Dobbs: as I mean today,
[07:15] Bob Dobbs: are being urged to think they're subject to.
[07:17] Bob Dobbs: That's Black Lives Matter.
[07:19] Bob Dobbs: I'm jumping forward to that.
[07:21] Bob Dobbs: But 40 years ago,
[07:22] Bob Dobbs: that stopped being the case.
[07:24] Bob Dobbs: Baudrillard is pointing out,
[07:26] Bob Dobbs: now
[07:27] Bob Dobbs: I would think
[07:28] Bob Dobbs: McLuhan was trying to get to this point when he said satellite Earth,
[07:33] Bob Dobbs: what was it,
[07:36] Bob Dobbs: he called the Earth
[07:37] Bob Dobbs: Bucky Fuller's beach ball or something,
[07:40] Bob Dobbs: spaceship Earth,
[07:40] Bob Dobbs: whatever.
[07:41] Bob Dobbs: He said there's no passengers,
[07:45] Bob Dobbs: only crew.
[07:47] Bob Dobbs: Everybody's creating the vortex.
[07:52] Bob Dobbs: So there's not so much repression.
[07:55] Bob Dobbs: So that's what I see McLuhan pointing out that Baudrillard is trying to get to.
[08:01] Bob Dobbs: So I say Baudrillard is pointing out that if you look at a medium and you read McLuhan,
[08:04] Bob Dobbs: you think this medium,
[08:05] Bob Dobbs: TV,
[08:06] Bob Dobbs: is watching you.
[08:07] Bob Dobbs: That's the way it was when you were literate in the 50s and 60s,
[08:09] Bob Dobbs: but not in the 70s.
[08:11] Bob Dobbs: TV is not watching you.
[08:12] Bob Dobbs: It's not even a separate medium.
[08:14] Bob Dobbs: It's integrated into the flow of the global theater,
[08:17] Bob Dobbs: where you can't tell how it's separate from another medium.
[08:20] Bob Dobbs: Maybe I should say how it's separated from another medium.
[08:24] Bob Dobbs: It's the beginning of the electronic cable TV reality.
[08:27] Bob Dobbs: You have the merging of the medium and the message.
[08:31] Bob Dobbs: And Baudrillard says that's McLuhan and Wright,
[08:35] Bob Dobbs: it is,
[08:36] Bob Dobbs: Wright,
[08:36] Bob Dobbs: quote,
[08:36] Bob Dobbs: it is the first great formula of this new age.
[08:40] Bob Dobbs: Okay,
[08:40] Cameron McEwen: let's just stop there for a minute.
[08:44] Cameron McEwen: I've been rereading
[08:47] Cameron McEwen: Harold Innis.
[08:48] Bob Dobbs: Yes.
[08:48] Cameron McEwen: And Harold Innis.
[08:51] Cameron McEwen: in his own sort of very Canadian,
[08:54] Cameron McEwen: very Scottish,
[08:57] Cameron McEwen: very practical fashion,
[09:00] Cameron McEwen: was very concerned with ideas like this.
[09:04] Cameron McEwen: But one of the things he does that's very interesting is he shows that these ideas that we're talking about now in the,
[09:13] Cameron McEwen: let's say,
[09:13] Cameron McEwen: the
[09:16] Cameron McEwen: 1970s for McLuhan and
[09:18] Cameron McEwen: 1980s for Baudrillard,
[09:20] Cameron McEwen: We're already seen in the early
[09:25] Cameron McEwen: 19th century in England.
[09:28] Cameron McEwen: People were already saying that it's not the case that politics are parodied on the stage.
[09:39] Cameron McEwen: Instead,
[09:41] Cameron McEwen: politics are staged and we're all involved Innis.
[09:48] Cameron McEwen: staging,
[09:49] Cameron McEwen: which is taking over life.
[09:51] Cameron McEwen: That was already seen by intellectuals in the
[09:57] Cameron McEwen: 1830s.
[09:58] Cameron McEwen: So then...
[09:58] Bob Dobbs: Who's an example of that?
[10:03] Cameron McEwen: He quotes
[10:05] Cameron McEwen: Bulwer.
[10:07] Cameron McEwen: um or low trail low trimmer no no no no these are uh Innis isn't very interested in continental thought oh this is um very hmm Innis is quoting not McLuhan okay yeah
[10:23] Cameron McEwen: yeah this is this is in us showing that and you know in us was not uh first thought he died in 1952
[10:35] Cameron McEwen: So,
[10:35] Cameron McEwen: you know,
[10:38] Cameron McEwen: he certainly wasn't aware of debates going on 20 and 30 years later.
[10:43] Cameron McEwen: However,
[10:44] Cameron McEwen: the issues were already before him,
[10:50] Cameron McEwen: and they were before him in terms of what
[10:54] Cameron McEwen: 19th century
[10:56] Cameron McEwen: British intellectuals already saw going on in society.
[11:02] Cameron McEwen: So it seems to me we have...
[11:04] Cameron McEwen: two things going on here between Baudrillard and McLuhan.
[11:08] Cameron McEwen: One is,
[11:10] Cameron McEwen: what are the problems,
[11:15] Cameron McEwen: or no,
[11:15] Cameron McEwen: put it another way,
[11:16] Cameron McEwen: what is happening to society when the world becomes a global village?
[11:25] Cameron McEwen: And you can describe that happening in many different ways.
[11:30] Cameron McEwen: And then you can ask,
[11:32] Cameron McEwen: well,
[11:32] Cameron McEwen: What does that...
[11:33] Cameron McEwen: imply?
[11:35] Cameron McEwen: Where do you get to in the global village?
[11:38] Cameron McEwen: And the answer to that is implosion.
[11:41] Cameron McEwen: The answer to that is you don't get anywhere because things ultimately merge,
[11:48] Cameron McEwen: and with the merger you lose reality and you lose meaning.
[11:53] Cameron McEwen: Now,
[11:54] Bob Dobbs: who's Bulwer you're quoting Innis quote?
[11:58] Bob Dobbs: How do you spell that?
[11:58] Cameron McEwen: It was
[12:00] Cameron McEwen: B-U-L-W-E-R.
[12:02] Bob Dobbs: Bulwer.
[12:03] Bob Dobbs: Okay.
[12:04] Bob Dobbs: And he quotes them.
[12:06] Cameron McEwen: Yeah.
[12:08] Cameron McEwen: And this is practically only quotes.
[12:10] Cameron McEwen: And it's quite amazing.
[12:13] Cameron McEwen: So in political economy in the modern state,
[12:22] Cameron McEwen: he has long essays,
[12:25] Cameron McEwen: which are about 90%
[12:27] Cameron McEwen: quotations from other people.
[12:29] Cameron McEwen: To my mind,
[12:30] Cameron McEwen: it's the kind of model for Gutenberg Galaxy.
[12:33] Cameron McEwen: It's often Chardin Innis to know when it's Innis talking or when he's quoting somebody.
[12:40] Cameron McEwen: And the same thing is true in Gutenberg Galaxy.
[12:43] Cameron McEwen: There are unacknowledged quotations which just sort of go on from what McLuhan is talking about.
[12:53] Cameron McEwen: And then it turns out that he hasn't been speaking in his own voice at all.
[12:59] Cameron McEwen: He's been just citing somebody else.
[13:02] Cameron McEwen: and that's
[13:02] Cameron McEwen: something that you find in
[13:04] Cameron McEwen: Innis and Spades.
[13:07] Cameron McEwen: It's really not...
[13:08] Cameron McEwen: Go ahead.
[13:10] Bob Dobbs: You're talking about the
[13:12] Bob Dobbs: 1830s. This is where I start my
[13:14] Bob Dobbs: LaRue squadron,
[13:15] Bob Dobbs: 1840.
[13:16] Bob Dobbs: That's the global village.
[13:19] Cameron McEwen: Well,
[13:20] Cameron McEwen: you're prescient,
[13:20] Cameron McEwen: Bob.
[13:21] Bob Dobbs: Yes,
[13:22] Bob Dobbs: I anticipated Innis in retrospect.
[13:27] Cameron McEwen: That's a good line.
[13:29] Bob Dobbs: Yeah,
[13:30] Bob Dobbs: I hadn't known that Innis was...
[13:32] Bob Dobbs: what I was referring to.
[13:35] Bob Dobbs: You're saying that Bulwer,
[13:36] Bob Dobbs: he's quoting Bulwer in the 1830s?
[13:37] Bob Dobbs: Is that what you said?
[13:39] Bob Dobbs: Yes.
[13:39] Cameron McEwen: Yeah.
[13:40] Cameron McEwen: Yes.
[13:41] Cameron McEwen: But not exclusively Bulwer.
[13:44] Cameron McEwen: The quotations that he makes are astonishing.
[13:50] Cameron McEwen: I wrote a post that gives some of his quotations.
[13:58] Cameron McEwen: I don't know if you're interested to reference that at some point.
[14:02] Cameron McEwen: point that the post is called
[14:06] Cameron McEwen: McLuhan Reads Innis'
[14:09] Cameron McEwen: Political Economy in the Modern State,
[14:11] Cameron McEwen: number one.
[14:13] Cameron McEwen: And basically what I'm going to do is I'm going to go through
[14:17] Cameron McEwen: Political Economy in the Modern State and I'm going to show how there's an astonishing number of ideas in Innis that
[14:30] Cameron McEwen: I don't say I
[14:32] Cameron McEwen: were found by McLuhan for the first time in his life,
[14:37] Cameron McEwen: but either they were new to McLuhan and interested him,
[14:43] Cameron McEwen: or they reinforced ideas he had from someplace else.
[14:48] Cameron McEwen: So just as an example,
[14:50] Cameron McEwen: one of the...
[14:52] Bob Dobbs: When did Innis write this collection?
[14:56] Cameron McEwen: Some of the essays are from the
[14:58] Cameron McEwen: 1930s, but most of them are from the
[15:01] Cameron McEwen: 1940s.
[15:01] Bob Dobbs: Yeah,
[15:02] Bob Dobbs: before empowering communications and the bias of communication.
[15:06] Bob Dobbs: Okay.
[15:07] Cameron McEwen: Right.
[15:10] Bob Dobbs: All right,
[15:11] Cameron McEwen: that's good.
[15:12] Cameron McEwen: Okay,
[15:12] Cameron McEwen: yeah,
[15:12] Cameron McEwen: read a couple.
[15:12] Cameron McEwen: Yeah,
[15:13] Cameron McEwen: so,
[15:13] Cameron McEwen: for example,
[15:14] Cameron McEwen: here's a man by the name of Bagehot.
[15:18] Cameron McEwen: I don't know if that's the correct pronunciation of his name,
[15:21] Cameron McEwen: but it's B-A-G-E-H-O-T,
[15:24] Cameron McEwen: Walter Bagehot.
[15:25] Bob Dobbs: I've seen that name.
[15:27] Cameron McEwen: Yeah,
[15:27] Cameron McEwen: so he wrote an article on Charles Dickens already in 1858,
[15:33] Cameron McEwen: and what he says is,
[15:35] Cameron McEwen: London was,
[15:36] Cameron McEwen: no,
[15:37] Cameron McEwen: I'm sorry,
[15:37] Cameron McEwen: this is Innis.
[15:38] Cameron McEwen: Innis says London was like a newspaper,
[15:42] Cameron McEwen: right?
[15:43] Cameron McEwen: So,
[15:43] Cameron McEwen: and then he quotes Bagehot,
[15:46] Cameron McEwen: everything is there and everything is disconnected.
[15:51] Bob Dobbs: That's the quote from Bagehot.
[15:53] Cameron McEwen: That's right.
[15:54] Cameron McEwen: So this is
[15:57] Cameron McEwen: Innis citing people from the
[16:01] Cameron McEwen: 1850s in England,
[16:02] Cameron McEwen: and he's saying,
[16:03] Cameron McEwen: look,
[16:05] Cameron McEwen: certain problems are already...
[16:08] Cameron McEwen: apparent here in the
[16:11] Cameron McEwen: 1850s that will be developed by the symbolists in French poetry,
[16:19] Cameron McEwen: starting around that same time with Baudelaire and going to the end of the century with Mallarmé.
[16:28] Cameron McEwen: So
[16:28] Cameron McEwen: McLuhan, five years after this 1946 book by
[16:37] Cameron McEwen: Innis,
[16:39] Cameron McEwen: is saying that modern art is like a newspaper,
[16:44] Cameron McEwen: and he Wright all kinds of essays on that topic.
[16:49] Cameron McEwen: So then,
[16:50] Cameron McEwen: here's something else from him.
[16:52] Cameron McEwen: This is
[16:53] Cameron McEwen: Innis himself.
[16:54] Cameron McEwen: He says,
[16:56] Cameron McEwen: the London stage,
[16:58] Cameron McEwen: at that point,
[17:00] Cameron McEwen: the London stage was used to appeal to the eye rather than to the ear.
[17:07] Cameron McEwen: I mean,
[17:07] Cameron McEwen: this is incredible stuff.
[17:09] Cameron McEwen: right yeah any another quotation he says spectacles were the fashion at present and this is a quotation uh citing bulwer from 1833 at present the english instead of finding politics in the stage find
[17:28] Cameron McEwen: their stage in politics right so he that's the global village i mean sorry the global theater in 1833
[17:39] Bob Dobbs: You know,
[17:39] Bob Dobbs: this may be the guys I told you about,
[17:42] Bob Dobbs: the eye-ear ideologues.
[17:45] Bob Dobbs: Let me go to my library and see if I can see if Bagehot,
[17:49] Bob Dobbs: that may be where I've seen the book,
[17:51] Bob Dobbs: by this
[17:53] Bob Dobbs: Vincent somebody.
[17:54] Bob Dobbs: He was a student of McLuhan,
[17:55] Bob Dobbs: ended up teaching in the States.
[17:57] Bob Dobbs: I was telling you about him,
[17:57] Bob Dobbs: you know,
[17:58] Bob Dobbs: many months ago.
[18:01] Bob Dobbs: The eye-ear thing was in there in the middle of the 19th century.
[18:04] Bob Dobbs: So let's see what this is.
[18:12] Bob Dobbs: Vincent,
[18:14] Bob Dobbs: where is he?
[18:15] Bob Dobbs: Yeah,
[18:16] Cameron McEwen: I know who you're talking about,
[18:18] Cameron McEwen: but I can't remember his last name either.
[18:20] Bob Dobbs: Yeah,
[18:21] Bob Dobbs: Vincent.
[18:31] Bob Dobbs: Huge library here.
[18:33] Bob Dobbs: Huge.
[18:38] Bob Dobbs: Vincent,
[18:38] Bob Dobbs: come on,
[18:39] Bob Dobbs: where are you?
[18:42] Bob Dobbs: Keep talking while I look.
[18:45] Cameron McEwen: All right.
[18:47] Cameron McEwen: So
[18:48] Cameron McEwen: I guess what I would say is that about where we are in the book is that the attempt to go into the
[19:05] Cameron McEwen: practicalities of life in the
[19:10] Cameron McEwen: 1970s,
[19:11] Cameron McEwen: 1980s,
[19:12] Cameron McEwen: 1990s,
[19:12] Cameron McEwen: 2000,
[19:15] Cameron McEwen: is interesting in the sense that if
[19:20] Cameron McEwen: McLuhan really were outside of the cul-de-sac,
[19:25] Cameron McEwen: then we need to be able to find in him a good analysis of these happenings that occurred after he died.
[19:36] Cameron McEwen: Yeah.
[19:36] Cameron McEwen: Is it in his?
[19:38] Bob Dobbs: is
[19:39] Cameron McEwen: Innis you're talking about?
[19:41] Cameron McEwen: Well,
[19:41] Cameron McEwen: I mean,
[19:41] Cameron McEwen: it applies to Innis,
[19:42] Cameron McEwen: but
[19:44] Cameron McEwen: I'm speaking specifically of McLuhan.
[19:48] Cameron McEwen: What I'm saying is if somebody like McLuhan or indeed somebody like Innis had a way of looking at life,
[19:58] Cameron McEwen: looking tactility that was not disabled by Gutenberg perspective,
[20:05] Cameron McEwen: then one of the tests
[20:07] Cameron McEwen: that we need to bring to that is how that understanding can be applied to things that happened after they were dead.
[20:19] Cameron McEwen: And I think that's one way of looking at what you're doing in the book at this point.
[20:24] Cameron McEwen: You're following Baudrillard into practical reality after McLuhan was already passed away.
[20:38] Bob Dobbs: Yes.
[20:40] Bob Dobbs: The guy's name is Vincent Cherry.
[20:43] Bob Dobbs: I've got one book,
[20:44] Bob Dobbs: but it's not the one I'm looking for.
[20:48] Cameron McEwen: Sorry.
[20:50] Cameron McEwen: He Wright stuff on the generation of the First World War.
[20:55] Bob Dobbs: Yeah.
[20:55] Bob Dobbs: He wrote on...
[20:56] Cameron McEwen: The men of 1914 or whatever.
[20:59] Bob Dobbs: Yeah.
[21:00] Bob Dobbs: So,
[21:01] Bob Dobbs: where are these books?
[21:13] Bob Dobbs: I don't know why I can't see them.
[21:18] Cameron McEwen: So are you looking for books and then within the books you can search?
[21:23] Bob Dobbs: See if I can find them.
[21:24] Bob Dobbs: Yeah,
[21:25] Bob Dobbs: I'm looking for his particular book,
[21:26] Bob Dobbs: the first one I read.
[21:29] Bob Dobbs: And I've got to keep looking to find it.
[21:35] Cameron McEwen: You can't make a search across books?
[21:38] Bob Dobbs: What did you say?
[21:40] Bob Dobbs: Across.
[21:40] Cameron McEwen: I say,
[21:41] Cameron McEwen: can you...
[21:41] Cameron McEwen: Across.
[21:42] Cameron McEwen: In other words,
[21:44] Cameron McEwen: I guess,
[21:46] Cameron McEwen: when you find the book,
[21:48] Cameron McEwen: okay,
[21:48] Cameron McEwen: good.
[21:49] Bob Dobbs: Yeah,
[21:49] Bob Dobbs: it's called Ezra Pound,
[21:50] Bob Dobbs: Wyndham Lewis,
[21:51] Bob Dobbs: and Radical Modernism.
[21:53] Bob Dobbs: And it came out in 93.
[21:58] Bob Dobbs: So I'm going to go in the back and see if Bagehot is listed.
[22:06] Bob Dobbs: No Bagehot.
[22:08] Cameron McEwen: Are you looking at an electronic?
[22:11] Cameron McEwen: Version of the book?
[22:14] Cameron McEwen: No,
[22:14] Cameron McEwen: no,
[22:14] Cameron McEwen: Eric Devers.
[22:14] Cameron McEwen: No.
[22:14] Cameron McEwen: Oh,
[22:15] Cameron McEwen: I see.
[22:15] Bob Dobbs: And so he's talking,
[22:18] Bob Dobbs: let's see where he first gets,
[22:21] Bob Dobbs: from the continent to England,
[22:23] Bob Dobbs: 1889 to 1925.
[22:27] Bob Dobbs: Okay,
[22:28] Bob Dobbs: as the terror subsided in Postman Paris,
[22:32] Bob Dobbs: that's 1871,
[22:35] Bob Dobbs: liberal intellectuals,
[22:37] Bob Dobbs: Marie-Jean Condorcet,
[22:39] Bob Dobbs: Emmanuel Seath,
[22:40] Bob Dobbs: and...
[22:40] Bob Dobbs: Antoine de Stutt de Tracy,
[22:43] Bob Dobbs: I've only heard of Condorcet,
[22:44] Bob Dobbs: found themselves allied in a well-founded skepticism about the practical validity of the new political ideals.
[22:52] Bob Dobbs: Liberty and equality and fraternity,
[22:55] Bob Dobbs: urgent but nonetheless abstract notions,
[22:57] Bob Dobbs: had manifestly failed to guide civil behavior in the desired direction.
[23:02] Bob Dobbs: So this is about like a hundred years later.
[23:05] Bob Dobbs: And so this loose confederacy of thinkers...
[23:08] Bob Dobbs: Members of the class of Moral and Political Sciences at the newly formed Institute of France sought to return social thinking to an older enlightenment tradition.
[23:18] Bob Dobbs: Empirical inquiry into human physiology,
[23:21] Bob Dobbs: in particular the faculties of perception and cognition,
[23:25] Bob Dobbs: and not the reiteration of preconceived ideas,
[23:28] Bob Dobbs: must provide the concepts to guide service environment.
[23:31] Bob Dobbs: On this exercise they conferred a name that locates a prime irony of intellectual history.
[23:38] Bob Dobbs: The name is Hauntology,
[23:40] Bob Dobbs: Hauntology.
[23:44] Bob Dobbs: It's French.
[23:46] Bob Dobbs: For the usual modern sense of this term,
[23:49] Bob Dobbs: hyphen,
[23:50] Bob Dobbs: a body of political beliefs enjoying the unquestioned allegiance of the discarnate,
[23:57] Bob Dobbs: defies the first intent of ideology,
[24:00] Bob Dobbs: that's hyphenated,
[24:02] Bob Dobbs: intent of ideology,
[24:04] Bob Dobbs: as expressed in the Greek roots of the word.
[24:06] Bob Dobbs: Most precisely,
[24:07] Bob Dobbs: a study of images,
[24:08] Bob Dobbs: or eidos,
[24:09] Bob Dobbs: E-I-D-O-S,
[24:10] Bob Dobbs: which means image.
[24:11] Bob Dobbs: More broadly,
[24:12] Bob Dobbs: an objective analysis of the social meaning of sense impressions.
[24:17] Bob Dobbs: LaRouche would say they went Aristotelian.
[24:20] Bob Dobbs: Following John Locke and Abbe Condillac,
[24:22] Bob Dobbs: and regarding ideas merely as a transformed stuff of sensation,
[24:26] Bob Dobbs: the first ideologues,
[24:28] Bob Dobbs: isn't that interesting?
[24:29] Bob Dobbs: This is how the word was first said.
[24:31] Bob Dobbs: The first ideologues took the fabric of sentient and perceptual life
[24:36] Bob Dobbs: as the sole locus from which political and philosophical concepts could be adduced.
[24:41] Bob Dobbs: An abstract hypothesis must be founded on an objective basis.
[24:46] Bob Dobbs: That's concepts coming from percepts.
[24:49] Bob Dobbs: The right to property discovered a rationale that fairly samples their method.
[24:53] Bob Dobbs: Let me just jump ahead here.
[24:58] Bob Dobbs: Now,
[24:58] Bob Dobbs: we know McLuhan talks about Bernard.
[25:01] Bob Dobbs: So he says here,
[25:03] Bob Dobbs: news of the French movement reached England by 1797 when the monthly magazine carried notice of Tracy's Explorations of ideology,
[25:14] Bob Dobbs: yet its main tradition remained on the continent.
[25:17] Bob Dobbs: where Anglo-Americans of European leanings,
[25:19] Bob Dobbs: T.E.
[25:20] Bob Dobbs: Hume,
[25:21] Bob Dobbs: as well as Pound and Lewis,
[25:22] Bob Dobbs: could find the Enlightenment legacy,
[25:24] Bob Dobbs: which was rekindled at the turn of the next century.
[25:28] Cameron McEwen: You said 1797.
[25:30] Cameron McEwen: It must have meant 1897.
[25:34] Bob Dobbs: Yes,
[25:34] Bob Dobbs: but he's saying 1797.
[25:37] Bob Dobbs: Let me look at footnote three.
[25:38] Cameron McEwen: Yeah,
[25:38] Cameron McEwen: it must be a misprint in the book.
[25:41] Cameron McEwen: That doesn't sound right.
[25:43] Bob Dobbs: That's right.
[25:44] Bob Dobbs: Let's see.
[25:49] Bob Dobbs: Chapter
[25:57] Bob Dobbs: 1, footnote 3.
[25:59] Bob Dobbs: You know,
[25:59] Bob Dobbs: he's got here,
[26:00] Bob Dobbs: Monthly Magazine,
[26:01] Bob Dobbs: 3rd of April,
[26:05] Bob Dobbs: 1797.
[26:08] Cameron McEwen: Doesn't seem to be that early.
[26:09] Cameron McEwen: I mean,
[26:10] Cameron McEwen: that was immediately after the French Revolution.
[26:13] Bob Dobbs: Yeah.
[26:14] Cameron McEwen: So he may be saying that the
[26:18] Cameron McEwen: English...
[26:20] Cameron McEwen: got the news of the revolutions.
[26:25] Cameron McEwen: No,
[26:25] Cameron McEwen: no,
[26:25] Cameron McEwen: certainly.
[26:25] Cameron McEwen: I mean,
[26:26] Cameron McEwen: the
[26:27] Cameron McEwen: English knew about the
[26:29] Cameron McEwen: French Revolution very,
[26:31] Cameron McEwen: very quickly.
[26:32] Cameron McEwen: That was not a problem.
[26:34] Cameron McEwen: But the idea that the ideologues are going back to the previous century,
[26:42] Cameron McEwen: which is what you were reading about,
[26:44] Cameron McEwen: maybe that's what he's talking about.
[26:47] Cameron McEwen: Maybe that's the news.
[26:49] Cameron McEwen: that came to people like whom?
[26:52] Bob Dobbs: Yeah,
[26:52] Bob Dobbs: because he's quoting
[26:58] Bob Dobbs: Tracy from 1817.
[27:03] Bob Dobbs: So,
[27:03] Bob Dobbs: yeah,
[27:03] Bob Dobbs: there's a little screw-up here.
[27:07] Bob Dobbs: I'm seeing it,
[27:07] Bob Dobbs: I thought it was more in the 1850s when this became popular.
[27:13] Bob Dobbs: But,
[27:13] Bob Dobbs: anyways,
[27:14] Bob Dobbs: he says...
[27:17] Bob Dobbs: Hume,
[27:17] Bob Dobbs: as well as Pound and Lewis,
[27:18] Bob Dobbs: could find the Enlightenment legacy,
[27:21] Bob Dobbs: which was rekindled at the turn of the next century.
[27:25] Bob Dobbs: So that's 1910.
[27:27] Bob Dobbs: Sociologists were once again addressing the material basis of human sensibility,
[27:31] Bob Dobbs: as were estheticians like Gourmand,
[27:33] Bob Dobbs: you know,
[27:34] Bob Dobbs: René Gourmand and Benda.
[27:36] Bob Dobbs: The tradition they were extending,
[27:37] Bob Dobbs: however,
[27:38] Bob Dobbs: had complicated itself during the preceding century.
[27:42] Bob Dobbs: While the original ideologues belonged to a progressive intelligentsia,
[27:46] Bob Dobbs: eager to consolidate revolutionary gains by proving egalitarian ideas empirically,
[27:52] Bob Dobbs: so maybe,
[27:53] Bob Dobbs: 1797,
[27:55] Bob Dobbs: their scientific approach played into the reactionary hands of
[27:58] Bob Dobbs: Henri Saint-Simon and Auguste Comte in the mid-19th century,
[28:02] Bob Dobbs: so now he's jumped 50 years.
[28:04] Bob Dobbs: The earlier emphasis on common physiology was shifting to stress on variable human nature to describe an ideally hierarchical organic social order,
[28:13] Bob Dobbs: a natural elite.
[28:15] Bob Dobbs: Heirs to this
[28:16] Bob Dobbs: double tradition,
[28:17] Bob Dobbs: the modern critics Voices of Literature and painting align their Explorations with various social creeds opposite political testaments.
[28:24] Bob Dobbs: As such,
[28:24] Bob Dobbs: the Europeans demonstrate not only the flexibility of the living tradition,
[28:28] Bob Dobbs: but the free open-ended,
[28:29] Bob Dobbs: essentially inductive character of their method.
[28:32] Bob Dobbs: Their civics varied according to the different laws they saw evidence in the human census.
[28:37] Bob Dobbs: Now,
[28:38] Bob Dobbs: most attempts to return social precepts to the ways of the Soma,
[28:42] Bob Dobbs: Terry Eagleton,
[28:43] Bob Dobbs: he's a 70s guy,
[28:45] Bob Dobbs: argues
[28:45] Bob Dobbs: forcefully in the ideology of the aesthetic,
[28:49] Bob Dobbs: represent an enterprise designed to ratify the concepts of existing political order.
[28:54] Bob Dobbs: Okay,
[28:55] Bob Dobbs: so remember how McLuhan talked about theater lips?
[28:59] Bob Dobbs: This is,
[29:00] Bob Dobbs: he's mentioned here.
[29:01] Bob Dobbs: In romantic and Postman poetics,
[29:04] Bob Dobbs: no experience triggers more largely than the act of empathy.
[29:07] Bob Dobbs: From the landscape conventions of the late 18th century to the dramatic monologues of the Victorians.
[29:13] Bob Dobbs: A primary motive and goal for poet and reader is to achieve union with the aesthetic object.
[29:18] Bob Dobbs: Modern commentators tend to present this feeling of identification as a strictly physiological moment and a kind of descriptive mechanics.
[29:25] Bob Dobbs: Worringer,
[29:26] Bob Dobbs: who McLuhan talked about,
[29:28] Bob Dobbs: quote,
[29:28] Bob Dobbs: To enjoy aesthetically means to enjoy myself in a sensuous object diverse from myself.
[29:34] Bob Dobbs: Worringer argues in Abstraction and Empathy,
[29:36] Bob Dobbs: to empathize myself into it.
[29:39] Bob Dobbs: The main...
[29:39] Bob Dobbs: spring of his projection lies in his inner vitalist core.
[29:43] Bob Dobbs: This energy called,
[29:45] Bob Dobbs: quote,
[29:45] Bob Dobbs: life,
[29:46] Bob Dobbs: inner working,
[29:46] Bob Dobbs: striving by his form and our theater lips wells up and its surge carries his possessor into a feeling of contact with nature or objects close by.
[29:55] Bob Dobbs: Thus the recipient may flow uninhibitedly with his inner feeling of vitality,
[29:59] Bob Dobbs: with his inner need for activity into the cognate organic.
[30:03] Bob Dobbs: So,
[30:04] Bob Dobbs: this is all leading into Bergson.
[30:07] Bob Dobbs: who gets into empathy and that's aligned with the ear and then you have the eye um so why did but i'm looking for bagahot and he's not in here so bagahot
[30:23] Bob Dobbs: may be part of this world though and that's well he's the eye ear thing becomes by the mid-19th century uh factional so i'm thinking that's what
[30:37] Bob Dobbs: Bulwer or whoever you're quoting is getting it from and Innis is getting it from.
[30:43] Bob Dobbs: Okay?
[30:43] Bob Dobbs: So Vincent Sherry,
[30:44] Bob Dobbs: you might want to look into him sometime.
[30:48] Cameron McEwen: For sure.
[30:49] Cameron McEwen: But what's going on here in my view,
[30:54] Cameron McEwen: Bob,
[30:54] Cameron McEwen: is that the
[30:59] Cameron McEwen: 19th century,
[31:01] Cameron McEwen: like any century,
[31:03] Cameron McEwen: can be seen.
[31:06] Cameron McEwen: in terms of the dynamics of the relation between ear and eye or the dynamics between form and matter.
[31:19] Cameron McEwen: And so what I see going on here is people trying to think how these dynamics can be conceived in
[31:34] Cameron McEwen: a way that
[31:36] Cameron McEwen: provides access to what's going on and especially access to how to avoid extremes in society and how to maintain ideals in society.
[31:55] Cameron McEwen: So people start in France,
[31:58] Cameron McEwen: let's say,
[32:00] Cameron McEwen: first there is an extreme emphasis on ideas,
[32:04] Cameron McEwen: fraternity,
[32:06] Cameron McEwen: equality,
[32:06] Cameron McEwen: for example.
[32:08] Cameron McEwen: And now these people in 1870,
[32:12] Cameron McEwen: after the experience of the
[32:15] Cameron McEwen: 19th century before them,
[32:18] Cameron McEwen: say,
[32:18] Cameron McEwen: well,
[32:18] Cameron McEwen: look,
[32:19] Cameron McEwen: this concentration on ideas didn't lead to stability at all.
[32:26] Cameron McEwen: It led to,
[32:28] Cameron McEwen: first,
[32:30] Cameron McEwen: too much emphasis on revolution,
[32:34] Cameron McEwen: then too much emphasis on stability and it really never got us anywhere.
[32:40] Cameron McEwen: So what we have to do is we have to try to bring ideas into relation with soma,
[32:47] Cameron McEwen: with the body.
[32:48] Cameron McEwen: Yeah.
[32:49] Cameron McEwen: And so the analysis is,
[32:52] Cameron McEwen: well,
[32:52] Cameron McEwen: there was too much Platonism,
[32:54] Cameron McEwen: we need more Aristotelianism.
[32:56] Cameron McEwen: Yeah.
[32:58] Cameron McEwen: But the problem that's going on here,
[33:01] Cameron McEwen: and one that we all saw in Baudrillard,
[33:04] Cameron McEwen: is that no matter how you play with these oppositions,
[33:09] Cameron McEwen: all you do is get more firmly entrenched in them.
[33:13] Cameron McEwen: And so the big question is,
[33:15] Cameron McEwen: how do we get into a place where we can more or less look back on these oppositions or at least not be trapped by
[33:30] Cameron McEwen: them?
[33:31] Cameron McEwen: And that this
[33:33] Cameron McEwen: ideal in relationship to the oppositions becomes a kind of motor to modern intellectual history.
[33:43] Bob Dobbs: Yeah.
[33:44] Bob Dobbs: Now,
[33:44] Bob Dobbs: Bagehot,
[33:45] Bob Dobbs: the reason Innis would know about him,
[33:48] Bob Dobbs: he's a journalist and businessman who wrote extensively about government and economics.
[33:56] Bob Dobbs: Okay.
[33:56] Bob Dobbs: So says that
[34:01] Bob Dobbs: He wrote a book in 1872 called Physics and Politics,
[34:05] Bob Dobbs: in which he examines how civilizations sustain themselves,
[34:09] Bob Dobbs: arguing that in their earliest phase,
[34:11] Bob Dobbs: civilizations are very much in opposition to the values of modern liberalism,
[34:15] Bob Dobbs: insofar as they are sustained by conformism and military success.
[34:18] Bob Dobbs: But once they are secured,
[34:19] Bob Dobbs: it is possible for them to mature into systems which allow for greater diversity and freedom.
[34:24] Bob Dobbs: His viewpoint was based on a distinction between the qualities of an accomplished man
[34:29] Bob Dobbs: and those of a rude man,
[34:31] Bob Dobbs: which he considered the result of iterative inheritances by which the nervous organization of individuals became increasingly refined through the generations.
[34:40] Bob Dobbs: He regarded this distinction as a moral achievement,
[34:43] Bob Dobbs: whereby through the action of the will,
[34:45] Bob Dobbs: this accomplished elite was able to morally differentiate themselves from rude men by hereditary drill.
[34:53] Cameron McEwen: Notice,
[34:54] Cameron McEwen: number one,
[34:56] Cameron McEwen: that's at the same time as the French...
[34:59] Cameron McEwen: people were looking for some sort of connection between ideas and the body.
[35:05] Cameron McEwen: And he seems to be talking about the same thing.
[35:08] Cameron McEwen: He doesn't come to the same conclusions.
[35:11] Cameron McEwen: But I think what you may be talking about here is not the Bulwer that
[35:17] Cameron McEwen: Innis was quoting from 1833,
[35:20] Cameron McEwen: but his son.
[35:21] Bob Dobbs: No,
[35:22] Bob Dobbs: this is Bagehot.
[35:23] Bob Dobbs: I'm quoting Bagehot.
[35:24] Cameron McEwen: Oh,
[35:24] Cameron McEwen: I'm sorry.
[35:24] Cameron McEwen: Yeah,
[35:25] Cameron McEwen: Bagehot.
[35:26] Cameron McEwen: Okay,
[35:26] Cameron McEwen: Bagehot,
[35:27] Cameron McEwen: yeah.
[35:28] Cameron McEwen: Walter Bagehot.
[35:29] Bob Dobbs: Right,
[35:30] Bob Dobbs: so now if I put in Bulwer,
[35:31] Bob Dobbs: let's see what they say about him.
[35:35] Bob Dobbs: Bulwer,
[35:36] Bob Dobbs: this would be 1801 to 1872,
[35:39] Bob Dobbs: British politician,
[35:40] Bob Dobbs: diplomat,
[35:40] Bob Dobbs: and writer probably,
[35:41] Bob Dobbs: right?
[35:43] Cameron McEwen: Yeah.
[35:43] Bob Dobbs: Yeah,
[35:44] Bob Dobbs: Henry Bulwer,
[35:49] Bob Dobbs: political...
[35:50] Cameron McEwen: Henry Bulwer doesn't sound right.
[35:53] Cameron McEwen: Let me try and find out...
[35:56] Bob Dobbs: He was a writer.
[36:04] Bob Dobbs: British politician,
[36:05] Bob Dobbs: English physician and writer,
[36:07] Bob Dobbs: John Bull,
[36:07] Bob Dobbs: no that's 1606,
[36:12] Bob Dobbs: nephew of Henry Bulwer.
[36:15] Bob Dobbs: I think it might be,
[36:17] Bob Dobbs: unless it's
[36:18] Bob Dobbs: James Bulwer.
[36:21] Cameron McEwen: I'll have the answer in a minute.
[36:39] Cameron McEwen: His name was Edward
[36:41] Cameron McEwen: Lytton Bulwer.
[36:43] Cameron McEwen: Lytton is spelled L-Y-T-T-O-N.
[36:47] Bob Dobbs: Yeah,
[36:47] Bob Dobbs: that's this guy.
[36:49] Cameron McEwen: Yeah?
[36:50] Bob Dobbs: Okay,
[36:50] Bob Dobbs: good.
[36:50] Bob Dobbs: It says
[36:51] Bob Dobbs: William Henry Lytton
[36:54] Bob Dobbs: Earl Bulwer.
[36:55] Bob Dobbs: He's got Lytton,
[36:56] Bob Dobbs: so maybe he was the elder brother.
[36:59] Bob Dobbs: Okay,
[37:00] Bob Dobbs: Bulwer,
[37:01] Bob Dobbs: Edward Bulwer Lytton is the brother of the guy I'm talking about.
[37:04] Bob Dobbs: So I'll click on that guy.
[37:08] Bob Dobbs: He was a writer and politician too.
[37:11] Bob Dobbs: Let's see what they say about his ideas.
[37:16] Cameron McEwen: Yeah,
[37:16] Cameron McEwen: the Bulwer family was active throughout the
[37:19] Cameron McEwen: 19th century in England.
[37:20] Cameron McEwen: And if memory serves,
[37:23] Cameron McEwen: the last one was involved in a very scandalous life.
[37:31] Cameron McEwen: I can't remember if he had several wives at the same time.
[37:35] Bob Dobbs: Would that be Edward?
[37:38] Cameron McEwen: No,
[37:38] Cameron McEwen: no.
[37:39] Cameron McEwen: This is two or three generations later.
[37:42] Bob Dobbs: This guy is quite encyclopedic.
[37:44] Bob Dobbs: So,
[37:45] Bob Dobbs: Edward,
[37:47] Bob Dobbs: he began in 1820 with a book of poems.
[37:51] Bob Dobbs: He wrote in a variety of genres,
[37:53] Bob Dobbs: including historical fiction,
[37:55] Bob Dobbs: mystery,
[37:55] Bob Dobbs: romance,
[37:56] Bob Dobbs: the occult,
[37:57] Bob Dobbs: and science fiction.
[37:59] Bob Dobbs: He financed his extravagant way of life with a varied and prolific literary output,
[38:03] Bob Dobbs: sometimes publishing anonymously.
[38:05] Bob Dobbs: So,
[38:06] Bob Dobbs: pretty interesting character.
[38:08] Cameron McEwen: Yep.
[38:09] Cameron McEwen: Innis quotes from a book called England and the English.
[38:14] Cameron McEwen: He quotes a lot from it.
[38:16] Cameron McEwen: And one amazing quotation from Bulwer in 1833 is the following.
[38:24] Cameron McEwen: He says,
[38:25] Cameron McEwen: the magic of Gutenberg conjured a wide chasm between the past and future history of mankind,
[38:34] Cameron McEwen: the people on one side of the gulf.
[38:36] Cameron McEwen: are not the same people as on the other side.
[38:40] Bob Dobbs: Wow,
[38:40] Bob Dobbs: now this...
[38:41] Cameron McEwen: That's incredible,
[38:42] Cameron McEwen: right?
[38:42] Bob Dobbs: Yes,
[38:43] Bob Dobbs: and I know who this Paul Rulettan is.
[38:45] Bob Dobbs: He's in the conspiracy literature.
[38:47] Bob Dobbs: Listen to this.
[38:49] Bob Dobbs: He wrote many articles and many other works,
[38:51] Bob Dobbs: including Vril,
[38:52] Bob Dobbs: V-R-I-L,
[38:53] Bob Dobbs: The Power of the Coming Race,
[38:54] Bob Dobbs: 1871,
[38:56] Bob Dobbs: which drew heavily on his interest in the occult and contributed to the early growth of the science fiction genre.
[39:02] Bob Dobbs: Its story of a subterranean race waiting to reclaim the surface of the earth is an early science fiction theme.
[39:09] Bob Dobbs: The book popularized the hollow earth theory and may have inspired Nazi mysticism.
[39:13] Bob Dobbs: His term Vril lent its name to Beauvril meat extract.
[39:18] Bob Dobbs: The book was also the theme of a fundraising event held at the Royal Albert Hall in 1891,
[39:24] Bob Dobbs: the Vrilja Bazaar and Fete.
[39:26] Bob Dobbs: Vril has been adopted by theosophists and occultists since the
[39:30] Bob Dobbs: 1870s and became slow.
[39:32] Bob Dobbs: closely associated with the ideas of an esoteric neo-Nazism after 1945.
[39:38] Bob Dobbs: That's pretty interesting.
[39:39] Bob Dobbs: That's the kind of guy McLuhan would be interested in.
[39:42] Bob Dobbs: And it's interesting that
[39:45] Bob Dobbs: Innis says that...
[39:48] Cameron McEwen: Yes,
[39:48] Cameron McEwen: but Innis is interested in a different aspect.
[39:51] Cameron McEwen: But
[39:52] Cameron McEwen: I'm not sure that these are the same bulwark.
[39:58] Bob Dobbs: It is.
[39:59] Bob Dobbs: This is bulwark Lytton.
[39:59] Bob Dobbs: You said Lytton.
[40:01] Bob Dobbs: That's his name.
[40:02] Cameron McEwen: Yeah.
[40:03] Cameron McEwen: But is it is his name is his last name Bulwer-Lytton?
[40:08] Cameron McEwen: If it is.
[40:09] Bob Dobbs: Yeah,
[40:10] Cameron McEwen: that's a difference.
[40:11] Cameron McEwen: This guy,
[40:12] Cameron McEwen: the guy that Innis is quoting is Edward
[40:15] Cameron McEwen: Lytton Bulwer.
[40:17] Cameron McEwen: Now,
[40:18] Cameron McEwen: as I said,
[40:19] Cameron McEwen: this family was a large family,
[40:23] Cameron McEwen: was very.
[40:25] Cameron McEwen: influential among intellectuals and politicians throughout the
[40:31] Cameron McEwen: 19th century.
[40:32] Cameron McEwen: Now,
[40:33] Cameron McEwen: if there was a Bulwer-Lytton,
[40:35] Cameron McEwen: that could very well be somebody who was emphasizing a connection with the Lytton and Bulwer families,
[40:47] Cameron McEwen: but is not the same person as Edward Lytton Bulwer.
[40:51] Cameron McEwen: And Lytton is the middle.
[40:53] Cameron McEwen: middle name,
[40:54] Cameron McEwen: not part of the last name of the guy that Innis is quoting.
[40:58] Bob Dobbs: Okay,
[40:59] Bob Dobbs: so there's a
[41:02] Bob Dobbs: Edward
[41:03] Bob Dobbs: Bulwer-Lytton, not hyphenated,
[41:11] Bob Dobbs: he was created,
[41:14] Bob Dobbs: he died in 1870,
[41:17] Bob Dobbs: he died born,
[41:19] Bob Dobbs: no,
[41:19] Bob Dobbs: married in 1827.
[41:26] Bob Dobbs: What did he do?
[41:28] Bob Dobbs: It's kind of more obscure.
[41:29] Bob Dobbs: Edward Bulwer-Lytton.
[41:32] Bob Dobbs: And you're saying your guy is Edward Lytton Bulwer,
[41:35] Bob Dobbs: but not hyphenated?
[41:37] Bob Dobbs: No.
[41:38] Cameron McEwen: Well,
[41:38] Cameron McEwen: but remember that in
[41:44] Cameron McEwen: Innis, as well as in McLuhan,
[41:47] Cameron McEwen: there's all sorts of problems with the manuscripts.
[41:51] Cameron McEwen: You never know if something is correct.
[41:54] Cameron McEwen: or not.
[41:55] Bob Dobbs: Right.
[41:57] Bob Dobbs: So this guy did write novels.
[42:02] Bob Dobbs: And what year is your Bulwer-Lytton?
[42:08] Bob Dobbs: The one,
[42:08] Bob Dobbs: yeah,
[42:08] Bob Dobbs: 1873.
[42:12] Bob Dobbs: Okay.
[42:12] Bob Dobbs: Born 1803.
[42:16] Bob Dobbs: This guy's born in 1803.
[42:18] Bob Dobbs: So it is.
[42:22] Bob Dobbs: Okay.
[42:22] Bob Dobbs: They call him Edward Bulwer Lytton.
[42:24] Bob Dobbs: Not hyphenated,
[42:26] Bob Dobbs: but then down below his picture,
[42:27] Bob Dobbs: he is hyphenated.
[42:29] Bob Dobbs: So I think it's the same guy.
[42:32] Bob Dobbs: It's just a lot of mix-up on the name.
[42:35] Cameron McEwen: Maybe.
[42:36] Cameron McEwen: I'm looking him up in
[42:38] Cameron McEwen: Wikipedia right now,
[42:40] Cameron McEwen: and it turns out the guy's name is said to be the following.
[42:44] Cameron McEwen: It's said to be
[42:45] Cameron McEwen: Edward
[42:46] Cameron McEwen: George Earl
[42:48] Cameron McEwen: Lytton
[42:50] Cameron McEwen: Bulwer Lytton.
[42:53] Cameron McEwen: So Lytton is in there twice.
[42:56] Bob Dobbs: Yeah,
[42:56] Bob Dobbs: it's the same guy,
[42:58] Bob Dobbs: but he has a long name and a short name in two different positions.
[43:03] Cameron McEwen: Maybe.
[43:06] Bob Dobbs: So,
[43:07] Bob Dobbs: okay,
[43:08] Bob Dobbs: now read the quote again about Gutenberg Galaxy.
[43:10] Bob Dobbs: That's the important part.
[43:14] Cameron McEwen: I have to go to,
[43:18] Cameron McEwen: okay.
[43:18] Cameron McEwen: The magic of Gutenberg conjured a wide...
[43:21] Cameron McEwen: chasm between the past and future history of mankind.
[43:26] Cameron McEwen: The people on one side of the gulf are not the people on the other side.
[43:32] Bob Dobbs: You see,
[43:32] Bob Dobbs: this is where McLuhan,
[43:34] Bob Dobbs: he knew that media studies already was happening in the
[43:38] Bob Dobbs: 19th century.
[43:39] Bob Dobbs: And that's why he said,
[43:41] Bob Dobbs: I'm applied,
[43:42] Bob Dobbs: Joyce.
[43:42] Bob Dobbs: I'm not coming up with anything new.
[43:45] Bob Dobbs: I'm saying this is what we didn't notice,
[43:47] Bob Dobbs: that the science of media ecology had shown up
[43:50] Bob Dobbs: And the men of 1914 were bouncing off it,
[43:53] Bob Dobbs: but I have a perspective of later,
[43:56] Bob Dobbs: and I can apply it.
[43:57] Bob Dobbs: I can complete it.
[43:59] Bob Dobbs: See,
[43:59] Bob Dobbs: so this is important to understand how much,
[44:02] Bob Dobbs: as
[44:03] Bob Dobbs: Vincent Sherry's book shows,
[44:05] Bob Dobbs: that this eye-ear sensory battle goes on in the 19th century,
[44:09] Bob Dobbs: which nobody knows about,
[44:12] Bob Dobbs: in the McLuhan world anyways.
[44:14] Bob Dobbs: That McLuhan didn't make this up.
[44:15] Bob Dobbs: He came out of an obscure tradition.
[44:20] Cameron McEwen: Yeah,
[44:21] Cameron McEwen: but it's a tradition that is not sort of one current.
[44:30] Cameron McEwen: It's multiple currents.
[44:33] Cameron McEwen: So in especially
[44:36] Cameron McEwen: Catholic theology,
[44:39] Cameron McEwen: there was,
[44:41] Cameron McEwen: especially in the Middle Ages,
[44:43] Cameron McEwen: and I don't know where the Middle Ages got it from.
[44:45] Cameron McEwen: There's probably research out there that...
[44:48] Cameron McEwen: has looked into this,
[44:50] Cameron McEwen: but the whole idea of the common sense and how the senses relate to each other is already in Dianima of Aristotle and was taken up in very detailed commentaries on Aristotle by
[45:07] Cameron McEwen: the scholastics in the Middle Ages.
[45:10] Cameron McEwen: So there's this whole tradition from
[45:15] Cameron McEwen: Aristotle that um,
[45:18] Cameron McEwen: probably relates to
[45:20] Cameron McEwen: Aristotle's attempts to sort of capture the sense of Plato.
[45:29] Cameron McEwen: and to bring it forward in new ways,
[45:34] Cameron McEwen: which then leaves an imprint on the whole civilization.
[45:40] Cameron McEwen: So what these people are doing with the eye and the ear in the
[45:44] Cameron McEwen: 19th century in France,
[45:46] Cameron McEwen: and then what McLuhan is doing with the eye and the ear later,
[45:52] Cameron McEwen: a century later,
[45:54] Cameron McEwen: basically is going back to Plato and Aristotle.
[45:58] Cameron McEwen: and
[45:59] Cameron McEwen: saying how are we to first of all understand what was at stake
[46:09] Cameron McEwen: 2,500 years ago and then understand how that might be applied today and in wondering how it might be applied today we have to understand how it got screwed up or how it got forgotten or
[46:27] Cameron McEwen: overlooked.
[46:29] Cameron McEwen: in all of these years.
[46:31] Cameron McEwen: Yeah,
[46:32] Bob Dobbs: let me say this.
[46:33] Bob Dobbs: The Coleridge says people are either Platonists or Aristotelians.
[46:39] Bob Dobbs: Now,
[46:39] Bob Dobbs: this is the effect of the phonetic alphabet.
[46:41] Bob Dobbs: You can go abstract,
[46:43] Bob Dobbs: which is Plato's ideas,
[46:45] Bob Dobbs: or then you can balance off the hyper-abstraction of Plato to someone like Aristotle and move back to the senses.
[46:53] Bob Dobbs: So you've got the battle with the senses,
[46:55] Bob Dobbs: or you could say the mind-body-spirit.
[46:56] Bob Dobbs: split comes in with the phonetic alphabet.
[46:59] Bob Dobbs: That's schizophrenia.
[47:00] Bob Dobbs: That's split.
[47:02] Bob Dobbs: And it's always the same all the way through.
[47:04] Bob Dobbs: Then it's intensified with the printing press,
[47:06] Bob Dobbs: and then the electric age confuses everybody.
[47:10] Cameron McEwen: Correct.
[47:11] Bob Dobbs: New tactility.
[47:13] Cameron McEwen: Correct.
[47:13] Bob Dobbs: That's the bigger arc here.
[47:14] Cameron McEwen: So the new tactility is a kind of reference back to Plato and Aristotle.
[47:21] Bob Dobbs: Yeah.
[47:23] Cameron McEwen: What it's saying is Um,
[47:26] Cameron McEwen: The essential connection that was always the motor of any considerations or applications of these splits for 2,500 years,
[47:40] Cameron McEwen: this motor was already at stake back between Plato and Aristotle,
[47:45] Cameron McEwen: and we have to recapture that.
[47:48] Cameron McEwen: And part of the recapturing is understanding its deformities.
[47:53] Bob Dobbs: Right,
[47:54] Bob Dobbs: and also
[47:55] Bob Dobbs: Aeschylus.
[47:56] Bob Dobbs: And theater.
[47:58] Bob Dobbs: The theater dramatized the eye versus ear in another way.
[48:03] Cameron McEwen: Yes.
[48:05] Cameron McEwen: In the interplay between the chorus and the protagonist.
[48:10] Bob Dobbs: Yeah,
[48:10] Bob Dobbs: or the individual and the collective.
[48:12] Bob Dobbs: That comes in with writing.
[48:14] Bob Dobbs: It's not a problem in pre-literate societies.
[48:17] Bob Dobbs: Everybody's just part of the Borg,
[48:20] Bob Dobbs: the acoustic tactile Borg of aboriginals.
[48:23] Cameron McEwen: But remember the...
[48:26] Cameron McEwen: When we're talking in linear terms like this,
[48:31] Cameron McEwen: what we're trying to do is we're trying to get a handle on something that is not linear.
[48:38] Bob Dobbs: Yeah,
[48:38] Bob Dobbs: we're trying to drop the terms once we've mastered them.
[48:43] Cameron McEwen: Yes,
[48:44] Cameron McEwen: absolutely.
[48:49] Cameron McEwen: Yeah,
[48:50] Cameron McEwen: that's why Wittgenstein,
[48:51] Cameron McEwen: for example,
[48:53] Cameron McEwen: in the Tractatus says that
[48:55] Cameron McEwen: What we're trying to do is climb a ladder and then get rid of the ladder.
[49:00] Bob Dobbs: Yeah.
[49:01] Bob Dobbs: Okay,
[49:02] Bob Dobbs: so we see where McLuhan doesn't get out of the cul-de-sac.
[49:07] Bob Dobbs: How do we not repeat that?
[49:11] Bob Dobbs: We climb the ladder and then get rid of the ladder.
[49:13] Cameron McEwen: I think McLuhan does.
[49:15] Cameron McEwen: I think McLuhan does get out of the cul-de-sac.
[49:19] Bob Dobbs: But he can't communicate it.
[49:21] Cameron McEwen: Correct.
[49:23] Cameron McEwen: Exactly the problem of civilization.
[49:26] Cameron McEwen: Many people have not been captured by the cul-de-sac,
[49:29] Cameron McEwen: but they were unable to specify it in such a way that it was communicated.
[49:36] Cameron McEwen: So in modern times,
[49:38] Cameron McEwen: what we have is a problem of communication.
[49:41] Cameron McEwen: And it's a problem of communication in two different ways.
[49:45] Cameron McEwen: One is the problem of tactility,
[49:48] Cameron McEwen: which is communication.
[49:50] Cameron McEwen: The communication that is...
[49:52] Cameron McEwen: between all things and makes all things possible.
[49:55] Cameron McEwen: There's that sort of communication.
[49:57] Cameron McEwen: And then there's the communication of that communication.
[50:02] Cameron McEwen: And what we have in modern times is a failure of both.
[50:06] Cameron McEwen: The tactility is collapsing and floating on itself,
[50:10] Cameron McEwen: and it's imploding on itself because we've lost the ability to communicate about it.
[50:16] Bob Dobbs: So that's where the tactility takes off.
[50:19] Bob Dobbs: That's what I'm trying to show with the...
[50:21] Bob Dobbs: Squaring of tactile in the Android Meme and then the tech body is tactile he takes off on its own and Metaphorically leaves the human level and we're trying to communicate that situation
[50:34] Bob Dobbs: Which yes really and what's yeah,
[50:36] Cameron McEwen: what's interesting about your formulation is that?
[50:40] Cameron McEwen: Tactility squared in the sense that it can be taken over by the Android Meme.
[50:45] Cameron McEwen: Yes is actually the loss of tactility
[50:50] Cameron McEwen: Because tactility is not something that can be taken over.
[50:59] Cameron McEwen: It's what first makes taking over possible.
[51:02] Cameron McEwen: So it's a mistake in time,
[51:04] Cameron McEwen: you could say.
[51:06] Cameron McEwen: It takes something as secondary,
[51:08] Cameron McEwen: which is in fact primary.
[51:11] Bob Dobbs: Right.
[51:12] Bob Dobbs: And you know what?
[51:13] Bob Dobbs: Spelling out what I did in a linear way,
[51:16] Bob Dobbs: sort of,
[51:17] Bob Dobbs: needs to be said to lead to our conversation where we can talk,
[51:22] Bob Dobbs: which is better than writing,
[51:23] Bob Dobbs: the problem and almost talk ourselves out of it,
[51:28] Bob Dobbs: out of the cul-de-sac,
[51:29] Bob Dobbs: by stating the problem very clearly.
[51:32] Bob Dobbs: and it includes artificial intelligence or AI.
[51:35] Cameron McEwen: That's exactly where I was just going to go,
[51:38] Cameron McEwen: Bob.
[51:38] Cameron McEwen: Good.
[51:41] Cameron McEwen: If
[51:42] Cameron McEwen: AI is able to complete its hold on humanity,
[51:48] Cameron McEwen: that's the decisive event in human history,
[51:56] Cameron McEwen: and it's a very negative one.
[51:58] Cameron McEwen: It may be the end of humans.
[52:00] Cameron McEwen: So then...
[52:03] Cameron McEwen: If we ask what's going on here,
[52:06] Cameron McEwen: we say well it's it's tactility cubed,
[52:09] Cameron McEwen: or tactility to the tenth or something like this,
[52:13] Cameron McEwen: where the very possibility of tactility no longer exists with the body or with human
[52:29] Cameron McEwen: history.
[52:29] Cameron McEwen: It's completely taken off into a new dimension.
[52:33] Bob Dobbs: Right,
[52:33] Bob Dobbs: and I can see where Kroker trying to say this with metaphors like,
[52:36] Bob Dobbs: the genes leave the body and jump into the machinic,
[52:41] Bob Dobbs: you know?
[52:42] Cameron McEwen: Yeah.
[52:42] Cameron McEwen: That's a bizarre way.
[52:43] Cameron McEwen: Absolutely.
[52:44] Bob Dobbs: Now,
[52:45] Bob Dobbs: as you say this,
[52:46] Bob Dobbs: it clarifies what I've thought and discussed with Ion.
[52:50] Bob Dobbs: I bring in ESP extended,
[52:53] Bob Dobbs: which is Ion,
[52:55] Bob Dobbs: and
[52:56] Bob Dobbs: Ion admits...
[52:57] Bob Dobbs: They're up against a problem,
[52:59] Bob Dobbs: the tech body.
[52:59] Bob Dobbs: And as he's even saying lately,
[53:01] Bob Dobbs: the tech body is winning in the battle with humans,
[53:07] Bob Dobbs: with ion helping humans,
[53:08] Bob Dobbs: but failing.
[53:09] Bob Dobbs: That's where we're at right now.
[53:11] Bob Dobbs: But that complexity,
[53:13] Bob Dobbs: you bring in ESP,
[53:15] Bob Dobbs: and then my phrase,
[53:15] Bob Dobbs: cloning ESP,
[53:17] Bob Dobbs: all of these have been superseded by something.
[53:20] Bob Dobbs: And you're saying it's no longer human.
[53:23] Bob Dobbs: We would include ESP in the human.
[53:25] Bob Dobbs: Something has threatened humans here.
[53:31] Cameron McEwen: Sure.
[53:31] Cameron McEwen: Well,
[53:32] Cameron McEwen: I think you've been talking about that for a long time.
[53:34] Cameron McEwen: Oh,
[53:36] Cameron McEwen: very long time.
[53:36] Cameron McEwen: In the 1980s.
[53:37] Cameron McEwen: Yeah.
[53:39] Cameron McEwen: If not earlier than that.
[53:41] Bob Dobbs: And I think McLuhan was too with titles in the 50s like his electronics ESP.
[53:48] Bob Dobbs: Remember that essay?
[53:50] Cameron McEwen: Sure.
[53:50] Bob Dobbs: Ruby Vocal Visual.
[53:51] Bob Dobbs: ESP was always lurking in there.
[53:53] Bob Dobbs: He would stick it in here and there,
[53:55] Bob Dobbs: you know?
[53:56] Bob Dobbs: And that was maybe another term for tactility for him.
[54:01] Cameron McEwen: Well,
[54:03] Cameron McEwen: he,
[54:03] Cameron McEwen: I don't know about that.
[54:04] Cameron McEwen: I think that your use of
[54:07] Cameron McEwen: ESP as a,
[54:15] Cameron McEwen: you could almost say the Android Meme.
[54:19] Cameron McEwen: becomes the externalized senses of humans in a way that they no longer have control of or don't even know that it's going on.
[54:33] Bob Dobbs: Right,
[54:34] Bob Dobbs: and that is in so many movies for a hundred years that theme.
[54:39] Cameron McEwen: Yeah.
[54:39] Bob Dobbs: Some alien,
[54:40] Bob Dobbs: some force,
[54:41] Bob Dobbs: the Exorcist or something takes over and the human can't control it.
[54:45] Cameron McEwen: Correct,
[54:47] Cameron McEwen: So the...
[54:48] Cameron McEwen: Let me just read you the end of the post that I did on
[54:57] Cameron McEwen: McLuhan reading Innis.
[55:02] Cameron McEwen: This would be
[55:04] Cameron McEwen: Innis's book of essays from the
[55:07] Cameron McEwen: 1930s and 40s,
[55:08] Cameron McEwen: which he published in 1946,
[55:10] Cameron McEwen: which was the year that McLuhan went to the University of Toronto and stayed there.
[55:15] Bob Dobbs: Yeah.
[55:16] Cameron McEwen: So he arrives in 1946.
[55:21] Cameron McEwen: His friend Easterbrook,
[55:23] Cameron McEwen: one of his best friends in the world,
[55:26] Cameron McEwen: comes back to the political economy department at Toronto,
[55:33] Cameron McEwen: from which he had his Ph.D.
[55:34] Cameron McEwen: in the 30s.
[55:36] Cameron McEwen: He comes back to the department to teach in 1947,
[55:43] Cameron McEwen: so one year after McLuhan arrives.
[55:45] Bob Dobbs: Right.
[55:46] Cameron McEwen: So in 1947,
[55:48] Cameron McEwen: in the fall,
[55:49] Cameron McEwen: Easterbrook begins to teach in the department.
[55:52] Cameron McEwen: His advisor had been Innis.
[55:55] Cameron McEwen: Innis had seen the publication of
[55:58] Cameron McEwen: Easterbrook...
[55:59] Cameron McEwen: thesis by University of Toronto
[56:02] Cameron McEwen: Press, had written a forward to the book and was an increasingly close friend with
[56:12] Bob Dobbs: Easterbrook when Easterbrook came back.
[56:14] Bob Dobbs: Yeah,
[56:14] Bob Dobbs: here's this guy that's going to be a big influence on McLuhan and his best buddy's already involved with him.
[56:19] Bob Dobbs: That's a pretty tight circle there.
[56:21] Cameron McEwen: Absolutely.
[56:22] Cameron McEwen: So
[56:24] Cameron McEwen: McLuhan gets introduced to
[56:27] Cameron McEwen: Innis in
[56:29] Cameron McEwen: 1947 or 1948.
[56:33] Cameron McEwen: I think it was probably 1948.
[56:36] Cameron McEwen: By Easterbrook.
[56:37] Cameron McEwen: By Easterbrook,
[56:38] Cameron McEwen: that's right.
[56:39] Cameron McEwen: And Easterbrook then begins giving articles and writings of McLuhan to
[56:47] Cameron McEwen: Innis and articles and books and writings of Innis to
[56:52] Bob Dobbs: McLuhan. How do you know that?
[56:54] Bob Dobbs: Where is that recorded?
[56:58] Cameron McEwen: Well,
[56:58] Cameron McEwen: I...
[56:59] Cameron McEwen: I show in posts how,
[57:05] Cameron McEwen: well,
[57:05] Cameron McEwen: we know,
[57:06] Cameron McEwen: for example,
[57:06] Cameron McEwen: that Innis was a huge,
[57:08] Cameron McEwen: huge influence on McLuhan.
[57:11] Bob Dobbs: Right.
[57:12] Cameron McEwen: You're asking,
[57:13] Cameron McEwen: how do we know that Innis was reading McLuhan,
[57:15] Cameron McEwen: right?
[57:16] Bob Dobbs: Yeah,
[57:16] Bob Dobbs: or that Easterbrook was giving them stuff,
[57:20] Bob Dobbs: the go-between.
[57:22] Bob Dobbs: Is there anything stated?
[57:23] Bob Dobbs: Is that your hypothesis,
[57:26] Bob Dobbs: or where is that stated?
[57:29] Cameron McEwen: Well,
[57:30] Cameron McEwen: no,
[57:31] Cameron McEwen: I show in various posts that that must have been the case.
[57:39] Cameron McEwen: For example,
[57:41] Cameron McEwen: how did
[57:42] Cameron McEwen: Innis get interested in Lewis?
[57:44] Cameron McEwen: Was that just out of the blue,
[57:46] Cameron McEwen: or did he have the
[57:51] Cameron McEwen: 1943 or 44 Lewis article by McLuhan?
[57:55] Bob Dobbs: Yeah.
[57:55] Cameron McEwen: That's right.
[57:56] Cameron McEwen: And then...
[57:58] Cameron McEwen: There was a proposal that
[58:02] Cameron McEwen: McLuhan did for the University of Chicago,
[58:06] Cameron McEwen: and
[58:07] Cameron McEwen: Innis virtually quotes some of the proposals of
[58:14] Cameron McEwen: McLuhan, which were made in 1946.
[58:20] Cameron McEwen: Innis virtually quotes those in a lecture that he made at Oxford in 1948.
[58:26] Bob Dobbs: Where do you see that?
[58:28] Bob Dobbs: Where is that lecture?
[58:30] Bob Dobbs: Where do you read it?
[58:31] Cameron McEwen: Well,
[58:31] Cameron McEwen: it's published.
[58:33] Cameron McEwen: It's published.
[58:35] Cameron McEwen: Bob,
[58:35] Cameron McEwen: I can send you all kinds of references to posts in my blog that discuss this stuff and demonstrate this stuff.
[58:48] Cameron McEwen: In our conversation,
[58:49] Cameron McEwen: I think we have to take a higher level and say that
[58:55] Cameron McEwen: There does appear to have been this exchange between the two of them,
[59:01] Cameron McEwen: and that
[59:02] Cameron McEwen: McLuhan would have seen this progress in the
[59:09] Cameron McEwen: 19th century that Innis was constantly talking about,
[59:13] Cameron McEwen: where the
[59:15] Cameron McEwen: 19th century began,
[59:18] Cameron McEwen: probably in England,
[59:19] Cameron McEwen: probably began pretty much as a reaction to the French Revolution.
[59:24] Cameron McEwen: and was self-conscious of the fact that there had to be a balance in
[59:32] Cameron McEwen: English society and in the world at large between contrasting forces.
[59:39] Cameron McEwen: And that was the only way to have a healthy internal society and an external condition of peace.
[59:48] Bob Dobbs: That's a general mood you're saying is in the 19th century.
[59:53] Bob Dobbs: I see.
[59:53] Cameron McEwen: early.
[59:54] Cameron McEwen: the early 19th century.
[59:56] Cameron McEwen: So Innis'
[59:57] Cameron McEwen: theme is
[59:58] Cameron McEwen: Innis wants to know how we got to a century of war,
[1:00:03] Cameron McEwen: the 20th century,
[1:00:05] Cameron McEwen: from a century of peace, the 19th century.
[1:00:08] Cameron McEwen: And what he records is in the
[1:00:12] Cameron McEwen: 19th century,
[1:00:13] Cameron McEwen: there was an increasing loss in England of the sense of balance and that he shows that
[1:00:23] Cameron McEwen: by the start of the
[1:00:25] Cameron McEwen: 20th century,
[1:00:26] Cameron McEwen: the sense of balance was lost,
[1:00:29] Cameron McEwen: not only in internal
[1:00:32] Cameron McEwen: British society,
[1:00:34] Cameron McEwen: but in the external society in which England was a player.
[1:00:39] Cameron McEwen: And that sense of,
[1:00:40] Cameron McEwen: that loss of sense of balance,
[1:00:42] Cameron McEwen: according to
[1:00:43] Cameron McEwen: Innis, was what led to this century of war,
[1:00:48] Cameron McEwen: as he calls it.
[1:00:50] Bob Dobbs: Right,
[1:00:50] Bob Dobbs: and Lewis is very aware of that.
[1:00:52] Bob Dobbs: He knows there's something wrong in England,
[1:00:54] Bob Dobbs: so he spends 10 years in Europe in the knots,
[1:00:59] Bob Dobbs: running around looking for something.
[1:01:02] Cameron McEwen: I think he had already,
[1:01:03] Cameron McEwen: I think as a child,
[1:01:05] Cameron McEwen: he had already been sent for some education in France.
[1:01:09] Bob Dobbs: Yeah.
[1:01:10] Cameron McEwen: So
[1:01:11] Cameron McEwen: I think Lewis had a sense that there had to be,
[1:01:17] Cameron McEwen: he had to find some kind of balance between the continent and England,
[1:01:25] Cameron McEwen: just as he had to find the balance between,
[1:01:28] Cameron McEwen: let's say,
[1:01:29] Cameron McEwen: Shakespeare's time and his own time.
[1:01:32] Cameron McEwen: in his own writings.
[1:01:33] Bob Dobbs: Yeah.
[1:01:34] Bob Dobbs: So,
[1:01:36] Bob Dobbs: I was going to say something.
[1:01:39] Bob Dobbs: You,
[1:01:39] Bob Dobbs: what were you,
[1:01:40] Bob Dobbs: okay,
[1:01:41] Bob Dobbs: Innis is trying to figure this out.
[1:01:43] Cameron McEwen: That's right.
[1:01:44] Cameron McEwen: And what I,
[1:01:46] Cameron McEwen: Oh yeah,
[1:01:47] Bob Dobbs: the exchange.
[1:01:48] Bob Dobbs: Now,
[1:01:49] Bob Dobbs: isn't it funny that McLuhan says,
[1:01:52] Bob Dobbs: why does he drop this point that he's been involved with Innis for three years and he's saying in 51,
[1:01:58] Bob Dobbs: I read the Bias of Communication,
[1:02:00] Bob Dobbs: and he's quoting my book,
[1:02:01] Bob Dobbs: Mechanical Bride.
[1:02:02] Bob Dobbs: And he says,
[1:02:03] Bob Dobbs: I had to look into this guy.
[1:02:05] Bob Dobbs: There's something theatrical there going on for some reason.
[1:02:08] Cameron McEwen: Yeah.
[1:02:08] Bob Dobbs: Well,
[1:02:11] Cameron McEwen: I have a long post about that.
[1:02:15] Cameron McEwen: When McLuhan talked about what he called meeting in us,
[1:02:20] Cameron McEwen: he had very different versions of this.
[1:02:25] Cameron McEwen: Yeah.
[1:02:25] Cameron McEwen: So.
[1:02:28] Cameron McEwen: What happened was when he talked about meeting Innis at the end of his life,
[1:02:32] Cameron McEwen: this was 1977 and 1978,
[1:02:37] Cameron McEwen: what he did was he mixed up individual papers which were published as part of the Mechanical Bride with the publication of the Mechanical Bride itself.
[1:02:51] Cameron McEwen: So what he says very late is that,
[1:02:55] Cameron McEwen: oh,
[1:02:55] Cameron McEwen: here's Innis.
[1:02:57] Cameron McEwen: having a footnote to
[1:02:59] Cameron McEwen: Mechanical Bride and the Bias of Communication.
[1:03:03] Cameron McEwen: And because he did that,
[1:03:05] Cameron McEwen: I went around to meet him.
[1:03:07] Cameron McEwen: So,
[1:03:08] Cameron McEwen: I mean,
[1:03:08] Cameron McEwen: that makes zero sense.
[1:03:11] Cameron McEwen: Because the
[1:03:13] Cameron McEwen: Bias of Communication was able to have a footnote to the Mechanical Bride only fairly late in 1951.
[1:03:21] Cameron McEwen: Because the Mechanical Bride was published,
[1:03:23] Cameron McEwen: I think,
[1:03:24] Cameron McEwen: in March of 1951.
[1:03:26] Cameron McEwen: And in order to get a footnote in print in the Bias of Communication in an essay that did not have that footnote when it was originally published,
[1:03:38] Cameron McEwen: in order to get that footnote in,
[1:03:41] Cameron McEwen: it had to be directed by Innis late in
[1:03:45] Bob Dobbs: 1951. It's like his last entry.
[1:03:48] Bob Dobbs: It's his last entry.
[1:03:49] Bob Dobbs: He stuck it in.
[1:03:50] Cameron McEwen: Correct.
[1:03:51] Cameron McEwen: So what that means is what McLuhan said.
[1:03:56] Cameron McEwen: in the late 70s about how he met Innis is senseless.
[1:04:01] Cameron McEwen: And it's senseless because what he did was he mixed up reading essays of Innis in 1948,
[1:04:12] Cameron McEwen: which were then included in the Bias of Communication in 1951.
[1:04:19] Cameron McEwen: And similarly,
[1:04:21] Cameron McEwen: when he talks about Innis having...
[1:04:25] Cameron McEwen: the mechanical bride in his reading list for a course in communications.
[1:04:32] Cameron McEwen: That's nonsense because in order to have a reading list with the mechanical bride,
[1:04:42] Cameron McEwen: that would have to take place late in
[1:04:46] Cameron McEwen: 1951 when Innis knew he was dying.
[1:04:49] Cameron McEwen: He wasn't giving courses then.
[1:04:51] Cameron McEwen: So what McLuhan is actually thinking about,
[1:04:55] Cameron McEwen: are two publications that McLuhan made in
[1:04:59] Cameron McEwen: 1947 on advertising,
[1:05:04] Cameron McEwen: which
[1:05:05] Cameron McEwen: Innis could well have included in his communications courses in the late
[1:05:11] Cameron McEwen: 40s, but this was not The Mechanical Bride.
[1:05:14] Cameron McEwen: It was publications in 1947 taken from The Mechanical Bride as it then existed.
[1:05:23] Cameron McEwen: Well,
[1:05:23] Bob Dobbs: wait a minute.
[1:05:25] Bob Dobbs: In the late 40s,
[1:05:25] Bob Dobbs: as it then existed,
[1:05:27] Bob Dobbs: no,
[1:05:27] Bob Dobbs: it wasn't out yet.
[1:05:29] Bob Dobbs: So I'm not sure what you mean.
[1:05:31] Cameron McEwen: What I mean is that the
[1:05:33] Cameron McEwen: Mechanical Bride went through a long editing process where in order to get the book published,
[1:05:41] Cameron McEwen: McLuhan had to water it down and water it down and water it down.
[1:05:46] Cameron McEwen: And he was extremely pissed off at that editorial process.
[1:05:51] Bob Dobbs: Yes.
[1:05:51] Cameron McEwen: And so what do you...
[1:05:53] Cameron McEwen: What he continually said to people is,
[1:05:55] Cameron McEwen: the Mechanical Bride was not my book from 1941.
[1:05:59] Cameron McEwen: It's a watered-down version of a book from 1946 or 1947.
[1:06:04] Bob Dobbs: Yeah,
[1:06:05] Bob Dobbs: you said 41.
[1:06:05] Bob Dobbs: You meant 51.
[1:06:06] Bob Dobbs: It's not from 51.
[1:06:07] Bob Dobbs: It's watered down from 47,
[1:06:12] Cameron McEwen: 46 and 47.
[1:06:13] Cameron McEwen: Yes.
[1:06:13] Bob Dobbs: Exactly.
[1:06:13] Cameron McEwen: Sorry if I spoke.
[1:06:15] Cameron McEwen: So what we're doing here is basically we're talking around the fact that by the late
[1:06:26] Cameron McEwen: 1940s, along with the work that McLuhan was doing on Mallarmé,
[1:06:30] Cameron McEwen: along with the work he was doing on cybernetics,
[1:06:33] Cameron McEwen: along with the work he was doing on Havelock and on the
[1:06:38] Cameron McEwen: Epyllion form in poetry and all literature,
[1:06:43] Cameron McEwen: along with all of that,
[1:06:44] Cameron McEwen: He was reading all of
[1:06:47] Bob Dobbs: Innis. Yeah.
[1:06:48] Cameron McEwen: So either because he got independently interested in Innis after he met him,
[1:06:55] Cameron McEwen: or because Easterbrook kept feeding him stuff,
[1:06:59] Cameron McEwen: who knows?
[1:07:00] Cameron McEwen: Yeah.
[1:07:00] Cameron McEwen: I think
[1:07:01] Cameron McEwen: Easterbrook was constantly going back and forth between the two of them because he knew that,
[1:07:09] Cameron McEwen: Easterbrook knew that there were many,
[1:07:11] Cameron McEwen: many things that were common.
[1:07:15] Cameron McEwen: to McLuhan and Innis that the two of them needed to be aware of.
[1:07:21] Cameron McEwen: And this was true even at the family level.
[1:07:24] Cameron McEwen: So both
[1:07:26] Cameron McEwen: McLuhan and Innis studied in the Midwest.
[1:07:30] Cameron McEwen: Or,
[1:07:30] Cameron McEwen: I'm sorry,
[1:07:31] Cameron McEwen: no.
[1:07:33] Cameron McEwen: Oh,
[1:07:33] Cameron McEwen: yeah,
[1:07:33] Cameron McEwen: Innis was out there.
[1:07:39] Cameron McEwen: Innis took his Ph.D.
[1:07:41] Cameron McEwen: at the University of Chicago.
[1:07:43] Bob Dobbs: Right.
[1:07:43] Cameron McEwen: And he lived in Chicago for years after the First World War,
[1:07:50] Cameron McEwen: sort of from,
[1:07:50] Cameron McEwen: let's say,
[1:07:51] Cameron McEwen: 1917 to 1919 or 1920,
[1:07:57] Cameron McEwen: which is when he began to teach at the University of Toronto.
[1:08:01] Cameron McEwen: So he was in Chicago.
[1:08:03] Cameron McEwen: McLuhan,
[1:08:04] Cameron McEwen: 20 years later,
[1:08:05] Cameron McEwen: is in St.
[1:08:06] Cameron McEwen: Louis.
[1:08:07] Cameron McEwen: Innis marries an American woman.
[1:08:10] Cameron McEwen: who turns out to be a very exceptional person and works with Innis in many ways.
[1:08:18] Cameron McEwen: McLuhan marries an American woman who turns out to be exceptional and works with him in many ways.
[1:08:25] Bob Dobbs: Yeah.
[1:08:25] Cameron McEwen: Right?
[1:08:25] Cameron McEwen: Turns out to be his editor for his early works.
[1:08:30] Cameron McEwen: Yeah.
[1:08:30] Cameron McEwen: And does all of his typing,
[1:08:31] Cameron McEwen: even as she's turning out baby after baby after baby.
[1:08:35] Bob Dobbs: Yeah.
[1:08:36] Cameron McEwen: Both
[1:08:37] Cameron McEwen: Innis and McLuhan have large families.
[1:08:40] Cameron McEwen: for an academic.
[1:08:43] Cameron McEwen: Innis had four children.
[1:08:44] Cameron McEwen: In 1947,
[1:08:46] Cameron McEwen: the fourth child of McLuhan was born.
[1:08:49] Cameron McEwen: Yeah.
[1:08:50] Cameron McEwen: So there's many,
[1:08:51] Cameron McEwen: many commonalities like this.
[1:08:54] Cameron McEwen: Both Innis and McLuhan were fascinated by the question of the relationship between the United States and Canada.
[1:09:05] Cameron McEwen: They both had been brought up in a Anti-environment.
[1:09:10] Cameron McEwen: that they rebelled against,
[1:09:12] Cameron McEwen: but both of them remain fascinated by the whole question of what has happened to religion in modern society?
[1:09:22] Cameron McEwen: Why did it happen?
[1:09:23] Cameron McEwen: How did it happen?
[1:09:25] Cameron McEwen: What are the effects that it happened?
[1:09:28] Cameron McEwen: So
[1:09:30] Cameron McEwen: Easterbrook recognizes that there are all these commonalities,
[1:09:35] Cameron McEwen: but he also recognizes that there are
[1:09:39] Cameron McEwen: some big differences between the two that they should wrestle with.
[1:09:45] Cameron McEwen: So the biggest question that Easterbrook took from Innis was that the modern life is in a cul-de-sac that it cannot get out of.
[1:10:00] Cameron McEwen: Innis called this the solipsism of Western civilization.
[1:10:06] Cameron McEwen: So
[1:10:06] Bob Dobbs: Easterbrook gets that.
[1:10:09] Cameron McEwen: Yes,
[1:10:09] Cameron McEwen: he gets it very much.
[1:10:12] Cameron McEwen: Easterbrook more or less takes that solipsism to be the outstanding fact of modern life and continues to talk about it for the rest of his life and
[1:10:26] Cameron McEwen: argues with McLuhan about it for the rest of his life.
[1:10:29] Bob Dobbs: Yeah,
[1:10:30] Bob Dobbs: there's a big missed opportunity.
[1:10:32] Bob Dobbs: Someone should have interviewed
[1:10:34] Bob Dobbs: Innis
[1:10:35] Bob Dobbs: Easterbrook about the late 40s and that relationship.
[1:10:38] Bob Dobbs: Correct.
[1:10:39] Bob Dobbs: But probably none of the young McLuhan scholars knew at that point of
[1:10:44] Bob Dobbs: Easterbrook in the middle there.
[1:10:46] Cameron McEwen: That probably didn't come out until later.
[1:10:49] Cameron McEwen: There's a lot of very interesting stuff.
[1:10:52] Cameron McEwen: So when
[1:10:55] Cameron McEwen: Innis was dying,
[1:10:57] Cameron McEwen: Easterbrook became more or less his secretary and was helping Innis.
[1:11:04] Cameron McEwen: to write books and essays.
[1:11:09] Cameron McEwen: Well,
[1:11:09] Cameron McEwen: I shouldn't say books.
[1:11:10] Cameron McEwen: He didn't write books.
[1:11:11] Cameron McEwen: But it was helping to write Innis essays that would be published in 1952 that Innis really didn't have the strength to do on his own.
[1:11:26] Cameron McEwen: But there's also memoranda in the University of Toronto archive that
[1:11:32] Cameron McEwen: were written by Easterbrook of conversations that he had with Innis.
[1:11:39] Cameron McEwen: And those conversations need to be,
[1:11:42] Cameron McEwen: number one,
[1:11:43] Cameron McEwen: they need to be published,
[1:11:44] Cameron McEwen: and number two,
[1:11:45] Cameron McEwen: they need to be brought into the context of this whole interplay between Innis and McLuhan and
[1:11:53] Cameron McEwen: Easterbrook that took place over five years,
[1:11:56] Cameron McEwen: 1947 to 1952.
[1:12:01] Cameron McEwen: Have you looked at those?
[1:12:02] Cameron McEwen: No,
[1:12:03] Cameron McEwen: I've never seen them.
[1:12:05] Cameron McEwen: I desperately want to,
[1:12:07] Cameron McEwen: but it's just sort of on my bucket list.
[1:12:12] Cameron McEwen: I haven't,
[1:12:14] Cameron McEwen: you know,
[1:12:14] Cameron McEwen: taken the time.
[1:12:16] Bob Dobbs: I can get somebody to look at them.
[1:12:18] Bob Dobbs: Where are they?
[1:12:20] Cameron McEwen: They're in the Innis Papers of the University of Toronto.
[1:12:24] Bob Dobbs: That's in
[1:12:25] Bob Dobbs: Fort, what do you call it,
[1:12:27] Bob Dobbs: Thomas
[1:12:28] Bob Dobbs: Fisher, the Rare Book Library?
[1:12:31] Cameron McEwen: I don't think they are.
[1:12:35] Cameron McEwen: They're easy to find by doing a Google search.
[1:12:40] Cameron McEwen: I don't think they're at Fisher.
[1:12:42] Cameron McEwen: I think they're in the regular
[1:12:44] Cameron McEwen: University of Toronto archive.
[1:12:46] Bob Dobbs: Okay,
[1:12:46] Bob Dobbs: well,
[1:12:46] Bob Dobbs: I'm going to get a guy to look at them.
[1:12:49] Cameron McEwen: Well,
[1:12:49] Cameron McEwen: I'll get copies of them.
[1:12:50] Cameron McEwen: It's no problem to write the archive and get them to make copies.
[1:12:55] Bob Dobbs: Oh,
[1:12:56] Bob Dobbs: okay.
[1:12:57] Cameron McEwen: Right.
[1:12:57] Cameron McEwen: So if that's of interest to you.
[1:13:01] Cameron McEwen: That's something that we could,
[1:13:03] Cameron McEwen: after we're finished with your book,
[1:13:05] Cameron McEwen: that's something that we could go through.
[1:13:08] Cameron McEwen: I could get copies of those things,
[1:13:10] Cameron McEwen: share the copies with you,
[1:13:12] Cameron McEwen: and then we could sort of make a commentary on what was happening between these three guys in these five years.
[1:13:21] Cameron McEwen: Because that was the decisive time for McLuhan,
[1:13:26] Cameron McEwen: as he knew.
[1:13:29] Cameron McEwen: What I,
[1:13:29] Cameron McEwen: what I...
[1:13:30] Cameron McEwen: in my blog,
[1:13:31] Cameron McEwen: as I call it,
[1:13:32] Cameron McEwen: the time of McLuhan second conversion.
[1:13:35] Bob Dobbs: Yeah.
[1:13:36] Cameron McEwen: So he made his initial conversion in 1937,
[1:13:40] Cameron McEwen: but that was very Gutenbergian,
[1:13:42] Cameron McEwen: very Gutenbergian.
[1:13:44] Cameron McEwen: And then when
[1:13:46] Cameron McEwen: McLuhan remained a Catholic in the face of completely changing his worldview,
[1:13:54] Cameron McEwen: That was very,
[1:13:55] Cameron McEwen: very important because it...
[1:13:59] Cameron McEwen: indicates a way to tie to the tradition through postmodernism,
[1:14:05] Cameron McEwen: and it indicates something that the Catholic Church has not taken up,
[1:14:09] Cameron McEwen: but should do.
[1:14:12] Bob Dobbs: What do you think?
[1:14:13] Bob Dobbs: You're saying the Gutenbergian,
[1:14:14] Bob Dobbs: and what happened in the late 40s?
[1:14:15] Bob Dobbs: What's his second conversion?
[1:14:17] Cameron McEwen: Well,
[1:14:19] Cameron McEwen: yeah,
[1:14:20] Cameron McEwen: I say it's his second conversion to the Church,
[1:14:24] Cameron McEwen: because what happened was he lost all of the...
[1:14:28] Cameron McEwen: foundation of his initial conversion,
[1:14:32] Cameron McEwen: but found a way to be converted a second time in the face of Mallarmé and of
[1:14:39] Cameron McEwen: Nietzsche and all of the stuff that he was learning in the
[1:14:45] Cameron McEwen: 1940s that he didn't know anything about in the
[1:14:47] Bob Dobbs: 1930s. Yeah,
[1:14:48] Bob Dobbs: he was trying to say that Mallarmé and them were redoing the Patristic Fathers.
[1:14:54] Cameron McEwen: That's right.
[1:14:55] Cameron McEwen: That's right.
[1:14:56] Cameron McEwen: So that's part of
[1:14:58] Cameron McEwen: That's part of his way of remaining a Catholic in the face of stuff that he didn't know in the 30s but learned in the
[1:15:08] Bob Dobbs: 40s. And got close to the occult,
[1:15:11] Bob Dobbs: which he didn't like.
[1:15:13] Bob Dobbs: And so he had to figure out a way to get beyond the occult,
[1:15:17] Bob Dobbs: straight occult interest,
[1:15:18] Bob Dobbs: which is Bulwer-Lytton.
[1:15:19] Cameron McEwen: Yeah,
[1:15:23] Cameron McEwen: maybe.
[1:15:24] Cameron McEwen: Thank you.
[1:15:27] Cameron McEwen: When you're talking about Bulwer Lytton,
[1:15:29] Cameron McEwen: and that's something I know nothing about except through quotations in Innis,
[1:15:34] Cameron McEwen: which are from 1833,
[1:15:38] Cameron McEwen: and you're talking about the man's production in 1870.
[1:15:43] Cameron McEwen: Yeah.
[1:15:43] Cameron McEwen: If we're talking about the same guy,
[1:15:45] Cameron McEwen: because in the Wikipedia,
[1:15:47] Cameron McEwen: when I look up what the guy wrote,
[1:15:51] Cameron McEwen: it doesn't include what Innis is citing.
[1:15:54] Cameron McEwen: And so then I have to wonder if it's a different guy,
[1:15:58] Cameron McEwen: even a different generation.
[1:16:01] Bob Dobbs: And he just says Bulwer.
[1:16:02] Bob Dobbs: He doesn't say Bulwer Lytton.
[1:16:05] Cameron McEwen: That's right.
[1:16:06] Cameron McEwen: That's right.
[1:16:07] Bob Dobbs: But there is no Bulwer.
[1:16:08] Bob Dobbs: It's hard to find the Bulwer.
[1:16:10] Bob Dobbs: Like,
[1:16:10] Bob Dobbs: that's a pretty important quote.
[1:16:12] Cameron McEwen: Well,
[1:16:13] Cameron McEwen: remember that in
[1:16:14] Cameron McEwen: England, the way names are used is very,
[1:16:18] Cameron McEwen: very complicated.
[1:16:20] Cameron McEwen: And
[1:16:21] Cameron McEwen: Innis may have had a good understanding of this.
[1:16:25] Cameron McEwen: So,
[1:16:25] Cameron McEwen: you know,
[1:16:26] Cameron McEwen: if somebody is
[1:16:27] Cameron McEwen: Sir
[1:16:28] Cameron McEwen: Magic Johnson or something like this,
[1:16:31] Cameron McEwen: they're Sir Eric.
[1:16:32] Cameron McEwen: They're not Sir Johnson.
[1:16:34] Bob Dobbs: Right.
[1:16:34] Cameron McEwen: And...
[1:16:37] Cameron McEwen: when people are talking within a certain class,
[1:16:44] Cameron McEwen: then they don't use their hyphenated names.
[1:16:48] Cameron McEwen: They have a single name.
[1:16:50] Cameron McEwen: And it's a little bit like Spain in that respect,
[1:16:53] Cameron McEwen: right?
[1:16:54] Cameron McEwen: The
[1:16:55] Cameron McEwen: Spanish have names that are used that list their mother.
[1:17:03] Cameron McEwen: Thank you.
[1:17:03] Cameron McEwen: those names are used only in certain circumstances,
[1:17:07] Cameron McEwen: and that's dropped in most circumstances.
[1:17:10] Cameron McEwen: And the same is true in England.
[1:17:11] Cameron McEwen: So when Innis is talking about Bulwer,
[1:17:15] Cameron McEwen: I'm not sure if this is a different guy or if he uses the part of his name that's appropriate for a certain circumstance.
[1:17:25] Bob Dobbs: Okay,
[1:17:26] Bob Dobbs: there's a very similar guy,
[1:17:28] Bob Dobbs: politician and writer.
[1:17:29] Bob Dobbs: So Henry Bulwer,
[1:17:31] Bob Dobbs: he...
[1:17:34] Bob Dobbs: Let's see,
[1:17:35] Bob Dobbs: he's 1801 to 1872.
[1:17:41] Bob Dobbs: The Bulwer-Lytton is 1803 to 18-something.
[1:17:45] Bob Dobbs: So it could be Henry Bulwer.
[1:17:51] Bob Dobbs: Now,
[1:17:52] Cameron McEwen: the guy that
[1:17:54] Cameron McEwen: Innis is quoting is always said to be
[1:17:57] Cameron McEwen: Edward Lytton Bulwer.
[1:18:00] Bob Dobbs: It does say that,
[1:18:01] Bob Dobbs: besides just the word Bulwer?
[1:18:03] Cameron McEwen: Yes.
[1:18:06] Cameron McEwen: When he makes a full citation,
[1:18:09] Cameron McEwen: he has the guy's full name.
[1:18:11] Cameron McEwen: But in the essay itself,
[1:18:15] Cameron McEwen: he just calls the guy Bulwer.
[1:18:17] Bob Dobbs: So look at Henry Bulwer's works,
[1:18:22] Bob Dobbs: The Monarchy of the Middle Classes,
[1:18:24] Bob Dobbs: French,
[1:18:25] Bob Dobbs: Social,
[1:18:25] Bob Dobbs: Literary,
[1:18:26] Bob Dobbs: Political.
[1:18:29] Cameron McEwen: They were certainly interested in...
[1:18:33] Cameron McEwen: The Bulwer family was very active in journalism and in politics.
[1:18:41] Cameron McEwen: So what you're talking about here with the French is central to what was going on in
[1:18:49] Cameron McEwen: English journalism in the
[1:18:50] Cameron McEwen: 19th century and to the
[1:18:53] Cameron McEwen: Bulwer family,
[1:18:54] Cameron McEwen: for sure.
[1:18:55] Bob Dobbs: And that's the monarchy of the middle classes.
[1:18:57] Bob Dobbs: That's the Gutenberg era.
[1:18:59] Bob Dobbs: I'm looking for hints of the...
[1:19:02] Bob Dobbs: Gutenberg quote.
[1:19:05] Bob Dobbs: He enjoyed three years in America and wished to return to Europe and was posted to Florence,
[1:19:14] Bob Dobbs: Tuscany.
[1:19:16] Bob Dobbs: His two years in Italy were largely uneventful.
[1:19:19] Bob Dobbs: He went back to London.
[1:19:22] Bob Dobbs: Then he went to Eastern Europe,
[1:19:24] Bob Dobbs: a really tetrad guy.
[1:19:28] Bob Dobbs: He even became ambassador to the Ottoman Empire.
[1:19:35] Bob Dobbs: He went back to politics when he returned to England in 1868.
[1:19:38] Bob Dobbs: He returned to literature after his retirement and then got to peerage.
[1:19:45] Bob Dobbs: So that's pretty worldly.
[1:19:50] Bob Dobbs: And he also was a Freemason.
[1:19:53] Bob Dobbs: That can be the occult if you're into Freemasonry.
[1:19:59] Bob Dobbs: So there's something,
[1:20:01] Bob Dobbs: got to find a little bit more about the difference between him and Bulwer-Lytton.
[1:20:09] Cameron McEwen: Yeah,
[1:20:10] Cameron McEwen: there's,
[1:20:10] Cameron McEwen: I mean,
[1:20:11] Cameron McEwen: the whole
[1:20:13] Cameron McEwen: Bulwer family is very complicated.
[1:20:19] Cameron McEwen: I see that Edward Bulwer-Lytton was buried in Westminster Abbey.
[1:20:24] Bob Dobbs: Yeah.
[1:20:26] Cameron McEwen: So that doesn't sound like...
[1:20:28] Cameron McEwen: a guy that's preoccupied with the occult.
[1:20:33] Bob Dobbs: Right,
[1:20:33] Bob Dobbs: right.
[1:20:34] Cameron McEwen: But maybe,
[1:20:36] Cameron McEwen: maybe.
[1:20:40] Cameron McEwen: I really don't know.
[1:20:40] Cameron McEwen: All I know is that this guy,
[1:20:45] Cameron McEwen: Edward George Earl Lytton,
[1:20:48] Cameron McEwen: Bulwer Lytton.
[1:20:52] Cameron McEwen: Jesus.
[1:20:56] Cameron McEwen: He seems to have been
[1:20:58] Cameron McEwen: A very influential journalist and politician in the
[1:21:04] Cameron McEwen: 19th century,
[1:21:05] Cameron McEwen: and he had these the same years you were just reading,
[1:21:08] Cameron McEwen: 1803 to 1873.
[1:21:11] Bob Dobbs: Yeah,
[1:21:11] Bob Dobbs: Henry Bulwer is the brother of Edward Bulwer or Lytton.
[1:21:17] Bob Dobbs: And Henry has the names Earl Bulwer,
[1:21:21] Bob Dobbs: Lytton Earl Bulwer in his fucking name.
[1:21:25] Cameron McEwen: Yeah,
[1:21:26] Cameron McEwen: it's pretty complicated.
[1:21:28] Bob Dobbs: They're involved with each other.
[1:21:32] Bob Dobbs: Yeah,
[1:21:33] Bob Dobbs: one guy goes,
[1:21:34] Bob Dobbs: becomes establishment politician and everything.
[1:21:36] Bob Dobbs: He gets put in Westminster and his brother becomes an occultist.
[1:21:41] Bob Dobbs: And
[1:21:42] Bob Dobbs: I'm pretty sure in conspiracy literature years ago,
[1:21:46] Bob Dobbs: People who first started writing about the 19th century,
[1:21:49] Bob Dobbs: Bulwer-Lytton is mentioned.
[1:21:51] Bob Dobbs: He's quite a name in the beginning of it,
[1:21:53] Bob Dobbs: to create that genre of kind of Illuminati talk.
[1:21:58] Bob Dobbs: Yeah.
[1:21:58] Cameron McEwen: Well,
[1:21:58] Cameron McEwen: a guy I see here in
[1:22:00] Cameron McEwen: Amazon that has collected works are 19 volumes.
[1:22:05] Bob Dobbs: Wow.
[1:22:05] Cameron McEwen: But the guy,
[1:22:06] Cameron McEwen: you know,
[1:22:08] Cameron McEwen: wrote a tremendous amount.
[1:22:10] Cameron McEwen: Yeah,
[1:22:12] Bob Dobbs: wrote a tremendous amount.
[1:22:14] Bob Dobbs: Let me just see.
[1:22:15] Bob Dobbs: I'm just going to write in conspiracy theory and bulwark lit and see what happens.
[1:22:23] Bob Dobbs: And this is all coming down to this very important quote.
[1:22:27] Bob Dobbs: That's why we're looking at the guy.
[1:22:29] Cameron McEwen: Correct.
[1:22:31] Bob Dobbs: I mean,
[1:22:31] Bob Dobbs: he's saying the medium changed people.
[1:22:34] Bob Dobbs: He gets it.
[1:22:35] Cameron McEwen: Correct.
[1:22:36] Cameron McEwen: So then,
[1:22:38] Cameron McEwen: but what I find surprising is if.
[1:22:41] Cameron McEwen: The guy that we're looking at wrote this in 1833 and was born in 1803,
[1:22:50] Cameron McEwen: and he was only 30 years of age.
[1:22:52] Bob Dobbs: Yeah.
[1:22:53] Cameron McEwen: So
[1:22:54] Cameron McEwen: Innis is quoting a guy who seems to have a great insight into Western civilization,
[1:23:02] Cameron McEwen: but at the age of 30.
[1:23:04] Cameron McEwen: So maybe he did,
[1:23:06] Cameron McEwen: maybe he didn't.
[1:23:07] Cameron McEwen: I don't know the story.
[1:23:08] Cameron McEwen: I don't know the answer to that.
[1:23:10] Bob Dobbs: Okay,
[1:23:11] Bob Dobbs: so it says,
[1:23:17] Bob Dobbs: so an article on QAnon and conspiracy theories,
[1:23:21] Bob Dobbs: and it goes back to
[1:23:23] Bob Dobbs: Bulwer-Lytton.
[1:23:27] Bob Dobbs: His book,
[1:23:28] Bob Dobbs: Vril,
[1:23:29] Bob Dobbs: this concept of Vril,
[1:23:30] Bob Dobbs: appears in a book called The Coming Race by Victorian novelist and politician called Edward Bulwer-Lytton.
[1:23:38] Bob Dobbs: He was sort of a pulp writer.
[1:23:40] Bob Dobbs: One of his novels starts with the famously cheesy line,
[1:23:44] Bob Dobbs: quote,
[1:23:45] Bob Dobbs: it was a dark and stormy night,
[1:23:49] Bob Dobbs: who made a fortune from book sales,
[1:23:51] Bob Dobbs: then became a reformist MP,
[1:23:53] Bob Dobbs: but he seems to have grown more reactionary as he aged.
[1:23:56] Bob Dobbs: He was also fascinated by the occult.
[1:23:58] Bob Dobbs: He had a massive public falling out with his wife,
[1:24:01] Bob Dobbs: which actually seems to be written about with the other guy.
[1:24:05] Bob Dobbs: There's some divorce they go into,
[1:24:07] Bob Dobbs: I noticed,
[1:24:07] Bob Dobbs: with Henry.
[1:24:09] Bob Dobbs: Okay,
[1:24:09] Bob Dobbs: so The Coming Race is the last novel about an American who descends into a cave and discovers a hidden advanced civilization run by an alternative species of hominid,
[1:24:19] Bob Dobbs: taller,
[1:24:20] Bob Dobbs: wiser,
[1:24:20] Bob Dobbs: stronger,
[1:24:21] Bob Dobbs: and in all ways superior to homo sapiens.
[1:24:24] Bob Dobbs: He quails before them,
[1:24:25] Bob Dobbs: I don't know what that means,
[1:24:27] Bob Dobbs: as before demigods.
[1:24:28] Bob Dobbs: They are able to control an energy called Vril,
[1:24:31] Bob Dobbs: which gives them the power to destroy whole cities in a moment,
[1:24:34] Bob Dobbs: and also the power to control minds and to direct automatons to do their bidding.
[1:24:39] Bob Dobbs: Vril is in some ways an old occult idea that there is some prima materia called the ether or spiritus or chi or prana.
[1:24:49] Bob Dobbs: It's supposedly the energy which permeates all things which the magus can control to heal or destroy.
[1:24:54] Bob Dobbs: There's also an old occult idea which one could call occult authoritarianism,
[1:24:58] Bob Dobbs: where the magus uses their magical power to control both automatons and the masses.
[1:25:03] Bob Dobbs: That is actually talked about by McLuhan.
[1:25:07] Bob Dobbs: In Manichean poetry,
[1:25:10] Bob Dobbs: and that theme is in
[1:25:12] Bob Dobbs: Eliot, I think.
[1:25:14] Bob Dobbs: If you remember that paper,
[1:25:16] Bob Dobbs: Eliot and the Manichean Myth in Poetry,
[1:25:18] Bob Dobbs: talks about,
[1:25:20] Bob Dobbs: I think it's a Hindu mythology,
[1:25:22] Bob Dobbs: that some,
[1:25:22] Bob Dobbs: you know,
[1:25:23] Bob Dobbs: semi-god,
[1:25:24] Bob Dobbs: demigod,
[1:25:25] Bob Dobbs: controls the whole town or civilization.
[1:25:29] Bob Dobbs: So
[1:25:29] Bob Dobbs: Lytton mixes this up with a new idea,
[1:25:31] Bob Dobbs: the evolution of Homo sapiens.
[1:25:34] Bob Dobbs: And it goes into Darwin.
[1:25:39] Bob Dobbs: and then they discovered the remains of a neanderthal man in eighteen sixty four and linton plays with these ideas and imagines an alternative more advanced race of hominid homo superior they are both awe-inspiring and terrifying what if they come to the surface and destroy us all as we might destroy an anthill so
[1:25:58] Bob Dobbs: This is,
[1:26:01] Bob Dobbs: so it says,
[1:26:03] Bob Dobbs: his elitist occultism appealed to other upper class people who also felt disempowered and disgusted by the rise of mass democracy.
[1:26:12] Bob Dobbs: Like W.B.
[1:26:12] Bob Dobbs: Yeats,
[1:26:13] Bob Dobbs: for example,
[1:26:14] Bob Dobbs: says a crypto-fascist and member of the Golden Dawn.
[1:26:17] Bob Dobbs: Or Aldous Huxley,
[1:26:18] Bob Dobbs: also into magic,
[1:26:19] Bob Dobbs: also full of content for mass democracy.
[1:26:22] Bob Dobbs: Such occult elitists felt themselves totally superior to the masses for practically different species entirely.
[1:26:28] Bob Dobbs: Lytton's stories appeal to another impoverished aristocrat,
[1:26:31] Bob Dobbs: Madame Blavatsky.
[1:26:32] Bob Dobbs: So there it is.
[1:26:33] Bob Dobbs: He's the guy that leads into the theosophical occult stuff.
[1:26:38] Cameron McEwen: Right.
[1:26:38] Cameron McEwen: And this is very much related to the story that I was explaining of how the English had a sense of balance and lost it.
[1:26:51] Bob Dobbs: Yeah.
[1:26:52] Cameron McEwen: And the story that Innis tells is...
[1:26:57] Cameron McEwen: What in popular thinking is thought of as sort of the rise of democracy or something like this.
[1:27:05] Cameron McEwen: But for
[1:27:06] Cameron McEwen: Innis, it's not the rise of democracy,
[1:27:09] Cameron McEwen: it's the loss of balance.
[1:27:11] Cameron McEwen: So for the people that
[1:27:13] Cameron McEwen: Innis quotes,
[1:27:15] Cameron McEwen: that he thinks know what was going on,
[1:27:21] Cameron McEwen: there's no difference between all power lying with the...
[1:27:27] Cameron McEwen: public or all power lying with the king,
[1:27:30] Cameron McEwen: because both are singular.
[1:27:33] Cameron McEwen: Both are unbalanced by other considerations or other classes,
[1:27:40] Cameron McEwen: right?
[1:27:40] Cameron McEwen: So when Innis talks about what happened going between the century of peace to the century of war,
[1:27:49] Cameron McEwen: you have the
[1:27:52] Cameron McEwen: Catholic Church and churches in general losing their
[1:27:56] Cameron McEwen: power against politics.
[1:27:59] Cameron McEwen: People no longer think that they need first to think about what their preacher said in a sermon last week before they think about politics.
[1:28:11] Cameron McEwen: No,
[1:28:11] Cameron McEwen: politics takes over.
[1:28:14] Cameron McEwen: Or in economics,
[1:28:15] Cameron McEwen: people don't have a sense of the public good that outweighs the immediate moment.
[1:28:23] Bob Dobbs: Okay,
[1:28:23] Bob Dobbs: so listen to this.
[1:28:24] Bob Dobbs: So Innis sees the Borg,
[1:28:27] Bob Dobbs: but McLuhan sees,
[1:28:29] Bob Dobbs: he doesn't see it as digital,
[1:28:30] Bob Dobbs: but maybe he does,
[1:28:31] Bob Dobbs: but didn't say much about it at the end.
[1:28:33] Bob Dobbs: He begins to see the electric autonomy.
[1:28:37] Bob Dobbs: He says,
[1:28:38] Bob Dobbs: mass man is not tribal,
[1:28:40] Bob Dobbs: it's not a Borg.
[1:28:41] Bob Dobbs: It starts to have autonomous elements that gets it out of the Borg.
[1:28:46] Bob Dobbs: That's the hope,
[1:28:48] Bob Dobbs: maybe,
[1:28:48] Bob Dobbs: that McLuhan sees,
[1:28:50] Bob Dobbs: the optimistic part.
[1:28:53] Cameron McEwen: Well,
[1:28:54] Cameron McEwen: I think what he sees is that all varieties of experience can be understood in the electric age.
[1:29:07] Cameron McEwen: And that it's by looking at all of them rather than any one of them.
[1:29:15] Bob Dobbs: Right,
[1:29:15] Bob Dobbs: but that makes the electric man acultural in the sense of amoral.
[1:29:20] Bob Dobbs: A new kind of cultural that's not cultural,
[1:29:23] Bob Dobbs: that's discarnate and addicted to information,
[1:29:26] Bob Dobbs: addicted to the stimulus.
[1:29:31] Cameron McEwen: I think you're mixing up two things there.
[1:29:34] Cameron McEwen: There's what McLuhan would say is the ability not to have a point of view.
[1:29:43] Cameron McEwen: And then there is the discarnate.
[1:29:49] Cameron McEwen: And both of them...
[1:29:50] Cameron McEwen: can be said to be a nobody.
[1:29:54] Cameron McEwen: A discarnate is no body,
[1:29:57] Cameron McEwen: and not having a point of view is nobody.
[1:30:03] Cameron McEwen: But those are essentially different.
[1:30:06] Cameron McEwen: So for
[1:30:07] Cameron McEwen: McLuhan, the hope is that the nobody of no point of view can understand all varieties of human experience,
[1:30:18] Cameron McEwen: and thereby
[1:30:20] Cameron McEwen: get us out of the cul-de-sac.
[1:30:22] Bob Dobbs: An autonomy which can be a cul-de-sac.
[1:30:26] Cameron McEwen: Yes,
[1:30:28] Cameron McEwen: so the no body of the discarnate is one type of human experience that has become dislodged,
[1:30:40] Cameron McEwen: you could say,
[1:30:41] Cameron McEwen: from all other human experience.
[1:30:43] Cameron McEwen: It's taken off into a new realm.
[1:30:46] Cameron McEwen: For McLuhan,
[1:30:47] Cameron McEwen: the only way to
[1:30:50] Cameron McEwen: get that balloon back into the human,
[1:30:58] Cameron McEwen: what does he call it,
[1:30:59] Cameron McEwen: the connubium,
[1:31:00] Cameron McEwen: is to understand it as one variety of human experience,
[1:31:09] Cameron McEwen: not as a new and unconnected variety.
[1:31:15] Bob Dobbs: Right.
[1:31:15] Bob Dobbs: And now,
[1:31:16] Bob Dobbs: what did you say was that?
[1:31:19] Bob Dobbs: before you said canubium you were saying is that the bubble you said
[1:31:26] Cameron McEwen: Yeah,
[1:31:27] Cameron McEwen: let me just go back.
[1:31:29] Cameron McEwen: Yeah,
[1:31:33] Cameron McEwen: the balloon is a reference to the discarnate,
[1:31:37] Cameron McEwen: to artificial intelligence,
[1:31:39] Cameron McEwen: to the taking off of a variety of human experience that machines are able to replicate and to multiply.
[1:31:52] Cameron McEwen: And that is...
[1:31:54] Cameron McEwen: kind of the end result of the cul-de-sac.
[1:31:58] Cameron McEwen: And the question is,
[1:32:00] Cameron McEwen: how do we get out of it?
[1:32:04] Cameron McEwen: What I want to do,
[1:32:06] Cameron McEwen: Bob,
[1:32:06] Cameron McEwen: is get back to the Bulwer quotation,
[1:32:09] Cameron McEwen: because when I give all of it,
[1:32:11] Cameron McEwen: it ties into what you were reading.
[1:32:14] Bob Dobbs: Yeah,
[1:32:14] Bob Dobbs: let me tell you this.
[1:32:16] Bob Dobbs: I'll send you this article,
[1:32:17] Bob Dobbs: How to Invent a Conspiracy.
[1:32:20] Bob Dobbs: Bulwer-Lytton is the source of everything that gets into the Theosophists,
[1:32:25] Bob Dobbs: then the
[1:32:27] Bob Dobbs: Aleister Crowley,
[1:32:28] Bob Dobbs: then Tim Leary.
[1:32:29] Bob Dobbs: The guy goes into all this stuff and brings it up to
[1:32:34] Bob Dobbs: Hunter Thompson after passing through H.G.
[1:32:38] Bob Dobbs: Wells and the famous book,
[1:32:39] Bob Dobbs: The Morning of the Magicians.
[1:32:42] Bob Dobbs: You know,
[1:32:43] Bob Dobbs: the Alex Jones,
[1:32:44] Bob Dobbs: the guys who worry about this conspiracy.
[1:32:46] Bob Dobbs: conspiracy,
[1:32:46] Bob Dobbs: the globalists,
[1:32:47] Bob Dobbs: the Illuminati.
[1:32:48] Bob Dobbs: It comes from Bulwer-Lytton.
[1:32:51] Cameron McEwen: Maybe.
[1:32:52] Bob Dobbs: And that was what McLuhan was interested in.
[1:32:54] Bob Dobbs: That was his popular idea of the Antichrist.
[1:32:58] Bob Dobbs: We've discovered something here with Bulwer.
[1:33:01] Cameron McEwen: Well,
[1:33:02] Cameron McEwen: let me read you the quotation.
[1:33:04] Bob Dobbs: Yeah,
[1:33:05] Bob Dobbs: because that's about magic.
[1:33:07] Bob Dobbs: That's about occult forces,
[1:33:08] Bob Dobbs: the way the guy Wright it.
[1:33:13] Cameron McEwen: As I say,
[1:33:14] Cameron McEwen: let me read the complete
[1:33:15] Cameron McEwen: quotation because the magic of Gutenberg,
[1:33:20] Cameron McEwen: where he starts off,
[1:33:22] Cameron McEwen: gets into some of the things that you're talking about,
[1:33:25] Cameron McEwen: which are very interesting.
[1:33:27] Cameron McEwen: So he says,
[1:33:29] Cameron McEwen: the magic of
[1:33:31] Cameron McEwen: Gutenberg, and by the way,
[1:33:32] Cameron McEwen: this quotation from
[1:33:37] Cameron McEwen: Edward Lytton Bulwer is given in a footnote to
[1:33:42] Cameron McEwen: Innis's paper.
[1:33:44] Cameron McEwen: But the footnotes in Innis's paper are not notes at the end.
[1:33:48] Cameron McEwen: They're given at the bottom of the page.
[1:33:51] Bob Dobbs: Yeah.
[1:33:52] Cameron McEwen: So this footnote is the last footnote in the essay.
[1:33:57] Cameron McEwen: And because it's on the last page,
[1:34:03] Cameron McEwen: it's the last words of the essay.
[1:34:07] Bob Dobbs: And what's the essay about?
[1:34:10] Cameron McEwen: The essay is,
[1:34:11] Cameron McEwen: get the title of this.
[1:34:13] Cameron McEwen: An Economic Approach to English Literature in the
[1:34:18] Cameron McEwen: 19th Century.
[1:34:19] Bob Dobbs: Wow.
[1:34:20] Cameron McEwen: It's the second essay in Innis'
[1:34:22] Cameron McEwen: 1946 book.
[1:34:26] Cameron McEwen: Remember that in
[1:34:28] Cameron McEwen: McLuhan career,
[1:34:30] Cameron McEwen: he wrote his master's thesis on
[1:34:33] Cameron McEwen: English literature in the 19th century,
[1:34:35] Cameron McEwen: namely Merida.
[1:34:37] Cameron McEwen: So here's McLuhan.
[1:34:38] Cameron McEwen: He comes to...
[1:34:40] Cameron McEwen: the
[1:34:41] Cameron McEwen: University of Toronto,
[1:34:42] Cameron McEwen: his friend Easterbrook comes to him and says,
[1:34:45] Cameron McEwen: well,
[1:34:45] Cameron McEwen: here's my buddy Innis,
[1:34:47] Cameron McEwen: and here's his latest book,
[1:34:49] Cameron McEwen: which is just published the year that you came to Toronto.
[1:34:53] Cameron McEwen: And the second essay is on English literature in the
[1:34:56] Cameron McEwen: 19th century.
[1:34:57] Cameron McEwen: And you're a goddamn expert in that.
[1:35:00] Cameron McEwen: So why don't you why don't you read this essay and see if Innis can tell you anything new that you don't know.
[1:35:08] Bob Dobbs: And what McLuhan
[1:35:10] Bob Dobbs: And what he says about economics is his Pryde word for media.
[1:35:15] Bob Dobbs: It is his talking about media forces there,
[1:35:19] Cameron McEwen: right?
[1:35:20] Cameron McEwen: He's talking about forces that are larger than media in the newspaper,
[1:35:30] Cameron McEwen: television,
[1:35:30] Cameron McEwen: radio sense.
[1:35:32] Cameron McEwen: But that is what
[1:35:33] Cameron McEwen: McLuhan will take media to be.
[1:35:36] Cameron McEwen: So you're absolutely right.
[1:35:37] Cameron McEwen: There is a connection between what
[1:35:41] Cameron McEwen: Innis takes political economy to be and what
[1:35:46] Cameron McEwen: McLuhan takes media to be.
[1:35:47] Bob Dobbs: Right,
[1:35:48] Bob Dobbs: because he talks about in Mechanical Bride that Marx hit on the medium as a message in terms of the means of production,
[1:35:54] Bob Dobbs: control of society.
[1:35:56] Bob Dobbs: That was the crude beginning of it.
[1:35:59] Bob Dobbs: And then Innis is into studying that and making it,
[1:36:03] Bob Dobbs: not being a Marxist,
[1:36:04] Bob Dobbs: but he's looking at the same phenomenon.
[1:36:07] Bob Dobbs: And then you end with this Gutenberg point,
[1:36:09] Bob Dobbs: which is the major point of early McLuhan,
[1:36:12] Bob Dobbs: when he starts writing Pound in 52.
[1:36:15] Bob Dobbs: Man,
[1:36:15] Bob Dobbs: this essay,
[1:36:16] Bob Dobbs: this is like
[1:36:18] Bob Dobbs: McLuhan in 46.
[1:36:21] Cameron McEwen: Yeah.
[1:36:21] Cameron McEwen: So let me read the Walter Kaufmann quotation here,
[1:36:26] Cameron McEwen: because it gets into a lot of the stuff that you're talking about.
[1:36:31] Cameron McEwen: He says,
[1:36:31] Cameron McEwen: the magic of Gutenberg has conjured a wide chasm between the past and future history of mankind.
[1:36:40] Cameron McEwen: The people on one side of the gulf are not the people on the other.
[1:36:44] Cameron McEwen: So there's the Gutenberg galaxy for you.
[1:36:46] Bob Dobbs: Right there.
[1:36:48] Cameron McEwen: The physical force...
[1:36:49] Cameron McEwen: is no longer separated from the moral.
[1:36:53] Bob Dobbs: Wait,
[1:36:53] Bob Dobbs: are you reading?
[1:36:54] Bob Dobbs: Are you continuing to read it?
[1:36:56] Cameron McEwen: Yeah,
[1:36:56] Cameron McEwen: this is the quotation,
[1:36:58] Cameron McEwen: right?
[1:36:58] Cameron McEwen: The people on one side of the gulf are not the people on the other.
[1:37:02] Cameron McEwen: The physical force is no longer separated from the moral.
[1:37:08] Cameron McEwen: The mind has by slow degrees crept into the mighty mass.
[1:37:15] Cameron McEwen: That's the public.
[1:37:17] Cameron McEwen: The popular simon...
[1:37:19] Cameron McEwen: The popular Simon has received a soul.
[1:37:23] Bob Dobbs: What's the Simon?
[1:37:24] Bob Dobbs: What's that word?
[1:37:25] Cameron McEwen: Simon is,
[1:37:28] Cameron McEwen: I looked that up and I talk about it in the post that I wrote.
[1:37:32] Cameron McEwen: Simon was,
[1:37:33] Cameron McEwen: I believe,
[1:37:35] Cameron McEwen: an opera in the late 18th century,
[1:37:40] Cameron McEwen: which took off from a story in Boccaccio.
[1:37:44] Cameron McEwen: And in Boccaccio's story,
[1:37:46] Cameron McEwen: Simon is a shepherd.
[1:37:49] Cameron McEwen: he comes upon a group of women washing themselves and seeing them naked.
[1:37:57] Cameron McEwen: And the story in Boccaccio is that the women had maybe a nurse or somebody who was there with them,
[1:38:10] Cameron McEwen: and he wanted to befriend the women and became intoxicated by their beauty and all this stuff.
[1:38:18] Cameron McEwen: And the nurse rejected his advances because he was so uncouth.
[1:38:26] Cameron McEwen: So in the story of Boccaccio,
[1:38:31] Cameron McEwen: he's so entranced by the women that he goes back and becomes educated and then is able to find the women again and links
[1:38:45] Cameron McEwen: up with them.
[1:38:46] Cameron McEwen: and I believe becomes married to one of them,
[1:38:49] Cameron McEwen: and the two of them then became prince and princess somewhere.
[1:38:56] Cameron McEwen: So the popular Simon is the public which has received a soul.
[1:39:04] Cameron McEwen: How do you spell Simon?
[1:39:08] Cameron McEwen: Postman.
[1:39:09] Bob Dobbs: Postman.
[1:39:11] Bob Dobbs: Never seen that before.
[1:39:13] Bob Dobbs: He is Simon,
[1:39:14] Bob Dobbs: and he becomes a symbol of the mass mind?
[1:39:18] Cameron McEwen: No,
[1:39:21] Cameron McEwen: Simon is the public.
[1:39:23] Bob Dobbs: Okay.
[1:39:24] Cameron McEwen: Remember,
[1:39:24] Cameron McEwen: you were talking about how
[1:39:29] Cameron McEwen: Bulwer-Lytton, or Lytton-Bulwer,
[1:39:31] Cameron McEwen: whatever his name is,
[1:39:33] Cameron McEwen: became afraid of the rise of public opinion.
[1:39:41] Bob Dobbs: Yeah.
[1:39:41] Cameron McEwen: And...
[1:39:42] Cameron McEwen: tried to maintain the need for an aristocratic level of mind that would kind of lead the way.
[1:39:59] Cameron McEwen: And that you related to the rise of occultism,
[1:40:04] Cameron McEwen: right,
[1:40:05] Cameron McEwen: and to some kind of privileged access to reality.
[1:40:09] Cameron McEwen: But please
[1:40:10] Cameron McEwen: Please let me finish the quotation because it goes on in very interesting ways.
[1:40:16] Cameron McEwen: So we've had the magic of Gutenberg with the two sides,
[1:40:20] Cameron McEwen: and then we have the physical forces no longer separated from the moral.
[1:40:24] Cameron McEwen: So Simon,
[1:40:25] Cameron McEwen: you can say,
[1:40:26] Cameron McEwen: is the physical force.
[1:40:27] Cameron McEwen: It's the mass.
[1:40:29] Cameron McEwen: It's the public,
[1:40:30] Cameron McEwen: which until.
[1:40:33] Cameron McEwen: The early
[1:40:35] Cameron McEwen: 19th century had simply been led by the aristocrats wherever they wanted to take the mass of the public.
[1:40:47] Cameron McEwen: And now the mass of the public is discovering its power and represents for people like
[1:40:55] Cameron McEwen: Lytton Bulwer a new phenomenon that at once is to be feared.
[1:41:02] Cameron McEwen: and in some way steered in ways where its power can be,
[1:41:13] Cameron McEwen: instead of threatening,
[1:41:15] Cameron McEwen: can be put to use.
[1:41:17] Cameron McEwen: So anyway,
[1:41:17] Cameron McEwen: we have here that physical force is no longer separated from the moral.
[1:41:22] Cameron McEwen: Mind has by slow degrees crept into the mighty mass.
[1:41:27] Cameron McEwen: The popular Simon has received a soul.
[1:41:31] Cameron McEwen: In the primal and restless consciousness of the new spirit,
[1:41:36] Cameron McEwen: Luther appealed to the people.
[1:41:39] Cameron McEwen: Right,
[1:41:39] Cameron McEwen: so this Luther is going back to the magic of Gutenberg,
[1:41:43] Cameron McEwen: right?
[1:41:46] Cameron McEwen: In the primal and restless consciousness of the new spirit,
[1:41:51] Cameron McEwen: Luther appealed to the people.
[1:41:53] Cameron McEwen: From that moment,
[1:41:55] Cameron McEwen: all the codes of classical dogmatists were worthless.
[1:42:00] Cameron McEwen: expired leases to an estate.
[1:42:06] Cameron McEwen: These were the expired leases to an estate,
[1:42:09] Cameron McEwen: which has been let to new tenants upon new conditions.
[1:42:13] Bob Dobbs: Wow.
[1:42:15] Cameron McEwen: Right.
[1:42:15] Cameron McEwen: So he keeps circling around this idea of the magic of Gutenberg and the people on one side and the people on the other side,
[1:42:23] Cameron McEwen: right?
[1:42:23] Bob Dobbs: Yeah.
[1:42:24] Cameron McEwen: So the way that
[1:42:27] Cameron McEwen: I developed that in and
[1:42:30] Cameron McEwen: the post that I'm talking about is that
[1:42:36] Cameron McEwen: Bulwer is making the point that the mass of the public can become unbalanced internally.
[1:42:53] Cameron McEwen: Because of the soul?
[1:42:55] Bob Dobbs: Because the soul is possessed?
[1:42:59] Cameron McEwen: The um,
[1:43:01] Cameron McEwen: When the mind goes into the public,
[1:43:05] Cameron McEwen: the public can become aware of its power and can unbalance the body politic,
[1:43:14] Cameron McEwen: which is what in us things happened in the
[1:43:18] Cameron McEwen: 19th century.
[1:43:20] Cameron McEwen: But the public mind can also become unbalanced internally.
[1:43:29] Cameron McEwen: And that's the great threat and problem that
[1:43:37] Cameron McEwen: Bulwer was hinting at.
[1:43:40] Cameron McEwen: So how I end the post here is the popular Simon has received a soul,
[1:43:51] Cameron McEwen: indeed animated by the brain of a lunatic since the glass jar with...
[1:43:58] Cameron McEwen: the intended brain of a SubGenius was dropped by the clumsy
[1:44:03] Cameron McEwen: Igor
[1:44:05] Cameron McEwen: Frankenstein, and this is a quote from
[1:44:09] Cameron McEwen: Bulwer, in the primal and restless consciousness of the new spirit,
[1:44:14] Cameron McEwen: looks around,
[1:44:15] Cameron McEwen: wild-eyed,
[1:44:16] Cameron McEwen: and begins to take his first fateful steps.
[1:44:23] Cameron McEwen: Fateful,
[1:44:24] Bob Dobbs: F-A-T-E?
[1:44:26] Cameron McEwen: Yeah,
[1:44:27] Cameron McEwen: fateful steps.
[1:44:28] Cameron McEwen: So what I see Innis 1833 quotation from Bulwer is exactly the development that you were talking about.
[1:44:39] Bob Dobbs: Yes.
[1:44:39] Cameron McEwen: That the soul in some way has become something that can be transported.
[1:44:50] Cameron McEwen: And when it becomes transported into the popular mass,
[1:44:55] Cameron McEwen: it becomes a great threat.
[1:44:58] Cameron McEwen: But since it can be transported,
[1:45:01] Cameron McEwen: it can also be transported in other ways.
[1:45:05] Cameron McEwen: And so if the popular mass has become a threat,
[1:45:09] Cameron McEwen: then one answer to it could be an aristocratic transportation of it into some other form.
[1:45:18] Cameron McEwen: And you can see that with the Theosophist,
[1:45:21] Cameron McEwen: let's say,
[1:45:23] Cameron McEwen: or with Crowley.
[1:45:25] Cameron McEwen: But another way...
[1:45:27] Cameron McEwen: it might be transported would be to be in a different type of human being.
[1:45:34] Cameron McEwen: And you quoted a science fiction novel as seeing this other species as being below the earth.
[1:45:44] Bob Dobbs: Yeah.
[1:45:45] Cameron McEwen: Right?
[1:45:45] Cameron McEwen: The ground.
[1:45:47] Bob Dobbs: The hidden ground.
[1:45:48] Cameron McEwen: That's correct.
[1:45:51] Cameron McEwen: And then you tied this in with AI,
[1:45:53] Cameron McEwen: which is you could say that what happens with AI is that Frankenstein,
[1:46:00] Cameron McEwen: Dr.
[1:46:01] Cameron McEwen: Frankenstein,
[1:46:01] Cameron McEwen: not Frankenstein the monster.
[1:46:03] Cameron McEwen: Let's say that Dr.
[1:46:05] Cameron McEwen: Frankenstein sees his monster wandering off with the brain of a lunatic.
[1:46:12] Bob Dobbs: Yeah.
[1:46:13] Cameron McEwen: And so he turns around and he sees the broken jar with the brain of the SubGenius that has been all cut up by the glass shards upon the jar being dropped.
[1:46:29] Cameron McEwen: And Dr.
[1:46:29] Cameron McEwen: Frankenstein says to himself,
[1:46:31] Cameron McEwen: well,
[1:46:32] Cameron McEwen: I wonder if the brain of the SubGenius can be reconstituted.
[1:46:37] Cameron McEwen: Maybe I can put it back together.
[1:46:41] Cameron McEwen: Right.
[1:46:41] Cameron McEwen: And then...
[1:46:44] Cameron McEwen: Maybe with the brain of the SubGenius,
[1:46:46] Cameron McEwen: I don't even need a body.
[1:46:48] Cameron McEwen: Maybe the brain of the SubGenius can work independently,
[1:46:55] Cameron McEwen: right?
[1:46:55] Cameron McEwen: And so when
[1:46:58] Cameron McEwen: Mary Shelley sees this
[1:47:02] Cameron McEwen: Frankenstein possibility in the early
[1:47:07] Cameron McEwen: 19th century,
[1:47:08] Cameron McEwen: in a way,
[1:47:10] Cameron McEwen: you can see it leading on to
[1:47:12] Cameron McEwen: AI. Yes.
[1:47:15] Bob Dobbs: Now,
[1:47:15] Bob Dobbs: this is the
[1:47:19] Bob Dobbs: McLuhan interest in Illuminati and conspiracy stuff and the occult,
[1:47:23] Bob Dobbs: and then he gets out of it with media.
[1:47:26] Bob Dobbs: This quote brings it back together.
[1:47:29] Bob Dobbs: This essay carries all these different,
[1:47:32] Bob Dobbs: the schizoid part of McLuhan,
[1:47:35] Bob Dobbs: his interest in pagan spirituality or pagan...
[1:47:39] Bob Dobbs: occult stuff while being a Catholic,
[1:47:42] Bob Dobbs: being superseded,
[1:47:44] Bob Dobbs: that division being superseded by
[1:47:46] Bob Dobbs: AI coming in,
[1:47:48] Bob Dobbs: which McLuhan is talking about too,
[1:47:49] Bob Dobbs: because he says the cyborg is,
[1:47:52] Bob Dobbs: he starts writing about that in the 60s.
[1:47:54] Bob Dobbs: If he read this in 1946 when he came to the University of Toronto,
[1:48:01] Bob Dobbs: he probably never recovered from it.
[1:48:04] Cameron McEwen: Well,
[1:48:05] Cameron McEwen: I don't know about that,
[1:48:06] Cameron McEwen: but remember that
[1:48:09] Cameron McEwen: At the start of
[1:48:12] Cameron McEwen: Christian humanism and modern letters,
[1:48:15] Cameron McEwen: McLuhan says that we've discovered all of these primitive customs,
[1:48:25] Cameron McEwen: and we've learned that the way to understand primitive people is to understand their language,
[1:48:33] Cameron McEwen: to sort of get inside their societies.
[1:48:39] Cameron McEwen: achievement of anthropology,
[1:48:45] Cameron McEwen: which
[1:48:46] Cameron McEwen: McLuhan learned about in the
[1:48:49] Cameron McEwen: 1930s because
[1:48:51] Cameron McEwen: Richards was including essays by Malinowski in his books.
[1:48:59] Bob Dobbs: That's right.
[1:49:01] Cameron McEwen: That's correct.
[1:49:02] Cameron McEwen: So
[1:49:03] Cameron McEwen: McLuhan, very early on,
[1:49:05] Cameron McEwen: was aware of...
[1:49:08] Cameron McEwen: the research and the new research into primitive societies and realized how important it was for modern thinking.
[1:49:20] Cameron McEwen: And he,
[1:49:22] Cameron McEwen: at the start of the Christian Humanism lecture,
[1:49:26] Cameron McEwen: this is 1954,
[1:49:30] Cameron McEwen: McLuhan says that teachers at Acadia University
[1:49:36] Cameron McEwen: who deal in these primitive cultures are always amazed that their Catholic students find no problem with the idea of getting into their minds.
[1:49:51] Cameron McEwen: And then McLuhan goes on to say that's because
[1:49:54] Cameron McEwen: Catholicism has no reason to fear these things.
[1:49:59] Cameron McEwen: They
[1:50:00] Cameron McEwen: Catholics don't need to worry about being captured by them.
[1:50:05] Cameron McEwen: And why is that?
[1:50:06] Cameron McEwen: That's because in order to be a Catholic,
[1:50:11] Cameron McEwen: you have to understand more than Catholic experience.
[1:50:15] Cameron McEwen: You have to understand what human experience is all about,
[1:50:19] Cameron McEwen: and then you more or less make a choice or find yourself,
[1:50:25] Cameron McEwen: once you understand the range of human experience,
[1:50:28] Cameron McEwen: then you understand that that,
[1:50:30] Cameron McEwen: in a sense,
[1:50:31] Cameron McEwen: is being Catholic.
[1:50:32] Cameron McEwen: It's being Carolyn in the Greek meaning,
[1:50:35] Cameron McEwen: which is
[1:50:36] Cameron McEwen: Universal.
[1:50:38] Cameron McEwen: So...
[1:50:40] Cameron McEwen: When you bring in the schizoid McLuhan and the McLuhan interest into magic and into Gnosticism,
[1:50:50] Cameron McEwen: that is part and parcel of a certain necessity for McLuhan.
[1:50:56] Cameron McEwen: For McLuhan,
[1:50:57] Cameron McEwen: you cannot understand one experience without understanding all experience.
[1:51:03] Cameron McEwen: You can't understand one medium without understanding all media.
[1:51:08] Cameron McEwen: Yes.
[1:51:09] Cameron McEwen: Right?
[1:51:09] Cameron McEwen: There is no such thing for McLuhan as one medium.
[1:51:15] Cameron McEwen: So when the first words are spoken,
[1:51:20] Cameron McEwen: there's something in somebody's mind that gets expressed to somebody else's mind.
[1:51:28] Cameron McEwen: So you have the mind in action,
[1:51:32] Cameron McEwen: but you also have words,
[1:51:34] Cameron McEwen: physical words that are expressed.
[1:51:37] Cameron McEwen: And so you have...
[1:51:38] Cameron McEwen: two media already.
[1:51:41] Cameron McEwen: And as a matter of fact,
[1:51:42] Cameron McEwen: when those humans spoke to each other with the first words,
[1:51:48] Cameron McEwen: they also had some kind of knowledge of hunting or of cultural exchanges,
[1:52:03] Cameron McEwen: say,
[1:52:04] Cameron McEwen: of women or of
[1:52:07] Cameron McEwen: mythology or something.
[1:52:09] Cameron McEwen: So again,
[1:52:10] Cameron McEwen: you had multimedia in the beginning.
[1:52:13] Bob Dobbs: What are the two meaning in the beginning,
[1:52:15] Bob Dobbs: the mouth and the mind?
[1:52:18] Cameron McEwen: Well,
[1:52:18] Cameron McEwen: there's the mouth and the mind,
[1:52:19] Cameron McEwen: but the mouth is living in some sort of group.
[1:52:24] Cameron McEwen: There's no such thing as a mouth that just appears on the world.
[1:52:28] Cameron McEwen: Every mouth has always been a baby.
[1:52:31] Cameron McEwen: And so that baby had to be brought up.
[1:52:35] Cameron McEwen: in some sort of cultural understanding.
[1:52:37] Cameron McEwen: So that cultural understanding is also a medium.
[1:52:41] Bob Dobbs: Yeah.
[1:52:41] Cameron McEwen: Right.
[1:52:42] Cameron McEwen: So multimedia are built into the human experience for McLuhan.
[1:52:50] Bob Dobbs: Yes.
[1:52:51] Cameron McEwen: But it's only with the electronic multimedia that humans can understand that multimedia that's always been going on.
[1:53:05] Bob Dobbs: Yep.
[1:53:06] Bob Dobbs: And that's why he says language is tactility.
[1:53:10] Bob Dobbs: It carries all the senses.
[1:53:12] Bob Dobbs: It's not oral,
[1:53:13] Bob Dobbs: it's tactile.
[1:53:14] Bob Dobbs: Correct.
[1:53:16] Cameron McEwen: That includes...
[1:53:18] Cameron McEwen: Multimedia and all-at-onceness are interestingly correlated for McLuhan.
[1:53:24] Bob Dobbs: Yeah.
[1:53:26] Bob Dobbs: So that's quite a discovery,
[1:53:29] Bob Dobbs: that quote and that essay.
[1:53:31] Bob Dobbs: And then the role of Bulwer is starting.
[1:53:36] Bob Dobbs: what is now a major popular theme.
[1:53:40] Bob Dobbs: I mean,
[1:53:40] Bob Dobbs: they say the internet got the populace into conspiracy.
[1:53:45] Bob Dobbs: That's the history that comes from Bulwer-Lytton.
[1:53:50] Bob Dobbs: He's one of the originators of it.
[1:53:53] Cameron McEwen: Correct.
[1:53:54] Cameron McEwen: So it's a history.
[1:53:57] Cameron McEwen: I mean,
[1:53:57] Cameron McEwen: there's many different things that flow into the 20th century,
[1:54:01] Cameron McEwen: but this
[1:54:03] Cameron McEwen: 19th century
[1:54:04] Cameron McEwen: English
[1:54:05] Cameron McEwen: journalism,
[1:54:07] Cameron McEwen: popular fiction angle is very important.
[1:54:13] Bob Dobbs: Right.
[1:54:13] Bob Dobbs: Here's the journalist's final paragraph.
[1:54:19] Bob Dobbs: So he says,
[1:54:20] Bob Dobbs: and yet,
[1:54:21] Bob Dobbs: as ever with powerful conspiracy theories,
[1:54:24] Bob Dobbs: remember,
[1:54:24] Bob Dobbs: conspiracy theories is a political issue now.
[1:54:28] Bob Dobbs: They divide the people between the vaccinated and the anti-vaxxers who are conspiracy theorists.
[1:54:35] Cameron McEwen: And also,
[1:54:37] Cameron McEwen: it has a very great deal to do with your book.
[1:54:39] Bob Dobbs: Yes,
[1:54:41] Cameron McEwen: yeah.
[1:54:41] Cameron McEwen: It has to do with what your book is about,
[1:54:44] Cameron McEwen: what is the significance Trump in the very broad sense of significance.
[1:54:51] Bob Dobbs: That's right.
[1:54:51] Bob Dobbs: He's a shaman.
[1:54:52] Bob Dobbs: He's the first shaman in politics.
[1:54:54] Cameron McEwen: We're in the White House.
[1:54:56] Cameron McEwen: Yeah,
[1:54:57] Cameron McEwen: and what does he represent in...
[1:55:03] Cameron McEwen: Modern American history.
[1:55:05] Bob Dobbs: Yeah.
[1:55:06] Cameron McEwen: What can be read in the rise and achievement and fall Trump?
[1:55:16] Bob Dobbs: Well,
[1:55:16] Bob Dobbs: he's back on top.
[1:55:17] Cameron McEwen: You should hear him being interviewed this week about Biden in Afghanistan.
[1:55:22] Bob Dobbs: He's back in his power.
[1:55:27] Cameron McEwen: Could be like the waves of the sea where they...
[1:55:30] Cameron McEwen: Yeah.
[1:55:30] Cameron McEwen: The rise and the fall and the rise and the fall of what?
[1:55:34] Bob Dobbs: Oh,
[1:55:34] Bob Dobbs: he's having a field day,
[1:55:36] Bob Dobbs: colleague.
[1:55:37] Bob Dobbs: He says Biden was a mistake when he got born.
[1:55:40] Bob Dobbs: That's what he said today.
[1:55:43] Bob Dobbs: He's really,
[1:55:44] Bob Dobbs: you know,
[1:55:45] Bob Dobbs: heightened up the insult talent he has.
[1:55:48] Bob Dobbs: Okay,
[1:55:49] Bob Dobbs: so it says here,
[1:55:50] Bob Dobbs: and yet,
[1:55:51] Bob Dobbs: as ever with powerful conspiracy theories,
[1:55:53] Bob Dobbs: there is a grain of truth in the stories.
[1:55:56] Bob Dobbs: Some progressive thinkers like H.G.
[1:55:58] Bob Dobbs: Wells or Julian Huxley really did dream of one world government and one world religion.
[1:56:03] Bob Dobbs: and of a global population controlled and sometimes culled by an international scientific elite.
[1:56:09] Bob Dobbs: Sometimes they really did talk about themselves as a breed apart,
[1:56:12] Bob Dobbs: practically a different species to the moronic masses.
[1:56:16] Bob Dobbs: But this was as a deluded,
[1:56:19] Bob Dobbs: grandiose fantasy as much as any paranoid conspiracy theory.
[1:56:24] Bob Dobbs: They were not in control.
[1:56:25] Bob Dobbs: In fact,
[1:56:26] Bob Dobbs: Julian Huxley,
[1:56:26] Bob Dobbs: who briefly rose to be director of UNESCO,
[1:56:29] Bob Dobbs: was a Neurotica who was repeatedly sectioned for bipolar.
[1:56:33] Bob Dobbs: Episodes,
[1:56:34] Bob Dobbs: I guess,
[1:56:34] Bob Dobbs: quarantine section for bipolar episodes.
[1:56:37] Bob Dobbs: And as for mind control and satanic rituals...
[1:56:40] Bob Dobbs: That was part of the paranoid outsider's fevered imaginations.
[1:56:44] Bob Dobbs: They were staring through the fence,
[1:56:45] Bob Dobbs: trying to guess what the insiders were doing.
[1:56:48] Bob Dobbs: They got some things right and some things way off.
[1:56:51] Bob Dobbs: The idea of an all-powerful demon-worshipping,
[1:56:54] Bob Dobbs: think of Pizzagate,
[1:56:56] Bob Dobbs: all-powerful demon-worshipping superhuman elite controlling the world is an illusion,
[1:57:02] Bob Dobbs: praise the journalist.
[1:57:03] Bob Dobbs: On the other hand,
[1:57:05] Bob Dobbs: the fact that some people have much more power and money than others and use that power to define others as lesser humans,
[1:57:11] Bob Dobbs: then treat them as disposable raw material for their own fantasies,
[1:57:14] Bob Dobbs: unfortunately,
[1:57:15] Bob Dobbs: that is often all too true.
[1:57:18] Bob Dobbs: So we come back to the paradox,
[1:57:19] Bob Dobbs: the cul-de-sac.
[1:57:22] Cameron McEwen: Right.
[1:57:22] Cameron McEwen: So remember that when
[1:57:26] Cameron McEwen: Bulwer-Lytton, or
[1:57:28] Cameron McEwen: Lytton, Bulwer,
[1:57:29] Cameron McEwen: whatever the guy's name was,
[1:57:30] Cameron McEwen: when he was writing this stuff,
[1:57:32] Cameron McEwen: this was...
[1:57:32] Cameron McEwen: 1833.
[1:57:35] Bob Dobbs: You know what's happening in that year?
[1:57:37] Bob Dobbs: The ultimate conspiracy is beginning.
[1:57:39] Bob Dobbs: The skull and bones starts in Germany in 1832.
[1:57:44] Bob Dobbs: Oh,
[1:57:44] Bob Dobbs: yeah?
[1:57:45] Cameron McEwen: Interesting.
[1:57:45] Cameron McEwen: But in 1817 was when Mary Shelley published Frankenstein.
[1:57:52] Cameron McEwen: So the idea that mind is transposable and can have great power,
[1:58:00] Cameron McEwen: You can see Innis.
[1:58:02] Cameron McEwen: time,
[1:58:03] Cameron McEwen: in the early
[1:58:04] Cameron McEwen: 19th century,
[1:58:06] Cameron McEwen: this idea can go in two very different directions.
[1:58:10] Cameron McEwen: It can go in the direction of the mass becoming a kind of intoxicated,
[1:58:21] Cameron McEwen: unstoppable power.
[1:58:23] Cameron McEwen: And so that you can see as the
[1:58:29] Cameron McEwen: Nazi army.
[1:58:31] Cameron McEwen: being one intoxicated mind going out to sort of conquer the whole world.
[1:58:40] Cameron McEwen: And then on the other side,
[1:58:42] Cameron McEwen: you have the transposable mind as leading to the transhuman,
[1:58:50] Cameron McEwen: to something that's more than human.
[1:58:53] Cameron McEwen: And both of these ideas are alive in early
[1:58:59] Cameron McEwen: 19th century England.
[1:59:01] Cameron McEwen: And the question is posed at the time,
[1:59:06] Cameron McEwen: how are we going to cure ourselves from these two satanic monsters that modern civilization is giving birth to?
[1:59:19] Bob Dobbs: Okay,
[1:59:22] Bob Dobbs: two points.
[1:59:22] Bob Dobbs: First,
[1:59:23] Bob Dobbs: the article ends by saying,
[1:59:26] Bob Dobbs: read a book called Breaking Open,
[1:59:29] Bob Dobbs: subtitled Finding a Way Through Satan.
[1:59:31] Bob Dobbs: Spiritual Emergency.
[1:59:32] Bob Dobbs: And this is a guide to navigating our collective spiritual cul-de-sac.
[1:59:38] Bob Dobbs: It actually says crisis.
[1:59:39] Bob Dobbs: For a guide to navigating our collective spiritual crisis.
[1:59:42] Bob Dobbs: Now what's ironic is I spend
[1:59:47] Bob Dobbs: 20 hours on the weekend propagating my team as the new elite.
[1:59:55] Bob Dobbs: This is autobiography for fuck's sake.
[2:00:01] Bob Dobbs: Really?
[2:00:01] Bob Dobbs: This is crazy.
[2:00:04] Bob Dobbs: I've got to get my secret team to read this essay and then get that quote.
[2:00:08] Bob Dobbs: So what is the title of your article that you quote this quote in?
[2:00:16] Bob Dobbs: What is your McLuhan Scientist item?
[2:00:19] Cameron McEwen: Yeah,
[2:00:19] Cameron McEwen: so I'll send you a link,
[2:00:22] Cameron McEwen: but it's just called McLuhan Reads Innis's
[2:00:26] Cameron McEwen: Political Economy in Modern States 1.
[2:00:29] Cameron McEwen: And basically what I'm going to do is I'm going to go through all of the essays in Innis's 1946 book and show how many of the themes that
[2:00:41] Cameron McEwen: McLuhan later Wright about are already there.
[2:00:46] Cameron McEwen: And remember,
[2:00:48] Cameron McEwen: we only did,
[2:00:51] Cameron McEwen: I only read a couple of them.
[2:00:54] Cameron McEwen: Another,
[2:00:55] Cameron McEwen: for example,
[2:00:56] Cameron McEwen: is this is Innis.
[2:00:57] Cameron McEwen: He says,
[2:00:58] Cameron McEwen: The new literature,
[2:01:00] Cameron McEwen: meaning like Dickens,
[2:01:02] Cameron McEwen: for example,
[2:01:03] Cameron McEwen: the new literature followed the new journalism.
[2:01:07] Cameron McEwen: Well,
[2:01:07] Cameron McEwen: that's a big theme in
[2:01:09] Cameron McEwen: McLuhan. Yes.
[2:01:11] Cameron McEwen: Right?
[2:01:12] Bob Dobbs: Now,
[2:01:12] Cameron McEwen: I don't say that he only got it from Innis.
[2:01:15] Bob Dobbs: Yeah.
[2:01:15] Cameron McEwen: You know,
[2:01:17] Cameron McEwen: Innis,
[2:01:17] Cameron McEwen: when Innis was writing this stuff in the mid-1940s,
[2:01:22] Cameron McEwen: he was writing stuff that rang a bell with...
[2:01:26] Cameron McEwen: McLuhan.
[2:01:26] Cameron McEwen: McLuhan knew it was right.
[2:01:28] Bob Dobbs: Yes,
[2:01:29] Bob Dobbs: and he knew he could use it to complete,
[2:01:32] Bob Dobbs: and no one else knew about it.
[2:01:34] Bob Dobbs: He was the only one who knew,
[2:01:35] Bob Dobbs: so he was an expert on Innis.
[2:01:38] Cameron McEwen: Well,
[2:01:39] Cameron McEwen: I guess that's true.
[2:01:41] Cameron McEwen: But why did he become an expert in Innis?
[2:01:43] Cameron McEwen: He became an expert in Innis because Innis was saying stuff that McLuhan knew from,
[2:01:50] Cameron McEwen: let's say,
[2:01:50] Cameron McEwen: the French symbolists or something.
[2:01:53] Cameron McEwen: Like the new literature followed the new journalism.
[2:01:55] Cameron McEwen: That's right out of the history of the second half of the 19th century
[2:02:01] Cameron McEwen: French literature.
[2:02:02] Cameron McEwen: Or where he says
[2:02:05] Cameron McEwen: London was like a newspaper.
[2:02:07] Cameron McEwen: He was reading the same thing in Mallarmé,
[2:02:10] Cameron McEwen: let's say.
[2:02:12] Cameron McEwen: So he sees things in Innis that rings a bell,
[2:02:16] Cameron McEwen: and that says to him,
[2:02:18] Cameron McEwen: well,
[2:02:19] Cameron McEwen: maybe there's things in Innis that I have to learn,
[2:02:22] Cameron McEwen: because I know that he's a very smart guy.
[2:02:27] Cameron McEwen: So that then leads him on to
[2:02:30] Cameron McEwen: Innis on communication,
[2:02:33] Cameron McEwen: Innis on the need for balance.
[2:02:37] Cameron McEwen: That's what
[2:02:38] Cameron McEwen: McLuhan becomes all about,
[2:02:40] Cameron McEwen: right?
[2:02:42] Cameron McEwen: What is the role of communication in relationship to communication?
[2:02:47] Cameron McEwen: What is unbalanced,
[2:02:49] Cameron McEwen: like the Gutenberg Galaxy,
[2:02:51] Cameron McEwen: and what is balanced?
[2:02:53] Cameron McEwen: So there's his whole career.
[2:02:55] Bob Dobbs: Yeah,
[2:02:55] Bob Dobbs: Innis is recapitulating the themes of the men of 1914 and before,
[2:03:02] Bob Dobbs: saying it a little bit before McLuhan.
[2:03:05] Bob Dobbs: He's saying it before McLuhan,
[2:03:07] Bob Dobbs: and McLuhan recognizes,
[2:03:09] Bob Dobbs: that's what I have been trying to say,
[2:03:12] Bob Dobbs: but didn't know how to do it yet.
[2:03:14] Bob Dobbs: And then Innis did it,
[2:03:16] Bob Dobbs: and with his first essay.
[2:03:18] Bob Dobbs: So
[2:03:19] Bob Dobbs: Easterbrook hands the first transformation of McLuhan with the Chesterton book,
[2:03:24] Bob Dobbs: and then he hands the second transformation with the Innis book in 1946.
[2:03:29] Cameron McEwen: Correct,
[2:03:30] Cameron McEwen: correct.
[2:03:30] Bob Dobbs: Wow.
[2:03:30] Cameron McEwen: Correct,
[2:03:31] Cameron McEwen: yeah.
[2:03:32] Cameron McEwen: And always,
[2:03:33] Cameron McEwen: lifelong.
[2:03:35] Cameron McEwen: presents a kind of steeplechase for McLuhan,
[2:03:41] Cameron McEwen: because
[2:03:44] Cameron McEwen: Easterbrook was a born skeptic,
[2:03:49] Cameron McEwen: and
[2:03:49] Cameron McEwen: McLuhan was a born enthusiast.
[2:03:52] Bob Dobbs: Yeah,
[2:03:53] Bob Dobbs: yeah.
[2:03:54] Cameron McEwen: So what Easterbrook was able to do was insist that the enthusiast bring his ideas.
[2:04:04] Cameron McEwen: down to earth and make them clear.
[2:04:07] Bob Dobbs: Yeah.
[2:04:08] Cameron McEwen: Well,
[2:04:08] Cameron McEwen: that was very good for McLuhan.
[2:04:10] Bob Dobbs: Yeah,
[2:04:10] Bob Dobbs: and look at his name.
[2:04:11] Bob Dobbs: He's got the Christian Easter,
[2:04:13] Bob Dobbs: and he's river run.
[2:04:14] Bob Dobbs: Easterbrook,
[2:04:15] Bob Dobbs: what a poetic,
[2:04:16] Bob Dobbs: fitting name.
[2:04:19] Cameron McEwen: Absolutely,
[2:04:19] Cameron McEwen: absolutely.
[2:04:20] Cameron McEwen: And Brook is also related to break.
[2:04:23] Bob Dobbs: Yes,
[2:04:23] Bob Dobbs: yeah.
[2:04:24] Cameron McEwen: So you have the day break and the break between different media.
[2:04:29] Cameron McEwen: The break means gap.
[2:04:31] Bob Dobbs: The gap,
[2:04:31] Bob Dobbs: yeah,
[2:04:32] Bob Dobbs: Easter gap.
[2:04:35] Bob Dobbs: Yeah.
[2:04:36] Bob Dobbs: And Tom,
[2:04:38] Bob Dobbs: what is it?
[2:04:38] Bob Dobbs: He talks about Tom,
[2:04:39] Bob Dobbs: the great Tom is in Innis Wake or something,
[2:04:42] Bob Dobbs: or Tom Elliott.
[2:04:44] Cameron McEwen: Yeah,
[2:04:45] Cameron McEwen: the great Tom is the book on
[2:04:47] Cameron McEwen: Elliott. Yeah,
[2:04:48] Bob Dobbs: he's talking about Easterbrook.
[2:04:50] Bob Dobbs: He recognizes what the real source is.
[2:04:55] Cameron McEwen: Maybe.
[2:04:55] Cameron McEwen: That's right.
[2:04:57] Bob Dobbs: That's a missed opportunity.
[2:04:58] Bob Dobbs: People should have interviewed him more.
[2:05:00] Bob Dobbs: They should have paid attention to him.
[2:05:02] Cameron McEwen: We'll get into that.
[2:05:03] Cameron McEwen: We'll find out if there was,
[2:05:06] Cameron McEwen: in fact,
[2:05:07] Cameron McEwen: an interview.
[2:05:09] Bob Dobbs: Right,
[2:05:09] Bob Dobbs: right.
[2:05:09] Cameron McEwen: We know.
[2:05:10] Bob Dobbs: And there might be someone still alive,
[2:05:12] Bob Dobbs: 100 years old,
[2:05:13] Bob Dobbs: sitting in some old person's home in Manitoba who knew these guys.
[2:05:18] Bob Dobbs: What's the third member of the school gang?
[2:05:21] Bob Dobbs: They can find him.
[2:05:24] Bob Dobbs: An interview before he drops dead.
[2:05:28] Cameron McEwen: We know who the third member was.
[2:05:32] Cameron McEwen: that
[2:05:33] Cameron McEwen: was
[2:05:33] Cameron McEwen: Carl Williams,
[2:05:35] Cameron McEwen: who was in the same high school as McLuhan.
[2:05:39] Cameron McEwen: New McLuhan before Easterbrook became the president of
[2:05:44] Cameron McEwen: Western Ontario
[2:05:46] Cameron McEwen: University, now Western University,
[2:05:49] Cameron McEwen: but he's dead.
[2:05:51] Cameron McEwen: I don't think that we're going to find people that knew these guys because they were all born around 1910.
[2:06:00] Cameron McEwen: Easterbrook was born in 1907 and then outlived McLuhan.
[2:06:06] Bob Dobbs: Oh,
[2:06:06] Bob Dobbs: Easterbrook was the older?
[2:06:08] Cameron McEwen: Yeah,
[2:06:09] Cameron McEwen: yeah.
[2:06:10] Cameron McEwen: And why he was in the same class as
[2:06:14] Cameron McEwen: McLuhan in university is a big question.
[2:06:16] Cameron McEwen: I don't know why that is.
[2:06:19] Cameron McEwen: He may have dropped out of between high school Acadia University.
[2:06:23] Cameron McEwen: He may have dropped out to work.
[2:06:25] Cameron McEwen: I don't know.
[2:06:26] Cameron McEwen: But in 1928,
[2:06:28] Cameron McEwen: they were in the same year of engineering together.
[2:06:33] Bob Dobbs: Yeah,
[2:06:33] Bob Dobbs: their first year.
[2:06:35] Cameron McEwen: Yes,
[2:06:35] Cameron McEwen: but
[2:06:36] Cameron McEwen: McLuhan was 17 and
[2:06:38] Cameron McEwen: Easterbrook was 21.
[2:06:39] Bob Dobbs: Wow.
[2:06:40] Bob Dobbs: And,
[2:06:41] Bob Dobbs: well,
[2:06:42] Bob Dobbs: Carlton was in between?
[2:06:45] Cameron McEwen: No,
[2:06:46] Cameron McEwen: Williams was the youngest.
[2:06:49] Cameron McEwen: He was born in 1912.
[2:06:52] Cameron McEwen: But,
[2:06:54] Cameron McEwen: interestingly,
[2:06:55] Cameron McEwen: Carl Williams was the youngest,
[2:06:58] Cameron McEwen: he graduated before the other two who are older.
[2:07:01] Cameron McEwen: And that's because
[2:07:04] Cameron McEwen: at least in McLuhan case,
[2:07:06] Cameron McEwen: he changed majors from engineering to English.
[2:07:10] Cameron McEwen: So he lost a year in a certain sense,
[2:07:14] Cameron McEwen: whereas
[2:07:15] Cameron McEwen: Williams went into psychology.
[2:07:19] Cameron McEwen: He did it in three years.
[2:07:22] Cameron McEwen: Yeah,
[2:07:22] Cameron McEwen: exactly.
[2:07:24] Bob Dobbs: Very interesting.
[2:07:25] Bob Dobbs: So,
[2:07:27] Bob Dobbs: okay,
[2:07:28] Bob Dobbs: so you've got the quote.
[2:07:30] Cameron McEwen: So for people that don't know,
[2:07:32] Cameron McEwen: these three people,
[2:07:33] Cameron McEwen: McLuhan,
[2:07:34] Cameron McEwen: Easterbrook,
[2:07:35] Cameron McEwen: and Williams were three of the five that founded the
[2:07:41] Cameron McEwen: Ford, yeah,
[2:07:42] Cameron McEwen: founded Explorations and founded the
[2:07:45] Cameron McEwen: Ford Seminar that was the sort of the ground of Explorations.
[2:07:51] Bob Dobbs: Yeah,
[2:07:51] Bob Dobbs: like Tom Cooper went around and interviewed people connected to McLuhan.
[2:07:57] Bob Dobbs: I went and got articles.
[2:07:58] Bob Dobbs: I was lazy on interviewing the guys.
[2:08:00] Bob Dobbs: I missed my opportunity.
[2:08:04] Cameron McEwen: Well,
[2:08:04] Cameron McEwen: that's true.
[2:08:06] Cameron McEwen: I mean,
[2:08:06] Cameron McEwen: so did I.
[2:08:06] Bob Dobbs: Yeah.
[2:08:08] Cameron McEwen: I could have studied with McLuhan if I'd chosen to do so,
[2:08:11] Cameron McEwen: but I chose not to do so.
[2:08:14] Cameron McEwen: And at that time,
[2:08:15] Cameron McEwen: Easterbrook was still alive,
[2:08:18] Cameron McEwen: and
[2:08:20] Cameron McEwen: I believe he was still the chairman of the political economy department.
[2:08:28] Bob Dobbs: Yeah,
[2:08:29] Bob Dobbs: what's poignant is the end of Carpenter's...
[2:08:34] Bob Dobbs: We were the first to break into the Silent Sea article for Robert Fulford,
[2:08:38] Bob Dobbs: which then is the appendix for Theo's book.
[2:08:41] Bob Dobbs: He ends with they're at McLuhan funeral.
[2:08:44] Bob Dobbs: Carpenter,
[2:08:45] Bob Dobbs: Easterbrook,
[2:08:46] Bob Dobbs: maybe one or two other guys,
[2:08:48] Bob Dobbs: and they're all bemoaning how they've been cut off from McLuhan in the last 10 years by the kids.
[2:08:59] Bob Dobbs: They're wishing they had spent more time with them.
[2:09:02] Bob Dobbs: They missed the last 10 years of McLuhan.
[2:09:06] Cameron McEwen: Right.
[2:09:06] Bob Dobbs: And that's Easterbrook is there.
[2:09:08] Bob Dobbs: He got cut off too.
[2:09:10] Cameron McEwen: That's right.
[2:09:11] Cameron McEwen: That's right.
[2:09:13] Cameron McEwen: I think they all felt that they didn't understand
[2:09:19] Cameron McEwen: McLuhan anymore.
[2:09:20] Bob Dobbs: Yeah.
[2:09:21] Bob Dobbs: And they would have liked to hang out with him,
[2:09:26] Bob Dobbs: try to catch up to him,
[2:09:27] Bob Dobbs: try to figure out what he was on about.
[2:09:29] Bob Dobbs: But,
[2:09:30] Cameron McEwen: of course,
[2:09:30] Cameron McEwen: this is...
[2:09:31] Cameron McEwen: This is what people always say at funerals.
[2:09:35] Bob Dobbs: Yeah.
[2:09:36] Cameron McEwen: So it's a little bit of cliche action going on here.
[2:09:39] Bob Dobbs: Yeah,
[2:09:39] Bob Dobbs: but Easterbrook said that he later,
[2:09:43] Bob Dobbs: I think it's in that thing or somewhere,
[2:09:45] Bob Dobbs: he later read Take Today.
[2:09:48] Bob Dobbs: At first he didn't get it,
[2:09:49] Bob Dobbs: but then he read it years later and he said,
[2:09:52] Bob Dobbs: wow,
[2:09:52] Bob Dobbs: this is important in economics.
[2:09:54] Bob Dobbs: He had a new appreciation of Take Today.
[2:09:57] Bob Dobbs: Ever seen that quote?
[2:09:59] Bob Dobbs: Does that sound familiar?
[2:10:01] Bob Dobbs: Yeah,
[2:10:01] Bob Dobbs: that was said somewhere.
[2:10:03] Bob Dobbs: I don't know where right now.
[2:10:05] Bob Dobbs: Maybe it's said in that article.
[2:10:07] Bob Dobbs: But you read that article,
[2:10:08] Bob Dobbs: so you don't remember this.
[2:10:10] Bob Dobbs: But
[2:10:10] Bob Dobbs: Easterbrook came around on the Take Today later.
[2:10:18] Cameron McEwen: Well,
[2:10:18] Cameron McEwen: it is a book that you need to read repeatedly.
[2:10:24] Cameron McEwen: That's actually one of the things that I took from our one meeting in New York.
[2:10:31] Cameron McEwen: You talked about Take Today appreciably in a way that I didn't recognize.
[2:10:40] Cameron McEwen: And so I went back and I read Take Today again and I said to myself,
[2:10:45] Cameron McEwen: well,
[2:10:45] Cameron McEwen: Bob was right about that.
[2:10:47] Bob Dobbs: Great.
[2:10:48] Bob Dobbs: Yeah,
[2:10:49] Bob Dobbs: the last page where he talks about making the news becomes making the world.
[2:10:55] Bob Dobbs: And the Burroughs review where he talks,
[2:10:58] Bob Dobbs: the artist becomes a pharaoh making the world like the pharaoh.
[2:11:02] Bob Dobbs: He called it Egyptian.
[2:11:04] Bob Dobbs: That comes back to this quote,
[2:11:07] Bob Dobbs: the super elite making the world.
[2:11:12] Cameron McEwen: I'm not sure I would agree with that,
[2:11:15] Cameron McEwen: but that's one reading.
[2:11:21] Cameron McEwen: I would prefer to go to the other quote.
[2:11:25] Cameron McEwen: In his sites from
[2:11:26] Cameron McEwen: Bulwer, in the same book,
[2:11:28] Cameron McEwen: there's 1833,
[2:11:30] Cameron McEwen: I read it earlier,
[2:11:32] Cameron McEwen: at present the English,
[2:11:33] Cameron McEwen: instead of finding politics in the stage,
[2:11:36] Cameron McEwen: find their stage in politics.
[2:11:38] Cameron McEwen: So he already saw the global theater.
[2:11:45] Cameron McEwen: What he's saying there is that politics is not something that becomes a model for the stage.
[2:11:54] Cameron McEwen: Instead,
[2:11:55] Cameron McEwen: the stage is the model for politics.
[2:11:59] Bob Dobbs: Yeah.
[2:12:00] Bob Dobbs: All the world's a stage.
[2:12:01] Bob Dobbs: All the stage is a world.
[2:12:03] Bob Dobbs: That's right.
[2:12:03] Bob Dobbs: That's how McLuhan flips it.
[2:12:05] Cameron McEwen: Correct.
[2:12:08] Bob Dobbs: But Dan,
[2:12:09] Bob Dobbs: he's an early science fiction guy.
[2:12:12] Cameron McEwen: Yeah.
[2:12:12] Bob Dobbs: I remember reading this conspiracy newsletter in the
[2:12:16] Bob Dobbs: 80s, and they were going on about Bulwer-Lytton,
[2:12:19] Bob Dobbs: and I didn't know who he was or anything.
[2:12:22] Bob Dobbs: But now,
[2:12:24] Bob Dobbs: his new prominence in Innis is looking at this guy.
[2:12:30] Cameron McEwen: Absolutely.
[2:12:32] Cameron McEwen: Has read a lot of him.
[2:12:33] Bob Dobbs: Yeah.
[2:12:35] Bob Dobbs: And then
[2:12:35] Bob Dobbs: Lewis is in there.
[2:12:37] Bob Dobbs: Lewis is aware of these dilemmas or these mergings.
[2:12:41] Bob Dobbs: And Innis is influenced by Lewis,
[2:12:44] Bob Dobbs: though you don't agree,
[2:12:46] Bob Dobbs: but there is that biography that goes into Lewis.
[2:12:51] Bob Dobbs: Maybe he got that from McLuhan,
[2:12:55] Bob Dobbs: McLuhan articles.
[2:12:56] Cameron McEwen: You kind of lost me there.
[2:13:00] Cameron McEwen: Lewis was influenced by who?
[2:13:02] Bob Dobbs: No,
[2:13:02] Bob Dobbs: Lewis was well aware of these problems of the satanic Illuminati running British society.
[2:13:09] Bob Dobbs: That's what Apes of God is about.
[2:13:11] Cameron McEwen: Yeah,
[2:13:12] Cameron McEwen: so sure.
[2:13:13] Cameron McEwen: So he's very aware not only of Wells and all those people,
[2:13:17] Cameron McEwen: but he's also aware of the literature of the
[2:13:21] Cameron McEwen: 19th century.
[2:13:22] Bob Dobbs: Yeah.
[2:13:23] Cameron McEwen: And so he's aware of exactly these developments that
[2:13:31] Cameron McEwen: Innis is writing about.
[2:13:34] Cameron McEwen: So it's not,
[2:13:36] Cameron McEwen: McLuhan doesn't get them only from Innis.
[2:13:39] Cameron McEwen: He gets them from his own research.
[2:13:45] Cameron McEwen: his own research,
[2:13:46] Cameron McEwen: and then in Lewis,
[2:13:49] Cameron McEwen: he gets them in a certain way from
[2:13:52] Cameron McEwen: Richards. He gets the negative view from Richards.
[2:13:57] Cameron McEwen: For Richards,
[2:13:57] Cameron McEwen: the 19th century literature is just unconscious of itself.
[2:14:05] Cameron McEwen: And what happens with the 20th century is people like Eliot are actually conscious.
[2:14:11] Cameron McEwen: of what they're doing,
[2:14:12] Cameron McEwen: and that leads them to understand language in a new way.
[2:14:17] Bob Dobbs: Right,
[2:14:17] Bob Dobbs: so the telegraph is influencing the eye-ear thing,
[2:14:22] Bob Dobbs: and you know,
[2:14:23] Bob Dobbs: if it was in the 1797,
[2:14:25] Bob Dobbs: it comes back in a new way because of the telegraph,
[2:14:30] Bob Dobbs: and that's the content,
[2:14:31] Bob Dobbs: the body becomes the content of the first discarnate expression of the telegraph,
[2:14:36] Bob Dobbs: and you know,
[2:14:37] Bob Dobbs: you have the famous British Prime Minister saying,
[2:14:41] Bob Dobbs: You know,
[2:14:42] Bob Dobbs: that the people who run the world are not known by the public.
[2:14:46] Bob Dobbs: He's one of the first people of that conspiracy Fritz Senn sight.
[2:14:51] Bob Dobbs: And he's the same time as Bulwer.
[2:14:54] Bob Dobbs: It's either Disraeli or Gladstone.
[2:14:56] Bob Dobbs: I think it's Disraeli who says it.
[2:14:58] Bob Dobbs: So the implosion of the telegraph,
[2:15:01] Bob Dobbs: people are starting to see a satanic,
[2:15:05] Bob Dobbs: Antichrist kind of character can take over the planet.
[2:15:09] Cameron McEwen: Correct.
[2:15:09] Cameron McEwen: Correct.
[2:15:10] Cameron McEwen: That's why I was bringing Frankenstein into connection with the
[2:15:14] Cameron McEwen: Bulwer-Lytton quote.
[2:15:18] Cameron McEwen: Everybody saw that something had come alive.
[2:15:24] Cameron McEwen: People looked at the French Revolution,
[2:15:27] Cameron McEwen: and they realized that here was a power that could sweep aside the church,
[2:15:33] Cameron McEwen: sweep aside the king,
[2:15:36] Cameron McEwen: sweep aside the aristocrats.
[2:15:39] Cameron McEwen: and
[2:15:39] Cameron McEwen: take over for itself.
[2:15:41] Cameron McEwen: But it was a power that really didn't know what it was doing.
[2:15:46] Cameron McEwen: It was just destructive.
[2:15:48] Bob Dobbs: And then it merged with,
[2:15:51] Bob Dobbs: and the people felt it as a discarded emotion of multitude.
[2:15:55] Cameron McEwen: Yeah,
[2:15:55] Cameron McEwen: but it was already merged with the public in the French Revolution.
[2:16:01] Cameron McEwen: The French Revolution was that merger.
[2:16:04] Bob Dobbs: Yeah,
[2:16:05] Bob Dobbs: and then it had a new factor.
[2:16:07] Bob Dobbs: You could say that the people were different before the telegraph as after the telegraph.
[2:16:13] Bob Dobbs: They were changed again.
[2:16:14] Bob Dobbs: Each electric medium did that.
[2:16:18] Bob Dobbs: What was said about the Gutenberg,
[2:16:21] Bob Dobbs: every telegraph,
[2:16:22] Bob Dobbs: movies,
[2:16:22] Bob Dobbs: radio,
[2:16:23] Bob Dobbs: TV,
[2:16:24] Bob Dobbs: satellites,
[2:16:24] Bob Dobbs: they changed people from before to after.
[2:16:29] Cameron McEwen: So you have...
[2:16:30] Cameron McEwen: You have the,
[2:16:32] Cameron McEwen: McLuhan was constantly talking about how we need to use previous media revolutions as the model for what we need now.
[2:16:43] Bob Dobbs: Yeah.
[2:16:43] Cameron McEwen: So people would say,
[2:16:46] Cameron McEwen: you know,
[2:16:47] Cameron McEwen: how can you be optimistic in the face of all of this terrible stuff that's going on?
[2:16:54] Cameron McEwen: And McLuhan would say,
[2:16:55] Cameron McEwen: because humans are capable of a revolution.
[2:16:59] Cameron McEwen: We can see that revolution in Greece in 400 BC.
[2:17:04] Cameron McEwen: We can see it in Gutenberg.
[2:17:06] Cameron McEwen: And we can see it beginning with the telegraph,
[2:17:08] Cameron McEwen: which is what you're talking about.
[2:17:10] Bob Dobbs: Yeah.
[2:17:11] Bob Dobbs: And the tech body.
[2:17:13] Bob Dobbs: Remember how the world became obsessed Trump?
[2:17:15] Bob Dobbs: He was expressing some demonic thing for many people.
[2:17:19] Bob Dobbs: You know,
[2:17:20] Bob Dobbs: he had hijacked the process.
[2:17:23] Cameron McEwen: Yeah.
[2:17:25] Bob Dobbs: Yeah.
[2:17:25] Bob Dobbs: Amazing.
[2:17:26] Bob Dobbs: So,
[2:17:27] Bob Dobbs: excellent.
[2:17:28] Cameron McEwen: Yeah,
[2:17:30] Cameron McEwen: we should probably draw a line under it here,
[2:17:32] Cameron McEwen: but this is obviously a very important part of your book and a very important topic in McLuhan and a very important topic in sort of where we're at.
[2:17:46] Bob Dobbs: Yeah,
[2:17:46] Bob Dobbs: yeah.
[2:17:47] Bob Dobbs: So that was,
[2:17:48] Bob Dobbs: how did,
[2:17:49] Bob Dobbs: why did we get into Innis and you quoting that
[2:17:52] Bob Dobbs: 46? How did we stumble from the Baudrillard to there?
[2:17:56] Bob Dobbs: Oh,
[2:17:56] Bob Dobbs: the I-E-R.
[2:17:58] Bob Dobbs: Oh,
[2:17:58] Bob Dobbs: and then you quoted Bowler,
[2:18:00] Bob Dobbs: and then that reminded me of the eye-ear.
[2:18:02] Bob Dobbs: Right.
[2:18:03] Cameron McEwen: But the eye-ear was already something that Innis said.
[2:18:07] Bob Dobbs: Yeah.
[2:18:07] Cameron McEwen: When the stage was used to appeal to the eye rather than to the ear.
[2:18:12] Bob Dobbs: Yeah.
[2:18:14] Bob Dobbs: That's pretty neat.
[2:18:15] Bob Dobbs: So we serendipitous did it again,
[2:18:18] Bob Dobbs: created another incredible two hours of discovery,
[2:18:24] Bob Dobbs: reinforcing how amazing Bob's book is.
[2:18:30] Cameron McEwen: It's certainly suggestive.
[2:18:32] Bob Dobbs: Yeah,
[2:18:32] Bob Dobbs: yeah.
[2:18:33] Bob Dobbs: So excellent.
[2:18:34] Bob Dobbs: Glad to have you notice this stuff.
[2:18:37] Cameron McEwen: Good.
[2:18:38] Cameron McEwen: Well,
[2:18:38] Cameron McEwen: thanks,
[2:18:38] Cameron McEwen: Bob.
[2:18:39] Cameron McEwen: I enjoyed the conversation,
[2:18:40] Cameron McEwen: and I look forward to the next one.
[2:18:42] Bob Dobbs: Right.
[2:18:42] Bob Dobbs: That was really good.
[2:18:44] Bob Dobbs: Okay.
[2:18:44] Bob Dobbs: Talk to you later,
[2:18:44] Bob Dobbs: Ewen Cameron.
[2:18:45] Cameron McEwen: Okay.
[2:18:46] Cameron McEwen: Ciao,
[2:18:46] Cameron McEwen: ciao,
[2:18:46] Cameron McEwen: Bob.
[2:18:47] Bob Dobbs: Bye.