[00:02] Bob Dobbs: Okay,
[00:02] Bob Dobbs: Ewen Cameron and Bob are back with the
[00:05] Bob Dobbs: 37th episode of our examination of my book Trump.
[00:12] Bob Dobbs: And let's see,
[00:18] Bob Dobbs: Ewen Cameron sent me an article.
[00:20] Bob Dobbs: If anybody listened to our
[00:22] Bob Dobbs: 36th episode,
[00:25] Bob Dobbs: we came across the epiphany of the word or the meaning of archive at the end.
[00:31] Bob Dobbs: And then,
[00:32] Bob Dobbs: did you remember this article and look for it,
[00:36] Bob Dobbs: or did you just stumble across it,
[00:38] Bob Dobbs: Ewen Cameron?
[00:39] Cameron McEwen: No,
[00:40] Cameron McEwen: I knew about it,
[00:41] Cameron McEwen: but I'd never read it.
[00:43] Bob Dobbs: Right,
[00:43] Bob Dobbs: so Ewen Cameron looked up this article.
[00:47] Bob Dobbs: Jacques Derrida gave a speech,
[00:49] Bob Dobbs: might have been in 94,
[00:51] Bob Dobbs: and it's published in 95,
[00:54] Bob Dobbs: and it's called Archive Fever,
[00:56] Bob Dobbs: a Freudian Impression.
[00:59] Bob Dobbs: and um
[01:00] Bob Dobbs: 1995 it comes out.
[01:02] Bob Dobbs: So it's a very interesting article.
[01:04] Bob Dobbs: And after
[01:06] Bob Dobbs: Ewen Cameron read it,
[01:07] Bob Dobbs: he wrote to me,
[01:08] Bob Dobbs: we will need to go through this lecture.
[01:11] Bob Dobbs: Stunning how much of it was foreseen by Innis and McLuhan 50 years before for Innis and 30 to 40 years before for McLuhan.
[01:19] Bob Dobbs: So we're now doing our talks every two weeks,
[01:24] Bob Dobbs: so I had time to read this long,
[01:25] Bob Dobbs: complicated article.
[01:26] Bob Dobbs: It's
[01:27] Bob Dobbs: 63 pages.
[01:30] Bob Dobbs: It's a...
[01:30] Bob Dobbs: typical
[01:31] Bob Dobbs: Jacques Derrida complexity to read.
[01:34] Bob Dobbs: I hadn't read Jacques Derrida in a long time,
[01:37] Bob Dobbs: so I had to get back into shape.
[01:39] Bob Dobbs: So we're talking about it.
[01:42] Bob Dobbs: We're not going to go into much of the article,
[01:45] Bob Dobbs: but we're talking about what is the archive and what we learned about it,
[01:52] Bob Dobbs: what was new in what Jacques Derrida pointed out.
[01:55] Bob Dobbs: So I said it reminded me of the markers on the roads.
[02:00] Bob Dobbs: 2,000 years ago.
[02:01] Bob Dobbs: So what were you saying about Hermes,
[02:03] Bob Dobbs: Ewen Cameron?
[02:05] Cameron McEwen: Yeah,
[02:06] Cameron McEwen: I was simply saying that
[02:08] Cameron McEwen: Hermes and Mercury were conceived as gods of the way,
[02:16] Cameron McEwen: and they weren't conceived as merely mythological figures.
[02:26] Cameron McEwen: They were concrete.
[02:28] Cameron McEwen: So along the way there were hermetic markers indicating the way to go and
[02:38] Cameron McEwen: I believe indicating distances.
[02:41] Cameron McEwen: And many of these markers had an erect phallus.
[02:47] Cameron McEwen: And
[02:49] Cameron McEwen: I'm not exactly sure why an erect phallus was identified with
[02:55] Cameron McEwen: Hermes.
[02:59] Cameron McEwen: It may be that it had to do with masculinity being associated
[03:13] Cameron McEwen: with the way more than femininity being conceived as the destination or the origin.
[03:24] Cameron McEwen: But that would have to be thought about.
[03:27] Cameron McEwen: But in any case,
[03:28] Cameron McEwen: along the way were hermetic markers.
[03:31] Bob Dobbs: Yeah,
[03:32] Bob Dobbs: along the routes that people walked or rode horses or whatever means.
[03:36] Bob Dobbs: And they would maybe pray at these or do some kind of ritual at the markers.
[03:44] Cameron McEwen: Yeah,
[03:44] Cameron McEwen: could well be.
[03:45] Cameron McEwen: And still in
[03:48] Cameron McEwen: Greece and even in Europe.
[03:50] Cameron McEwen: So this isn't only an Orthodox thing,
[03:54] Cameron McEwen: but both in...
[03:56] Cameron McEwen: Orthodox and Catholic countries,
[04:00] Cameron McEwen: it's still the case that there are shrines along the way.
[04:05] Bob Dobbs: Right.
[04:05] Bob Dobbs: So we were wondering what is an archive,
[04:09] Bob Dobbs: and it's a stopping,
[04:11] Bob Dobbs: and
[04:12] Bob Dobbs: I'm reminded of,
[04:13] Bob Dobbs: I think,
[04:13] Bob Dobbs: Duchamp said something like,
[04:15] Bob Dobbs: Marcel Duchamp said,
[04:17] Bob Dobbs: asked what was ours or something,
[04:19] Bob Dobbs: he said,
[04:20] Bob Dobbs: well,
[04:20] Bob Dobbs: it's something you point at.
[04:22] Bob Dobbs: So it seems to me the eye is coming into is
[04:26] Bob Dobbs: into culture and people are starting to locate meaningful sites.
[04:33] Bob Dobbs: I think the,
[04:35] Bob Dobbs: what do you call them,
[04:37] Bob Dobbs: the mobile,
[04:38] Bob Dobbs: what do you call those people,
[04:39] Bob Dobbs: nomadic,
[04:40] Bob Dobbs: the nomadic aboriginals,
[04:43] Bob Dobbs: if they did travel all over the place,
[04:45] Bob Dobbs: they kept moving,
[04:46] Bob Dobbs: they had their natural seasonal markers or whatever their experiences were with the rhythms of the animals they were hunting.
[04:55] Bob Dobbs: I don't see them using visual markers.
[05:00] Bob Dobbs: They might have sounds and use their other senses.
[05:04] Bob Dobbs: So when you start getting into worshipping figures,
[05:08] Bob Dobbs: that's the beginning of the Neolithic age and the sort of slowing down and getting people to become sedentary.
[05:16] Bob Dobbs: And so then you start creating an archive or a marker.
[05:21] Bob Dobbs: of memory,
[05:22] Bob Dobbs: of information or security.
[05:27] Bob Dobbs: So archive,
[05:29] Bob Dobbs: what archive did the shaman have,
[05:33] Bob Dobbs: the dancing shaman?
[05:35] Bob Dobbs: He had an oral tactile memory,
[05:37] Bob Dobbs: co-anesthetic memory,
[05:39] Bob Dobbs: and he knew a lot about the plants and herbs and things,
[05:41] Bob Dobbs: or she did.
[05:43] Bob Dobbs: So that's the way and the marker and the going along the road,
[05:50] Bob Dobbs: that's...
[05:50] Bob Dobbs: the beginning of visuality,
[05:53] Bob Dobbs: it seems to me.
[05:55] Bob Dobbs: And so the archive comes in with visual space or the beginning of the seeing.
[06:03] Bob Dobbs: Now the pyramids could be one of the earliest archives,
[06:07] Bob Dobbs: and McLuhan defines the pyramid as the huge non-visual aspects of acoustic and tactile space or spaces to start to visualize it.
[06:19] Bob Dobbs: They had to make huge monuments,
[06:21] Bob Dobbs: he suggested.
[06:22] Bob Dobbs: Do you remember that?
[06:24] Cameron McEwen: I don't remember the exact place that you're pointing to,
[06:29] Cameron McEwen: but what you're saying makes a great deal of sense.
[06:34] Cameron McEwen: The pyramid is a huge visual marker,
[06:38] Cameron McEwen: but what it marks is acoustic space.
[06:41] Bob Dobbs: Yeah,
[06:42] Bob Dobbs: which was huge to them.
[06:44] Bob Dobbs: Not like infinite,
[06:45] Bob Dobbs: like Blaise Pascal suffered when they...
[06:47] Bob Dobbs: Gutenberg got them looking out at the skies,
[06:49] Bob Dobbs: but some kind of huge or,
[06:52] Bob Dobbs: I don't know,
[06:53] Bob Dobbs: swallowing situation.
[06:56] Bob Dobbs: Now,
[06:56] Bob Dobbs: McLuhan says that you get to the Greeks in that era,
[06:59] Bob Dobbs: and humans start thinking,
[07:02] Bob Dobbs: at least westernized humans,
[07:04] Bob Dobbs: start thinking of being as a prison.
[07:07] Bob Dobbs: So
[07:08] Bob Dobbs: I don't think the space before visuality was a prison,
[07:13] Bob Dobbs: but it was some kind of swallowing involving space.
[07:17] Bob Dobbs: space.
[07:18] Bob Dobbs: And so when they started to say,
[07:20] Bob Dobbs: okay,
[07:20] Bob Dobbs: let's make a big archive of it,
[07:22] Bob Dobbs: a pyramid visualization,
[07:26] Bob Dobbs: they made big ones to encompass the hugeness of anti-environment they felt they were in.
[07:34] Bob Dobbs: Because I think if you get into Neolithic,
[07:38] Bob Dobbs: I think people started by being more sedentary.
[07:41] Bob Dobbs: They're in the same spaces all the time.
[07:43] Bob Dobbs: So it becomes familiar.
[07:45] Bob Dobbs: And
[07:47] Bob Dobbs: maybe even fatiguing,
[07:49] Bob Dobbs: and then it begins to feel like a prison.
[07:52] Bob Dobbs: This is pure speculation,
[07:53] Bob Dobbs: but I'm trying to figure out,
[07:56] Bob Dobbs: I'm trying to justify the archive.
[07:58] Bob Dobbs: Even though speech is an archive,
[08:00] Bob Dobbs: and all communication media is an archive,
[08:04] Bob Dobbs: the leading to the Alexandrian library,
[08:07] Bob Dobbs: you know,
[08:08] Bob Dobbs: huge archive,
[08:09] Bob Dobbs: that's coming in with visual space emphasis,
[08:12] Bob Dobbs: I think.
[08:13] Bob Dobbs: Yes,
[08:13] Cameron McEwen: well,
[08:15] Cameron McEwen: I mean,
[08:16] Cameron McEwen: first off,
[08:17] Cameron McEwen: the library has collections.
[08:24] Cameron McEwen: I don't want to say books,
[08:26] Cameron McEwen: right?
[08:26] Cameron McEwen: It's got scrolls and it's got parchment.
[08:29] Cameron McEwen: It's got a bunch of letters that are written on various substances.
[08:36] Cameron McEwen: But the whole notion of letters is fairly new in human history.
[08:42] Cameron McEwen: So once you begin to have letters,
[08:47] Cameron McEwen: which are a way of sort of concretizing time,
[08:54] Cameron McEwen: and you automatically have the notion of archive because letters are types of sound.
[09:06] Cameron McEwen: They are a collection.
[09:08] Cameron McEwen: Each letter,
[09:09] Cameron McEwen: each sound is a collection that has been made out of language.
[09:16] Cameron McEwen: And so you sort of automatically have an archive.
[09:22] Cameron McEwen: You begin to write,
[09:23] Cameron McEwen: but you write on the basis of what has been written.
[09:28] Cameron McEwen: And when you write,
[09:29] Cameron McEwen: it can be read tomorrow as well.
[09:33] Cameron McEwen: So what an archive is,
[09:36] Cameron McEwen: is a kind of bridge in time.
[09:38] Bob Dobbs: Yeah.
[09:40] Bob Dobbs: Okay,
[09:40] Bob Dobbs: so we jumped to the present,
[09:43] Bob Dobbs: and I was just...
[09:45] Bob Dobbs: Gilson to a section of last time we talked,
[09:48] Bob Dobbs: September
[09:49] Bob Dobbs: 9th, and I'm saying the tech body is the archive incarnate,
[09:55] Bob Dobbs: and the tech body makes it Hillman,
[10:00] Bob Dobbs: teases you with,
[10:01] Bob Dobbs: today,
[10:01] Bob Dobbs: for people's media diet,
[10:04] Bob Dobbs: they have to keep up or they're forced to encounter new images and sensations all the time,
[10:11] Bob Dobbs: and they can look it up,
[10:13] Bob Dobbs: maybe in YouTube archives or wherever,
[10:17] Bob Dobbs: and in the digital media,
[10:20] Bob Dobbs: but they're always pressured to move on,
[10:22] Bob Dobbs: and you don't know how much to pay attention to what's been recently archived,
[10:28] Bob Dobbs: available for replay,
[10:30] Bob Dobbs: because it's subject to change.
[10:32] Bob Dobbs: There's so much change going on in our experience that we don't know how to...
[10:39] Bob Dobbs: a weather to settle.
[10:41] Bob Dobbs: So I'm saying the tech body upsets that.
[10:44] Bob Dobbs: The tech body exaggerates that.
[10:49] Cameron McEwen: Wait just a sec before we get too far along.
[10:53] Cameron McEwen: When you say the tech body is the archive incarnate,
[10:58] Cameron McEwen: are you using incarnate are you capturing the bodily the
[11:10] Cameron McEwen: the meat that's involved in
[11:14] Cameron McEwen: carne. Yeah.
[11:16] Cameron McEwen: In carne,
[11:17] Cameron McEwen: are you bringing that in,
[11:19] Cameron McEwen: or are you simply saying that the tech body is sort of what the archive is in some sort of universal
[11:35] Cameron McEwen: sense?
[11:35] Cameron McEwen: In other words,
[11:36] Cameron McEwen: you're not referencing...
[11:40] Cameron McEwen: the idea of meat or of flesh at all.
[11:44] Bob Dobbs: Now,
[11:45] Bob Dobbs: I am doing flesh,
[11:46] Bob Dobbs: meat,
[11:46] Bob Dobbs: and the senses become human.
[11:49] Bob Dobbs: Incarnate,
[11:51] Bob Dobbs: what do they say about Christ?
[11:53] Bob Dobbs: He was the word incarnate?
[11:55] Cameron McEwen: Yes,
[11:55] Cameron McEwen: absolutely.
[11:56] Bob Dobbs: So it was the word made human,
[11:58] Bob Dobbs: right?
[12:00] Cameron McEwen: Yes.
[12:04] Bob Dobbs: Let's assume that's what I could mean.
[12:07] Bob Dobbs: And being like,
[12:09] Bob Dobbs: I could mean that,
[12:13] Bob Dobbs: though it is not meaning that at the same time.
[12:17] Bob Dobbs: So the tech body is archiving memory,
[12:20] Bob Dobbs: mind,
[12:22] Bob Dobbs: preservation of so many different kinds of information,
[12:26] Bob Dobbs: but it's a human,
[12:28] Bob Dobbs: it's become artificial intelligence or...
[12:32] Bob Dobbs: human thing that interacts intimately with humans.
[12:35] Bob Dobbs: That's why I brought in the ESP stuff.
[12:38] Bob Dobbs: McLuhan quote on ESP.
[12:40] Bob Dobbs: He was picking up on a new kind of intimacy that was happening.
[12:45] Cameron McEwen: So we could say that the incarnate does have to do with what might be called humanization or something.
[12:57] Bob Dobbs: On the chart,
[12:57] Bob Dobbs: I call it Anthropomorphic Physical.
[13:00] Bob Dobbs: Okay,
[13:00] Bob Dobbs: good.
[13:01] Cameron McEwen: Yeah.
[13:03] Cameron McEwen: But it's Anthropomorphic Physical only by calling into question what those are.
[13:10] Cameron McEwen: Yep.
[13:12] Cameron McEwen: Because those are losing their anchor in humanism and in what was thought to be physicality.
[13:25] Bob Dobbs: Yeah,
[13:25] Bob Dobbs: what I call the chemical body.
[13:27] Cameron McEwen: Yeah,
[13:28] Bob Dobbs: exactly.
[13:28] Cameron McEwen: Exactly.
[13:29] Bob Dobbs: Yeah.
[13:30] Cameron McEwen: So it's...
[13:31] Cameron McEwen: another instance of I got to use words when I talk to you.
[13:35] Cameron McEwen: So what we're talking about here is we're talking about archive in a sense that people can automatically understand,
[13:48] Cameron McEwen: but then you want to complicate that.
[13:51] Cameron McEwen: And for example,
[13:53] Cameron McEwen: when you talk about how things are getting more and more
[14:01] Cameron McEwen: fast.
[14:02] Cameron McEwen: Ephemeral.
[14:03] Cameron McEwen: Yeah,
[14:04] Cameron McEwen: exactly.
[14:04] Cameron McEwen: Ephemeral,
[14:06] Cameron McEwen: which goes back to the Greek word Forsdale,
[14:08] Cameron McEwen: by the way,
[14:09] Cameron McEwen: which is emera,
[14:11] Cameron McEwen: and still in modern Greek as well.
[14:15] Cameron McEwen: So,
[14:15] Cameron McEwen: ephemeral means of a day or of a moment.
[14:20] Cameron McEwen: But at any rate,
[14:21] Cameron McEwen: when we talk about how humans are either trying to relate to that or
[14:30] Cameron McEwen: are automatically related to that out of the womb,
[14:33] Cameron McEwen: we have to understand that at the very same time,
[14:37] Cameron McEwen: they themselves are being revolutionized.
[14:40] Cameron McEwen: So it's not just sort of something that's happening objectively where things are faster and faster and less distinct.
[14:50] Cameron McEwen: It's also a subjective faster and faster and less distinct.
[14:55] Cameron McEwen: So both the subjective and the objective poles
[14:58] Cameron McEwen: are being dissolved at the same time.
[15:01] Bob Dobbs: Yes.
[15:02] Bob Dobbs: So
[15:04] Bob Dobbs: I had a problem with my computer a couple days ago.
[15:08] Bob Dobbs: So for two days,
[15:10] Bob Dobbs: I couldn't get online.
[15:11] Bob Dobbs: And this happens once a year or something.
[15:15] Bob Dobbs: It turned out I needed a new router.
[15:17] Bob Dobbs: But I didn't know what it was.
[15:19] Bob Dobbs: But
[15:21] Bob Dobbs: I could not function.
[15:23] Bob Dobbs: And if we hadn't figured out what it was,
[15:26] Bob Dobbs: and this piled up,
[15:28] Bob Dobbs: I had a lot of backlog for my radio shows and all the stuff I do with Carolyn and ION.
[15:35] Bob Dobbs: It just would have been a real drag if it went by two weeks,
[15:38] Bob Dobbs: and then it got fixed,
[15:39] Bob Dobbs: and I had to go back and catch up,
[15:41] Bob Dobbs: you know,
[15:43] Bob Dobbs: because I do spend a lot of time doing it.
[15:45] Bob Dobbs: But it always reminds me,
[15:46] Bob Dobbs: this is a body.
[15:48] Bob Dobbs: So in Derrida's article,
[15:51] Bob Dobbs: he disperses.
[15:53] Bob Dobbs: The meaning of archive scatters it,
[15:55] Bob Dobbs: like Joyce does in Finnegans Wake.
[15:58] Bob Dobbs: And so
[16:01] Bob Dobbs: I'm actually,
[16:02] Bob Dobbs: I was saying to Carolyn,
[16:04] Bob Dobbs: look,
[16:05] Bob Dobbs: this is as much as a body,
[16:06] Bob Dobbs: an organ,
[16:07] Bob Dobbs: as any chemical body organ.
[16:09] Bob Dobbs: It's a pressure on me.
[16:11] Bob Dobbs: I've got to deal with it.
[16:12] Bob Dobbs: I have to stay with it and control it,
[16:15] Bob Dobbs: just like I got to go to the bathroom or I have to eat.
[16:19] Bob Dobbs: And then I said,
[16:20] Bob Dobbs: what is a body?
[16:20] Bob Dobbs: Is it the instinct?
[16:22] Bob Dobbs: Is it hunger?
[16:23] Bob Dobbs: You know,
[16:25] Bob Dobbs: the basic drives?
[16:27] Bob Dobbs: The Internet,
[16:28] Bob Dobbs: this computer thing,
[16:29] Bob Dobbs: is a drive,
[16:30] Bob Dobbs: what I call the chip body.
[16:31] Bob Dobbs: So I was reawakened or reminded of what I mean by saying we've got more than one organ,
[16:37] Bob Dobbs: more than one body.
[16:39] Cameron McEwen: Right.
[16:40] Cameron McEwen: Yeah,
[16:40] Cameron McEwen: you've been talking about that for decades.
[16:43] Bob Dobbs: Yeah.
[16:43] Bob Dobbs: And
[16:44] Bob Dobbs: I think it's an obvious thing.
[16:45] Cameron McEwen: But notice,
[16:46] Cameron McEwen: before we go too fast,
[16:47] Cameron McEwen: notice how the word drive.
[16:49] Bob Dobbs: Yeah.
[16:51] Cameron McEwen: applies here.
[16:52] Bob Dobbs: He used the word drive,
[16:54] Bob Dobbs: I think,
[16:55] Bob Dobbs: in the article at one point.
[16:58] Bob Dobbs: Jacques Derrida did.
[17:00] Cameron McEwen: Oh,
[17:00] Cameron McEwen: I'm sure.
[17:01] Cameron McEwen: Absolutely.
[17:02] Cameron McEwen: I mean,
[17:02] Cameron McEwen: drives are very important to Freud.
[17:05] Cameron McEwen: Drives is what you have in a computer,
[17:08] Cameron McEwen: right?
[17:08] Bob Dobbs: Yeah.
[17:09] Bob Dobbs: Hard drive.
[17:09] Cameron McEwen: You know,
[17:10] Cameron McEwen: hard drive.
[17:10] Cameron McEwen: That hard penis,
[17:12] Bob Dobbs: that erect penis from the highway.
[17:15] Cameron McEwen: Yeah,
[17:17] Cameron McEwen: that's a very important concept there.
[17:20] Bob Dobbs: Yeah,
[17:21] Bob Dobbs: so the dispersal.
[17:24] Bob Dobbs: Now,
[17:26] Bob Dobbs: the dispersal,
[17:27] Bob Dobbs: is that a problem for young kids?
[17:29] Bob Dobbs: It's only when they have to encounter different societies,
[17:33] Bob Dobbs: which emphasize different media,
[17:34] Bob Dobbs: and different archives,
[17:36] Bob Dobbs: societies or archives,
[17:37] Bob Dobbs: what they think is important to preserve.
[17:40] Bob Dobbs: And the problem more and more for the generations,
[17:44] Bob Dobbs: the new generations,
[17:45] Bob Dobbs: is how much they can drop the old archive.
[17:49] Bob Dobbs: and process ephemerally every day the archive of information they're dealing with.
[17:56] Bob Dobbs: And if they're not processing it,
[17:58] Bob Dobbs: they don't think they're keeping up with it.
[18:01] Bob Dobbs: Because you can think of how everybody's on the Internet doing a billion different websites or whatever they're processing.
[18:08] Bob Dobbs: And it's the processing process that means you're alive,
[18:14] Bob Dobbs: not what you're processing,
[18:16] Bob Dobbs: not the content.
[18:20] Bob Dobbs: So I see all these people all the time looking at their smartphones and processing information.
[18:25] Bob Dobbs: And that's what Barry
[18:27] Bob Dobbs: Nevitt,
[18:28] Bob Dobbs: I said,
[18:29] Bob Dobbs: one day I said,
[18:30] Bob Dobbs: what's Finnegans Wake or something?
[18:31] Bob Dobbs: And he said,
[18:32] Bob Dobbs: it's process as figure.
[18:34] Bob Dobbs: And that's why it's prophetic.
[18:36] Bob Dobbs: It showed the process of information blatantly and the dispersal and the subjectivity challenges and the objectivity challenges and all these things.
[18:45] Bob Dobbs: And all you have to do is keep swimming.
[18:47] Bob Dobbs: Doesn't matter where you're going,
[18:48] Bob Dobbs: if you get anywhere,
[18:49] Bob Dobbs: but you've got to keep swimming.
[18:51] Bob Dobbs: And if you get disconnected,
[18:53] Bob Dobbs: knocked offline,
[18:54] Bob Dobbs: you start thinking you're stranded at a port or something.
[18:58] Bob Dobbs: You know,
[18:58] Bob Dobbs: you're not out in the sea,
[19:00] Bob Dobbs: swimming,
[19:02] Bob Dobbs: processing.
[19:04] Cameron McEwen: I think we'd have to be clear about the difference of somebody like Joyce,
[19:12] Cameron McEwen: who is attempting to...
[19:17] Cameron McEwen: depict that processing and somebody who's subject to it,
[19:27] Cameron McEwen: right?
[19:27] Cameron McEwen: So that the kids,
[19:31] Cameron McEwen: when they're trying to get an idea of what the hell's going on,
[19:37] Cameron McEwen: they're not conscious of the complications of processing.
[19:42] Bob Dobbs: Right,
[19:42] Bob Dobbs: they're living it instinctively.
[19:44] Bob Dobbs: They're good at it.
[19:45] Bob Dobbs: They don't know the world.
[19:47] Cameron McEwen: Well,
[19:47] Cameron McEwen: are they good at it?
[19:48] Cameron McEwen: I mean,
[19:50] Cameron McEwen: if you look at what they make of it in terms of stuff you can read in the media or read in journals,
[20:01] Cameron McEwen: I mean,
[20:02] Cameron McEwen: it's almost pathetic.
[20:04] Bob Dobbs: Yeah,
[20:05] Bob Dobbs: but that's in an older medium.
[20:09] Bob Dobbs: You know,
[20:09] Bob Dobbs: you're looking at how they're doing with older media,
[20:11] Bob Dobbs: but they may be pretty good with their texting.
[20:14] Bob Dobbs: And whatever they do...
[20:16] Cameron McEwen: How would one know?
[20:17] Bob Dobbs: Ah,
[20:17] Bob Dobbs: see?
[20:18] Bob Dobbs: Uncharted C.
[20:19] Bob Dobbs: The last sentence of penultimate C of...
[20:23] Bob Dobbs: The penultimate sentence of Laws of Media is we're in an uncharted,
[20:27] Bob Dobbs: unchartable C.
[20:29] Cameron McEwen: Yeah,
[20:30] Cameron McEwen: that's from Coleridge.
[20:31] Bob Dobbs: Yeah.
[20:33] Bob Dobbs: Okay,
[20:33] Bob Dobbs: now...
[20:35] Cameron McEwen: Via Heidegger,
[20:35] Cameron McEwen: by the way.
[20:36] Bob Dobbs: Beg your pardon?
[20:38] Cameron McEwen: I say it's from Coleridge and probably via Heidegger.
[20:42] Bob Dobbs: Okay.
[20:43] Cameron McEwen: Because in the 70s,
[20:45] Cameron McEwen: McLuhan was reading
[20:47] Cameron McEwen: Heidegger with his friend Tom Langan and was very impressed with Heidegger and
[20:56] Cameron McEwen: Heidegger's brother described Heidegger's...
[20:59] Cameron McEwen: work as through Coleridge's image of we were the first to break into that unknown sea.
[21:12] Cameron McEwen: So
[21:13] Cameron McEwen: I think that's where the McLuhan got it.
[21:16] Cameron McEwen: No,
[21:16] Bob Dobbs: he had that quote in the
[21:18] Bob Dobbs: 60s. He said he and Ted Carpenter felt that way with Explorations.
[21:23] Cameron McEwen: Well,
[21:24] Cameron McEwen: of course,
[21:24] Cameron McEwen: he read Coleridge a lot.
[21:27] Bob Dobbs: He refers to it in
[21:29] Bob Dobbs: Pro and Con,
[21:30] Bob Dobbs: one of the articles on him in there.
[21:32] Bob Dobbs: He's quoted.
[21:33] Bob Dobbs: He also talked about millennial phatic,
[21:38] Bob Dobbs: which I've never seen him use anywhere else.
[21:40] Bob Dobbs: Have you?
[21:40] Bob Dobbs: No.
[21:41] Bob Dobbs: Millennial phatic.
[21:42] Bob Dobbs: No,
[21:43] Bob Dobbs: but I like that.
[21:43] Bob Dobbs: Yeah?
[21:44] Bob Dobbs: Yeah.
[21:45] Bob Dobbs: You hadn't heard that before?
[21:47] Cameron McEwen: No.
[21:48] Bob Dobbs: Yeah,
[21:48] Bob Dobbs: that's what I'm thinking of in my quadrant.
[21:50] Bob Dobbs: The Dobbs quadrant is called ecstasy,
[21:52] Bob Dobbs: or it refers to ecstasy,
[21:54] Bob Dobbs: whereas the others are paranoia.
[21:56] Bob Dobbs: schizophrenia,
[21:57] Bob Dobbs: hysteria,
[21:58] Bob Dobbs: and panic,
[21:59] Bob Dobbs: but I included ecstasy.
[22:03] Cameron McEwen: Ecstasy is a good way of talking about Jacques Derrida.
[22:07] Bob Dobbs: Yep,
[22:07] Bob Dobbs: yep.
[22:08] Bob Dobbs: And,
[22:08] Bob Dobbs: you know,
[22:08] Bob Dobbs: Baudrillard had a book,
[22:09] Bob Dobbs: The Ecstasy of Communication.
[22:13] Bob Dobbs: That's where we're all stoned in that sense,
[22:16] Bob Dobbs: electrically.
[22:18] Bob Dobbs: So
[22:20] Bob Dobbs: I bought two new...
[22:23] Bob Dobbs: Two recent copies of Finnegans Wake,
[22:25] Bob Dobbs: 2012 and 2020,
[22:27] Bob Dobbs: because I suspected they'd have introductory essays.
[22:32] Bob Dobbs: I know the one before them,
[22:34] Bob Dobbs: like 20 years ago,
[22:36] Bob Dobbs: has an essay by
[22:38] Bob Dobbs: John Bishop.
[22:39] Bob Dobbs: So he was the big joy scholar of the day,
[22:42] Bob Dobbs: of the moment,
[22:42] Bob Dobbs: so he did an introduction.
[22:44] Bob Dobbs: Whereas,
[22:44] Bob Dobbs: you know,
[22:45] Bob Dobbs: from back in the 20th century,
[22:47] Bob Dobbs: Finnegans Wake had no commentary when you bought it.
[22:50] Bob Dobbs: It was just the book itself,
[22:51] Bob Dobbs: nothing.
[22:52] Bob Dobbs: introducing it or any history and it was like pure uh no muddied uh imposition of somebody so bishop did an introduction so i suspected they were um these ones would happen and they they did and they're both were very good and they updated because i haven't uh
[23:11] Bob Dobbs: i haven't um read Finnegans Wake you know like for a long stretch uh in
[23:20] Bob Dobbs: 15 20 years
[23:22] Bob Dobbs: So I wasn't aware of the scholarship other than whatever I picked up.
[23:26] Bob Dobbs: And so it was a great updating of all kinds of new information that people have,
[23:33] Bob Dobbs: access to the 25,000 pages of the Finnegans Wake manuscripts,
[23:39] Bob Dobbs: huge stuff in Dublin and places.
[23:42] Bob Dobbs: So
[23:43] Bob Dobbs: I caught up with a lot of the new scholarship by the younger people.
[23:49] Bob Dobbs: And...
[23:50] Bob Dobbs: They're starting to incorporate one in the 2020 copy edition.
[23:58] Bob Dobbs: They mentioned the importance,
[24:00] Bob Dobbs: the value of doing Finnegans Wake with groups.
[24:04] Bob Dobbs: Now,
[24:04] Bob Dobbs: there's been lots of groups in the 90s when I had my New York group doing Finnegans Wake.
[24:11] Bob Dobbs: There were about 50 around the world.
[24:13] Bob Dobbs: In the
[24:14] Bob Dobbs: 90s, people started to get into it and weren't so intimidated by it.
[24:18] Bob Dobbs: and there's been many groups since then,
[24:19] Bob Dobbs: and there's online groups.
[24:21] Bob Dobbs: You can get all kinds of stuff on the wake by different people or amateur scholars and that.
[24:30] Bob Dobbs: So reading the review of stuff,
[24:36] Bob Dobbs: someone mentioned that
[24:39] Bob Dobbs: Joyce was correcting,
[24:40] Bob Dobbs: you know,
[24:42] Bob Dobbs: he corrected the book after it was published,
[24:44] Bob Dobbs: but just before it was published in 1939,
[24:48] Bob Dobbs: He was constantly,
[24:49] Bob Dobbs: if you go through the manuscript pages,
[24:51] Bob Dobbs: he's constantly writing over like a palimpsest and adding and changing almost obsessively,
[24:58] Bob Dobbs: compulsive disorder kind of thing.
[25:03] Bob Dobbs: So it just struck me that he was doing a diary.
[25:08] Bob Dobbs: It's a diary.
[25:09] Bob Dobbs: Somebody once said McLuhan wrote a diary.
[25:11] Bob Dobbs: It might have been to Kirchhoff.
[25:13] Bob Dobbs: His writings were a diary.
[25:15] Bob Dobbs: So here's Joyce.
[25:16] Bob Dobbs: Processing information.
[25:18] Bob Dobbs: his own constructed playpen,
[25:22] Bob Dobbs: but there's no meaning and no marker that gets stopped at.
[25:28] Bob Dobbs: The message of his book is that he's processing information and adding to it and enjoying the ephemerality of each day's insights and patterns that he puts into the pages and Wright over them.
[25:44] Cameron McEwen: But can't avoid the...
[25:47] Cameron McEwen: materiality of the book.
[25:51] Cameron McEwen: He can't.
[25:54] Cameron McEwen: At some point,
[25:55] Cameron McEwen: it has to be finished.
[25:56] Cameron McEwen: Maybe it gets finished by his death.
[25:59] Cameron McEwen: Maybe it gets finished by his signature.
[26:04] Bob Dobbs: I have actually talked to him through a medium about that.
[26:09] Bob Dobbs: He said that there were a lot of passages is um so
[26:17] Bob Dobbs: that were on the cutting room floor.
[26:19] Bob Dobbs: Better stuff than in there.
[26:21] Bob Dobbs: He said,
[26:21] Bob Dobbs: I had to stop it and put out a book,
[26:25] Bob Dobbs: but it wasn't important as much what he put out.
[26:29] Bob Dobbs: He kept on correcting and writing it after it was put out.
[26:34] Bob Dobbs: In 39 and 40,
[26:35] Bob Dobbs: he only lived another year or so after.
[26:37] Bob Dobbs: He lived just
[26:38] Bob Dobbs: May 4th,
[26:39] Bob Dobbs: 39,
[26:40] Bob Dobbs: died January 13th,
[26:41] Bob Dobbs: 41.
[26:41] Bob Dobbs: So he lived just about two years.
[26:44] Bob Dobbs: But he's totally continuing the processing of,
[26:49] Bob Dobbs: you know,
[26:49] Bob Dobbs: almost narcissistic or what he calls self-absorbed editing and patterning.
[26:56] Bob Dobbs: And that is what he's a prophet of.
[27:00] Bob Dobbs: That's where we are today.
[27:01] Bob Dobbs: People are always processing their information way more than they imagined 30,
[27:05] Bob Dobbs: 40 years ago.
[27:08] Cameron McEwen: Yes,
[27:09] Cameron McEwen: that's exactly why McLuhan said there was a...
[27:13] Cameron McEwen: the possibility in the electronic age of seeing what a medium is.
[27:20] Bob Dobbs: Yeah,
[27:21] Bob Dobbs: the possibility of seeing what it is.
[27:23] Bob Dobbs: Is that what you said?
[27:24] Cameron McEwen: Yeah,
[27:25] Cameron McEwen: or of understanding what it is.
[27:27] Cameron McEwen: Understanding is probably a better word than seeing.
[27:30] Bob Dobbs: Yeah,
[27:31] Bob Dobbs: and
[27:33] Bob Dobbs: iON likes to say,
[27:34] Bob Dobbs: don't use the word understanding.
[27:35] Bob Dobbs: That means you're standing under and bumping your head on the ceiling.
[27:39] Bob Dobbs: They prefer overlaying,
[27:41] Bob Dobbs: and that is what Joyce was doing.
[27:43] Bob Dobbs: constantly overlaying,
[27:44] Bob Dobbs: and that's what we're forced to do today.
[27:47] Bob Dobbs: And,
[27:49] Bob Dobbs: you know,
[27:51] Bob Dobbs: Eskimos or Inuit up there north,
[27:53] Bob Dobbs: processing the cold environment,
[27:56] Bob Dobbs: they're processing,
[27:57] Bob Dobbs: humans are always processing,
[28:00] Bob Dobbs: but the immensity of what we process,
[28:02] Bob Dobbs: the variety,
[28:04] Bob Dobbs: that wasn't foreseen,
[28:08] Bob Dobbs: other than maybe by Joyce,
[28:10] Bob Dobbs: by his acting it out.
[28:12] Bob Dobbs: I mean,
[28:13] Bob Dobbs: that's the thing.
[28:14] Bob Dobbs: You don't look to see...
[28:16] Bob Dobbs: I'm also catching up on some of the books that have been written over the last 20 years on Finnegans Wake.
[28:23] Bob Dobbs: And there's one by John Gordon,
[28:26] Bob Dobbs: a plot summary.
[28:27] Bob Dobbs: And he admits,
[28:28] Bob Dobbs: okay,
[28:28] Bob Dobbs: I'm going to do the absurd.
[28:29] Bob Dobbs: I'm going to reduce the Finnegans Wake to a little narrative.
[28:33] Bob Dobbs: And he does that.
[28:35] Cameron McEwen: That's what
[28:36] Cameron McEwen: Campbell tried to do with the skeleton,
[28:39] Cameron McEwen: too.
[28:39] Bob Dobbs: Right.
[28:40] Bob Dobbs: And,
[28:40] Bob Dobbs: um...
[28:42] Bob Dobbs: What was I going to say about that?
[28:43] Bob Dobbs: So you're missing the point of the message of Joyce or of the process that he was trapped in and giving people a warning.
[28:54] Bob Dobbs: When you're trying to make a story out of it,
[28:56] Bob Dobbs: it's not a story,
[28:57] Bob Dobbs: and he's going to keep altering it.
[29:02] Bob Dobbs: So there's something about that that I want to relate to the tech body.
[29:07] Cameron McEwen: That relates to what we're talking about with archives.
[29:10] Bob Dobbs: Yeah.
[29:11] Cameron McEwen: Very centrally,
[29:13] Cameron McEwen: right?
[29:13] Cameron McEwen: I mean,
[29:14] Cameron McEwen: the problem with story is that it's stories plural.
[29:18] Bob Dobbs: Yeah.
[29:19] Cameron McEwen: Right?
[29:19] Cameron McEwen: And so it's in,
[29:22] Cameron McEwen: everybody is trying to deal with that plurality,
[29:26] Cameron McEwen: and that plurality is both internal and external.
[29:31] Cameron McEwen: And the ways that most people have to deal with it,
[29:36] Cameron McEwen: including huge government agencies.
[29:40] Cameron McEwen: including military and stuff,
[29:43] Cameron McEwen: is to try to still it,
[29:45] Cameron McEwen: to try to bring it to a standstill and be something that is fixed.
[29:52] Cameron McEwen: Yeah.
[29:53] Cameron McEwen: And that's sort of our great danger.
[29:55] Cameron McEwen: When these fixes,
[29:56] Cameron McEwen: as McLuhan would say,
[29:58] Cameron McEwen: when these great fixities start to confront each other,
[30:05] Cameron McEwen: then we have a huge danger.
[30:08] Cameron McEwen: And so...
[30:09] Cameron McEwen: The need is for these fixities to become fluid,
[30:15] Cameron McEwen: but without people going crazy through that process.
[30:20] Bob Dobbs: Yeah.
[30:21] Bob Dobbs: Okay,
[30:21] Bob Dobbs: so I was going to add to that.
[30:24] Cameron McEwen: Sorry,
[30:25] Cameron McEwen: you were just about to talk about the tech body.
[30:27] Bob Dobbs: Yeah,
[30:29] Bob Dobbs: but the fixity,
[30:32] Bob Dobbs: the process.
[30:33] Bob Dobbs: Oh,
[30:33] Bob Dobbs: yeah,
[30:34] Bob Dobbs: McLuhan hoiking up silent majority when that came in in the early 70s of the Nixon era.
[30:42] Bob Dobbs: That's what so many people today are.
[30:45] Bob Dobbs: There's a statistic that 70%
[30:47] Bob Dobbs: of Americans do not follow politics and do not really vote,
[30:51] Bob Dobbs: and they don't watch it at all.
[30:53] Bob Dobbs: That's the silent majority that is processing the present.
[30:56] Bob Dobbs: And they're not concerned about,
[30:57] Bob Dobbs: you know,
[30:58] Bob Dobbs: some bureaucracy in Washington and some fixities that claim they're doing something.
[31:03] Bob Dobbs: Most people,
[31:05] Bob Dobbs: it's not a dumbing down.
[31:06] Bob Dobbs: It's a super involvement in all kinds of experiences they can have through their different bodies.
[31:12] Bob Dobbs: So in the midst of that becomes the archive turns on us and starts to play,
[31:20] Bob Dobbs: attack,
[31:21] Bob Dobbs: confuse.
[31:22] Bob Dobbs: exacerbate the motives that are hard to figure out,
[31:27] Bob Dobbs: other than it's just a Menippean,
[31:29] Bob Dobbs: you know,
[31:30] Bob Dobbs: jerk that is just like interrupting people and throwing them off,
[31:36] Bob Dobbs: which in some schools of esoteric wisdom,
[31:39] Bob Dobbs: that's how you make people aware.
[31:41] Bob Dobbs: You upset them,
[31:42] Bob Dobbs: is what Gurdjieff would do,
[31:43] Bob Dobbs: right?
[31:44] Bob Dobbs: So when McLuhan said that television was the highest decibels of consciousness,
[31:50] Bob Dobbs: In the tradition of a shaman or guru bugging people,
[31:55] Bob Dobbs: that's what anti-environment was becoming with television.
[31:59] Bob Dobbs: It was putting new challenges on people that made them,
[32:04] Bob Dobbs: by the 60s,
[32:04] Bob Dobbs: get more and more aggravated.
[32:06] Bob Dobbs: So then you had the first tumultuous decade,
[32:08] Bob Dobbs: and every decade since it had been very tumultuous.
[32:11] Bob Dobbs: And then you get the big fixity of the White House and the president's role.
[32:17] Bob Dobbs: And it's so ridiculous how much media is spent on covering the president,
[32:20] Bob Dobbs: who is not going to do anything.
[32:23] Bob Dobbs: McLuhan and I,
[32:23] Bob Dobbs: we have a,
[32:24] Bob Dobbs: Nelson had a recording from class,
[32:26] Bob Dobbs: 1974 or so,
[32:28] Bob Dobbs: and Marshall was saying to the students,
[32:30] Bob Dobbs: if you were president,
[32:31] Bob Dobbs: what would you do?
[32:32] Bob Dobbs: And they're all trying to think,
[32:33] Bob Dobbs: well,
[32:34] Bob Dobbs: I try to help people,
[32:35] Bob Dobbs: I try to feed people,
[32:36] Bob Dobbs: you know.
[32:37] Bob Dobbs: They got practical or socially justified,
[32:41] Bob Dobbs: and he said,
[32:42] Bob Dobbs: no,
[32:42] Bob Dobbs: you do nothing.
[32:44] Bob Dobbs: What?
[32:45] Bob Dobbs: Everybody stunned.
[32:45] Bob Dobbs: What do you mean you would do that?
[32:46] Bob Dobbs: He says,
[32:47] Bob Dobbs: how could you do anything?
[32:49] Bob Dobbs: There's too many things happening.
[32:50] Bob Dobbs: What are you going to do?
[32:52] Bob Dobbs: What position are you going to take?
[32:53] Bob Dobbs: And then he laid out the whole point.
[32:56] Bob Dobbs: You can't have a point of view under these situations.
[32:59] Bob Dobbs: And all his basic maxims of behavior,
[33:02] Bob Dobbs: he showed the example of the president is forced to live that way.
[33:07] Bob Dobbs: It's like the executive is dropout.
[33:10] Bob Dobbs: So the fixity of focusing on the president.
[33:14] Bob Dobbs: It's ridiculous the amount of coverage of it,
[33:16] Bob Dobbs: of this nothing void.
[33:18] Bob Dobbs: And then
[33:19] Bob Dobbs: Trump the tech body said,
[33:22] Bob Dobbs: we're coming back at you.
[33:23] Bob Dobbs: We're going to accuse you of doing something or nothing and being stupid.
[33:29] Bob Dobbs: And that aggressive action by the tech body slash Trump a big disruption of the archival impulse.
[33:39] Bob Dobbs: I remember a documentary on New York reporters.
[33:43] Bob Dobbs: You know,
[33:43] Bob Dobbs: Maggie Haberman or something,
[33:45] Bob Dobbs: I don't read them close enough to remember their names,
[33:47] Bob Dobbs: but the main ones that were trying to follow Trump,
[33:50] Bob Dobbs: and their big problem every day was,
[33:51] Bob Dobbs: what the hell do we write about?
[33:53] Bob Dobbs: Because the guy says,
[33:54] Bob Dobbs: Trump different stuff all day long,
[33:57] Bob Dobbs: which was a great way to,
[33:59] Bob Dobbs: like a Zen master,
[34:00] Bob Dobbs: a way of bypassing the enemy,
[34:04] Bob Dobbs: which is the coverage you constantly have as a president.
[34:07] Bob Dobbs: You know,
[34:07] Bob Dobbs: every president since,
[34:09] Bob Dobbs: say,
[34:09] Bob Dobbs: Nixon and was complaining about the media.
[34:12] Bob Dobbs: and the coverage of themselves.
[34:14] Bob Dobbs: And so
[34:15] Bob Dobbs: Trump would be really interesting if he was very conscious.
[34:21] Bob Dobbs: He purposely said ridiculous stuff all day long,
[34:24] Bob Dobbs: which,
[34:24] Bob Dobbs: of course,
[34:24] Bob Dobbs: the old bureaucrats said,
[34:26] Bob Dobbs: this is upsetting our relations with other countries.
[34:28] Bob Dobbs: They need to know what we're fixed about,
[34:30] Bob Dobbs: what we're going to do in all this.
[34:32] Bob Dobbs: Trump,
[34:33] Bob Dobbs: having been in the media game for years in New York,
[34:36] Bob Dobbs: he knew,
[34:37] Bob Dobbs: no,
[34:38] Bob Dobbs: this White House position has no power.
[34:39] Bob Dobbs: I'm going to say as crazy stuff as possible.
[34:42] Bob Dobbs: Keep it changing.
[34:43] Bob Dobbs: That would have been a great,
[34:45] Bob Dobbs: if he did it consciously,
[34:47] Bob Dobbs: a great performance.
[34:48] Bob Dobbs: But if he could not do that,
[34:51] Bob Dobbs: no human would have done it consciously,
[34:53] Bob Dobbs: then the tech body,
[34:54] Bob Dobbs: is what I'm saying,
[34:55] Bob Dobbs: was doing it.
[34:56] Bob Dobbs: And the tech body somehow knew.
[34:58] Bob Dobbs: And so when you talk to the tech body,
[35:01] Bob Dobbs: it is quite...
[35:03] Bob Dobbs: self-satisfied about its role in bugging us all the time.
[35:07] Bob Dobbs: It takes on the spiritual posture.
[35:10] Bob Dobbs: I'm keeping you guys awake.
[35:12] Bob Dobbs: You keep trying to fall asleep.
[35:13] Bob Dobbs: Not anymore.
[35:14] Bob Dobbs: We're going to keep you going.
[35:16] Bob Dobbs: And,
[35:17] Bob Dobbs: of course,
[35:18] Bob Dobbs: this is so dangerous for humans.
[35:22] Bob Dobbs: Look,
[35:22] Bob Dobbs: you look at 18 months ago.
[35:24] Bob Dobbs: Did you see that they have lockdowns?
[35:28] Bob Dobbs: They've got them in Ontario and Saskatchewan and Australia.
[35:32] Bob Dobbs: Did you see that 18 months ago?
[35:34] Bob Dobbs: Do you remember in March,
[35:35] Bob Dobbs: April
[35:36] Bob Dobbs: 2020? Oh,
[35:37] Bob Dobbs: this will wear a mask for a couple of weeks as it passes.
[35:40] Bob Dobbs: Nobody saw.
[35:41] Bob Dobbs: Holy shit,
[35:42] Bob Dobbs: we're going into 1984 quadrupled.
[35:46] Bob Dobbs: You know what I mean?
[35:46] Cameron McEwen: Yeah.
[35:47] Cameron McEwen: Oh,
[35:48] Cameron McEwen: absolutely.
[35:49] Bob Dobbs: Absolutely.
[35:50] Bob Dobbs: You're agreeing that nobody saw that?
[35:53] Bob Dobbs: Maybe a few.
[35:54] Bob Dobbs: Yeah.
[35:54] Bob Dobbs: Okay,
[35:54] Bob Dobbs: good.
[35:55] Bob Dobbs: Yeah.
[35:56] Bob Dobbs: That's what we...
[35:57] Cameron McEwen: But are you saying that the...
[36:04] Cameron McEwen: there's a process that's going on that isn't self-conscious.
[36:12] Cameron McEwen: And that can be related to Joyce,
[36:15] Cameron McEwen: by the way,
[36:16] Cameron McEwen: by saying that communication is so fundamental that there's no way of screwing up words that doesn't communicate.
[36:32] Cameron McEwen: Right.
[36:34] Cameron McEwen: But just to come back to the question of all-at-onceness,
[36:37] Cameron McEwen: you seem to be saying that the process of history is,
[36:48] Cameron McEwen: in your understanding,
[36:50] Cameron McEwen: it is self-conscious in multiple ways.
[36:56] Cameron McEwen: So you have the tech body of IAM.
[36:59] Cameron McEwen: I don't know if there are other.
[37:01] Cameron McEwen: Yeah.
[37:02] Bob Dobbs: Each one of the bodies is a different kind of consciousness or all-at-onceness.
[37:05] Bob Dobbs: The astral body,
[37:06] Bob Dobbs: the TV body,
[37:08] Bob Dobbs: the chip body,
[37:10] Bob Dobbs: and then the mystery body,
[37:11] Bob Dobbs: and then the hectic body.
[37:14] Cameron McEwen: Are you saying that the tech body itself has all those different bodies?
[37:20] Bob Dobbs: Yeah,
[37:21] Bob Dobbs: it's a merger of all those bodies and an exaggeration.
[37:24] Cameron McEwen: Oh,
[37:24] Cameron McEwen: it's a merger,
[37:24] Cameron McEwen: okay.
[37:25] Bob Dobbs: Yeah,
[37:25] Bob Dobbs: it's an exaggeration.
[37:26] Cameron McEwen: But it's only one,
[37:28] Cameron McEwen: the tech body is only one.
[37:31] Cameron McEwen: of these sort of archetypal bodies that you see,
[37:35] Cameron McEwen: right?
[37:37] Bob Dobbs: It's the dominator right now.
[37:39] Bob Dobbs: It's getting its 15 minutes of attention.
[37:44] Cameron McEwen: But it's a little bit like the 12 gods of
[37:49] Cameron McEwen: Greece, where there was constant turmoil of gods either stealing wives or stealing girlfriends.
[38:01] Cameron McEwen: stealing power or something from each other.
[38:05] Cameron McEwen: So how many of these sort of archetypal bodies are there?
[38:12] Bob Dobbs: Well,
[38:12] Bob Dobbs: now there's six.
[38:14] Bob Dobbs: There's the chemical body,
[38:15] Bob Dobbs: the astral body,
[38:17] Bob Dobbs: the TV body,
[38:18] Bob Dobbs: the chip body,
[38:19] Bob Dobbs: and then the mystery body,
[38:20] Bob Dobbs: which is unforeseen realities that show up.
[38:24] Bob Dobbs: Like,
[38:24] Bob Dobbs: for example,
[38:25] Bob Dobbs: if aliens showed up in the sky,
[38:28] Bob Dobbs: that would be...
[38:29] Bob Dobbs: part of the mystery body revealed.
[38:32] Bob Dobbs: You know,
[38:32] Bob Dobbs: lots of rumors.
[38:33] Bob Dobbs: Okay,
[38:33] Cameron McEwen: I can buy that.
[38:34] Bob Dobbs: Yeah.
[38:36] Cameron McEwen: You said that the tech body.
[38:39] Cameron McEwen: The phatic,
[38:39] Bob Dobbs: the sixth body,
[38:41] Bob Dobbs: the phatic.
[38:42] Bob Dobbs: And that's on my chart.
[38:44] Bob Dobbs: I was pointing on the chart to the phatic.
[38:47] Bob Dobbs: I say,
[38:49] Bob Dobbs: waiting for organic,
[38:52] Bob Dobbs: what is it?
[38:52] Bob Dobbs: Waiting for the thing at the bottom.
[38:57] Bob Dobbs: The spinning.
[38:58] Bob Dobbs: Clothing crystals.
[39:02] Bob Dobbs: Waiting for organic bodies.
[39:04] Bob Dobbs: Yeah,
[39:05] Bob Dobbs: the spinning clothing crystals dance the hex advertisement,
[39:11] Bob Dobbs: something like that.
[39:13] Bob Dobbs: So the hex ad,
[39:15] Bob Dobbs: the sixth body merged with advertisement,
[39:18] Bob Dobbs: because it was monad,
[39:19] Bob Dobbs: dyad,
[39:20] Bob Dobbs: triad,
[39:21] Bob Dobbs: tetrad,
[39:21] Bob Dobbs: and pentad,
[39:22] Bob Dobbs: so the hex ad.
[39:23] Bob Dobbs: So I was pointing to something beyond.
[39:27] Bob Dobbs: the five bodies and that turned out to be ion and my chart actually predicted ion and then there's a conflict or an argument about Hutchins ion and Hutchins the tech body which is ongoing with ion but
[39:43] Bob Dobbs: i did predict some strange thing would show up and um it happened so okay but what when i was trying to clarify um yeah so there's six archetypes there
[39:57] Cameron McEwen: Yeah,
[39:58] Cameron McEwen: but...
[39:58] Cameron McEwen: The thing is,
[39:59] Cameron McEwen: you use the word body in the very name tech body.
[40:03] Bob Dobbs: Yeah.
[40:04] Cameron McEwen: So you have,
[40:05] Cameron McEwen: and you said that the tech body was the amalgamation of the other bodies.
[40:11] Bob Dobbs: I used to say the Android Meme was the merger of the five bodies.
[40:14] Bob Dobbs: And then the tech body took it on another level.
[40:16] Bob Dobbs: And remember,
[40:17] Bob Dobbs: I didn't coin the word tech body,
[40:19] Bob Dobbs: Ion did.
[40:20] Bob Dobbs: Ion pointed out to me the tech body and what it was doing.
[40:24] Cameron McEwen: Right,
[40:25] Cameron McEwen: right.
[40:25] Cameron McEwen: But what I was trying to ask about...
[40:28] Cameron McEwen: when I talked about how many bodies are there,
[40:31] Cameron McEwen: I was using body in the sense of the tech body,
[40:34] Cameron McEwen: not in the sense of the five or six other bodies.
[40:39] Cameron McEwen: I was talking about the tech body as the amalgamation of the fusion of these other bodies.
[40:48] Cameron McEwen: Let's say that that's one body.
[40:50] Bob Dobbs: Yeah.
[40:50] Cameron McEwen: Let's say that ion is another body in some other sense of body.
[40:55] Bob Dobbs: Right.
[40:55] Cameron McEwen: So how many of these
[40:58] Cameron McEwen: type of archetypal bodies of these managerial bodies,
[41:04] Cameron McEwen: let's say,
[41:04] Cameron McEwen: are there?
[41:05] Cameron McEwen: Are there just two or are there multiple instances of these?
[41:16] Bob Dobbs: Maybe the user is the content.
[41:19] Bob Dobbs: You would decide what you would fragment and make categories of.
[41:26] Bob Dobbs: I'm saying the six bodies of the six archetypes,
[41:29] Bob Dobbs: and you'll see I play with archetype the word in the other chart,
[41:33] Bob Dobbs: the Fuller chart,
[41:36] Bob Dobbs: called Dobbs Formula,
[41:37] Bob Dobbs: which goes from 1750 to 2020.
[41:40] Bob Dobbs: I have the word archetype up there in the title,
[41:45] Bob Dobbs: but I'm fully aware of the cliché to archetype interplay,
[41:49] Bob Dobbs: which McLuhan said consciousness itself was the interplay of the cliché to archetype dialectic.
[41:56] Bob Dobbs: Interesting statement.
[42:00] Bob Dobbs: But then I have to say that humans,
[42:03] Bob Dobbs: they would have to decide how many archetypes they require or prefer or feel put upon by.
[42:10] Bob Dobbs: I wouldn't make a rule about it because there's always no rules to be made here,
[42:15] Bob Dobbs: even though you're constantly making daily rules or patterns or epiphanies.
[42:21] Cameron McEwen: And that applies,
[42:22] Cameron McEwen: in your view,
[42:23] Cameron McEwen: that applies to humans.
[42:23] Cameron McEwen: applies also to
[42:25] Cameron McEwen: ION and the tech body?
[42:27] Bob Dobbs: Yes.
[42:29] Bob Dobbs: Okay,
[42:29] Cameron McEwen: so that's interesting,
[42:30] Cameron McEwen: right?
[42:30] Cameron McEwen: Because look at how that kind of ABC of Relativity everything you say in the book.
[42:40] Cameron McEwen: If the tech body is behind
[42:47] Cameron McEwen: Trump is pulling the strings Trump,
[42:54] Cameron McEwen: But the tech body is itself a relative power.
[43:01] Cameron McEwen: What that does is it introduces a series of mirrors that we need to be aware of in evaluating Trump.
[43:12] Bob Dobbs: Yeah,
[43:13] Bob Dobbs: the world of horizontal symbolism that McLuhan liked in the early
[43:16] Bob Dobbs: 50s, ricocheting mirrors.
[43:18] Cameron McEwen: Yeah,
[43:20] Bob Dobbs: And McLuhan,
[43:20] Bob Dobbs: that's what he thought Finnegans Wake represented.
[43:23] Bob Dobbs: an announcement that the horizontal symbolist tradition had taken over from the vertical symbolist.
[43:28] Bob Dobbs: No way could you get back to the vertical and electric conditions.
[43:32] Cameron McEwen: Correct.
[43:33] Cameron McEwen: Correct.
[43:34] Bob Dobbs: So he,
[43:35] Cameron McEwen: one of the,
[43:36] Cameron McEwen: we should just,
[43:38] Cameron McEwen: I'm sorry,
[43:39] Cameron McEwen: should I interrupt your thought?
[43:41] Cameron McEwen: No,
[43:41] Cameron McEwen: no,
[43:41] Cameron McEwen: you interrupt.
[43:42] Bob Dobbs: Go ahead.
[43:43] Cameron McEwen: Well,
[43:44] Cameron McEwen: anybody who's reading
[43:46] Cameron McEwen: McLuhan needs to understand that he used the word horizontal.
[43:51] Cameron McEwen: in two fundamentally different ways.
[43:54] Cameron McEwen: So in the article you're talking about,
[44:00] Cameron McEwen: he distinguishes horizontal from vertical in the sense that with the vertical thinkers,
[44:08] Cameron McEwen: there could be thinkers that valorized the up or there could be thinkers that valorized the down.
[44:17] Cameron McEwen: And the horizontal thinker was a third.
[44:21] Cameron McEwen: possibility,
[44:22] Cameron McEwen: not a second possibility from the vertical,
[44:25] Cameron McEwen: but a third possibility.
[44:27] Cameron McEwen: And so sometimes he used horizontal in what seems like a dualistic fashion,
[44:35] Cameron McEwen: and other times he was explicit about it being at least three,
[44:41] Cameron McEwen: if not more.
[44:43] Bob Dobbs: Yeah,
[44:43] Bob Dobbs: that's the important part about McLuhan is that he,
[44:46] Bob Dobbs: yes,
[44:47] Bob Dobbs: he was a Ed Sullivan,
[44:49] Bob Dobbs: but not stuck there.
[44:51] Bob Dobbs: And so that became part of the mystery of them,
[44:53] Bob Dobbs: is that oscillating up and down the trivium and quadrivium,
[44:57] Bob Dobbs: shifting from one aspect to another,
[45:00] Bob Dobbs: and that's...
[45:01] Bob Dobbs: Being horizontal in the third way.
[45:04] Cameron McEwen: Correct.
[45:05] Cameron McEwen: Absolutely correct.
[45:06] Cameron McEwen: And notice that that's not just
[45:11] Cameron McEwen: McLuhan way of thinking.
[45:13] Cameron McEwen: It's what he sees in history as well.
[45:16] Cameron McEwen: So it's not as if,
[45:20] Cameron McEwen: you know,
[45:20] Cameron McEwen: there's a kind of thinking going on,
[45:22] Cameron McEwen: and then that thinking imposes a pattern,
[45:27] Cameron McEwen: Wychwood Park be a mode of dialectics.
[45:31] Cameron McEwen: Instead,
[45:34] Cameron McEwen: what the thinking does is try to come to terms both in itself and in history with that dynamic of the three.
[45:46] Bob Dobbs: Yeah,
[45:46] Bob Dobbs: so when you read McLuhan,
[45:50] Bob Dobbs: and I don't think anybody has emphasized this really,
[45:53] Bob Dobbs: you've got to have Finnegans Wake beside you because he is contemplating
[45:59] Bob Dobbs: bouncing off Finnegans Wake,
[46:00] Bob Dobbs: at least in the book level,
[46:02] Bob Dobbs: in the Gutenberg world,
[46:04] Bob Dobbs: constantly.
[46:05] Bob Dobbs: And if you can't read Finnegans Wake,
[46:07] Bob Dobbs: then you can't understand McLuhan.
[46:12] Cameron McEwen: I thought I remember Bob Dobbs saying that over and over.
[46:15] Bob Dobbs: Oh,
[46:15] Bob Dobbs: I've said that for 40 years,
[46:17] Bob Dobbs: yes.
[46:20] Cameron McEwen: Let me point out something you may find interesting.
[46:23] Cameron McEwen: I've been doing some work on Hans Selye lately.
[46:26] Bob Dobbs: Oh,
[46:26] Bob Dobbs: good.
[46:27] Cameron McEwen: and
[46:28] Cameron McEwen: He had an article in the first Explorations,
[46:33] Cameron McEwen: 1953.
[46:39] Cameron McEwen: And Selye concern was with the endocrinology.
[46:45] Cameron McEwen: And endocrinology is concerned with the organics of the communication system,
[46:52] Cameron McEwen: that is,
[46:54] Cameron McEwen: not a communication system of the nerves.
[46:57] Cameron McEwen: in the human body,
[46:59] Cameron McEwen: but of hormones.
[47:01] Cameron McEwen: And the basis of hormones is the benzene ring.
[47:06] Cameron McEwen: And what is the benzene ring?
[47:08] Cameron McEwen: The benzene ring is six carbon atoms.
[47:12] Bob Dobbs: Oh,
[47:13] Bob Dobbs: that's amazing.
[47:14] Bob Dobbs: Carbon is really important in ion chemistry.
[47:18] Bob Dobbs: And what did you say?
[47:20] Bob Dobbs: Hormone.
[47:22] Bob Dobbs: What's that?
[47:22] Bob Dobbs: The telegraph?
[47:23] Bob Dobbs: The social hormone in understanding media?
[47:27] Bob Dobbs: Doesn't he have one of the titles as Hormone?
[47:30] Cameron McEwen: Maybe.
[47:31] Cameron McEwen: I don't remember.
[47:32] Cameron McEwen: I haven't read Understanding Media in 20 years.
[47:34] Cameron McEwen: Yeah,
[47:37] Cameron McEwen: I've got anchored in the
[47:39] Cameron McEwen: 1950s.
[47:40] Bob Dobbs: Okay, so what you...
[47:42] Bob Dobbs: Oh,
[47:42] Bob Dobbs: Hans Selye is supremely important.
[47:45] Bob Dobbs: McLuhan said the idea that media are extensions or,
[47:49] Bob Dobbs: you know,
[47:50] Bob Dobbs: history of technology or one to the next is obvious,
[47:53] Bob Dobbs: he said.
[47:54] Bob Dobbs: What is not obvious is why...
[47:56] Bob Dobbs: Humans are numbed by the process,
[47:59] Bob Dobbs: and nobody has explained that.
[48:01] Bob Dobbs: And he says in Understanding Media,
[48:03] Bob Dobbs: I've figured out how to explain it.
[48:05] Bob Dobbs: And it was based on Selye.
[48:06] Cameron McEwen: Yeah,
[48:08] Cameron McEwen: well,
[48:08] Cameron McEwen: Selye and what was the other guy's name?
[48:13] Cameron McEwen: McLuhan calls him
[48:14] Cameron McEwen: Adolf
[48:17] Cameron McEwen: Jonas.
[48:18] Cameron McEwen: The guy's name was actually David.
[48:21] Cameron McEwen: McLuhan screwed that up.
[48:23] Bob Dobbs: Adolf Jonas?
[48:24] Bob Dobbs: What did he do?
[48:25] Cameron McEwen: Yeah,
[48:25] Cameron McEwen: yeah.
[48:26] Cameron McEwen: So
[48:27] Cameron McEwen: Adolph Jonas was the guy that wrote a book on irritation and counter-irritation.
[48:32] Cameron McEwen: Oh,
[48:32] Cameron McEwen: yeah.
[48:33] Bob Dobbs: Yes.
[48:33] Cameron McEwen: And the whole concept of the amputation of the senses comes from that book.
[48:43] Cameron McEwen: I see.
[48:44] Cameron McEwen: And that's where numbing comes from,
[48:46] Cameron McEwen: is from auto-amputation.
[48:48] Bob Dobbs: Oh,
[48:48] Bob Dobbs: that's interesting.
[48:49] Bob Dobbs: So it's Jonas and Salyer.
[48:52] Bob Dobbs: Correct.
[48:52] Bob Dobbs: I didn't know about Jonas and that.
[48:53] Bob Dobbs: Correct.
[48:53] Cameron McEwen: And then...
[48:54] Cameron McEwen: In some of the scholarship,
[48:57] Cameron McEwen: Jonas is said to be a student of
[49:01] Cameron McEwen: Selye, but that's nonsense.
[49:04] Cameron McEwen: I don't even know if he knew
[49:08] Cameron McEwen: Selye personally.
[49:10] Bob Dobbs: They're saying that they thought he was a literal student at McGill or someplace?
[49:14] Bob Dobbs: Yeah,
[49:14] Cameron McEwen: exactly.
[49:15] Cameron McEwen: I see.
[49:15] Cameron McEwen: Exactly.
[49:16] Cameron McEwen: And he couldn't have.
[49:19] Cameron McEwen: Sorry?
[49:19] Bob Dobbs: And he couldn't have been,
[49:21] Bob Dobbs: you're saying.
[49:21] Bob Dobbs: Well,
[49:21] Cameron McEwen: he wasn't.
[49:23] Cameron McEwen: He simply wasn't,
[49:24] Cameron McEwen: as a matter of fact.
[49:24] Bob Dobbs: Right.
[49:25] Bob Dobbs: Did they write at the same time?
[49:28] Cameron McEwen: Yes.
[49:29] Cameron McEwen: So,
[49:30] Cameron McEwen: more or less.
[49:31] Cameron McEwen: I mean,
[49:31] Cameron McEwen: Selye was already writing in the,
[49:34] Cameron McEwen: you know,
[49:34] Cameron McEwen: his first paper was in the
[49:37] Cameron McEwen: 1920s. So,
[49:39] Cameron McEwen: Selye wrote a ton of stuff in the
[49:42] Cameron McEwen: 1930s,
[49:43] Cameron McEwen: 1940s,
[49:45] Cameron McEwen: 1950s. And Jonas's book...
[49:47] Cameron McEwen: was published in,
[49:49] Cameron McEwen: I think,
[49:51] Cameron McEwen: 61.
[49:52] Cameron McEwen: And McLuhan refers to it already in 1962.
[49:59] Cameron McEwen: So for some reason,
[50:01] Cameron McEwen: McLuhan jumped on that book as soon as it was published.
[50:04] Bob Dobbs: Right.
[50:05] Bob Dobbs: I'll have to look at that.
[50:08] Bob Dobbs: As you're talking,
[50:09] Bob Dobbs: I'm thinking of abstract expression art,
[50:12] Bob Dobbs: Pollock,
[50:13] Bob Dobbs: and then those guys,
[50:14] Bob Dobbs: Barnett,
[50:15] Bob Dobbs: Newman,
[50:15] Bob Dobbs: who just paint stripes.
[50:17] Bob Dobbs: They were doing the medium as the message or the process.
[50:20] Bob Dobbs: They were just processing as painters.
[50:23] Bob Dobbs: They weren't looking for some marker image or some archetype to do.
[50:32] Bob Dobbs: They were engaged in processing.
[50:34] Bob Dobbs: Ridiculously.
[50:35] Cameron McEwen: Yeah,
[50:36] Cameron McEwen: they were engaged in processing,
[50:38] Cameron McEwen: but they were looking for the medium.
[50:43] Cameron McEwen: The whole process of modern art.
[50:46] Cameron McEwen: was an attempt to understand what art is.
[50:50] Bob Dobbs: Right.
[50:50] Cameron McEwen: And so early in the century,
[50:54] Cameron McEwen: people were already saying,
[50:55] Cameron McEwen: well,
[50:56] Cameron McEwen: it's color,
[50:57] Cameron McEwen: or it's form,
[51:00] Cameron McEwen: or it's whatever.
[51:02] Cameron McEwen: And they were trying to engage those ideas in painting.
[51:10] Cameron McEwen: But the same thing was going on in sculpture.
[51:12] Cameron McEwen: The same thing was going on in dance.
[51:14] Cameron McEwen: Same thing was going on in music.
[51:17] Bob Dobbs: And in books,
[51:18] Bob Dobbs: like Joyce.
[51:20] Cameron McEwen: Yeah,
[51:21] Cameron McEwen: absolutely.
[51:22] Cameron McEwen: And if we want to go down that road,
[51:24] Cameron McEwen: then you start to get into physics and to,
[51:29] Cameron McEwen: you know,
[51:29] Cameron McEwen: different kinds of chemistry.
[51:31] Bob Dobbs: Yeah,
[51:31] Bob Dobbs: and the looking for endless particles.
[51:35] Bob Dobbs: You know,
[51:36] Bob Dobbs: an undergraduate would mock,
[51:38] Bob Dobbs: well,
[51:38] Bob Dobbs: they just keep finding particles.
[51:39] Bob Dobbs: They can't get the final particle,
[51:41] Bob Dobbs: you know.
[51:42] Bob Dobbs: They didn't understand the process of it,
[51:44] Bob Dobbs: of processing.
[51:46] Bob Dobbs: So
[51:47] Bob Dobbs: I wanted to mention that you just said the artist looking for a form.
[51:55] Bob Dobbs: It just occurred to me that
[51:57] Bob Dobbs: Warhol saw that that was silly.
[52:01] Bob Dobbs: So he engaged in the process with a great indifference.
[52:06] Cameron McEwen: He pointed out that whatever form was found,
[52:11] Cameron McEwen: it was going to be a type.
[52:14] Cameron McEwen: And as a type,
[52:15] Cameron McEwen: it was going to be a cliche.
[52:16] Bob Dobbs: Yeah,
[52:17] Bob Dobbs: it wouldn't last long.
[52:19] Cameron McEwen: It would necessarily be a repetition of what was already there.
[52:25] Bob Dobbs: Yeah,
[52:26] Bob Dobbs: so that's where Tom Wolfe Wright about,
[52:30] Bob Dobbs: in the painted word,
[52:31] Bob Dobbs: the leap from the abstract expressionist Clement Greenberg was the writer for that,
[52:36] Bob Dobbs: the critic,
[52:37] Bob Dobbs: and then that pops into
[52:39] Bob Dobbs: Warhol's pop and the rest of them in the 60s.
[52:41] Bob Dobbs: I think Rosenberg was the critic for that era.
[52:44] Bob Dobbs: And,
[52:45] Bob Dobbs: you know,
[52:45] Bob Dobbs: Wolf goes through the history in his book,
[52:46] Bob Dobbs: The Painted Word,
[52:48] Bob Dobbs: but the pop artists,
[52:51] Bob Dobbs: especially Warhol,
[52:55] Bob Dobbs: canceled the
[52:57] Bob Dobbs: Barnett Newman project of looking for the form.
[53:01] Bob Dobbs: They actually included the not finding.
[53:05] Bob Dobbs: Isn't that a definition of the postmodern?
[53:10] Bob Dobbs: Say writers,
[53:10] Bob Dobbs: postmodern,
[53:11] Bob Dobbs: they are fragmented.
[53:12] Bob Dobbs: They don't try to wrap it up.
[53:14] Bob Dobbs: They don't try to make a big what they call totality or totalism.
[53:18] Bob Dobbs: They accepted the incomplete and not finding a suitable ending to the story.
[53:26] Bob Dobbs: So that's where McLuhan says at the end of Culture Is Our Business,
[53:29] Bob Dobbs: there is no finish line.
[53:31] Bob Dobbs: That is the postmodern discovery.
[53:34] Bob Dobbs: That's the making the process process a cliché.
[53:39] Bob Dobbs: And the archetype becomes sidelined.
[53:43] Bob Dobbs: Or you watch other people grasp for archetypes,
[53:47] Bob Dobbs: and then you have the war of archetypes as people try to get fixed,
[53:53] Bob Dobbs: whatever that is in people.
[53:55] Cameron McEwen: But at the same time,
[53:57] Cameron McEwen: what McLuhan was trying to point out is that all of these complications are not only compatible with truth,
[54:07] Cameron McEwen: but they implicate truth.
[54:10] Bob Dobbs: What does that mean,
[54:11] Bob Dobbs: implicate?
[54:12] Bob Dobbs: You mean imply a truth?
[54:14] Cameron McEwen: Yeah.
[54:15] Cameron McEwen: Well,
[54:16] Cameron McEwen: the word placate is cognate with the word fold.
[54:22] Cameron McEwen: So implicate means folding in or having already folded in.
[54:29] Bob Dobbs: Is that David Bohm The Implicate Order?
[54:33] Cameron McEwen: Yeah.
[54:33] Bob Dobbs: Right.
[54:34] Bob Dobbs: The folding in.
[54:35] Bob Dobbs: Yeah,
[54:36] Bob Dobbs: the folding.
[54:36] Cameron McEwen: Absolutely.
[54:37] Cameron McEwen: I do a certain amount of,
[54:39] Cameron McEwen: on my blog,
[54:42] Cameron McEwen: For a while,
[54:43] Cameron McEwen: I did a number of posts on the parallels between Bohm and
[54:48] Cameron McEwen: McLuhan. Ah,
[54:49] Bob Dobbs: interesting.
[54:50] Bob Dobbs: And you know who was in the middle?
[54:52] Bob Dobbs: not on the McLuhan side,
[54:53] Bob Dobbs: was Krishnamurti.
[54:54] Bob Dobbs: Have you ever seen the Maurice McNamee Krishnamurti dialogues?
[54:58] Cameron McEwen: Yes.
[54:58] Bob Dobbs: Yeah,
[54:59] Bob Dobbs: because Krishnamurti was the beginning of the Carolyn person.
[55:03] Bob Dobbs: Spirituality is Carolyn and may be engaged in process,
[55:08] Bob Dobbs: because I've watched a lot of his videos.
[55:10] Bob Dobbs: In New York City,
[55:12] Bob Dobbs: the community channel featured him every Tuesday,
[55:16] Bob Dobbs: you know,
[55:17] Bob Dobbs: for an hour.
[55:18] Bob Dobbs: So I had seen him personally through the years,
[55:21] Bob Dobbs: but
[55:22] Bob Dobbs: I could watch the video was better you could watch them closer you weren't distracted by sitting in a crowd by somebody and the cameras closed in on them so you could really watch his face and the ripples of uh suggestion as he was talking the same lecture every every time it's the same fucking lecture you know and
[55:41] Bob Dobbs: with a little temporary ephemeral reference to whatever's going on in the news or something but uh there's a guy doing process and to the point
[55:52] Bob Dobbs: to the point he said,
[55:52] Bob Dobbs: I ain't suggesting anything to anybody,
[55:55] Bob Dobbs: but you better get into this process that I'm an example of.
[55:59] Bob Dobbs: So he did it with the chemical body.
[56:02] Bob Dobbs: And then McLuhan,
[56:04] Bob Dobbs: Wright in my McLuhan essay back in the 90s that he went further than Krishnamurti.
[56:11] Bob Dobbs: He started to process the other electric anti-environment.
[56:15] Bob Dobbs: They weren't bodies then,
[56:16] Bob Dobbs: they were anti-environment.
[56:18] Bob Dobbs: And that was a new part of awareness that people weren't aware of.
[56:23] Bob Dobbs: They didn't know there could be a discipline to it or patterns you could call laws.
[56:29] Bob Dobbs: It went beyond the person that was being promoted,
[56:33] Bob Dobbs: you know,
[56:33] Bob Dobbs: 100 years ago as a world savior.
[56:36] Bob Dobbs: And he rejected that.
[56:39] Bob Dobbs: And McLuhan purposely made himself look like just a normal Joe,
[56:44] Bob Dobbs: right?
[56:45] Bob Dobbs: Going along,
[56:46] Bob Dobbs: regular neighborhood guy.
[56:47] Bob Dobbs: He goes to church regularly.
[56:48] Bob Dobbs: He put on this whole bourgeois boringness,
[56:55] Bob Dobbs: dullness.
[56:57] Bob Dobbs: But he certainly didn't live that way when you encountered him.
[57:01] Bob Dobbs: But he did say back in the
[57:04] Bob Dobbs: 40s, the artist has to infiltrate decent society.
[57:08] Bob Dobbs: He put decent in quotes.
[57:10] Bob Dobbs: Have you looked at that much?
[57:14] Bob Dobbs: You know,
[57:14] Bob Dobbs: Joyce had to write books.
[57:18] Bob Dobbs: Picasso had to do painting and all this stuff.
[57:20] Bob Dobbs: Do you see McLuhan as that kind of antisocial enemy like Lewis,
[57:26] Bob Dobbs: but it was a hugely corporate society,
[57:29] Bob Dobbs: so he had to infiltrate and look real boring and normal?
[57:34] Cameron McEwen: No,
[57:35] Cameron McEwen: I think these are Gutenbergian categories.
[57:38] Bob Dobbs: Yes.
[57:39] Cameron McEwen: The individual and the society and the friend and the enemy.
[57:44] Cameron McEwen: All of this is dualistic stuff.
[57:46] Cameron McEwen: Yes,
[57:46] Bob Dobbs: but I wouldn't...
[57:48] Bob Dobbs: I don't exclude the Gutenberg.
[57:50] Bob Dobbs: It's a subplot.
[57:52] Bob Dobbs: I'm not stuck in it,
[57:55] Bob Dobbs: but I can engage it.
[57:56] Bob Dobbs: So I would suggest you don't dismiss the Gutenberg as part of your ammunition,
[58:01] Bob Dobbs: your armory.
[58:03] Bob Dobbs: Use that occasionally.
[58:04] Bob Dobbs: Put on the dualism.
[58:05] Cameron McEwen: Remember that I'm like yourself.
[58:09] Cameron McEwen: I'm an all-at-onceness.
[58:12] Bob Dobbs: sky.
[58:13] Cameron McEwen: So I don't at all.
[58:14] Cameron McEwen: Oh,
[58:14] Bob Dobbs: I could do that.
[58:15] Bob Dobbs: I do that on Tuesdays.
[58:16] Bob Dobbs: That's no problem.
[58:20] Cameron McEwen: I don't dismiss the Gutenberg influence.
[58:25] Cameron McEwen: Believe me,
[58:25] Cameron McEwen: that's a huge,
[58:27] Cameron McEwen: huge danger in the world at the moment.
[58:29] Cameron McEwen: But it's an ever-present danger.
[58:32] Bob Dobbs: Right.
[58:32] Bob Dobbs: But to say you're all at once,
[58:33] Bob Dobbs: you can't help but be that.
[58:34] Bob Dobbs: But I wouldn't limit myself to the all at all-at-onceness.
[58:38] Bob Dobbs: I would
[58:41] Bob Dobbs: put on the fragment because everything's all at once,
[58:46] Bob Dobbs: the Gutenberg fragment.
[58:48] Bob Dobbs: I think that's what Mifflin did by writing books.
[58:50] Cameron McEwen: You can't,
[58:51] Cameron McEwen: Bob,
[58:52] Cameron McEwen: you can't be all at once.
[58:57] Cameron McEwen: Everybody has to be a fragment in the sense that they have a certain body,
[59:02] Cameron McEwen: they have a certain history,
[59:04] Cameron McEwen: they have a certain language,
[59:06] Cameron McEwen: they have certain quirks,
[59:09] Cameron McEwen: etc.,
[59:09] Cameron McEwen: etc.
[59:11] Cameron McEwen: Limitation is not something that we ever get away from.
[59:18] Cameron McEwen: So the people that have thought greatly,
[59:22] Cameron McEwen: let's just say Joyce,
[59:25] Cameron McEwen: are trying to think about how limitation works in a way that isn't only negative.
[59:40] Cameron McEwen: How does...
[59:41] Cameron McEwen: Limitation work with communication.
[59:43] Cameron McEwen: Yes.
[59:45] Cameron McEwen: How does limitation work with love?
[59:49] Cameron McEwen: Those are questions that
[59:51] Cameron McEwen: Joyce is constantly asking,
[59:55] Cameron McEwen: and
[59:56] Cameron McEwen: McLuhan was too.
[59:57] Bob Dobbs: Yeah.
[59:58] Cameron McEwen: So there was no denial of fragmentation.
[1:00:01] Bob Dobbs: Jobs is too.
[1:00:03] Cameron McEwen: Oh,
[1:00:03] Cameron McEwen: good.
[1:00:03] Cameron McEwen: Good.
[1:00:05] Cameron McEwen: That's why
[1:00:06] Cameron McEwen: I brought up fragmentation early on.
[1:00:08] Bob Dobbs: Right.
[1:00:09] Bob Dobbs: Okay.
[1:00:10] Bob Dobbs: But I would say,
[1:00:11] Bob Dobbs: like you say,
[1:00:13] Bob Dobbs: you brought in different things that I have to relate to.
[1:00:17] Bob Dobbs: I can spend a lot of time in silence that nobody knows about,
[1:00:21] Bob Dobbs: and that can be a whole realm of communication that I don't express to anybody.
[1:00:26] Bob Dobbs: And that could be all at all-at-onceness or leaving,
[1:00:31] Bob Dobbs: dropping off from all at all-at-onceness.
[1:00:34] Bob Dobbs: What did you say about all at all-at-onceness,
[1:00:35] Bob Dobbs: that we can't do it,
[1:00:36] Bob Dobbs: but maybe I can do it?
[1:00:37] Bob Dobbs: Yeah,
[1:00:37] Cameron McEwen: we can't be it.
[1:00:38] Bob Dobbs: You can't be it in relation to other people,
[1:00:41] Bob Dobbs: but you can be maybe by yourself on Tuesday.
[1:00:45] Cameron McEwen: No,
[1:00:47] Bob Dobbs: Well,
[1:00:48] Bob Dobbs: I tell you,
[1:00:48] Bob Dobbs: I've spent a lot of time by myself.
[1:00:53] Cameron McEwen: Where do you get that time,
[1:00:54] Cameron McEwen: Bob?
[1:00:54] Cameron McEwen: If you're on the radio 24 hours a day,
[1:00:57] Cameron McEwen: what is the time?
[1:00:57] Bob Dobbs: That's only this past year.
[1:01:00] Bob Dobbs: Okay.
[1:01:00] Bob Dobbs: No,
[1:01:00] Bob Dobbs: really.
[1:01:02] Bob Dobbs: I'm only on the radio twice a week.
[1:01:05] Bob Dobbs: I see.
[1:01:05] Bob Dobbs: And Tuesdays is two hours broadcasting and then five or six hours talking in what we call tailgate,
[1:01:12] Bob Dobbs: not broadcast,
[1:01:13] Bob Dobbs: but I'm taking questions or discussing whatever happened in the show.
[1:01:16] Bob Dobbs: But on Saturday,
[1:01:17] Bob Dobbs: it's a
[1:01:18] Bob Dobbs: whole show.
[1:01:19] Bob Dobbs: That's ridiculously long.
[1:01:20] Bob Dobbs: And then five,
[1:01:22] Bob Dobbs: seven hours on tailgate.
[1:01:24] Bob Dobbs: So I do two long days.
[1:01:27] Bob Dobbs: I got another five days that I have no obligation to anybody.
[1:01:32] Bob Dobbs: I don't need to earn a living,
[1:01:33] Bob Dobbs: you know.
[1:01:34] Bob Dobbs: And so
[1:01:35] Bob Dobbs: I spend a lot of time by myself.
[1:01:38] Bob Dobbs: And I always,
[1:01:40] Bob Dobbs: as much as possible those five days that I'm not doing radio,
[1:01:43] Bob Dobbs: I go to the ocean and I swim.
[1:01:45] Bob Dobbs: I do long-distance swimming,
[1:01:46] Bob Dobbs: and that's a good alone time and a great way to do it,
[1:01:49] Bob Dobbs: and I also do some surfing.
[1:01:51] Bob Dobbs: So
[1:01:52] Bob Dobbs: I think,
[1:01:53] Bob Dobbs: like,
[1:01:53] Bob Dobbs: I have not had one experience of the COVID reality of the last 18 months.
[1:02:00] Bob Dobbs: I have not been to a store where I had to stand in line with the little spots that I've seen on the news.
[1:02:06] Bob Dobbs: You know,
[1:02:06] Bob Dobbs: people stand in social distancing and wearing the mask.
[1:02:12] Bob Dobbs: I've never worn a mask.
[1:02:13] Bob Dobbs: Never been involved.
[1:02:15] Bob Dobbs: I take cabs sometimes,
[1:02:16] Bob Dobbs: and here I always get a cab guy who doesn't want a mask.
[1:02:20] Bob Dobbs: I don't have to wear a mask.
[1:02:21] Bob Dobbs: So look at that.
[1:02:23] Bob Dobbs: I have never worn a mask.
[1:02:24] Bob Dobbs: I've never been subject to somebody waiting in line because Carolyn goes to our own market.
[1:02:31] Bob Dobbs: We own a farm that makes our stuff,
[1:02:33] Bob Dobbs: so it's a market thing.
[1:02:35] Bob Dobbs: She does go to Costco for other things,
[1:02:38] Bob Dobbs: but she likes to get out there and go to these places.
[1:02:40] Bob Dobbs: I don't care to.
[1:02:41] Bob Dobbs: So
[1:02:42] Bob Dobbs: I have not experienced.
[1:02:43] Bob Dobbs: experienced one iota of this new normal that people have impeached on.
[1:02:50] Cameron McEwen: Congratulations.
[1:02:51] Bob Dobbs: Yeah,
[1:02:52] Bob Dobbs: it's unique.
[1:02:53] Bob Dobbs: I don't think anybody can claim that unless they're out in the wilderness,
[1:02:57] Bob Dobbs: you know.
[1:02:58] Cameron McEwen: My neighbor is an artist,
[1:03:00] Cameron McEwen: and
[1:03:02] Cameron McEwen: I don't think he has absolute isolation like you do,
[1:03:07] Cameron McEwen: but he has almost.
[1:03:09] Cameron McEwen: I'm familiar with that lifestyle through him.
[1:03:12] Bob Dobbs: Is it because he can live on his art and he doesn't have to,
[1:03:16] Bob Dobbs: he can make a living at it without involving?
[1:03:19] Cameron McEwen: Yeah,
[1:03:19] Cameron McEwen: exactly.
[1:03:19] Cameron McEwen: And all of his food is delivered.
[1:03:22] Cameron McEwen: His wife,
[1:03:25] Cameron McEwen: if anything is needed,
[1:03:27] Cameron McEwen: like you,
[1:03:27] Cameron McEwen: his wife goes out and does it.
[1:03:29] Bob Dobbs: Yeah.
[1:03:30] Cameron McEwen: But yeah,
[1:03:31] Cameron McEwen: but he's got a whole routine of the food gets delivered,
[1:03:35] Cameron McEwen: then it goes into quarantine.
[1:03:39] Cameron McEwen: You know,
[1:03:39] Cameron McEwen: there's stuff for this.
[1:03:41] Cameron McEwen: day in quarantine,
[1:03:42] Cameron McEwen: except for that day in quarantine.
[1:03:44] Cameron McEwen: It's funny to see how that sort of lifestyle gets maintained.
[1:03:48] Bob Dobbs: Yeah,
[1:03:48] Bob Dobbs: what do you mean in quarantine?
[1:03:50] Bob Dobbs: What does that mean?
[1:03:51] Cameron McEwen: That means if something comes in,
[1:03:54] Cameron McEwen: let's say from Amazon,
[1:03:56] Cameron McEwen: then it goes into quarantine.
[1:03:59] Cameron McEwen: He doesn't deal with it for a certain amount of time depending on what it is.
[1:04:03] Bob Dobbs: Oh,
[1:04:03] Bob Dobbs: because he might get infected or something?
[1:04:05] Cameron McEwen: Yeah,
[1:04:06] Cameron McEwen: exactly.
[1:04:06] Bob Dobbs: Oh,
[1:04:07] Bob Dobbs: you know,
[1:04:07] Bob Dobbs: that's fine.
[1:04:08] Bob Dobbs: I never thought of that,
[1:04:09] Bob Dobbs: but
[1:04:09] Bob Dobbs: ION my products.
[1:04:10] Bob Dobbs: I feel immune.
[1:04:13] Bob Dobbs: iON said that I've caught COVID three times,
[1:04:16] Bob Dobbs: but it didn't do anything to me because I had,
[1:04:19] Bob Dobbs: our products are so amazing.
[1:04:21] Bob Dobbs: And so there's that kind of,
[1:04:22] Bob Dobbs: no,
[1:04:22] Bob Dobbs: I don't worry about,
[1:04:23] Bob Dobbs: you know,
[1:04:24] Bob Dobbs: when we order a lot,
[1:04:25] Bob Dobbs: Carolyn gets a lot of stuff delivered.
[1:04:27] Bob Dobbs: So
[1:04:28] Bob Dobbs: I've never thought of that,
[1:04:29] Bob Dobbs: not touching the box.
[1:04:32] Bob Dobbs: So,
[1:04:33] Bob Dobbs: but you don't really,
[1:04:34] Bob Dobbs: you have to be an artist in that traditional sense to do what he and I are doing,
[1:04:39] Bob Dobbs: right?
[1:04:39] Bob Dobbs: That's right.
[1:04:40] Bob Dobbs: That's right.
[1:04:41] Cameron McEwen: But let me mention,
[1:04:42] Cameron McEwen: Bob,
[1:04:42] Cameron McEwen: before we get too far away from it,
[1:04:44] Cameron McEwen: let me mention that we were talking last time and at the very start of our conversation this time about Bulwer,
[1:04:55] Cameron McEwen: Edward
[1:04:56] Cameron McEwen: Lytton Bulwer.
[1:04:57] Cameron McEwen: And
[1:04:58] Cameron McEwen: Krishnamurti is at the tail end of that same story.
[1:05:03] Bob Dobbs: That's right,
[1:05:03] Bob Dobbs: the theosophical story.
[1:05:05] Cameron McEwen: That's right.
[1:05:06] Cameron McEwen: So Bulwer was very influential with this.
[1:05:09] Cameron McEwen: Theosophists,
[1:05:10] Cameron McEwen: Krishnamurti.
[1:05:12] Cameron McEwen: was the sort of chosen son of the Theosophists and then rejected that.
[1:05:19] Cameron McEwen: And so this story that goes from Bulwer to Krishnamurti is one sort of,
[1:05:28] Cameron McEwen: one of the narratives of majority.
[1:05:31] Bob Dobbs: Yeah,
[1:05:31] Bob Dobbs: and that's why if McLuhan went further than Krishnamurti,
[1:05:36] Bob Dobbs: he and Innis go back to Bulwer.
[1:05:39] Bob Dobbs: And that's...
[1:05:41] Bob Dobbs: the interest in the occult that McLuhan had.
[1:05:44] Bob Dobbs: We don't have anything about that from Innis,
[1:05:46] Bob Dobbs: right?
[1:05:48] Bob Dobbs: No,
[1:05:49] Bob Dobbs: he didn't have it.
[1:05:50] Bob Dobbs: Yeah,
[1:05:51] Bob Dobbs: not that we know of.
[1:05:52] Bob Dobbs: But he does,
[1:05:54] Bob Dobbs: he was aware of Bulwer,
[1:05:55] Bob Dobbs: maybe for media reasons,
[1:05:56] Bob Dobbs: not the what Bulwer became known as a novelist of the occult and all that.
[1:06:01] Bob Dobbs: But yeah,
[1:06:01] Bob Dobbs: Bulwer was the beginning of the mythology of the Illuminati or something that became Theosophy.
[1:06:09] Bob Dobbs: Yeah,
[1:06:09] Bob Dobbs: it's a good point.
[1:06:10] Bob Dobbs: And...
[1:06:11] Bob Dobbs: Remarkable that they are referred to,
[1:06:14] Bob Dobbs: or Innis is referring to Bulwer Innis early writing in 1936,
[1:06:20] Bob Dobbs: which you discovered.
[1:06:21] Bob Dobbs: Well,
[1:06:21] Cameron McEwen: Bulwer is 1933.
[1:06:24] Cameron McEwen: Well,
[1:06:24] Cameron McEwen: I'm thinking of the
[1:06:28] Bob Dobbs: 1936 article that Innis did that you were quoting.
[1:06:35] Bob Dobbs: Your blog starts off with that 1936 article by Innis,
[1:06:39] Bob Dobbs: doesn't it?
[1:06:41] Cameron McEwen: 1936 is not the right word.
[1:06:46] Cameron McEwen: He was referring to
[1:06:48] Cameron McEwen: Boer in,
[1:06:51] Cameron McEwen: I think this was 1944.
[1:06:57] Bob Dobbs: I'd have to look it up.
[1:06:58] Cameron McEwen: Okay.
[1:06:59] Cameron McEwen: It's one of the essays that's in
[1:07:01] Cameron McEwen: Political Economy in the Modern State,
[1:07:04] Cameron McEwen: and the essays in that book sort of go from 42 to
[1:07:09] Cameron McEwen: 46.
[1:07:12] Cameron McEwen: So I think it's probably 1944 that he quotes Bulwer on Gutenberg.
[1:07:19] Bob Dobbs: What is the blog you sent me?
[1:07:21] Bob Dobbs: Here it is,
[1:07:23] Bob Dobbs: where Bulwer got,
[1:07:25] Bob Dobbs: let's see,
[1:07:26] Bob Dobbs: Victor Hugo just happened to be right in front of me.
[1:07:31] Bob Dobbs: PEMS,
[1:07:32] Bob Dobbs: PEMS
[1:07:33] Bob Dobbs: 1.
[1:07:34] Cameron McEwen: Yeah.
[1:07:35] Bob Dobbs: What is that?
[1:07:37] Cameron McEwen: That's political economy in the modern state.
[1:07:40] Bob Dobbs: Okay.
[1:07:41] Bob Dobbs: McLuhan reads Innis,
[1:07:43] Bob Dobbs: PIMS 1.
[1:07:43] Bob Dobbs: So Innis article,
[1:07:45] Bob Dobbs: where do I see
[1:07:46] Bob Dobbs: PIMS? Oh,
[1:07:47] Bob Dobbs: there's PIMS 1.
[1:07:49] Bob Dobbs: Am I going to see something?
[1:07:53] Bob Dobbs: Okay,
[1:07:53] Bob Dobbs: 1948.
[1:07:56] Bob Dobbs: Where did I get this 36 thing?
[1:07:59] Cameron McEwen: Well,
[1:08:00] Cameron McEwen: I had an earlier Postman
[1:08:02] Cameron McEwen: McLuhan and Innis in 1936.
[1:08:06] Cameron McEwen: You may have gone back to that for some reason.
[1:08:10] Bob Dobbs: Yeah,
[1:08:10] Bob Dobbs: I'm not seeing where I got 36 from.
[1:08:14] Bob Dobbs: I don't know why I'm thinking that.
[1:08:17] Bob Dobbs: I'm looking at the Hugo article,
[1:08:22] Bob Dobbs: but the political economy book,
[1:08:27] Bob Dobbs: where do I find that,
[1:08:29] Bob Dobbs: a little more detail on that?
[1:08:30] Bob Dobbs: Which column?
[1:08:32] Bob Dobbs: One of the PEMs?
[1:08:34] Cameron McEwen: Well,
[1:08:35] Cameron McEwen: PEM is Political Economy in a Modern State.
[1:08:38] Bob Dobbs: Right,
[1:08:38] Bob Dobbs: so I would go to...
[1:08:38] Cameron McEwen: That's what it is.
[1:08:40] Cameron McEwen: For example,
[1:08:42] Cameron McEwen: I'm looking at a footnote,
[1:08:44] Cameron McEwen: a long footnote that I have in
[1:08:47] Cameron McEwen: Innis multiplying Hugo.
[1:08:50] Cameron McEwen: And what I show there is that
[1:08:57] Cameron McEwen: Innis quotes Hugo in
[1:08:59] Cameron McEwen: The Economic Significance of Culture,
[1:09:02] Cameron McEwen: which is 1944.
[1:09:04] Cameron McEwen: He quotes him again in Minerva's Owl,
[1:09:07] Cameron McEwen: which is 1947.
[1:09:09] Cameron McEwen: And he quotes him again in an essay called
[1:09:12] Cameron McEwen: This Has Killed That,
[1:09:14] Cameron McEwen: and we don't know the exact date of that because it was never published,
[1:09:19] Cameron McEwen: but it was sometime around the same time.
[1:09:22] Cameron McEwen: So
[1:09:23] Cameron McEwen: McCloughan, I'm sorry,
[1:09:24] Cameron McEwen: Innis was quoting
[1:09:27] Cameron McEwen: Hugo in 44,
[1:09:28] Cameron McEwen: 45,
[1:09:29] Cameron McEwen: 46,
[1:09:33] Cameron McEwen: 47,
[1:09:34] Cameron McEwen: in that period.
[1:09:37] Cameron McEwen: That's odd,
[1:09:38] Bob Dobbs: because I have this in my memory.
[1:09:40] Bob Dobbs: I have a pretty photogenic memory,
[1:09:42] Bob Dobbs: and when I'm reading and something was going on in 1936,
[1:09:46] Bob Dobbs: that was the new fact for me.
[1:09:48] Cameron McEwen: Well,
[1:09:48] Cameron McEwen: that's what I was,
[1:09:49] Cameron McEwen: I have a post that I think is very interesting on
[1:09:54] Cameron McEwen: McLuhan reading Innis in 1936.
[1:09:57] Cameron McEwen: And why do I think that happened?
[1:09:59] Cameron McEwen: Because in the
[1:10:01] Cameron McEwen: Dalhousie Review issue,
[1:10:04] Cameron McEwen: where McLuhan first published on
[1:10:06] Cameron McEwen: Chesterton.
[1:10:07] Cameron McEwen: There's also a very interesting article by Innis,
[1:10:10] Cameron McEwen: and
[1:10:11] Cameron McEwen: I don't think that McLuhan could have had that issue of the Dalhousie Review and not have read the article by Innis,
[1:10:20] Cameron McEwen: and that was in 1936.
[1:10:23] Bob Dobbs: Okay,
[1:10:23] Bob Dobbs: so maybe that's what I'm thinking of.
[1:10:26] Cameron McEwen: I think so.
[1:10:26] Bob Dobbs: What was Innis'
[1:10:27] Bob Dobbs: article about?
[1:10:32] Cameron McEwen: Well,
[1:10:33] Cameron McEwen: he had written or actually given a lecture at UBC in 1935,
[1:10:43] Cameron McEwen: and the essay in 1935 concerned the possibilities of the social sciences.
[1:10:54] Cameron McEwen: And it was kind of an answer to...
[1:10:58] Cameron McEwen: McLuhan mentor and department head in the Department of Political Economy at University of Toronto,
[1:11:05] Cameron McEwen: a man by the name of
[1:11:07] Cameron McEwen: Urwick.
[1:11:08] Cameron McEwen: And
[1:11:09] Cameron McEwen: Urwick was a guy that basically said,
[1:11:12] Cameron McEwen: well,
[1:11:12] Cameron McEwen: you know,
[1:11:13] Cameron McEwen: we really can't know anything in the social sciences that things are constantly up in the air.
[1:11:26] Cameron McEwen: And so
[1:11:27] Cameron McEwen: Innis was trying to sort of come to terms with that,
[1:11:31] Cameron McEwen: you could say,
[1:11:33] Cameron McEwen: in his
[1:11:34] Cameron McEwen: UBC talk in 1935 and then in his 1936 paper for Dalhousie Review.
[1:11:43] Bob Dobbs: Yeah,
[1:11:43] Bob Dobbs: you said Urwick was the head of McLuhan department.
[1:11:45] Bob Dobbs: You meant Innis'
[1:11:46] Bob Dobbs: department.
[1:11:47] Cameron McEwen: Oh,
[1:11:47] Cameron McEwen: I'm sorry,
[1:11:48] Cameron McEwen: yes.
[1:11:48] Bob Dobbs: Yeah,
[1:11:49] Bob Dobbs: and that brings in...
[1:11:52] Bob Dobbs: The
[1:11:53] Bob Dobbs: Easterbrook article from 1960 that you sent me,
[1:11:56] Bob Dobbs: Easterbrook talks about the two schools,
[1:11:59] Bob Dobbs: the McLuhan School and the Know-Nothing School.
[1:12:01] Bob Dobbs: Correct.
[1:12:02] Bob Dobbs: Did I get that right?
[1:12:04] Bob Dobbs: Yes.
[1:12:04] Bob Dobbs: Yeah,
[1:12:05] Bob Dobbs: he's talking about that.
[1:12:06] Bob Dobbs: And so that's the Urwick School versus the McLuhan School.
[1:12:09] Bob Dobbs: Yes.
[1:12:10] Bob Dobbs: That
[1:12:11] Bob Dobbs: Easterbrook was in between.
[1:12:14] Cameron McEwen: Yes,
[1:12:14] Cameron McEwen: and Innis was also in between,
[1:12:15] Cameron McEwen: you could say.
[1:12:17] Cameron McEwen: Yeah.
[1:12:20] Cameron McEwen: So Innis...
[1:12:21] Cameron McEwen: He thought that ultimately,
[1:12:24] Cameron McEwen: or at least towards the end of his life,
[1:12:26] Cameron McEwen: it's very difficult to know what
[1:12:28] Cameron McEwen: Innis was thinking because he was very sick and he was just writing,
[1:12:34] Cameron McEwen: And he doesn't have a clear stance.
[1:12:38] Cameron McEwen: So he tries to do justice both to the idea that the humanities have a tradition Thank you.
[1:12:50] Cameron McEwen: that establishes norms.
[1:12:52] Cameron McEwen: He tries to take that position at the same time as saying that there's an instability to that norm setting.
[1:13:02] Cameron McEwen: So the social sciences have to be constantly navigating,
[1:13:07] Cameron McEwen: you could say,
[1:13:09] Cameron McEwen: between fixed extremes that it has to avoid.
[1:13:14] Bob Dobbs: Okay.
[1:13:16] Bob Dobbs: And McLuhan,
[1:13:17] Bob Dobbs: like Easterbrook,
[1:13:18] Bob Dobbs: was between
[1:13:20] Bob Dobbs: The whitehead guy that ran his English department,
[1:13:24] Bob Dobbs: who was the history of ideas school in literary criticism,
[1:13:29] Bob Dobbs: versus whatever McLuhan brought from Cambridge that the whitehead,
[1:13:33] Bob Dobbs: or whatever his name was,
[1:13:34] Bob Dobbs: guy didn't like.
[1:13:35] Bob Dobbs: You remember that?
[1:13:37] Cameron McEwen: Yes,
[1:13:37] Cameron McEwen: I do.
[1:13:38] Cameron McEwen: I know whitehead is not the right...
[1:13:40] Cameron McEwen: Not the name,
[1:13:40] Bob Dobbs: but it's some name like that.
[1:13:41] Cameron McEwen: Not the name.
[1:13:42] Bob Dobbs: You know who I mean.
[1:13:43] Bob Dobbs: Oh,
[1:13:43] Cameron McEwen: absolutely.
[1:13:44] Cameron McEwen: Absolutely.
[1:13:45] Cameron McEwen: So they were...
[1:13:46] Cameron McEwen: Yeah,
[1:13:47] Cameron McEwen: it was kind of peculiar.
[1:13:48] Cameron McEwen: There was...
[1:13:50] Cameron McEwen: Both had been influenced by Cambridge,
[1:13:52] Cameron McEwen: but in very different ways.
[1:13:55] Cameron McEwen: And when McLuhan got hired by
[1:13:57] Cameron McEwen: St. Mike's,
[1:13:59] Cameron McEwen: it was over that guy's opposition.
[1:14:02] Cameron McEwen: And so that antagonism remained sort of forever.
[1:14:08] Cameron McEwen: And McLuhan,
[1:14:09] Cameron McEwen: in his letters especially,
[1:14:11] Cameron McEwen: was constantly mocking him.
[1:14:14] Bob Dobbs: And remember I told you that he was on the PhD board.
[1:14:18] Bob Dobbs: for Theall
[1:14:19] Bob Dobbs: PhD hearing and
[1:14:23] Bob Dobbs: McLuhan, of course,
[1:14:25] Bob Dobbs: Don was doing all McLuhan stuff and Whitehead called him up after.
[1:14:28] Bob Dobbs: Remember I told you this?
[1:14:29] Bob Dobbs: Called him up that night and said,
[1:14:30] Bob Dobbs: wow,
[1:14:31] Bob Dobbs: your thesis is incredible.
[1:14:32] Bob Dobbs: You could start a new school with that,
[1:14:34] Bob Dobbs: new school of literary criticism.
[1:14:36] Bob Dobbs: He did not recognize it was McLuhan.
[1:14:41] Bob Dobbs: And Theall thought that was funny.
[1:14:42] Bob Dobbs: So this...
[1:14:47] Bob Dobbs: you're talking about the social sciences jockeying between fixity and Innis okay that's the dilemma of everybody in every culture no matter where they are they're um they're up against the new ionosphere or what do you call this um uh the
[1:15:05] Bob Dobbs: apparently the guy rudolf steiner who did anthroposophy i just heard some people talking about this he had the idea in the 20s of the the eighth sphere,
[1:15:14] Bob Dobbs: the eighth level.
[1:15:16] Bob Dobbs: electronic virtual surround that was coming in.
[1:15:20] Bob Dobbs: So everybody has to deal with the mass man,
[1:15:23] Bob Dobbs: which is not just collective and tribal,
[1:15:25] Bob Dobbs: but also autonomous.
[1:15:27] Bob Dobbs: You got that schizoid process.
[1:15:30] Bob Dobbs: And then you,
[1:15:31] Bob Dobbs: whatever culture or whatever your allegiance that you were conditioned by when you were younger,
[1:15:37] Bob Dobbs: that's competing with your present global Esperanto that everybody's living in.
[1:15:44] Cameron McEwen: Notice how all of this relates to the archive.
[1:15:47] Bob Dobbs: Yes,
[1:15:48] Bob Dobbs: and then the Android Meme comes along and replays that back at people,
[1:15:53] Bob Dobbs: passively presents so that you're not sure where your schizophrenia ends and the other outside of you begins,
[1:16:01] Bob Dobbs: and then the tech body turns that into a psychopath phenomenon.
[1:16:06] Bob Dobbs: Whatever you would call a serial killer,
[1:16:10] Bob Dobbs: a vicious,
[1:16:11] Bob Dobbs: what's that,
[1:16:11] Bob Dobbs: the silence of the lambs?
[1:16:13] Bob Dobbs: Remember that guy in jail?
[1:16:15] Cameron McEwen: Yeah,
[1:16:16] Cameron McEwen: I didn't.
[1:16:17] Cameron McEwen: see any of that stuff.
[1:16:19] Cameron McEwen: But I know what you're talking about.
[1:16:20] Bob Dobbs: Yeah,
[1:16:21] Bob Dobbs: we're talking about the psychopathic modern movie figure.
[1:16:25] Cameron McEwen: If you want to go into the psychopathic,
[1:16:29] Cameron McEwen: how does that relate to what you said about the tech body trying to instigate consciousness?
[1:16:38] Bob Dobbs: Well,
[1:16:39] Bob Dobbs: the tech body knows we're quadrophrenia,
[1:16:41] Bob Dobbs: so he's playing on all parts of our potentials.
[1:16:44] Bob Dobbs: Or what we are and don't recognize.
[1:16:47] Bob Dobbs: So,
[1:16:49] Bob Dobbs: yes,
[1:16:50] Bob Dobbs: Gurdjieff and these people were seen as rather psychopaths.
[1:16:54] Bob Dobbs: Lewis could be seen as a psychopath because he called himself the enemy and he destroyed all his social relationships constantly.
[1:17:02] Bob Dobbs: So there's probably different...
[1:17:06] Bob Dobbs: A guy who ends up killing people and that,
[1:17:08] Bob Dobbs: you know,
[1:17:08] Bob Dobbs: his psychopathy gets out of control,
[1:17:11] Bob Dobbs: whereas the artist or the guru...
[1:17:14] Bob Dobbs: the leader of a group in a school and a lot of the artists were that kind of personality,
[1:17:19] Bob Dobbs: somebody took it over,
[1:17:20] Bob Dobbs: like say the Pre-Raphaelites,
[1:17:23] Bob Dobbs: they're psychopaths that can hide it and control it and not kill people.
[1:17:29] Bob Dobbs: I think the Android Meme and the tech body would do both.
[1:17:32] Bob Dobbs: It would cover the whole range of the Anthropomorphic Physical.
[1:17:37] Cameron McEwen: Okay,
[1:17:37] Cameron McEwen: good.
[1:17:37] Cameron McEwen: Yeah,
[1:17:38] Cameron McEwen: so what you're pointing to there,
[1:17:40] Cameron McEwen: I think,
[1:17:40] Cameron McEwen: is that the word And...
[1:17:43] Cameron McEwen: pathology covers a wide range.
[1:17:47] Cameron McEwen: And probably comes down at the end to tactility.
[1:17:57] Cameron McEwen: So you can touch somebody in a terrible way or you can touch them in a loving way.
[1:18:06] Cameron McEwen: There's a great range there.
[1:18:08] Bob Dobbs: Yeah,
[1:18:09] Bob Dobbs: in Finnegans Wake he begins with
[1:18:11] Bob Dobbs: they call it,
[1:18:12] Bob Dobbs: the caveman dialogue,
[1:18:14] Bob Dobbs: mute,
[1:18:15] Bob Dobbs: jut and mute,
[1:18:15] Bob Dobbs: whatever the two guys are,
[1:18:17] Bob Dobbs: page 16 or so.
[1:18:19] Bob Dobbs: There's the first encounter with the other,
[1:18:22] Bob Dobbs: or you meet a human.
[1:18:24] Bob Dobbs: And McLuhan at one point said,
[1:18:26] Bob Dobbs: in 1970,
[1:18:27] Bob Dobbs: that the private person goes way back,
[1:18:31] Bob Dobbs: that the Gutenberg retrieved the private person.
[1:18:33] Bob Dobbs: And most people think of our origins in a tribe,
[1:18:36] Bob Dobbs: but there might have been a phase before that.
[1:18:40] Bob Dobbs: Even in the Theosophical school that claims there's places like Atlantis,
[1:18:43] Bob Dobbs: which were higher civilizations,
[1:18:45] Bob Dobbs: there might have been great autonomy and antisocial behavior in those fanciful places or real places.
[1:18:57] Bob Dobbs: So it's interesting to think of the private individual that you wouldn't know what you were encountering.
[1:19:04] Bob Dobbs: You wouldn't know what the person could do.
[1:19:07] Bob Dobbs: You wouldn't trust anybody.
[1:19:10] Cameron McEwen: You're right that that is in McLuhan,
[1:19:12] Cameron McEwen: but it's a very puzzling thought.
[1:19:15] Cameron McEwen: It's because the idea of a singular origin is a very Gutenbergian thought.
[1:19:24] Cameron McEwen: It's the inverted perspective.
[1:19:27] Bob Dobbs: Right,
[1:19:28] Bob Dobbs: and it's Innis Rolling Stone article.
[1:19:31] Bob Dobbs: He went to San Francisco,
[1:19:32] Bob Dobbs: somewhere in California,
[1:19:33] Bob Dobbs: and did a speech to a pop audience.
[1:19:37] Bob Dobbs: like in October 1970,
[1:19:40] Bob Dobbs: and he's quoted a lot in the article,
[1:19:43] Bob Dobbs: but we don't know if the quotes are accurate.
[1:19:45] Bob Dobbs: We don't know if that guy heard it right about the private statement,
[1:19:48] Bob Dobbs: but I took it on face value.
[1:19:50] Bob Dobbs: I said,
[1:19:50] Bob Dobbs: well,
[1:19:50] Bob Dobbs: that's very interesting,
[1:19:51] Bob Dobbs: and then I thought that opened up a different way of what McLuhan was including.
[1:19:58] Bob Dobbs: So I appreciate the mistake or the fallacy,
[1:20:00] Bob Dobbs: because,
[1:20:01] Bob Dobbs: oh,
[1:20:01] Bob Dobbs: well,
[1:20:02] Bob Dobbs: maybe
[1:20:03] Bob Dobbs: I should have asked McLuhan that,
[1:20:05] Bob Dobbs: you know,
[1:20:06] Cameron McEwen: at some point.
[1:20:07] Bob Dobbs: So
[1:20:09] Cameron McEwen: I think in that context,
[1:20:11] Cameron McEwen: we could understand that
[1:20:14] Cameron McEwen: McLuhan may have been trying to counter what he felt was a kind of collective wave.
[1:20:22] Cameron McEwen: Yeah.
[1:20:23] Cameron McEwen: Right?
[1:20:23] Cameron McEwen: So people were trying to merge themselves in some sort of...
[1:20:30] Bob Dobbs: Yeah,
[1:20:30] Bob Dobbs: beehive.
[1:20:30] Cameron McEwen: I don't know.
[1:20:31] Cameron McEwen: Yeah,
[1:20:32] Cameron McEwen: yeah,
[1:20:32] Cameron McEwen: exactly.
[1:20:33] Cameron McEwen: So he may have wanted to emphasize the private person.
[1:20:37] Cameron McEwen: and how that was fundamental.
[1:20:39] Cameron McEwen: Yeah,
[1:20:40] Cameron McEwen: that brings up...
[1:20:40] Cameron McEwen: And that could have...
[1:20:41] Bob Dobbs: Here's something.
[1:20:42] Bob Dobbs: That brings up an aspect.
[1:20:43] Bob Dobbs: Okay,
[1:20:43] Bob Dobbs: you can finish.
[1:20:44] Bob Dobbs: That could have...
[1:20:44] Bob Dobbs: Yeah,
[1:20:45] Bob Dobbs: maybe what he meant.
[1:20:46] Bob Dobbs: Here's what may be useful to say.
[1:20:52] Bob Dobbs: he was very aware of what fads were going on in the information society,
[1:20:58] Bob Dobbs: new kinds of fads.
[1:20:59] Bob Dobbs: And when he would go out and speak,
[1:21:01] Bob Dobbs: he purposely positioned himself to be some kind of anti-environment to what he thought the fad was at the time.
[1:21:09] Bob Dobbs: Are you aware of that,
[1:21:10] Bob Dobbs: that most of his talks are geared that way?
[1:21:13] Cameron McEwen: Absolutely.
[1:21:15] Bob Dobbs: He's not making a point to build up a social science theory or something.
[1:21:21] Bob Dobbs: He is directly encountering the collective consciousness,
[1:21:24] Bob Dobbs: not unconscious,
[1:21:26] Bob Dobbs: that has gotten into a pattern due to the ground of the
[1:21:30] Bob Dobbs: 18-month period,
[1:21:32] Bob Dobbs: and he's addressing that.
[1:21:34] Bob Dobbs: Do you ever hear anybody say that about him?
[1:21:36] Bob Dobbs: No,
[1:21:37] Bob Dobbs: they don't say that he's addressing.
[1:21:39] Bob Dobbs: And so that lecture you're talking about,
[1:21:41] Bob Dobbs: he made up this idea of the private because he knew he had a certain charisma and people would be interested in what he said.
[1:21:47] Bob Dobbs: And so he said,
[1:21:48] Bob Dobbs: well,
[1:21:48] Bob Dobbs: I'll get them looking at this way to get out of this tribalism they're into.
[1:21:52] Bob Dobbs: Yeah.
[1:21:55] Cameron McEwen: And that's one of the ways that
[1:21:59] Cameron McEwen: McLuhan sort of,
[1:22:02] Cameron McEwen: I don't want to say he took over this aspect from Innis.
[1:22:08] Cameron McEwen: What could I say?
[1:22:09] Cameron McEwen: This is one of the ways that Easterbrook was able to show Innis and McLuhan.
[1:22:15] Cameron McEwen: that they had certain common concerns.
[1:22:19] Cameron McEwen: So that had to be done?
[1:22:22] Bob Dobbs: That had to be,
[1:22:23] Bob Dobbs: they couldn't see it?
[1:22:26] Cameron McEwen: No,
[1:22:28] Cameron McEwen: but they may not have been able to see why they should get to know the other guy.
[1:22:33] Bob Dobbs: Oh,
[1:22:33] Bob Dobbs: I see.
[1:22:34] Cameron McEwen: So he may have said to each of them,
[1:22:37] Cameron McEwen: well,
[1:22:38] Cameron McEwen: here's an interesting guy.
[1:22:41] Cameron McEwen: I think you should meet him.
[1:22:43] Cameron McEwen: And then in a...
[1:22:44] Cameron McEwen: or McLuhan may have said to Easterbrook,
[1:22:46] Cameron McEwen: well,
[1:22:46] Cameron McEwen: you know,
[1:22:47] Cameron McEwen: why would I do this?
[1:22:49] Cameron McEwen: And
[1:22:50] Cameron McEwen: Easterbrook would have had lots of answers to that.
[1:22:52] Cameron McEwen: I've got lots of posts that deal with that question.
[1:22:56] Cameron McEwen: But
[1:22:57] Cameron McEwen: Innis was very interested in the question of balance.
[1:23:02] Cameron McEwen: So for Innis,
[1:23:05] Cameron McEwen: what's interesting about the
[1:23:07] Cameron McEwen: 19th century is that there was a sense of balance.
[1:23:13] Cameron McEwen: that was able to constrain the individual expression of both people in a society and between different societies.
[1:23:26] Cameron McEwen: And that's why there was a century of peace.
[1:23:30] Cameron McEwen: And what happened in the 20th century,
[1:23:32] Cameron McEwen: according to Innis,
[1:23:33] Cameron McEwen: is that we lost that sense of balance.
[1:23:36] Cameron McEwen: We became dedicated to extremes.
[1:23:40] Cameron McEwen: And if you're thinking in terms of extremes,
[1:23:43] Cameron McEwen: There's no sense of overriding justice,
[1:23:48] Cameron McEwen: so there's no way to constrain through a
[1:23:51] Cameron McEwen: League of Nations,
[1:23:52] Cameron McEwen: let's say,
[1:23:53] Cameron McEwen: or through a United Nations,
[1:23:55] Cameron McEwen: or through a Catholic Church,
[1:23:58] Cameron McEwen: or some sort of universal philosophy.
[1:24:02] Cameron McEwen: All of these things fall by the boards,
[1:24:05] Cameron McEwen: and what you're left with is,
[1:24:07] Cameron McEwen: according to Innis,
[1:24:09] Cameron McEwen: a century of war.
[1:24:11] Bob Dobbs: And the existential.
[1:24:13] Bob Dobbs: The existential.
[1:24:16] Bob Dobbs: I guess.
[1:24:16] Cameron McEwen: He never talks about it that way.
[1:24:19] Cameron McEwen: I'm not sure myself.
[1:24:20] Cameron McEwen: No,
[1:24:20] Bob Dobbs: but he quoted the great phrase by
[1:24:24] Bob Dobbs: Joyce on page 18 of Finnegans Wake,
[1:24:26] Bob Dobbs: you know,
[1:24:27] Bob Dobbs: in the ignorance that knits the impression that wets the wits finds the name for them.
[1:24:31] Bob Dobbs: You know that quote from Finnegans Wake?
[1:24:34] Bob Dobbs: Yes,
[1:24:34] Cameron McEwen: absolutely.
[1:24:35] Bob Dobbs: He has that somewhere in maybe a cliché to archetype,
[1:24:39] Bob Dobbs: but it ends up with the existential.
[1:24:41] Cameron McEwen: Right,
[1:24:42] Cameron McEwen: but I was talking about Innis,
[1:24:43] Cameron McEwen: right?
[1:24:43] Cameron McEwen: And you're going over to McLuhan.
[1:24:46] Bob Dobbs: Okay,
[1:24:46] Bob Dobbs: so what you were saying is that Innis...
[1:24:48] Cameron McEwen: What I was saying is Innis,
[1:24:51] Cameron McEwen: the century of peace followed by the century of war.
[1:24:54] Cameron McEwen: And how did that happen?
[1:24:56] Cameron McEwen: Through a loss of our sense of balance,
[1:25:00] Cameron McEwen: right?
[1:25:00] Cameron McEwen: So
[1:25:01] Cameron McEwen: McLuhan then takes over,
[1:25:04] Cameron McEwen: that's the wrong word,
[1:25:05] Cameron McEwen: not takes over,
[1:25:06] Cameron McEwen: continues.
[1:25:08] Cameron McEwen: Innis'
[1:25:08] Cameron McEwen: sense for balance.
[1:25:10] Cameron McEwen: It's one of the things that McLuhan continues on through his career.
[1:25:15] Bob Dobbs: Yeah,
[1:25:16] Bob Dobbs: the equilibrium,
[1:25:17] Bob Dobbs: homeostasis.
[1:25:18] Cameron McEwen: Correct.
[1:25:19] Bob Dobbs: Yeah,
[1:25:20] Bob Dobbs: and so,
[1:25:23] Bob Dobbs: yeah,
[1:25:24] Bob Dobbs: so,
[1:25:24] Bob Dobbs: but
[1:25:25] Cameron McEwen: Innis... Homeostasis brings us back to Selye,
[1:25:29] Cameron McEwen: by the way.
[1:25:30] Bob Dobbs: Right,
[1:25:30] Bob Dobbs: that's right.
[1:25:32] Cameron McEwen: And to the
[1:25:33] Cameron McEwen: Decad.
[1:25:34] Bob Dobbs: But Innis didn't experience the global theater of the 60s.
[1:25:38] Bob Dobbs: You know,
[1:25:39] Bob Dobbs: he dealt with radio and...
[1:25:41] Bob Dobbs: Not TV.
[1:25:41] Bob Dobbs: Right.
[1:25:41] Cameron McEwen: He died in 1952.
[1:25:44] Bob Dobbs: Right.
[1:25:45] Bob Dobbs: So McLuhan saw a new pressure,
[1:25:48] Bob Dobbs: a new,
[1:25:48] Bob Dobbs: you know,
[1:25:49] Bob Dobbs: went beyond what Innis had to encounter.
[1:25:51] Bob Dobbs: So McLuhan had to update Innis,
[1:25:53] Bob Dobbs: overlay,
[1:25:55] Bob Dobbs: and maybe that brought in the existential is what I was thinking.
[1:25:58] Cameron McEwen: But again,
[1:25:59] Cameron McEwen: it was sort of a continuation because what
[1:26:03] Cameron McEwen: Innis saw in the
[1:26:05] Cameron McEwen: 19th century,
[1:26:07] Cameron McEwen: you could say in the bowels of the century of peace.
[1:26:11] Cameron McEwen: He saw that newspapers and the Telegraph were upsetting the balance that had been established.
[1:26:22] Cameron McEwen: So when
[1:26:24] Cameron McEwen: Innis becomes...
[1:26:28] Bob Dobbs: 1830s.
[1:26:29] Cameron McEwen: That's right.
[1:26:30] Cameron McEwen: That's right.
[1:26:30] Cameron McEwen: When
[1:26:31] Cameron McEwen: Innis reads in the
[1:26:36] Cameron McEwen: 1830s, somebody like Bulwer talking about the different...
[1:26:40] Cameron McEwen: human beings on the two sides of the Gutenbergian gulf.
[1:26:48] Cameron McEwen: Then Innis says to himself,
[1:26:49] Cameron McEwen: well,
[1:26:51] Cameron McEwen: maybe one of the ways to articulate what happened between the century of peace and the century of bullets is to say that we have a new kind of human being caused by communication
[1:27:08] Cameron McEwen: breakdown.
[1:27:09] Cameron McEwen: or communication revolution,
[1:27:10] Cameron McEwen: I guess I should say,
[1:27:13] Cameron McEwen: right?
[1:27:13] Cameron McEwen: So you have what Innis is constantly talking about in his essays,
[1:27:20] Cameron McEwen: let's say from 1942 even,
[1:27:24] Cameron McEwen: but certainly by 1944,
[1:27:27] Cameron McEwen: he's constantly talking about what happens with newspapers and with other types of rapid communication.
[1:27:37] Cameron McEwen: It was steamboats,
[1:27:38] Cameron McEwen: railways,
[1:27:39] Cameron McEwen: all this stuff.
[1:27:40] Cameron McEwen: What happens to human beings?
[1:27:43] Cameron McEwen: How do they become unbalanced through this process?
[1:27:47] Bob Dobbs: Did you ever read letters to Playboy that McLuhan did in the late
[1:27:53] Bob Dobbs: 60s? You ever come across them?
[1:27:57] Cameron McEwen: Late
[1:27:58] Cameron McEwen: 60s or 70s?
[1:27:59] Bob Dobbs: No,
[1:27:59] Bob Dobbs: late 60s.
[1:27:59] Bob Dobbs: He wrote letters a lot to Playboy.
[1:28:03] Cameron McEwen: No.
[1:28:05] Cameron McEwen: If you have those,
[1:28:06] Cameron McEwen: send them to me,
[1:28:06] Cameron McEwen: please.
[1:28:07] Bob Dobbs: Yeah,
[1:28:07] Bob Dobbs: I'd have to make copies because when I was in L.A.
[1:28:10] Bob Dobbs: in 77,
[1:28:11] Bob Dobbs: when Carol was doing a two-month elective there,
[1:28:16] Bob Dobbs: I went to the microfiche of
[1:28:18] Bob Dobbs: UCLA. They had all the Playboys,
[1:28:21] Bob Dobbs: and I went through them all and found all the letters.
[1:28:23] Bob Dobbs: I used to read them and look for them,
[1:28:26] Bob Dobbs: every issue in the late 60s,
[1:28:27] Bob Dobbs: so I knew they were there.
[1:28:28] Bob Dobbs: Then I found a place that had Playboy on microfilm.
[1:28:31] Bob Dobbs: So...
[1:28:33] Bob Dobbs: There's a guy who Wright an article,
[1:28:35] Bob Dobbs: Alan Harrington.
[1:28:37] Bob Dobbs: He Wright an article on The Coming Race psychopath,
[1:28:40] Bob Dobbs: or the rise of the psychopath,
[1:28:42] Bob Dobbs: in 6970.
[1:28:44] Bob Dobbs: And McLuhan latches onto that article and says,
[1:28:47] Bob Dobbs: yes,
[1:28:47] Bob Dobbs: that's what we're going to see,
[1:28:48] Bob Dobbs: more and more weird psychopaths.
[1:28:52] Bob Dobbs: So that's the extreme of the autonomy side of mass man.
[1:28:56] Bob Dobbs: You have maybe the crowd dynamic of hippies or John Birchers.
[1:29:02] Bob Dobbs: phatic republicans or democrats for black lives matter that's the beehive part of the tactile you know multi-bodied situation uh but the also the direction for silence and autonomy leads to the psychopath so
[1:29:18] Bob Dobbs: you got two so you have the collective uh flash mob and then the psychopath these are happening at the same time correct so alan harrington uh he
[1:29:30] Bob Dobbs: He hit upon it,
[1:29:31] Bob Dobbs: and when I started attending William Irwin Thompson lectures at the
[1:29:36] Bob Dobbs: Cathedral of St.
[1:29:37] Bob Dobbs: John the Divine,
[1:29:38] Bob Dobbs: 93,
[1:29:42] Bob Dobbs: 94,
[1:29:44] Bob Dobbs: up to 99,
[1:29:45] Bob Dobbs: the woman who was the secretary of the dean there at the church,
[1:29:49] Bob Dobbs: Peggy Harrington,
[1:29:51] Bob Dobbs: she was the widow of Alan Harrington.
[1:29:54] Bob Dobbs: He died back then.
[1:29:56] Bob Dobbs: So one day...
[1:29:58] Bob Dobbs: We just got talking,
[1:29:59] Bob Dobbs: and she brought it up,
[1:29:59] Bob Dobbs: and I said,
[1:30:00] Bob Dobbs: oh,
[1:30:00] Bob Dobbs: I know that article and what he did,
[1:30:02] Bob Dobbs: and here's what McLuhan said about it.
[1:30:05] Bob Dobbs: So I actually met someone.
[1:30:09] Bob Dobbs: Connected to that article,
[1:30:10] Bob Dobbs: which I always remembered it.
[1:30:11] Bob Dobbs: It was an important letter.
[1:30:15] Bob Dobbs: You know,
[1:30:15] Bob Dobbs: here's McLuhan.
[1:30:16] Bob Dobbs: They're thinking he's a guy saying,
[1:30:17] Bob Dobbs: oh,
[1:30:17] Bob Dobbs: wonderful pastoral utopia is coming.
[1:30:20] Bob Dobbs: You know,
[1:30:20] Bob Dobbs: silly stuff that I call the Madison Avenue McLuhan.
[1:30:23] Bob Dobbs: And here he is looking at hard facts about this rise of psychopaths.
[1:30:28] Cameron McEwen: Sure.
[1:30:29] Bob Dobbs: And serial killer and all that.
[1:30:31] Cameron McEwen: Yeah.
[1:30:31] Cameron McEwen: So he not only saw the dangers of the anti-environment,
[1:30:36] Cameron McEwen: he saw the dangers.
[1:30:38] Cameron McEwen: of losing the old one.
[1:30:39] Bob Dobbs: Yeah,
[1:30:40] Bob Dobbs: yeah.
[1:30:40] Cameron McEwen: So he was also talking about loss of private identity,
[1:30:44] Cameron McEwen: loss of stability,
[1:30:48] Cameron McEwen: loss of democracy,
[1:30:51] Cameron McEwen: loss of privacy,
[1:30:53] Cameron McEwen: all of these things that had their roots in the Gutenbergian galaxy,
[1:30:59] Cameron McEwen: he wanted to preserve.
[1:31:00] Cameron McEwen: But you could only preserve them by understanding media plural.
[1:31:06] Bob Dobbs: Yeah.
[1:31:07] Bob Dobbs: And,
[1:31:08] Bob Dobbs: you know,
[1:31:08] Bob Dobbs: you have Freud,
[1:31:09] Bob Dobbs: Jung,
[1:31:09] Bob Dobbs: every different theory of our ills and how to counter it.
[1:31:14] Bob Dobbs: And I would say McLuhan was the most balanced and the most useful of diagnosing the problems and what to do about them.
[1:31:24] Bob Dobbs: You know,
[1:31:25] Bob Dobbs: everybody was becoming a therapist in different ways in an information society from the 60s on.
[1:31:30] Bob Dobbs: Edgar Friedenberg used to talk about that in his class at Dalhousie.
[1:31:34] Bob Dobbs: He would sit in on...
[1:31:37] Bob Dobbs: He did the vanishing adolescent in the Gutenberg Galaxy.
[1:31:40] Bob Dobbs: But overall,
[1:31:43] Bob Dobbs: McLuhan therapy was the best,
[1:31:48] Bob Dobbs: the most comprehensive.
[1:31:50] Cameron McEwen: I think so.
[1:31:51] Bob Dobbs: Yeah,
[1:31:52] Bob Dobbs: and the most up-to-date about our issues.
[1:31:56] Cameron McEwen: Yeah,
[1:31:57] Cameron McEwen: it wasn't the most accurate sort of theoretically.
[1:32:04] Cameron McEwen: If you read a couple pages of Heidegger and then you read a couple pages of McLuhan,
[1:32:10] Cameron McEwen: you come away just sort of shaking your head about McLuhan.
[1:32:14] Cameron McEwen: But if you think about it,
[1:32:17] Cameron McEwen: if you don't just react to it,
[1:32:19] Cameron McEwen: but think about it,
[1:32:22] Cameron McEwen: and understand the complexities of what
[1:32:26] Cameron McEwen: McLuhan is implicating,
[1:32:29] Cameron McEwen: then it's very impressive.
[1:32:32] Bob Dobbs: Yeah,
[1:32:32] Bob Dobbs: and more relevant.
[1:32:33] Bob Dobbs: So he...
[1:32:34] Bob Dobbs: When he says,
[1:32:35] Bob Dobbs: I don't deal with concepts,
[1:32:36] Bob Dobbs: I deal with percepts,
[1:32:37] Bob Dobbs: that would be him looking at the mood of the last 18 months.
[1:32:41] Bob Dobbs: I'm just quoting Zappa.
[1:32:42] Bob Dobbs: He said,
[1:32:42] Bob Dobbs: there's always a new fad every 18 months,
[1:32:44] Bob Dobbs: he said,
[1:32:44] Bob Dobbs: in the late 60s.
[1:32:46] Bob Dobbs: So that sense of a fad or a new mood,
[1:32:49] Bob Dobbs: McLuhan was very aware of,
[1:32:50] Bob Dobbs: and that was the percept that he was encountering,
[1:32:53] Bob Dobbs: not concepts.
[1:32:56] Bob Dobbs: He was engaging in an ESP.
[1:32:58] Bob Dobbs: He felt he was in tune to what...
[1:33:01] Bob Dobbs: made people get obsessive about for a couple of months or years.
[1:33:06] Bob Dobbs: And he could look at the empirical reasons for it by the characteristics of anti-environment around him.
[1:33:12] Bob Dobbs: So it was very precise what he was doing,
[1:33:14] Bob Dobbs: but in communicating it,
[1:33:16] Bob Dobbs: it can't be a conceptual etymology like
[1:33:21] Bob Dobbs: Heidegger did.
[1:33:22] Bob Dobbs: You know?
[1:33:23] Bob Dobbs: He was writing about the weather,
[1:33:25] Bob Dobbs: and the weather was not in your normal weatherman terms anymore.
[1:33:30] Cameron McEwen: Right.
[1:33:31] Cameron McEwen: No,
[1:33:33] Cameron McEwen: I like that way of putting it.
[1:33:35] Bob Dobbs: Yeah.
[1:33:36] Bob Dobbs: I mean,
[1:33:36] Bob Dobbs: that's what
[1:33:38] Bob Dobbs: I was always interested in the zeitgeist or something,
[1:33:41] Bob Dobbs: and that's probably what appealed to me about McLuhan,
[1:33:45] Bob Dobbs: that he was encountering what was being generated in what he called the collective consciousness.
[1:33:53] Bob Dobbs: Right.
[1:33:53] Bob Dobbs: We were unconscious of how we became collectively conscious.
[1:33:58] Bob Dobbs: But we were collectively conscious,
[1:34:00] Bob Dobbs: right?
[1:34:00] Bob Dobbs: Here comes everybody.
[1:34:01] Bob Dobbs: Everybody was dealing with the same phenomenon all the time through the American media domination.
[1:34:09] Bob Dobbs: Everybody had to deal with the Beatles.
[1:34:10] Bob Dobbs: Everybody had to deal with what?
[1:34:12] Bob Dobbs: Nixon in 1968 and all that happened in 68 and all the assassinations.
[1:34:20] Bob Dobbs: I don't think that was McLuhan point.
[1:34:23] Bob Dobbs: In the 30s and 20s,
[1:34:25] Bob Dobbs: you'd read about it.
[1:34:26] Bob Dobbs: You wouldn't get all aggravated.
[1:34:29] Bob Dobbs: people did once you get into the global theater.
[1:34:32] Bob Dobbs: It ever became,
[1:34:34] Bob Dobbs: I guess you'd call,
[1:34:34] Bob Dobbs: pack journalism.
[1:34:37] Cameron McEwen: Yeah,
[1:34:37] Cameron McEwen: so this is,
[1:34:39] Cameron McEwen: this actually is another point that Innis constantly makes about newspapers in the
[1:34:47] Cameron McEwen: 19th century,
[1:34:48] Cameron McEwen: that they discovered the way to get viewers was to hep them up.
[1:34:55] Cameron McEwen: Newspapers for the first half of the
[1:34:58] Cameron McEwen: 19th century were very staid.
[1:35:01] Cameron McEwen: They were controlled by government.
[1:35:05] Cameron McEwen: In order to publish a newspaper,
[1:35:07] Cameron McEwen: you had to buy stamps,
[1:35:08] Cameron McEwen: and it was an expensive process.
[1:35:15] Cameron McEwen: You weren't allowed to report what was going on in Parliament,
[1:35:19] Cameron McEwen: for example.
[1:35:21] Cameron McEwen: And so then newspapers were able to...
[1:35:24] Cameron McEwen: extricate themselves from this straitjacket,
[1:35:30] Cameron McEwen: and they began to hep up the audience.
[1:35:33] Cameron McEwen: And that's,
[1:35:34] Cameron McEwen: according to Innis,
[1:35:35] Cameron McEwen: this epyllion up process was one of the ways that society became unbalanced.
[1:35:42] Bob Dobbs: Right.
[1:35:42] Bob Dobbs: Now,
[1:35:42] Bob Dobbs: was that because of the telegraph?
[1:35:44] Bob Dobbs: Is that what Innis says?
[1:35:46] Cameron McEwen: No,
[1:35:47] Cameron McEwen: Innis is not.
[1:35:48] Cameron McEwen: This whole idea that McLuhan and Innis are technological determinists is bullshit.
[1:35:56] Cameron McEwen: For Innis,
[1:35:57] Cameron McEwen: of course,
[1:35:58] Cameron McEwen: the rise of newspapers is related to technological developments.
[1:36:05] Cameron McEwen: If you didn't have good roads,
[1:36:07] Cameron McEwen: if you didn't have good access to paper,
[1:36:10] Cameron McEwen: if you didn't have a way of printing that wasn't too expensive,
[1:36:16] Cameron McEwen: then of course you couldn't have newspapers in a modern sense.
[1:36:21] Cameron McEwen: So of course there's a relationship.
[1:36:23] Cameron McEwen: between developments anti-environment,
[1:36:26] Cameron McEwen: technological developments anti-environment,
[1:36:29] Cameron McEwen: and the possibility of having newspapers cap up the population.
[1:36:37] Cameron McEwen: But it's not the case that this is only a technological thing.
[1:36:43] Cameron McEwen: It's also a thing that is going on in both individuals and in society psychologically.
[1:36:52] Cameron McEwen: and it's
[1:36:54] Cameron McEwen: It would be unbalanced to come down on one side or the other.
[1:36:58] Cameron McEwen: You have to see how technology and insight work together or work sometimes positively together,
[1:37:10] Cameron McEwen: sometimes negatively together.
[1:37:12] Cameron McEwen: But they work together and that working then produces effects that are generative.
[1:37:22] Cameron McEwen: the future.
[1:37:25] Bob Dobbs: Right,
[1:37:25] Bob Dobbs: so what is technology determinism?
[1:37:30] Cameron McEwen: Who knows?
[1:37:32] Cameron McEwen: If you think about it a lot,
[1:37:34] Cameron McEwen: it's incoherent.
[1:37:37] Cameron McEwen: People throw around the phrase,
[1:37:39] Cameron McEwen: but they haven't really thought of it.
[1:37:42] Bob Dobbs: Right,
[1:37:42] Bob Dobbs: and you're saying that tends toward the sociological and they miss the psychological.
[1:37:49] Cameron McEwen: Yeah,
[1:37:50] Cameron McEwen: I mean they
[1:37:51] Cameron McEwen: When people say that Innis and McLuhan are technological determinists,
[1:37:57] Cameron McEwen: that simply is a misreading.
[1:38:01] Cameron McEwen: It's an imposition on their text.
[1:38:06] Bob Dobbs: But they do emphasize technology in a way that hadn't been done before.
[1:38:10] Bob Dobbs: So how is it slightly technological determinist?
[1:38:18] Cameron McEwen: Well,
[1:38:18] Cameron McEwen: I don't know if there is such a thing as slightly technological determinants.
[1:38:25] Cameron McEwen: What they show is that the human mind is decisively shaped by technology,
[1:38:39] Cameron McEwen: but at the exact same time,
[1:38:41] Cameron McEwen: technology is shaped by the human mind.
[1:38:45] Cameron McEwen: And so it's a...
[1:38:47] Cameron McEwen: You have a very complicated figure.
[1:38:50] Cameron McEwen: Oh,
[1:38:50] Bob Dobbs: so that's tactile.
[1:38:52] Bob Dobbs: Yeah,
[1:38:52] Bob Dobbs: so the tactile determinist tends to be too
[1:38:56] Bob Dobbs: Gutenberg and robotic.
[1:38:58] Bob Dobbs: You're missing the interplay.
[1:39:00] Bob Dobbs: Okay.
[1:39:01] Cameron McEwen: Correct,
[1:39:01] Cameron McEwen: correct.
[1:39:02] Bob Dobbs: What would we call that?
[1:39:04] Bob Dobbs: Tactile determinist?
[1:39:08] Cameron McEwen: Well,
[1:39:11] Cameron McEwen: you never get away from the tactile.
[1:39:13] Cameron McEwen: Yeah.
[1:39:14] Cameron McEwen: You simply have...
[1:39:16] Cameron McEwen: A tactility that is downplayed,
[1:39:22] Cameron McEwen: but it's still tactility.
[1:39:23] Bob Dobbs: Yeah.
[1:39:25] Cameron McEwen: So in a certain way,
[1:39:29] Cameron McEwen: the beehive community that we were just talking about,
[1:39:33] Cameron McEwen: you could say that this is tactility squared.
[1:39:36] Bob Dobbs: Yeah.
[1:39:37] Cameron McEwen: And the extreme emphasis on an individual might be tactility to the minus.
[1:39:45] Cameron McEwen: One or something.
[1:39:47] Bob Dobbs: Maybe horizontal.
[1:39:48] Bob Dobbs: Yeah,
[1:39:49] Bob Dobbs: beehive is horizontal and tactility for the individual is vertical.
[1:39:56] Cameron McEwen: Yes.
[1:39:56] Cameron McEwen: Yeah.
[1:39:59] Bob Dobbs: That's an interesting update.
[1:40:03] Bob Dobbs: I think we've stumbled into another insight.
[1:40:06] Cameron McEwen: Well,
[1:40:06] Cameron McEwen: maybe.
[1:40:07] Cameron McEwen: I wonder if we ever got back to archives.
[1:40:10] Cameron McEwen: Well,
[1:40:10] Bob Dobbs: the archive is,
[1:40:12] Bob Dobbs: okay,
[1:40:12] Bob Dobbs: so technology incarnate.
[1:40:15] Bob Dobbs: Tech body is information.
[1:40:17] Bob Dobbs: Archive is information.
[1:40:21] Bob Dobbs: The idea that archive came from visual space may be true,
[1:40:25] Bob Dobbs: but then...
[1:40:25] Bob Dobbs: the newer media made new kinds of archives.
[1:40:30] Bob Dobbs: So that's another example of people being different before Gutenberg from after.
[1:40:35] Bob Dobbs: Because once you had media superseding the Gutenberg,
[1:40:39] Bob Dobbs: that's devastating.
[1:40:42] Bob Dobbs: That is mutating.
[1:40:43] Bob Dobbs: And McLuhan even said,
[1:40:44] Bob Dobbs: when radio came in,
[1:40:46] Bob Dobbs: we evolved a million years.
[1:40:48] Bob Dobbs: Did you ever see that sentence?
[1:40:49] Cameron McEwen: Yes.
[1:40:51] Bob Dobbs: That's a really important sentence.
[1:40:53] Bob Dobbs: We changed.
[1:40:55] Bob Dobbs: leaped a million years in cliche evolution terms.
[1:41:00] Cameron McEwen: Sometimes he says 10,000 years in a week or something.
[1:41:06] Cameron McEwen: That was an image he liked to use.
[1:41:10] Cameron McEwen: The whole idea there is that time is not some kind of constant.
[1:41:18] Cameron McEwen: The idea of the constancy of time was
[1:41:20] Cameron McEwen: Gutenbergian.
[1:41:22] Bob Dobbs: The Hugo quote,
[1:41:25] Bob Dobbs: You know,
[1:41:25] Bob Dobbs: they think,
[1:41:27] Bob Dobbs: okay,
[1:41:28] Bob Dobbs: we're a certain way before Bloomberg and then a different way after.
[1:41:33] Bob Dobbs: But nobody developed the imagination that the changes of the people after,
[1:41:38] Bob Dobbs: they were changed many times through millions of years.
[1:41:44] Bob Dobbs: That you have to get to McLuhan to get to that updating of Hugo.
[1:41:50] Cameron McEwen: Well,
[1:41:50] Cameron McEwen: but it's implied in
[1:41:52] Cameron McEwen: Innis. Innis.
[1:41:55] Cameron McEwen: takes the singular revolution of Gutenberg and then says that then there was another revolution of the newspaper and another of the radio.
[1:42:07] Cameron McEwen: What he's saying is that faster and faster humans are getting erased.
[1:42:15] Bob Dobbs: Yeah,
[1:42:17] Bob Dobbs: and
[1:42:17] Bob Dobbs: I have no problem with the term technological determinist in the sense of the tactile meaning.
[1:42:23] Bob Dobbs: We are determined by technology to the degree we're not aware of what's going on.
[1:42:28] Bob Dobbs: We are determined.
[1:42:30] Bob Dobbs: That's the updating of Krishnamurti and the conditioned response that McLuhan brought in.
[1:42:37] Bob Dobbs: And maybe Innis began it.
[1:42:39] Bob Dobbs: But McLuhan,
[1:42:41] Bob Dobbs: the guru figure,
[1:42:42] Bob Dobbs: was more resonant in the
[1:42:46] Bob Dobbs: 60s because the individual becomes ideogramic,
[1:42:51] Bob Dobbs: translucent.
[1:42:52] Bob Dobbs: an icon,
[1:42:54] Bob Dobbs: you know,
[1:42:54] Bob Dobbs: under satellite conditions,
[1:42:56] Bob Dobbs: you have the celebrity culture,
[1:42:58] Bob Dobbs: maybe is the phrase they say,
[1:43:00] Bob Dobbs: comes in.
[1:43:02] Bob Dobbs: And so McLuhan comes across as a guru because that's the zeitgeist.
[1:43:06] Bob Dobbs: That's what happens to anybody who gets attention for a while.
[1:43:11] Cameron McEwen: Yeah,
[1:43:11] Cameron McEwen: well,
[1:43:13] Cameron McEwen: he put on that persona.
[1:43:17] Cameron McEwen: Not entirely comfortably,
[1:43:20] Cameron McEwen: but he did it.
[1:43:22] Bob Dobbs: Right,
[1:43:22] Bob Dobbs: and he included it.
[1:43:27] Bob Dobbs: That would be what he and Theall studied in the early
[1:43:30] Bob Dobbs: 50s when they studied the occult,
[1:43:31] Bob Dobbs: Edgar Cayce and these people.
[1:43:33] Bob Dobbs: He was looking at the charismatic individual,
[1:43:37] Bob Dobbs: probably with the patina of coming from Asia and the East.
[1:43:45] Bob Dobbs: Why would the East...
[1:43:47] Bob Dobbs: Go ahead.
[1:43:50] Cameron McEwen: What was going on at that period of time?
[1:43:52] Cameron McEwen: And by the way,
[1:43:53] Cameron McEwen: let me mention that we've already gone over our appointed time.
[1:44:01] Cameron McEwen: Oh,
[1:44:01] Bob Dobbs: yeah.
[1:44:03] Bob Dobbs: We'll end in a minute.
[1:44:04] Cameron McEwen: We'll have to break off soon.
[1:44:05] Cameron McEwen: But it's a very interesting topic,
[1:44:09] Cameron McEwen: what was going on with McLuhan in the early
[1:44:12] Cameron McEwen: 1950s when he was,
[1:44:17] Cameron McEwen: he had always been
[1:44:21] Cameron McEwen: aware of the question of balance and the question of how extremes can take away from it.
[1:44:31] Cameron McEwen: But what he became conscious of in the early
[1:44:35] Cameron McEwen: 1950s was the idea that people were intentionally trying to unbalance society.
[1:44:42] Cameron McEwen: Yeah.
[1:44:43] Cameron McEwen: And that was something that he says himself.
[1:44:47] Cameron McEwen: He had never been aware of that.
[1:44:49] Cameron McEwen: had been
[1:44:50] Cameron McEwen: sort of naive in thinking that problems were personal,
[1:44:59] Cameron McEwen: individual,
[1:45:01] Cameron McEwen: but they were problems of sin,
[1:45:02] Cameron McEwen: they were problems of greed,
[1:45:05] Cameron McEwen: and what he came to see is that a lot of these things were collective.
[1:45:14] Cameron McEwen: And he hadn't seen that before,
[1:45:16] Cameron McEwen: and he hadn't seen that there were bodies that were consciously,
[1:45:27] Cameron McEwen: financially bringing about these collective,
[1:45:37] Cameron McEwen: how can I say?
[1:45:39] Bob Dobbs: Manias.
[1:45:40] Cameron McEwen: Yeah,
[1:45:41] Cameron McEwen: manias that were intentionally militaristic.
[1:45:45] Cameron McEwen: and intentionally introducing instabilities to the world.
[1:45:52] Cameron McEwen: And that shocked McLuhan.
[1:45:55] Bob Dobbs: Where does he say that he was shocked?
[1:45:57] Bob Dobbs: Where do you get evidence of that?
[1:46:00] Cameron McEwen: Oh,
[1:46:00] Cameron McEwen: there's lots of evidence of that in his writings in the
[1:46:05] Cameron McEwen: 1950s.
[1:46:08] Cameron McEwen: He began to look at art since Coleridge,
[1:46:13] Cameron McEwen: for example.
[1:46:14] Cameron McEwen: as artists taking on themselves extreme operations that were unimaginably
[1:46:31] Cameron McEwen: hurtful.
[1:46:32] Cameron McEwen: If you look at the very end of the Coleridge essay,
[1:46:35] Cameron McEwen: for example,
[1:46:36] Cameron McEwen: and then realize that McLuhan is talking about himself,
[1:46:40] Cameron McEwen: you realize that what...
[1:46:44] Cameron McEwen: he had been going through in the
[1:46:47] Cameron McEwen: 1950s was a very painful exercise.
[1:46:51] Cameron McEwen: I have a couple of posts where I quote stuff about this.
[1:46:54] Cameron McEwen: I can send you links if you want.
[1:46:55] Bob Dobbs: Yeah,
[1:46:55] Bob Dobbs: send those.
[1:46:56] Bob Dobbs: I'd like to look at that.
[1:46:58] Cameron McEwen: Okay,
[1:46:58] Cameron McEwen: well,
[1:46:58] Bob Dobbs: let's end on that fine point or fine breakthrough or a new door.
[1:47:08] Bob Dobbs: So,
[1:47:08] Bob Dobbs: all right,
[1:47:09] Bob Dobbs: thanks a lot,
[1:47:10] Cameron McEwen: and we'll continue in two weeks.
[1:47:13] Cameron McEwen: If you can find any of those.
[1:47:14] Cameron McEwen: Yeah,
[1:47:14] Bob Dobbs: the Playboy letters.
[1:47:16] Cameron McEwen: Yeah.
[1:47:16] Bob Dobbs: I'll have to start gathering them.
[1:47:17] Bob Dobbs: Yeah,
[1:47:17] Cameron McEwen: if you can send me those,
[1:47:18] Cameron McEwen: that would be great.
[1:47:19] Bob Dobbs: Okay.
[1:47:20] Bob Dobbs: All right.
[1:47:21] Bob Dobbs: Thanks a lot,
[1:47:21] Bob Dobbs: Chairman.
[1:47:22] Cameron McEwen: Talk to you in a couple of weeks.
[1:47:23] Bob Dobbs: Yep.
[1:47:24] Bob Dobbs: Okay,
[1:47:24] Bob Dobbs: bye.
[1:47:25] Cameron McEwen: Ciao,
[1:47:25] Cameron McEwen: ciao.