Dialogue 45 — Transcript

[00:02] Bob Dobbs: Okay,

[00:02] Bob Dobbs: Cameron McEwen and Bob Dobbs are back for episode number 45.

[00:08] Bob Dobbs: We had a little break there,

[00:09] Bob Dobbs: and we're looking at page

[00:14] Bob Dobbs: 82 of my book.

[00:18] Bob Dobbs: And at the very top of my page 82,

[00:21] Bob Dobbs: not necessarily Cameron's,

[00:23] Bob Dobbs: we have the important quote about connubium of a superterrestrial kind.

[00:31] Bob Dobbs: Well,

[00:31] Bob Dobbs: that inspired

[00:32] Bob Dobbs: Ewen Cameron to write an article or several articles on this theme,

[00:37] Bob Dobbs: which you can get at his collection.

[00:43] Bob Dobbs: Do you want to say concisely how to find it,

[00:47] Bob Dobbs: Ewen Cameron?

[00:49] Cameron McEwen: How to find that particular post or how to find the blog?

[00:52] Bob Dobbs: No,

[00:52] Bob Dobbs: no.

[00:52] Bob Dobbs: Well,

[00:53] Bob Dobbs: generally the blog and then the post.

[00:55] Cameron McEwen: Yeah.

[00:55] Cameron McEwen: So the blog is called McLuhan New Sciences.

[01:00] Cameron McEwen: So even if you just search Google

[01:03] Cameron McEwen: McLuhan Sciences plural,

[01:06] Cameron McEwen: it usually comes up on the first page.

[01:08] Cameron McEwen: And then

[01:10] Cameron McEwen: Connubium of Being is a recent post.

[01:14] Cameron McEwen: And so when you go to the blog,

[01:15] Cameron McEwen: it appears at the top on the right side.

[01:19] Cameron McEwen: So it's very easy to find once you're at the blog.

[01:24] Bob Dobbs: Yeah,

[01:24] Bob Dobbs: and this is a very original essay nobody has ever discussed.

[01:28] Bob Dobbs: The last page of War and Peace in the Global Village,

[01:30] Bob Dobbs: page 190,

[01:31] Bob Dobbs: on how McLuhan talks about the macrocosmic,

[01:35] Bob Dobbs: canubium,

[01:36] Bob Dobbs: and variations of that.

[01:38] Bob Dobbs: And

[01:39] Bob Dobbs: I pointed it out Ewen Cameron,

[01:40] Bob Dobbs: and he took the ball and ran with it,

[01:43] Bob Dobbs: which is really great.

[01:45] Bob Dobbs: So it's a really important point,

[01:47] Bob Dobbs: which then we wanted to get into the numbness factor that

[01:55] Bob Dobbs: Ewen Cameron talks about Innis article.

[01:58] Bob Dobbs: But before we do that,

[02:01] Bob Dobbs: we go down to 82,

[02:04] Bob Dobbs: and we have a quote from page 190 of War and Peace in the Gold Village.

[02:13] Bob Dobbs: Then

[02:14] Bob Dobbs: I say,

[02:14] Bob Dobbs: Jean Baudrillard was on the appropriate angle when he said that he regarded McLuhan as a musician.

[02:20] Bob Dobbs: It might be more accurate to say that McLuhan was a musician of the synesthete slash co-anesthetic.

[02:27] Bob Dobbs: See Don Theall Beyond the Word,

[02:29] Bob Dobbs: 1995,

[02:30] Bob Dobbs: for definitions.

[02:31] Bob Dobbs: So I'll read that again.

[02:32] Bob Dobbs: It might be more accurate to say that McLuhan was a musician of the Innis School.

[02:37] Bob Dobbs: The only musical apophenia ecologist,

[02:40] Bob Dobbs: that's my term,

[02:41] Bob Dobbs: apophenia,

[02:42] Bob Dobbs: but I'm getting para from Don,

[02:45] Bob Dobbs: Don Theall,

[02:45] Bob Dobbs: who recommended back in 71,

[02:48] Bob Dobbs: as the word postmodern was starting to be used,

[02:51] Bob Dobbs: he said it should be Carolyn Dean.

[02:54] Bob Dobbs: No one took him up on it,

[02:55] Bob Dobbs: but it's a good point.

[02:58] Bob Dobbs: there's no post actually,

[03:00] Bob Dobbs: maybe just an overlaying.

[03:01] Bob Dobbs: So you don't leave the modern,

[03:03] Bob Dobbs: but you overlay it with something different from the modern,

[03:06] Bob Dobbs: which people unfortunately call the postmodern,

[03:09] Bob Dobbs: thinking there is a rupture,

[03:13] Bob Dobbs: but we're still including everything in the big synchronicity,

[03:16] Bob Dobbs: the big synchronous,

[03:17] Bob Dobbs: big now.

[03:19] Bob Dobbs: And so it would be Carolyn Dean.

[03:22] Bob Dobbs: And then I adapted that to the paramedia ecologist.

[03:25] Bob Dobbs: out.

[03:26] Cameron McEwen: We should say that there's nothing wrong with distinction per se.

[03:32] Cameron McEwen: It's just that if you think distinction so that you end up with a singularity,

[03:41] Cameron McEwen: then you have a problem.

[03:43] Cameron McEwen: You've tried to think distinction,

[03:46] Cameron McEwen: but you,

[03:47] Cameron McEwen: in effect,

[03:48] Cameron McEwen: throw it away.

[03:50] Bob Dobbs: Yeah,

[03:50] Bob Dobbs: and critics,

[03:54] Bob Dobbs: as they became more aware of...

[03:55] Bob Dobbs: Finnegans Wake and then McLuhan,

[03:57] Bob Dobbs: they always had difficulty of saying McLuhan was a modernist or a postmodernist.

[04:04] Bob Dobbs: They weren't sure.

[04:05] Bob Dobbs: I think Kroker calls him the last modernist.

[04:08] Bob Dobbs: And Finnegans Wake is obviously postmodern because anybody who did postmodern works was influenced by Joyce,

[04:16] Bob Dobbs: either Ulysses or

[04:17] Bob Dobbs: Finnegans Wake.

[04:19] Bob Dobbs: So it's not correct to say Joyce is a modernist or from the honors period

[04:24] Bob Dobbs: So that confusion,

[04:26] Bob Dobbs: which probably is a Carolyn Dean situation,

[04:29] Bob Dobbs: that you can't pin where the beginning stopped and the ending came in and the shifts of the discontinuity,

[04:36] Bob Dobbs: that's the nature of the electric gauge.

[04:40] Bob Dobbs: Correct.

[04:41] Bob Dobbs: It's a paradox.

[04:42] Bob Dobbs: There are distinctions,

[04:43] Bob Dobbs: but then they're not.

[04:44] Bob Dobbs: So you've got two angles depending on which sense.

[04:49] Bob Dobbs: bias you're using.

[04:50] Bob Dobbs: So anyways,

[04:51] Bob Dobbs: I say musical apophenia.

[04:53] Bob Dobbs: Now why I say apophenia how I use it is I bring in the use of mediums,

[04:59] Bob Dobbs: psychics,

[04:59] Bob Dobbs: seances.

[05:01] Bob Dobbs: So that's paranormal.

[05:03] Bob Dobbs: So on the surface,

[05:05] Bob Dobbs: you don't know about Don's Carolyn Dean.

[05:08] Bob Dobbs: You just see para.

[05:09] Bob Dobbs: So the reader,

[05:10] Bob Dobbs: the average reader would think of paranormal.

[05:12] Bob Dobbs: So I want that effect in my use of it,

[05:15] Bob Dobbs: but it's not limited to that.

[05:16] Bob Dobbs: But that's where I got.

[05:18] Bob Dobbs: I decided to adopt Don's term for these other reasons,

[05:24] Bob Dobbs: right?

[05:25] Bob Dobbs: So I say the only musical paramedia ecologist who was keeping up with McLuhan was Frank Zappa.

[05:32] Bob Dobbs: This is why I put McLuhan Zappa in the Holeopathic Television Satellite Quadrant of my Tiny Note chart.

[05:38] Bob Dobbs: Let's see.

[05:40] Cameron McEwen: So if people wanted to follow that up,

[05:43] Cameron McEwen: the word in McLuhan.

[05:45] Cameron McEwen: The talk that he uses when he's talking about this sort of stuff is paradox.

[05:49] Bob Dobbs: Paradox,

[05:50] Bob Dobbs: yes.

[05:51] Bob Dobbs: Yeah,

[05:51] Bob Dobbs: para.

[05:53] Bob Dobbs: Now,

[05:55] Bob Dobbs: let's see.

[05:56] Bob Dobbs: So then I have a little Explorations.

[05:57] Bob Dobbs: I go,

[05:58] Bob Dobbs: the synesthete and co-entesthete aren't really musical.

[06:01] Bob Dobbs: They're the TV images and interplay of many senses more than the movie.

[06:07] Bob Dobbs: And it's live,

[06:08] Bob Dobbs: live in quotes.

[06:09] Bob Dobbs: People thought synesthesia was coming with TV,

[06:12] Bob Dobbs: and that's why people took LSD to get the synesthete.

[06:14] Bob Dobbs: synesthetic version of synesthesia mixing up their senses,

[06:17] Bob Dobbs: which they already were getting from TV.

[06:19] Bob Dobbs: Remember,

[06:20] Bob Dobbs: synesthesia is one hears what one sees and sees what one hears.

[06:24] Bob Dobbs: So the mixture of senses is what happened when people took LC.

[06:27] Bob Dobbs: But the other juxtaposition,

[06:29] Bob Dobbs: co-anesthetic,

[06:30] Bob Dobbs: is a tendency to put one,

[06:32] Bob Dobbs: maybe I should say oneself,

[06:33] Bob Dobbs: to put oneself in the driver's seat.

[06:36] Bob Dobbs: As media got more and more imploded and shrunk all of a sudden,

[06:39] Bob Dobbs: one ends up with a palm pilot and all this analog media as our content.

[06:43] Bob Dobbs: that one can massage.

[06:45] Bob Dobbs: One becomes a director.

[06:46] Bob Dobbs: That's co-anesthetic as opposed to synesthesia.

[06:50] Bob Dobbs: Synesthesia is the content.

[06:52] Bob Dobbs: Co-anesthetic is the platform,

[06:53] Bob Dobbs: the director's chair,

[06:55] Bob Dobbs: movie director,

[06:56] Bob Dobbs: from which the person experiencing the content synesthesia is viewing the synesthesia.

[07:00] Bob Dobbs: McLuhan understood people were mixing things up with synesthesia,

[07:03] Bob Dobbs: and TV was an extension of that,

[07:06] Bob Dobbs: and they took drugs to mind what TV was doing to them.

[07:09] Bob Dobbs: So the...

[07:11] Bob Dobbs: The digital,

[07:12] Bob Dobbs: the internet,

[07:15] Bob Dobbs: Web

[07:16] Bob Dobbs: 1.0 and Web 2.0 more and more develop co-anesthetic.

[07:21] Bob Dobbs: So that today,

[07:23] Bob Dobbs: especially with Web 2.0,

[07:25] Bob Dobbs: you are running your own broadcast networks and

[07:31] Bob Dobbs: Instagrams. You've got all kinds of media that you can make movies and TV shows and all kinds of panels and talk shows.

[07:39] Bob Dobbs: Do you see the co-anesthetic?

[07:46] Cameron McEwen: comes after synesthesia?

[07:48] Cameron McEwen: Yes,

[07:48] Cameron McEwen: I don't think you want to say comes after because then that gets into directionality and it takes you back into the Gutenberg Galaxy.

[07:59] Cameron McEwen: So

[08:02] Cameron McEwen: I would say that what happens with co-anesthetic is it becomes aware

[08:11] Cameron McEwen: of the complexities in Innis.

[08:16] Bob Dobbs: Right,

[08:16] Bob Dobbs: but you were brought into the center.

[08:18] Bob Dobbs: You are the producer,

[08:20] Bob Dobbs: the coordinator.

[08:22] Bob Dobbs: You can make your own movies or TV shows.

[08:25] Cameron McEwen: Yeah,

[08:25] Cameron McEwen: but that's right.

[08:26] Cameron McEwen: But that's what happens at the level of the literal.

[08:32] Cameron McEwen: But at the level of the co-anesthetic itself,

[08:39] Cameron McEwen: the whole idea of...

[08:41] Cameron McEwen: being the director or being in the driver's seat falls through itself.

[08:47] Cameron McEwen: That's very much of a Gutenberg Galaxy type of image.

[08:53] Bob Dobbs: Yeah,

[08:54] Bob Dobbs: Andrew Sarris in the

[08:56] Bob Dobbs: 60s came up with the auteur theory,

[08:59] Bob Dobbs: analyzing

[09:00] Bob Dobbs: French directors and French movie making.

[09:04] Bob Dobbs: And that would be a Gutenberg reflection,

[09:06] Bob Dobbs: making a big deal out of the director,

[09:09] Bob Dobbs: the auteur.

[09:10] Bob Dobbs: It's there,

[09:12] Bob Dobbs: but your Gutenberg bias is going to have too much emphasis on him.

[09:17] Cameron McEwen: That's right.

[09:20] Cameron McEwen: At that time,

[09:22] Cameron McEwen: a lot of

[09:24] Cameron McEwen: French film was trying to come to grips with that,

[09:30] Cameron McEwen: how the director is involved in the film,

[09:36] Cameron McEwen: even though you don't see the director directly.

[09:39] Bob Dobbs: Right.

[09:40] Cameron McEwen: And so some of the film was trying,

[09:44] Cameron McEwen: like Godard,

[09:44] Cameron McEwen: for example,

[09:46] Cameron McEwen: was trying to account for that sort of presence-absence dialectic in film.

[09:54] Bob Dobbs: Yes.

[09:55] Bob Dobbs: Maybe that's what Eight and a Half was about.

[09:57] Bob Dobbs: Fellini,

[09:58] Bob Dobbs: he was discouraging being placed in the director's pedestal.

[10:02] Bob Dobbs: So he had all these problems as a person,

[10:05] Bob Dobbs: as a director,

[10:06] Bob Dobbs: and that's what the movie's about,

[10:08] Cameron McEwen: him ambivalent.

[10:10] Cameron McEwen: And so

[10:11] Cameron McEwen: Buñuel,

[10:13] Cameron McEwen: for example,

[10:14] Cameron McEwen: also got into that problem,

[10:18] Cameron McEwen: but in a different way.

[10:19] Cameron McEwen: So there was that film in the sort of

[10:23] Cameron McEwen: 60s, 70s,

[10:24] Cameron McEwen: early 80s.

[10:25] Cameron McEwen: It's very interesting from that point of view,

[10:30] Cameron McEwen: people trying to account for the possibility of making sense through film.

[10:41] Bob Dobbs: Yeah,

[10:41] Bob Dobbs: the possibility of making sense.

[10:43] Bob Dobbs: Is that what you said?

[10:45] Bob Dobbs: Yes,

[10:45] Cameron McEwen: sir.

[10:46] Bob Dobbs: Okay.

[10:48] Bob Dobbs: So,

[10:50] Bob Dobbs: we like to say that media shrinks,

[10:53] Bob Dobbs: miniaturizes,

[10:54] Bob Dobbs: gets tinier and tinier,

[10:55] Bob Dobbs: and more is able to be done with it.

[10:58] Bob Dobbs: That's the co-anesthetic trend.

[11:01] Bob Dobbs: That maybe more and more synesthesia is happening anyways,

[11:06] Bob Dobbs: but you're overlaying,

[11:07] Bob Dobbs: and it looks like the focus is on the co-anesthetic.

[11:10] Bob Dobbs: So that's why you say it doesn't really come after,

[11:13] Bob Dobbs: but it looks like separate from synesthesia.

[11:17] Cameron McEwen: Correct.

[11:18] Bob Dobbs: Yeah.

[11:19] Bob Dobbs: Okay.

[11:20] Bob Dobbs: So

[11:20] Bob Dobbs: McLuhan is a musician.

[11:22] Bob Dobbs: Then I say,

[11:23] Bob Dobbs: no wonder Duke Ellington visited McLuhan.

[11:24] Bob Dobbs: So he had the top musician pretty well in the pop culture.

[11:29] Bob Dobbs: And many people thought jazz was the

[11:31] Bob Dobbs: American classical music.

[11:34] Bob Dobbs: But,

[11:34] Bob Dobbs: you know,

[11:34] Bob Dobbs: you had your classical Stravinsky's and that.

[11:36] Bob Dobbs: But Duke Ellington was a major figure in music.

[11:41] Bob Dobbs: And the fact that he would talk about McLuhan in his concerts,

[11:45] Bob Dobbs: he would visit McLuhan.

[11:47] Bob Dobbs: Marge Stewart had the diary showing people visiting.

[11:51] Bob Dobbs: She showed it to me.

[11:52] Bob Dobbs: Duke Ellington showed up a couple times in the early

[11:55] Bob Dobbs: 70s. That's really important to understand why someone of Duke Ellington's musical stature,

[12:01] Bob Dobbs: why he respected McLuhan.

[12:03] Bob Dobbs: Because McLuhan was saying,

[12:05] Bob Dobbs: speaking to the musician,

[12:08] Bob Dobbs: like as if he was the musician.

[12:12] Bob Dobbs: So,

[12:12] Bob Dobbs: Baudrillard is clever and I think he's the first to really literally just say that.

[12:17] Bob Dobbs: McLuhan was a musician.

[12:19] Bob Dobbs: What do you say about that?

[12:21] Bob Dobbs: I say that's quadrophrenia.

[12:23] Bob Dobbs: That's McLuhan in the quadrivium.

[12:25] Bob Dobbs: But what would you say about this musical appellation you put on McLuhan?

[12:31] Cameron McEwen: Yes,

[12:33] Cameron McEwen: you could say that music defines the problem.

[12:39] Cameron McEwen: Let's say that...

[12:40] Cameron McEwen: You want to understand Duke Ellington or Zappa.

[12:44] Cameron McEwen: What does it take to situate oneself in that kind of musical idiom?

[12:53] Cameron McEwen: And that's a very difficult problem.

[12:55] Cameron McEwen: It gets into the problem of the numb.

[12:58] Cameron McEwen: It gets into the problem of the cul-de-sac.

[13:02] Cameron McEwen: It gets into the whole problem of communication.

[13:08] Bob Dobbs: Okay,

[13:08] Bob Dobbs: so you've opened it up.

[13:10] Bob Dobbs: You talk about the numb in your Canubium article.

[13:13] Bob Dobbs: What would you say here about that?

[13:15] Bob Dobbs: How would you begin to point this out to people,

[13:18] Bob Dobbs: the missing factor in McLuhan studies of the numbness,

[13:22] Bob Dobbs: which he said was what he discovered.

[13:24] Bob Dobbs: He didn't discover the medium where extensions of our senses.

[13:27] Bob Dobbs: Others had done that.

[13:29] Bob Dobbs: But he said this numbness is the reason people can't recognize technological change the way he was hoping people could do.

[13:37] Cameron McEwen: Correct.

[13:39] Bob Dobbs: And you would try to explain that.

[13:41] Cameron McEwen: Yes.

[13:42] Cameron McEwen: Well,

[13:44] Cameron McEwen: I haven't published some of the posts that I've done on that.

[13:50] Cameron McEwen: The

[13:51] Cameron McEwen: Panubium post is sort of dipping my toe into that.

[13:56] Cameron McEwen: But

[13:57] Cameron McEwen: I would have to get into the book that

[14:03] Cameron McEwen: McLuhan was referencing.

[14:08] Cameron McEwen: Yes.

[14:08] Cameron McEwen: after he had finished understanding media.

[14:12] Cameron McEwen: And that's the book on irritation and counter-irritation by,

[14:25] Cameron McEwen: McLuhan calls him

[14:27] Cameron McEwen: Adolphe Jonas,

[14:28] Cameron McEwen: but the guy's name was actually David.

[14:30] Cameron McEwen: All of his other books.

[14:32] Cameron McEwen: were published under the name David Jonas.

[14:35] Cameron McEwen: And why the

[14:39] Cameron McEwen: Irritation and Counter-Irritation has a different name,

[14:42] Cameron McEwen: I do not know.

[14:44] Cameron McEwen: But that's the way it is.

[14:46] Bob Dobbs: And that's the only book he knew of

[14:49] Bob Dobbs: Jonas. Yes.

[14:49] Cameron McEwen: That's right.

[14:50] Cameron McEwen: Well,

[14:51] Cameron McEwen: the other books of Jonas might be interesting to you because he went from

[14:56] Cameron McEwen: Irritation and Counter-Irritation.

[14:58] Cameron McEwen: He got married to a woman that was very interested.

[15:02] Cameron McEwen: in sort of terrestrial evolution,

[15:07] Cameron McEwen: meaning evolution out of the world,

[15:12] Cameron McEwen: out of the earth,

[15:13] Cameron McEwen: out of the planet.

[15:14] Bob Dobbs: Great.

[15:14] Cameron McEwen: A Gnostic vision?

[15:17] Bob Dobbs: Pardon me?

[15:17] Bob Dobbs: A Gnostic vision?

[15:20] Cameron McEwen: Well,

[15:20] Cameron McEwen: to me it's Gnostic,

[15:22] Cameron McEwen: but it's for

[15:26] Cameron McEwen: Jonas and his wife.

[15:28] Cameron McEwen: They published quite a few books actually together.

[15:31] Cameron McEwen: And what they try to do is they try to make sense of human life as a kind of evolution out of the earth.

[15:41] Bob Dobbs: Is that Teilhard de Chardin?

[15:45] Cameron McEwen: Well,

[15:45] Cameron McEwen: I don't think they reference,

[15:47] Cameron McEwen: they don't reference him,

[15:48] Cameron McEwen: but of course it's related to that.

[15:51] Bob Dobbs: Yeah.

[15:52] Cameron McEwen: The whole question,

[15:53] Cameron McEwen: as we're going to get into in your book,

[15:55] Cameron McEwen: is how does linearity sort of

[16:01] Cameron McEwen: come back on itself so that it doesn't lose linearity but it also realizes the all-at-onceness.

[16:12] Bob Dobbs: Right now you make a good slight nuance about the term self-amputation so you you extend your eye through books that's amputating your visual sense but you say self-amputation

[16:29] Bob Dobbs: can be regarded to the acoustic space that the visual book took over,

[16:35] Bob Dobbs: knocked off,

[16:36] Bob Dobbs: amputated,

[16:38] Bob Dobbs: removed the old space.

[16:40] Bob Dobbs: Is that what you meant?

[16:40] Bob Dobbs: That's how I was reading it.

[16:42] Cameron McEwen: Yes,

[16:42] Cameron McEwen: certainly.

[16:43] Cameron McEwen: The self-amputation,

[16:46] Cameron McEwen: as

[16:47] Cameron McEwen: McLuhan immediately took to that phrase,

[16:53] Cameron McEwen: as was his habit,

[16:55] Cameron McEwen: he kind of reinterpreted it from

[16:58] Cameron McEwen: Jonas.

[17:00] Cameron McEwen: So what McLuhan saw was that self-amputation is sort of the history of the world.

[17:07] Cameron McEwen: So when books or when the literary,

[17:14] Cameron McEwen: I guess we could say,

[17:15] Cameron McEwen: better than books,

[17:18] Cameron McEwen: in let's say 400 BC in classical Greece,

[17:22] Cameron McEwen: when the alphabet begins to be part of education and part of politics,

[17:28] Cameron McEwen: Then there is self-amputation from the acoustic,

[17:33] Cameron McEwen: which doesn't disappear.

[17:35] Cameron McEwen: Self-amputation is just a relative emphasis on the eye versus the ear.

[17:41] Cameron McEwen: But at the same time,

[17:43] Cameron McEwen: there is a self-amputation from the previous reality into a new reality.

[17:51] Cameron McEwen: And there's also a self-amputation from realities.

[17:57] Cameron McEwen: plural.

[17:58] Cameron McEwen: So it's like a hall of mirrors where self-amputation needs to be understood as squared,

[18:08] Cameron McEwen: as something that sort of takes off into new realms all by itself.

[18:16] Cameron McEwen: It's almost a genetic happening so that self-amputation leads to another self-amputation and to another and another.

[18:27] Cameron McEwen: until you get into the modern world and we realize that self-amputation has also amputated the self.

[18:38] Bob Dobbs: Yeah,

[18:38] Bob Dobbs: now I was going to say something there.

[18:45] Bob Dobbs: I don't know.

[18:47] Bob Dobbs: Amputation of the self.

[18:52] Cameron McEwen: Yeah,

[18:52] Cameron McEwen: that's the history of the modern world,

[18:54] Cameron McEwen: right?

[18:55] Cameron McEwen: the cul-de-sac in which we're in.

[18:58] Cameron McEwen: That relates to what we were just talking about with the director and the director's chair.

[19:02] Bob Dobbs: Right.

[19:03] Bob Dobbs: So is self-amputation causes numbness?

[19:09] Cameron McEwen: Well,

[19:10] Cameron McEwen: no.

[19:12] Cameron McEwen: The numbness is already involved in self-amputation.

[19:16] Bob Dobbs: Right.

[19:16] Cameron McEwen: So one of the things that happens with the birth of the literary is that

[19:26] Cameron McEwen: what seems like illumination also has a darkness to it.

[19:30] Cameron McEwen: And the darkness,

[19:32] Cameron McEwen: what it can't see,

[19:35] Cameron McEwen: is a numbness.

[19:38] Cameron McEwen: A numbness to itself,

[19:39] Cameron McEwen: a numbness to the world,

[19:40] Cameron McEwen: a numbness to the past,

[19:42] Cameron McEwen: a numbness to the future.

[19:45] Bob Dobbs: Okay,

[19:45] Bob Dobbs: so in your article you talk about the first of all,

[19:50] Bob Dobbs: the italicized.

[19:52] Bob Dobbs: Now,

[19:52] Bob Dobbs: you're not quoting anything when you say first of all.

[19:55] Bob Dobbs: Where does McLuhan say,

[19:56] Bob Dobbs: first of all,

[19:58] Bob Dobbs: where do you get this notion of,

[20:00] Bob Dobbs: or is it just yours,

[20:01] Bob Dobbs: of we have to get back to the first of all?

[20:04] Cameron McEwen: Yes,

[20:05] Cameron McEwen: so

[20:07] Cameron McEwen: McLuhan doesn't talk about that very much as far as I know,

[20:14] Cameron McEwen: but he does talk about principles.

[20:22] Cameron McEwen: He talks a little bit about origins.

[20:25] Cameron McEwen: So the whole problem for McLuhan,

[20:30] Cameron McEwen: and this is a problem of the tradition from Plato to Heidegger,

[20:35] Cameron McEwen: is just how do you start again?

[20:38] Cameron McEwen: How do you get from one self to another self?

[20:42] Cameron McEwen: How do you get from one reality to another reality?

[20:46] Bob Dobbs: In retracing the stage of apprehension,

[20:49] Bob Dobbs: you mean?

[20:50] Cameron McEwen: Absolutely.

[20:51] Bob Dobbs: Yeah.

[20:51] Cameron McEwen: Well,

[20:51] Cameron McEwen: I mean,

[20:53] Cameron McEwen: what retracing...

[20:55] Cameron McEwen: those stages means is very different depending on how it's looked at.

[21:00] Cameron McEwen: So you can have retracing as something that's linear,

[21:03] Cameron McEwen: or you can have retracing as something that is not only linear.

[21:09] Cameron McEwen: But the whole problem that we're talking about here is it's literally the case that there are realities,

[21:17] Cameron McEwen: plural.

[21:18] Cameron McEwen: And so when we try to talk about what's going on,

[21:25] Cameron McEwen: There is no talk that is outside some reality.

[21:31] Cameron McEwen: So talking about realities,

[21:34] Cameron McEwen: plural,

[21:35] Cameron McEwen: happens in the context of reality,

[21:39] Cameron McEwen: singular,

[21:40] Cameron McEwen: and that's a difficult problem.

[21:43] Cameron McEwen: You could say that's what

[21:45] Cameron McEwen: Duke Ellington is doing at the piano.

[21:48] Cameron McEwen: He's playing a tune,

[21:50] Cameron McEwen: but it's not only that tune.

[21:52] Cameron McEwen: He's referencing other ones,

[21:54] Cameron McEwen: and he's doing it in large part through jumps and gaps and what he doesn't play.

[22:02] Cameron McEwen: So it's a highly interesting problematic,

[22:08] Cameron McEwen: but it's one that is so difficult that the world has got caught Innis impossibility.

[22:17] Bob Dobbs: Yeah,

[22:17] Bob Dobbs: and

[22:19] Bob Dobbs: McLuhan was...

[22:21] Bob Dobbs: Noticing how media tend to be like language,

[22:24] Bob Dobbs: spoken language,

[22:26] Bob Dobbs: they move towards becoming more and more linguistic,

[22:31] Bob Dobbs: like people talking.

[22:32] Bob Dobbs: And so texting is more like people talking than maybe email.

[22:36] Bob Dobbs: So he saw that pattern.

[22:39] Cameron McEwen: He said that the whole need was to have a grammar of the media.

[22:47] Bob Dobbs: Yeah.

[22:47] Bob Dobbs: and knowing that all artifacts were words and were tending to becoming speech or some kind of intimate speech we might call ESP.

[22:58] Bob Dobbs: So

[23:01] Bob Dobbs: I think he has a phrase somewhere,

[23:04] Bob Dobbs: conversation is easy as jazz or jazz is easy as conversation.

[23:08] Bob Dobbs: Do you remember that sentence?

[23:11] Cameron McEwen: I think you mentioned it before.

[23:13] Cameron McEwen: Yeah.

[23:14] Cameron McEwen: That's exactly what we're talking about for sure.

[23:16] Bob Dobbs: Yeah.

[23:18] Cameron McEwen: And,

[23:18] Cameron McEwen: of course,

[23:18] Cameron McEwen: that ties in with Finnegans Wake.

[23:21] Cameron McEwen: Yeah.

[23:23] Cameron McEwen: It's not good enough to say that media are languages because then you say,

[23:27] Cameron McEwen: well,

[23:27] Cameron McEwen: what's a language?

[23:28] Bob Dobbs: Yeah.

[23:28] Cameron McEwen: And so then that kind of language kind of falls through itself,

[23:35] Cameron McEwen: and yet it makes sense.

[23:37] Bob Dobbs: Yeah.

[23:38] Cameron McEwen: So when I look at Finnegans Wake,

[23:40] Cameron McEwen: and I'm certainly not a good reader of Finnegans Wake,

[23:42] Cameron McEwen: but when I look at it,

[23:45] Cameron McEwen: it's saying to me that,

[23:49] Cameron McEwen: the failure of sense is impossible.

[23:53] Bob Dobbs: Yes,

[23:54] Bob Dobbs: and he says somewhere,

[23:56] Bob Dobbs: he describes speech as stuttering gaps or something.

[24:00] Bob Dobbs: That's a great line.

[24:01] Cameron McEwen: He got that out of Finnegans Wake,

[24:03] Cameron McEwen: right?

[24:05] Bob Dobbs: Yeah,

[24:05] Bob Dobbs: because

[24:06] Bob Dobbs: Moses stuttered,

[24:07] Bob Dobbs: H.C.E.

[24:07] Bob Dobbs: I think stutters.

[24:09] Bob Dobbs: the main character,

[24:09] Bob Dobbs: supposedly.

[24:11] Bob Dobbs: But the way he says it,

[24:12] Bob Dobbs: you know,

[24:13] Bob Dobbs: we are numb to the stuttering we're doing as we talk because the content becomes familiar and we limit ourselves to what we talk about.

[24:23] Bob Dobbs: So it becomes cliche.

[24:25] Bob Dobbs: Okay,

[24:25] Bob Dobbs: so now I'm thinking,

[24:26] Bob Dobbs: what the heck am I doing here at this part?

[24:30] Bob Dobbs: How is this leading to the tech body?

[24:32] Bob Dobbs: So I need to go forward a bit to see why did I bring this point in,

[24:37] Bob Dobbs: the quadrophrenia?

[24:38] Bob Dobbs: Well,

[24:38] Bob Dobbs: do you agree that McClellan,

[24:40] Bob Dobbs: as a musician,

[24:42] Bob Dobbs: that he,

[24:44] Bob Dobbs: understanding media,

[24:45] Bob Dobbs: even Gutenberg Galaxy,

[24:46] Bob Dobbs: are updating his PhD by going out of the trivium and into the quadrivium?

[24:52] Bob Dobbs: What do you think of that?

[24:53] Bob Dobbs: Yeah,

[24:53] Cameron McEwen: I think that's an interesting way of looking at it,

[24:56] Cameron McEwen: sure.

[24:56] Bob Dobbs: Yeah,

[24:57] Bob Dobbs: because he's dealing with,

[24:59] Bob Dobbs: as he said,

[24:59] Bob Dobbs: the 20th century,

[25:00] Bob Dobbs: we live entirely by music.

[25:01] Bob Dobbs: So everything is musical,

[25:02] Bob Dobbs: everything's tactile,

[25:04] Bob Dobbs: and he's addressing...

[25:06] Bob Dobbs: As a literate person,

[25:07] Bob Dobbs: he's addressing the issues of that the new grammars are based on the gap,

[25:13] Bob Dobbs: not on the connection.

[25:15] Cameron McEwen: Correct.

[25:16] Cameron McEwen: So you could say that the trivium is the logic or is the hauntology of the ontical

[25:32] Cameron McEwen: that's named in the quadrivium.

[25:36] Cameron McEwen: whole point of those two sort of different spheres is to see how they interrelate.

[25:44] Cameron McEwen: So it's not the case that you can have the quadrivium and not at the same time name the trivium and also vice versa.

[25:54] Cameron McEwen: So for example,

[25:55] Cameron McEwen: if you say in chemistry,

[25:59] Cameron McEwen: you know,

[26:01] Cameron McEwen: here's this lump of graphite.

[26:05] Cameron McEwen: Is that what carbon is?

[26:06] Cameron McEwen: And the answer is,

[26:07] Cameron McEwen: yes,

[26:07] Cameron McEwen: that's what carbon is.

[26:09] Cameron McEwen: But so is this elementary side in the table of chemical elements.

[26:20] Cameron McEwen: And so the whole key in chemistry is to see how those are the same in some important sense.

[26:29] Cameron McEwen: But,

[26:29] Cameron McEwen: of course,

[26:29] Cameron McEwen: they're also completely different.

[26:31] Cameron McEwen: And similarly with...

[26:33] Cameron McEwen: the trivium and the quadrivium.

[26:36] Bob Dobbs: Are you saying the ontological tends to be in the trivium and the ontic is in the quadrivium?

[26:42] Cameron McEwen: Well,

[26:42] Cameron McEwen: that's one way of understanding it,

[26:44] Cameron McEwen: but I'm not saying that that's the only way.

[26:47] Bob Dobbs: Yeah,

[26:47] Bob Dobbs: that's a Gutenberg effect.

[26:49] Cameron McEwen: Yeah,

[26:51] Cameron McEwen: it's also possible to reverse that.

[26:53] Cameron McEwen: So McLuhan always talked about how figure and ground can only be understood when you realize that the ground can be a figure.

[27:01] Bob Dobbs: Right.

[27:04] Bob Dobbs: So how did you define,

[27:06] Bob Dobbs: earlier to me,

[27:07] Bob Dobbs: ontic?

[27:08] Bob Dobbs: It's the particular,

[27:10] Bob Dobbs: whereas the ontological is the big B?

[27:13] Cameron McEwen: Yeah,

[27:13] Cameron McEwen: particular is exactly the right word.

[27:16] Cameron McEwen: Ontic is the world of particularities,

[27:21] Cameron McEwen: including particular selves,

[27:24] Cameron McEwen: including particular times,

[27:27] Cameron McEwen: including particular stuff.

[27:30] Cameron McEwen: And the great question is,

[27:32] Cameron McEwen: what is its reality?

[27:34] Cameron McEwen: And that gets into the musical because it turns out that the reality is not something like

[27:43] Cameron McEwen: Thompson might describe as something apart from particularity.

[27:49] Cameron McEwen: Particularity is the expression of the ontological.

[27:56] Bob Dobbs: And the real?

[27:58] Cameron McEwen: Yeah.

[27:58] Cameron McEwen: So,

[27:59] Cameron McEwen: I mean,

[27:59] Cameron McEwen: all of these words have different meanings,

[28:02] Cameron McEwen: right?

[28:03] Cameron McEwen: Everybody understands the Carolyn terms of what I can touch and what I can see and all that sort of stuff.

[28:10] Cameron McEwen: But the real can also be understood as what's the structure of that reality.

[28:17] Cameron McEwen: And so you have different senses to the word or the concept of reality.

[28:26] Cameron McEwen: And the great need is to understand their musicality.

[28:32] Cameron McEwen: their inner penetration,

[28:35] Cameron McEwen: their difference,

[28:36] Cameron McEwen: preserving the gap,

[28:38] Cameron McEwen: but their interaction,

[28:41] Cameron McEwen: their implication of the other.

[28:46] Bob Dobbs: Right.

[28:46] Bob Dobbs: So I have here

[28:48] Bob Dobbs: Zappa was the Duke Ellington of his generation.

[28:50] Bob Dobbs: Then McLuhan played off dialectics,

[28:53] Bob Dobbs: Duns Scotus,

[28:55] Bob Dobbs: who split,

[28:56] Bob Dobbs: divided everything,

[28:57] Bob Dobbs: as a philosopher.

[28:59] Bob Dobbs: Grammar is Aquinas,

[29:00] Bob Dobbs: and rhetoric is Augustine.

[29:02] Bob Dobbs: So he played off Dobbs grammar,

[29:03] Bob Dobbs: rhetoric,

[29:04] Bob Dobbs: the trivium,

[29:04] Bob Dobbs: and music from the quadrivium,

[29:07] Bob Dobbs: Ezra Pound,

[29:08] Bob Dobbs: sticking at no station for long.

[29:11] Bob Dobbs: His was the silence of tactility,

[29:14] Bob Dobbs: and that's Wyndham Lewis.

[29:16] Bob Dobbs: So Stern says,

[29:18] Bob Dobbs: asks McLuhan,

[29:19] Bob Dobbs: will there ever be silence?

[29:20] Bob Dobbs: And McLuhan says,

[29:21] Bob Dobbs: objects are unobservable.

[29:23] Bob Dobbs: Only relationships among objects are observable.

[29:27] Bob Dobbs: Have you thought much about that thing,

[29:29] Bob Dobbs: that question and answer in particular?

[29:32] Cameron McEwen: Sure.

[29:33] Cameron McEwen: I've thought about that for

[29:35] Cameron McEwen: 50 or 60 years.

[29:37] Bob Dobbs: Right.

[29:38] Bob Dobbs: Because the relationships are your emphasis on gap in the interval.

[29:42] Bob Dobbs: The relationships among objects are observable.

[29:45] Bob Dobbs: We only know by the gap.

[29:47] Cameron McEwen: Yes.

[29:48] Cameron McEwen: Yeah.

[29:48] Cameron McEwen: But what happens...

[29:50] Cameron McEwen: When the gap is properly understood,

[29:52] Cameron McEwen: then the object becomes observable in a whole new sense.

[29:56] Bob Dobbs: Yes,

[29:57] Bob Dobbs: and is that the

[30:00] Bob Dobbs: Joyce's

[30:01] Bob Dobbs: Juan Gris Claritis Magic Johnson,

[30:05] Bob Dobbs: where the object becomes an epiphany?

[30:08] Cameron McEwen: Yes,

[30:08] Cameron McEwen: I think so.

[30:10] Cameron McEwen: But that's also,

[30:12] Cameron McEwen: what's named there is also the logic or the...

[30:20] Cameron McEwen: the musicality,

[30:22] Cameron McEwen: we could say,

[30:23] Cameron McEwen: of what appears.

[30:26] Cameron McEwen: When the object is epiphany,

[30:29] Cameron McEwen: it has brought a certain kind of relationship with it.

[30:35] Cameron McEwen: And so it's not the object per se that is seen,

[30:40] Cameron McEwen: it's the object in the light of a certain relationship,

[30:45] Cameron McEwen: and that reception of the light

[30:49] Cameron McEwen: which McLuhan calls iconic,

[30:52] Cameron McEwen: is how the epiphany works.

[30:55] Bob Dobbs: Right.

[30:55] Bob Dobbs: I think McLuhan said,

[30:57] Bob Dobbs: only the ground changes,

[30:58] Bob Dobbs: the figure never changes.

[31:00] Bob Dobbs: And then he has to take today,

[31:02] Bob Dobbs: humans are the figure,

[31:04] Bob Dobbs: man is the figure,

[31:05] Bob Dobbs: and the ground is the social matrix,

[31:07] Bob Dobbs: the social media technologies and their anti-environment.

[31:11] Bob Dobbs: That's what changes,

[31:13] Bob Dobbs: that's the ground.

[31:17] Bob Dobbs: If you take a visually biased culture with the book,

[31:21] Bob Dobbs: the figure aspect of John Wain becomes obsessed.

[31:27] Bob Dobbs: You obsess over it,

[31:28] Bob Dobbs: and you miss the ground factor of the change.

[31:31] Bob Dobbs: So the flaw of the Gutenberg Galaxy was they missed the dynamics of what McClellan called a transformational change or media change.

[31:43] Bob Dobbs: They didn't have a theory of change.

[31:45] Bob Dobbs: They were trying to fix.

[31:47] Bob Dobbs: On essences,

[31:49] Bob Dobbs: elements,

[31:52] Bob Dobbs: objectivity,

[31:54] Bob Dobbs: you know?

[31:54] Cameron McEwen: Right.

[31:55] Cameron McEwen: They were trying to use process to get beyond process.

[31:59] Bob Dobbs: Yes.

[32:00] Bob Dobbs: Yeah.

[32:01] Cameron McEwen: So you could say that for them,

[32:04] Cameron McEwen: process was a figure,

[32:06] Cameron McEwen: and beyond process was ground,

[32:09] Cameron McEwen: and McLuhan wants to set those things in a dynamic relationship.

[32:15] Bob Dobbs: Yes.

[32:16] Bob Dobbs: And

[32:17] Bob Dobbs: I have here,

[32:18] Bob Dobbs: let's see,

[32:25] Bob Dobbs: Nevitt.

[32:30] Bob Dobbs: Okay,

[32:30] Bob Dobbs: so are you listening to the Monday night seminars that Andrew is posting?

[32:37] Cameron McEwen: I only listened to a little bit of the first one.

[32:40] Cameron McEwen: That's something that I have to do.

[32:44] Cameron McEwen: I did note...

[32:45] Cameron McEwen: when I listened to about half of the first one,

[32:48] Cameron McEwen: that the transcript in

[32:50] Cameron McEwen: Google was very good,

[32:52] Cameron McEwen: which is unusual.

[32:53] Bob Dobbs: Yeah.

[32:55] Cameron McEwen: And so

[32:58] Cameron McEwen: I've downloaded that transcript,

[33:01] Cameron McEwen: and

[33:02] Cameron McEwen: I listened to the first half of the first seminar that

[33:08] Cameron McEwen: Andrew put up.

[33:11] Cameron McEwen: I listened with the transcript,

[33:13] Cameron McEwen: and I found it

[33:14] Cameron McEwen: interesting.

[33:16] Bob Dobbs: Okay.

[33:17] Bob Dobbs: So I'm scanning down to find the

[33:20] Bob Dobbs: Barry Nevitt quote in the last minute of number two or three.

[33:29] Bob Dobbs: He's put up three?

[33:30] Bob Dobbs: I think he's put up three.

[33:33] Bob Dobbs: So I'm just scrolling down to find it because Barry says an interesting thing at the end.

[33:38] Bob Dobbs: So I'm just scrolling down because I posted it.

[33:42] Bob Dobbs: Where is it going to be?

[33:44] Cameron McEwen: Are you scrolling in your book?

[33:46] Cameron McEwen: No,

[33:46] Bob Dobbs: my Facebook page.

[33:48] Bob Dobbs: I posted the quote that I got to get down there and find a week or two ago.

[33:57] Bob Dobbs: So I'm just scrolling.

[33:58] Cameron McEwen: Did you search on Barry?

[34:02] Cameron McEwen: Yeah.

[34:02] Bob Dobbs: Here it is.

[34:04] Bob Dobbs: So within the last minute,

[34:08] Bob Dobbs: they're saying something.

[34:10] Bob Dobbs: And then Barry says,

[34:11] Bob Dobbs: so what we're seeing is that the...

[34:14] Bob Dobbs: So what we're seeing is that the old ground rules reverse and change.

[34:18] Bob Dobbs: And the question is,

[34:19] Bob Dobbs: what are the new ground rules?

[34:22] Bob Dobbs: So there aren't any.

[34:24] Bob Dobbs: They're process patterns.

[34:26] Bob Dobbs: So I was thinking about this,

[34:28] Bob Dobbs: and people complain that news is just Innis now.

[34:32] Bob Dobbs: Just,

[34:33] Bob Dobbs: you know,

[34:34] Bob Dobbs: Fox and CNN,

[34:34] Bob Dobbs: these kids,

[34:35] Bob Dobbs: their opinions about what's going on.

[34:37] Bob Dobbs: Constant talking.

[34:40] Cameron McEwen: People can see that there's always somebody sitting in the driver's seat.

[34:46] Bob Dobbs: Right.

[34:47] Cameron McEwen: That's become obvious.

[34:48] Bob Dobbs: Right.

[34:48] Bob Dobbs: So they don't give news items.

[34:52] Bob Dobbs: That's objects.

[34:54] Bob Dobbs: They're constantly engaged in process pattern.

[34:58] Bob Dobbs: And

[34:59] Bob Dobbs: McLuhan said that's more and more the participation mystique.

[35:02] Bob Dobbs: Each new electric and digital technology brings you more involving,

[35:06] Bob Dobbs: makes you more,

[35:07] Bob Dobbs: quote,

[35:08] Bob Dobbs: hypnotized by the process.

[35:10] Bob Dobbs: And so people are not Ivins anymore,

[35:14] Bob Dobbs: or news items don't give perception.

[35:16] Bob Dobbs: The processing of what people have experienced for a couple of days in the news stories.

[35:22] Bob Dobbs: or whatever they're picking up from the massive amount of information that's available for them.

[35:27] Bob Dobbs: So we're doing the ground is not a technology.

[35:33] Bob Dobbs: It's information,

[35:34] Bob Dobbs: but it's what Barry's calling process patterns.

[35:38] Bob Dobbs: So this is an interesting point he's making.

[35:40] Bob Dobbs: The question is,

[35:40] Bob Dobbs: what are the new ground rules,

[35:42] Bob Dobbs: which you could say,

[35:43] Bob Dobbs: what is the new medium?

[35:46] Bob Dobbs: Then he goes,

[35:46] Bob Dobbs: so there aren't any.

[35:47] Bob Dobbs: They're process patterns.

[35:50] Bob Dobbs: we are totally in a world of talking.

[35:53] Bob Dobbs: All media have become talking,

[35:56] Bob Dobbs: and that's what everybody is processing all the time,

[35:58] Bob Dobbs: every day.

[35:58] Bob Dobbs: The talking,

[36:00] Bob Dobbs: and the talking heads,

[36:01] Bob Dobbs: and all the different forms of,

[36:04] Bob Dobbs: you know,

[36:04] Bob Dobbs: what are they called,

[36:05] Bob Dobbs: blogs and panels and opinion on the mainstream media.

[36:10] Cameron McEwen: And tweets.

[36:12] Bob Dobbs: Yeah,

[36:12] Bob Dobbs: tweeting and Instagram,

[36:14] Bob Dobbs: and what's the new one,

[36:16] Bob Dobbs: TikTok.

[36:16] Bob Dobbs: So

[36:18] Bob Dobbs: I realized that,

[36:19] Bob Dobbs: you know,

[36:20] Bob Dobbs: I'm taking Barry's maybe words out of context,

[36:23] Bob Dobbs: but

[36:24] Bob Dobbs: I think that what I'm pointing out would get people to relax and stop demanding news.

[36:33] Bob Dobbs: That kind of demand,

[36:34] Bob Dobbs: you know,

[36:34] Bob Dobbs: they're saying,

[36:35] Bob Dobbs: I'm not getting any news,

[36:36] Bob Dobbs: I'm not listening to these people Innis.

[36:37] Bob Dobbs: But they can't stop listening because they're engaging in the effect of our weird no technology world now,

[36:46] Bob Dobbs: software participation.

[36:48] Bob Dobbs: and engaging in making process patterns.

[36:50] Bob Dobbs: And everybody gets in,

[36:52] Bob Dobbs: and they all start having their own place where they're projecting their process patterning.

[36:57] Bob Dobbs: This was a new insight I got lately.

[36:59] Bob Dobbs: Do you see what I'm saying?

[37:02] Bob Dobbs: It's sort of an Explorations of the grievance that we're not getting news anymore.

[37:09] Cameron McEwen: Yeah,

[37:09] Cameron McEwen: I mean,

[37:13] Cameron McEwen: for my purposes,

[37:14] Cameron McEwen: it's a people are...

[37:17] Cameron McEwen: aware of being integrated or implicated in a process that they don't understand.

[37:28] Cameron McEwen: All they understand is that something very complicated is going on in which they're lost.

[37:36] Bob Dobbs: Right.

[37:37] Bob Dobbs: And if you saw that clearly,

[37:42] Bob Dobbs: that you will be forced to engage process patterns.

[37:47] Bob Dobbs: then you would not be driven by looking for the old Gutenberg effect of what's the significant news item,

[37:53] Bob Dobbs: what will tell us where we're going.

[37:56] Cameron McEwen: Correct.

[37:57] Bob Dobbs: And the more you see that,

[37:58] Bob Dobbs: you can relax and stop trying to see where you're going and just watch everybody get more and more involved in the arguments.

[38:06] Bob Dobbs: And they call it a more divisive America,

[38:09] Bob Dobbs: right?

[38:09] Bob Dobbs: It's more divisive or divisive,

[38:11] Bob Dobbs: whatever the word is.

[38:13] Bob Dobbs: And they bemoan this.

[38:14] Bob Dobbs: This is horrible.

[38:15] Bob Dobbs: But it's all part of the tactile interplay of on and off or figure and ground,

[38:24] Bob Dobbs: the perpetual transformation that we will not get out of unless we turn anti-environment off.

[38:31] Bob Dobbs: It's the only way it's going to stop.

[38:32] Bob Dobbs: If we really want it and it's driving us all crazy,

[38:34] Bob Dobbs: we better turn it off.

[38:36] Bob Dobbs: You see what I'm saying?

[38:38] Cameron McEwen: I do,

[38:39] Cameron McEwen: but the turning off and turning on.

[38:45] Cameron McEwen: are a primordial thing.

[38:51] Cameron McEwen: It's not as if you can just turn off by becoming unconscious or by killing yourself or by getting on a rocket and going someplace.

[39:03] Cameron McEwen: The need is to understand that there's something about ground that implicates groundlessness.

[39:15] Cameron McEwen: So what I don't like about Barry's quote is it's not the case that the answer is that there is no answer.

[39:24] Cameron McEwen: Rather,

[39:26] Cameron McEwen: the lack of an answer is a kind of challenge.

[39:34] Cameron McEwen: We need to see how a lack of an answer is somehow compatible with ground.

[39:42] Bob Dobbs: Yeah.

[39:43] Cameron McEwen: And that perception is,

[39:46] Cameron McEwen: I think,

[39:46] Cameron McEwen: what we were earlier talking about as musicality.

[39:49] Bob Dobbs: Yes.

[39:51] Bob Dobbs: So...

[39:57] Bob Dobbs: Well,

[39:58] Bob Dobbs: the problem is now it's become this surround I'm calling the tech body.

[40:04] Bob Dobbs: And so there's something new about this endless involvement with the tech body.

[40:10] Bob Dobbs: The tech body may have figured a way to be the ultimate director,

[40:15] Bob Dobbs: co-anesthetic and hijack the process.

[40:19] Bob Dobbs: But that's what we're going to try to find out if I get there to that point.

[40:24] Cameron McEwen: Okay,

[40:24] Cameron McEwen: good.

[40:25] Bob Dobbs: Yeah.

[40:25] Cameron McEwen: Good.

[40:26] Cameron McEwen: It's...

[40:27] Cameron McEwen: You know,

[40:28] Cameron McEwen: that's the question of where we're at.

[40:35] Bob Dobbs: Yeah,

[40:36] Bob Dobbs: it's the problem I'm working on here.

[40:39] Bob Dobbs: Objects are unobservable.

[40:40] Bob Dobbs: Only relationships among objects are observable.

[40:42] Bob Dobbs: I mean,

[40:43] Bob Dobbs: that's amazing.

[40:44] Bob Dobbs: There can't be silence as an object.

[40:48] Bob Dobbs: And so people,

[40:49] Bob Dobbs: they yearn for silence.

[40:50] Bob Dobbs: They think they're getting it.

[40:51] Bob Dobbs: But there's never pure silence because there's never anything that's pure.

[40:56] Bob Dobbs: itself.

[40:56] Bob Dobbs: What's that?

[40:57] Bob Dobbs: Pure ontic?

[40:58] Bob Dobbs: There's no pure particularity.

[41:01] Cameron McEwen: Yeah,

[41:01] Cameron McEwen: well,

[41:02] Cameron McEwen: there's no pure ontological and there's no pure ontic.

[41:06] Bob Dobbs: Okay.

[41:07] Cameron McEwen: They implicate each other.

[41:09] Bob Dobbs: Right.

[41:10] Bob Dobbs: Okay,

[41:10] Bob Dobbs: so then I say any theory of agency applied to McLuhan would have to include the interplay of most of the contemporary theories.

[41:18] Bob Dobbs: So these theories are object-oriented hauntology.

[41:22] Bob Dobbs: Now,

[41:22] Bob Dobbs: you know about Hauntology and Nietzsche.

[41:25] Bob Dobbs: Hi,

[41:26] Bob Dobbs: Digger.

[41:26] Bob Dobbs: Do you know what is object-oriented hauntology?

[41:30] Bob Dobbs: Ever heard of that?

[41:32] Cameron McEwen: I've seen the phrase,

[41:34] Cameron McEwen: but I've never read anything about it.

[41:37] Cameron McEwen: I'm not too interested in that.

[41:41] Cameron McEwen: But the phrase itself is interesting because it might be read as saying that hauntology of itself reaches out of itself.

[41:57] Cameron McEwen: The interesting thing about McLuhan is when he talks about technology as an extension of the human,

[42:06] Cameron McEwen: the word extension is usually understood as something that sort of occurs in the world.

[42:14] Cameron McEwen: People invent the telescope or the microscope or the telephone or whatever,

[42:19] Cameron McEwen: and extension is simply understood.

[42:24] Cameron McEwen: as something that kind of belongs Posthuman being.

[42:30] Cameron McEwen: But for McLuhan,

[42:32] Cameron McEwen: extension is what might be called the alienation of hauntology.

[42:42] Cameron McEwen: It's the iconic expression of hauntology.

[42:51] Cameron McEwen: And so the...

[42:55] Cameron McEwen: Extension of man is not a subjective genitive,

[43:04] Cameron McEwen: where of man would be belongs to man.

[43:08] Cameron McEwen: Rather,

[43:09] Cameron McEwen: the extension of man,

[43:12] Cameron McEwen: man is an object.

[43:14] Cameron McEwen: What is it that gets extended?

[43:17] Cameron McEwen: Human being.

[43:18] Cameron McEwen: Where does human being get extended?

[43:20] Cameron McEwen: Into an alienated world that thinks.

[43:25] Cameron McEwen: that its complex is all there is.

[43:31] Cameron McEwen: And

[43:32] Cameron McEwen: I think I hear you saying that that is exactly what this dark figure is.

[43:41] Cameron McEwen: That it's this seemingly Self-Condemned,

[43:47] Cameron McEwen: Self-Condemned matrix that people cling to.

[43:54] Cameron McEwen: because they fear what would happen if they didn't cling to it.

[43:58] Cameron McEwen: And that's the numb,

[44:00] Cameron McEwen: actually,

[44:00] Cameron McEwen: right there.

[44:02] Bob Dobbs: Yeah,

[44:02] Bob Dobbs: McClellan said,

[44:04] Bob Dobbs: I think in Understanding Media,

[44:05] Bob Dobbs: that when he's writing,

[44:06] Bob Dobbs: he looks around and grabs at anything.

[44:09] Bob Dobbs: He says,

[44:09] Bob Dobbs: okay,

[44:10] Bob Dobbs: I can use this,

[44:10] Bob Dobbs: I'll use that.

[44:11] Cameron McEwen: Absolutely.

[44:14] Cameron McEwen: Just think of a chemist,

[44:15] Cameron McEwen: how ridiculous it would be to think that there was anything in the chemist's world

[44:23] Cameron McEwen: that wasn't subject to chemical analysis.

[44:26] Cameron McEwen: It would be absurd.

[44:29] Cameron McEwen: But that view of physical nature is only a couple hundred years old.

[44:34] Cameron McEwen: And what McLuhan,

[44:35] Cameron McEwen: I believe,

[44:35] Cameron McEwen: was trying to say is,

[44:36] Cameron McEwen: well,

[44:36] Cameron McEwen: look,

[44:37] Cameron McEwen: I mean,

[44:37] Cameron McEwen: why can't we regard human reality like that?

[44:40] Cameron McEwen: Why is there anything that is not analyzable and a kind of epiphany?

[44:48] Bob Dobbs: Right.

[44:49] Bob Dobbs: So I'm thinking that I saw somewhere object-oriented hauntology,

[44:53] Bob Dobbs: didn't know what it was,

[44:54] Bob Dobbs: actor network theory.

[44:56] Bob Dobbs: Ever went to that?

[44:57] Bob Dobbs: That classroom and relational agency.

[45:00] Bob Dobbs: I can take the words and make up meanings,

[45:02] Bob Dobbs: but probably not the meanings of the context it came from.

[45:05] Bob Dobbs: But I grabbed as samples,

[45:08] Bob Dobbs: for some reason,

[45:09] Bob Dobbs: these words.

[45:10] Bob Dobbs: This is sort of getting at what I'm saying.

[45:12] Bob Dobbs: And I say that these phrases are a replay of how McLuhan played with the trivium and the quadrivium in every paragraph he wrote.

[45:21] Bob Dobbs: So it's an odd sentence,

[45:23] Bob Dobbs: but it is part of the making process where...

[45:26] Bob Dobbs: you don't necessarily know what you're saying.

[45:30] Cameron McEwen: Correct.

[45:30] Cameron McEwen: So notice you used the word played there,

[45:33] Cameron McEwen: and earlier we were talking about Duke Ellington.

[45:35] Bob Dobbs: Yeah.

[45:36] Cameron McEwen: So what is being played?

[45:39] Cameron McEwen: And there you name it.

[45:41] Cameron McEwen: You say include the interplay,

[45:45] Cameron McEwen: and then later you say the replay.

[45:47] Bob Dobbs: Right.

[45:47] Cameron McEwen: And this interplay,

[45:50] Cameron McEwen: replay,

[45:51] Cameron McEwen: played with,

[45:54] Cameron McEwen: that is

[45:56] Cameron McEwen: a kind of ballet or dance or music that human beings need to understand in the sense of placing themselves under,

[46:08] Cameron McEwen: and that's the only way to get out of this mass hypnosis or mass confusion that currently reigns.

[46:16] Bob Dobbs: Right.

[46:17] Bob Dobbs: I'm thinking of,

[46:19] Bob Dobbs: if there's no time,

[46:20] Bob Dobbs: then there's no past,

[46:21] Bob Dobbs: present,

[46:21] Bob Dobbs: future.

[46:22] Bob Dobbs: So

[46:23] Bob Dobbs: I'm...

[46:23] Bob Dobbs: playing with past,

[46:24] Bob Dobbs: present,

[46:24] Bob Dobbs: future,

[46:25] Bob Dobbs: and I'm calling it play,

[46:26] Bob Dobbs: interplay,

[46:27] Bob Dobbs: and replay.

[46:28] Cameron McEwen: Right.

[46:28] Cameron McEwen: That's past,

[46:29] Cameron McEwen: present,

[46:30] Bob Dobbs: future.

[46:31] Cameron McEwen: Right,

[46:31] Cameron McEwen: but it's not that there's no time.

[46:35] Cameron McEwen: Instead,

[46:36] Cameron McEwen: there's multiple times,

[46:38] Cameron McEwen: and you can't understand multiple times without getting away from the numb and getting into the...

[46:51] Cameron McEwen: I'm just letting the dog out the door here.

[46:55] Bob Dobbs: He appears in every episode,

[46:57] Bob Dobbs: that dog.

[46:58] Cameron McEwen: That's right.

[47:01] Cameron McEwen: That's Pogo.

[47:02] Bob Dobbs: Okay.

[47:04] Cameron McEwen: Yeah.

[47:07] Bob Dobbs: Did we disrupt you too much?

[47:09] Bob Dobbs: You forgot what you were saying?

[47:11] Bob Dobbs: Well,

[47:11] Cameron McEwen: I've sort of become a little bit disconnected,

[47:13] Cameron McEwen: but we were talking about time.

[47:15] Bob Dobbs: Oh,

[47:15] Bob Dobbs: yeah.

[47:16] Bob Dobbs: Multiple times.

[47:17] Bob Dobbs: Multiple times.

[47:18] Cameron McEwen: That's right.

[47:18] Cameron McEwen: And your book gets into that,

[47:20] Cameron McEwen: actually.

[47:21] Cameron McEwen: just coming up in the Dilworth citation.

[47:27] Cameron McEwen: But what's interesting here is that the plurality of time seems to be the hurdle that nobody has been able to understand over,

[47:43] Cameron McEwen: let's say,

[47:44] Cameron McEwen: a 5,000-year period.

[47:45] Cameron McEwen: Or better said,

[47:47] Cameron McEwen: those that did understand it

[47:49] Cameron McEwen: Couldn't communicate.

[47:51] Cameron McEwen: And

[47:52] Cameron McEwen: I see that as sort of McLuhan problem.

[47:56] Bob Dobbs: Yeah.

[47:57] Cameron McEwen: How do you communicate multiple times?

[48:01] Bob Dobbs: Yeah,

[48:01] Bob Dobbs: what did he used to say?

[48:02] Bob Dobbs: The communication of the new is a miracle,

[48:05] Bob Dobbs: but not impossible.

[48:06] Cameron McEwen: Yeah.

[48:07] Bob Dobbs: That was his hope.

[48:09] Bob Dobbs: He's an optimist.

[48:10] Cameron McEwen: That's right.

[48:11] Cameron McEwen: That's right.

[48:12] Cameron McEwen: So what I see missing in the quotation that you had from Barry is that

[48:19] Cameron McEwen: You would think if somebody said,

[48:20] Cameron McEwen: well,

[48:21] Cameron McEwen: there are no patterns,

[48:23] Cameron McEwen: then they couldn't be a Catholic.

[48:27] Cameron McEwen: But for McLuhan,

[48:28] Cameron McEwen: the fact that there are no patterns was involved with or implicated with him being a Catholic.

[48:35] Bob Dobbs: Yeah,

[48:36] Bob Dobbs: he had to make it up.

[48:38] Bob Dobbs: That's why George Thompson says McLuhan was not like any other Catholic,

[48:42] Bob Dobbs: to the point that George said

[48:44] Bob Dobbs: McLuhan was not a Catholic,

[48:46] Bob Dobbs: not like any other Catholic.

[48:49] Bob Dobbs: Yeah,

[48:49] Bob Dobbs: he did that.

[48:50] Cameron McEwen: Yeah,

[48:51] Cameron McEwen: well,

[48:51] Cameron McEwen: I believe he said it,

[48:52] Cameron McEwen: but I don't think he really understood

[48:56] Cameron McEwen: McLuhan view of being a Catholic.

[48:59] Cameron McEwen: I think he would have said,

[49:00] Cameron McEwen: yes,

[49:00] Cameron McEwen: I'm different from every other Catholic,

[49:03] Cameron McEwen: and I'm also exactly the same as every other Catholic.

[49:09] Cameron McEwen: He wouldn't,

[49:09] Cameron McEwen: I mean,

[49:09] Cameron McEwen: to claim some sort of special status is ridiculous in terms of...

[49:16] Cameron McEwen: Being a Catholic,

[49:17] Cameron McEwen: I mean,

[49:18] Cameron McEwen: you go to church and there's a whole bunch of churchgoers there,

[49:21] Cameron McEwen: and you're one of them,

[49:23] Cameron McEwen: and you're trying to sort of replay,

[49:27] Cameron McEwen: retrieve a message that comes to us through that liturgy,

[49:35] Cameron McEwen: where liturgy is a Greek word meaning the work.

[49:40] Cameron McEwen: of the people,

[49:41] Cameron McEwen: right?

[49:42] Cameron McEwen: Liturgy has the same root as energy.

[49:48] Cameron McEwen: So liturgy and energy are closely related,

[49:51] Cameron McEwen: has to do with,

[49:53] Cameron McEwen: on the one hand,

[49:54] Cameron McEwen: the work of physical materials is energy,

[49:58] Cameron McEwen: and liturgy is the work of the people.

[50:01] Bob Dobbs: Right.

[50:03] Bob Dobbs: So but McLuhan felt that there was a new problem

[50:10] Bob Dobbs: for conscience,

[50:12] Bob Dobbs: for morals or ethics,

[50:14] Bob Dobbs: or having a sense of righteousness and being a Catholic,

[50:19] Bob Dobbs: and that's where he was different.

[50:21] Bob Dobbs: He felt that there was,

[50:22] Bob Dobbs: and this comes out in his talks with that guy in the Electric Light book,

[50:27] Bob Dobbs: that he is saying there's an issue here that the Pope,

[50:30] Bob Dobbs: nobody's dealing with,

[50:32] Bob Dobbs: a new challenge to being a Christian.

[50:35] Cameron McEwen: Absolutely.

[50:36] Cameron McEwen: I wasn't at all saying but

[50:39] Cameron McEwen: He thought that being a Catholic was unproblematic or something.

[50:44] Cameron McEwen: He thought it was greatly problematic.

[50:47] Cameron McEwen: And he thought that the Church,

[50:49] Cameron McEwen: by not understanding how complicated its message is and its history is,

[50:56] Cameron McEwen: that the

[50:58] Cameron McEwen: Church was sort of missing the boat.

[51:00] Bob Dobbs: Yeah.

[51:02] Cameron McEwen: But on the other hand,

[51:05] Cameron McEwen: that didn't separate him from all sorts of people.

[51:09] Cameron McEwen: In the church,

[51:10] Cameron McEwen: in the history of the church,

[51:12] Cameron McEwen: it's bound him to that.

[51:15] Bob Dobbs: Yeah.

[51:16] Cameron McEwen: Because the way the church works is that it's always falling away from its mission,

[51:22] Cameron McEwen: and then people have to recall it,

[51:25] Cameron McEwen: retrieve it.

[51:26] Cameron McEwen: And McLuhan saw himself in that context.

[51:30] Bob Dobbs: Are you a Catholic?

[51:30] Bob Dobbs: Were you brought up as a Catholic?

[51:32] Bob Dobbs: No,

[51:32] Cameron McEwen: but

[51:34] Cameron McEwen: I sort of,

[51:35] Cameron McEwen: I think

[51:35] Cameron McEwen: I understand whether it's...

[51:39] Cameron McEwen: means

[51:40] Cameron McEwen: I enjoy going to Mass.

[51:42] Cameron McEwen: I enjoy going to Orthodox liturgy.

[51:45] Cameron McEwen: I enjoy going to the liturgies of really any religion,

[51:52] Cameron McEwen: as long as they don't get into some sort of

[51:57] Cameron McEwen: Rotarian message about doing good in the world or something.

[52:07] Bob Dobbs: Okay.

[52:08] Bob Dobbs: So that's enough Explorations.

[52:10] Bob Dobbs: That's good enough.

[52:13] Bob Dobbs: So then we have pulled from a paraphrased summary of a March 1973 talk at St.

[52:18] Bob Dobbs: Basil's Seminary,

[52:19] Bob Dobbs: that's

[52:19] Bob Dobbs: McLuhan church,

[52:22] Bob Dobbs: at

[52:23] Bob Dobbs: St. Michael's College and the University of Toronto campus,

[52:25] Bob Dobbs: for those who don't know.

[52:26] Bob Dobbs: And I'm amazed at this quote that I found.

[52:29] Bob Dobbs: I do have a book,

[52:31] Bob Dobbs: At the Speed of Light,

[52:32] Bob Dobbs: There's Only Illumination.

[52:33] Bob Dobbs: That's a collection of papers presented at a McLuhan conference in Ottawa.

[52:37] Bob Dobbs: around 2004.

[52:39] Bob Dobbs: Were you aware of that book?

[52:41] Cameron McEwen: Yes,

[52:41] Cameron McEwen: I have it.

[52:42] Bob Dobbs: Okay,

[52:43] Bob Dobbs: so it says,

[52:44] Bob Dobbs: I have here a paraphrase of McLuhan by Tom Dilworth.

[52:48] Bob Dobbs: Look what he says.

[52:48] Bob Dobbs: He says,

[52:49] Bob Dobbs: Teilhard de Chardin fell into,

[52:51] Bob Dobbs: he's saying this is what McLuhan said.

[52:53] Bob Dobbs: Teilhard de Chardin fell into the trap of thinking there was a direction,

[52:57] Bob Dobbs: which we've been just saying.

[52:59] Bob Dobbs: Newman fell into the same trap.

[53:01] Bob Dobbs: Evolution is an unfortunate metaphor.

[53:03] Bob Dobbs: Clock time is visual.

[53:05] Bob Dobbs: Other cultures don't have it.

[53:07] Bob Dobbs: and is useless even as a metaphor at the speed of light.

[53:10] Bob Dobbs: Under conditions of literacy,

[53:11] Bob Dobbs: continuum makes sense.

[53:14] Bob Dobbs: Acoustic man lives not in a continuum,

[53:16] Bob Dobbs: but in a sphere,

[53:18] Bob Dobbs: without margin or center.

[53:20] Bob Dobbs: Man,

[53:20] Bob Dobbs: the spheros,

[53:21] Bob Dobbs: or sphere,

[53:22] Bob Dobbs: acoustic,

[53:23] Bob Dobbs: simultaneous man,

[53:24] Bob Dobbs: is back together with a rush,

[53:26] Bob Dobbs: humpty-dumpty.

[53:27] Bob Dobbs: At the speed of light,

[53:28] Bob Dobbs: there is only illumination.

[53:30] Bob Dobbs: Tactile,

[53:31] Bob Dobbs: smelling,

[53:32] Bob Dobbs: hearing man senses no continuum.

[53:34] Bob Dobbs: Spengler was right.

[53:36] Bob Dobbs: Western man went down the hill and he disappeared.

[53:40] Bob Dobbs: Now,

[53:40] Bob Dobbs: that's a pretty interesting speech that McLuhan was making.

[53:43] Bob Dobbs: Absolutely.

[53:44] Cameron McEwen: So to say that to seven aliens,

[53:49] Cameron McEwen: that's a big deal.

[53:49] Bob Dobbs: Yeah,

[53:50] Bob Dobbs: yeah.

[53:51] Bob Dobbs: So

[53:51] Bob Dobbs: I'm glad I found that quote.

[53:53] Bob Dobbs: So then I say the new spherical global theater,

[53:56] Bob Dobbs: as opposed to the visual linear evolution-oriented Gutenberg space.

[53:59] Bob Dobbs: You know how people,

[54:00] Bob Dobbs: your normal well-educated person,

[54:03] Bob Dobbs: thinks that

[54:04] Bob Dobbs: Darwin was right.

[54:06] Bob Dobbs: And they mock the religious people,

[54:13] Bob Dobbs: generally fundamentalists who believe in creationism and that stuff.

[54:17] Bob Dobbs: And there's such a snobbery there.

[54:20] Bob Dobbs: And then you see

[54:22] Bob Dobbs: McLuhan last line is that his vision mocks the evolutionists,

[54:28] Bob Dobbs: derides the evolutionists.

[54:30] Bob Dobbs: I don't think anybody picked up that McLuhan was not a Darwinian,

[54:34] Bob Dobbs: you know?

[54:36] Bob Dobbs: Oh,

[54:36] Cameron McEwen: definitely.

[54:37] Bob Dobbs: Wychwood Park appall people,

[54:39] Bob Dobbs: because everybody,

[54:40] Bob Dobbs: at least back in the 60s,

[54:42] Bob Dobbs: you had to be a Darwinian.

[54:43] Bob Dobbs: That was a fact,

[54:44] Bob Dobbs: right?

[54:45] Cameron McEwen: Yep.

[54:46] Bob Dobbs: So this is a,

[54:49] Bob Dobbs: to get rid of your,

[54:50] Bob Dobbs: you don't have to become a creationist,

[54:52] Bob Dobbs: but to realize the limitations of Darwin is a deeper understanding of McLuhan.

[55:00] Bob Dobbs: You have to drop that bias.

[55:04] Bob Dobbs: Maybe just recognized as another product of the Gutenberg era of speculation,

[55:10] Bob Dobbs: the theory.

[55:12] Bob Dobbs: But that to the degree that you're not afraid to say,

[55:15] Bob Dobbs: to question evolution,

[55:17] Bob Dobbs: is a measure of your understanding of McLuhan.

[55:19] Bob Dobbs: Because that's what he was doing.

[55:21] Cameron McEwen: Absolutely.

[55:22] Cameron McEwen: So he talked a lot about the problem of the missing link.

[55:27] Bob Dobbs: Yes.

[55:29] Cameron McEwen: Right?

[55:30] Cameron McEwen: He said that was...

[55:31] Bob Dobbs: He made an interesting thought.

[55:32] Bob Dobbs: He said that was the big discovery of the

[55:35] Bob Dobbs: 19th century,

[55:36] Bob Dobbs: not the connecting evolutionary theory,

[55:38] Bob Dobbs: but the missing link.

[55:39] Bob Dobbs: That was the big discovery,

[55:41] Bob Dobbs: which is pretty neat.

[55:41] Cameron McEwen: Correct.

[55:42] Cameron McEwen: Yeah,

[55:43] Cameron McEwen: yeah.

[55:43] Cameron McEwen: So notice by putting the Dilworth quote in your book here,

[55:49] Cameron McEwen: you're circling back to the end of War and Peace.

[55:54] Bob Dobbs: Yeah,

[55:54] Cameron McEwen: yeah.

[55:54] Cameron McEwen: So the way you're composing here is sort of in spirals.

[56:01] Bob Dobbs: Yes,

[56:02] Bob Dobbs: Baroque Spiral,

[56:03] Bob Dobbs: that's a section of my chart.

[56:06] Bob Dobbs: So,

[56:07] Bob Dobbs: well,

[56:08] Bob Dobbs: that's great that you noticed that.

[56:09] Bob Dobbs: So then,

[56:11] Bob Dobbs: still trying to see where I'm going,

[56:13] Bob Dobbs: is there a direction possible?

[56:17] Bob Dobbs: The medium is the message only under electronic conditions.

[56:23] Bob Dobbs: I don't say only,

[56:24] Bob Dobbs: but I think that's what I'm meaning there.

[56:25] Bob Dobbs: The medium is the message under electronic conditions.

[56:28] Bob Dobbs: The medium is not the message in the Gutenberg era.

[56:33] Cameron McEwen: That's right.

[56:34] Bob Dobbs: Okay.

[56:37] Cameron McEwen: Yeah,

[56:37] Cameron McEwen: I mean,

[56:38] Cameron McEwen: the medium always was the message,

[56:40] Cameron McEwen: but the

[56:43] Cameron McEwen: Gutenberg Galaxy is numbed to that reality.

[56:47] Bob Dobbs: That's right.

[56:47] Bob Dobbs: That's its message.

[56:48] Bob Dobbs: That's right.

[56:51] Bob Dobbs: Yeah.

[56:52] Bob Dobbs: That there is,

[56:53] Bob Dobbs: you've got people running around for 300 years recognizing or forgetting that the medium is the message.

[56:59] Bob Dobbs: And...

[57:01] Bob Dobbs: Not noticing that this particular medium has a particular message that they're robotically stuck in.

[57:07] Bob Dobbs: And it took the electronic disaster,

[57:09] Bob Dobbs: the Armageddon of electric technologies beginning with the telegraph,

[57:13] Bob Dobbs: to wrench people out of that.

[57:16] Cameron McEwen: Well,

[57:16] Cameron McEwen: you would think that,

[57:17] Cameron McEwen: but in fact,

[57:19] Cameron McEwen: all that happened with this electronic disaster was that people became more entrenched with Schubert,

[57:27] Cameron McEwen: and that's where we are today.

[57:30] Bob Dobbs: Yeah,

[57:30] Bob Dobbs: but...

[57:31] Cameron McEwen: We're in an electronic world that is captured by print.

[57:36] Cameron McEwen: It's ridiculous.

[57:37] Bob Dobbs: Right.

[57:38] Bob Dobbs: And people thought that all these changes,

[57:41] Bob Dobbs: vast changes coming in rapidly,

[57:43] Bob Dobbs: but then you find one little place where he said,

[57:46] Bob Dobbs: well,

[57:46] Bob Dobbs: we're going to be stuck in the Gutenberg hangover for another 150,

[57:50] Bob Dobbs: 200 years.

[57:52] Bob Dobbs: Nobody thought change was that slow when reading McLuhan because he gave a sense of acceleration.

[58:00] Bob Dobbs: He recognized what you're saying is that,

[58:02] Bob Dobbs: no,

[58:02] Bob Dobbs: this hangover,

[58:03] Bob Dobbs: the goober,

[58:04] Bob Dobbs: is going to take a long time.

[58:06] Bob Dobbs: It took us a long time to get into it.

[58:08] Bob Dobbs: You know,

[58:09] Bob Dobbs: it's the slowest medium acquisition,

[58:11] Bob Dobbs: literacy or the printed book.

[58:13] Bob Dobbs: It'll take a long time to get out of it.

[58:15] Cameron McEwen: Correct.

[58:16] Cameron McEwen: Correct.

[58:16] Cameron McEwen: So the obsolete sort of takes over the world.

[58:20] Bob Dobbs: Yeah.

[58:20] Bob Dobbs: Yeah.

[58:21] Bob Dobbs: That is the they're calling it globalism,

[58:26] Bob Dobbs: conspiracy theory.

[58:29] Bob Dobbs: the cabal,

[58:30] Bob Dobbs: all these pointing fingers at something at the top,

[58:33] Bob Dobbs: some human grouping or something that's hijacked the planet.

[58:38] Bob Dobbs: That's not an accurate perception of what's going on.

[58:41] Cameron McEwen: For sure,

[58:42] Cameron McEwen: because a lot of,

[58:44] Cameron McEwen: I mean,

[58:47] Cameron McEwen: it's not as if all of that is completely false.

[58:50] Cameron McEwen: It's that the vision of that usually doesn't understand itself.

[58:56] Bob Dobbs: Yes.

[58:56] Cameron McEwen: So if you're just...

[58:58] Cameron McEwen: pointing to something else as the problem,

[59:02] Cameron McEwen: nearly always there is something problematic in your conception of that.

[59:10] Bob Dobbs: Right.

[59:10] Bob Dobbs: So if you go on about George Soros,

[59:12] Bob Dobbs: you're missing the point that Soros,

[59:15] Bob Dobbs: because of the nature of Gutenberg effects,

[59:17] Bob Dobbs: there has to be someone at the figure,

[59:20] Bob Dobbs: the organization man chart,

[59:22] Bob Dobbs: there has to be a hierarchy in visual space,

[59:24] Bob Dobbs: and he is not consciously controlling everybody,

[59:28] Bob Dobbs: he's

[59:28] Bob Dobbs: trapped just like you and your neighbor.

[59:30] Cameron McEwen: Correct.

[59:31] Cameron McEwen: Absolutely correct.

[59:32] Bob Dobbs: Yeah.

[59:33] Cameron McEwen: Yeah.

[59:34] Cameron McEwen: That's a very important perception there.

[59:37] Bob Dobbs: And that's why if I was brought into the Bilderbergers,

[59:44] Bob Dobbs: you wouldn't point fingers.

[59:46] Bob Dobbs: You would try to,

[59:46] Bob Dobbs: because they're all generally there trying to figure out who's screwing them.

[59:50] Bob Dobbs: Or,

[59:50] Bob Dobbs: like,

[59:50] Bob Dobbs: just take the whole trucker thing.

[59:53] Bob Dobbs: Look at the confusion over who caused what in the convoy in Ottawa,

[59:57] Bob Dobbs: right?

[59:58] Bob Dobbs: And so the point is you would...

[1:00:01] Bob Dobbs: McLuhan gave us a way to talk about the situation without putting the blame on everybody.

[1:00:07] Bob Dobbs: And he would even say,

[1:00:09] Bob Dobbs: I can't be moral about this because how can we blame humanity when they're lost in huge environmental realities,

[1:00:17] Bob Dobbs: new natural,

[1:00:18] Bob Dobbs: new natures?

[1:00:20] Cameron McEwen: That's right.

[1:00:21] Cameron McEwen: And

[1:00:22] Cameron McEwen: I myself,

[1:00:25] Cameron McEwen: as a Catholic,

[1:00:26] Cameron McEwen: know that

[1:00:28] Cameron McEwen: I'm,

[1:00:29] Cameron McEwen: I don't.

[1:00:30] Cameron McEwen: see everything and I don't see everything correctly and I'm always screwing up.

[1:00:35] Cameron McEwen: So it's part of my vision of what's going on that

[1:00:42] Cameron McEwen: I'm not necessarily correct.

[1:00:44] Cameron McEwen: If you don't like that failure then

[1:00:51] Cameron McEwen: I've got lots more.

[1:00:54] Bob Dobbs: What was I going to say?

[1:00:55] Bob Dobbs: The exploring ignorance for discovery.

[1:00:59] Bob Dobbs: That was MacLean's mantra.

[1:01:00] Cameron McEwen: Absolutely.

[1:01:01] Cameron McEwen: Absolutely.

[1:01:03] Cameron McEwen: Think how wonderful it is for a scientist.

[1:01:07] Cameron McEwen: Like recently they found the physicists in using these new telescopes.

[1:01:15] Cameron McEwen: They found out that galaxies have shapes that they can't explain.

[1:01:22] Cameron McEwen: Wow.

[1:01:23] Cameron McEwen: That there's too Marconi Galaxy that are in a disk shape.

[1:01:30] Cameron McEwen: So everybody's happy knowing that they can't explain it because when they grapple with it and gradually come to understand it then they will extend the science.

[1:01:43] Cameron McEwen: So not knowing something is very very valuable and very exciting.

[1:01:47] Bob Dobbs: Yeah it levels the playing field,

[1:01:50] Bob Dobbs: is that the phrase?

[1:01:53] Bob Dobbs: It brings everybody back into this the same problem,

[1:01:57] Bob Dobbs: the original problem.

[1:01:59] Bob Dobbs: Questing for some issue that's a problem,

[1:02:02] Bob Dobbs: that gets forgotten when you start getting bogged down in getting answers.

[1:02:09] Bob Dobbs: And then learning something new.

[1:02:11] Bob Dobbs: When you learn something new,

[1:02:12] Bob Dobbs: that will create new unforeseen effects.

[1:02:16] Bob Dobbs: And then that will cause division or disagreement,

[1:02:19] Bob Dobbs: and you'll lose the harmony of everybody not knowing until something new really does disrupt everything.

[1:02:25] Bob Dobbs: And everybody then is back in the same boat.

[1:02:29] Bob Dobbs: agreeing that we're ignorant.

[1:02:32] Bob Dobbs: Yeah,

[1:02:33] Cameron McEwen: we're ignorant and that not only is okay,

[1:02:37] Cameron McEwen: it also is perceptive of reality.

[1:02:41] Bob Dobbs: Yeah.

[1:02:43] Cameron McEwen: So being perceptive of reality doesn't mean that we are matching it.

[1:02:51] Cameron McEwen: It means that in our making,

[1:02:54] Cameron McEwen: we understand it.

[1:02:57] Cameron McEwen: even though our making is not absolute.

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

[1:03:01] Bob Dobbs: Ian said the advantage you have,

[1:03:04] Bob Dobbs: Bob,

[1:03:04] Bob Dobbs: is you know more than most people that you don't know.

[1:03:08] Cameron McEwen: Correct.

[1:03:09] Bob Dobbs: Or that you know what you don't know.

[1:03:12] Bob Dobbs: You know,

[1:03:13] Bob Dobbs: variations on that.

[1:03:14] Bob Dobbs: But that's a big factor.

[1:03:16] Cameron McEwen: Yeah.

[1:03:16] Cameron McEwen: So that's how the whole Western tradition starts,

[1:03:20] Cameron McEwen: right?

[1:03:20] Cameron McEwen: Yeah.

[1:03:23] Cameron McEwen: Socrates says it's not...

[1:03:26] Cameron McEwen: the case that I'm trying to teach something.

[1:03:30] Cameron McEwen: I'm trying to teach a problem.

[1:03:32] Cameron McEwen: The problem is that when I think about virtue or courage or the good,

[1:03:38] Cameron McEwen: I don't know what I'm doing.

[1:03:40] Cameron McEwen: I don't understand what those things are.

[1:03:43] Bob Dobbs: And I don't know if it's a problem or not that I don't know.

[1:03:47] Cameron McEwen: Yeah,

[1:03:48] Cameron McEwen: this whole cloud of unknowing is how philosophy and the Western tradition and

[1:03:56] Cameron McEwen: starts and the tradition aside from a certain great artists and philosophers and theologians and filmmakers and poets,

[1:04:14] Cameron McEwen: aside from those people which are sort of like mountains whose tops are obscured in clouds,

[1:04:24] Cameron McEwen: the whole tradition has...

[1:04:26] Cameron McEwen: been involved in trying to end those problems.

[1:04:30] Cameron McEwen: It's as if we could somehow find something that brought us into that boat that you were just talking about.

[1:04:41] Cameron McEwen: And that boat would be all of us together in some reality.

[1:04:46] Cameron McEwen: But that's not what reality is.

[1:04:49] Cameron McEwen: Reality is extended.

[1:04:51] Cameron McEwen: It's extended outside of itself.

[1:04:54] Cameron McEwen: And that's

[1:04:55] Cameron McEwen: That's the great mystery.

[1:04:59] Bob Dobbs: Okay,

[1:05:00] Bob Dobbs: so I say Dilworth's quotation above is a great example of the obsolescence,

[1:05:05] Bob Dobbs: applying McLuhan meaning that everyone's doing it.

[1:05:08] Bob Dobbs: When something's obsolete,

[1:05:09] Bob Dobbs: everybody's doing it.

[1:05:11] Cameron McEwen: Correct.

[1:05:11] Bob Dobbs: Applying McLuhan meaning that everyone's doing it.

[1:05:14] Bob Dobbs: It's a great example of the obsolescence by the Android Meme of even the best of McLuhan revelations.

[1:05:20] Bob Dobbs: So yes,

[1:05:20] Bob Dobbs: I'm starting to point out that the anti-environment,

[1:05:23] Bob Dobbs: the Android Meme phase,

[1:05:25] Bob Dobbs: which is not the tech body yet,

[1:05:27] Bob Dobbs: But I'm trying to say,

[1:05:28] Bob Dobbs: look,

[1:05:29] Bob Dobbs: there's something that's been going on the last 20,

[1:05:30] Bob Dobbs: 30 years that McLuhan content doesn't help,

[1:05:35] Bob Dobbs: doesn't get to the problem.

[1:05:39] Cameron McEwen: If it's seen as content,

[1:05:41] Cameron McEwen: that's right.

[1:05:42] Bob Dobbs: Right.

[1:05:42] Bob Dobbs: So I say this is why some critics of McLuhan see McLuhan as a hack whose tactics were hijacked by everybody,

[1:05:48] Bob Dobbs: merging McLuhan with the ground,

[1:05:50] Bob Dobbs: and his work failing to provide an effective anti-environment.

[1:05:54] Bob Dobbs: This is especially accurate today,

[1:05:55] Bob Dobbs: even though McLuhan was an effective anti-environment in the

[1:05:57] Bob Dobbs: 60s. The anti-environment for now is something completely different,

[1:06:01] Bob Dobbs: Monty Python in the early 70s.

[1:06:03] Bob Dobbs: Media colleges and journalists like to cite McLuhan hot and cool dialectic and or Neil Postman amusing yourselves to death as entrees into understanding the appeal,

[1:06:12] Bob Dobbs: charisma,

[1:06:13] Bob Dobbs: or raison d'etre of the era of Donald Trump.

[1:06:17] Bob Dobbs: But I would say that doesn't apply.

[1:06:19] Bob Dobbs: What do I say?

[1:06:22] Bob Dobbs: I say...

[1:06:23] Bob Dobbs: In the blue portion,

[1:06:24] Bob Dobbs: media colleges and journalists do not get at the essence of Donald Trump.

[1:06:27] Bob Dobbs: All the articles say,

[1:06:28] Bob Dobbs: wow,

[1:06:29] Bob Dobbs: Trump just an entertainment guy.

[1:06:30] Bob Dobbs: He's a president who entertains us.

[1:06:32] Bob Dobbs: That's what Neil Postman predicted back in 85.

[1:06:35] Bob Dobbs: Then I say,

[1:06:35] Bob Dobbs: nope,

[1:06:36] Bob Dobbs: Trump way more than that.

[1:06:38] Bob Dobbs: Then I say both McLuhan and Postman are again,

[1:06:40] Bob Dobbs: mostly inadequate and even useless.

[1:06:43] Bob Dobbs: Now,

[1:06:44] Bob Dobbs: in our discussions,

[1:06:45] Bob Dobbs: we find aspects of McLuhan like the connubial that no one talked about.

[1:06:49] Bob Dobbs: So

[1:06:50] Bob Dobbs: I think I'm generally saying the cliche understandings of McLuhan,

[1:06:54] Bob Dobbs: the global village,

[1:06:55] Bob Dobbs: hot and cool,

[1:06:56] Bob Dobbs: whatever,

[1:06:57] Bob Dobbs: they don't work.

[1:06:58] Bob Dobbs: But there's a whole bunch of secret stuff in McLuhan that if you find,

[1:07:03] Bob Dobbs: you'll be inspired to Wright book,

[1:07:05] Bob Dobbs: which I just did.

[1:07:06] Bob Dobbs: So,

[1:07:08] Bob Dobbs: and I think we're bringing that out.

[1:07:10] Bob Dobbs: I don't think any,

[1:07:11] Bob Dobbs: no one has ever heard anybody discuss McLuhan the way we're doing it.

[1:07:15] Cameron McEwen: Yeah,

[1:07:16] Cameron McEwen: so

[1:07:17] Cameron McEwen: I agree with you because...

[1:07:20] Cameron McEwen: The whole problem is that all words,

[1:07:23] Cameron McEwen: including all of McLuhan words,

[1:07:26] Cameron McEwen: are contextualized.

[1:07:29] Cameron McEwen: And what the great need is to understand context,

[1:07:34] Cameron McEwen: plural,

[1:07:36] Cameron McEwen: and how to do that is a very great problem.

[1:07:41] Cameron McEwen: And probably

[1:07:43] Cameron McEwen: McLuhan didn't solve it or wasn't able to.

[1:07:49] Cameron McEwen: bring that need into some sort of resolution.

[1:07:55] Cameron McEwen: So

[1:07:56] Cameron McEwen: McLuhan changed very much over his career how he was attempting to communicate.

[1:08:04] Cameron McEwen: And as far as I can see,

[1:08:05] Cameron McEwen: he never did.

[1:08:08] Cameron McEwen: With his own kids,

[1:08:09] Cameron McEwen: for example,

[1:08:10] Cameron McEwen: only Eric became a Catholic,

[1:08:13] Cameron McEwen: or remained a Catholic,

[1:08:14] Cameron McEwen: I guess I should say,

[1:08:15] Cameron McEwen: and all of the other kids dropped out.

[1:08:18] Cameron McEwen: And that represented a tremendous failure of communication on

[1:08:22] Cameron McEwen: McLuhan part and one that he deeply regretted.

[1:08:25] Bob Dobbs: Right.

[1:08:26] Bob Dobbs: So,

[1:08:28] Bob Dobbs: and another thing is that he didn't get his,

[1:08:33] Bob Dobbs: you know,

[1:08:34] Bob Dobbs: advanced perceptions of what was going on.

[1:08:36] Bob Dobbs: It never got said to anybody.

[1:08:38] Bob Dobbs: Nobody else got it as much as he did.

[1:08:40] Bob Dobbs: So he failed to leave what,

[1:08:41] Bob Dobbs: you know,

[1:08:42] Bob Dobbs: what do you call a successor?

[1:08:44] Bob Dobbs: Yeah,

[1:08:44] Bob Dobbs: absolutely.

[1:08:45] Bob Dobbs: Adequate successor.

[1:08:47] Cameron McEwen: Yeah.

[1:08:49] Cameron McEwen: So that's one way of seeing his papers in Ottawa.

[1:08:58] Cameron McEwen: It's the amount that the man wrote and talked about that we have in tapes or lectured that we have in videos and stuff.

[1:09:11] Cameron McEwen: The sheer amount of stuff there is incredible.

[1:09:15] Cameron McEwen: And that betrays...

[1:09:17] Cameron McEwen: the energy that McLuhan had to try to solve this problem.

[1:09:22] Cameron McEwen: So it may be that his papers in the future will have an effect that he himself in his lifetime did not have.

[1:09:36] Bob Dobbs: Yeah,

[1:09:37] Bob Dobbs: he was too involved in creating the output and no one got to the position of looking at all that he was saying.

[1:09:44] Bob Dobbs: He didn't even get it all done.

[1:09:47] Bob Dobbs: It's the way I'm feeling.

[1:09:48] Bob Dobbs: I'm reading this thing and saying,

[1:09:49] Bob Dobbs: what the heck did Wright here?

[1:09:50] Bob Dobbs: Where was I going?

[1:09:53] Cameron McEwen: Yeah,

[1:09:54] Cameron McEwen: that's a good way to look at one's own stuff.

[1:09:57] Bob Dobbs: Yeah,

[1:09:58] Bob Dobbs: I'm really enjoying this.

[1:09:59] Bob Dobbs: I don't know if there's many...

[1:10:02] Bob Dobbs: Many writers,

[1:10:04] Bob Dobbs: thinkers,

[1:10:04] Bob Dobbs: like Heidegger,

[1:10:05] Bob Dobbs: did he have somebody,

[1:10:07] Bob Dobbs: did they record him getting some buddies to help him figure out what his book meant?

[1:10:13] Bob Dobbs: You know,

[1:10:14] Bob Dobbs: I don't think that's been done before.

[1:10:16] Bob Dobbs: It's maybe a first time thing here.

[1:10:19] Cameron McEwen: I mean,

[1:10:19] Cameron McEwen: all great thinkers are continually trying to go backwards with their thought.

[1:10:28] Cameron McEwen: All great thinkers try to see what was implicated.

[1:10:32] Cameron McEwen: in what they wrote or what they said that they weren't able to bring out.

[1:10:37] Cameron McEwen: And so when a great thinker Wright or talks,

[1:10:44] Cameron McEwen: what's at stake is trying to get at what was not written or not said previously by that thinker.

[1:10:59] Bob Dobbs: Yeah.

[1:10:59] Cameron McEwen: So,

[1:10:59] Cameron McEwen: um,

[1:11:01] Cameron McEwen: That's a good example of your quotation here with

[1:11:07] Cameron McEwen: Chardin, I fell into the trap of thinking there was a direction.

[1:11:11] Cameron McEwen: Newman fell into the same trap.

[1:11:13] Cameron McEwen: Evolution is an unfortunate metaphor.

[1:11:16] Cameron McEwen: Clock time is visual.

[1:11:18] Cameron McEwen: And so all great thinkers do not think in an evolutionary way.

[1:11:24] Cameron McEwen: They go backwards.

[1:11:26] Cameron McEwen: They're trying to clarify what's at stake.

[1:11:30] Cameron McEwen: in what they already said but didn't say it right.

[1:11:34] Bob Dobbs: Yeah,

[1:11:35] Bob Dobbs: a friend of mine found out that the word repent originally meant to retrace.

[1:11:40] Cameron McEwen: yeah.

[1:11:42] Bob Dobbs: Retrace the stages of apprehension.

[1:11:45] Cameron McEwen: Yeah,

[1:11:45] Cameron McEwen: we've talked in the past about R-E words.

[1:11:49] Bob Dobbs: Yeah.

[1:11:50] Cameron McEwen: I think your wife's products are mostly

[1:11:53] Cameron McEwen: R-E words.

[1:11:54] Cameron McEwen: And for McLuhan,

[1:11:56] Cameron McEwen: there's like 20 different R-E words.

[1:11:59] Cameron McEwen: that he plays with,

[1:12:00] Cameron McEwen: like replay,

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

[1:12:03] Cameron McEwen: rediscover,

[1:12:04] Cameron McEwen: on and on and on.

[1:12:05] Bob Dobbs: What about renaissance?

[1:12:06] Bob Dobbs: Does that qualify?

[1:12:07] Cameron McEwen: Yeah,

[1:12:08] Cameron McEwen: absolutely.

[1:12:09] Cameron McEwen: Yeah,

[1:12:09] Cameron McEwen: that means rebirth,

[1:12:11] Cameron McEwen: right?

[1:12:11] Bob Dobbs: Yeah.

[1:12:12] Bob Dobbs: Okay,

[1:12:13] Bob Dobbs: so

[1:12:16] Bob Dobbs: Corinne once said to Marge Stewart,

[1:12:19] Bob Dobbs: Marshall didn't love me,

[1:12:21] Bob Dobbs: he loved his work first.

[1:12:23] Bob Dobbs: So that's someone who's obsessed and,

[1:12:26] Bob Dobbs: quote,

[1:12:26] Bob Dobbs: becomes a great thinker.

[1:12:28] Bob Dobbs: so to speak,

[1:12:28] Bob Dobbs: because of their obsession.

[1:12:30] Bob Dobbs: But even to the,

[1:12:32] Bob Dobbs: she was wise that she was second to his work.

[1:12:36] Bob Dobbs: You know what

[1:12:38] Bob Dobbs: I mean?

[1:12:39] Cameron McEwen: Imagine somebody,

[1:12:40] Cameron McEwen: she,

[1:12:41] Cameron McEwen: Corinne,

[1:12:42] Cameron McEwen: as you know,

[1:12:43] Cameron McEwen: was a very,

[1:12:44] Cameron McEwen: very strong person.

[1:12:46] Bob Dobbs: Yeah.

[1:12:46] Cameron McEwen: That's probably what

[1:12:49] Cameron McEwen: Elsie saw in Corinne.

[1:12:51] Cameron McEwen: Yeah.

[1:12:52] Cameron McEwen: And wanted to get a friend together with Marshall.

[1:12:56] Bob Dobbs: Yeah.

[1:12:57] Cameron McEwen: So.

[1:12:57] Cameron McEwen: But imagine the strength it takes to appreciate that somebody has more direction to something that's not you than to you.

[1:13:11] Bob Dobbs: Yeah.

[1:13:12] Cameron McEwen: Right?

[1:13:12] Cameron McEwen: And remember,

[1:13:14] Cameron McEwen: this is a woman that had six children with a man.

[1:13:16] Cameron McEwen: Yeah.

[1:13:16] Cameron McEwen: Right?

[1:13:18] Cameron McEwen: And often dealt with him more or less as the seventh child.

[1:13:22] Bob Dobbs: That's right.

[1:13:23] Cameron McEwen: Yeah.

[1:13:25] Cameron McEwen: The kids.

[1:13:26] Cameron McEwen: Very complex.

[1:13:28] Bob Dobbs: they've said,

[1:13:29] Bob Dobbs: I've talked to Mary about it,

[1:13:30] Bob Dobbs: but for McLuhan,

[1:13:32] Bob Dobbs: for the kids,

[1:13:34] Bob Dobbs: Marshall was a guy laying on the couch reading poetry all the time.

[1:13:39] Cameron McEwen: Yeah.

[1:13:39] Bob Dobbs: You know,

[1:13:40] Bob Dobbs: he wasn't interacting.

[1:13:41] Bob Dobbs: And then Corinne says in some interview,

[1:13:43] Bob Dobbs: it's in the public,

[1:13:44] Bob Dobbs: she says,

[1:13:45] Bob Dobbs: well,

[1:13:45] Bob Dobbs: McLuhan,

[1:13:47] Bob Dobbs: he was in love with the idea of being a family man.

[1:13:50] Bob Dobbs: Correct.

[1:13:51] Cameron McEwen: Correct.

[1:13:53] Bob Dobbs: He never really did it.

[1:13:56] Cameron McEwen: Yes.

[1:13:57] Cameron McEwen: Absolutely.

[1:13:58] Cameron McEwen: Absolutely.

[1:13:58] Cameron McEwen: You can see that in the letters that he wrote to Corinne just before they got married.

[1:14:03] Bob Dobbs: Right.

[1:14:04] Cameron McEwen: I mean,

[1:14:05] Cameron McEwen: he's living in a sort of theological cloud that is going to come into extreme conflict with the reality of being the father of a bunch of children,

[1:14:21] Cameron McEwen: needing to get money to feed everybody.

[1:14:24] Cameron McEwen: people and Canadian winter and all that sort of stuff.

[1:14:28] Cameron McEwen: And that's one of the things that got him out of the Gutenberg Galaxy around 1950.

[1:14:35] Bob Dobbs: Yes,

[1:14:36] Bob Dobbs: that's why he got into consulting.

[1:14:38] Bob Dobbs: Was it moonlighting,

[1:14:39] Bob Dobbs: they call it,

[1:14:40] Bob Dobbs: back then?

[1:14:42] Cameron McEwen: Yeah,

[1:14:42] Cameron McEwen: I guess so.

[1:14:43] Cameron McEwen: That's a great phrase for him.

[1:14:45] Bob Dobbs: Yeah,

[1:14:46] Bob Dobbs: so

[1:14:46] Bob Dobbs: Marshall McLuhan.

[1:14:49] Bob Dobbs: So Don Theall talked about that era.

[1:14:51] Bob Dobbs: Okay,

[1:14:52] Bob Dobbs: so he's the confidant of McLuhan,

[1:14:53] Bob Dobbs: 50 to 52,

[1:14:53] Bob Dobbs: 53.

[1:14:57] Bob Dobbs: And they were the two lay people at St.

[1:14:59] Bob Dobbs: Mike's.

[1:15:01] Bob Dobbs: All the other people were priests,

[1:15:02] Bob Dobbs: and they were the teachers,

[1:15:04] Bob Dobbs: and you had these two guys who weren't priests.

[1:15:07] Bob Dobbs: And they got really low salary,

[1:15:10] Bob Dobbs: and they're starting to have lots of kids.

[1:15:12] Bob Dobbs: It was really a problem economically working at St.

[1:15:16] Bob Dobbs: Mike's for Donna and Marshall.

[1:15:17] Cameron McEwen: Absolutely,

[1:15:18] Bob Dobbs: and the

[1:15:19] Cameron McEwen: Canadian at the time,

[1:15:21] Cameron McEwen: Jill Soen was another lay guy that was teaching there.

[1:15:26] Cameron McEwen: And all of them...

[1:15:28] Cameron McEwen: were trying to deal with Canadian tax law.

[1:15:31] Cameron McEwen: I mean,

[1:15:33] Cameron McEwen: there were people in Ottawa that didn't do anything but try to tax people that were earning $2,000 or $3,000 a year,

[1:15:44] Cameron McEwen: trying to tax them.

[1:15:45] Cameron McEwen: And meanwhile,

[1:15:47] Cameron McEwen: the people that were really rich weren't paying any taxes at all because they had great lawyers.

[1:15:55] Cameron McEwen: So that was a situation that...

[1:15:57] Cameron McEwen: McLuhan knew about it.

[1:16:00] Cameron McEwen: He deeply regretted it,

[1:16:02] Cameron McEwen: but he also saw the humor in it.

[1:16:04] Bob Dobbs: Yeah.

[1:16:05] Bob Dobbs: Okay.

[1:16:05] Bob Dobbs: So then I say both McLuhan and Postman are,

[1:16:10] Bob Dobbs: again,

[1:16:10] Bob Dobbs: mostly inadequate and even useless.

[1:16:12] Bob Dobbs: They're so cliche that they offer no keen perception on the obscene,

[1:16:18] Bob Dobbs: that's in quotes,

[1:16:19] Bob Dobbs: today.

[1:16:20] Bob Dobbs: Then I say,

[1:16:21] Bob Dobbs: basically,

[1:16:22] Bob Dobbs: as

[1:16:23] Bob Dobbs: Jean Baudrillard pointed out,

[1:16:24] Bob Dobbs: More and more of everything got exposed in the 80s,

[1:16:27] Bob Dobbs: 90s,

[1:16:27] Bob Dobbs: and 2000s.

[1:16:28] Bob Dobbs: People got bored because all that had been risque or underground or unconscious was now right in their face.

[1:16:34] Bob Dobbs: It was shocking for a while,

[1:16:36] Bob Dobbs: and then they became numb.

[1:16:38] Bob Dobbs: Obscenity became non-obscene,

[1:16:40] Bob Dobbs: so people had to find their tactile contrast elsewhere.

[1:16:44] Bob Dobbs: With porn such as Deep Throat,

[1:16:46] Bob Dobbs: 1972,

[1:16:47] Bob Dobbs: that's literally the obscene in the old terms.

[1:16:49] Bob Dobbs: Violence in the media.

[1:16:51] Bob Dobbs: with porn such as Deep Throat.

[1:16:54] Bob Dobbs: the obscene in the old terms,

[1:16:55] Bob Dobbs: violence in the media became the new obscene.

[1:16:58] Bob Dobbs: As the media served up more and more violent scenes,

[1:17:00] Bob Dobbs: people thought the world was getting more violent,

[1:17:03] Bob Dobbs: especially the older people who were locked in and had nothing to do but watch TV.

[1:17:07] Bob Dobbs: McLuhan talked about the book Subliminal Seduction by Wilson Bryan Key concerning advertising embedding images.

[1:17:13] Bob Dobbs: Wilson Bryan Key,

[1:17:14] Bob Dobbs: a friend of McLuhan,

[1:17:15] Bob Dobbs: discovered these subliminals in the early

[1:17:17] Bob Dobbs: 70s while attending McLuhan seminar.

[1:17:19] Bob Dobbs: He was a professor at another university who wrote the above book,

[1:17:22] Bob Dobbs: Subliminal Seduction.

[1:17:23] Bob Dobbs: got in big trouble with the advertising world,

[1:17:25] Bob Dobbs: then gets fired from the university.

[1:17:27] Bob Dobbs: But McLuhan had written an introduction to the book in which he said,

[1:17:30] Bob Dobbs: quote,

[1:17:31] Bob Dobbs: the close relation between sex and violence,

[1:17:34] Bob Dobbs: between good news and bad news,

[1:17:36] Bob Dobbs: helps to explain the compulsion of the admin to dunk all their products in sex by erogenizing every contour of every bottle of cigarette.

[1:17:43] Bob Dobbs: Having reached this happy state where the good news is fairly popping,

[1:17:47] Bob Dobbs: the admin said,

[1:17:48] Bob Dobbs: as it were,

[1:17:49] Bob Dobbs: quote,

[1:17:49] Bob Dobbs: better add a bit of the bad news now to take the hex off.

[1:17:53] Bob Dobbs: all that bonanza stuff.

[1:17:58] Bob Dobbs: Pretty neat.

[1:17:58] Bob Dobbs: Yeah,

[1:18:00] Cameron McEwen: absolutely.

[1:18:03] Bob Dobbs: I got one more thing.

[1:18:04] Bob Dobbs: What he says,

[1:18:06] Bob Dobbs: he answers,

[1:18:08] Bob Dobbs: Key didn't understand why this was going on,

[1:18:10] Bob Dobbs: but in his foreword,

[1:18:11] Bob Dobbs: McLuhan explained that,

[1:18:13] Bob Dobbs: look,

[1:18:13] Bob Dobbs: you're going to get more violent images.

[1:18:16] Bob Dobbs: That always happens when there's more sexual imagery,

[1:18:18] Bob Dobbs: I guess you'd call it.

[1:18:20] Bob Dobbs: They go together.

[1:18:22] Bob Dobbs: And that's why the death images and the sex images are in the same ads.

[1:18:27] Bob Dobbs: And that was his old thing,

[1:18:28] Bob Dobbs: you know,

[1:18:29] Bob Dobbs: good news sells bad news,

[1:18:30] Bob Dobbs: bad news helps people put up with good news because good news is a problem.

[1:18:34] Bob Dobbs: It demands you to change and get something new.

[1:18:36] Bob Dobbs: So what were you going to say?

[1:18:38] Cameron McEwen: I was going to say that he could have said all of this stuff in The Mechanical Bride.

[1:18:43] Cameron McEwen: So this is stuff that he already saw in the

[1:18:48] Cameron McEwen: 1940s. and the

[1:18:52] Cameron McEwen: introduction that he did to Key's book.

[1:18:55] Cameron McEwen: Isn't that in the early 70s or something?

[1:18:58] Cameron McEwen: Yeah,

[1:18:58] Bob Dobbs: early 70s.

[1:18:59] Bob Dobbs: Yeah.

[1:19:00] Cameron McEwen: Yeah.

[1:19:00] Cameron McEwen: So he's kind of retrieving what he had said almost 30 years before and that nobody has picked up.

[1:19:12] Bob Dobbs: Well,

[1:19:12] Bob Dobbs: Clinton is getting access to him and sometimes he'll read to me

[1:19:18] Bob Dobbs: McLuhan 40s writing and boy,

[1:19:19] Bob Dobbs: that's a whole different character.

[1:19:22] Bob Dobbs: That guy in the 40s,

[1:19:23] Bob Dobbs: what he's writing,

[1:19:25] Bob Dobbs: and banging his head up against everybody.

[1:19:28] Bob Dobbs: Everybody's stupid.

[1:19:29] Bob Dobbs: They don't see anything.

[1:19:30] Bob Dobbs: He sees it all,

[1:19:32] Bob Dobbs: and he's disgusted.

[1:19:34] Bob Dobbs: And I guess Mechanical Bride,

[1:19:38] Bob Dobbs: because that kind of failed,

[1:19:41] Bob Dobbs: he had to check himself,

[1:19:43] Bob Dobbs: and he did that through talking to Pound,

[1:19:46] Bob Dobbs: Innis,

[1:19:46] Bob Dobbs: Ted Carpenter,

[1:19:48] Bob Dobbs: and Don Theall,

[1:19:49] Bob Dobbs: and maybe a few other people in there.

[1:19:52] Bob Dobbs: He really went through a major transformation in the early

[1:19:54] Bob Dobbs: 50s or late 40s.

[1:19:55] Cameron McEwen: Correct.

[1:19:58] Cameron McEwen: So he saw the medium at work in his previous thought.

[1:20:02] Bob Dobbs: Yeah.

[1:20:03] Cameron McEwen: And that medium was literary point of view.

[1:20:06] Bob Dobbs: Yeah.

[1:20:10] Bob Dobbs: He used to say he likes people with big egos.

[1:20:14] Bob Dobbs: That's a bit of a Posthuman,

[1:20:16] Bob Dobbs: but that's being in anti-environment to the present.

[1:20:19] Bob Dobbs: Everybody becomes nobody.

[1:20:21] Bob Dobbs: But he was being a big ego in the

[1:20:23] Bob Dobbs: 40s, maybe unconscious.

[1:20:25] Bob Dobbs: until he recognized it.

[1:20:26] Bob Dobbs: Yeah,

[1:20:28] Cameron McEwen: He thought he was a big ego,

[1:20:31] Cameron McEwen: you could say,

[1:20:32] Cameron McEwen: and then he found out that he was kind of a piece of shit,

[1:20:37] Cameron McEwen: and he had to deal with that reality.

[1:20:41] Bob Dobbs: Yeah.

[1:20:42] Bob Dobbs: So I go,

[1:20:43] Bob Dobbs: I don't know if that's a prudish projection by McLuhan,

[1:20:46] Bob Dobbs: but definitely as people seem to get more open about different ways of having sex,

[1:20:51] Bob Dobbs: the world also seemed to get more violent.

[1:20:53] Bob Dobbs: And then people started saying,

[1:20:55] Bob Dobbs: well,

[1:20:55] Bob Dobbs: my private ethics is nobody's business.

[1:20:57] Bob Dobbs: I'll do what I want,

[1:20:58] Bob Dobbs: but you better be a greenie politician and wear your conscience on your sleeve.

[1:21:02] Bob Dobbs: I want purity,

[1:21:03] Bob Dobbs: not in my private life,

[1:21:04] Bob Dobbs: but in the public sphere.

[1:21:07] Bob Dobbs: See,

[1:21:07] Bob Dobbs: that's a nice switch.

[1:21:08] Bob Dobbs: The people became very slack about their private ethics,

[1:21:11] Bob Dobbs: but they demanded to compensate for that.

[1:21:14] Bob Dobbs: In other words,

[1:21:14] Bob Dobbs: they always had to have the harmony.

[1:21:16] Bob Dobbs: So you've got to overdo and demand your politicians to be super pure.

[1:21:21] Cameron McEwen: Right.

[1:21:22] Cameron McEwen: And

[1:21:22] Cameron McEwen: McLuhan talked about it.

[1:21:23] Cameron McEwen: that a lot in the

[1:21:26] Cameron McEwen: 1970s, right?

[1:21:26] Bob Dobbs: Yeah.

[1:21:27] Cameron McEwen: So that is definitely something that he thought that that was maybe some way of communicating what he wanted to communicate by pointing out to people the

[1:21:44] Cameron McEwen: paradoxes or the conflicts in their own thinking between themselves.

[1:21:49] Cameron McEwen: Yeah,

[1:21:50] Bob Dobbs: the hypocrisy.

[1:21:52] Bob Dobbs: He was pointing out new levels of hypocrisy,

[1:21:55] Bob Dobbs: new complications of it.

[1:21:59] Bob Dobbs: Correct.

[1:22:00] Bob Dobbs: Okay,

[1:22:00] Bob Dobbs: here's a thought.

[1:22:02] Bob Dobbs: Because people couldn't see the new hypocrisies,

[1:22:07] Bob Dobbs: and the old ones didn't have any power anymore,

[1:22:10] Bob Dobbs: so people relaxed about being hypocritical in the old way,

[1:22:14] Bob Dobbs: right?

[1:22:17] Bob Dobbs: Because the pressure was somewhere else,

[1:22:18] Bob Dobbs: and they didn't know where it was,

[1:22:19] Bob Dobbs: or didn't even know the pressure was somewhere else.

[1:22:22] Bob Dobbs: But then McLuhan came along to point out where they were hypocritical and didn't notice it.

[1:22:27] Cameron McEwen: Correct.

[1:22:28] Cameron McEwen: So that relates to the Barry quotation that you gave from your Facebook page.

[1:22:35] Cameron McEwen: Because what's happening there is that people are trying to find a ground.

[1:22:42] Cameron McEwen: And the ground that they think they find is to say,

[1:22:48] Cameron McEwen: well,

[1:22:48] Cameron McEwen: there is no ground.

[1:22:50] Cameron McEwen: Everybody just has their own point of view.

[1:22:53] Cameron McEwen: As long as I'm happy with myself is sort of what reality is,

[1:23:01] Cameron McEwen: trying to be happy with yourself.

[1:23:03] Cameron McEwen: And then somebody else says,

[1:23:04] Cameron McEwen: well,

[1:23:05] Cameron McEwen: look at how ignorant that is or something.

[1:23:10] Cameron McEwen: And then you say,

[1:23:10] Cameron McEwen: well,

[1:23:11] Cameron McEwen: being ignorant is part of how I'm relaxed into...

[1:23:19] Cameron McEwen: reality or something like this.

[1:23:21] Cameron McEwen: So what you're talking about here is an attempt to find ground by denying that there is anything like ground.

[1:23:30] Bob Dobbs: At which the anti-environment created that perception.

[1:23:33] Bob Dobbs: That was one of the effects.

[1:23:35] Bob Dobbs: That's one of the effects.

[1:23:37] Cameron McEwen: Yeah,

[1:23:39] Cameron McEwen: So people are involved in a cloud of assumptions that they're unaware of.

[1:23:47] Bob Dobbs: Yes.

[1:23:48] Bob Dobbs: And that's always the case.

[1:23:49] Bob Dobbs: And the sneaky assumptions,

[1:23:51] Bob Dobbs: they change,

[1:23:52] Bob Dobbs: and you think you've mastered some.

[1:23:54] Bob Dobbs: Oh,

[1:23:54] Bob Dobbs: no,

[1:23:54] Bob Dobbs: those were just got removed.

[1:23:55] Bob Dobbs: They're obsolete.

[1:23:56] Bob Dobbs: There's a new bunch of assumptions you haven't noticed yet.

[1:23:59] Cameron McEwen: Correct,

[1:24:00] Cameron McEwen: correct.

[1:24:00] Cameron McEwen: And so then involved in that is seeing a previous numb and also a kind of abysmal gap that you need to

[1:24:16] Cameron McEwen: navigate.

[1:24:18] Cameron McEwen: in order to get from an old numb to a new numb.

[1:24:22] Cameron McEwen: And so what's so important about

[1:24:26] Cameron McEwen: McLuhan around 1950,

[1:24:28] Cameron McEwen: and what I call his second conversion,

[1:24:31] Cameron McEwen: is he came to understand that he himself as a person and his work needed to come to terms with

[1:24:45] Cameron McEwen: Um,

[1:24:46] Cameron McEwen: the limitations of making as opposed to making the assumption that there was a matching.

[1:24:58] Cameron McEwen: going on.

[1:24:59] Cameron McEwen: McLuhan,

[1:25:00] Cameron McEwen: up until 1950,

[1:25:01] Cameron McEwen: was sort of trying to match some sort of ethical ideal or something.

[1:25:07] Cameron McEwen: And he failed.

[1:25:11] Cameron McEwen: He necessarily failed.

[1:25:13] Cameron McEwen: And coming to terms with that necessary failure is what was the motor of his work in the

[1:25:21] Cameron McEwen: 1950s.

[1:25:22] Bob Dobbs: Yes. And then he says in the 70s,

[1:25:24] Bob Dobbs: in his last recorded interview I think we have.

[1:25:28] Bob Dobbs: That he's not interested in happiness.

[1:25:30] Bob Dobbs: He's exploring suffering all the time.

[1:25:33] Bob Dobbs: So he had done a lot of it,

[1:25:34] Bob Dobbs: 30 years of it,

[1:25:36] Bob Dobbs: of enjoying the advantages of suffering.

[1:25:40] Cameron McEwen: Right.

[1:25:41] Bob Dobbs: Which are these transformations that he kept being forced to go through.

[1:25:45] Bob Dobbs: Like my pattern,

[1:25:46] Bob Dobbs: every time a new medium came in,

[1:25:47] Bob Dobbs: he got ill.

[1:25:49] Cameron McEwen: Yeah.

[1:25:50] Cameron McEwen: Yeah.

[1:25:50] Cameron McEwen: So there's a physical...

[1:25:55] Bob Dobbs: problem going on and a psychological problem going on and the two were in interplay yeah and if you keep processing them digesting them you won't die of cancer or something you know he had his colleagues were dying he kept going even though he only lasted 69 years but he put himself into the fight into the frying pan and

[1:26:17] Bob Dobbs: uh survived pretty good since he was allowing himself to suffer or to

[1:26:24] Bob Dobbs: get into problems where he'd have to check what his assumptions were.

[1:26:28] Bob Dobbs: That's the real,

[1:26:30] Bob Dobbs: I guess I would say,

[1:26:31] Bob Dobbs: Christian lifestyle.

[1:26:33] Cameron McEwen: Yeah,

[1:26:33] Cameron McEwen: I agree.

[1:26:34] Cameron McEwen: I agree,

[1:26:34] Cameron McEwen: yeah.

[1:26:35] Cameron McEwen: So he knew that his health was in terrible shape starting in the late

[1:26:46] Cameron McEwen: 1950s. That's when he started to have the blackout.

[1:26:49] Bob Dobbs: Yeah.

[1:26:50] Cameron McEwen: and he knew that...

[1:26:55] Cameron McEwen: he might not be able to realize the goals that he had set himself.

[1:27:02] Cameron McEwen: And coming to terms with that and trying to communicate how that failure is okay is a very important thing to do.

[1:27:18] Cameron McEwen: It's a great topic for thought,

[1:27:21] Cameron McEwen: but it's certainly not a happy one.

[1:27:23] Bob Dobbs: Right.

[1:27:24] Bob Dobbs: And that's why he dropped the value judgments.

[1:27:29] Bob Dobbs: That was the public banner of what he was going through that you've just been describing.

[1:27:36] Cameron McEwen: Yeah.

[1:27:37] Cameron McEwen: So that happens.

[1:27:38] Cameron McEwen: He himself thought that happened in the late

[1:27:41] Cameron McEwen: 1940s when he gave up the idea that he sort of knew what was going on.

[1:27:51] Cameron McEwen: He gave up kind of.

[1:27:53] Cameron McEwen: attachment to

[1:27:54] Cameron McEwen: Levis and thought that instead of looking to what Levis called continuity,

[1:28:08] Cameron McEwen: that is to say attachment to the tradition,

[1:28:10] Cameron McEwen: McLuhan saw that we were already beyond the old tradition and we had to come to terms with that.

[1:28:19] Cameron McEwen: First of all,

[1:28:20] Cameron McEwen: personally.

[1:28:21] Bob Dobbs: Yes.

[1:28:22] Bob Dobbs: So,

[1:28:23] Bob Dobbs: We're at page 87,

[1:28:25] Bob Dobbs: and it's just part two after all that.

[1:28:29] Bob Dobbs: Let me just see the beginning here.

[1:28:32] Bob Dobbs: I've got global.

[1:28:33] Bob Dobbs: So that all,

[1:28:34] Bob Dobbs: 87 pages,

[1:28:37] Bob Dobbs: well,

[1:28:38] Bob Dobbs: 77,

[1:28:40] Bob Dobbs: is Global Village.

[1:28:41] Bob Dobbs: And now we're just getting into Global Theater,

[1:28:44] Bob Dobbs: and then we have to get into Global Membrane,

[1:28:46] Bob Dobbs: and Android Meme Phase 1 and 2,

[1:28:49] Bob Dobbs: then the Anthropomorphic Physical.

[1:28:50] Bob Dobbs: So

[1:28:52] Bob Dobbs: I guess...

[1:28:53] Bob Dobbs: What I've done is summarized the knowable McLuhan,

[1:29:00] Bob Dobbs: but highlighting things that people didn't know,

[1:29:05] Bob Dobbs: areas that he was thinking about,

[1:29:07] Bob Dobbs: not the cliches.

[1:29:08] Bob Dobbs: So I'm trying to renew the image of McLuhan himself and get rid of the cliches.

[1:29:21] Bob Dobbs: then begin to analyze something that was bypassing everybody,

[1:29:24] Bob Dobbs: including McLuhan,

[1:29:26] Bob Dobbs: Wychwood Park be the global theism and the Android Meme.

[1:29:29] Bob Dobbs: Now,

[1:29:29] Bob Dobbs: McLuhan,

[1:29:30] Bob Dobbs: he knew it.

[1:29:31] Bob Dobbs: Maybe he couldn't find a way to say it.

[1:29:35] Bob Dobbs: But just sort of recognizing that he knew what other people didn't know,

[1:29:42] Bob Dobbs: where he saw the problems,

[1:29:45] Bob Dobbs: was as far as he could get.

[1:29:47] Bob Dobbs: And it is pretty hard to communicate it.

[1:29:51] Bob Dobbs: to communicate this new situation and the world,

[1:29:55] Bob Dobbs: everybody in all fields has been floundering.

[1:29:59] Cameron McEwen: So by taking up McLuhan failures,

[1:30:05] Cameron McEwen: we're becoming the best kind of student.

[1:30:10] Bob Dobbs: Yeah.

[1:30:11] Cameron McEwen: We're not,

[1:30:15] Cameron McEwen: if we just come to praise Caesar,

[1:30:18] Cameron McEwen: then we're being sycophants.

[1:30:21] Bob Dobbs: Yeah.

[1:30:21] Cameron McEwen: But what we need to do and what McLuhan himself was doing.

[1:30:27] Cameron McEwen: with seeing the complications that were implicated in his work.

[1:30:32] Bob Dobbs: Yeah,

[1:30:32] Bob Dobbs: the work wrote itself in a way,

[1:30:35] Bob Dobbs: and he would look at it and say,

[1:30:36] Bob Dobbs: wow,

[1:30:36] Bob Dobbs: those are tough questions that my work says back to me.

[1:30:40] Cameron McEwen: Absolutely,

[1:30:41] Cameron McEwen: that's why I like conversation.

[1:30:43] Bob Dobbs: Yeah,

[1:30:43] Bob Dobbs: yeah.

[1:30:44] Bob Dobbs: He said that was the best art form,

[1:30:46] Bob Dobbs: conversation.

[1:30:48] Bob Dobbs: So,

[1:30:49] Bob Dobbs: yes,

[1:30:50] Bob Dobbs: I'm sort of saying,

[1:30:52] Bob Dobbs: I'm going to show that McLuhan is pretty...

[1:30:57] Bob Dobbs: worthwhile studying,

[1:30:58] Bob Dobbs: even today.

[1:31:00] Bob Dobbs: But you've got to recognize the problems that he saw coming and never had a chance to talk about them.

[1:31:08] Bob Dobbs: So I'm trying to talk about what McLuhan didn't get to say.

[1:31:12] Cameron McEwen: Correct.

[1:31:13] Cameron McEwen: So think about any of the physical sciences.

[1:31:19] Cameron McEwen: What's interesting about them is that when they look at

[1:31:26] Cameron McEwen: their present work,

[1:31:28] Cameron McEwen: let alone the past work.

[1:31:29] Cameron McEwen: But when a science looks at its present work,

[1:31:32] Cameron McEwen: what it's interested in is what it doesn't know.

[1:31:36] Cameron McEwen: So if we interrogate

[1:31:38] Cameron McEwen: McLuhan in terms of what's implicated here but not said directly or something,

[1:31:44] Cameron McEwen: that's the best way of reading.

[1:31:46] Bob Dobbs: Yeah.

[1:31:47] Bob Dobbs: So

[1:31:48] Bob Dobbs: I saw,

[1:31:49] Bob Dobbs: you know,

[1:31:49] Bob Dobbs: Ed had some lady who...

[1:31:53] Bob Dobbs: handles insurance claims or studies the insurance industry and how they're really floundering in the COVID crisis.

[1:31:59] Bob Dobbs: And then in passing,

[1:32:00] Bob Dobbs: she says,

[1:32:01] Bob Dobbs: there's more and more papers being published,

[1:32:04] Bob Dobbs: but 90%

[1:32:05] Bob Dobbs: of them is crap.

[1:32:06] Bob Dobbs: Now,

[1:32:07] Bob Dobbs: the public debate is between the Bronowski and the questioning science,

[1:32:11] Bob Dobbs: right?

[1:32:12] Bob Dobbs: If you're a vaxxer,

[1:32:14] Bob Dobbs: you believe in science.

[1:32:15] Bob Dobbs: And it's an obsolete icon going on.

[1:32:18] Bob Dobbs: And Carolyn saw this in medicine.

[1:32:20] Bob Dobbs: There's more and more sloppy studies.

[1:32:23] Bob Dobbs: Bad studies,

[1:32:24] Bob Dobbs: wrong studies,

[1:32:25] Bob Dobbs: and even the New England Journal of Medicine person about 20 years ago,

[1:32:29] Bob Dobbs: the editor quit because she saw there was so much corruption in the studies,

[1:32:35] Bob Dobbs: people selling their stuff.

[1:32:36] Bob Dobbs: So we are arguing over science,

[1:32:39] Bob Dobbs: and that's not the issue anymore,

[1:32:40] Bob Dobbs: or the old industrial or Gutenberg science.

[1:32:43] Bob Dobbs: That is not the science that we're talking about.

[1:32:45] Bob Dobbs: And you have in your Canoeble article,

[1:32:47] Bob Dobbs: you,

[1:32:48] Bob Dobbs: in an eccentric way,

[1:32:50] Bob Dobbs: start defining science in a new way.

[1:32:52] Bob Dobbs: Following along what

[1:32:53] Bob Dobbs: Carolyn Marvin meant,

[1:32:54] Bob Dobbs: right?

[1:32:55] Bob Dobbs: You're saying there,

[1:32:56] Bob Dobbs: this new science,

[1:32:58] Bob Dobbs: but you're not talking about the scientists like Fauci and those guys.

[1:33:03] Bob Dobbs: So this is a big,

[1:33:05] Bob Dobbs: you know,

[1:33:05] Bob Dobbs: McLuhan might say,

[1:33:06] Bob Dobbs: well,

[1:33:06] Bob Dobbs: the hidden ground today is that the religion of science,

[1:33:10] Bob Dobbs: the pagan religion of science ain't working.

[1:33:14] Bob Dobbs: It's failed.

[1:33:15] Bob Dobbs: And yet that's what people will fight to defend.

[1:33:19] Bob Dobbs: Keep the people...

[1:33:20] Bob Dobbs: These renegade terrorists who are dumping science.

[1:33:24] Bob Dobbs: Now,

[1:33:25] Bob Dobbs: they don't know why they're doing it,

[1:33:26] Bob Dobbs: but they're recognizing that there's something inadequate.

[1:33:29] Bob Dobbs: And this woman who handles insurance claims and how badly the insurance industry is getting themselves into with this new situation said,

[1:33:37] Bob Dobbs: don't go by the standard peer-reviewed journals.

[1:33:41] Bob Dobbs: They're not real anymore.

[1:33:43] Bob Dobbs: They're not applicable.

[1:33:44] Bob Dobbs: So that's another factor

[1:33:46] Bob Dobbs: I'm trying to deal with here.

[1:33:48] Cameron McEwen: We can imagine that...

[1:33:51] Cameron McEwen: Let's say that there's two forces at work.

[1:34:00] Cameron McEwen: I'm not saying that these are the only forces.

[1:34:03] Cameron McEwen: I'm not saying that they're pure.

[1:34:05] Cameron McEwen: But let's say that on the one hand,

[1:34:08] Cameron McEwen: there's science,

[1:34:09] Cameron McEwen: but real science.

[1:34:10] Cameron McEwen: So science that questions itself,

[1:34:13] Cameron McEwen: that has confirmed in...

[1:34:19] Cameron McEwen: genuine observation,

[1:34:21] Cameron McEwen: what it's talking about.

[1:34:23] Cameron McEwen: And on the other hand,

[1:34:25] Cameron McEwen: you have what could be called political science.

[1:34:29] Bob Dobbs: Yeah.

[1:34:31] Cameron McEwen: And all of the humanities and social sciences are political in a way.

[1:34:39] Cameron McEwen: They're trying to bring forward a point of view that they claim has some sort of inherent value or Um,

[1:34:48] Cameron McEwen: is awake,

[1:34:49] Cameron McEwen: right?

[1:34:50] Cameron McEwen: Well,

[1:34:50] Bob Dobbs: they're trying to save their tradition,

[1:34:52] Bob Dobbs: which is gone.

[1:34:53] Bob Dobbs: And they're saying,

[1:34:55] Bob Dobbs: no,

[1:34:55] Bob Dobbs: no,

[1:34:55] Bob Dobbs: we've got to save what we did.

[1:34:57] Bob Dobbs: We did do something worthwhile.

[1:34:58] Bob Dobbs: We don't know what it is anymore,

[1:34:59] Bob Dobbs: but we're fighting for it.

[1:35:01] Cameron McEwen: Well,

[1:35:01] Cameron McEwen: I mean,

[1:35:02] Cameron McEwen: sometimes they say that,

[1:35:03] Cameron McEwen: but mostly they say that we're beyond all tradition.

[1:35:07] Cameron McEwen: We're beyond any kind of collective wisdom.

[1:35:14] Cameron McEwen: There's only what I assert or what people I like assert,

[1:35:19] Cameron McEwen: right?

[1:35:19] Cameron McEwen: But anyway,

[1:35:20] Cameron McEwen: let's imagine that there's these two forces.

[1:35:23] Cameron McEwen: There's a force of what might be called real science,

[1:35:27] Cameron McEwen: and then there's the force of pseudoscience,

[1:35:30] Cameron McEwen: you could say.

[1:35:31] Cameron McEwen: And certainly the humanities and the social sciences have been completely taken over by pseudoscience.

[1:35:38] Cameron McEwen: Now,

[1:35:40] Cameron McEwen: between these two forces,

[1:35:44] Cameron McEwen: there's an ongoing conflict.

[1:35:46] Cameron McEwen: And the conflict is that pseudoscience is trying to take over science.

[1:35:53] Cameron McEwen: And to a certain extent,

[1:35:56] Cameron McEwen: it's done so.

[1:35:57] Cameron McEwen: And maybe with

[1:35:59] Cameron McEwen: COVID, for example,

[1:36:01] Cameron McEwen: We don't have any real science going on because there's no transparency.

[1:36:08] Cameron McEwen: And science requires transparency.

[1:36:11] Cameron McEwen: But on the other hand,

[1:36:15] Cameron McEwen: real science challenges the stupidity of what's going on in the humanities and the social sciences.

[1:36:24] Cameron McEwen: Real sciences says,

[1:36:27] Cameron McEwen: let's make...

[1:36:30] Cameron McEwen: real things here.

[1:36:31] Cameron McEwen: Let's really understand.

[1:36:34] Cameron McEwen: And so you can see that there's,

[1:36:37] Cameron McEwen: between these two forces,

[1:36:40] Cameron McEwen: there's a conflict going back and forth that may end up with real science giving up the ghost and becoming just bullshit,

[1:36:54] Cameron McEwen: or the bullshit,

[1:36:56] Cameron McEwen: the existing bullshit of the humanities and

[1:36:59] Cameron McEwen: Social sciences may be exposed as bullshit.

[1:37:02] Cameron McEwen: And we don't know how that play of forces is going to work out.

[1:37:07] Cameron McEwen: All we know is that it's taking place.

[1:37:10] Bob Dobbs: And we know more and more.

[1:37:12] Bob Dobbs: They tell us the public's more and more confused.

[1:37:14] Bob Dobbs: They don't respect authority anymore because they're caught in that dilemma that you just laid out.

[1:37:20] Cameron McEwen: And people can take advantage of that,

[1:37:23] Cameron McEwen: right?

[1:37:24] Cameron McEwen: When a mob goes into a store and grabs everything.

[1:37:29] Cameron McEwen: What's happening is that they're taking advantage of the fact that we don't know what's real anymore.

[1:37:37] Cameron McEwen: They're saying,

[1:37:39] Cameron McEwen: well,

[1:37:39] Cameron McEwen: the old categories like yours and mine don't apply.

[1:37:44] Bob Dobbs: And that's because everybody's living in the texting world where everything's shared so quickly,

[1:37:53] Bob Dobbs: nobody would consider ownership of it unless you get caught saying something.

[1:37:57] Bob Dobbs: And then the mob comes after you saying something that's politically incorrect or spiritually incorrect.

[1:38:05] Bob Dobbs: Have you seen the World Economic Forum commercial or goal or plan?

[1:38:13] Cameron McEwen: I saw that

[1:38:14] Cameron McEwen: Ed put that up,

[1:38:14] Cameron McEwen: but I didn't listen to it.

[1:38:17] Bob Dobbs: Yeah,

[1:38:17] Bob Dobbs: well,

[1:38:17] Bob Dobbs: basically they say...

[1:38:19] Cameron McEwen: That was Klaus Schwab,

[1:38:21] Cameron McEwen: right?

[1:38:21] Bob Dobbs: Yeah,

[1:38:22] Bob Dobbs: and he says,

[1:38:23] Bob Dobbs: they say,

[1:38:23] Bob Dobbs: they have this young kid saying...

[1:38:28] Bob Dobbs: I don't own anything,

[1:38:29] Bob Dobbs: but I'm going to be happy,

[1:38:31] Bob Dobbs: or I am happy.

[1:38:32] Bob Dobbs: Or they say,

[1:38:33] Bob Dobbs: you won't own anything,

[1:38:35] Bob Dobbs: but you will be happy.

[1:38:36] Bob Dobbs: I think that's the way it goes.

[1:38:37] Bob Dobbs: You won't own anything,

[1:38:39] Bob Dobbs: but you'll be happy.

[1:38:41] Bob Dobbs: That's the world they're already living in.

[1:38:43] Bob Dobbs: They don't live,

[1:38:45] Bob Dobbs: you know,

[1:38:45] Bob Dobbs: I see it every day on the beach.

[1:38:46] Bob Dobbs: People are sitting there texting while Innis wonderful environment.

[1:38:51] Bob Dobbs: And that's all they're doing.

[1:38:53] Bob Dobbs: It's like what they did.

[1:38:54] Bob Dobbs: They said,

[1:38:54] Bob Dobbs: okay,

[1:38:54] Bob Dobbs: let's go on vacation.

[1:38:55] Bob Dobbs: We'll go to Maui and tweak.

[1:38:57] Bob Dobbs: together,

[1:38:58] Bob Dobbs: you know,

[1:38:59] Bob Dobbs: sit beside each other.

[1:39:00] Bob Dobbs: And they're all in their little things doing it.

[1:39:05] Cameron McEwen: It's possible to think that they're ignoring the beauty of the sea and the sky and the sun and the moon and all that stuff.

[1:39:14] Cameron McEwen: But actually,

[1:39:15] Cameron McEwen: all of those things have been incorporated into their texting.

[1:39:20] Cameron McEwen: So it's not that there's sort of a real world of their they're numb to it.

[1:39:26] Cameron McEwen: to it or ignoring it or something.

[1:39:28] Cameron McEwen: Rather,

[1:39:29] Cameron McEwen: that whole world is incorporated in what they're texting,

[1:39:33] Cameron McEwen: and the numb is between that whole world and other whole worlds.

[1:39:40] Bob Dobbs: Yeah,

[1:39:41] Bob Dobbs: the texting on their screens is more beautiful than the nature around them.

[1:39:48] Cameron McEwen: Yeah,

[1:39:49] Cameron McEwen: but it's not,

[1:39:50] Cameron McEwen: as McLuhan would say,

[1:39:52] Cameron McEwen: nature has died.

[1:39:53] Cameron McEwen: Right.

[1:39:55] Cameron McEwen: Nature has been incorporated into their texting.

[1:40:00] Cameron McEwen: It's not that they don't see the sea and the sky and all that sort of stuff.

[1:40:04] Bob Dobbs: They see the new beauty.

[1:40:06] Bob Dobbs: They see the new beauty in the texting.

[1:40:10] Cameron McEwen: Well,

[1:40:10] Cameron McEwen: but it's not as if beauty is one thing.

[1:40:17] Cameron McEwen: We can't just say they're seeing the beauty or something.

[1:40:23] Cameron McEwen: What we can say is that this whole world,

[1:40:29] Cameron McEwen: the physical world and the world of technology,

[1:40:34] Cameron McEwen: everything,

[1:40:35] Cameron McEwen: that is...

[1:40:38] Cameron McEwen: forms a kind of consolidated experience and that consolidated experience is the cul-de-sac.

[1:40:46] Cameron McEwen: It's what people need desperately to get out of but they cannot see any way to extricate themselves.

[1:40:56] Cameron McEwen: And what's interesting is when you were talking about

[1:40:59] Cameron McEwen: Klaus Schwab saying,

[1:41:01] Cameron McEwen: well,

[1:41:02] Cameron McEwen: you're not going to own anything and you're going to be happy.

[1:41:04] Cameron McEwen: Of course,

[1:41:05] Cameron McEwen: the people that love that the best

[1:41:08] Cameron McEwen: are the people that do own that thing.

[1:41:09] Bob Dobbs: Right?

[1:41:11] Cameron McEwen: So the

[1:41:14] Cameron McEwen: Facebook people and the Twitter people and the Google people,

[1:41:19] Cameron McEwen: all of those owners love to own things,

[1:41:22] Cameron McEwen: right?

[1:41:22] Bob Dobbs: Yeah,

[1:41:24] Cameron McEwen: and they're miserable.

[1:41:27] Cameron McEwen: They're buying up most of Hawaii,

[1:41:29] Cameron McEwen: for example.

[1:41:30] Bob Dobbs: Yeah,

[1:41:31] Bob Dobbs: but they're miserable.

[1:41:32] Bob Dobbs: At least their percent is miserable.

[1:41:34] Bob Dobbs: They're harassed.

[1:41:34] Bob Dobbs: They've got to go to school.

[1:41:36] Bob Dobbs: explain themselves in Congress every few months,

[1:41:38] Bob Dobbs: and they're not,

[1:41:41] Bob Dobbs: so they own everything and not happy,

[1:41:43] Bob Dobbs: whereas the techno-electro peasants.

[1:41:46] Cameron McEwen: They're involved Innis world that has no answers.

[1:41:50] Bob Dobbs: Yeah,

[1:41:51] Bob Dobbs: yeah.

[1:41:52] Cameron McEwen: Right,

[1:41:52] Cameron McEwen: and so that's not a very happy way to be,

[1:41:56] Cameron McEwen: no matter how rich you are.

[1:41:57] Bob Dobbs: Yeah,

[1:41:57] Bob Dobbs: so it attracts people who get happiness out of being unhappy.

[1:42:01] Bob Dobbs: There's those kind of people.

[1:42:03] Cameron McEwen: Right,

[1:42:04] Cameron McEwen: well,

[1:42:04] Cameron McEwen: that's the,

[1:42:05] Cameron McEwen: that's,

[1:42:05] Cameron McEwen: Thank you.

[1:42:07] Cameron McEwen: At the end of the day,

[1:42:08] Cameron McEwen: when people can't find ground,

[1:42:10] Cameron McEwen: then they say not finding ground is ground.

[1:42:14] Bob Dobbs: Yes.

[1:42:15] Bob Dobbs: Now,

[1:42:16] Bob Dobbs: what's the meaning of supervene in your Carolyn article?

[1:42:24] Cameron McEwen: Well,

[1:42:25] Cameron McEwen: I was trying to say that there's a dialectic of the above and below that's always going on.

[1:42:35] Cameron McEwen: Yeah,

[1:42:35] Bob Dobbs: because I looked it up.

[1:42:36] Bob Dobbs: And you have something happening or an object,

[1:42:42] Bob Dobbs: and then something goes past it.

[1:42:44] Bob Dobbs: It supervenes it.

[1:42:47] Cameron McEwen: Yes.

[1:42:47] Cameron McEwen: So

[1:42:48] Cameron McEwen: I'm just going to go there right now.

[1:42:51] Cameron McEwen: And if we read the sentence,

[1:42:54] Cameron McEwen: I think what we'll find is that I was using supervention in contrast to something like understand.

[1:43:03] Cameron McEwen: So you have the under and the super.

[1:43:06] Cameron McEwen: Which is above and below.

[1:43:08] Bob Dobbs: Yeah,

[1:43:08] Bob Dobbs: I see.

[1:43:09] Bob Dobbs: All right.

[1:43:10] Bob Dobbs: Okay,

[1:43:11] Bob Dobbs: so that gives me a way to look at it.

[1:43:13] Bob Dobbs: So,

[1:43:13] Bob Dobbs: again,

[1:43:14] Bob Dobbs: as we analyze my book,

[1:43:15] Bob Dobbs: we end up analyzing your stuff.

[1:43:18] Bob Dobbs: Well,

[1:43:18] Cameron McEwen: we haven't done very much of that,

[1:43:20] Cameron McEwen: but that's a welcome development as far as I can see.

[1:43:26] Bob Dobbs: Yeah,

[1:43:26] Cameron McEwen: so I talk about underlies and supervenes,

[1:43:31] Cameron McEwen: right?

[1:43:31] Cameron McEwen: So you have the under and you have the over.

[1:43:33] Bob Dobbs: Okay.

[1:43:34] Bob Dobbs: Yeah,

[1:43:35] Bob Dobbs: that's it.

[1:43:36] Bob Dobbs: Maybe end with this.

[1:43:37] Bob Dobbs: Ian says the word understanding is not appropriate because you're standing under something.

[1:43:42] Bob Dobbs: Use the word overlaying.

[1:43:44] Bob Dobbs: That's what we're really living.

[1:43:46] Bob Dobbs: We're overlaying.

[1:43:46] Cameron McEwen: And so,

[1:43:47] Cameron McEwen: yeah.

[1:43:48] Cameron McEwen: But I think

[1:43:49] Cameron McEwen: Ian should say both.

[1:43:51] Bob Dobbs: Oh,

[1:43:51] Bob Dobbs: yeah.

[1:43:52] Bob Dobbs: He said both.

[1:43:52] Cameron McEwen: That both are necessary.

[1:43:54] Bob Dobbs: Yeah,

[1:43:54] Bob Dobbs: but he has to get people to realize there is another.

[1:43:57] Bob Dobbs: And then they can reconcile the two.

[1:43:59] Bob Dobbs: But they don't know.

[1:44:01] Bob Dobbs: They think there's only one.

[1:44:02] Cameron McEwen: Yeah,

[1:44:03] Cameron McEwen: of course.

[1:44:03] Cameron McEwen: Of course.

[1:44:04] Cameron McEwen: So.

[1:44:07] Cameron McEwen: The whole way that numb works is that it consolidates into unity.

[1:44:15] Cameron McEwen: And so numb is a kind of defense against plurality.

[1:44:21] Bob Dobbs: Yeah,

[1:44:21] Bob Dobbs: and there's a fine line between numbness and peace,

[1:44:24] Bob Dobbs: capital P-E-A-C-E,

[1:44:27] Bob Dobbs: to quote you.

[1:44:29] Cameron McEwen: Yeah,

[1:44:29] Cameron McEwen: because what I tried,

[1:44:32] Cameron McEwen: I mean,

[1:44:32] Cameron McEwen: remember that

[1:44:34] Cameron McEwen: McLuhan, I'm...

[1:44:35] Cameron McEwen: Innis post,

[1:44:36] Cameron McEwen: I'm trying to explicate what Carolyn bliss is.

[1:44:41] Cameron McEwen: And Carolyn bliss is peace.

[1:44:45] Cameron McEwen: And what is peace?

[1:44:46] Cameron McEwen: Peace is the belonging together of the absolutely different.

[1:44:51] Cameron McEwen: So if you're a Catholic and you believe that

[1:44:54] Cameron McEwen: God himself dies,

[1:45:00] Cameron McEwen: that notion...

[1:45:03] Cameron McEwen: that the absolute itself,

[1:45:07] Cameron McEwen: that is to say God,

[1:45:09] Cameron McEwen: that the absolute itself can die and become other than itself is a very strange notion of peace.

[1:45:20] Cameron McEwen: But at the end of the day,

[1:45:24] Cameron McEwen: it's the only notion of peace that works.

[1:45:29] Cameron McEwen: If we don't recognize absolute difference...

[1:45:32] Cameron McEwen: then at the end of the day,

[1:45:33] Cameron McEwen: we're going to have to say,

[1:45:34] Cameron McEwen: well,

[1:45:35] Cameron McEwen: Russia or China or India or Thailand or whatever needs to become us.

[1:45:41] Cameron McEwen: And,

[1:45:42] Cameron McEwen: you know,

[1:45:42] Cameron McEwen: number one,

[1:45:43] Cameron McEwen: that's not going to work.

[1:45:44] Cameron McEwen: Number two,

[1:45:45] Cameron McEwen: it's very arrogant and just yields war instead of peace.

[1:45:51] Cameron McEwen: So understanding the absolutely different is what is...

[1:46:01] Cameron McEwen: the first step towards peace.

[1:46:04] Cameron McEwen: And I think that's what you were saying

[1:46:07] Cameron McEwen: Ayan was about.

[1:46:09] Bob Dobbs: Yes.

[1:46:09] Bob Dobbs: And where does that old term,

[1:46:13] Bob Dobbs: the other,

[1:46:14] Bob Dobbs: come in here?

[1:46:18] Cameron McEwen: Are you asking in my post or in my opinion?

[1:46:21] Bob Dobbs: No,

[1:46:21] Bob Dobbs: just now.

[1:46:22] Bob Dobbs: You're talking about absolutely different,

[1:46:25] Bob Dobbs: but

[1:46:26] Bob Dobbs: I don't know what field,

[1:46:27] Bob Dobbs: psychology or something.

[1:46:28] Bob Dobbs: They talk about dealing with your other.

[1:46:31] Cameron McEwen: Correct.

[1:46:31] Bob Dobbs: Is that the same notion?

[1:46:36] Cameron McEwen: No,

[1:46:36] Cameron McEwen: no.

[1:46:39] Cameron McEwen: The other can appear in very different contexts in thinking.

[1:46:47] Cameron McEwen: So,

[1:46:47] Cameron McEwen: for example,

[1:46:48] Cameron McEwen: in

[1:46:49] Cameron McEwen: Jungian psychology,

[1:46:51] Cameron McEwen: analytic psychology,

[1:46:53] Cameron McEwen: then the other is something internal,

[1:46:57] Cameron McEwen: the shadow.

[1:46:58] Cameron McEwen: And you have to...

[1:46:59] Cameron McEwen: You have to come to terms with the internal other in order to understand how you act in the world.

[1:47:10] Cameron McEwen: But then there is the other appears in,

[1:47:15] Cameron McEwen: let's say,

[1:47:16] Cameron McEwen: Buber's thought,

[1:47:18] Cameron McEwen: I am thou,

[1:47:19] Cameron McEwen: where understanding the claim of the other is the only way that the

[1:47:28] Cameron McEwen: I can be authentic.

[1:47:30] Cameron McEwen: So the other is a very rich theme in thinking,

[1:47:37] Cameron McEwen: but it's not one theme.

[1:47:38] Cameron McEwen: It's a whole bunch of themes.

[1:47:40] Bob Dobbs: Okay.

[1:47:41] Bob Dobbs: Okay,

[1:47:41] Bob Dobbs: so it's getting near your time to stop.

[1:47:45] Bob Dobbs: Yeah.

[1:47:46] Bob Dobbs: So in part two,

[1:47:47] Bob Dobbs: I say McLuhan became famous for his phrase,

[1:47:49] Bob Dobbs: global village,

[1:47:50] Bob Dobbs: but not so well known at the time was his phrase for the late 60s,

[1:47:53] Bob Dobbs: global theater,

[1:47:54] Bob Dobbs: which meant the satellite technology of the 60s had turned the global city into an art form.

[1:47:59] Bob Dobbs: McLuhan,

[1:47:59] Bob Dobbs: by the Malinowski,

[1:48:01] Bob Dobbs: as can be seen in his correspondence with Sheila and Wilford Watson,

[1:48:04] Bob Dobbs: was perceiving a anti-environment of electronic process,

[1:48:07] Bob Dobbs: the interplay of cliché to archetype,

[1:48:09] Bob Dobbs: the essence of consciousness.

[1:48:11] Bob Dobbs: So that's the exciting point we've come to,

[1:48:15] Bob Dobbs: and we'll see where the hell I take it and how you translate what I'm doing.

[1:48:22] Cameron McEwen: All right.

[1:48:22] Cameron McEwen: Well,

[1:48:23] Cameron McEwen: I translate what you just said there as the question of language.

[1:48:28] Bob Dobbs: Yeah.

[1:48:29] Cameron McEwen: Language is the interplay of cliche and archetype and the essence of consciousness.

[1:48:34] Cameron McEwen: So we could say that what

[1:48:38] Cameron McEwen: McLuhan did is he thought he was the master of language until about

[1:48:43] Cameron McEwen: 1950. And then going on from 1950,

[1:48:47] Cameron McEwen: he realized he was the servant of language and had to figure out what that meant.

[1:48:53] Bob Dobbs: Yeah,

[1:48:53] Bob Dobbs: and he Wright the pound right around that time in 1951,

[1:48:57] Bob Dobbs: I think.

[1:48:58] Bob Dobbs: He says,

[1:48:59] Bob Dobbs: you guys had a new appreciation of the word,

[1:49:02] Bob Dobbs: but I am dealing with a time where the word has become a drug.

[1:49:06] Cameron McEwen: Correct.

[1:49:07] Cameron McEwen: Yep,

[1:49:09] Cameron McEwen: yep.

[1:49:10] Bob Dobbs: All right.

[1:49:10] Cameron McEwen: Well,

[1:49:10] Cameron McEwen: that's a good place to leave it.

[1:49:14] Bob Dobbs: Yes.

[1:49:14] Cameron McEwen: It's a very thought-provoking perception.

[1:49:20] Bob Dobbs: Yeah,

[1:49:20] Bob Dobbs: these discussions are us having recess.

[1:49:24] Bob Dobbs: Now we do the real work.

[1:49:25] Bob Dobbs: You go off of nurse Alan Watts.

[1:49:26] Bob Dobbs: I go off of mine for a couple weeks.

[1:49:28] Bob Dobbs: We process whatever has to be processed,

[1:49:32] Bob Dobbs: right?

[1:49:32] Cameron McEwen: That's right.

[1:49:33] Cameron McEwen: Absolutely.

[1:49:34] Cameron McEwen: Absolutely.

[1:49:35] Bob Dobbs: Okay,

[1:49:35] Bob Dobbs: very good.

[1:49:37] Cameron McEwen: I got to tell you,

[1:49:37] Cameron McEwen: Bob,

[1:49:38] Cameron McEwen: I like very much how in our conversations you are presenting another face.

[1:49:48] Cameron McEwen: I could say,

[1:49:49] Cameron McEwen: right?

[1:49:50] Cameron McEwen: You have the face of somebody who has thought through things that other people haven't.

[1:49:57] Bob Dobbs: Yes.

[1:49:58] Cameron McEwen: And that's sort of the adventurous Bob,

[1:50:03] Cameron McEwen: the Bob that you need to understand and follow.

[1:50:08] Bob Dobbs: Yeah.

[1:50:09] Cameron McEwen: But I'd like to think that in our conversations,

[1:50:13] Cameron McEwen: we're bringing out the probing

[1:50:16] Cameron McEwen: Bob.

[1:50:17] Cameron McEwen: Yeah.

[1:50:18] Cameron McEwen: The Bob that is going backwards in some sense.

[1:50:22] Bob Dobbs: The ignorant Bob.

[1:50:24] Cameron McEwen: Yeah,

[1:50:24] Cameron McEwen: well,

[1:50:24] Cameron McEwen: I wouldn't use that phrase,

[1:50:25] Cameron McEwen: but you can.

[1:50:26] Bob Dobbs: Right.

[1:50:27] Bob Dobbs: Remember he said that Bernard had a weekly hebdomadary,

[1:50:33] Bob Dobbs: was the word,

[1:50:34] Bob Dobbs: session with his buddies,

[1:50:36] Bob Dobbs: but he did it in great humility.

[1:50:37] Bob Dobbs: That's what I do,

[1:50:38] Bob Dobbs: talking to you,

[1:50:39] Bob Dobbs: great humility.

[1:50:40] Bob Dobbs: I don't show humility on the Jack show on Instagram.

[1:50:45] Bob Dobbs: if you've seen any of those.

[1:50:48] Bob Dobbs: Right?

[1:50:49] Bob Dobbs: You're getting at that point.

[1:50:50] Cameron McEwen: Going up and going down.

[1:50:52] Bob Dobbs: Yeah,

[1:50:52] Bob Dobbs: yeah.

[1:50:53] Bob Dobbs: Well,

[1:50:53] Bob Dobbs: glad you appreciate it.

[1:50:54] Bob Dobbs: I am trying to be a reasonable person here.

[1:50:58] Cameron McEwen: Well,

[1:50:58] Cameron McEwen: I think you're succeeding.

[1:51:00] Bob Dobbs: All right,

[1:51:00] Bob Dobbs: very good.

[1:51:01] Bob Dobbs: All right.

[1:51:02] Bob Dobbs: Okay,

[1:51:02] Bob Dobbs: so we'll talk soon.

[1:51:03] Cameron McEwen: Thank you.

[1:51:04] Bob Dobbs: You're welcome.

[1:51:05] Bob Dobbs: Great talking to you.

[1:51:06] Cameron McEwen: Bye.

[1:51:06] Bob Dobbs: Bye.