Dialogue 47 — Transcript

[00:02] Bob Dobbs: Hello,

[00:02] Bob Dobbs: this is Cameron McEwen and Bob Dobbs with episode number 47 of our ongoing series of figuring out what my book meant.

[00:11] Bob Dobbs: And we're on page 89,

[00:14] Bob Dobbs: floating down to the second quote.

[00:17] Bob Dobbs: We ended with the quote at the top of page 89 a month ago.

[00:22] Bob Dobbs: So now we're looking at a quote from Cliché to archetype by Marshall McLuhan and Wilford Watson in 1970.

[00:31] Bob Dobbs: From Cliché to archetype,

[00:32] Bob Dobbs: pages 12 to 13.

[00:35] Bob Dobbs: And here's the quote.

[00:37] Bob Dobbs: And we're going to see what kind of question this evokes Ewen Cameron.

[00:42] Bob Dobbs: So the quote says,

[00:44] Bob Dobbs: Since Sputnik put the globe in a proscenium arch,

[00:47] Bob Dobbs: that's in quotes,

[00:48] Bob Dobbs: proscenium arch,

[00:49] Bob Dobbs: and the global village has been transformed into a global theater,

[00:53] Bob Dobbs: the result,

[00:53] Bob Dobbs: quite literally,

[00:54] Bob Dobbs: is the use of public space for,

[00:56] Bob Dobbs: quote,

[00:57] Bob Dobbs: doing one's thing.

[00:59] Bob Dobbs: A planet...

[00:59] Bob Dobbs: parenthesized,

[01:02] Bob Dobbs: or bracketed,

[01:02] Bob Dobbs: by a anti-environment,

[01:05] Bob Dobbs: no longer offers any directions or goals to nation or individual.

[01:09] Bob Dobbs: The world itself has become a probe.

[01:12] Bob Dobbs: Then he has a quote,

[01:13] Bob Dobbs: snooping with intent to creep,

[01:16] Bob Dobbs: and then a second quote,

[01:17] Bob Dobbs: casing everybody else's joint,

[01:19] Bob Dobbs: has become a major activity.

[01:22] Bob Dobbs: As the main business of the world becomes espionage,

[01:25] Bob Dobbs: secrecy becomes the basis of wealth,

[01:27] Bob Dobbs: as with magic in a tribal society.

[01:29] Bob Dobbs: Perhaps this is not the only latest form of cliché probe,

[01:33] Bob Dobbs: but merely the largest and most perceptible.

[01:37] Bob Dobbs: Now,

[01:37] Bob Dobbs: I have a little statement at that point.

[01:39] Bob Dobbs: There's more to the quote.

[01:41] Bob Dobbs: Bob says,

[01:44] Bob Dobbs: we're starting to get what it means to be a global theater.

[01:46] Bob Dobbs: McLuhan spelling out aspects of it like everything turning into espionage.

[01:50] Bob Dobbs: So that's a little comment I make to the listener,

[01:56] Bob Dobbs: or reader.

[01:56] Bob Dobbs: Then back to the quote.

[01:58] Bob Dobbs: It is just when people are all engaged in snooping on themselves and one another that they become anesthetized to the whole process.

[02:07] Bob Dobbs: Tranquilizers and co-anesthetic,

[02:09] Bob Dobbs: private and corporate,

[02:11] Bob Dobbs: become the largest business in the world just as the world is attempting to maximize every form of alert.

[02:18] Bob Dobbs: That is so accurate.

[02:20] Bob Dobbs: Medicine changed in the 70s so much.

[02:23] Bob Dobbs: That happened,

[02:24] Bob Dobbs: what he's saying there.

[02:25] Bob Dobbs: To the max,

[02:26] Bob Dobbs: you know?

[02:28] Cameron McEwen: Yeah,

[02:28] Cameron McEwen: well,

[02:29] Cameron McEwen: Ukraine is a perfect example of that.

[02:32] Bob Dobbs: Yeah,

[02:34] Cameron McEwen: okay.

[02:35] Cameron McEwen: Everybody anesthetizing themselves to everything through some sort of virtue signaling.

[02:42] Bob Dobbs: Yeah,

[02:43] Bob Dobbs: that creates Gutenberg wealth,

[02:45] Bob Dobbs: larger business.

[02:47] Bob Dobbs: Okay,

[02:48] Bob Dobbs: so then

[02:50] Bob Dobbs: McLuhan says,

[02:51] Bob Dobbs: sound light shows,

[02:52] Bob Dobbs: sound hyphen light shows,

[02:53] Bob Dobbs: as new cliche,

[02:55] Bob Dobbs: that means probe,

[02:56] Bob Dobbs: are in effect mergers.

[02:57] Bob Dobbs: retrievers of the tribal condition.

[02:59] Bob Dobbs: It is a state that has already overtaken private enterprise as individual businesses form into massive conglomerates.

[03:07] Bob Dobbs: As information itself,

[03:09] Bob Dobbs: as I read this,

[03:10] Bob Dobbs: you think of the popular dreams of the hippies and the counterculture or the right-wing and left-wing.

[03:16] Bob Dobbs: They're so trivial compared to what was going on as McLuhan was laying out.

[03:20] Bob Dobbs: Do you know what I mean?

[03:21] Bob Dobbs: Nobody saw this coming.

[03:23] Cameron McEwen: I agree.

[03:24] Cameron McEwen: Yeah.

[03:25] Cameron McEwen: And he did.

[03:27] Cameron McEwen: This is 10 years before his death.

[03:29] Cameron McEwen: Yeah.

[03:31] Cameron McEwen: And he's always saying,

[03:34] Cameron McEwen: with every sentence here,

[03:35] Cameron McEwen: he's saying,

[03:36] Cameron McEwen: how can I say this so that you get it?

[03:38] Bob Dobbs: Yeah,

[03:40] Bob Dobbs: yeah.

[03:41] Bob Dobbs: And he has a blurb on the book when it came out in 1970 that this is way more important than understanding media.

[03:51] Bob Dobbs: It breaks new ground.

[03:53] Bob Dobbs: And he had the phrase...

[03:57] Bob Dobbs: Interactive media was it?

[03:59] Bob Dobbs: Intermedia.

[04:00] Bob Dobbs: Intermedia.

[04:02] Bob Dobbs: So then he says,

[04:05] Bob Dobbs: after massive conglomerates,

[04:07] Bob Dobbs: as information itself becomes the largest business in the world,

[04:10] Bob Dobbs: databanks know more about individual people than the people do themselves.

[04:15] Bob Dobbs: Now these are jokes and stuff that comics talk about 50 years later,

[04:20] Bob Dobbs: right?

[04:21] Bob Dobbs: They play off these patterns.

[04:23] Cameron McEwen: But not just comics.

[04:26] Cameron McEwen: Everybody.

[04:27] Cameron McEwen: This is what the whole world is about,

[04:28] Cameron McEwen: right?

[04:29] Cameron McEwen: So when he talks about information being the largest business in the world,

[04:35] Cameron McEwen: you can understand by that the SWIFT system between banks,

[04:39] Cameron McEwen: for example.

[04:41] Cameron McEwen: The

[04:42] Cameron McEwen: SWIFT system controls the world's economy.

[04:44] Cameron McEwen: And what is it?

[04:45] Cameron McEwen: It's a translation between transactions.

[04:51] Cameron McEwen: And now China and Russia and India and countries associated with them are challenging that model with another form of information.

[05:01] Cameron McEwen: And so then you have battles of media being far more important than battles between countries or especially battles between individuals.

[05:12] Bob Dobbs: Yeah,

[05:12] Bob Dobbs: battles between countries is a form of more Gutenberg wealth.

[05:17] Bob Dobbs: Keep the old...

[05:18] Bob Dobbs: Printing press is supposedly meaning something.

[05:21] Cameron McEwen: Yeah.

[05:22] Bob Dobbs: So it's a big distraction.

[05:24] Bob Dobbs: So as information itself becomes the biggest business in the world,

[05:28] Bob Dobbs: do you say data or data?

[05:30] Cameron McEwen: I say data.

[05:31] Bob Dobbs: Okay.

[05:32] Cameron McEwen: I don't do data banks,

[05:35] Cameron McEwen: but I think you can say either one.

[05:37] Bob Dobbs: Yeah.

[05:37] Bob Dobbs: Data banks know more about individual people than people do themselves.

[05:40] Bob Dobbs: The more that data banks record about each one of us,

[05:43] Bob Dobbs: the less we exist.

[05:46] Bob Dobbs: Now this...

[05:48] Bob Dobbs: I don't know of anybody in the 20th century who wrote stuff that was so accurate,

[05:54] Bob Dobbs: like 50 years ahead of his time.

[05:57] Bob Dobbs: I mean,

[05:58] Bob Dobbs: I don't know,

[05:59] Bob Dobbs: maybe somebody in science did something and it led to the crippled guy hawking or something,

[06:06] Bob Dobbs: saying stuff about black holes or something.

[06:08] Bob Dobbs: But there's so much that McLuhan says that they could put it into high school and say,

[06:15] Bob Dobbs: there's only one subject.

[06:17] Bob Dobbs: What McLuhan wrote,

[06:18] Bob Dobbs: if you want to understand your world,

[06:20] Bob Dobbs: high school students,

[06:21] Bob Dobbs: you know,

[06:22] Bob Dobbs: spend time talking about it.

[06:25] Cameron McEwen: One way to think about the last sentence there is to think about what Heidegger was doing around 1930.

[06:36] Cameron McEwen: No,

[06:36] Bob Dobbs: 1830.

[06:38] Bob Dobbs: No,

[06:38] Bob Dobbs: Heidegger.

[06:38] Bob Dobbs: Sorry,

[06:38] Bob Dobbs: I'm thinking of Kierkegaard.

[06:39] Bob Dobbs: Okay.

[06:40] Bob Dobbs: Yes,

[06:40] Bob Dobbs: Heidegger.

[06:40] Bob Dobbs: So,

[06:43] Cameron McEwen: Being and Time,

[06:44] Cameron McEwen: Sein und Zeit.

[06:45] Cameron McEwen: had come out in 1927 and literally nobody had understood what it was about.

[06:53] Cameron McEwen: And so

[06:55] Cameron McEwen: Heidegger was asking himself how that had happened,

[06:59] Cameron McEwen: because he had written it as a kind of textbook for trying to understand what's going on.

[07:08] Bob Dobbs: Yeah,

[07:08] Bob Dobbs: like this is like making it easy for people.

[07:12] Cameron McEwen: That's right.

[07:13] Cameron McEwen: And he had...

[07:15] Cameron McEwen: done it easy for academics yeah right he had he had written it as an academic textbook for people that were highly highly literate and um so he had to figure out why it was that they couldn't understand what he was doing even though it was written specifically for them yeah

[07:36] Cameron McEwen: and so in in 19 in a series of publications starting in 1929 and

[07:43] Cameron McEwen: and going through 1930,

[07:47] Cameron McEwen: he tried to show that there was a kind of abysmal drop that had to be made in the course of understanding,

[07:59] Cameron McEwen: and that instead of making that drop with him,

[08:04] Cameron McEwen: people had tried to paper it over.

[08:08] Cameron McEwen: And that was why they had not understood.

[08:10] Cameron McEwen: it.

[08:11] Cameron McEwen: And so he then...

[08:13] Cameron McEwen: took upon himself the task of trying to show how that abysmal drop works,

[08:22] Cameron McEwen: both in terms of contemporary history and in terms of the history of thought.

[08:29] Cameron McEwen: And so that's what he did for the next almost 50 years of his remaining life.

[08:36] Cameron McEwen: But we're in the same place today,

[08:38] Cameron McEwen: and

[08:39] Cameron McEwen: McLuhan took up that same task.

[08:44] Cameron McEwen: How are people to understand that their place in the world includes an understanding of the abyss,

[08:56] Cameron McEwen: basically?

[08:57] Cameron McEwen: How is it that the abyss allows understanding or issues in understanding?

[09:05] Cameron McEwen: And so that's what he calls our place in the macrocosm.

[09:11] Cameron McEwen: in the long passage at the end of

[09:14] Cameron McEwen: War and Peace,

[09:16] Cameron McEwen: and what he's taking up again,

[09:19] Cameron McEwen: both in cliché to archetype and take today.

[09:23] Bob Dobbs: Yeah,

[09:23] Bob Dobbs: so

[09:25] Bob Dobbs: McLuhan kind of dismissed

[09:29] Bob Dobbs: Heidegger in Laws of Media.

[09:32] Bob Dobbs: They said,

[09:33] Bob Dobbs: yeah,

[09:33] Bob Dobbs: he was responding,

[09:34] Bob Dobbs: knee-jerk responding to new requests for Periceps,

[09:37] Bob Dobbs: but he didn't understand where it came from.

[09:39] Bob Dobbs: Would you agree with that?

[09:40] Cameron McEwen: Well,

[09:41] Cameron McEwen: I'm in laws and laws of media was put together by Eric,

[09:48] Cameron McEwen: of course.

[09:50] Cameron McEwen: And

[09:51] Cameron McEwen: I have some posts on

[09:54] Cameron McEwen: McLuhan reading

[09:57] Cameron McEwen: Heidegger, and his readings,

[09:59] Cameron McEwen: I think,

[10:00] Cameron McEwen: are very good.

[10:01] Cameron McEwen: And in general,

[10:03] Cameron McEwen: they're very positive.

[10:05] Cameron McEwen: So

[10:06] Cameron McEwen: I don't take what he says in

[10:09] Cameron McEwen: Laws of Media as being what

[10:13] Cameron McEwen: Eric took him to be saying in Laws of Media.

[10:16] Cameron McEwen: I don't take that to be his last word.

[10:20] Cameron McEwen: I think

[10:21] Cameron McEwen: McLuhan understood Heidegger in an unusual and enlightening way.

[10:27] Cameron McEwen: And what he did was he handed over the task that

[10:36] Cameron McEwen: Heidegger was probing and that he himself,

[10:40] Cameron McEwen: McLuhan himself,

[10:41] Cameron McEwen: was probing for us further to question.

[10:47] Cameron McEwen: As an example,

[10:47] Cameron McEwen: when he talks,

[10:48] Cameron McEwen: he says Innis passage,

[10:50] Cameron McEwen: a planet parenthesized.

[10:52] Cameron McEwen: What does that mean?

[10:53] Cameron McEwen: It means that all human beings,

[10:58] Cameron McEwen: everything that's ever happened on the planet and everything that will happen on the planet is parenthesized by a certain limitation.

[11:09] Cameron McEwen: And human beings,

[11:11] Cameron McEwen: in order to be real human beings,

[11:14] Cameron McEwen: need to understand that limitation,

[11:17] Cameron McEwen: need to come out of that limitation in order to understand themselves and their fate.

[11:23] Cameron McEwen: So most of what's going on in the planet today is an attempt to deny that limitation,

[11:31] Cameron McEwen: an attempt to assert that,

[11:33] Cameron McEwen: oh,

[11:33] Cameron McEwen: we know very well what right and wrong is,

[11:35] Cameron McEwen: we know what progress is,

[11:37] Cameron McEwen: and all that sort of stuff.

[11:38] Bob Dobbs: Yeah,

[11:38] Bob Dobbs: there are directions and goals.

[11:40] Cameron McEwen: Yeah,

[11:41] Cameron McEwen: it's all bullshit,

[11:42] Cameron McEwen: total bullshit,

[11:42] Cameron McEwen: right?

[11:43] Cameron McEwen: Yeah.

[11:44] Bob Dobbs: So where does McLuhan do accurate readings of Heidegger?

[11:49] Bob Dobbs: What's the title of the articles that you have done on that?

[11:53] Cameron McEwen: Well,

[11:54] Cameron McEwen: you could just click on Heidegger in the categories.

[11:59] Bob Dobbs: Okay.

[12:00] Cameron McEwen: And they would get that.

[12:04] Bob Dobbs: Okay.

[12:04] Cameron McEwen: Plus,

[12:05] Cameron McEwen: of course,

[12:06] Cameron McEwen: one of the things about my blog that I think is interesting is that it has very...

[12:13] Cameron McEwen: advanced search capabilities.

[12:16] Cameron McEwen: So in

[12:18] Cameron McEwen: McLuhan research,

[12:20] Cameron McEwen: people are always going on about,

[12:22] Cameron McEwen: oh,

[12:23] Cameron McEwen: the digital this and the digital that.

[12:25] Cameron McEwen: But in fact,

[12:27] Cameron McEwen: McLuhan research is entirely chaos.

[12:31] Cameron McEwen: Nobody pays any attention to the digital environment.

[12:34] Cameron McEwen: It's quite incredible.

[12:35] Cameron McEwen: And so you have somebody like Andrew Chrystall,

[12:38] Cameron McEwen: for example,

[12:39] Cameron McEwen: who continually and

[12:42] Cameron McEwen: is praising,

[12:43] Cameron McEwen: quote-unquote,

[12:44] Cameron McEwen: the digital,

[12:45] Cameron McEwen: but he,

[12:46] Cameron McEwen: like the rest of the industry,

[12:49] Cameron McEwen: doesn't pay any attention to the digital.

[12:53] Cameron McEwen: It would be funny if it weren't kind of pathetic.

[12:56] Bob Dobbs: Yeah,

[12:56] Bob Dobbs: what are they missing?

[12:57] Bob Dobbs: What do you mean that he talks about the digital,

[13:00] Bob Dobbs: but he ignores the digital?

[13:02] Cameron McEwen: Right.

[13:03] Cameron McEwen: Well,

[13:03] Cameron McEwen: it means the digital has two different senses,

[13:07] Cameron McEwen: both of which are missed.

[13:08] Cameron McEwen: So they...

[13:15] Cameron McEwen: One aspect of the digital is simply information that is primarily digital.

[13:22] Cameron McEwen: So your book is an e-book.

[13:25] Cameron McEwen: It's not a book.

[13:26] Cameron McEwen: Right.

[13:27] Cameron McEwen: So one of the things that you would need to do in understanding the digital is you'd have to understand information that is digital from the outset.

[13:41] Cameron McEwen: But then the difficulty is to understand information that's digital from the outset,

[13:48] Cameron McEwen: you have to begin yourself to understand digitally from the outset.

[13:56] Cameron McEwen: So in order to read information that's digital from the outset,

[14:00] Cameron McEwen: your mind has to be digital from the outset.

[14:03] Cameron McEwen: And it's that flip that is the key thing.

[14:08] Cameron McEwen: And if you don't understand that,

[14:10] Cameron McEwen: flip and if you don't follow along with that flip then you can't read McLuhan you can't start to do McLuhan research so we have a we have a world industry of people going around and being McLuhan experts and publishing

[14:26] Cameron McEwen: books on McLuhan experts and having conventions and all sorts of meetings where McLuhan is supposedly the topic but nobody has

[14:39] Cameron McEwen: started to actually read them.

[14:43] Bob Dobbs: Do you mean to read what are in his books?

[14:47] Cameron McEwen: Yes,

[14:47] Cameron McEwen: I mean,

[14:48] Cameron McEwen: just what I said before,

[14:49] Cameron McEwen: that to read information that is structured digitally,

[14:57] Cameron McEwen: you have to have your thought itself needs to begin digitally.

[15:03] Cameron McEwen: And in order to read McLuhan passages like the one you just read or the ones from Take Today that you read last time,

[15:13] Cameron McEwen: You can't read these passages by...

[15:16] Cameron McEwen: starting at the beginning and going to the end and following along.

[15:20] Cameron McEwen: That's not how McLuhan Wright.

[15:22] Cameron McEwen: That's not what McLuhan was trying to say.

[15:25] Cameron McEwen: You have any passage from McLuhan,

[15:28] Cameron McEwen: you have to read,

[15:29] Cameron McEwen: you have to start at the end and then reread or retrieve or replay how he starts.

[15:37] Bob Dobbs: So you click from 1975 to 1942 or something?

[15:43] Cameron McEwen: Yes,

[15:43] Cameron McEwen: absolutely.

[15:44] Cameron McEwen: Absolutely.

[15:45] Bob Dobbs: That's the reading.

[15:46] Cameron McEwen: Yeah,

[15:47] Bob Dobbs: McLuhan.

[15:49] Bob Dobbs: Yes.

[15:49] Bob Dobbs: Did Andrew do something in general lately,

[15:52] Bob Dobbs: or are you just remembering your reading of him,

[15:55] Bob Dobbs: citing him as an example?

[15:58] Cameron McEwen: Well,

[15:59] Cameron McEwen: I can't remember the article.

[16:03] Cameron McEwen: I think he did something on

[16:05] Cameron McEwen: Havelock that he published.

[16:06] Cameron McEwen: Oh,

[16:07] Cameron McEwen: he did,

[16:07] Cameron McEwen: yeah,

[16:08] Bob Dobbs: last year.

[16:09] Cameron McEwen: Yeah,

[16:09] Cameron McEwen: in the Canadian Journal of Communication.

[16:12] Bob Dobbs: Yeah.

[16:12] Cameron McEwen: And...

[16:13] Cameron McEwen: he laments in there that people haven't done various things.

[16:19] Cameron McEwen: But I've written extensively about them,

[16:21] Cameron McEwen: and you and I have talked extensively about them.

[16:24] Cameron McEwen: And so you have to say,

[16:26] Cameron McEwen: well,

[16:26] Cameron McEwen: why does that not count?

[16:29] Cameron McEwen: And that doesn't count because it's digital.

[16:34] Cameron McEwen: And it's digital in the two ways I was saying.

[16:37] Cameron McEwen: It's digital in that it's not put into digital or...

[16:42] Cameron McEwen: digital in quotes.

[16:43] Cameron McEwen: It's not put into digital form derived from the book.

[16:48] Cameron McEwen: It's digital from the outset.

[16:50] Cameron McEwen: And in order to understand something that's digital from the outset,

[16:54] Cameron McEwen: your thinking has to start from tactility from the outset.

[16:59] Cameron McEwen: And that's the whole question that McLuhan poses and that McLuhan research is designed to avoid.

[17:11] Bob Dobbs: Are you saying that you take advantage of the fact that all the works are digitized or that one can make a digital collection and then you jump from

[17:21] Bob Dobbs: 42 to 77?

[17:24] Bob Dobbs: That's the way you see it's all one big work or something?

[17:29] Cameron McEwen: Well,

[17:30] Cameron McEwen: I wouldn't put it exactly like that.

[17:32] Cameron McEwen: I would say that

[17:34] Cameron McEwen: McLuhan, like any great thinker,

[17:40] Cameron McEwen: So this...

[17:41] Cameron McEwen: The kind of thought that I'm recommending or attempting to describe or attempting to translate reaches a high point in Plato already.

[17:57] Cameron McEwen: So the need to think by starting again is already very plain in Plato,

[18:08] Cameron McEwen: and he probably takes it over from...

[18:11] Cameron McEwen: older thinkers.

[18:12] Cameron McEwen: So he spent a lot of time in his later career talking about the pre-Socratics,

[18:21] Cameron McEwen: especially Heraclitus and Parmenides.

[18:25] Cameron McEwen: So

[18:26] Cameron McEwen: Plato already saw his task as one of taking over what had been talked about before,

[18:38] Cameron McEwen: but attempting to clarify it so that

[18:40] Cameron McEwen: People wouldn't mistake it.

[18:43] Cameron McEwen: But the problem is that in attempting to translate what is already stuff that's difficult for people to understand,

[19:01] Cameron McEwen: the problem of the initial understanding gets multiplied.

[19:09] Cameron McEwen: squared,

[19:09] Cameron McEwen: as you might say,

[19:12] Cameron McEwen: or even cubed.

[19:13] Cameron McEwen: So the great difficulty is that already for Plato and then going through people up to

[19:26] Cameron McEwen: Heidegger and then on to McLuhan,

[19:28] Cameron McEwen: the great difficulty is to try to show that

[19:34] Cameron McEwen: The limitations of the world,

[19:37] Cameron McEwen: the parentheses of the world,

[19:40] Cameron McEwen: are what enable understanding.

[19:43] Cameron McEwen: They're not what prevents understanding.

[19:46] Cameron McEwen: And people in general,

[19:51] Cameron McEwen: and I would say it's becoming more and more and more the case,

[19:55] Cameron McEwen: the less people think that they have anything to do with religion,

[19:59] Cameron McEwen: anything to do with the sort of highfalutin thought.

[20:05] Cameron McEwen: The less they think they have to do with those things,

[20:08] Cameron McEwen: the more they're bound up by the rules of those things.

[20:11] Cameron McEwen: So people think that they have no relationship with God,

[20:17] Cameron McEwen: no relationship with the tradition,

[20:20] Cameron McEwen: but they become more and more tightly enclosed in what the tradition was about.

[20:26] Cameron McEwen: And that's one way to understand the global theater,

[20:31] Cameron McEwen: one way to understand the roles that people are playing.

[20:34] Cameron McEwen: There's roles that people play that they have some awareness of,

[20:39] Cameron McEwen: and then there's roles that people play that they have no awareness of.

[20:43] Cameron McEwen: And I'm talking about both of those in terms of

[20:48] Cameron McEwen: McLuhan research.

[20:50] Bob Dobbs: Right.

[20:50] Bob Dobbs: So I don't get you say,

[20:52] Bob Dobbs: Andrew is talking about the digital,

[20:54] Bob Dobbs: and then he ignores the digital.

[20:56] Bob Dobbs: You're using that word twice.

[20:58] Bob Dobbs: What's the difference?

[20:59] Cameron McEwen: Correct.

[21:00] Cameron McEwen: Correct.

[21:00] Cameron McEwen: Exactly.

[21:03] Cameron McEwen: What I said was there's information that's in digital form,

[21:07] Cameron McEwen: and then there's the tactility that is needed in order to understand not only the stuff that's in digital form,

[21:16] Cameron McEwen: needed to understand anything.

[21:19] Bob Dobbs: So why are you calling that tactility?

[21:21] Bob Dobbs: What's that?

[21:23] Cameron McEwen: That's the ability to start from the end.

[21:27] Cameron McEwen: That's the ability to understand that.

[21:30] Cameron McEwen: The up and the down and the beginning and the end are bound together by what you're calling intermediality here.

[21:42] Bob Dobbs: Yeah,

[21:42] Bob Dobbs: so you're saying to follow up on whatever insights you get from reading an article by McLuhan is to go to Plato or go to

[21:53] Bob Dobbs: Shakespeare. You're saying jump to other previous...

[21:57] Bob Dobbs: categorized information that you might think is not relevant.

[22:01] Cameron McEwen: That's one way to do it,

[22:02] Cameron McEwen: but as you said a few minutes ago yourself,

[22:07] Cameron McEwen: another way to do it is to go backwards in McLuhan and reread something and then to come up in his career from there.

[22:17] Cameron McEwen: So you're continually going from the end to the beginning.

[22:22] Cameron McEwen: And the great need is to understand what's...

[22:26] Cameron McEwen: in between those?

[22:28] Cameron McEwen: Why does that work?

[22:30] Cameron McEwen: What was going on already in McLuhan early stuff that bore the seeds of his later stuff?

[22:40] Cameron McEwen: Why does probing of his early stuff lead McLuhan to where he gets to in the later stuff?

[22:49] Cameron McEwen: And how does that not,

[22:51] Cameron McEwen: that K-N-O-T,

[22:52] Cameron McEwen: how does that not work?

[22:54] Cameron McEwen: Yeah.

[22:56] Bob Dobbs: I see the people say today,

[23:01] Bob Dobbs: well,

[23:01] Bob Dobbs: McLuhan did a few books,

[23:04] Bob Dobbs: opened up the studies.

[23:05] Bob Dobbs: Now we need a new McLuhan or we need to look at some new stuff or make our own stuff.

[23:09] Bob Dobbs: And you're saying,

[23:10] Bob Dobbs: no,

[23:11] Bob Dobbs: McLuhan pretty well did it all.

[23:13] Bob Dobbs: You just haven't read it all.

[23:14] Bob Dobbs: You don't know what he's done.

[23:17] Bob Dobbs: And so you don't have to look for new translators of McLuhan,

[23:22] Bob Dobbs: new writers.

[23:23] Bob Dobbs: You need to spend more time reading all of McLuhan,

[23:25] Bob Dobbs: is what you're saying.

[23:26] Cameron McEwen: Right.

[23:28] Cameron McEwen: When you say it's all there in McLuhan,

[23:33] Cameron McEwen: the question is,

[23:33] Cameron McEwen: what is that all?

[23:34] Cameron McEwen: Yeah.

[23:36] Cameron McEwen: That cannot be understood in Gutenbergian terms.

[23:39] Cameron McEwen: We're not trying to get to some great answer because the planet is parenthesized,

[23:46] Cameron McEwen: as he says Innis quote,

[23:48] Cameron McEwen: humans do not have and never will have that.

[23:53] Cameron McEwen: Great answer.

[23:54] Cameron McEwen: Humans like to think that they can have it.

[23:58] Cameron McEwen: They like to think that they can know virtue with no problem.

[24:05] Cameron McEwen: They think they can know the meaning of life.

[24:08] Bob Dobbs: And then drop,

[24:09] Bob Dobbs: and then not have to deal with something.

[24:11] Bob Dobbs: Drop that.

[24:12] Bob Dobbs: I've got that mastered.

[24:14] Bob Dobbs: Move on to something else.

[24:16] Cameron McEwen: Right.

[24:17] Cameron McEwen: But always moving on is always a question of either.

[24:22] Cameron McEwen: Now I've got it.

[24:24] Cameron McEwen: Or what's the process?

[24:28] Cameron McEwen: What's the linear way that I have to go in order to get it?

[24:32] Cameron McEwen: But none of that works because of the parentheses.

[24:35] Cameron McEwen: Human beings are in a limited context,

[24:39] Cameron McEwen: and the great thing to understand is how does limitation or how do limitation and understanding belong together?

[24:48] Cameron McEwen: And that belonging together is the intermediate that you're about to talk about.

[24:54] Bob Dobbs: Yes,

[24:54] Bob Dobbs: that's exactly what my book is.

[24:57] Bob Dobbs: I take the new ground,

[24:58] Bob Dobbs: the tech body,

[24:59] Bob Dobbs: and I go back and find it in McLuhan.

[25:02] Bob Dobbs: rather than look at the latest science fiction or abstract virtual theoretician from somewhere that's getting interviewed or something,

[25:13] Bob Dobbs: or even Jordan Peterson.

[25:15] Bob Dobbs: No,

[25:16] Bob Dobbs: I went back to prove that McLuhan anticipated the tick body.

[25:19] Bob Dobbs: That's going back and finding stuff in McLuhan that no one knows is there.

[25:24] Bob Dobbs: That's exactly what you're asking,

[25:26] Bob Dobbs: is what I've done Innis paper.

[25:29] Cameron McEwen: Yeah.

[25:30] Cameron McEwen: So...

[25:31] Cameron McEwen: It's interesting that you mention

[25:33] Cameron McEwen: Jordan Peterson because he has this year lectured at both Oxford and Cambridge lectures that are available in

[25:48] Cameron McEwen: YouTube.

[25:50] Cameron McEwen: And in both of those lectures,

[25:54] Cameron McEwen: he comes up to the point where he should be turning to McLuhan.

[25:59] Bob Dobbs: Yep,

[26:00] Bob Dobbs: I've seen that.

[26:01] Cameron McEwen: And so people are saying,

[26:03] Cameron McEwen: oh,

[26:04] Cameron McEwen: here's this great thinker and here's all this sort of stuff.

[26:07] Cameron McEwen: But in order for him to understand his own program,

[26:17] Cameron McEwen: he really should be turning to McLuhan.

[26:20] Cameron McEwen: But,

[26:21] Cameron McEwen: of course,

[26:21] Cameron McEwen: he's not doing it yet.

[26:23] Bob Dobbs: Because he's distracted by commenting on whatever's going on this week with Rex Murphy or somebody.

[26:30] Bob Dobbs: whatever the news story is,

[26:32] Bob Dobbs: or he's going the old circuit,

[26:33] Bob Dobbs: the Gutenberg circuit like Oxford.

[26:35] Bob Dobbs: He should deny,

[26:36] Bob Dobbs: he should turn them all down,

[26:40] Bob Dobbs: their request.

[26:40] Cameron McEwen: Perhaps.

[26:41] Cameron McEwen: He certainly needs to enter into the parentheses in a way that he doesn't.

[26:48] Bob Dobbs: Yeah,

[26:48] Bob Dobbs: that's what struck me is,

[26:50] Bob Dobbs: wow,

[26:51] Bob Dobbs: this guy goes right up,

[26:53] Bob Dobbs: and McLuhan is where he needs to go,

[26:57] Bob Dobbs: and he doesn't.

[26:58] Bob Dobbs: And that's...

[26:58] Bob Dobbs: interesting you watch this person.

[27:00] Bob Dobbs: He's stuck there.

[27:01] Bob Dobbs: He can't go through the door.

[27:02] Bob Dobbs: He doesn't even know the door is there.

[27:05] Bob Dobbs: Right,

[27:05] Cameron McEwen: because it's behind them.

[27:06] Cameron McEwen: It's behind them in two senses,

[27:09] Cameron McEwen: right?

[27:10] Cameron McEwen: McLuhan dead and what McLuhan would indicate to him is you've got to turn around and understand in a different way how you've come to where you are.

[27:23] Bob Dobbs: And nobody's out there to tell him that.

[27:26] Bob Dobbs: There was about

[27:27] Bob Dobbs: four years ago when I first noticed him,

[27:31] Bob Dobbs: somebody brought up McLuhan and he said,

[27:33] Bob Dobbs: hmm,

[27:34] Bob Dobbs: that's an interesting point.

[27:35] Bob Dobbs: I've got to look into that.

[27:36] Bob Dobbs: I bet you he didn't.

[27:37] Bob Dobbs: He's too distracted going around filling in the gap for people who don't want to do anything or learn anything.

[27:45] Bob Dobbs: He could become a package.

[27:47] Bob Dobbs: Now,

[27:47] Bob Dobbs: McLuhan didn't do that.

[27:49] Cameron McEwen: Filling in the gap is a great phrase.

[27:52] Bob Dobbs: Yeah.

[27:53] Bob Dobbs: And McLuhan,

[27:54] Bob Dobbs: when he went to Oxford and these places,

[27:55] Bob Dobbs: he stirred them up.

[27:58] Bob Dobbs: They end up saying,

[27:59] Bob Dobbs: well,

[28:00] Bob Dobbs: we got this guy here.

[28:00] Bob Dobbs: This guy's irrelevant.

[28:02] Bob Dobbs: He doesn't help us at all.

[28:03] Bob Dobbs: They don't say that about Peterson.

[28:04] Cameron McEwen: He doesn't know what he's talking about.

[28:06] Cameron McEwen: He contradicts himself.

[28:08] Bob Dobbs: Peterson probably is going to get more trophies,

[28:11] Bob Dobbs: Order of Canada and all this nonsense.

[28:15] Bob Dobbs: And meanwhile,

[28:16] Bob Dobbs: we're doing the real work.

[28:17] Bob Dobbs: Well,

[28:19] Cameron McEwen: I got to hand it to

[28:21] Cameron McEwen: Jordan Peterson in that he dropped out of University of...

[28:26] Cameron McEwen: Toronto.

[28:27] Cameron McEwen: He's getting into arguments with the government of Canada and the Supreme Court of Canada.

[28:37] Cameron McEwen: So he's being a contrarian at the same time that he's being this famous guy that you were talking about.

[28:45] Cameron McEwen: And the great question is how those belong together.

[28:50] Cameron McEwen: And I don't think that he himself has understood that.

[28:55] Bob Dobbs: Yeah,

[28:55] Bob Dobbs: he's

[28:55] Bob Dobbs: He's going to get lost in these rabbit holes,

[28:58] Bob Dobbs: fighting these old bureaucracies.

[29:00] Bob Dobbs: He's got to point out how they're not dealing with what's happening,

[29:04] Bob Dobbs: not what they're doing.

[29:05] Bob Dobbs: What they're doing,

[29:06] Bob Dobbs: yeah,

[29:06] Bob Dobbs: it's wrong what they're doing,

[29:07] Bob Dobbs: but that's not the issue.

[29:08] Bob Dobbs: They shouldn't be paid attention to anymore.

[29:11] Bob Dobbs: They don't apply.

[29:13] Cameron McEwen: But the only way that he could genuinely do that is by realizing that he himself shouldn't be paid attention to.

[29:22] Bob Dobbs: Yeah.

[29:23] Cameron McEwen: So,

[29:23] Cameron McEwen: um...

[29:28] Cameron McEwen: He wants to achieve.

[29:31] Cameron McEwen: some sort of clarification as the end goal of a process and that won't work yeah so the only the only way for him to do what he said he thinks he wants to do is to drop out yeah

[29:48] Cameron McEwen: I can't drop out every drop out is a drop in is taking the only way to drop in yeah yeah that's how you drop in parentheses we choke

[29:59] Cameron McEwen: Sorry,

[30:00] Cameron McEwen: what did you say?

[30:00] Bob Dobbs: I said that's the way you drop in.

[30:02] Bob Dobbs: You drop out.

[30:06] Bob Dobbs: Okay,

[30:06] Bob Dobbs: so,

[30:07] Bob Dobbs: okay.

[30:08] Cameron McEwen: Notice,

[30:08] Cameron McEwen: by the way,

[30:09] Cameron McEwen: how that fits in with what I was trying to talk about with Heidegger in 1930,

[30:14] Cameron McEwen: is that he was saying that Being and Time had not been understood because people did not understand how to drop out.

[30:23] Cameron McEwen: They couldn't come to terms with their own finitude.

[30:27] Cameron McEwen: But coming to terms with your own finitude is what it means to exist in parentheses,

[30:33] Cameron McEwen: and that's where understanding is.

[30:38] Bob Dobbs: Okay,

[30:39] Bob Dobbs: so let's go on to my commentary about what I've read so far,

[30:45] Bob Dobbs: and then see what we've got to.

[30:48] Bob Dobbs: So

[30:50] Bob Dobbs: I say...

[30:50] Cameron McEwen: And people should notice that...

[30:55] Cameron McEwen: One of the things that you're doing is you're picking out seminal texts from

[31:02] Cameron McEwen: War and Peace in the Global Village,

[31:03] Cameron McEwen: from

[31:04] Cameron McEwen: Cliche and Archetype,

[31:05] Cameron McEwen: and Take Today.

[31:07] Cameron McEwen: And you're showing that there's something going on here that is both the same.

[31:17] Cameron McEwen: McLuhan talking about,

[31:18] Cameron McEwen: quote-unquote,

[31:18] Cameron McEwen: the same things.

[31:20] Cameron McEwen: But in order to understand the same things,

[31:22] Cameron McEwen: you have to understand the jumps between them.

[31:25] Bob Dobbs: Yeah,

[31:26] Bob Dobbs: and that's what I say.

[31:27] Bob Dobbs: I say the 70s became quite different from the

[31:30] Bob Dobbs: 60s. The baby boomers started snorting cocaine and going to Studio 54 or becoming a punk musician.

[31:36] Bob Dobbs: They got depressed in the

[31:38] Bob Dobbs: 70s because they thought the desired revolutions of the 60s didn't succeed.

[31:42] Bob Dobbs: McLuhan said the baby boomers went from glow to glum.

[31:45] Bob Dobbs: Remember the Kent State University shootings happened on May 4,

[31:49] Bob Dobbs: 1970,

[31:50] Bob Dobbs: and the students got nervous and scared.

[31:52] Bob Dobbs: More violence started.

[31:54] Bob Dobbs: to happen.

[31:55] Bob Dobbs: So I go,

[31:55] Bob Dobbs: remember the Kent State University shootings happened on May 4th and the students got nervous and scared,

[32:00] Bob Dobbs: more violence started to happen.

[32:03] Bob Dobbs: So I'm taking timely journalistic statements that were said all over the culture in the early 70s,

[32:08] Bob Dobbs: you know,

[32:09] Bob Dobbs: quoting cliches here,

[32:11] Bob Dobbs: and I'm saying apply that to what you just read McLuhan said about the constant espionage.

[32:19] Bob Dobbs: So then...

[32:24] Bob Dobbs: Go back up to the quote.

[32:31] Bob Dobbs: So this parenthesis,

[32:35] Bob Dobbs: I'm saying today that the tech body is parenthesis quadruple.

[32:44] Bob Dobbs: It's really claustrophobic now.

[32:46] Bob Dobbs: And it's not like these weird satellites out in space are framing Earth.

[32:52] Bob Dobbs: We have the frame in your home,

[32:55] Bob Dobbs: in your mind,

[32:56] Bob Dobbs: in your being.

[32:58] Bob Dobbs: That's so intimate,

[32:59] Bob Dobbs: the framing,

[33:00] Bob Dobbs: the parenthesis has happened.

[33:02] Bob Dobbs: That's Heidegger's word,

[33:03] Bob Dobbs: inframing.

[33:06] Bob Dobbs: What does he mean by that word,

[33:07] Bob Dobbs: do you know?

[33:09] Cameron McEwen: Yes,

[33:10] Cameron McEwen: he means the denial of parentheses,

[33:16] Cameron McEwen: right?

[33:17] Cameron McEwen: Parentheses seem to be a frame.

[33:21] Cameron McEwen: They seem to block out a phrase or a clarification or something.

[33:27] Cameron McEwen: But what

[33:28] Cameron McEwen: McLuhan means by parentheses is something like what Heidegger means by framing.

[33:35] Cameron McEwen: That is to say that framing needs to be seen to point beyond itself.

[33:44] Bob Dobbs: And I call that holopathy.

[33:45] Bob Dobbs: That's exactly what I mean.

[33:47] Bob Dobbs: It becomes more and more invisible,

[33:49] Bob Dobbs: the parenthesis.

[33:51] Bob Dobbs: It's no longer the proscenium arch by the 80s.

[33:55] Bob Dobbs: And then that becomes an art form,

[33:57] Bob Dobbs: so they start talking about Star Wars.

[33:59] Bob Dobbs: It became invisible,

[34:01] Bob Dobbs: right?

[34:01] Bob Dobbs: So Star Wars became the debate in the

[34:04] Bob Dobbs: 80s as the parentheses went deeper into maybe immunity problems,

[34:12] Bob Dobbs: AIDS,

[34:13] Bob Dobbs: and the beginning of what we have today with the plague.

[34:16] Cameron McEwen: Right,

[34:17] Cameron McEwen: so notice that...

[34:20] Cameron McEwen: The beginning of Being and Time is a quotation from

[34:28] Cameron McEwen: Plato's Dialogue.

[34:29] Cameron McEwen: the Sophist.

[34:32] Cameron McEwen: And in the Sophist at that point,

[34:35] Cameron McEwen: Plato is talking about what he calls the Gigantomachia Perot usius,

[34:42] Cameron McEwen: as to say the battle of the gods and the giants.

[34:47] Cameron McEwen: And the battle of the gods and the giants can be thought of as Star Wars.

[34:54] Cameron McEwen: So this notion

[35:03] Cameron McEwen: that Star Wars are coming into consciousness is a very fertile one if it is understood as

[35:16] Cameron McEwen: at once a papering over,

[35:19] Cameron McEwen: a misunderstanding of Star Wars that points beyond itself internally to the genuine.

[35:28] Cameron McEwen: Star Wars.

[35:30] Cameron McEwen: It's a very interesting phenomenon where something becomes conscious in the mode of being unconscious.

[35:38] Bob Dobbs: Yes.

[35:39] Bob Dobbs: So you have Star Wars becomes the celebrity battles that are within the world of constant surveillance,

[35:48] Bob Dobbs: and they're all surveilling each other,

[35:50] Bob Dobbs: epitomized by People magazine.

[35:52] Bob Dobbs: And so you see what you call the Hollywood the left,

[35:57] Bob Dobbs: but no,

[35:58] Bob Dobbs: it's...

[35:58] Bob Dobbs: the most divisive place going because they are the figure,

[36:03] Bob Dobbs: what Barry Nevitt called figure,

[36:04] Bob Dobbs: figure,

[36:05] Bob Dobbs: rather than the ground.

[36:06] Bob Dobbs: And so they are the battle that everybody is projecting on to the use for the military Star Wars.

[36:18] Bob Dobbs: That's the wrong Star Wars construction.

[36:23] Bob Dobbs: The Star Wars is the more and more competition.

[36:27] Bob Dobbs: between all the celebrities.

[36:28] Bob Dobbs: So you get into Crossfire in the 80s,

[36:30] Bob Dobbs: endless screaming and yelling at each other,

[36:32] Bob Dobbs: what they later called the culture wars.

[36:34] Bob Dobbs: That's the Star Wars that took over as espionage made everybody uncomfortable.

[36:41] Bob Dobbs: And yet that was the means to Gutenberg wealth,

[36:44] Bob Dobbs: constant surveillance of each other.

[36:46] Bob Dobbs: So,

[36:46] Bob Dobbs: you know,

[36:47] Bob Dobbs: you take the Oscars,

[36:49] Bob Dobbs: there's this whole military campaign to promote your movie a few months before the Oscar ceremony.

[36:55] Bob Dobbs: You know?

[36:56] Bob Dobbs: And people heard more about this over the last 10 years,

[36:59] Bob Dobbs: but it was going on earlier.

[37:01] Bob Dobbs: So the warfare of those that are supposed to put out messages to enlighten,

[37:09] Bob Dobbs: inspire,

[37:10] Bob Dobbs: calm people down,

[37:12] Bob Dobbs: give them role models,

[37:13] Bob Dobbs: are the most violent action in society.

[37:17] Bob Dobbs: The talk shows.

[37:20] Bob Dobbs: So

[37:21] Bob Dobbs: I'm thinking of a pun on Star Wars.

[37:22] Bob Dobbs: Are you thinking of that when you were...

[37:24] Bob Dobbs: Starting to play with the word Star Wars?

[37:27] Cameron McEwen: Well,

[37:28] Cameron McEwen: whenever I hear the term Star Wars,

[37:30] Cameron McEwen: I think about it as both a surface phenomenon that distracts and the great topic of world history.

[37:39] Cameron McEwen: And it's both.

[37:41] Cameron McEwen: But we've reached the point where

[37:45] Cameron McEwen: Star Wars is either going to kill us because we're playing with a nuclear topic

[37:55] Cameron McEwen: that has enormous power,

[37:58] Cameron McEwen: enormous potentially destructive power to it,

[38:01] Cameron McEwen: or we're going to understand Star Wars for the first time,

[38:05] Cameron McEwen: really understand it,

[38:07] Cameron McEwen: in which case the possibility of solving our problems comes before us.

[38:13] Bob Dobbs: And so you said,

[38:14] Bob Dobbs: you began by saying Star Wars would kill us.

[38:16] Bob Dobbs: You mean military hardware Star Wars?

[38:19] Cameron McEwen: Well,

[38:19] Cameron McEwen: it could be,

[38:20] Cameron McEwen: but I mean,

[38:21] Cameron McEwen: there's many other ways.

[38:23] Cameron McEwen: which we're killing ourselves,

[38:25] Cameron McEwen: human beings no longer have the possibility of information.

[38:33] Cameron McEwen: Our whole information environment exists to deny the possibility of information.

[38:41] Cameron McEwen: And Posthuman beings may just become some sort of animal species that hasn't killed itself militarily,

[38:50] Cameron McEwen: but it's killed itself.

[38:51] Cameron McEwen: So that's,

[38:52] Cameron McEwen: human beings are no longer human beings.

[38:54] Bob Dobbs: Yeah,

[38:55] Bob Dobbs: psychically,

[38:56] Bob Dobbs: it's killed themselves.

[38:58] Bob Dobbs: Like Zappa,

[38:59] Bob Dobbs: he was interviewed in the

[39:02] Bob Dobbs: 80s about Star Wars,

[39:03] Bob Dobbs: and he said,

[39:04] Bob Dobbs: Star Wars won't work.

[39:05] Bob Dobbs: The real issue is biological warfare.

[39:08] Bob Dobbs: There's no defenses from that.

[39:11] Bob Dobbs: And Johnny Carson was stunned by this.

[39:13] Bob Dobbs: Oh,

[39:13] Bob Dobbs: wow,

[39:14] Bob Dobbs: he said,

[39:14] Bob Dobbs: that's amazing.

[39:15] Bob Dobbs: You know,

[39:16] Bob Dobbs: Zappa pointed out another technological frontier that was unfolding.

[39:21] Bob Dobbs: that Star Wars did not address.

[39:25] Bob Dobbs: So that would be the plagues which we have today.

[39:31] Cameron McEwen: Yeah,

[39:31] Cameron McEwen: I mean,

[39:34] Cameron McEwen: the power that human beings have and think that they control,

[39:42] Cameron McEwen: of course,

[39:43] Cameron McEwen: that's false.

[39:44] Cameron McEwen: But the power that human beings are exposed to and that is given over to them is a power of total control.

[39:56] Cameron McEwen: But that total control,

[39:59] Cameron McEwen: if it's...

[40:00] Cameron McEwen: exercised without understanding is a control of depth.

[40:06] Bob Dobbs: Yeah,

[40:07] Bob Dobbs: so we have here this section we quoted is a description of surveillance capitalism.

[40:15] Bob Dobbs: That's the new code word from that writer out of Harvard,

[40:17] Bob Dobbs: that woman,

[40:18] Bob Dobbs: about the turn in 2012 with the

[40:21] Bob Dobbs: Facebook, Google,

[40:22] Bob Dobbs: and them starting to exchange hyper,

[40:25] Bob Dobbs: hyper exchanges of nothing,

[40:27] Bob Dobbs: but calling it...

[40:29] Bob Dobbs: useful information about people and trying to make patterns out of it you know so that when McLuhan says information itself becomes the largest business in the world see that's silicon alley but nobody had one image of that at all in 1970 but yes but notice how notice how there's different

[40:50] Cameron McEwen: readings of that so the when when something is the uh biggest industry um

[40:59] Cameron McEwen: That can be thought of in terms of media conglomerates and the CIA and all of that sort of stuff,

[41:06] Cameron McEwen: or it can be thought of as what is prior Posthuman beings and to which they are subjected as human beings.

[41:19] Cameron McEwen: And so understanding media can be taken in the former sense,

[41:25] Cameron McEwen: and

[41:26] Cameron McEwen: McLuhan was perfectly willing to talk about it in the former sense.

[41:28] Cameron McEwen: farmer sense,

[41:29] Cameron McEwen: but what he was talking about was an attempt to clarify the latter sense,

[41:36] Cameron McEwen: the idea that there are shapes that he already called the trivium back in 1943.

[41:46] Cameron McEwen: There are shapes that are prior Posthuman being,

[41:49] Cameron McEwen: and if humans are to understand that being that they are,

[41:53] Cameron McEwen: they need to understand those prior shapes.

[41:56] Cameron McEwen: and

[41:58] Cameron McEwen: The word prior there is key because that indicates the need to go back to the beginning and start again from the beginning with those shapes.

[42:10] Cameron McEwen: And that's the great question that hangs over human beings right now.

[42:15] Cameron McEwen: Are they going to use those shapes to destroy themselves or are they going to subject themselves to those shapes to understand themselves?

[42:25] Bob Dobbs: What's the example of a shape that was...

[42:26] Bob Dobbs: prior Posthuman media.

[42:31] Cameron McEwen: So if we look at it in terms of McLuhan career,

[42:35] Cameron McEwen: what he deals with in his

[42:37] Cameron McEwen: Nash thesis are the three forms of the trivium that shape from the start the different ways of education,

[42:53] Cameron McEwen: the different ways of...

[42:56] Cameron McEwen: Self-Condemned between the year 500 BC,

[43:00] Cameron McEwen: or actually 400 BC,

[43:02] Cameron McEwen: and 1600.

[43:05] Cameron McEwen: So

[43:06] Cameron McEwen: 2,000 years of Self-Condemned is described by McLuhan in his thesis as the play of three different forms of conceptuality.

[43:21] Cameron McEwen: And that thesis then forms a

[43:25] Cameron McEwen: a kind of ground that he then probes for the almost 40 years left of his life.

[43:36] Bob Dobbs: Yeah,

[43:36] Bob Dobbs: so these divisions,

[43:39] Bob Dobbs: there's the medieval and then the merchant capitalism,

[43:42] Bob Dobbs: mercantilism takes over,

[43:45] Bob Dobbs: are really barriers to understanding what's all available.

[43:50] Bob Dobbs: You can see that's what Joyce tried to show with Phineas Wake.

[43:54] Bob Dobbs: He dumped all cultural information in the same big now.

[44:01] Cameron McEwen: I was actually going to say exactly what you just said.

[44:06] Cameron McEwen: And it relates to what we were saying earlier about McLuhan research.

[44:10] Cameron McEwen: If humans try to understand their being,

[44:15] Cameron McEwen: their fate,

[44:16] Cameron McEwen: in linear terms,

[44:18] Cameron McEwen: you can't get anywhere.

[44:20] Cameron McEwen: And that's what all of the science is.

[44:23] Cameron McEwen: All of the sciences show that you need to begin with forms.

[44:30] Cameron McEwen: that do not have history in that sense.

[44:33] Cameron McEwen: So in chemistry,

[44:34] Cameron McEwen: you have the elements.

[44:36] Cameron McEwen: The elements don't have a history.

[44:39] Cameron McEwen: They are what is always there and gets expressed.

[44:43] Cameron McEwen: Or in DNA,

[44:45] Cameron McEwen: the forms of possible

[44:49] Cameron McEwen: DNA configuration are always there.

[44:54] Cameron McEwen: And so the understanding or the laws in physics,

[44:58] Cameron McEwen: for example,

[45:00] Cameron McEwen: Understanding anything in these various fields needs to be able to start with forms that do not have a history and then understand our history,

[45:12] Cameron McEwen: the history of the planet,

[45:14] Cameron McEwen: in terms of those ahistorical forms.

[45:18] Cameron McEwen: And that's really the trick.

[45:20] Cameron McEwen: How do you come back from linearity to synchronicity?

[45:24] Cameron McEwen: How do we,

[45:26] Cameron McEwen: in understanding our own understanding,

[45:29] Cameron McEwen: How do we come back from linearity,

[45:33] Cameron McEwen: from the attempt to get somewhere,

[45:35] Cameron McEwen: to an understanding of where we've already come from?

[45:39] Bob Dobbs: And McLuhan answer was 20th century art has to be a collage.

[45:45] Cameron McEwen: Yeah,

[45:46] Cameron McEwen: or it already is a collage,

[45:49] Cameron McEwen: whether it knows it or not.

[45:53] Cameron McEwen: And that collage implicates borders.

[45:57] Cameron McEwen: In order to have a collage,

[45:58] Cameron McEwen: you have to have difference.

[46:00] Cameron McEwen: In order to have difference,

[46:02] Cameron McEwen: you need to have parentheses.

[46:04] Cameron McEwen: And so in the passage that you're reading from Cliche and Archetype,

[46:09] Cameron McEwen: he's saying that the whole earth is parenthesized.

[46:14] Cameron McEwen: The whole earth is a collage.

[46:17] Cameron McEwen: And until human beings understand the limitation inside themselves,

[46:24] Cameron McEwen: the limitation that is built...

[46:26] Cameron McEwen: into them as a collage,

[46:28] Cameron McEwen: then they really can't understand anything and they can destroy themselves through that lack of understanding.

[46:36] Bob Dobbs: Right.

[46:36] Bob Dobbs: So you have do your own thing in cliché to archetype.

[46:41] Bob Dobbs: And you go to the next quote,

[46:42] Bob Dobbs: which is from

[46:44] Bob Dobbs: Take Today.

[46:45] Bob Dobbs: So a couple of years later,

[46:48] Bob Dobbs: this is from pages 294 and 295 in Take Today.

[46:52] Bob Dobbs: Now listen to this.

[46:54] Cameron McEwen: We should point out to people,

[46:56] Cameron McEwen: this is the very end of Take Today.

[46:59] Bob Dobbs: Yes.

[47:00] Cameron McEwen: This is not the very last words,

[47:02] Cameron McEwen: but it's almost the last words.

[47:04] Bob Dobbs: Yeah,

[47:04] Bob Dobbs: it's the second last pages.

[47:06] Bob Dobbs: I think it ends in 296,

[47:08] Bob Dobbs: 297.

[47:10] Bob Dobbs: So look at this quote.

[47:11] Bob Dobbs: It says,

[47:12] Bob Dobbs: Many may think that we are now safely ensconced inside a utopian kingdom like Rabelais'

[47:19] Bob Dobbs: Abbey of Thélème,

[47:20] Bob Dobbs: the fantastic world of do-as-you-like.

[47:23] Bob Dobbs: There it is.

[47:24] Bob Dobbs: Now the global theater prompts you to do your thing.

[47:27] Bob Dobbs: Now it is a fantastic world of do as you like.

[47:32] Bob Dobbs: Doing your own thing has become exaggerated.

[47:35] Bob Dobbs: In fact,

[47:36] Bob Dobbs: we have now to replace nature itself,

[47:38] Bob Dobbs: remaking it as an art form perfectly accommodated to the totality of human needs and aspirations.

[47:44] Bob Dobbs: Such an enterprise requires nothing less than inclusive awareness of human resources and limitations.

[47:49] Bob Dobbs: That's your point,

[47:50] Bob Dobbs: limitations.

[47:51] Bob Dobbs: Yep.

[47:53] Bob Dobbs: Man-made nature,

[47:54] Bob Dobbs: fashioned according to life as art,

[47:56] Bob Dobbs: may tax human creativity far beyond anything levied on pre-satellite man.

[48:01] Bob Dobbs: So he's saying man-made nature is going to be more creative than human.

[48:10] Cameron McEwen: And notice how you're circling back.

[48:12] Cameron McEwen: All of these quotes,

[48:14] Cameron McEwen: to me,

[48:14] Cameron McEwen: are very,

[48:15] Cameron McEwen: very interesting in that they themselves form a collage.

[48:20] Bob Dobbs: Yeah.

[48:20] Cameron McEwen: So this quote.

[48:22] Cameron McEwen: goes very well with the end of War and Peace and Global Village.

[48:26] Cameron McEwen: There he's talking about the need for humans to become outbreeders.

[48:33] Cameron McEwen: And you've just read a passage of the need for human creativity to go far beyond pre-satellite man.

[48:45] Bob Dobbs: Yeah,

[48:45] Bob Dobbs: Gutenberg creativity.

[48:47] Bob Dobbs: Way beyond Gutenberg creativity.

[48:50] Cameron McEwen: That's right.

[48:50] Bob Dobbs: Which are the celebrities that I was taking that are the figures of the Star Wars.

[48:55] Bob Dobbs: All these old Gutenberg arts of creativity.

[48:57] Bob Dobbs: The obsolete arts.

[49:02] Bob Dobbs: The poor kids.

[49:03] Bob Dobbs: They have no clue.

[49:04] Cameron McEwen: Notice that obsolete,

[49:05] Cameron McEwen: obsolete relates to limitation and parentheses.

[49:11] Cameron McEwen: There's nothing wrong with something being obsolete so long as you understand the power of its limitation.

[49:20] Bob Dobbs: Right,

[49:21] Bob Dobbs: and also that more and more people are doing it.

[49:24] Bob Dobbs: It's becoming cliche.

[49:25] Bob Dobbs: That's what obsolescence means.

[49:27] Cameron McEwen: Yeah.

[49:28] Bob Dobbs: So he then says,

[49:30] Bob Dobbs: having engineered into existence this giant rim spin around all human transactions,

[49:35] Bob Dobbs: so we have a new term for the global theater,

[49:37] Bob Dobbs: the rim spin,

[49:39] Bob Dobbs: we now have to discover the means of adjusting the speed of this spin in order to accommodate the response of spins of all the components.

[49:46] Bob Dobbs: Now,

[49:46] Bob Dobbs: who the heck even dared to see how you would do that?

[49:51] Bob Dobbs: They never read the sentence.

[49:53] Bob Dobbs: But what a demand he's making.

[49:55] Bob Dobbs: This is a new creativity required.

[49:57] Bob Dobbs: I noticed...

[49:58] Bob Dobbs: Go ahead.

[50:00] Cameron McEwen: Well,

[50:00] Cameron McEwen: I was going to say,

[50:02] Cameron McEwen: what I find particularly interesting in a sentence like this is,

[50:06] Cameron McEwen: I don't think that

[50:07] Cameron McEwen: McLuhan himself really knew what he was talking about,

[50:12] Cameron McEwen: he and Barry,

[50:13] Cameron McEwen: but not because they were dumb or blind in some sense.

[50:20] Cameron McEwen: They were talking beyond themselves.

[50:24] Bob Dobbs: They were reading their grasp,

[50:26] Bob Dobbs: the metaphor.

[50:26] Cameron McEwen: That's right.

[50:27] Cameron McEwen: Absolutely.

[50:28] Cameron McEwen: Absolutely.

[50:29] Cameron McEwen: So you can see what he's saying here in terms that you were just explicating,

[50:35] Cameron McEwen: that is to say,

[50:36] Cameron McEwen: kind of indicating the future and what had to be understood,

[50:41] Cameron McEwen: but can also be understood backwards as being an attempt to encapsulate what is at stake in the whole history of the world.

[50:50] Bob Dobbs: Yeah.

[50:52] Bob Dobbs: So quite amazing statements.

[50:56] Bob Dobbs: And you can see that.

[50:57] Bob Dobbs: Nobody knew how to deal with them.

[50:59] Bob Dobbs: Northrop Frye didn't deal with them.

[51:01] Bob Dobbs: Nobody.

[51:02] Bob Dobbs: Nobody looked at it.

[51:03] Bob Dobbs: As

[51:04] Bob Dobbs: I've said a thousand times,

[51:06] Bob Dobbs: I went to the Coach House and,

[51:09] Bob Dobbs: you brought up any of his stops,

[51:11] Bob Dobbs: they said,

[51:11] Bob Dobbs: oh,

[51:11] Bob Dobbs: I haven't read that.

[51:12] Bob Dobbs: I don't know.

[51:13] Bob Dobbs: McLuhan's far out.

[51:14] Bob Dobbs: I don't know what he's talking about there.

[51:16] Bob Dobbs: And that was it.

[51:17] Bob Dobbs: And that's what disappointed you.

[51:19] Bob Dobbs: There was nothing going on there you felt of.

[51:22] Bob Dobbs: I don't know if you would have.

[51:24] Bob Dobbs: seen the McLuhan words.

[51:26] Bob Dobbs: Did you see Cliché to archetype when it came out in 1970?

[51:31] Cameron McEwen: When I was talking with Marshall,

[51:35] Cameron McEwen: I had not read

[51:37] Cameron McEwen: Cliché to archetype for sure.

[51:38] Cameron McEwen: So that's one of the things that makes me think that I probably was speaking to him in

[51:46] Cameron McEwen: 67 or 68.

[51:47] Bob Dobbs: Right.

[51:48] Bob Dobbs: Okay.

[51:48] Bob Dobbs: So then the quote continues,

[51:50] Bob Dobbs: It's concert matter.

[51:52] Bob Dobbs: As concert master,

[51:53] Bob Dobbs: now he's got a new term,

[51:54] Bob Dobbs: satellite man.

[51:56] Bob Dobbs: As concert master,

[51:57] Bob Dobbs: satellite man's a concert master,

[51:59] Bob Dobbs: would have to addition such selections as the Manhattan Project,

[52:03] Bob Dobbs: that's the World War II atomic bomb project,

[52:07] Bob Dobbs: with exquisite prescience of audience effects.

[52:09] Bob Dobbs: They had to do this.

[52:11] Bob Dobbs: Today,

[52:12] Bob Dobbs: they had to redo the Manhattan Project with more concentration on the effects of it,

[52:16] Bob Dobbs: whereas...

[52:18] Bob Dobbs: The actual making of the bomb Manhattan Project was focused on one kind of effect and that's all that should be done.

[52:27] Bob Dobbs: And the audience be damned,

[52:29] Bob Dobbs: we're going to affect it.

[52:31] Bob Dobbs: They weren't looking at how the audience would survive that new technology.

[52:37] Bob Dobbs: And what would that mean?

[52:39] Bob Dobbs: Maybe you'd get bombed on another level.

[52:42] Bob Dobbs: Your institutions would collapse as the satellites took over.

[52:46] Bob Dobbs: So the Manhattan Project,

[52:48] Bob Dobbs: like Star Wars,

[52:49] Bob Dobbs: was aimed at the wrong problem,

[52:53] Bob Dobbs: or the inadequate problem.

[52:56] Cameron McEwen: Right,

[52:56] Cameron McEwen: but

[52:57] Cameron McEwen: I would rather say that it can be mistaken as indicating the wrong problem,

[53:07] Cameron McEwen: or it can be taken as indicating the right problem.

[53:11] Cameron McEwen: And the dialectic between the wrong-taking and the right...

[53:16] Cameron McEwen: taking is the great question.

[53:20] Bob Dobbs: Yeah,

[53:20] Bob Dobbs: now here's something that's coming up.

[53:22] Bob Dobbs: So he says,

[53:24] Bob Dobbs: the audience of Satellite Man includes the actors.

[53:27] Bob Dobbs: There we are,

[53:27] Bob Dobbs: Star Wars.

[53:28] Bob Dobbs: The audience of Satellite Man includes the actors,

[53:31] Bob Dobbs: and that's in quote,

[53:32] Bob Dobbs: and it's not merely human,

[53:33] Bob Dobbs: but consists of all the resonances awakened everywhere.

[53:36] Bob Dobbs: Everything becomes an actor.

[53:39] Bob Dobbs: Satellite Man no longer inhabits visual space,

[53:42] Bob Dobbs: but a resonating acoustic space.

[53:44] Bob Dobbs: whose boundaries are nowhere.

[53:47] Bob Dobbs: Today,

[53:48] Bob Dobbs: he is an information hunter in Eric Voegelin.

[53:50] Bob Dobbs: What is the main word,

[53:53] Bob Dobbs: the main scandal that's striking,

[53:56] Bob Dobbs: sort of dominating the edges of how much you dare investigate it?

[54:02] Bob Dobbs: Mr.

[54:02] Bob Dobbs: Biden.

[54:03] Bob Dobbs: Hunter

[54:04] Bob Dobbs: Biden. What a name.

[54:05] Bob Dobbs: Remember how McLuhan said your name made you big?

[54:08] Bob Dobbs: There's probably been other politicians'

[54:11] Bob Dobbs: sons.

[54:12] Bob Dobbs: who never had the word Hunter in their name.

[54:14] Bob Dobbs: But when you come up with Hunter Biden,

[54:16] Bob Dobbs: you've got the icon for what everybody's doing to themselves,

[54:21] Bob Dobbs: the global espionage.

[54:23] Cameron McEwen: Yeah.

[54:24] Cameron McEwen: That's right.

[54:25] Cameron McEwen: So that's a very good example of how everything is twofold.

[54:28] Cameron McEwen: So you have a guy that's completely out of his head and that has the potential to destroy the world,

[54:37] Cameron McEwen: especially the local world,

[54:39] Cameron McEwen: but at the same time he points beyond himself to something that's very important.

[54:45] Bob Dobbs: Yes.

[54:45] Cameron McEwen: And everything is that twofold,

[54:48] Cameron McEwen: and in order to understand that twofold,

[54:51] Cameron McEwen: You have to understand the parentheses or the border or the limitation between them.

[54:57] Cameron McEwen: And that is the great demand that we're up against.

[55:01] Cameron McEwen: Are we going to be able to understand the limitation through which understanding arises?

[55:08] Cameron McEwen: Or are we going to destroy ourselves by denying it?

[55:14] Cameron McEwen: If we look at

[55:16] Cameron McEwen: Germany right now,

[55:18] Cameron McEwen: Germany is up against the choice.

[55:20] Cameron McEwen: of either going along with the United States,

[55:25] Cameron McEwen: going along with a certain notion of virtue by cutting off oil and gas from

[55:34] Cameron McEwen: Russia, or they're going to see through the limitations of

[55:41] Cameron McEwen: NATO and of their own need and desire to be virtuous.

[55:50] Cameron McEwen: That question is hanging over Germany now in a way that it may commit suicide or it may reach a new understanding of the world.

[56:02] Cameron McEwen: And we don't know what's going to happen there.

[56:03] Cameron McEwen: It's hanging in the balance.

[56:05] Cameron McEwen: But that choice that it's facing is what

[56:10] Cameron McEwen: McLuhan is describing here and what you are saying by replaying.

[56:19] Cameron McEwen: this passage.

[56:20] Bob Dobbs: Yes.

[56:21] Bob Dobbs: You know,

[56:22] Bob Dobbs: what is it?

[56:23] Bob Dobbs: Limitations and going back up,

[56:27] Bob Dobbs: resources and limitations.

[56:29] Bob Dobbs: The interplay is tactility.

[56:31] Bob Dobbs: So I made a big discovery last night,

[56:34] Bob Dobbs: and I ran it by

[56:35] Bob Dobbs: Clint and them,

[56:36] Bob Dobbs: and they were kind of stunned.

[56:38] Bob Dobbs: So listen to this.

[56:39] Bob Dobbs: When McLuhan talks about tactility,

[56:41] Bob Dobbs: he's saying that's not a sense.

[56:43] Bob Dobbs: That's the interplay of the senses.

[56:45] Bob Dobbs: All that we mean by virtual reality is McLuhan tactility.

[56:49] Bob Dobbs: Virtual reality is something you can't touch.

[56:53] Bob Dobbs: It's not a sense,

[56:53] Bob Dobbs: right?

[56:53] Bob Dobbs: Well,

[56:54] Cameron McEwen: not only that,

[56:55] Cameron McEwen: it comes from a limitation,

[56:58] Cameron McEwen: right?

[56:59] Cameron McEwen: Virtual reality is the expression of the digital.

[57:04] Cameron McEwen: So virtual reality begins with the digital form,

[57:07] Cameron McEwen: and the digital form is the back and forth of the electric that can only exist by having a border between the poles,

[57:17] Cameron McEwen: the negative and positive pulls.

[57:19] Bob Dobbs: Yeah,

[57:20] Bob Dobbs: so we didn't need the word virtual reality.

[57:28] Bob Dobbs: Only the Gutenberg merchants needed it to make it make as if we're gone somewhere.

[57:33] Bob Dobbs: No,

[57:34] Bob Dobbs: McLuhan had already encompassed it by emphasizing tactility in all the 20th century technologies.

[57:40] Bob Dobbs: He was pointing to the new virtual reality.

[57:43] Bob Dobbs: So that's never been said before.

[57:44] Bob Dobbs: What do you think of that?

[57:46] Bob Dobbs: That his tactility is virtual.

[57:48] Bob Dobbs: Is the word virtual?

[57:51] Cameron McEwen: Yes.

[57:55] Cameron McEwen: Tonight,

[57:57] Cameron McEwen: or this morning,

[57:57] Cameron McEwen: we've been talking a lot about limitation,

[58:03] Cameron McEwen: parentheses,

[58:05] Cameron McEwen: the...

[58:07] Bob Dobbs: And new creativity.

[58:09] Cameron McEwen: That's right.

[58:10] Cameron McEwen: But within virtuality,

[58:14] Cameron McEwen: you have this dynamic.

[58:16] Cameron McEwen: of something that wants to present itself as the encompassing,

[58:22] Cameron McEwen: but properly understood is what releases from the encompassing.

[58:26] Bob Dobbs: Yeah.

[58:27] Cameron McEwen: And that's the great question.

[58:30] Cameron McEwen: Are human beings going to put on these helmets or whatever the things are called that you put on to live in a virtual reality?

[58:40] Bob Dobbs: Yeah,

[58:40] Bob Dobbs: make it metaverse.

[58:42] Cameron McEwen: Yeah,

[58:43] Cameron McEwen: exactly.

[58:44] Cameron McEwen: Are we...

[58:45] Cameron McEwen: going to live in a metaverse that is the end of human being or are we going to um understand virtuality as something that uh human beings have always lived in that's

[59:01] Cameron McEwen: correct um all all of the different cultures um have always been virtual realities yeah when terence mckenna talked about

[59:13] Bob Dobbs: You get to 2012 and the world blows up from too much novelty.

[59:18] Bob Dobbs: He was really McLuhan,

[59:20] Bob Dobbs: but...

[59:21] Bob Dobbs: A novelty,

[59:23] Bob Dobbs: he didn't need to use the word novelty.

[59:25] Bob Dobbs: Just go back to what McLuhan was saying on page 190,

[59:28] Bob Dobbs: what we're discussing.

[59:30] Bob Dobbs: See,

[59:30] Bob Dobbs: that's why you don't get any real new creativity,

[59:35] Bob Dobbs: because McLuhan has a world monopoly on it.

[59:40] Cameron McEwen: Well,

[59:40] Bob Dobbs: he's more creative than anybody about the issues that we're involved in.

[59:44] Bob Dobbs: Not that you parrot McLuhan,

[59:46] Bob Dobbs: but you have to understand how close he did become the world monopoly.

[59:50] Bob Dobbs: And bragged about it.

[59:52] Bob Dobbs: He's the center for culture and technology.

[59:56] Cameron McEwen: Right.

[59:56] Cameron McEwen: So,

[59:57] Cameron McEwen: I mean,

[59:58] Cameron McEwen: McLuhan was involved in many,

[1:00:01] Cameron McEwen: many different attempts to communicate.

[1:00:05] Cameron McEwen: And one of those ways was to sort of amplify himself in an absurd way.

[1:00:11] Bob Dobbs: Yeah.

[1:00:12] Cameron McEwen: So he's not saying,

[1:00:14] Cameron McEwen: I'm the greatest prophet that ever lived.

[1:00:17] Cameron McEwen: He's saying,

[1:00:18] Cameron McEwen: look at all of the great prophets.

[1:00:20] Cameron McEwen: and see how stupid they are.

[1:00:23] Bob Dobbs: Yeah,

[1:00:23] Bob Dobbs: it was easy to take over the field.

[1:00:26] Bob Dobbs: Correct.

[1:00:27] Cameron McEwen: And which he already pointed out in letters to his Jesuit friends back in the

[1:00:33] Cameron McEwen: 40s,

[1:00:34] Cameron McEwen: McLuhan says,

[1:00:36] Cameron McEwen: you know,

[1:00:37] Cameron McEwen: it's very easy to become famous and to more or less take over the world if you are properly grounded.

[1:00:48] Cameron McEwen: And...

[1:00:49] Cameron McEwen: Finally,

[1:00:51] Cameron McEwen: starting around 1960,

[1:00:54] Cameron McEwen: McLuhan says,

[1:00:55] Cameron McEwen: well,

[1:00:55] Cameron McEwen: I guess I'll try that avenue.

[1:00:57] Cameron McEwen: I'm going to become famous.

[1:01:00] Bob Dobbs: It's a probe.

[1:01:02] Bob Dobbs: Yeah.

[1:01:03] Bob Dobbs: You know,

[1:01:03] Bob Dobbs: that transcript of his meeting with the board of the University of Toronto in 1969,

[1:01:09] Bob Dobbs: where they're talking about what to do,

[1:01:12] Bob Dobbs: and they mention something.

[1:01:13] Bob Dobbs: He says,

[1:01:14] Bob Dobbs: well,

[1:01:14] Bob Dobbs: Marshall said,

[1:01:15] Bob Dobbs: well,

[1:01:15] Bob Dobbs: I tried that.

[1:01:16] Bob Dobbs: It didn't work.

[1:01:17] Bob Dobbs: This is at the end of the 60s.

[1:01:19] Bob Dobbs: Have you ever seen that?

[1:01:22] Cameron McEwen: I think so.

[1:01:22] Bob Dobbs: Yeah.

[1:01:23] Cameron McEwen: I think so.

[1:01:26] Bob Dobbs: I posted it.

[1:01:29] Cameron McEwen: Yeah.

[1:01:30] Cameron McEwen: I just have a vague memory of it.

[1:01:35] Cameron McEwen: Does that come from the president's report?

[1:01:39] Bob Dobbs: Something like that,

[1:01:39] Bob Dobbs: yeah.

[1:01:39] Cameron McEwen: 1970,

[1:01:41] Cameron McEwen: I think so.

[1:01:41] Cameron McEwen: Yeah.

[1:01:42] Cameron McEwen: So I know what you're talking about,

[1:01:44] Cameron McEwen: for sure.

[1:01:44] Bob Dobbs: Yeah,

[1:01:45] Bob Dobbs: what's funny is he's talking among...

[1:01:47] Bob Dobbs: his quote equals you know his colleagues in the university and they've retreated at the end of the

[1:01:52] Bob Dobbs: 60s and they're saying what do we do with all these students and this uproar and then they come out with some suggestions and McLuhan says yeah well i already did that that didn't work he's admitting he was a failure to them and they're all they all crack up and start laughing you know that's that's like a meeting of the mafia you know what i mean they're laughing about who got killed who didn't.

[1:02:14] Cameron McEwen: Yeah,

[1:02:15] Cameron McEwen: so...

[1:02:17] Cameron McEwen: This has replayed itself with Jordan Peterson and the University of Toronto.

[1:02:23] Bob Dobbs: Yeah,

[1:02:23] Bob Dobbs: that's what's interesting.

[1:02:24] Bob Dobbs: What is it about the University of Toronto that fosters this?

[1:02:27] Bob Dobbs: It is that the fact that Canada is in the interval.

[1:02:29] Bob Dobbs: I always say it's the interval.

[1:02:31] Bob Dobbs: It's the new Switzerland of the solar government.

[1:02:34] Bob Dobbs: It's the new interval position.

[1:02:37] Bob Dobbs: You know,

[1:02:37] Bob Dobbs: remember Switzerland was the normal.

[1:02:39] Bob Dobbs: Yeah,

[1:02:39] Cameron McEwen: which Trudeau and Freeland are trying to give up as quickly as they can.

[1:02:43] Bob Dobbs: Who's the second person?

[1:02:44] Bob Dobbs: Trudeau and Freeland.

[1:02:46] Cameron McEwen: Freeland,

[1:02:47] Cameron McEwen: Christian.

[1:02:47] Cameron McEwen: Oh,

[1:02:47] Bob Dobbs: yeah,

[1:02:48] Bob Dobbs: yeah.

[1:02:48] Bob Dobbs: The Nazi people.

[1:02:50] Bob Dobbs: Yeah,

[1:02:50] Bob Dobbs: the Nazis.

[1:02:52] Bob Dobbs: But the,

[1:02:55] Bob Dobbs: yeah,

[1:02:55] Bob Dobbs: Canada is the nowhere place.

[1:02:57] Bob Dobbs: No identity,

[1:02:58] Bob Dobbs: because it's in the interval.

[1:02:59] Bob Dobbs: It's virtual.

[1:03:00] Bob Dobbs: So maybe Canada was the first virtual culture,

[1:03:05] Bob Dobbs: if you mean by that,

[1:03:06] Bob Dobbs: tactile.

[1:03:08] Bob Dobbs: Not in the Lauder way of being tactile,

[1:03:10] Bob Dobbs: but second nature tactility.

[1:03:13] Cameron McEwen: Right.

[1:03:13] Cameron McEwen: But notice when you say first.

[1:03:16] Cameron McEwen: there,

[1:03:19] Cameron McEwen: it's difficult to understand what first means.

[1:03:23] Cameron McEwen: It doesn't mean first in a linear sequence,

[1:03:28] Cameron McEwen: because if all cultures have always been virtual,

[1:03:32] Cameron McEwen: which they have been,

[1:03:34] Cameron McEwen: if all cultures have always been Explorations of tactility,

[1:03:39] Cameron McEwen: then there's nothing that was first about Canada as

[1:03:45] Cameron McEwen: embodying those forces.

[1:03:46] Cameron McEwen: You know what Canada was?

[1:03:48] Bob Dobbs: Canada was recognized to be the country,

[1:03:51] Bob Dobbs: beginning with Lester Pearson,

[1:03:53] Bob Dobbs: to work in the interval,

[1:03:54] Bob Dobbs: to be the peacemaker,

[1:03:55] Bob Dobbs: to be the...

[1:03:56] Cameron McEwen: That's right.

[1:03:57] Cameron McEwen: That's right.

[1:03:59] Bob Dobbs: No country was like that before,

[1:04:01] Bob Dobbs: I don't think.

[1:04:02] Bob Dobbs: Maybe there were,

[1:04:03] Bob Dobbs: but not in any popular awareness.

[1:04:06] Bob Dobbs: Canada had a unique position,

[1:04:09] Bob Dobbs: which is what McLuhan acted out in the world of thought and academia.

[1:04:13] Bob Dobbs: He was the interval man that nobody could put a finger on.

[1:04:17] Bob Dobbs: He would also be Canadian.

[1:04:20] Bob Dobbs: And he Wright about Canada is the greatest artist in the 60s.

[1:04:23] Bob Dobbs: The idea of Canada,

[1:04:24] Bob Dobbs: whatever we thought Canada was,

[1:04:26] Bob Dobbs: that was the great artist.

[1:04:28] Bob Dobbs: And there's a book,

[1:04:29] Bob Dobbs: there's a new book,

[1:04:30] Bob Dobbs: well,

[1:04:31] Bob Dobbs: it came out a few years ago,

[1:04:33] Bob Dobbs: Counterblasting Canada,

[1:04:34] Bob Dobbs: and this art professor,

[1:04:36] Bob Dobbs: Mr.

[1:04:36] Bob Dobbs: Betts,

[1:04:37] Bob Dobbs: B-E-T-T-S,

[1:04:38] Bob Dobbs: he does a good article pointing that out.

[1:04:40] Bob Dobbs: I've never seen anybody look at McLuhan engagement with the art world.

[1:04:47] Bob Dobbs: See,

[1:04:47] Bob Dobbs: there was a whole new level that John Cage and these guys didn't know about,

[1:04:50] Bob Dobbs: that McLuhan was talking.

[1:04:52] Bob Dobbs: Betts does get to that point that Canada was the anti-environment to the world,

[1:04:57] Bob Dobbs: which was largely the American environment.

[1:05:03] Cameron McEwen: And that's precisely what Canada has given up.

[1:05:07] Bob Dobbs: Yes.

[1:05:07] Bob Dobbs: Canada didn't know how to deal with it.

[1:05:10] Bob Dobbs: They didn't listen to McLuhan.

[1:05:11] Bob Dobbs: They didn't get the question.

[1:05:13] Bob Dobbs: They didn't understand their role.

[1:05:17] Cameron McEwen: If understanding sort of takes off from that point,

[1:05:23] Cameron McEwen: as if what was needed is to go back to the quote-unquote unique or first-time role of Canada,

[1:05:33] Cameron McEwen: that is a Gutenbergian understanding.

[1:05:38] Bob Dobbs: Yes.

[1:05:38] Cameron McEwen: Because it's necessary to understand...

[1:05:44] Bob Dobbs: Pearson was a Gutenberg.

[1:05:45] Bob Dobbs: Pearson was the mayor,

[1:05:46] Bob Dobbs: Marshall was the Marconi.

[1:05:50] Cameron McEwen: Yeah,

[1:05:50] Cameron McEwen: but you see,

[1:05:53] Cameron McEwen: in the global theater,

[1:05:55] Cameron McEwen: in Star Wars,

[1:05:57] Cameron McEwen: it's not that the one takes over from the other.

[1:06:00] Cameron McEwen: The one is more powerful than the other.

[1:06:04] Cameron McEwen: Those are media,

[1:06:07] Cameron McEwen: capital M media,

[1:06:10] Cameron McEwen: and they are always in interplay.

[1:06:14] Cameron McEwen: So that gets rid of any notion of being the first or being the great exemplary or anything like this.

[1:06:22] Cameron McEwen: When you say unique,

[1:06:22] Bob Dobbs: Kenner,

[1:06:23] Bob Dobbs: it was a unique new image for a nation.

[1:06:26] Bob Dobbs: But listen to this.

[1:06:28] Bob Dobbs: When they were organizing to give McLuhan the Order of Canada in 1970,

[1:06:32] Bob Dobbs: what was going on in Parliament?

[1:06:34] Bob Dobbs: Governor General Vanier was saying McLuhan has to be policed,

[1:06:38] Bob Dobbs: ignored.

[1:06:38] Bob Dobbs: He's ruining the children.

[1:06:40] Bob Dobbs: In other words,

[1:06:40] Bob Dobbs: he was being honored and vilified at the same time.

[1:06:44] Cameron McEwen: Right.

[1:06:45] Bob Dobbs: Which is what I see translates to your point that he had two roles going.

[1:06:51] Bob Dobbs: As a counter to Pearson's specialist role,

[1:06:54] Bob Dobbs: a literal negotiator,

[1:06:57] Bob Dobbs: peacemaker.

[1:06:58] Bob Dobbs: And then Trudeau did with,

[1:07:01] Bob Dobbs: you know,

[1:07:01] Bob Dobbs: greatly influenced by McLuhan,

[1:07:03] Bob Dobbs: Trudeau made the Pearson position a little more interesting.

[1:07:10] Bob Dobbs: He had the McLuhan level,

[1:07:11] Bob Dobbs: which...

[1:07:12] Bob Dobbs: then made McLuhan lose his identity and have all these heart attacks and brain surgery.

[1:07:18] Bob Dobbs: Tudor had hijacked him.

[1:07:19] Bob Dobbs: Remember he had all these health problems from

[1:07:23] Bob Dobbs: 69 on?

[1:07:25] Cameron McEwen: Absolutely.

[1:07:25] Cameron McEwen: Every couple of years.

[1:07:27] Cameron McEwen: Yeah,

[1:07:29] Bob Dobbs: yeah.

[1:07:29] Cameron McEwen: It's like his understanding was untimely.

[1:07:35] Bob Dobbs: Yeah.

[1:07:36] Cameron McEwen: And so he had to pay for it.

[1:07:39] Bob Dobbs: Yes,

[1:07:39] Bob Dobbs: and the son of McLuhan is Trudeau,

[1:07:43] Bob Dobbs: not Eric.

[1:07:45] Bob Dobbs: In Nova Scotia,

[1:07:46] Bob Dobbs: I used to go around saying I was the son of McLuhan,

[1:07:49] Bob Dobbs: the one that the society wouldn't recognize.

[1:07:55] Bob Dobbs: I remember meeting Barbara Frum.

[1:07:58] Bob Dobbs: She was doing a book deal in the mid-'70s or something.

[1:08:00] Bob Dobbs: She came to the local bookstore,

[1:08:02] Bob Dobbs: and I was talking to her,

[1:08:02] Bob Dobbs: and I always brought up McLuhan to everybody because that was a hidden ground.

[1:08:06] Bob Dobbs: And she goes,

[1:08:07] Bob Dobbs: well,

[1:08:07] Bob Dobbs: I'm not sure what he's doing now.

[1:08:08] Bob Dobbs: He's talking about angels.

[1:08:10] Bob Dobbs: And,

[1:08:11] Bob Dobbs: you know,

[1:08:11] Bob Dobbs: when you knew what angels was,

[1:08:14] Bob Dobbs: these people who were writing books,

[1:08:16] Bob Dobbs: they were so ridiculous.

[1:08:18] Bob Dobbs: They had no clue what was going on,

[1:08:19] Bob Dobbs: which made them,

[1:08:20] Bob Dobbs: quote,

[1:08:20] Bob Dobbs: successful and saleable.

[1:08:24] Cameron McEwen: Sure.

[1:08:24] Cameron McEwen: Well,

[1:08:24] Cameron McEwen: look what's happened to her son,

[1:08:26] Cameron McEwen: right?

[1:08:27] Bob Dobbs: Oh,

[1:08:27] Bob Dobbs: my God.

[1:08:27] Bob Dobbs: That guy is in a bad way.

[1:08:29] Bob Dobbs: That guy.

[1:08:30] Cameron McEwen: That's right.

[1:08:31] Cameron McEwen: That's right.

[1:08:31] Cameron McEwen: But what he's expressing is the ground.

[1:08:38] Cameron McEwen: of his mother's insights as you say that she did not she was not able to be virtuous and informative as

[1:08:53] Cameron McEwen: she was attempting to do on the basis of the ground that she had yeah and so the son then pulls the curtain away from that ground and shows what it was and it's

[1:09:08] Cameron McEwen: It's laughable.

[1:09:09] Bob Dobbs: And he becomes a Varronian.

[1:09:11] Bob Dobbs: I was thinking if...

[1:09:13] Bob Dobbs: If Trudeau was McLuhan,

[1:09:15] Bob Dobbs: kept himself in the interval,

[1:09:17] Bob Dobbs: then they failed.

[1:09:18] Bob Dobbs: He failed.

[1:09:20] Bob Dobbs: And then they failed to be the great artists of the anti-environment of America.

[1:09:25] Bob Dobbs: So then Mulroney and the rest of them,

[1:09:27] Bob Dobbs: under free trade,

[1:09:28] Bob Dobbs: merged with America.

[1:09:29] Bob Dobbs: They became Americans.

[1:09:31] Cameron McEwen: Right.

[1:09:32] Cameron McEwen: Absolutely.

[1:09:33] Bob Dobbs: And David Frum leaves Canada and goes to consult with all the Trump.

[1:09:46] Cameron McEwen: Yeah,

[1:09:46] Cameron McEwen: so really you have a country,

[1:09:51] Cameron McEwen: Canada,

[1:09:52] Cameron McEwen: that was unable to sort of enter into its fate.

[1:09:59] Cameron McEwen: And that fate was described not only by McLuhan,

[1:10:02] Cameron McEwen: but people like Frye,

[1:10:05] Cameron McEwen: people like

[1:10:07] Cameron McEwen: Innis described aspects of it as well.

[1:10:11] Bob Dobbs: Conrad Black,

[1:10:12] Bob Dobbs: name any figure in Canada.

[1:10:13] Bob Dobbs: They all failed.

[1:10:15] Cameron McEwen: Oh,

[1:10:15] Cameron McEwen: for sure.

[1:10:16] Bob Dobbs: Yeah.

[1:10:16] Bob Dobbs: Well,

[1:10:16] Cameron McEwen: Black is a guy that's a little bit like Frum.

[1:10:20] Cameron McEwen: He's an American intellectual.

[1:10:21] Bob Dobbs: Yeah,

[1:10:22] Bob Dobbs: with a British lord.

[1:10:25] Bob Dobbs: Yeah.

[1:10:25] Bob Dobbs: He tried to make it overlay him,

[1:10:26] Bob Dobbs: more than one,

[1:10:28] Bob Dobbs: moving towards quadrophrenia.

[1:10:30] Cameron McEwen: Right.

[1:10:30] Bob Dobbs: And then he ends up defending Trump the National Post.

[1:10:36] Bob Dobbs: What a ridiculous fate on content level.

[1:10:40] Bob Dobbs: I think he's...

[1:10:40] Bob Dobbs: He's good antivirus to Canadians on Trump point,

[1:10:43] Bob Dobbs: but he probably doesn't understand how he got there or what it really means to what his role is.

[1:10:51] Bob Dobbs: Meanwhile,

[1:10:52] Bob Dobbs: I'm keeping Trump alive with my products so that

[1:10:57] Bob Dobbs: Black can have something to write about.

[1:11:01] Cameron McEwen: What do you think is going to happen in terms of the next election?

[1:11:07] Cameron McEwen: Do you think Trump going to be a candidate or not?

[1:11:11] Bob Dobbs: No,

[1:11:12] Bob Dobbs: he's going to become viceroy of the new feudal situation.

[1:11:16] Bob Dobbs: And what we got,

[1:11:17] Bob Dobbs: we may not get,

[1:11:18] Bob Dobbs: as things heat up,

[1:11:19] Bob Dobbs: as the Democrats try to get rid of Biden and create all kinds of crisis with that,

[1:11:23] Bob Dobbs: and then Putin drops a nuclear suitcase in

[1:11:26] Bob Dobbs: Warsaw, and then the

[1:11:28] Bob Dobbs: BAT2 virus starts killing millions of people.

[1:11:34] Bob Dobbs: It's already happening over there.

[1:11:36] Bob Dobbs: There's going to be so much chaos over the next few months that I think the midterms might be cancelled.

[1:11:41] Bob Dobbs: And in that chaos we'll have a constitutional convention,

[1:11:43] Bob Dobbs: or at least a convention of governors,

[1:11:46] Bob Dobbs: and that's when

[1:11:47] Bob Dobbs: Trump step in and usher in a new feudal arrangement with him as viceroy.

[1:11:54] Cameron McEwen: Well,

[1:11:54] Cameron McEwen: the

[1:11:55] Cameron McEwen: Democrats would certainly love to get rid of the midterms,

[1:11:59] Cameron McEwen: so let's see.

[1:12:01] Bob Dobbs: Yeah,

[1:12:02] Bob Dobbs: they want to get rid of old Biden.

[1:12:04] Bob Dobbs: Who says that?

[1:12:05] Bob Dobbs: Somebody calls

[1:12:07] Bob Dobbs: Biden is O-Biden,

[1:12:08] Bob Dobbs: you know,

[1:12:09] Bob Dobbs: run by Obama.

[1:12:12] Bob Dobbs: So these are the ridiculous celebrities,

[1:12:16] Bob Dobbs: and the people don't recognize the powers they have.

[1:12:19] Bob Dobbs: Even,

[1:12:20] Bob Dobbs: I mean,

[1:12:22] Bob Dobbs: these kids,

[1:12:23] Bob Dobbs: these mothers are trying to object to a certain kind of education that's going on,

[1:12:28] Bob Dobbs: but they don't have a counter program.

[1:12:31] Bob Dobbs: They just have reaction.

[1:12:33] Bob Dobbs: They can't act.

[1:12:35] Bob Dobbs: So that'll fail.

[1:12:36] Bob Dobbs: Everybody will fail in their agenda.

[1:12:39] Bob Dobbs: I mean,

[1:12:40] Bob Dobbs: look at

[1:12:41] Bob Dobbs: Biden. This guy's going to correct Trump,

[1:12:43] Bob Dobbs: the error Trump,

[1:12:45] Bob Dobbs: right?

[1:12:46] Bob Dobbs: He creates a worse error.

[1:12:49] Bob Dobbs: Because he's,

[1:12:50] Bob Dobbs: and it's been that way for 50 years since Eisenhower.

[1:12:54] Cameron McEwen: Well,

[1:12:54] Cameron McEwen: it's been that way forever.

[1:12:56] Cameron McEwen: That's what it means to be a human being.

[1:12:58] Cameron McEwen: Human beings,

[1:13:00] Cameron McEwen: at the end of the day,

[1:13:01] Cameron McEwen: human beings can only fail.

[1:13:03] Cameron McEwen: Right.

[1:13:04] Cameron McEwen: Everybody's,

[1:13:04] Cameron McEwen: right?

[1:13:05] Bob Dobbs: And that's what McLuhan says in Take Today,

[1:13:08] Bob Dobbs: no success like failure.

[1:13:11] Cameron McEwen: Correct.

[1:13:12] Bob Dobbs: And he says,

[1:13:12] Bob Dobbs: every remedy better than the next.

[1:13:18] Bob Dobbs: Every remedy better than the next.

[1:13:20] Cameron McEwen: Yeah.

[1:13:21] Bob Dobbs: Okay,

[1:13:21] Bob Dobbs: so you've got this,

[1:13:23] Bob Dobbs: you know,

[1:13:23] Bob Dobbs: theater of the absurd going on,

[1:13:25] Bob Dobbs: which is what McLuhan called the global theater.

[1:13:28] Bob Dobbs: So I say,

[1:13:29] Bob Dobbs: after reading what I just read,

[1:13:31] Bob Dobbs: constant mastered all that.

[1:13:35] Bob Dobbs: my Bob Howard Cassell commentary on his own collage,

[1:13:39] Bob Dobbs: I say,

[1:13:40] Bob Dobbs: McLuhan predicts the writings of people like Carlos Castaneda.

[1:13:43] Bob Dobbs: These are the people embracing dolphins and whales because,

[1:13:46] Bob Dobbs: quote,

[1:13:46] Bob Dobbs: resonances are awakened everywhere,

[1:13:48] Bob Dobbs: unquote.

[1:13:49] Bob Dobbs: But everybody's inside the effect of the ascending arch created by the satellites.

[1:13:54] Bob Dobbs: And then I have,

[1:13:55] Bob Dobbs: quote,

[1:13:55] Bob Dobbs: as concertmaster,

[1:13:57] Bob Dobbs: Satellite Man would have to audition such selections as the,

[1:14:00] Bob Dobbs: and I have end of quote,

[1:14:02] Bob Dobbs: and I say,

[1:14:02] Bob Dobbs: in other words,

[1:14:03] Bob Dobbs: if you were going to make an atomic bomb,

[1:14:05] Bob Dobbs: which was the Manhattan Project,

[1:14:06] Bob Dobbs: a project that researched and developed nuclear weapons during World War II,

[1:14:09] Bob Dobbs: in 44 to 45,

[1:14:11] Bob Dobbs: you wouldn't be able to do that by 1970.

[1:14:14] Bob Dobbs: You'd have to run it by the ecologists in Congress who are under this new paranoia that the world was turning into a weird new situation called a global theater.

[1:14:21] Bob Dobbs: A new sensitivity was afoot.

[1:14:23] Bob Dobbs: Then I have a quote,

[1:14:24] Bob Dobbs: satellite man no longer inhabits visual space,

[1:14:27] Bob Dobbs: but a resonating acoustic space whose boundaries are nowhere.

[1:14:30] Bob Dobbs: Today he is an information hunter in Eric Voegelin.

[1:14:33] Bob Dobbs: Then I say,

[1:14:35] Bob Dobbs: the unstructured and Grace Eckley school of electric information succeeds to the bureaucratic and fragmented school based on the classifications of print technology.

[1:14:46] Bob Dobbs: In the same way,

[1:14:47] Bob Dobbs: hardware economics based on a money-oriented market is succeeded by the new knowledge industries.

[1:14:52] Bob Dobbs: That's tactility.

[1:14:53] Bob Dobbs: That's virtual.

[1:14:54] Bob Dobbs: This revolution is,

[1:14:55] Bob Dobbs: and so they don't know how to translate that into wealth,

[1:14:58] Bob Dobbs: or to call a new,

[1:15:00] Bob Dobbs: make a new definition of the new wealth that is virtual.

[1:15:04] Bob Dobbs: This revolution is long past,

[1:15:05] Bob Dobbs: but it's still managed as if it were going to take place in the year 2001.

[1:15:09] Bob Dobbs: For the comprehensivist,

[1:15:11] Bob Dobbs: it is the noise of the anti-environment that he must now convert into the program of his global theater.

[1:15:18] Bob Dobbs: So then I say,

[1:15:19] Bob Dobbs: very big statements here.

[1:15:21] Bob Dobbs: Big vistas and landscapes that McLuhan was talking about.

[1:15:24] Bob Dobbs: He's proposing the running of the global anti-environment way the central banks run the economy.

[1:15:28] Bob Dobbs: But they were a puny operation,

[1:15:30] Bob Dobbs: running visual space and money,

[1:15:32] Bob Dobbs: compared to these massive anti-environment that were having huge effects that nobody even noticed.

[1:15:36] Bob Dobbs: There's your connubial.

[1:15:38] Bob Dobbs: Or if they noticed them,

[1:15:39] Bob Dobbs: they didn't know what was causing them.

[1:15:42] Bob Dobbs: Now,

[1:15:42] Bob Dobbs: I'm moving along.

[1:15:43] Bob Dobbs: I never did this before.

[1:15:43] Bob Dobbs: You move from one quote to the next.

[1:15:45] Bob Dobbs: So let's go to the next one.

[1:15:46] Bob Dobbs: From the letters,

[1:15:47] Bob Dobbs: 1987.

[1:15:49] Bob Dobbs: McLuhan says,

[1:15:50] Bob Dobbs: today with electronics we have discovered that we live in a global village and the job is to create a global city,

[1:15:56] Bob Dobbs: capital letter C-I-T-Y,

[1:15:57] Bob Dobbs: as center for the village margins.

[1:16:00] Bob Dobbs: The parameters of this task are by no means positional.

[1:16:03] Bob Dobbs: So again,

[1:16:04] Bob Dobbs: he's describing page 190 of War and Peace in a Global Village.

[1:16:08] Bob Dobbs: With electronics,

[1:16:08] Bob Dobbs: any marginal area can become center and marginal experiences can be had at any center.

[1:16:14] Bob Dobbs: Perhaps the city needed to coordinate in concert the distracted sense programs of our global village will have to be built by computers in the way in which a big airport has to coordinate multiple flights.

[1:16:25] Bob Dobbs: That's going into your interior landscape.

[1:16:29] Bob Dobbs: Build a global village interior.

[1:16:32] Cameron McEwen: You continue to pick out quotations here,

[1:16:37] Cameron McEwen: which are all echoes of each other.

[1:16:39] Cameron McEwen: Yeah,

[1:16:39] Bob Dobbs: yeah.

[1:16:41] Cameron McEwen: So.

[1:16:42] Cameron McEwen: If people wanted to understand what's going on in your book,

[1:16:48] Cameron McEwen: reading these quotations and letting them bounce off each other is a very good way to go about it.

[1:16:56] Bob Dobbs: Yeah,

[1:16:56] Bob Dobbs: and remember the cover of Cliché to archetype was this repeating font.

[1:17:02] Bob Dobbs: Cliché to archetype.

[1:17:03] Bob Dobbs: Cliché to archetype.

[1:17:04] Bob Dobbs: You kept trying to show an echo visually.

[1:17:07] Bob Dobbs: Remember?

[1:17:07] Bob Dobbs: That's how the cover was designed.

[1:17:10] Bob Dobbs: Yeah.

[1:17:12] Bob Dobbs: It's like McLuhan said about himself,

[1:17:14] Bob Dobbs: I'm painting surrealistic landscapes.

[1:17:18] Bob Dobbs: That's what I'm doing here.

[1:17:19] Bob Dobbs: But

[1:17:20] Bob Dobbs: I'm using the module,

[1:17:23] Bob Dobbs: the single unit.

[1:17:24] Bob Dobbs: And like,

[1:17:25] Bob Dobbs: I guess,

[1:17:25] Bob Dobbs: Chinese,

[1:17:27] Bob Dobbs: the Chinese idiogram has multiple resonances,

[1:17:30] Bob Dobbs: nuances,

[1:17:31] Bob Dobbs: right?

[1:17:32] Bob Dobbs: And meanings.

[1:17:32] Cameron McEwen: Yes,

[1:17:32] Cameron McEwen: sir.

[1:17:34] Cameron McEwen: Yeah.

[1:17:35] Cameron McEwen: So that's the difference between literacy and...

[1:17:41] Cameron McEwen: and not literacy.

[1:17:44] Bob Dobbs: You don't mean media literacy,

[1:17:46] Bob Dobbs: do you?

[1:17:47] Cameron McEwen: No,

[1:17:47] Cameron McEwen: I mean you're talking about the

[1:17:50] Cameron McEwen: Chinese ideogram.

[1:17:51] Bob Dobbs: Yeah,

[1:17:51] Bob Dobbs: yeah.

[1:17:51] Cameron McEwen: And so what is that?

[1:17:53] Cameron McEwen: That's not a letter.

[1:17:54] Bob Dobbs: Right.

[1:17:55] Cameron McEwen: And so the literacy is defined by the letter and the ideogram is defined by not being a letter.

[1:18:03] Bob Dobbs: And,

[1:18:03] Bob Dobbs: you know,

[1:18:03] Bob Dobbs: that's how I compose this.

[1:18:05] Bob Dobbs: You know,

[1:18:05] Bob Dobbs: I have a pretty good memory of all these quotes.

[1:18:08] Bob Dobbs: So I...

[1:18:09] Bob Dobbs: got a quote and then i said holy shit and i got dragged along you know like down a river uh oh there's another one that's the same thing oh look at the same things over here grab that so i my mind would race along book to book and grab them and make quick make a quick note then i had to go back and tighten them all up and

[1:18:27] Cameron McEwen: uh make this collage right exactly so that's and that's how McLuhan thought and how McLuhan wrote and how McLuhan spoke i believe yeah

[1:18:39] Cameron McEwen: because this hip-hop,

[1:18:43] Cameron McEwen: this dancing back and forth,

[1:18:46] Cameron McEwen: is how thinking works.

[1:18:50] Bob Dobbs: That's right.

[1:18:51] Bob Dobbs: That's the way I think he is.

[1:18:53] Bob Dobbs: And so you have,

[1:18:54] Bob Dobbs: you know,

[1:18:54] Bob Dobbs: the Kerckhove Skin of Culture,

[1:18:56] Bob Dobbs: Logan's The Fifth Language,

[1:18:58] Bob Dobbs: all these books these different people were putting out,

[1:19:00] Bob Dobbs: and they were trying to be linear about the latest gadgets that were coming out of the antique shop.

[1:19:09] Bob Dobbs: Remember,

[1:19:09] Bob Dobbs: the guy walks into the antique shop,

[1:19:12] Bob Dobbs: and he asks somebody,

[1:19:15] Bob Dobbs: what's the latest?

[1:19:17] Bob Dobbs: And the guy says,

[1:19:17] Bob Dobbs: it's not out yet.

[1:19:23] Bob Dobbs: So,

[1:19:23] Bob Dobbs: yeah,

[1:19:24] Bob Dobbs: I remember,

[1:19:25] Bob Dobbs: like,

[1:19:25] Bob Dobbs: all of a sudden,

[1:19:26] Bob Dobbs: I remember all my knowledge of McLuhan would explode in my head.

[1:19:31] Bob Dobbs: And he says in Understanding Media that he would grab whatever was nearby to make his pattern,

[1:19:36] Bob Dobbs: his inventory.

[1:19:38] Bob Dobbs: That's what I was doing in organizing this.

[1:19:41] Cameron McEwen: Yeah,

[1:19:42] Cameron McEwen: and you could say,

[1:19:43] Cameron McEwen: what's nearby?

[1:19:44] Cameron McEwen: What's nearby is everything in the macrocosm.

[1:19:48] Cameron McEwen: Yes.

[1:19:50] Cameron McEwen: What's nearby is...

[1:19:51] Cameron McEwen: Star Wars.

[1:19:52] Cameron McEwen: And the need is to kind of process that in the interior landscape.

[1:20:03] Cameron McEwen: And then what gets put out is different from the input.

[1:20:08] Bob Dobbs: But it's one more attempt Innis long history of human beings to indicate.

[1:20:15] Bob Dobbs: I fail again.

[1:20:18] Bob Dobbs: You say macro.

[1:20:19] Bob Dobbs: What was McLuhan nickname?

[1:20:21] Bob Dobbs: Mac.

[1:20:21] Bob Dobbs: That's right.

[1:20:23] Cameron McEwen: Good point.

[1:20:24] Bob Dobbs: Phatic communion.

[1:20:26] Bob Dobbs: I'm sure he meant that in there.

[1:20:28] Bob Dobbs: That's why he picked the word.

[1:20:31] Bob Dobbs: So here we have the computers are coordinating the multiple flights.

[1:20:37] Bob Dobbs: So then I say,

[1:20:38] Bob Dobbs: this is a nice collage.

[1:20:40] Bob Dobbs: You're reading along,

[1:20:40] Bob Dobbs: and I'm saying what I'm saying.

[1:20:42] Bob Dobbs: And also they go,

[1:20:43] Bob Dobbs: McLuhan was speaking or telling the intelligence agency of the world what they're really supposed to do.

[1:20:48] Bob Dobbs: No,

[1:20:48] Bob Dobbs: nobody ever said that's who he was consulting,

[1:20:51] Bob Dobbs: right?

[1:20:51] Bob Dobbs: That's pretty good.

[1:20:52] Bob Dobbs: He was telling the intelligence agencies of the world what they're really supposed to do.

[1:20:57] Bob Dobbs: Not their silly skirmishes fighting communists or capitalists.

[1:21:01] Bob Dobbs: McLuhan was laying out what a comprehensive CIA would do.

[1:21:04] Bob Dobbs: They'd be allowed to take over the world because you would have the computers and a new knowledge and an awareness of an expert,

[1:21:09] Bob Dobbs: a team of experts that could run the world.

[1:21:11] Bob Dobbs: Remember,

[1:21:11] Bob Dobbs: he proposed that in 64 when he was unfailing the huge new center.

[1:21:17] Bob Dobbs: And he said,

[1:21:18] Bob Dobbs: we can run the world via advertising in five years.

[1:21:23] Cameron McEwen: Yeah,

[1:21:23] Cameron McEwen: so what needs to be understood there is that he's not proposing that you have a kind of authoritarian.

[1:21:33] Bob Dobbs: New president or prime minister.

[1:21:36] Cameron McEwen: That's right.

[1:21:37] Cameron McEwen: Instead,

[1:21:39] Cameron McEwen: what needs to sort of happen to the world is to understand.

[1:21:45] Cameron McEwen: the forms that it's subject to,

[1:21:49] Cameron McEwen: and then for the world to organize itself City as Classroom without walls.

[1:21:55] Bob Dobbs: That's just what I was going to say.

[1:21:57] Bob Dobbs: He said that people should have run their elections out of a TV studio.

[1:22:01] Bob Dobbs: They didn't have to travel around shaking babies and stuff.

[1:22:05] Bob Dobbs: Just have a casual discussion of the issues once a week on TV among the candidates.

[1:22:11] Bob Dobbs: Absolutely.

[1:22:13] Bob Dobbs: And so then if you became whoever won,

[1:22:15] Bob Dobbs: they would continue that.

[1:22:16] Bob Dobbs: If I was president or prime minister or whatever,

[1:22:21] Bob Dobbs: I would have a few people around and discuss,

[1:22:26] Bob Dobbs: using McLuhan language,

[1:22:27] Bob Dobbs: the issues of the day.

[1:22:29] Bob Dobbs: That's all we do to govern,

[1:22:31] Bob Dobbs: would be to show people what they should attempt to understand.

[1:22:36] Cameron McEwen: Yeah,

[1:22:37] Cameron McEwen: and let them vote from their living rooms.

[1:22:42] Cameron McEwen: on which of the positions that are being discussed that they want to fund.

[1:22:49] Cameron McEwen: Right?

[1:22:49] Cameron McEwen: It's ridiculous for human beings all over the planet are paying taxes to government,

[1:22:58] Cameron McEwen: either income tax or the taxes on their commercial transactions,

[1:23:03] Cameron McEwen: but everybody is paying huge amounts to governments in order to make the world less safe.

[1:23:09] Cameron McEwen: for their children.

[1:23:10] Bob Dobbs: It's ridiculous.

[1:23:12] Cameron McEwen: But that's what we're doing.

[1:23:13] Cameron McEwen: That's what human beings have come to.

[1:23:17] Cameron McEwen: We're going to try to make the world as shitty as we can.

[1:23:23] Bob Dobbs: It's so irresponsible that if I ever get any clout,

[1:23:28] Bob Dobbs: there's going to be a lot of scolding coming from me.

[1:23:35] Bob Dobbs: So I'm there.

[1:23:36] Bob Dobbs: What do I say here?

[1:23:39] Bob Dobbs: Well,

[1:23:39] Bob Dobbs: this is Lee Beland.

[1:23:42] Bob Dobbs: May

[1:23:43] Bob Dobbs: 7th, you know,

[1:23:43] Bob Dobbs: when he,

[1:23:44] Bob Dobbs: when that 1964,

[1:23:46] Bob Dobbs: when he laid out the plans for this huge Center for Cultural Technology,

[1:23:50] Bob Dobbs: he and Daniel Capon were planning stuff.

[1:23:53] Bob Dobbs: And it was in May 64.

[1:23:55] Bob Dobbs: I think Understanding Media had just come out.

[1:23:57] Bob Dobbs: So some Toronto Daily Star journalist,

[1:24:00] Bob Dobbs: Lee Beland says he sees planners paradise.

[1:24:04] Bob Dobbs: And here's what the journalist says.

[1:24:06] Bob Dobbs: If University of Toronto professor Marshall McLuhan is right,

[1:24:09] Bob Dobbs: and if he gets the money,

[1:24:10] Bob Dobbs: he figures that within five years,

[1:24:12] Bob Dobbs: quote,

[1:24:12] Bob Dobbs: Madison Avenue could rule the world.

[1:24:14] Bob Dobbs: Can you imagine people reading this?

[1:24:15] Bob Dobbs: Your Barry Calhoun,

[1:24:17] Bob Dobbs: your local Beatney Poe said,

[1:24:18] Bob Dobbs: what the hell,

[1:24:19] Bob Dobbs: McLuhan gone fascist,

[1:24:20] Bob Dobbs: you know?

[1:24:22] Bob Dobbs: What,

[1:24:22] Bob Dobbs: Madison Avenue could rule the world?

[1:24:24] Bob Dobbs: In turn,

[1:24:25] Bob Dobbs: governments could manage the national economy,

[1:24:28] Bob Dobbs: quote,

[1:24:28] Bob Dobbs: as easily as adjusting the thermostat in the living room.

[1:24:32] Bob Dobbs: So there he was in 64.

[1:24:34] Bob Dobbs: He was ready to say that seven years before that,

[1:24:37] Bob Dobbs: you know.

[1:24:37] Bob Dobbs: And then he got the opportunity because the book showed up.

[1:24:40] Bob Dobbs: So then he had a reason to be interviewed.

[1:24:42] Bob Dobbs: And he had his plan that he'd been saying since 1950 that we arrived in 1984 in 1934.

[1:24:59] Cameron McEwen: Yeah,

[1:25:00] Cameron McEwen: so this is one more attempt to...

[1:25:01] Cameron McEwen: Try to get people to understand the dialogue that they were already in.

[1:25:07] Bob Dobbs: Yeah,

[1:25:08] Bob Dobbs: that they were living and acting out.

[1:25:10] Cameron McEwen: Correct.

[1:25:11] Cameron McEwen: It didn't work,

[1:25:13] Cameron McEwen: but...

[1:25:15] Bob Dobbs: It was a great effort.

[1:25:16] Cameron McEwen: Yeah,

[1:25:17] Cameron McEwen: he wasn't the only one that failed in the history of the world.

[1:25:20] Bob Dobbs: That's right.

[1:25:22] Bob Dobbs: So then I explained the city,

[1:25:25] Bob Dobbs: the big letters,

[1:25:25] Bob Dobbs: C-I-T-Y,

[1:25:27] Bob Dobbs: in the

[1:25:28] Bob Dobbs: 1987 letter.

[1:25:30] Bob Dobbs: We have to create a global...

[1:25:31] Bob Dobbs: city.

[1:25:31] Cameron McEwen: Yeah,

[1:25:32] Cameron McEwen: in the 1960 letter.

[1:25:35] Bob Dobbs: No,

[1:25:35] Bob Dobbs: this is 1987.

[1:25:36] Bob Dobbs: Yeah,

[1:25:37] Bob Dobbs: there's a 1961,

[1:25:38] Bob Dobbs: but this is 1987.

[1:25:39] Bob Dobbs: He repeats it.

[1:25:40] Bob Dobbs: Well,

[1:25:41] Cameron McEwen: 1980,

[1:25:42] Cameron McEwen: I mean,

[1:25:43] Cameron McEwen: he's lost it.

[1:25:43] Cameron McEwen: Oh,

[1:25:43] Cameron McEwen: no,

[1:25:43] Cameron McEwen: no,

[1:25:43] Bob Dobbs: I screwed up.

[1:25:45] Bob Dobbs: You're right.

[1:25:46] Bob Dobbs: I'm looking at the date of the book.

[1:25:48] Cameron McEwen: Yeah,

[1:25:50] Bob Dobbs: yeah.

[1:25:51] Bob Dobbs: As I was saying,

[1:25:51] Bob Dobbs: I said,

[1:25:51] Bob Dobbs: well,

[1:25:52] Bob Dobbs: what?

[1:25:52] Bob Dobbs: He only did it once.

[1:25:53] Bob Dobbs: How'd he do that?

[1:25:54] Bob Dobbs: Yeah,

[1:25:55] Bob Dobbs: this is 1960.

[1:25:57] Bob Dobbs: And then he gets to...

[1:25:58] Cameron McEwen: In 1960,

[1:26:01] Cameron McEwen: What

[1:26:02] Cameron McEwen: McLuhan is coming to is the idea that although individual people,

[1:26:14] Cameron McEwen: if they are to achieve understanding,

[1:26:18] Cameron McEwen: need to have a certain basis,

[1:26:23] Cameron McEwen: that basis is not the same thing as the meteorologic anti-environment which we live.

[1:26:31] Cameron McEwen: So there's a strange kind of dialectic that he tried to explain in 1959 to the seminarians at St.

[1:26:41] Cameron McEwen: Michael's,

[1:26:43] Cameron McEwen: where he says,

[1:26:44] Cameron McEwen: on the one hand,

[1:26:46] Cameron McEwen: you have the need for individual basis,

[1:26:49] Cameron McEwen: but on the other hand,

[1:26:50] Cameron McEwen: the individual basis is caught up in a service environment.

[1:26:54] Cameron McEwen: And what we have to do as Catholics or as academics,

[1:27:01] Cameron McEwen: or just as human beings,

[1:27:03] Cameron McEwen: is we have to try to come to an understanding of those two things and how they belong together.

[1:27:11] Cameron McEwen: And that's a huge project,

[1:27:13] Cameron McEwen: but it represents a very interesting step in the tradition of human beings trying to understand what's at stake in their being.

[1:27:27] Bob Dobbs: And he almost didn't survive that insight.

[1:27:29] Bob Dobbs: This is coming out.

[1:27:30] Bob Dobbs: He's writing after his whatever hospital situation he was put into earlier in 1960.

[1:27:39] Cameron McEwen: That's right.

[1:27:40] Cameron McEwen: That's right.

[1:27:40] Cameron McEwen: So,

[1:27:42] Cameron McEwen: Corinne has a note in letters about his blackouts starting in

[1:27:50] Bob Dobbs: 1959. Right.

[1:27:52] Bob Dobbs: So,

[1:27:57] Bob Dobbs: meanwhile...

[1:27:57] Bob Dobbs: Lee Gilson,

[1:27:58] Bob Dobbs: the journalist,

[1:27:59] Bob Dobbs: he's got a nice story to write about.

[1:28:01] Bob Dobbs: Some maniac thinks we could turn the thermostat into a living room.

[1:28:07] Bob Dobbs: He certainly doesn't jump aboard.

[1:28:13] Bob Dobbs: He goes on to his next story the next day,

[1:28:16] Bob Dobbs: a totally different item.

[1:28:18] Bob Dobbs: Doesn't stick with McLuhan.

[1:28:19] Bob Dobbs: He didn't quit his job and join him.

[1:28:22] Bob Dobbs: So this city.

[1:28:24] Bob Dobbs: would not be some geographical chemical body place,

[1:28:28] Bob Dobbs: because now I sneak my words in,

[1:28:31] Bob Dobbs: this city that we're sort of concretizing the virtual tactility,

[1:28:37] Bob Dobbs: this city would not be some geographical chemical body place,

[1:28:40] Bob Dobbs: because actual cities in rural areas were getting scattered and decentralized.

[1:28:44] Bob Dobbs: No more New York City dominance,

[1:28:46] Bob Dobbs: because magazines were everywhere on the highways.

[1:28:49] Bob Dobbs: Anybody could be anywhere to pick up New York culture in the magazine world,

[1:28:53] Bob Dobbs: world in quotes.

[1:28:54] Bob Dobbs: So the city had to be a software program.

[1:28:57] Bob Dobbs: McLuhan began to explore Tetrad management and programming.

[1:29:01] Bob Dobbs: He says he wants to take over the global thermostat,

[1:29:03] Bob Dobbs: program anti-environment,

[1:29:04] Bob Dobbs: and create a computerized city,

[1:29:06] Bob Dobbs: a database that would locate patterns.

[1:29:09] Bob Dobbs: Then,

[1:29:09] Bob Dobbs: quote,

[1:29:10] Bob Dobbs: oops,

[1:29:10] Bob Dobbs: too much radio in Venezuela.

[1:29:12] Bob Dobbs: We've got to turn off the radio and hype up the newspapers,

[1:29:14] Bob Dobbs: the bells off the turmoil in Venezuela,

[1:29:17] Bob Dobbs: end of quote.

[1:29:18] Bob Dobbs: In other words,

[1:29:18] Bob Dobbs: program the old analog media with a computer documenting sensory thresholds.

[1:29:24] Bob Dobbs: He laid that out in the Malinowski.

[1:29:25] Bob Dobbs: He had a couple of computer experts trying to measure the sensory thresholds of populations.

[1:29:30] Bob Dobbs: It was hard to do.

[1:29:32] Bob Dobbs: They tried it,

[1:29:32] Bob Dobbs: but it didn't work.

[1:29:33] Bob Dobbs: It was just too big.

[1:29:35] Bob Dobbs: And what nation is going to allow one to modulate their media environment?

[1:29:38] Bob Dobbs: When one suggested the program to governments,

[1:29:41] Bob Dobbs: they said,

[1:29:41] Bob Dobbs: That's fascism,

[1:29:42] Bob Dobbs: Mr.

[1:29:43] Bob Dobbs: McLuhan.

[1:29:44] Bob Dobbs: They thought McLuhan was a fascist,

[1:29:45] Bob Dobbs: but he was doing this to protect people.

[1:29:47] Bob Dobbs: They didn't know they needed protection until recently.

[1:29:50] Bob Dobbs: So there's the city.

[1:29:51] Bob Dobbs: turning the Global Village Theatre into an art form.

[1:29:54] Bob Dobbs: Go back up to that quotation on the new despotism at the beginning of the Global Theatre section,

[1:30:00] Bob Dobbs: page 88.

[1:30:01] Bob Dobbs: Global Village Theatre,

[1:30:02] Bob Dobbs: in quotes,

[1:30:03] Bob Dobbs: meant harnessing the satellite technology of the 60s to turn the Global Village into an art form.

[1:30:07] Bob Dobbs: At least that was McLuhan dream,

[1:30:09] Bob Dobbs: probe,

[1:30:10] Bob Dobbs: or proposal,

[1:30:11] Bob Dobbs: to create a virtual city,

[1:30:12] Bob Dobbs: which I would then now say tactile city.

[1:30:15] Bob Dobbs: There was no city in the Global Theatre at that time.

[1:30:18] Bob Dobbs: There were just scattered villages and megalopolis media anti-environment.

[1:30:22] Bob Dobbs: Now,

[1:30:22] Bob Dobbs: there was a city in the global theater,

[1:30:24] Bob Dobbs: but you had to create whatever he was going to create to show people it existed already.

[1:30:30] Cameron McEwen: Yes,

[1:30:30] Cameron McEwen: that's right.

[1:30:31] Cameron McEwen: So in that sense of city,

[1:30:34] Cameron McEwen: the pre-existing city,

[1:30:38] Cameron McEwen: can be said to be Star Wars,

[1:30:40] Cameron McEwen: or it can be said to be media.

[1:30:46] Cameron McEwen: It's what...

[1:30:48] Cameron McEwen: it's the demand Posthuman understanding to understand their macrocosmic environment.

[1:30:55] Bob Dobbs: Connubium.

[1:30:57] Cameron McEwen: Yes.

[1:30:58] Bob Dobbs: So you get to the top of 94,

[1:31:00] Bob Dobbs: and I say the same thing again in a different way.

[1:31:03] Bob Dobbs: I take a quote from Counterblast,

[1:31:06] Bob Dobbs: 1969,

[1:31:08] Bob Dobbs: page 64.

[1:31:09] Bob Dobbs: The bias of our culture,

[1:31:10] Bob Dobbs: McLuhan said,

[1:31:11] Bob Dobbs: is precisely to isolate the bias of all others in an effort at orchestration.

[1:31:16] Bob Dobbs: Social connubium?

[1:31:17] Bob Dobbs: Question mark.

[1:31:20] Cameron McEwen: There is that word again.

[1:31:20] Cameron McEwen: That's right.

[1:31:21] Cameron McEwen: And the word orchestration points back to

[1:31:27] Cameron McEwen: Sigfried Giedion that McLuhan met in 1943,

[1:31:34] Cameron McEwen: the same year that he met Wyndham Lewis.

[1:31:36] Cameron McEwen: Yeah.

[1:31:37] Cameron McEwen: And at the start of McLuhan...

[1:31:46] Cameron McEwen: sort of engagement with Giedion is the idea that the world is Giedion orchestra that can play harmoniously,

[1:31:56] Cameron McEwen: but at the moment all of the different musicians are in soundproof rooms and can't hear each other.

[1:32:05] Bob Dobbs: Is that a quote from Giedion?

[1:32:09] Cameron McEwen: Yes,

[1:32:10] Cameron McEwen: absolutely.

[1:32:12] Cameron McEwen: And the

[1:32:14] Cameron McEwen: McLuhan

[1:32:16] Cameron McEwen: takes over this notion of the need for orchestration in the sense of musicians,

[1:32:24] Cameron McEwen: a.k.a.

[1:32:24] Cameron McEwen: cultures,

[1:32:25] Cameron McEwen: need to be able to hear each other.

[1:32:28] Cameron McEwen: And you've just had a quotation from a letter in 1960 where he talks about centers and margins.

[1:32:37] Cameron McEwen: So instead of cultures understanding themselves as centers to which all other cultures...

[1:32:45] Cameron McEwen: Cultures are marginal.

[1:32:47] Cameron McEwen: McLuhan says,

[1:32:47] Cameron McEwen: no,

[1:32:48] Cameron McEwen: we need to understand all cultures in terms of a center anti-environment where those can flip,

[1:32:57] Cameron McEwen: just like figure and ground can flip,

[1:32:59] Cameron McEwen: so can center and margin.

[1:33:01] Cameron McEwen: And that flipping is conversation or is dialogue or is dialectic.

[1:33:10] Cameron McEwen: And so the harmonization that would take place.

[1:33:15] Cameron McEwen: in what he calls an effort of orchestration,

[1:33:18] Cameron McEwen: is the attempt to allow the dialogue of cultures to regulate.

[1:33:27] Cameron McEwen: how human beings go about their business.

[1:33:31] Bob Dobbs: Right.

[1:33:32] Bob Dobbs: So the tendency to make this a new world order,

[1:33:35] Bob Dobbs: I correct that and say,

[1:33:39] Bob Dobbs: it was already a dream of the Bucky Fuller in the United Nations to organize a global village into some sophisticated system,

[1:33:45] Bob Dobbs: but it was usually a model of,

[1:33:46] Bob Dobbs: quote,

[1:33:46] Bob Dobbs: world government,

[1:33:47] Bob Dobbs: unquote.

[1:33:48] Bob Dobbs: For McLuhan,

[1:33:49] Bob Dobbs: it was a computer program.

[1:33:50] Bob Dobbs: He announced this in May 64 when he released Understanding Media.

[1:33:54] Bob Dobbs: He said,

[1:33:54] Bob Dobbs: quote,

[1:33:55] Bob Dobbs: We're going to program sensory thresholds of whole populations.

[1:33:58] Bob Dobbs: Within five years,

[1:34:00] Bob Dobbs: with the help of Madison Avenue,

[1:34:01] Bob Dobbs: we will rule the whole world.

[1:34:03] Bob Dobbs: So he was quoting from Understanding Media to the journalists when he talked about Madison Avenue in five years.

[1:34:10] Bob Dobbs: We will rule the whole world.

[1:34:12] Bob Dobbs: Now,

[1:34:12] Bob Dobbs: isn't this an interesting way to put on everybody?

[1:34:15] Bob Dobbs: That's what he said in his...

[1:34:17] Bob Dobbs: This is what he meant by being the center of culture and technology.

[1:34:20] Bob Dobbs: That's what he said in his press conference.

[1:34:22] Bob Dobbs: Unfortunately,

[1:34:23] Bob Dobbs: nobody even noticed the article.

[1:34:24] Bob Dobbs: See the Lee Balin article above?

[1:34:27] Bob Dobbs: I say probably.

[1:34:28] Bob Dobbs: Nobody noticed it.

[1:34:29] Bob Dobbs: Although he had nice pictures and charts in the Toronto newspaper.

[1:34:32] Bob Dobbs: Who knows what people thought?

[1:34:34] Bob Dobbs: They were distracted by the Beatles,

[1:34:36] Bob Dobbs: who had just shown up on the Ed Sullivan Show a few months before.

[1:34:40] Bob Dobbs: So then we get to another quote,

[1:34:42] Bob Dobbs: Howard Locke Gossage.

[1:34:45] Bob Dobbs: What was once fresh,

[1:34:47] Bob Dobbs: and that's the so-called advertising guy who claimed to make McLuhan famous.

[1:34:53] Bob Dobbs: And Ted Carpenter Wright about it at the back of Don Theall book.

[1:34:57] Bob Dobbs: He witnessed the machinations of Mr.

[1:35:00] Bob Dobbs: Gossage out of San Francisco.

[1:35:03] Bob Dobbs: And so he did an article.

[1:35:05] Bob Dobbs: You can see why the mighty would be curious.

[1:35:07] Bob Dobbs: And he tried to get the mighty's attention.

[1:35:09] Bob Dobbs: And he did for McLuhan.

[1:35:12] Bob Dobbs: So my commentary is...

[1:35:14] Cameron McEwen: McLuhan laid out this program years before.

[1:35:18] Bob Dobbs: Yes.

[1:35:19] Cameron McEwen: So I think McLuhan used Gossage,

[1:35:21] Cameron McEwen: not Gossage used McLuhan.

[1:35:23] Bob Dobbs: That's right.

[1:35:23] Bob Dobbs: And Don Theall,

[1:35:25] Bob Dobbs: he's very valuable for what he experiences.

[1:35:29] Bob Dobbs: You know,

[1:35:29] Bob Dobbs: a graduate student,

[1:35:30] Bob Dobbs: 50 to 53,

[1:35:31] Bob Dobbs: 54,

[1:35:32] Bob Dobbs: said McLuhan was always talking about taking over power and puzzling about how he'd do it.

[1:35:39] Bob Dobbs: But Don heard him thinking about it out loud in the early

[1:35:43] Bob Dobbs: 50s.

[1:35:45] Bob Dobbs: That Don didn't,

[1:35:46] Bob Dobbs: he didn't understand it.

[1:35:48] Bob Dobbs: He was too young.

[1:35:49] Bob Dobbs: But later,

[1:35:50] Bob Dobbs: when McLuhan,

[1:35:51] Bob Dobbs: you know,

[1:35:51] Bob Dobbs: 10 years later...

[1:35:52] Bob Dobbs: is doing this kind of understanding media stuff,

[1:35:54] Bob Dobbs: Don remembered what he had said and saw how it had fallen,

[1:35:59] Bob Dobbs: you know...

[1:36:01] Cameron McEwen: Into place.

[1:36:02] Bob Dobbs: Into place.

[1:36:02] Bob Dobbs: I was going to say logically,

[1:36:04] Bob Dobbs: but you can't say that.

[1:36:05] Bob Dobbs: How it resonated appropriately with what he had already been saying.

[1:36:08] Cameron McEwen: Right.

[1:36:11] Bob Dobbs: So Ghazali comes along and has an interesting pattern.

[1:36:14] Bob Dobbs: He says,

[1:36:15] Bob Dobbs: What was once fresh and new turns into a cliché and assumes its role as part of anti-environment.

[1:36:21] Bob Dobbs: Now let's suppose that when you repaper the room,

[1:36:23] Bob Dobbs: you decide to save a square of the old stuff and have it framed.

[1:36:27] Bob Dobbs: As a picture,

[1:36:28] Bob Dobbs: it is no longer wallpaper,

[1:36:29] Bob Dobbs: but content for the anti-environment.

[1:36:32] Bob Dobbs: Something else has happened too.

[1:36:34] Bob Dobbs: It has become an art form.

[1:36:35] Bob Dobbs: If it is successful as an art form and is admired and copied,

[1:36:39] Bob Dobbs: or at any rate persists so that it eventually becomes the one and only from which all others emanate,

[1:36:43] Bob Dobbs: it constitutes an archetype.

[1:36:45] Bob Dobbs: Today's archetype was yesterday's art form.

[1:36:48] Bob Dobbs: The day before yesterday's cliche,

[1:36:51] Bob Dobbs: and the day before that,

[1:36:52] Bob Dobbs: it was the last word.

[1:36:53] Bob Dobbs: I really love that sequence when I read that in 67,

[1:36:58] Bob Dobbs: when the book came out.

[1:37:02] Bob Dobbs: That opened me up and prepared me for a cliché to archetype.

[1:37:06] Bob Dobbs: But it's a very useful little paragraph.

[1:37:10] Bob Dobbs: One was lucky.

[1:37:11] Bob Dobbs: I don't know if anybody else read it and got something out of it.

[1:37:14] Bob Dobbs: Probably didn't,

[1:37:15] Bob Dobbs: but he offered something.

[1:37:17] Bob Dobbs: There,

[1:37:17] Bob Dobbs: that was pretty good.

[1:37:19] Cameron McEwen: Yeah,

[1:37:20] Cameron McEwen: that's

[1:37:21] Cameron McEwen: Heraclitus revisited.

[1:37:23] Bob Dobbs: Yeah.

[1:37:25] Bob Dobbs: So then

[1:37:27] Bob Dobbs: Howard Cassell Dobbs comes in and he says,

[1:37:31] Bob Dobbs: in the global theater,

[1:37:32] Bob Dobbs: you have a rapid series of successive innovations as air,

[1:37:35] Bob Dobbs: sats,

[1:37:36] Bob Dobbs: anti-environment.

[1:37:37] Bob Dobbs: So there can't be an anti-environment unless you turn it off.

[1:37:40] Bob Dobbs: There can be a fake anti-environment unless you want to think fake is good enough because McLuhan once was accused of...

[1:37:47] Bob Dobbs: just dealing in half-truths,

[1:37:50] Bob Dobbs: and he said,

[1:37:50] Bob Dobbs: well,

[1:37:51] Bob Dobbs: half-truths are a lot of truth for most people.

[1:37:53] Bob Dobbs: So,

[1:37:54] Bob Dobbs: no problem being an air,

[1:37:55] Bob Dobbs: sats,

[1:37:56] Bob Dobbs: anti-environment.

[1:37:59] Bob Dobbs: In the global theater,

[1:37:59] Bob Dobbs: you have a rapid series of successive innovations as air,

[1:38:02] Bob Dobbs: sats,

[1:38:02] Bob Dobbs: anti-environment.

[1:38:03] Bob Dobbs: They become a cliché to archetype turnover.

[1:38:06] Bob Dobbs: Gossage is describing an introduction to that pattern.

[1:38:09] Bob Dobbs: This is the global theater phase.

[1:38:11] Bob Dobbs: Things become clichés and then archetypes,

[1:38:13] Bob Dobbs: and then they become new cliché probes.

[1:38:15] Bob Dobbs: This is a turnover of technologies which are rapidly becoming cliches and archetypes because the only thing that comes in is computers,

[1:38:22] Bob Dobbs: because the only thing that comes in is computers.

[1:38:25] Bob Dobbs: And Clinton Ignatov will complain today,

[1:38:27] Bob Dobbs: quote,

[1:38:28] Bob Dobbs: computers haven't changed in 40 years.

[1:38:32] Bob Dobbs: Nobody,

[1:38:33] Bob Dobbs: no,

[1:38:33] Bob Dobbs: I just met Clinton around the time I did this.

[1:38:36] Bob Dobbs: Nobody has really come up with a new breakthrough beyond our present software computer layout.

[1:38:40] Bob Dobbs: They're just accessorizing or making it faster.

[1:38:44] Bob Dobbs: We're all Luddites.

[1:38:45] Bob Dobbs: We can't take any newness.

[1:38:47] Bob Dobbs: So I'm explaining why they don't change the computers.

[1:38:50] Bob Dobbs: Not like we could in the 19th century.

[1:38:52] Bob Dobbs: It was considered progress in the 19th century,

[1:38:54] Bob Dobbs: but in the 70s and 80s,

[1:38:55] Bob Dobbs: quote,

[1:38:56] Bob Dobbs: no more progress,

[1:38:57] Bob Dobbs: shut down the nuclear power plants.

[1:38:59] Bob Dobbs: Obviously,

[1:38:59] Bob Dobbs: technology is doing us in,

[1:39:01] Bob Dobbs: unquote.

[1:39:02] Bob Dobbs: People are starting to notice the medium is the message on an instinctive paranoid level.

[1:39:06] Bob Dobbs: They didn't see technology as a beautiful art form like McLuhan did.

[1:39:12] Bob Dobbs: Then I go back to 1964.

[1:39:18] Bob Dobbs: Here he is,

[1:39:19] Bob Dobbs: you know,

[1:39:19] Bob Dobbs: a couple of years before Gossage comes up with it.

[1:39:21] Bob Dobbs: You know,

[1:39:21] Bob Dobbs: Gossage heard Marshall saying it.

[1:39:23] Bob Dobbs: That's where he got it,

[1:39:25] Bob Dobbs: right?

[1:39:25] Bob Dobbs: Sure.

[1:39:26] Bob Dobbs: But here's McLuhan laying it out in 1964.

[1:39:29] Bob Dobbs: TV as the latest archetypal,

[1:39:31] Bob Dobbs: it's already archetypal.

[1:39:33] Bob Dobbs: The latest archetypal anti-environment technology is very much Innis disheveled phase,

[1:39:37] Bob Dobbs: says McLuhan.

[1:39:38] Bob Dobbs: The movie remained in such a disheveled phase for decades.

[1:39:42] Bob Dobbs: Whether Telstar is already,

[1:39:43] Bob Dobbs: that was a new satellite program,

[1:39:46] Bob Dobbs: whether Telstar is already a new archetypal anti-environment assumes the present TV form as its content will appear fairly soon.

[1:39:53] Bob Dobbs: Nobody dealt with that one.

[1:39:56] Bob Dobbs: That got lost.

[1:39:58] Bob Dobbs: The jury's out still on that point.

[1:40:00] Bob Dobbs: Did Telstar become a new archetypal anti-environment assumes the present TV form as its content?

[1:40:06] Cameron McEwen: Sure.

[1:40:06] Cameron McEwen: Well,

[1:40:06] Cameron McEwen: Telstar was a satellite and is...

[1:40:13] Cameron McEwen: as

[1:40:14] Cameron McEwen: McLuhan has been talking in all of these quotations about a anti-environment and the questions that that poses.

[1:40:24] Cameron McEwen: So he is again here.

[1:40:27] Cameron McEwen: How are we to understand archetype and cliché in terms of the macrocosmic environment?

[1:40:37] Bob Dobbs: Yeah.

[1:40:38] Cameron McEwen: So you could say that...

[1:40:42] Cameron McEwen: For human beings,

[1:40:44] Cameron McEwen: there is a single question,

[1:40:45] Cameron McEwen: and that is,

[1:40:47] Cameron McEwen: they have a limited lifetime and limited understanding,

[1:40:51] Cameron McEwen: and they're in anti-environment.

[1:40:54] Cameron McEwen: And can the limitations of human beings come to terms with that unlimited environment?

[1:41:03] Cameron McEwen: And if human beings can come to terms with them,

[1:41:08] Cameron McEwen: how do they do it,

[1:41:09] Cameron McEwen: and what would that...

[1:41:11] Cameron McEwen: represent.

[1:41:12] Cameron McEwen: And all of these quotations that you're picking out of his works keep repeating that single question.

[1:41:21] Bob Dobbs: Yeah,

[1:41:22] Bob Dobbs: and so you're right that he saw it in 57 or he saw it in 53,

[1:41:30] Bob Dobbs: and then new noise would come in and he'd incorporate the new noise and overlay it or repaint the same picture.

[1:41:39] Cameron McEwen: Yeah.

[1:41:39] Bob Dobbs: Like abstract artists were doing.

[1:41:42] Cameron McEwen: Correct.

[1:41:43] Cameron McEwen: It's like rats in a maze.

[1:41:46] Cameron McEwen: All you can do is see what the choice is at any juncture,

[1:41:52] Cameron McEwen: and then you have to take one,

[1:41:54] Cameron McEwen: and you go to the next part of the maze,

[1:41:57] Cameron McEwen: and then there's another juncture.

[1:41:59] Cameron McEwen: And that's what human beings do.

[1:42:02] Bob Dobbs: Yeah,

[1:42:03] Bob Dobbs: so I was,

[1:42:04] Bob Dobbs: say that again,

[1:42:05] Bob Dobbs: you're in the maze and what do you do?

[1:42:08] Cameron McEwen: Well,

[1:42:08] Cameron McEwen: you come to a junction and then you have to decide which road,

[1:42:13] Cameron McEwen: which of the possible turns do I make.

[1:42:16] Bob Dobbs: Right.

[1:42:17] Cameron McEwen: And that's what

[1:42:19] Cameron McEwen: McLuhan was doing.

[1:42:20] Cameron McEwen: That's what we all do.

[1:42:24] Cameron McEwen: The maze is the set of limitations to which we are constrained.

[1:42:32] Cameron McEwen: And all we can do is try to make our way through that labyrinth.

[1:42:37] Bob Dobbs: Yeah,

[1:42:38] Bob Dobbs: so Andy Warhol,

[1:42:39] Bob Dobbs: he's starting to have the factory,

[1:42:41] Bob Dobbs: and he's just filming people sitting around being humans,

[1:42:45] Bob Dobbs: and McLuhan was doing it so much more articulately.

[1:42:48] Bob Dobbs: You know,

[1:42:50] Bob Dobbs: Warhol was just getting by instinct,

[1:42:52] Bob Dobbs: but Marshall was not inside instinct.

[1:42:55] Bob Dobbs: He said,

[1:42:56] Bob Dobbs: well,

[1:42:56] Bob Dobbs: of course Warhol gets attention.

[1:42:58] Bob Dobbs: He's a figure for what I'm talking about,

[1:43:00] Bob Dobbs: and

[1:43:01] Bob Dobbs: I'm not stuck in what I'm talking about.

[1:43:05] Bob Dobbs: So

[1:43:07] Bob Dobbs: What was I going to say?

[1:43:16] Bob Dobbs: These quotes you would never know.

[1:43:19] Bob Dobbs: Oh,

[1:43:19] Bob Dobbs: yeah,

[1:43:19] Bob Dobbs: this is what I wanted to say.

[1:43:20] Bob Dobbs: So here I am trying to describe the anti-environment,

[1:43:22] Bob Dobbs: and I'm ransacking the past of Marshall McLuhan and finding quotes that no one noticed,

[1:43:29] Bob Dobbs: nobody had paid any attention to,

[1:43:31] Bob Dobbs: to help lead to an understanding of the tech body.

[1:43:34] Bob Dobbs: The work had already been done by McLuhan.

[1:43:37] Bob Dobbs: This is a great achievement I'm making of showing how McLuhan was illustrating a new ground.

[1:43:44] Bob Dobbs: which is what's going to be later the punchline of the essay.

[1:43:47] Bob Dobbs: So

[1:43:50] Bob Dobbs: I tell you,

[1:43:51] Bob Dobbs: you could have maybe,

[1:43:53] Bob Dobbs: if you thought like me and wanted to do what I'm doing,

[1:43:55] Bob Dobbs: the tech body,

[1:43:57] Bob Dobbs: but I don't know anybody else that knows these quotes.

[1:43:59] Bob Dobbs: They certainly haven't shown up in any public forum or called me and told me what they'd done.

[1:44:07] Bob Dobbs: These are great quotes I'm finding,

[1:44:09] Bob Dobbs: right?

[1:44:10] Cameron McEwen: Oh,

[1:44:10] Cameron McEwen: absolutely,

[1:44:11] Cameron McEwen: absolutely.

[1:44:11] Cameron McEwen: I think you're...

[1:44:12] Cameron McEwen: Just like McLuhan,

[1:44:13] Cameron McEwen: I think you are talking beyond yourself.

[1:44:16] Bob Dobbs: Yeah.

[1:44:17] Cameron McEwen: You're hip-hopping between these various quotes,

[1:44:22] Cameron McEwen: and what you're doing is very,

[1:44:24] Cameron McEwen: very interesting in a way that requires a revisiting.

[1:44:29] Bob Dobbs: Yeah.

[1:44:30] Cameron McEwen: Right?

[1:44:30] Cameron McEwen: What was going on in your brain that was picking out these quotations and ordering them in a collage like this?

[1:44:41] Cameron McEwen: And that's sort of the interesting question that your book poses.

[1:44:48] Bob Dobbs: Right.

[1:44:49] Bob Dobbs: Where the hell did I get this from?

[1:44:51] Bob Dobbs: And

[1:44:52] Bob Dobbs: Queen Elizabeth said that to J.W.

[1:44:54] Bob Dobbs: a couple of months ago.

[1:44:55] Bob Dobbs: He said,

[1:44:56] Bob Dobbs: how did Bob do this?

[1:45:00] Cameron McEwen: Why do it?

[1:45:01] Cameron McEwen: Well,

[1:45:02] Cameron McEwen: the crew needs to pick up the phone and talk to you,

[1:45:05] Cameron McEwen: Bob.

[1:45:06] Bob Dobbs: Well,

[1:45:06] Bob Dobbs: a lot of them are saying,

[1:45:08] Bob Dobbs: can we just call up Bob?

[1:45:09] Bob Dobbs: And he says,

[1:45:10] Bob Dobbs: yeah.

[1:45:12] Bob Dobbs: And then he didn't tell her that usually Bob doesn't answer his phone.

[1:45:17] Bob Dobbs: But he said,

[1:45:18] Bob Dobbs: yeah,

[1:45:18] Bob Dobbs: go ahead,

[1:45:18] Bob Dobbs: Bob will talk to you.

[1:45:21] Bob Dobbs: And he says they're all quite nervous.

[1:45:23] Bob Dobbs: So they'd rather talk to Carolyn.

[1:45:25] Bob Dobbs: She has something practical,

[1:45:26] Bob Dobbs: assuaged by aches and pains.

[1:45:30] Bob Dobbs: That's something they can get a grip on.

[1:45:34] Bob Dobbs: Yeah,

[1:45:34] Bob Dobbs: it's pretty funny the way J.W.

[1:45:35] Bob Dobbs: is my probe.

[1:45:36] Bob Dobbs: He goes out there,

[1:45:38] Bob Dobbs: interacts with the Vatican,

[1:45:39] Bob Dobbs: interacts with the Queen Donald Trump.

[1:45:42] Bob Dobbs: And he reports back,

[1:45:43] Bob Dobbs: I'm always part of the conversation.

[1:45:45] Bob Dobbs: They are monitoring what we're saying.

[1:45:48] Cameron McEwen: So do you regard

[1:45:51] Cameron McEwen: J.W. as an ambassador?

[1:45:54] Bob Dobbs: Yeah.

[1:45:55] Bob Dobbs: He says,

[1:45:56] Bob Dobbs: Bob,

[1:45:56] Bob Dobbs: I don't want to be in your position.

[1:45:58] Bob Dobbs: He's at the factory making new technologies and very happy to do it.

[1:46:05] Bob Dobbs: But,

[1:46:06] Bob Dobbs: yes,

[1:46:07] Bob Dobbs: he's...

[1:46:08] Bob Dobbs: He's trying to get them to have the guts to come over here or to get me on the phone.

[1:46:13] Bob Dobbs: He kind of laughs that they won't do it,

[1:46:14] Bob Dobbs: but he keeps telling them,

[1:46:16] Bob Dobbs: Bob's very easy to talk to.

[1:46:17] Bob Dobbs: Just call him up.

[1:46:19] Bob Dobbs: They go,

[1:46:19] Bob Dobbs: oh,

[1:46:20] Bob Dobbs: no,

[1:46:20] Bob Dobbs: I don't want to meet the president.

[1:46:24] Bob Dobbs: You know,

[1:46:24] Bob Dobbs: just the same nervousness people had when they would meet McLuhan.

[1:46:27] Bob Dobbs: I was just reading.

[1:46:32] Cameron McEwen: I interpret that to mean that people don't want to.

[1:46:39] Cameron McEwen: know that their understanding comes out of their limitation.

[1:46:42] Bob Dobbs: Yeah,

[1:46:43] Bob Dobbs: yep,

[1:46:44] Bob Dobbs: they don't want to know.

[1:46:48] Bob Dobbs: So then I go,

[1:46:49] Bob Dobbs: okay,

[1:46:49] Bob Dobbs: after,

[1:46:50] Bob Dobbs: look at the way,

[1:46:51] Bob Dobbs: I don't know if I've got this right.

[1:46:52] Bob Dobbs: Whether Telstar is already a new archetypal anti-environment assumes the present TV form as its content,

[1:46:59] Bob Dobbs: will,

[1:46:59] Bob Dobbs: oh,

[1:47:00] Bob Dobbs: I see,

[1:47:00] Bob Dobbs: weather will appear.

[1:47:02] Bob Dobbs: The question will be answered,

[1:47:03] Bob Dobbs: will appear fairly soon.

[1:47:05] Bob Dobbs: Whether Telstar is already a new,

[1:47:07] Bob Dobbs: is it?

[1:47:08] Bob Dobbs: Already a new archetypal anti-environment assumes the present Anti-environment is content.

[1:47:12] Bob Dobbs: That issue will appear fairly soon or be resolved.

[1:47:18] Bob Dobbs: Is that how you read that?

[1:47:20] Cameron McEwen: Well,

[1:47:21] Cameron McEwen: I would say that it's the question that's been left hanging.

[1:47:24] Bob Dobbs: Yeah.

[1:47:26] Cameron McEwen: I mean,

[1:47:29] Cameron McEwen: if we ask what does new,

[1:47:32] Cameron McEwen: N-E-W,

[1:47:33] Cameron McEwen: mean Innis context,

[1:47:35] Cameron McEwen: it means the oldest of the old.

[1:47:37] Bob Dobbs: Yeah.

[1:47:38] Cameron McEwen: So whether or not we're going to be able to come to an understanding of the oldest of the old in a way that is revolutionary,

[1:47:48] Cameron McEwen: that's the great question.

[1:47:49] Cameron McEwen: And it's becoming very pointed today.

[1:47:54] Bob Dobbs: Well,

[1:47:54] Bob Dobbs: let's see.

[1:47:55] Bob Dobbs: I think I say that.

[1:47:56] Bob Dobbs: So my

[1:47:57] Bob Dobbs: Howard Bob Cosell says,

[1:47:59] Bob Dobbs: McLuhan isn't exactly clear about the pace of turnover.

[1:48:02] Bob Dobbs: When does TV become archetype?

[1:48:04] Bob Dobbs: In the case of Telstar,

[1:48:05] Bob Dobbs: the first U.S.

[1:48:06] Bob Dobbs: satellite launched on July 10,

[1:48:07] Bob Dobbs: 1962,

[1:48:09] Bob Dobbs: the satellite was a novelty,

[1:48:10] Bob Dobbs: the last word,

[1:48:11] Bob Dobbs: and then it was cliché,

[1:48:13] Bob Dobbs: and then it's going to be an art form.

[1:48:15] Bob Dobbs: When's it going to be an archetype?

[1:48:18] Bob Dobbs: McLuhan not sure how anti-environment go through this process.

[1:48:21] Bob Dobbs: Telstar is appearing archetypal.

[1:48:23] Bob Dobbs: Well,

[1:48:24] Bob Dobbs: is it actually becoming archetypal?

[1:48:26] Bob Dobbs: McLuhan says,

[1:48:27] Bob Dobbs: we'll figure that out soon enough.

[1:48:29] Bob Dobbs: It will appear as archetype fairly soon,

[1:48:31] Bob Dobbs: unquote.

[1:48:32] Bob Dobbs: But he miscalculated worldwide management.

[1:48:35] Bob Dobbs: He thought management would keep getting obsolescent and give up,

[1:48:38] Bob Dobbs: resign.

[1:48:39] Bob Dobbs: McLuhan told me,

[1:48:41] Bob Dobbs: quote,

[1:48:41] Bob Dobbs: management managed to hold on and stop the opportunities that new technology was giving.

[1:48:46] Bob Dobbs: They got their Kissinger and just sat there and said,

[1:48:48] Bob Dobbs: we aren't moving.

[1:48:49] Bob Dobbs: You don't run nothing.

[1:48:50] Bob Dobbs: We run it.

[1:48:51] Bob Dobbs: We're still going to fight wars based on nationalism or tribalism.

[1:48:55] Bob Dobbs: That's really like today.

[1:48:57] Bob Dobbs: McLuhan didn't realize they would get away with that stubbornness for so many decades.

[1:49:02] Cameron McEwen: Right.

[1:49:03] Cameron McEwen: Even centuries.

[1:49:04] Bob Dobbs: Right.

[1:49:05] Bob Dobbs: So there's the failure you talk about.

[1:49:07] Cameron McEwen: That's right.

[1:49:09] Cameron McEwen: There's well,

[1:49:10] Cameron McEwen: there's so you have the failure.

[1:49:12] Cameron McEwen: That's the great danger.

[1:49:14] Cameron McEwen: And you have the failure that's the great opportunity.

[1:49:17] Cameron McEwen: And that's the situation in which we're situated.

[1:49:26] Bob Dobbs: Yeah,

[1:49:27] Bob Dobbs: so when the Internet came in,

[1:49:28] Bob Dobbs: they all celebrated McLuhan,

[1:49:29] Bob Dobbs: Wired Magazine and that.

[1:49:31] Bob Dobbs: No,

[1:49:31] Bob Dobbs: it should have been,

[1:49:32] Bob Dobbs: uh-oh,

[1:49:33] Bob Dobbs: he failed.

[1:49:34] Bob Dobbs: It's not good that we're going to reap the benefits of what he saw on the negative side.

[1:49:45] Bob Dobbs: on the disservice side in other words if he failed we're in trouble i i remember when when zappa failed zappa failed when zappa died a couple of the musicians band who you know really respected his work and all that and had great concerts they said this is not good zappa didn't make it this

[1:50:05] Bob Dobbs: is not good you know what i mean yeah like the scout went ahead and didn't make it

[1:50:12] Bob Dobbs: This is the worst part of the Hollywood movie we're in right now.

[1:50:16] Bob Dobbs: There's no way out.

[1:50:17] Bob Dobbs: We actually blew it.

[1:50:19] Bob Dobbs: It's amazing.

[1:50:20] Bob Dobbs: You hear people say it all over the place,

[1:50:21] Bob Dobbs: right?

[1:50:23] Cameron McEwen: Right.

[1:50:23] Bob Dobbs: They really are despondent.

[1:50:26] Cameron McEwen: You used the phrase,

[1:50:27] Cameron McEwen: there's no way out.

[1:50:28] Bob Dobbs: Yeah.

[1:50:28] Cameron McEwen: And many discussions ago,

[1:50:32] Cameron McEwen: we were continually talking about the cul-de-sac.

[1:50:37] Bob Dobbs: Yes.

[1:50:38] Cameron McEwen: And the labyrinth.

[1:50:41] Cameron McEwen: And we're coming back to it here.

[1:50:45] Cameron McEwen: What

[1:50:46] Cameron McEwen: McLuhan was describing as the choice before human beings back in the

[1:50:54] Cameron McEwen: 1960s is a question that hasn't really been posed in the

[1:51:04] Cameron McEwen: 80 years since.

[1:51:06] Cameron McEwen: We're still in exactly the same spot.

[1:51:09] Bob Dobbs: That's right.

[1:51:11] Bob Dobbs: I used to say on the radio 40 years ago,

[1:51:13] Bob Dobbs: we're still running on the spot,

[1:51:15] Bob Dobbs: 1945.

[1:51:17] Bob Dobbs: We've just been overlaying novelties and information patterns from the same paralysis,

[1:51:23] Bob Dobbs: 1945,

[1:51:24] Bob Dobbs: when history had ended,

[1:51:26] Bob Dobbs: linear history.

[1:51:30] Bob Dobbs: So these patterns are the best kind of art that's happening today.

[1:51:37] Bob Dobbs: I guess so.

[1:51:39] Cameron McEwen: That's one thing that I've never really understood with McLuhan is his emphasis on art.

[1:51:48] Cameron McEwen: I think it was a way of trying to talk about religion and philosophy.

[1:51:56] Cameron McEwen: In a new way,

[1:51:58] Bob Dobbs: because the artist wasn't considered in that field.

[1:52:01] Cameron McEwen: Correct.

[1:52:02] Bob Dobbs: So he took the Gutenberg artists and showed what the importance in the history of philosophy that the academics missed.

[1:52:08] Bob Dobbs: But he was talking about a new kind of art,

[1:52:10] Bob Dobbs: not those guys.

[1:52:13] Cameron McEwen: Yeah,

[1:52:13] Cameron McEwen: he was talking about making.

[1:52:15] Bob Dobbs: Yeah,

[1:52:15] Bob Dobbs: and he was talking about Canada as anti-environment,

[1:52:18] Bob Dobbs: was the new artist.

[1:52:21] Bob Dobbs: He used to complain about,

[1:52:22] Bob Dobbs: you know,

[1:52:23] Bob Dobbs: Ted Carpenter joined the art world,

[1:52:25] Bob Dobbs: married whatever that family's name is,

[1:52:28] Bob Dobbs: and

[1:52:30] Bob Dobbs: Marshall said,

[1:52:31] Bob Dobbs: you know,

[1:52:31] Bob Dobbs: you don't go to New York,

[1:52:33] Bob Dobbs: that's a bunch of con men.

[1:52:35] Bob Dobbs: And so he came up with a way of...

[1:52:37] Bob Dobbs: Writing a poem about it,

[1:52:39] Bob Dobbs: saying Canada is the new art.

[1:52:41] Bob Dobbs: Now try to sell that.

[1:52:42] Bob Dobbs: Can you sell Canada as a great artwork,

[1:52:46] Bob Dobbs: like the Wall Street guys were doing with the old arts?

[1:52:50] Bob Dobbs: Just to realize what his metaphor,

[1:52:53] Bob Dobbs: what he was going beyond what he thought he knew,

[1:52:56] Bob Dobbs: or however you were saying that.

[1:52:57] Bob Dobbs: He was going beyond his grasp.

[1:53:00] Bob Dobbs: To grasp that that's what he's doing,

[1:53:02] Bob Dobbs: and to get partly what he's saying,

[1:53:04] Bob Dobbs: is an inspiration.

[1:53:07] Bob Dobbs: Inspiring art form to inflame the mind.

[1:53:11] Cameron McEwen: Correct.

[1:53:13] Cameron McEwen: And we could say that

[1:53:15] Cameron McEwen: Canada there is not the literal Canada,

[1:53:19] Cameron McEwen: just as media are not literal

[1:53:22] Cameron McEwen: TV, newspapers,

[1:53:24] Cameron McEwen: radio,

[1:53:24] Cameron McEwen: etc.

[1:53:25] Cameron McEwen: So

[1:53:26] Cameron McEwen: Canada there is not the literal Canada with certain borders and certain people that are in it.

[1:53:32] Cameron McEwen: Canada there stands in for the world.

[1:53:35] Cameron McEwen: Yeah.

[1:53:35] Cameron McEwen: Is the world going to be able to come to instantiate intermedia?

[1:53:42] Cameron McEwen: Yes or no?

[1:53:44] Bob Dobbs: Right.

[1:53:44] Cameron McEwen: If the world...

[1:53:45] Bob Dobbs: And Canada,

[1:53:46] Bob Dobbs: as the Grey's Arrows,

[1:53:47] Bob Dobbs: produced a unique politician,

[1:53:48] Bob Dobbs: Trudeau,

[1:53:50] Bob Dobbs: which McLuhan said you could never have a Trudeau in the United States.

[1:53:53] Bob Dobbs: They were too much on the spot with all the issues that they had to take responsibility for because they were the world managers,

[1:54:00] Bob Dobbs: the service environment.

[1:54:02] Cameron McEwen: Trudeau himself was a very failed kind of individual.

[1:54:08] Cameron McEwen: Yes,

[1:54:08] Bob Dobbs: their image was more than they realized what they were.

[1:54:12] Cameron McEwen: Correct,

[1:54:13] Cameron McEwen: absolutely.

[1:54:15] Bob Dobbs: Glenn Gould,

[1:54:16] Bob Dobbs: he failed too.

[1:54:17] Cameron McEwen: Yeah,

[1:54:18] Cameron McEwen: yeah.

[1:54:18] Cameron McEwen: Well,

[1:54:18] Cameron McEwen: we all do.

[1:54:21] Cameron McEwen: I mean,

[1:54:21] Cameron McEwen: you know,

[1:54:23] Cameron McEwen: people should be so lucky to fail like a McLuhan or like a Gould.

[1:54:27] Cameron McEwen: Yeah,

[1:54:28] Bob Dobbs: they're so gracefully,

[1:54:29] Bob Dobbs: to fail so gracefully.

[1:54:31] Cameron McEwen: Yeah,

[1:54:33] Bob Dobbs: yeah.

[1:54:34] Bob Dobbs: He said in 79,

[1:54:36] Bob Dobbs: I don't know where,

[1:54:38] Bob Dobbs: he was on the phone with that guy who did the bibliography down in Florida,

[1:54:41] Bob Dobbs: and I overheard him,

[1:54:43] Bob Dobbs: and he said,

[1:54:43] Bob Dobbs: It's just me and George now.

[1:54:47] Bob Dobbs: The two guys survived everything.

[1:54:49] Bob Dobbs: They were the only two guys left in Canada.

[1:54:52] Cameron McEwen: That's right.

[1:54:52] Cameron McEwen: And one of them didn't have too much time left.

[1:54:55] Bob Dobbs: And he didn't know I was standing there witnessing this.

[1:54:58] Bob Dobbs: And I was the other guy that survived.

[1:55:01] Cameron McEwen: That's right.

[1:55:02] Bob Dobbs: He didn't notice that.

[1:55:04] Bob Dobbs: Or maybe he did.

[1:55:06] Bob Dobbs: He used to.

[1:55:07] Bob Dobbs: As

[1:55:08] Bob Dobbs: I got.

[1:55:09] Bob Dobbs: Things wound down.

[1:55:11] Bob Dobbs: I mean,

[1:55:11] Bob Dobbs: remember,

[1:55:12] Bob Dobbs: Carolyn gave him the Selye,

[1:55:15] Bob Dobbs: the water purifier,

[1:55:17] Bob Dobbs: the day before his stroke or a couple days before the stroke.

[1:55:21] Bob Dobbs: And when he had a stroke on Friday,

[1:55:24] Bob Dobbs: September 26,

[1:55:25] Bob Dobbs: 1979,

[1:55:29] Bob Dobbs: and then Jim,

[1:55:29] Bob Dobbs: what's her name,

[1:55:29] Bob Dobbs: Margaret?

[1:55:31] Bob Dobbs: What's her name,

[1:55:32] Bob Dobbs: the secretary?

[1:55:33] Cameron McEwen: Jim Stewart.

[1:55:34] Bob Dobbs: Yeah.

[1:55:34] Bob Dobbs: Jim Stewart comes in,

[1:55:36] Bob Dobbs: and there on the little table in the hallway was the Selye unopened.

[1:55:40] Bob Dobbs: that carol had left for marshall like five days before maybe on a sunday and uh he didn't get to the Selye and it was sitting there very symbolic of of me being handed the torch or the bulletin or the uh the baseball bat whatever

[1:55:57] Bob Dobbs: you hand on to people the uh it's so symbolic our little artifact was there and uh Jim Stewart the entire tradition can Thank you.

[1:56:09] Cameron McEwen: can be called a series of unopened packages.

[1:56:13] Bob Dobbs: Yeah,

[1:56:13] Bob Dobbs: yeah.

[1:56:14] Bob Dobbs: And so

[1:56:19] Bob Dobbs: I took that as a sign.

[1:56:20] Bob Dobbs: I knew,

[1:56:20] Bob Dobbs: oh,

[1:56:20] Bob Dobbs: wow,

[1:56:21] Bob Dobbs: look at that.

[1:56:23] Bob Dobbs: And Jim Stewart,

[1:56:24] Bob Dobbs: he knew what the D cell was.

[1:56:25] Bob Dobbs: We had shown it to him.

[1:56:26] Bob Dobbs: It was a water purifier,

[1:56:27] Bob Dobbs: which led on to what we sell now,

[1:56:30] Bob Dobbs: the living water.

[1:56:30] Bob Dobbs: We have a whole new amazing apparatus.

[1:56:32] Bob Dobbs: It goes way beyond what Joe Dunn Sloan made with his little concrete D cells.

[1:56:37] Cameron McEwen: Is that what you call it,

[1:56:38] Cameron McEwen: the living water?

[1:56:39] Bob Dobbs: Yes,

[1:56:39] Bob Dobbs: well,

[1:56:40] Bob Dobbs: we're...

[1:56:40] Bob Dobbs: Selling is living water,

[1:56:42] Bob Dobbs: and you can't,

[1:56:43] Bob Dobbs: we don't sell to people because it'll kill them.

[1:56:45] Bob Dobbs: It's too powerful.

[1:56:46] Bob Dobbs: You've got to be on our products for a few years to be able to take what it does to you.

[1:56:50] Bob Dobbs: So what we are selling now,

[1:56:51] Bob Dobbs: just beginning,

[1:56:53] Bob Dobbs: is a watered-down version of living water,

[1:56:58] Bob Dobbs: three cans.

[1:56:59] Bob Dobbs: One's called

[1:57:00] Bob Dobbs: Mind, another's called Body,

[1:57:02] Bob Dobbs: and another's called Spirit.

[1:57:04] Bob Dobbs: And so those three cans will be marketing soon,

[1:57:07] Bob Dobbs: and you...

[1:57:08] Bob Dobbs: You drink them for a while to get your body tuned to be able to take the living water.

[1:57:13] Cameron McEwen: I see.

[1:57:14] Cameron McEwen: So

[1:57:16] Cameron McEwen: I believe the word whiskey means living water and daily.

[1:57:22] Bob Dobbs: Yeah.

[1:57:23] Cameron McEwen: And vodka may mean something like that in Slavic.

[1:57:29] Bob Dobbs: You know what you've got to listen to?

[1:57:31] Bob Dobbs: I'll show you the link.

[1:57:33] Bob Dobbs: You've got to listen to

[1:57:34] Bob Dobbs: Ion analyzing Finnegans Wake.

[1:57:38] Bob Dobbs: And he's showing that the page is in the wrong order.

[1:57:43] Bob Dobbs: So we've done 31 episodes,

[1:57:45] Bob Dobbs: so 31 pages.

[1:57:46] Bob Dobbs: And it usually includes a bit from the previous page.

[1:57:49] Bob Dobbs: Like we did 137 last Saturday.

[1:57:52] Bob Dobbs: So we started at 136 and we went all the way to 139.

[1:57:55] Bob Dobbs: Because it ended the first question in Chapter 6 of Book 1 about who was the great rector.

[1:58:02] Bob Dobbs: And the answer is Finn McCool.

[1:58:04] Bob Dobbs: And

[1:58:05] Bob Dobbs: Ion goes along and...

[1:58:07] Bob Dobbs: Selects words and phrases.

[1:58:09] Bob Dobbs: It's uncanny.

[1:58:11] Bob Dobbs: And he proves that Finn McCool is Donald Trump.

[1:58:15] Bob Dobbs: It's amazing.

[1:58:18] Bob Dobbs: And so I posted this on the Finning His Wake forum.

[1:58:21] Bob Dobbs: And a couple people listened to it.

[1:58:23] Bob Dobbs: It's interesting,

[1:58:24] Bob Dobbs: but it is pretty astounding that

[1:58:27] Bob Dobbs: Ayan does this every time.

[1:58:29] Bob Dobbs: He goes through the pages and shows how the words refer.

[1:58:34] Bob Dobbs: to the events in the news of that period,

[1:58:36] Bob Dobbs: of that week.

[1:58:37] Bob Dobbs: We do this every couple of weeks.

[1:58:39] Bob Dobbs: We do a page.

[1:58:40] Bob Dobbs: But

[1:58:41] Bob Dobbs: I'm saying to you,

[1:58:41] Bob Dobbs: I want you to listen to them and see what you make of this.

[1:58:45] Cameron McEwen: All right.

[1:58:46] Cameron McEwen: I'll give it a try.

[1:58:48] Cameron McEwen: Isn't it important to note that everything in Finnegans Wake can be interpreted Innis way and that way,

[1:58:58] Cameron McEwen: But it's lack of literal...

[1:59:04] Cameron McEwen: meaning that is the key.

[1:59:06] Bob Dobbs: Yes,

[1:59:07] Bob Dobbs: but the people find it,

[1:59:09] Bob Dobbs: they look for the past in it.

[1:59:11] Bob Dobbs: They don't see this week's news the week you're doing that page.

[1:59:17] Bob Dobbs: So it's a very refined,

[1:59:19] Bob Dobbs: super talented pattern recognition based on the cliche that,

[1:59:23] Bob Dobbs: well,

[1:59:23] Bob Dobbs: you can find anything in there.

[1:59:26] Bob Dobbs: I like to see you do this,

[1:59:28] Bob Dobbs: or anybody do what I did.

[1:59:30] Bob Dobbs: So anyway,

[1:59:31] Bob Dobbs: it's pretty phenomenal.

[1:59:32] Bob Dobbs: It's a revolution.

[1:59:33] Bob Dobbs: All right,

[1:59:33] Bob Dobbs: send me the link.

[1:59:34] Bob Dobbs: Yeah,

[1:59:35] Bob Dobbs: I think you'll find it entertaining.

[1:59:37] Bob Dobbs: Interesting.

[1:59:38] Bob Dobbs: Interesting process.

[1:59:42] Bob Dobbs: Yeah,

[1:59:42] Bob Dobbs: so I'm going to send you the list and start with the latest.

[1:59:47] Bob Dobbs: Carol was listening to the first episode,

[1:59:50] Bob Dobbs: and I had to go on for hours because I wasn't saying anything.

[1:59:55] Bob Dobbs: I don't know what was going on.

[1:59:56] Bob Dobbs: I couldn't get Ion to say anything.

[1:59:58] Bob Dobbs: in light of how in subsequent...

[2:00:01] Bob Dobbs: The performance is,

[2:00:02] Bob Dobbs: man,

[2:00:02] Bob Dobbs: he had a lot to say,

[2:00:03] Bob Dobbs: but there was some hesitation going on in the first.

[2:00:06] Bob Dobbs: I don't know if he was getting oriented or looking over the whole book,

[2:00:09] Bob Dobbs: or I don't know,

[2:00:09] Bob Dobbs: but it was very interesting,

[2:00:11] Bob Dobbs: the reticence in the first effort.

[2:00:14] Bob Dobbs: So I don't want anybody to hear that,

[2:00:15] Bob Dobbs: because you just hear me reading and nothing coming from Ion,

[2:00:18] Bob Dobbs: compared to how much Ion interrupts me when I'm reading it now.

[2:00:23] Bob Dobbs: I just go a line or two,

[2:00:25] Bob Dobbs: and then he says,

[2:00:26] Bob Dobbs: okay,

[2:00:26] Bob Dobbs: hold it,

[2:00:26] Bob Dobbs: and then he Explorations the words.

[2:00:29] Bob Dobbs: And it takes a while to get through that one page.

[2:00:32] Bob Dobbs: Anyways,

[2:00:32] Bob Dobbs: it's very,

[2:00:33] Bob Dobbs: very interesting.

[2:00:35] Bob Dobbs: And also,

[2:00:36] Bob Dobbs: Ian says you can figure out Innis Wake with something called a Playfair cipher.

[2:00:41] Bob Dobbs: You ever heard of those?

[2:00:42] Bob Dobbs: Playfair ciphers.

[2:00:45] Cameron McEwen: There's a vague bell ringing,

[2:00:49] Cameron McEwen: but I wouldn't be able to say what it reminds me of.

[2:00:52] Cameron McEwen: Right,

[2:00:53] Bob Dobbs: you've heard of it.

[2:00:53] Bob Dobbs: I'll send you the link.

[2:00:55] Bob Dobbs: to the Playfair cipher as defined in Wikipedia.

[2:00:58] Bob Dobbs: Well,

[2:00:59] Bob Dobbs: he says the Playfair cipher is angel,

[2:01:01] Bob Dobbs: the word angel.

[2:01:02] Bob Dobbs: So we're putting it right out there.

[2:01:03] Bob Dobbs: If you know how to do the Playfair cipher,

[2:01:05] Bob Dobbs: you can figure out how

[2:01:07] Bob Dobbs: Finnegans Wake,

[2:01:08] Bob Dobbs: you can crack the code of Finnegans Wake.

[2:01:11] Bob Dobbs: So

[2:01:12] Bob Dobbs: I don't know if anybody can do it,

[2:01:14] Bob Dobbs: but eventually we'll get Ian to show us how it's done.

[2:01:19] Bob Dobbs: Anyways,

[2:01:20] Bob Dobbs: it's very...

[2:01:22] Bob Dobbs: Exciting way to look at Finnegans Wake.

[2:01:25] Bob Dobbs: It's a totally new way.

[2:01:30] Bob Dobbs: Illustrating the old point again,

[2:01:33] Bob Dobbs: once again.

[2:01:37] Bob Dobbs: You know,

[2:01:38] Bob Dobbs: the points that you say we keep repeating.

[2:01:41] Bob Dobbs: or the patterns.

[2:01:43] Bob Dobbs: So then my next quote...

[2:01:46] Cameron McEwen: I guess I would just say that the test of any science is whether or not it can apply to what's right in front of us.

[2:02:00] Cameron McEwen: So it's when alchemy was doing its thing,

[2:02:06] Cameron McEwen: there were many interesting things that it had to say.

[2:02:11] Cameron McEwen: about things that had gone on in the past and things that people might think about was going on in the laboratory or something.

[2:02:24] Cameron McEwen: But when chemistry was able to say,

[2:02:27] Cameron McEwen: look here's a gas if you heat it in such and such a way here's what you get at the end,

[2:02:35] Cameron McEwen: then that was a revolution in human history.

[2:02:38] Cameron McEwen: It was

[2:02:40] Cameron McEwen: The present could be demonstrably understood Innis way.

[2:02:48] Cameron McEwen: It could be taught.

[2:02:51] Cameron McEwen: Ramifications could be drawn from it.

[2:02:53] Cameron McEwen: And that's McLuhan classroom without walls.

[2:02:57] Cameron McEwen: Yeah.

[2:03:01] Cameron McEwen: It's what he says is computer programming.

[2:03:11] Bob Dobbs: Right.

[2:03:12] Bob Dobbs: He once said in a lecture that we should have gone with the analog computer,

[2:03:16] Bob Dobbs: not the digital.

[2:03:20] Bob Dobbs: I didn't know at the time.

[2:03:21] Bob Dobbs: This was in September 78.

[2:03:23] Bob Dobbs: What the hell is an analog computer,

[2:03:25] Bob Dobbs: you know?

[2:03:26] Cameron McEwen: Yeah,

[2:03:26] Cameron McEwen: that's interesting.

[2:03:27] Cameron McEwen: That's interesting.

[2:03:28] Cameron McEwen: Because right at that time,

[2:03:30] Cameron McEwen: he says stuff like,

[2:03:36] Cameron McEwen: maybe I've gone wrong by emphasizing the acoustics.

[2:03:40] Cameron McEwen: too much as opposed to the visual.

[2:03:43] Bob Dobbs: Yeah,

[2:03:44] Bob Dobbs: he says that in late 70s,

[2:03:45] Bob Dobbs: same time.

[2:03:45] Bob Dobbs: That's right.

[2:03:46] Cameron McEwen: Interesting.

[2:03:47] Cameron McEwen: That's right,

[2:03:49] Cameron McEwen: and that's one understanding of an analog computer,

[2:03:53] Cameron McEwen: right?

[2:03:53] Cameron McEwen: The analog is visual or literary,

[2:03:57] Cameron McEwen: and the computer is digital or electronic.

[2:04:04] Cameron McEwen: And what he's saying with the analog computer is that those need to be understood in their ratio.

[2:04:11] Cameron McEwen: the analog one well they visual and the acoustic together or the analog and the digital together so a ratio is always two right and so what he what McLuhan was doing at the very end of his life as

[2:04:28] Cameron McEwen: is he was coming back to his notion that unless you talk in terms of ratios you're not going to get anywhere

[2:04:37] Bob Dobbs: Yeah,

[2:04:38] Bob Dobbs: he,

[2:04:38] Bob Dobbs: in Culture Is Our Business,

[2:04:39] Bob Dobbs: said he predicts we will flip individual values.

[2:04:42] Bob Dobbs: And he might have said that somewhere else,

[2:04:44] Bob Dobbs: but that's what,

[2:04:45] Bob Dobbs: by the late 70s,

[2:04:47] Bob Dobbs: we were going to flip individual again.

[2:04:49] Bob Dobbs: That's why he was saying that.

[2:04:51] Bob Dobbs: It's time for me to change my statement about where we're at.

[2:04:54] Bob Dobbs: The acoustic doesn't apply anymore.

[2:04:57] Bob Dobbs: And that became the neoconservative

[2:04:59] Bob Dobbs: 80s.

[2:05:01] Cameron McEwen: Oh, and it's still going on today.

[2:05:03] Bob Dobbs: Yeah.

[2:05:04] Cameron McEwen: It's gone on for

[2:05:06] Cameron McEwen: 70 years.

[2:05:07] Bob Dobbs: Well,

[2:05:08] Bob Dobbs: 40 since 1980.

[2:05:11] Bob Dobbs: Yeah,

[2:05:11] Cameron McEwen: 40 since 1980.

[2:05:13] Cameron McEwen: But as you were saying before,

[2:05:16] Cameron McEwen: history kind of stopped in 1945.

[2:05:21] Cameron McEwen: Yes.

[2:05:21] Cameron McEwen: And what happens in 1945 is the revolutionary aspects of the atomic bomb are papered over in a myriad different ways.

[2:05:34] Cameron McEwen: But the...

[2:05:36] Cameron McEwen: bomb anti-environment is not entered into.

[2:05:41] Bob Dobbs: Yeah,

[2:05:43] Bob Dobbs: some essay he wrote in the Malinowski,

[2:05:45] Bob Dobbs: short thing,

[2:05:46] Bob Dobbs: he said,

[2:05:47] Bob Dobbs: the bomb is the university all compact.

[2:05:50] Cameron McEwen: That's right.

[2:05:51] Bob Dobbs: There's a great line.

[2:05:54] Bob Dobbs: That's right.

[2:05:58] Cameron McEwen: I think you have that quotation.

[2:06:02] Bob Dobbs: In my thing here?

[2:06:04] Cameron McEwen: Yeah,

[2:06:04] Cameron McEwen: in your...

[2:06:05] Cameron McEwen: book,

[2:06:09] Cameron McEwen: that's either from the essay on Burroughs or from a related letter right around that time.

[2:06:21] Cameron McEwen: But what I found particularly interesting about that is the phrase,

[2:06:25] Cameron McEwen: all compact,

[2:06:27] Cameron McEwen: which you just emphasized.

[2:06:29] Bob Dobbs: I'm the first person in the world to say that out loud.

[2:06:33] Bob Dobbs: You might have said it yourself,

[2:06:35] Bob Dobbs: but...

[2:06:35] Bob Dobbs: No one ever said it to you.

[2:06:37] Cameron McEwen: Yeah,

[2:06:37] Cameron McEwen: well,

[2:06:38] Cameron McEwen: I've got several posts that talk about this,

[2:06:42] Cameron McEwen: because in 1933,

[2:06:50] Cameron McEwen: in McLuhan

[2:06:52] Cameron McEwen: MA thesis on George Meredith,

[2:06:55] Cameron McEwen: he cites one passage from Meredith Innis very short MA thesis,

[2:07:02] Cameron McEwen: which is only 100 pages long,

[2:07:05] Cameron McEwen: and it's W.T. Stead.

[2:07:07] Cameron McEwen: So it's a very short work.

[2:07:08] Bob Dobbs: Yeah.

[2:07:09] Cameron McEwen: He quotes one passage from

[2:07:13] Cameron McEwen: Meredith five times in that short work.

[2:07:17] Bob Dobbs: Wow.

[2:07:17] Cameron McEwen: He says it over and over and over again.

[2:07:20] Cameron McEwen: And what

[2:07:23] Cameron McEwen: Meredith is talking about is the attempt to pass through what he calls the clashing rocks of...

[2:07:35] Cameron McEwen: asceticism on the one hand and sensuality on the other.

[2:07:40] Bob Dobbs: That's

[2:07:41] Bob Dobbs: Scylla and Charybdis.

[2:07:43] Cameron McEwen: That's right.

[2:07:44] Cameron McEwen: And what

[2:07:46] Cameron McEwen: Meredith says is that this attempted passage is all compact of human destiny,

[2:07:58] Cameron McEwen: something like that.

[2:07:59] Cameron McEwen: He uses the phrase all compact.

[2:08:01] Bob Dobbs: Wow.

[2:08:04] Cameron McEwen: McLuhan is quoting himself from 30 years earlier when he uses the phrase all compact.

[2:08:11] Bob Dobbs: Very good find.

[2:08:12] Bob Dobbs: Very good find.

[2:08:14] Bob Dobbs: Well,

[2:08:15] Bob Dobbs: but nobody ever would bring up that phrase to you,

[2:08:17] Bob Dobbs: but I did it.

[2:08:19] Cameron McEwen: Yes,

[2:08:19] Cameron McEwen: sir.

[2:08:20] Bob Dobbs: Yes,

[2:08:20] Bob Dobbs: I'm worthy of being in the same room as you.

[2:08:24] Cameron McEwen: More than worthy,

[2:08:24] Cameron McEwen: yes.

[2:08:26] Bob Dobbs: More than worthy,

[2:08:26] Bob Dobbs: right.

[2:08:27] Bob Dobbs: No,

[2:08:27] Bob Dobbs: like...

[2:08:28] Bob Dobbs: It would be very interesting if Tom Cooper,

[2:08:31] Bob Dobbs: Logan,

[2:08:31] Bob Dobbs: any of these blues pals,

[2:08:32] Bob Dobbs: if they listen to us,

[2:08:33] Bob Dobbs: what would they say?

[2:08:35] Bob Dobbs: Because we're saying stuff that's never been heard before in relation to McLuhan.

[2:08:38] Bob Dobbs: And we're,

[2:08:40] Bob Dobbs: what is it,

[2:08:41] Bob Dobbs: gathering together our ammunition?

[2:08:43] Bob Dobbs: What did

[2:08:44] Bob Dobbs: Hercules or somebody,

[2:08:46] Bob Dobbs: he said,

[2:08:46] Bob Dobbs: gather together stuff.

[2:08:49] Bob Dobbs: You know,

[2:08:49] Bob Dobbs: gather getting,

[2:08:50] Bob Dobbs: he said the pound and 51.

[2:08:52] Bob Dobbs: I'm gathering together ammunition,

[2:08:54] Bob Dobbs: and I intend to use it.

[2:08:55] Bob Dobbs: But we're gathering together,

[2:08:56] Bob Dobbs: or I'm presenting this.

[2:08:58] Bob Dobbs: book,

[2:08:58] Bob Dobbs: which is evoking what you're gathering in your work,

[2:09:02] Bob Dobbs: is the work on McLuhan that no one ever talks about.

[2:09:05] Bob Dobbs: They don't know how to talk about it.

[2:09:09] Cameron McEwen: Yeah,

[2:09:09] Cameron McEwen: I think that's right.

[2:09:10] Cameron McEwen: The question,

[2:09:12] Cameron McEwen: the great question is,

[2:09:14] Cameron McEwen: how do you start to talk about this stuff?

[2:09:16] Bob Dobbs: Yeah.

[2:09:17] Cameron McEwen: There's a kind of revolution or a labyrinth that you need to go through.

[2:09:27] Cameron McEwen: before you can start to talk about this stuff.

[2:09:29] Cameron McEwen: And that's the great difficulty is in that prior starting place.

[2:09:37] Bob Dobbs: Right.

[2:09:38] Bob Dobbs: So then we go back to 1961,

[2:09:42] Bob Dobbs: and he says,

[2:09:43] Bob Dobbs: Jet travel and satellite broadcasting will foster the grasp of languages,

[2:09:48] Bob Dobbs: ancient and modern,

[2:09:50] Bob Dobbs: in a simultaneous cultural transparency.

[2:09:53] Bob Dobbs: Boy,

[2:09:53] Bob Dobbs: look at that.

[2:09:54] Bob Dobbs: What a statement.

[2:09:55] Bob Dobbs: Jet travel.

[2:09:56] Bob Dobbs: satellite broadcasting will fosper the grasp of languages,

[2:09:59] Bob Dobbs: ancient and modern,

[2:10:01] Bob Dobbs: what are ancient languages,

[2:10:02] Bob Dobbs: what are modern,

[2:10:03] Bob Dobbs: and a simultaneous cultural transparency.

[2:10:05] Bob Dobbs: That's actually a great statement about Finnegans Wake.

[2:10:10] Cameron McEwen: Sure,

[2:10:10] Cameron McEwen: absolutely.

[2:10:11] Cameron McEwen: But what he's talking about there can't be understood literally in terms of languages.

[2:10:20] Cameron McEwen: So he's already said,

[2:10:22] Cameron McEwen: by 1961,

[2:10:24] Cameron McEwen: he's already said,

[2:10:26] Cameron McEwen: that the media are languages.

[2:10:30] Cameron McEwen: And so he says that what we need in order to understand media are new grammars.

[2:10:37] Cameron McEwen: And he actually wrote an unpublished essay on the grammar of media.

[2:10:43] Cameron McEwen: I think it was 57 or 58 that I've published in my blog.

[2:10:52] Cameron McEwen: And so...

[2:10:54] Cameron McEwen: He's saying that we're going to get a new grasp of media,

[2:10:59] Cameron McEwen: ancient and modern,

[2:11:01] Cameron McEwen: that is to say that the

[2:11:04] Cameron McEwen: Star Wars that have always been going on anciently and are going on right now and modernly,

[2:11:15] Cameron McEwen: we're going to get a new grasp of that.

[2:11:18] Cameron McEwen: So what he's expressing there is a hope,

[2:11:21] Cameron McEwen: and that hope is...

[2:11:24] Cameron McEwen: still outstanding as we speak.

[2:11:29] Cameron McEwen: Maybe we're going to get that understanding,

[2:11:31] Cameron McEwen: and maybe we're going to find some peace,

[2:11:34] Cameron McEwen: or maybe we're not,

[2:11:35] Cameron McEwen: and we're going to blow ourselves sky high.

[2:11:38] Bob Dobbs: Yeah,

[2:11:39] Bob Dobbs: and I never thought of this before.

[2:11:40] Bob Dobbs: Ancient and Modern,

[2:11:41] Bob Dobbs: that's the ancient quarrel.

[2:11:43] Cameron McEwen: That's right.

[2:11:44] Cameron McEwen: Absolutely.

[2:11:46] Cameron McEwen: So you can see him more or less quoting himself in

[2:11:51] Cameron McEwen: 1961, quoting himself from the quarrel of the

[2:11:56] Cameron McEwen: Trivium. Yeah,

[2:11:57] Bob Dobbs: 1946.

[2:12:00] Bob Dobbs: And when he says simultaneous cultural transparency,

[2:12:02] Bob Dobbs: that's the new collective consciousness.

[2:12:04] Bob Dobbs: No more unconscious.

[2:12:06] Bob Dobbs: So you brought up an hour or two ago about the strange aspect of using the unconscious unconsciously.

[2:12:13] Bob Dobbs: Did you say something like that?

[2:12:15] Cameron McEwen: Yeah,

[2:12:17] Cameron McEwen: so no more unconscious doesn't mean that we have some sort of flash of enlightenment and nothing is hidden.

[2:12:29] Cameron McEwen: It means that just as chemistry can understand all of nature,

[2:12:39] Cameron McEwen: there's nothing in nature that

[2:12:41] Cameron McEwen: chemistry and physics and biology don't understand,

[2:12:47] Cameron McEwen: but that understanding will go on forever because the understanding,

[2:12:55] Cameron McEwen: although it is of everything,

[2:12:57] Cameron McEwen: is also always limited.

[2:12:59] Cameron McEwen: And in fact,

[2:13:00] Cameron McEwen: the insight is associated with that limitation.

[2:13:04] Cameron McEwen: So it's the same with the unconscious.

[2:13:08] Cameron McEwen: the unconscious now becomes

[2:13:12] Cameron McEwen: what we are understanding is the interior landscape.

[2:13:17] Cameron McEwen: But does that mean that everything is understood in a flash?

[2:13:20] Cameron McEwen: No.

[2:13:21] Cameron McEwen: It means that we will go on understanding this forever.

[2:13:27] Bob Dobbs: Yes.

[2:13:27] Bob Dobbs: So

[2:13:28] Bob Dobbs: I say in response to that quote,

[2:13:30] Bob Dobbs: that was happening.

[2:13:31] Bob Dobbs: But most people were listening to Cliff Richards,

[2:13:35] Bob Dobbs: starting to learn the twist.

[2:13:37] Bob Dobbs: They weren't grasping languages,

[2:13:38] Bob Dobbs: ancient and modern.

[2:13:39] Bob Dobbs: McLuhan was too optimistic about what intelligence would do with its time.

[2:13:44] Bob Dobbs: It's new leisure.

[2:13:45] Bob Dobbs: McLuhan was too optimistic about what intelligence would do with its time.

[2:13:48] Bob Dobbs: It's new leisure.

[2:13:49] Bob Dobbs: Everybody was paranoid of simultaneous cultural transparency.

[2:13:54] Bob Dobbs: Don't know about that.

[2:13:55] Bob Dobbs: They weren't grasping,

[2:13:56] Bob Dobbs: you know,

[2:13:57] Bob Dobbs: that needs to be teased out.

[2:13:59] Cameron McEwen: They're still not grasping that.

[2:14:01] Bob Dobbs: Right,

[2:14:01] Bob Dobbs: but they're acting it out.

[2:14:02] Bob Dobbs: They're acting it out,

[2:14:04] Bob Dobbs: unconsciously.

[2:14:05] Cameron McEwen: Yeah,

[2:14:05] Cameron McEwen: they have to act it out because that's who we are.

[2:14:08] Bob Dobbs: Yeah.

[2:14:08] Bob Dobbs: That's who we've become.

[2:14:10] Cameron McEwen: Yeah,

[2:14:11] Cameron McEwen: but it's not exactly true to say

[2:14:13] Cameron McEwen: McLuhan was too optimistic.

[2:14:16] Cameron McEwen: What we need to say is McLuhan Innis expression was being too optimistic.

[2:14:23] Bob Dobbs: Yeah.

[2:14:23] Cameron McEwen: But McLuhan wasn't limited to that expression.

[2:14:26] Cameron McEwen: McLuhan understood full well that this transparency could well not become conscious.

[2:14:37] Cameron McEwen: could not become the object of investigation.

[2:14:40] Cameron McEwen: They become opaque,

[2:14:41] Bob Dobbs: a new opaqueness.

[2:14:42] Cameron McEwen: That's right,

[2:14:44] Cameron McEwen: exactly.

[2:14:45] Bob Dobbs: So let's leave with that precise answer.

[2:14:48] Bob Dobbs: Exactly.

[2:14:51] Bob Dobbs: You have to,

[2:14:53] Bob Dobbs: well,

[2:14:53] Bob Dobbs: you're even a little over time here,

[2:14:54] Bob Dobbs: right?

[2:14:55] Cameron McEwen: Yeah,

[2:14:56] Cameron McEwen: yeah.

[2:14:56] Cameron McEwen: So it's a perfect ending for now.

[2:15:00] Cameron McEwen: I've got to go and take my medicine and make sure the dog is all right.

[2:15:06] Cameron McEwen: do all the stuff that human beings do.

[2:15:10] Bob Dobbs: Excellent.

[2:15:11] Bob Dobbs: And that was quite a conversation.

[2:15:14] Cameron McEwen: Yes,

[2:15:14] Cameron McEwen: Bob.

[2:15:14] Cameron McEwen: Enjoyed it.

[2:15:15] Cameron McEwen: Thank you very much.

[2:15:17] Bob Dobbs: Okay,

[2:15:17] Bob Dobbs: Ewen Cameron.

[2:15:17] Bob Dobbs: We'll talk soon.

[2:15:19] Cameron McEwen: Look forward.

[2:15:20] Cameron McEwen: Okay.

[2:15:21] Bob Dobbs: Bye.

[2:15:21] Cameron McEwen: Bye.