[00:02] Bob Dobbs: Hello,
[00:02] Bob Dobbs: welcome to
[00:04] Bob Dobbs: Cameron McEwen and Bob Dobbs exegeting,
[00:07] Bob Dobbs: explaining,
[00:08] Bob Dobbs: finding new meaning in my book on Donald Trump and the tech body.
[00:14] Bob Dobbs: And if you've been following us,
[00:16] Bob Dobbs: this is episode 58 and we're on page 120 and it is October 13,
[00:22] Bob Dobbs: 2022.
[00:24] Bob Dobbs: And Cameron and I are making more discoveries already for 20 minutes before we started recording,
[00:30] Bob Dobbs: but we should have.
[00:31] Bob Dobbs: I should have put it on,
[00:31] Bob Dobbs: but we casually walk into this stuff.
[00:36] Bob Dobbs: Just because I call Cameron and say,
[00:39] Bob Dobbs: anything new?
[00:39] Bob Dobbs: Cameron has nothing new to tell me,
[00:41] Bob Dobbs: so I make up something,
[00:42] Bob Dobbs: and that reminds him of something,
[00:43] Bob Dobbs: and he starts talking,
[00:44] Bob Dobbs: and suddenly we're talking new.
[00:47] Bob Dobbs: But it happens so fast we don't start the recording.
[00:50] Bob Dobbs: So here we are recording,
[00:52] Bob Dobbs: and
[00:54] Bob Dobbs: Cameron brought up an interesting point about academia in the 70s and 80s.
[00:59] Bob Dobbs: Do you want to restate the
[01:02] Bob Dobbs: publish or perish issue and how that affected McLuhan or what McLuhan did in response to that?
[01:08] Bob Dobbs: You want to say something?
[01:09] Bob Dobbs: Well,
[01:10] Cameron McEwen: McLuhan was,
[01:13] Cameron McEwen: in one sense,
[01:14] Cameron McEwen: he was part of that.
[01:16] Cameron McEwen: And the way that worked is that people started generating essay after essay after essay.
[01:25] Cameron McEwen: But it was basically the same stuff.
[01:27] Cameron McEwen: might have a different title,
[01:28] Cameron McEwen: might have a few sentences different at the start,
[01:32] Cameron McEwen: and might have some sentences omitted somewhere.
[01:36] Cameron McEwen: But a lot of the essays churned out by people was the same thing all over again,
[01:44] Cameron McEwen: and that's still happening today.
[01:47] Cameron McEwen: So it's a creation of what is junk in the name of
[01:57] Cameron McEwen: getting ahead as people say.
[01:59] Cameron McEwen: So people want to get ahead in pursuit of tenure and pursuit of fame and pursuit of influence and pursuit of all sorts of stuff and the way that we now do it is just
[02:15] Cameron McEwen: churning out huge amounts of information what is thought to be information but it's actually just junk.
[02:26] Bob Dobbs: Right.
[02:26] Bob Dobbs: So first point,
[02:28] Bob Dobbs: remember in 1970,
[02:29] Bob Dobbs: he started off,
[02:30] Bob Dobbs: maybe it was rolls,
[02:31] Bob Dobbs: masks,
[02:32] Bob Dobbs: and whatever the third word is in that,
[02:35] Bob Dobbs: rolls,
[02:35] Bob Dobbs: masks,
[02:35] Bob Dobbs: and performances.
[02:36] Bob Dobbs: He starts off saying performance is a new buzzword.
[02:39] Bob Dobbs: I consider this article performance,
[02:41] Bob Dobbs: and it was italicized.
[02:42] Bob Dobbs: You know,
[02:43] Bob Dobbs: he's performing.
[02:45] Bob Dobbs: And Steve Hicks said something the other day.
[02:47] Bob Dobbs: He said,
[02:48] Bob Dobbs: first there was participation in the global theater.
[02:51] Bob Dobbs: Then there was performance.
[02:53] Bob Dobbs: That's an interesting distinction.
[02:55] Bob Dobbs: Because then I'm thinking,
[02:56] Bob Dobbs: yeah,
[02:56] Bob Dobbs: get into the 70s,
[02:57] Bob Dobbs: and McLuhan says,
[02:58] Bob Dobbs: I'm not participating,
[02:59] Bob Dobbs: I'm performing.
[03:01] Bob Dobbs: And that's the pressure,
[03:02] Bob Dobbs: the increasing robotization of information production.
[03:08] Cameron McEwen: I don't think that's right,
[03:08] Cameron McEwen: Bob.
[03:09] Cameron McEwen: I think participation and performing are two different ways of looking at what's going on.
[03:20] Cameron McEwen: So that's ten dieties then,
[03:22] Bob Dobbs: one by means of two.
[03:23] Cameron McEwen: Yes.
[03:24] Cameron McEwen: So performing is always a participation.
[03:28] Cameron McEwen: Performing is always a role and the way a role is put on or a mask is to participate in the ensemble of roles
[03:42] Cameron McEwen: and masks that are available at every second,
[03:46] Cameron McEwen: right?
[03:46] Cameron McEwen: So the participation is the going back and forth between actuality and possibility.
[03:53] Cameron McEwen: Synchronic and then performing is what's done with these masks diachronically.
[04:02] Cameron McEwen: So there's no opposition there.
[04:05] Bob Dobbs: Okay,
[04:06] Bob Dobbs: so I'm thinking in the
[04:09] Bob Dobbs: 70s, the art world came up with performance art.
[04:12] Bob Dobbs: It was a little bit of in the 60s,
[04:13] Bob Dobbs: but it became a genre in the
[04:15] Bob Dobbs: 70s. What they were doing was continuing participation,
[04:18] Bob Dobbs: but they couldn't admit that they were just miming the present.
[04:23] Bob Dobbs: what the themes and memes were of that year.
[04:27] Bob Dobbs: So they covered up with the new words,
[04:29] Bob Dobbs: I'm doing performance.
[04:30] Bob Dobbs: And in that way,
[04:31] Bob Dobbs: they actually were still just doing participation,
[04:33] Bob Dobbs: which was already going on.
[04:35] Bob Dobbs: And they had to come up with a con,
[04:37] Cameron McEwen: renaming it.
[04:38] Cameron McEwen: Notice that what they're doing
[04:42] Cameron McEwen: 20 years or 25 years after McLuhan is saying that art is not about content.
[04:52] Cameron McEwen: It's about retrieval of the act of creation.
[04:58] Bob Dobbs: Yeah,
[04:58] Bob Dobbs: art about art,
[04:59] Bob Dobbs: I think Marshall said.
[05:01] Cameron McEwen: So that was already in around 1950.
[05:05] Cameron McEwen: He was trying to think through the idea that artists are always trying to retrieve their act of retrieval.
[05:20] Bob Dobbs: Yeah,
[05:21] Bob Dobbs: and he wrote sometime around then,
[05:22] Bob Dobbs: I think in the early
[05:23] Bob Dobbs: 50s, that today philosophy is just philosophy about philosophy.
[05:28] Bob Dobbs: They've got themselves in a rut.
[05:30] Bob Dobbs: And the art world was getting itself into a rut.
[05:33] Cameron McEwen: But that rut is also revelatory.
[05:36] Bob Dobbs: Well,
[05:37] Bob Dobbs: that's the circus animal's desertion.
[05:41] Bob Dobbs: That's the theme of cliched archetype.
[05:42] Cameron McEwen: Uh-huh.
[05:44] Cameron McEwen: Yeah,
[05:45] Cameron McEwen: but that relates to trash to treasure.
[05:49] Bob Dobbs: Yeah.
[05:49] Cameron McEwen: Because when people are doing art on art,
[05:55] Cameron McEwen: philosophy on philosophy,
[05:59] Cameron McEwen: Most people may be spinning their wheels,
[06:02] Cameron McEwen: but there's something that's very important to be learned there.
[06:06] Cameron McEwen: And that is that all of this stuff is a replay of roles that are available before us,
[06:21] Cameron McEwen: before both in space and time.
[06:25] Cameron McEwen: So most...
[06:28] Cameron McEwen: people most of the time aren't really able to know what they're talking about.
[06:34] Cameron McEwen: It takes somebody like McLuhan to say,
[06:36] Cameron McEwen: you're saying this,
[06:37] Cameron McEwen: but look at the hidden meaning in there that you don't even know,
[06:41] Cameron McEwen: even though you're the one saying it.
[06:44] Bob Dobbs: Yeah,
[06:44] Bob Dobbs: and he hasn't taken a some line like,
[06:46] Bob Dobbs: we're now in a global theater of constant replays with the whole world as our repertoire.
[06:52] Bob Dobbs: Remember that sentence?
[06:53] Cameron McEwen: Yeah,
[06:53] Cameron McEwen: absolutely.
[06:54] Cameron McEwen: Yeah.
[06:55] Bob Dobbs: So.
[06:56] Bob Dobbs: I want to just do a personal point here,
[06:58] Bob Dobbs: because this came up when we were talking before the recording.
[07:01] Bob Dobbs: I arrived in Toronto in
[07:03] Bob Dobbs: 77 with Carolyn,
[07:05] Bob Dobbs: and
[07:07] Bob Dobbs: I had my inventory from Marge Stewart,
[07:09] Bob Dobbs: the bibliography.
[07:11] Bob Dobbs: And I started going around to all the libraries,
[07:13] Bob Dobbs: and it was the utopia of McLuhan stuff,
[07:15] Bob Dobbs: all these articles that I was gathering.
[07:18] Bob Dobbs: So I would start to read them,
[07:20] Bob Dobbs: and say the later articles I'd see,
[07:23] Bob Dobbs: hmm.
[07:23] Bob Dobbs: He put something out in 71,
[07:24] Bob Dobbs: and then 72,
[07:25] Bob Dobbs: it's the same article with a few changes.
[07:28] Bob Dobbs: But then the changes were unique and never showed up again.
[07:33] Bob Dobbs: So the bulk of the article was repeated.
[07:36] Bob Dobbs: But the little difference in 71 from a 69 version,
[07:42] Bob Dobbs: in 73,
[07:43] Bob Dobbs: the same article,
[07:44] Bob Dobbs: most of it the same,
[07:45] Bob Dobbs: except for a new little twist that wasn't in the 71 or the 67.
[07:49] Bob Dobbs: So basically,
[07:50] Bob Dobbs: McLuhan was producing,
[07:52] Bob Dobbs: publish or perish,
[07:53] Bob Dobbs: producing stuff,
[07:54] Bob Dobbs: but he was writing a poem,
[07:56] Bob Dobbs: a prose poem,
[07:57] Bob Dobbs: sprinkled throughout each article.
[08:00] Bob Dobbs: So that's when I realized you had to read everything to see the progression that McLuhan was making,
[08:05] Bob Dobbs: or the synchronistic,
[08:08] Bob Dobbs: Cameron would say,
[08:09] Bob Dobbs: of spiraling through the same process starting back in the
[08:13] Bob Dobbs: 40s and adding a new spin on it.
[08:17] Cameron McEwen: Yeah.
[08:18] Cameron McEwen: So illustrating what it means to think.
[08:21] Bob Dobbs: Right.
[08:22] Cameron McEwen: Or re-presenting what it means to think.
[08:25] Bob Dobbs: And that's Finnegans Wake,
[08:26] Bob Dobbs: so I realized as I got more understanding of Finnegans Wake that McLuhan was redoing Finnegans Wake in English,
[08:33] Bob Dobbs: one language,
[08:34] Bob Dobbs: but the language dealt with the language of forms,
[08:36] Bob Dobbs: not the content of vernaculars,
[08:39] Bob Dobbs: national vernaculars.
[08:40] Bob Dobbs: So he has a higher level of abstraction,
[08:42] Bob Dobbs: so he could keep it within English,
[08:44] Bob Dobbs: but he was doing what Joyce was doing,
[08:46] Bob Dobbs: who kept repeating the H-E-E story in the park with a different angle on it.
[08:51] Bob Dobbs: And that's what McLuhan did,
[08:52] Bob Dobbs: saying they're writing the same article with a different angle.
[08:55] Bob Dobbs: And I think it was Don Theall who pointed out in his books of McLuhan that that was the Paul Klee method of painting,
[09:01] Bob Dobbs: and maybe one other artist back then.
[09:04] Bob Dobbs: They would make the same painting with slight changes in the little squares and things that they made the painting of.
[09:12] Cameron McEwen: And notice that what's going on there is the construction of a kind of palimpsest.
[09:20] Cameron McEwen: Yes.
[09:21] Cameron McEwen: if you have
[09:23] Cameron McEwen: Joyce using all of these different languages and all of these different grammatical techniques and all of these different etymological techniques,
[09:33] Cameron McEwen: what he's below what Joyce is doing is,
[09:38] Cameron McEwen: at least according to McLuhan,
[09:40] Cameron McEwen: is the creative process.
[09:42] Bob Dobbs: Yeah.
[09:42] Cameron McEwen: Is communication.
[09:44] Cameron McEwen: So then when you say that
[09:47] Cameron McEwen: McLuhan is doing the same thing as Joyce,
[09:50] Cameron McEwen: But in English,
[09:53] Cameron McEwen: what McLuhan is doing is again a palimpsest,
[09:57] Cameron McEwen: where below it...
[10:00] Cameron McEwen: You have what Joyce was doing,
[10:02] Cameron McEwen: and then below that,
[10:04] Cameron McEwen: the creative process and communication.
[10:07] Cameron McEwen: So you could say that what McLuhan is doing is a kind of palimpsest squared of what's going on in the Joyce.
[10:16] Bob Dobbs: On the creative process.
[10:18] Cameron McEwen: Yes.
[10:19] Bob Dobbs: That's a really key point.
[10:20] Bob Dobbs: He says in Catholic Humanism in 54 that we have discovered the creative process.
[10:27] Bob Dobbs: We understand the creative process.
[10:29] Bob Dobbs: and it's going to be extended to society in general through electronic vortex.
[10:34] Bob Dobbs: But yes,
[10:34] Bob Dobbs: he had figured out the stages of apprehension in his early criticism in the early
[10:39] Bob Dobbs: 50s, and he saw that that's the cliché that became archetypal in Finnegans Wake.
[10:44] Bob Dobbs: He was going to redo it,
[10:46] Bob Dobbs: showing the corporate expression through new media of the creative process for each individual on a collective level.
[10:55] Bob Dobbs: And so he said,
[10:55] Bob Dobbs: we now...
[10:57] Bob Dobbs: Absolutely,
[10:58] Bob Dobbs: says Cameron.
[10:58] Bob Dobbs: Yeah,
[10:59] Bob Dobbs: so I'll just add this.
[11:00] Bob Dobbs: And he said,
[11:01] Bob Dobbs: this gives us a way to,
[11:02] Bob Dobbs: we now know how to create cultures.
[11:04] Bob Dobbs: And then he goes into Ferdinand Lundberg,
[11:07] Bob Dobbs: or not Lundberg,
[11:07] Bob Dobbs: or Ferdinand somebody,
[11:09] Bob Dobbs: Foundations of Social Survival,
[11:11] Bob Dobbs: was going to use the Christian concept of love.
[11:13] Cameron McEwen: Yeah,
[11:13] Cameron McEwen: that's Lindbergh.
[11:15] Bob Dobbs: Yeah,
[11:15] Bob Dobbs: Lindbergh.
[11:16] Bob Dobbs: Lundbergh was the rich,
[11:18] Bob Dobbs: the guy who wrote on the rich in the late 60s.
[11:21] Bob Dobbs: So Lindbergh,
[11:23] Bob Dobbs: he's going to take the Christian concept of love.
[11:27] Bob Dobbs: and use it as a manager technique for the globalists at the United Nations,
[11:32] Bob Dobbs: naive early globalists.
[11:35] Bob Dobbs: They had figured out how you make cultures.
[11:38] Cameron McEwen: Right,
[11:39] Cameron McEwen: right.
[11:40] Cameron McEwen: So that's still going on,
[11:41] Cameron McEwen: of course,
[11:43] Cameron McEwen: with the
[11:43] Cameron McEwen: World Economic Forum and stuff.
[11:46] Cameron McEwen: But there's two points that are really important there.
[11:50] Cameron McEwen: You know what would be fun,
[11:52] Bob Dobbs: Cameron,
[11:52] Bob Dobbs: would be to somehow get...
[11:54] Bob Dobbs: go to the World Economic Forum or Davos and do a talk describing what they're doing and how the ground,
[12:01] Bob Dobbs: what the WF was doing was laid out in the
[12:03] Bob Dobbs: 50s and just use McLuhan and blow their minds with,
[12:07] Bob Dobbs: we understand what you're doing and you're doing it for the 10th time when it already started back in 47.
[12:14] Bob Dobbs: That would be quite a surprise to the scene there if they let you in.
[12:18] Cameron McEwen: Of course,
[12:19] Cameron McEwen: there would be many,
[12:20] Cameron McEwen: many difficulties.
[12:22] Cameron McEwen: you know,
[12:23] Cameron McEwen: even
[12:23] Cameron McEwen: getting there,
[12:25] Cameron McEwen: getting a time to talk.
[12:26] Cameron McEwen: But so that raises a very interesting question that gets to the other point that I wanted to make.
[12:36] Cameron McEwen: When you're talking about understanding how culture is manufactured and talking about how the world has become an artwork instead
[12:50] Cameron McEwen: of nature,
[12:52] Cameron McEwen: The issue...
[12:53] Cameron McEwen: thing that I think almost nobody understands about McLuhan is that these types of suggestion,
[13:03] Cameron McEwen: these types of,
[13:09] Cameron McEwen: what can I say,
[13:10] Cameron McEwen: of discovery,
[13:11] Cameron McEwen: of dis-covery,
[13:14] Cameron McEwen: point to a whole new realm of interrogation.
[13:20] Cameron McEwen: So
[13:21] Cameron McEwen: What McLuhan is interested in isn't the world of nature,
[13:25] Cameron McEwen: which has been obsolesced.
[13:27] Cameron McEwen: He's interested in the artwork,
[13:31] Cameron McEwen: which is to say the human manipulation of the natural world.
[13:37] Cameron McEwen: So we need to understand that the whole key to McLuhan is that there is another discipline,
[13:49] Cameron McEwen: another whole...
[13:51] Cameron McEwen: field aside from that of physical nature and that field is physical nature plus human nature yes and the physical nature plus human nature is what he calls the interior landscape so the interior landscape is nothing inside a head it's
[14:12] Cameron McEwen: something where the head is considered along with nature which and the head along with nature that's simply Thanks.
[14:20] Cameron McEwen: human experience,
[14:22] Cameron McEwen: right?
[14:22] Cameron McEwen: So all of the stuff that you were just saying is McLuhan's way of indicating the new field of inquiry,
[14:33] Cameron McEwen: which is the only way that humans will ever survive the pickle they got themselves in by using things like the idea of Christian love as a mode of imperialism.
[14:49] Cameron McEwen: Yeah,
[14:49] Cameron McEwen: social governance.
[14:51] Cameron McEwen: That's right.
[14:52] Bob Dobbs: I used to call it tetrad management.
[14:55] Cameron McEwen: Yes.
[14:56] Bob Dobbs: So the...
[14:59] Bob Dobbs: Okay,
[14:59] Bob Dobbs: so you were just saying,
[15:01] Bob Dobbs: damn,
[15:02] Bob Dobbs: what was it?
[15:03] Bob Dobbs: Oh,
[15:03] Bob Dobbs: yeah,
[15:04] Bob Dobbs: so he tried to express that from cliched archetype,
[15:07] Bob Dobbs: but Wilford Watson probably didn't get it.
[15:09] Bob Dobbs: So they had to bog down on understandings of what the book was.
[15:14] Bob Dobbs: You know about that,
[15:15] Bob Dobbs: eh?
[15:15] Bob Dobbs: They had an impact and weren't friendly.
[15:17] Cameron McEwen: Oh,
[15:17] Cameron McEwen: they almost came to blows.
[15:19] Bob Dobbs: But what you're describing was what he was attempting to lay out in cliched archetype.
[15:26] Bob Dobbs: Now,
[15:26] Bob Dobbs: if you understand that,
[15:27] Bob Dobbs: the book is a delight to read.
[15:28] Bob Dobbs: If you don't understand,
[15:30] Bob Dobbs: the book's not very pleasant or interesting or it's incomprehensible and you start saying it's messy and McLuhan screwed up.
[15:37] Bob Dobbs: You follow what I'm saying?
[15:39] Cameron McEwen: Yes.
[15:39] Cameron McEwen: Yeah,
[15:39] Cameron McEwen: it's another,
[15:41] Cameron McEwen: I would say it's another example of the palimpsest where you need to be able to see through the text.
[15:49] Bob Dobbs: Yeah,
[15:50] Bob Dobbs: see through it,
[15:52] Bob Dobbs: not on the surface,
[15:53] Bob Dobbs: what reflects off the surface of the text.
[15:57] Cameron McEwen: It's like a stained glass window.
[16:00] Bob Dobbs: Right,
[16:00] Bob Dobbs: and that's what's beautiful about War and Peace and Global Village,
[16:02] Bob Dobbs: the 1968 book,
[16:04] Bob Dobbs: where he's got beautiful Finnegans Wake quotes beside the middle simple prose of the middle column.
[16:11] Bob Dobbs: And he's showing you this is a palimpsest by showing the layers of Finnegans Wake.
[16:18] Bob Dobbs: Yeah,
[16:18] Bob Dobbs: it's quite beautiful.
[16:21] Cameron McEwen: Good example of what you were saying before.
[16:24] Cameron McEwen: about his attempt to rewrite Joyce in English.
[16:28] Bob Dobbs: Yeah,
[16:28] Bob Dobbs: yeah.
[16:29] Bob Dobbs: So,
[16:30] Bob Dobbs: and he would quote Eliot saying,
[16:34] Bob Dobbs: a scientist taking discoveries of Einstein is not replaying Einstein.
[16:39] Bob Dobbs: He's pursuing something that Einstein has broken through,
[16:42] Bob Dobbs: and there's a lot of opportunity for developing new wrinkles of it.
[16:46] Bob Dobbs: That's McLuhan describing himself using Joyce in Finnegans Wake as the Einstein.
[16:52] Bob Dobbs: that he was going to create new wrinkles from.
[16:56] Bob Dobbs: Yep.
[16:56] Bob Dobbs: Yeah.
[16:56] Cameron McEwen: He repeated,
[16:57] Cameron McEwen: I have a post on that.
[16:59] Cameron McEwen: Actually,
[16:59] Cameron McEwen: he repeated that,
[17:01] Cameron McEwen: uh,
[17:01] Cameron McEwen: Eliot,
[17:01] Cameron McEwen: uh,
[17:02] Cameron McEwen: talk about,
[17:04] Cameron McEwen: um,
[17:05] Cameron McEwen: um,
[17:06] Cameron McEwen: sort of getting around,
[17:08] Cameron McEwen: getting around the plagiarism.
[17:10] Bob Dobbs: Yeah.
[17:11] Cameron McEwen: Uh,
[17:11] Cameron McEwen: charge.
[17:12] Cameron McEwen: And I,
[17:13] Cameron McEwen: I think he did that because,
[17:14] Cameron McEwen: um,
[17:15] Cameron McEwen: in,
[17:16] Cameron McEwen: he knew that,
[17:17] Cameron McEwen: um,
[17:18] Cameron McEwen: seen in Gutenbergian terms,
[17:20] Cameron McEwen: he,
[17:20] Cameron McEwen: he was plagiarizing.
[17:22] Cameron McEwen: But seen in electric terms,
[17:25] Cameron McEwen: he saw the necessity of plagiarizing because it's not as if we can make up new stuff.
[17:32] Cameron McEwen: All the stuff is already there,
[17:34] Cameron McEwen: right?
[17:35] Cameron McEwen: So in a sense,
[17:36] Cameron McEwen: human life is a mode of plagiarizing.
[17:40] Bob Dobbs: Yes.
[17:42] Cameron McEwen: The great question is,
[17:43] Cameron McEwen: how do we learn how to investigate that so that we...
[17:51] Cameron McEwen: see what's actually going on rather than doing the crazy dance of selecting a mask that's already there,
[18:04] Cameron McEwen: putting it on like millions of people have already put it on,
[18:08] Cameron McEwen: and then claiming we're doing something new.
[18:11] Bob Dobbs: Yeah,
[18:13] Bob Dobbs: if you saw through and understood that,
[18:14] Bob Dobbs: you'd stop the guilt process,
[18:16] Bob Dobbs: which is then your projection all over the place and everybody gets...
[18:20] Bob Dobbs: pissed off at each other because they think plagiarism is a sin.
[18:26] Bob Dobbs: The old Gutenberg version of plagiarism,
[18:27] Bob Dobbs: but that's not what's happening.
[18:31] Bob Dobbs: Yeah,
[18:31] Bob Dobbs: remember McLuhan says in The Interior Landscape,
[18:33] Bob Dobbs: I think it's in the essay on Lewis,
[18:38] Bob Dobbs: that the modern scientist has a formula,
[18:41] Bob Dobbs: and McLuhan had a formula.
[18:43] Bob Dobbs: The formulaic aspect of science is really important,
[18:47] Bob Dobbs: and the artists more and more
[18:49] Bob Dobbs: became like scientists and developed a formula.
[18:52] Bob Dobbs: Correct.
[18:52] Bob Dobbs: And McLuhan...
[18:53] Cameron McEwen: And you know where McLuhan got that?
[18:56] Cameron McEwen: Is that
[18:58] Cameron McEwen: Havelock, already in the
[19:01] Cameron McEwen: 40s, when he was still at the University of Toronto,
[19:04] Cameron McEwen: was writing on poetry as a kind of formula,
[19:10] Cameron McEwen: as a kind of going into a lab.
[19:13] Cameron McEwen: And he uses exactly those terms.
[19:16] Cameron McEwen: in an essay that he published in 1946 and then did a supplement in 1947.
[19:22] Cameron McEwen: And that was exactly when McLuhan came to
[19:27] Cameron McEwen: University of Toronto.
[19:29] Cameron McEwen: And he definitely knew that essay because that's where he got his whole interest in the epyllion.
[19:41] Bob Dobbs: Yes.
[19:42] Bob Dobbs: And what's interesting is...
[19:44] Bob Dobbs: McLuhan would say,
[19:45] Bob Dobbs: it's common awareness today to say scientists are formulaic.
[19:50] Bob Dobbs: And he'd pretend it was like a common thing out there in general,
[19:54] Bob Dobbs: across the culture.
[19:55] Bob Dobbs: And he's really just saying,
[19:57] Bob Dobbs: Mr.
[19:57] Bob Dobbs: Havelock discovered this.
[19:58] Bob Dobbs: You know,
[19:59] Bob Dobbs: Mr.
[19:59] Bob Dobbs: Havelock said it.
[20:00] Bob Dobbs: That's enough.
[20:01] Bob Dobbs: One other guy is a crowd for McLuhan.
[20:04] Bob Dobbs: A trend.
[20:06] Cameron McEwen: That's like him always saying,
[20:07] Cameron McEwen: it's easy to see.
[20:11] Cameron McEwen: It was not only not easy to see,
[20:13] Cameron McEwen: it was impossible for most people to see.
[20:16] Bob Dobbs: Yeah,
[20:16] Bob Dobbs: he said,
[20:16] Bob Dobbs: easy to see this or that.
[20:18] Bob Dobbs: That's right.
[20:19] Bob Dobbs: You just had to find the right quote from somebody.
[20:22] Bob Dobbs: So you're saying that he would quote the
[20:24] Bob Dobbs: Joyce's doing Einstein.
[20:27] Bob Dobbs: No,
[20:28] Bob Dobbs: Joyce and scholars or novelists following Joyce's,
[20:32] Bob Dobbs: what they perceive Ulysses did,
[20:34] Bob Dobbs: were doing what scientists did with Einstein.
[20:36] Bob Dobbs: You're saying he would say that quote,
[20:38] Bob Dobbs: repeat that quote.
[20:39] Bob Dobbs: to cover anybody's thinking there's plagiarism going on.
[20:42] Bob Dobbs: That's what you just said a few minutes ago.
[20:44] Cameron McEwen: Well,
[20:46] Cameron McEwen: that may be a small part of what he was doing,
[20:49] Cameron McEwen: but the major part was to insist that,
[20:54] Cameron McEwen: as he would later put it,
[20:56] Cameron McEwen: that we exist in a global theater,
[21:00] Cameron McEwen: and all there is to existence in a global theater is performing roles.
[21:07] Bob Dobbs: Yeah,
[21:08] Bob Dobbs: from an endless repertoire that's immediately available for everybody.
[21:11] Cameron McEwen: Correct.
[21:12] Cameron McEwen: You can see it.
[21:12] Cameron McEwen: So plagiarism is universal.
[21:15] Bob Dobbs: Yeah.
[21:16] Bob Dobbs: And that would be the audience participating in its participation.
[21:19] Bob Dobbs: That phrase you can say later.
[21:21] Cameron McEwen: Absolutely.
[21:21] Cameron McEwen: Absolutely.
[21:22] Bob Dobbs: Yeah.
[21:23] Bob Dobbs: So,
[21:24] Bob Dobbs: you know,
[21:24] Bob Dobbs: he was always talking technically.
[21:26] Bob Dobbs: Very precise,
[21:27] Bob Dobbs: his language.
[21:29] Cameron McEwen: Yes,
[21:29] Cameron McEwen: much more precise than nearly everybody knows.
[21:32] Bob Dobbs: Yeah,
[21:33] Bob Dobbs: yeah.
[21:33] Bob Dobbs: They were subjective.
[21:34] Bob Dobbs: They get into emotions.
[21:35] Bob Dobbs: They get politically.
[21:37] Bob Dobbs: run off to a protest against vietnam or something so clode stayed the in his sort of ivory tower he told people don't go outside stay home and he'd be analyzing the whole world and he said in understanding media grabbing anything that showed up in
[21:54] Cameron McEwen: a tv environment you could grab anything and stick it in your uh soup sure so just think about uh chemistry for a minute um
[22:06] Cameron McEwen: Yep.
[22:07] Cameron McEwen: It would be impossible for a chemist to come across anything in the world that was not susceptible to chemical analysis.
[22:19] Cameron McEwen: I mean,
[22:19] Cameron McEwen: that's simply an impossibility.
[22:22] Cameron McEwen: But it's only since around 1800 that we've had anything like that idea.
[22:29] Cameron McEwen: And it was around 1870 when Mendeleev published his table.
[22:35] Cameron McEwen: that we really began to understand it.
[22:37] Cameron McEwen: So it's only 150 years that we have known that literally everything can be analyzed in quite simple terms.
[22:47] Cameron McEwen: And McLuhan was saying,
[22:48] Cameron McEwen: look,
[22:48] Cameron McEwen: the same thing applies to culture.
[22:51] Bob Dobbs: To media and artifacts,
[22:52] Bob Dobbs: cultural artifacts.
[22:53] Cameron McEwen: That's right.
[22:54] Cameron McEwen: But the pattern recognition is different because it's a different field.
[23:00] Cameron McEwen: And what he could not get people to do was to...
[23:04] Cameron McEwen: see the difference in pattern recognition that was necessary to go from the one field to the other field.
[23:13] Cameron McEwen: That's the whole trick.
[23:13] Cameron McEwen: And the phrase pattern recognition is a very good example of what you were saying about his technical way of using language or his technical way of speaking.
[23:27] Cameron McEwen: Most people think pattern recognition,
[23:29] Cameron McEwen: oh,
[23:29] Cameron McEwen: that means this pattern,
[23:31] Cameron McEwen: that pattern,
[23:32] Cameron McEwen: and whatever the hell kind of pattern you want.
[23:34] Cameron McEwen: And it means recognition that
[23:37] Cameron McEwen: I'm doing right now.
[23:38] Cameron McEwen: But that's not at all what pattern recognition means.
[23:41] Cameron McEwen: Pattern recognition is a precise technical term referring to something like what chemists began to see in physical nature around 1800.
[23:53] Cameron McEwen: And now McLuhan is saying,
[23:54] Cameron McEwen: look,
[23:57] Cameron McEwen: there are similar forms that we ourselves are living,
[24:02] Cameron McEwen: not as chemical bodies.
[24:04] Cameron McEwen: but as psychological and cultural bodies that is as investigatable as the physical world.
[24:16] Cameron McEwen: But it requires a different pattern recognition,
[24:20] Cameron McEwen: and here's how it works.
[24:22] Cameron McEwen: Well,
[24:23] Cameron McEwen: nobody has understood that yet.
[24:25] Bob Dobbs: And that was his third Copernican revolution,
[24:28] Bob Dobbs: pattern recognition.
[24:30] Cameron McEwen: Yeah.
[24:31] Bob Dobbs: So...
[24:33] Bob Dobbs: So what else did we bring up?
[24:37] Cameron McEwen: Well,
[24:37] Cameron McEwen: you were bringing up the fact that in the
[24:41] Cameron McEwen: 50s, early 50s,
[24:42] Cameron McEwen: 53,
[24:43] Cameron McEwen: 54,
[24:45] Cameron McEwen: he could see people like Lindbergh applying the ideas that he was trying to point to,
[24:53] Cameron McEwen: but they were applying them in the wrong way because they didn't really understand what they were doing.
[25:00] Cameron McEwen: So instead of being...
[25:03] Cameron McEwen: People that were investigating in a way that was helpful,
[25:08] Cameron McEwen: they were distorting the very ideas that they needed to do something that would be helpful.
[25:16] Bob Dobbs: Yeah,
[25:16] Bob Dobbs: they were being bureaucrats and getting bogged down in a new world order.
[25:23] Bob Dobbs: a new world government.
[25:28] Bob Dobbs: Correct.
[25:29] Bob Dobbs: There was a letter in the archives around 1976.
[25:33] Bob Dobbs: The early globalist guys of the 70s were saying,
[25:36] Bob Dobbs: we want to have a world government,
[25:37] Bob Dobbs: and we're going to do this and that.
[25:38] Bob Dobbs: And there were a movement across the planet.
[25:41] Bob Dobbs: And they asked McLuhan to sign on.
[25:44] Bob Dobbs: And he wrote back to them,
[25:45] Bob Dobbs: what are you talking about?
[25:46] Bob Dobbs: This already happened.
[25:48] Bob Dobbs: We already have a world order.
[25:52] Bob Dobbs: And they...
[25:52] Bob Dobbs: They ignored him from that point on and disappeared themselves.
[25:56] Cameron McEwen: Yeah,
[25:56] Cameron McEwen: that's funny.
[25:58] Bob Dobbs: Yeah,
[25:59] Bob Dobbs: so you were just saying your last words,
[26:01] Bob Dobbs: just to get back to that point.
[26:03] Bob Dobbs: You reminded me of that letter,
[26:05] Bob Dobbs: but I think you were starting to say something else.
[26:09] Bob Dobbs: Yeah,
[26:09] Bob Dobbs: the bureaucrats got bogged down in efficient causality.
[26:14] Cameron McEwen: I think I was headed in the direction of saying that because the new...
[26:22] Cameron McEwen: field can examine everything in human experience,
[26:28] Cameron McEwen: just as chemistry and physics can examine everything in the physical world.
[26:34] Cameron McEwen: When people misused the insights regarding,
[26:41] Cameron McEwen: say,
[26:41] Cameron McEwen: dialogue or love or something,
[26:45] Cameron McEwen: it wasn't as if that misuse fell outside.
[26:51] Cameron McEwen: the new field.
[26:53] Cameron McEwen: That's what's interesting,
[26:54] Cameron McEwen: that everything that is done,
[26:57] Cameron McEwen: it doesn't matter if it's good or bad or helpful or unhelpful,
[27:01] Cameron McEwen: it's subject to analysis.
[27:03] Cameron McEwen: That is to say,
[27:04] Cameron McEwen: it is always a palimpsest that points below itself to the suppositions that are being made.
[27:13] Cameron McEwen: And so pattern recognition is the pattern recognition of those suppositions.
[27:21] Cameron McEwen: When we recognize what's really going on with suppositions,
[27:25] Cameron McEwen: then we understand what's going on in all cultures,
[27:29] Cameron McEwen: and we can begin to develop the world as an artwork.
[27:34] Bob Dobbs: Yeah,
[27:34] Bob Dobbs: and
[27:35] Bob Dobbs: I think it's in Life Magazine in 66,
[27:38] Bob Dobbs: around that time,
[27:39] Bob Dobbs: he says,
[27:40] Bob Dobbs: I find patterns even in bad TV shows or bad movies.
[27:44] Cameron McEwen: Correct.
[27:44] Bob Dobbs: The aesthetic content value judgment was irrelevant.
[27:47] Bob Dobbs: The structures are what you could find.
[27:49] Cameron McEwen: Yeah,
[27:50] Cameron McEwen: yeah.
[27:50] Cameron McEwen: So he had already done that with Mechanical Bride.
[27:53] Bob Dobbs: Yeah.
[27:54] Cameron McEwen: He had already said that you have all of this junk,
[27:58] Cameron McEwen: right,
[27:58] Cameron McEwen: which gets back to your book because we're about to get into the junkyard.
[28:01] Bob Dobbs: Yeah.
[28:02] Cameron McEwen: Right,
[28:03] Cameron McEwen: you have all of this junk,
[28:04] Cameron McEwen: but if you look through it,
[28:08] Cameron McEwen: you can see patterns,
[28:10] Cameron McEwen: right?
[28:10] Cameron McEwen: So in
[28:14] Cameron McEwen: Mechanical Bride in 1951,
[28:16] Cameron McEwen: which is actually written in the 40s,
[28:19] Cameron McEwen: He repeats the idea from Poe of going into the maelstrom and recognizing the chaos in the maelstrom to be used as
[28:36] Cameron McEwen: a mode of salvation.
[28:39] Cameron McEwen: So the suggestion already in the early
[28:46] Cameron McEwen: 50s and then developed.
[28:49] Cameron McEwen: conceptually all through the
[28:52] Cameron McEwen: 1950s and 60s,
[28:54] Cameron McEwen: as you were just saying,
[28:55] Cameron McEwen: say in this
[28:57] Cameron McEwen: Look magazine article that you were pointing to.
[29:00] Bob Dobbs: Life magazine.
[29:01] Cameron McEwen: Oh,
[29:02] Cameron McEwen: was it Life?
[29:02] Cameron McEwen: I'm sorry.
[29:04] Cameron McEwen: Although he was also doing similar stuff in Look,
[29:07] Cameron McEwen: right?
[29:07] Cameron McEwen: At the same time.
[29:11] Cameron McEwen: What's going on there is a recognition that
[29:16] Cameron McEwen: There is absolutely nothing that doesn't have performance roles below it.
[29:26] Cameron McEwen: that are simply being activated in different ways,
[29:29] Cameron McEwen: a little bit like jazz,
[29:32] Cameron McEwen: or like modern dance,
[29:33] Cameron McEwen: or like a happening.
[29:35] Cameron McEwen: All of these things are ways of people trying to come to terms with the idea that there's something going on,
[29:45] Cameron McEwen: and we vaguely have pattern recognition of it,
[29:49] Cameron McEwen: but we can't quite grasp it.
[29:52] Cameron McEwen: And
[29:52] Cameron McEwen: McLuhan is trying to say,
[29:54] Cameron McEwen: well,
[29:54] Cameron McEwen: Change the kaleidoscope a little bit.
[29:56] Cameron McEwen: Look at it this way.
[29:58] Cameron McEwen: Oh,
[29:58] Cameron McEwen: if that doesn't work,
[29:59] Cameron McEwen: well,
[29:59] Cameron McEwen: look at it this other way.
[30:01] Bob Dobbs: Exactly.
[30:02] Bob Dobbs: So
[30:03] Bob Dobbs: I'll just wrap up this introductory theme that
[30:06] Bob Dobbs: I had a great 10-year period,
[30:08] Bob Dobbs: basically,
[30:09] Bob Dobbs: 77 to 87,
[30:11] Bob Dobbs: of finding all these articles in the Toronto libraries and going through them and looking for the new nuance that was in the article,
[30:20] Bob Dobbs: even though a lot of it was just the same old stuff repeated.
[30:23] Bob Dobbs: You kept...
[30:23] Bob Dobbs: finding this stuff.
[30:24] Bob Dobbs: And so there was the poem,
[30:26] Bob Dobbs: there was the written art form laid out.
[30:30] Bob Dobbs: And you thought,
[30:31] Bob Dobbs: man,
[30:32] Bob Dobbs: he knew what he had done.
[30:34] Bob Dobbs: So he said,
[30:34] Bob Dobbs: okay,
[30:34] Bob Dobbs: this angle has to be said in this article.
[30:37] Bob Dobbs: And I don't know how conscious he was of it,
[30:39] Bob Dobbs: but it seemed he was pretty conscious of what he left out,
[30:42] Bob Dobbs: what he would put in in the next article,
[30:45] Bob Dobbs: and then know that he didn't have to put that Indy game,
[30:47] Bob Dobbs: anywhere else.
[30:49] Bob Dobbs: I spent 10 years reading all these McLuhan articles and marveled after like 10 years.
[30:54] Bob Dobbs: What the hell?
[30:54] Bob Dobbs: I've been reading nothing but McLuhan,
[30:58] Bob Dobbs: who is,
[30:58] Bob Dobbs: if you're an average dull reader,
[31:00] Bob Dobbs: you'd think,
[31:01] Bob Dobbs: Bob,
[31:01] Bob Dobbs: you're just reading the same article neurotically for 10 years.
[31:04] Bob Dobbs: No,
[31:05] Bob Dobbs: if you read it really closely,
[31:07] Bob Dobbs: you'd find the gold in every article.
[31:10] Bob Dobbs: And so the bulk of it,
[31:11] Bob Dobbs: yeah,
[31:11] Bob Dobbs: was repeated.
[31:12] Bob Dobbs: But finding the new angle and noting that,
[31:16] Bob Dobbs: you'd learn something from that that you hadn't thought of.
[31:18] Bob Dobbs: WCW.
[31:19] Bob Dobbs: what you just said,
[31:20] Bob Dobbs: Cameron,
[31:20] Bob Dobbs: you were seeing another way to approach the issue.
[31:24] Bob Dobbs: He put another way in there,
[31:25] Bob Dobbs: another reference point.
[31:27] Bob Dobbs: So it was a real delight to go through that and discover it.
[31:30] Bob Dobbs: And I don't,
[31:31] Bob Dobbs: at that time,
[31:32] Bob Dobbs: never knew anybody else who was doing it.
[31:34] Bob Dobbs: Many people didn't have the time to find the articles and do it.
[31:38] Bob Dobbs: I had the time and went in there,
[31:40] Bob Dobbs: and that is the aesthetic joy of studying McLuhan,
[31:43] Bob Dobbs: is what I'm trying to say,
[31:45] Bob Dobbs: is to understand this.
[31:46] Bob Dobbs: And not many people realize.
[31:48] Bob Dobbs: know this.
[31:49] Bob Dobbs: Cameron knows it.
[31:50] Bob Dobbs: I don't know if anybody else has done it.
[31:52] Bob Dobbs: If they have,
[31:53] Bob Dobbs: they haven't shown up.
[31:55] Bob Dobbs: They haven't revealed their delight in their,
[31:59] Bob Dobbs: say,
[31:59] Bob Dobbs: expressing something creative out of it.
[32:02] Cameron McEwen: Notice that you were doing that precisely as everybody else was throwing out every book they had.
[32:08] Bob Dobbs: That's right.
[32:09] Cameron McEwen: Because he was some jerk.
[32:12] Bob Dobbs: He was wrong.
[32:13] Bob Dobbs: He was wrong.
[32:14] Bob Dobbs: We didn't get peace,
[32:16] Bob Dobbs: love,
[32:16] Bob Dobbs: and joy in the global village.
[32:19] Cameron McEwen: Yeah,
[32:20] Cameron McEwen: yeah,
[32:20] Cameron McEwen: yeah.
[32:21] Cameron McEwen: But notice there's an interesting parallel here with chemistry.
[32:27] Cameron McEwen: I'm sorry to keep going back to chemistry,
[32:29] Cameron McEwen: but I think it's important.
[32:32] Cameron McEwen: If people do an analysis of some complex thing,
[32:38] Cameron McEwen: let's say DNA or something like this,
[32:41] Cameron McEwen: they do an analysis and they find something or other.
[32:45] Cameron McEwen: And then somebody else.
[32:46] Cameron McEwen: does a re-analysis and they find something else and somebody else does a re-analysis and this goes on and on and on.
[32:53] Cameron McEwen: Well they're all doing quote-unquote the same thing but the same thing is generating insights all the time.
[33:03] Cameron McEwen: So when McLuhan was doing quote-unquote the same thing what he's doing is a re-analysis that actually changes the previous analysis.
[33:14] Bob Dobbs: So everything always seems new.
[33:16] Bob Dobbs: Every day or every week is different.
[33:19] Bob Dobbs: And you say,
[33:19] Bob Dobbs: wow,
[33:19] Bob Dobbs: I just keep going and I'm going to get a different angle,
[33:22] Bob Dobbs: which I guess would be the user is the content phenomenon.
[33:25] Cameron McEwen: Absolutely.
[33:27] Cameron McEwen: Exactly.
[33:27] Cameron McEwen: Because in the mid-60s,
[33:32] Cameron McEwen: somebody wrote a book on the body percept,
[33:37] Cameron McEwen: as it was called.
[33:38] Cameron McEwen: I don't know if that was in the title or not,
[33:40] Cameron McEwen: but I think it was in the title.
[33:42] Bob Dobbs: Yeah.
[33:42] Cameron McEwen: So
[33:43] Cameron McEwen: McLuhan never mentions that book,
[33:45] Cameron McEwen: but he begins at that time to talk about the body percept.
[33:49] Bob Dobbs: Right.
[33:50] Cameron McEwen: And what he says about the body percept is that at every moment,
[33:54] Cameron McEwen: at every second,
[33:55] Cameron McEwen: we develop a new body percept.
[33:59] Bob Dobbs: Yeah.
[33:59] Cameron McEwen: As to say,
[34:00] Cameron McEwen: human experience is a dynamic process that is occurring at every second.
[34:07] Cameron McEwen: And if we want to analyze what's going on,
[34:10] Cameron McEwen: going on in individual experience or in social experience,
[34:14] Cameron McEwen: we have to understand this process of creation.
[34:18] Cameron McEwen: that is going on at every second,
[34:20] Cameron McEwen: at every micro moment.
[34:23] Cameron McEwen: And so his own thought is an example of that,
[34:29] Cameron McEwen: and what he's trying to do is retrieve what's already happening.
[34:34] Bob Dobbs: Yeah,
[34:35] Bob Dobbs: the monk would go into the cave and analyze their body processes and get the nuances and whatever other crazy hallucinations happened to them and where it led to them in subjective.
[34:47] Bob Dobbs: intensities.
[34:49] Bob Dobbs: Marshall McLuhan was doing it with his clothing,
[34:51] Bob Dobbs: with the car,
[34:52] Bob Dobbs: with the house,
[34:52] Bob Dobbs: with the artifacts around him,
[34:54] Bob Dobbs: watching the nuance and sensory ratio shifts that was happening to him and in the culture.
[35:01] Bob Dobbs: What his kids came home and said they were doing.
[35:03] Bob Dobbs: Oh,
[35:03] Bob Dobbs: they're doing hula hoops.
[35:04] Bob Dobbs: Oh,
[35:05] Bob Dobbs: let's look at that.
[35:05] Bob Dobbs: You know what I mean?
[35:06] Bob Dobbs: So just looking at clothing and media,
[35:10] Bob Dobbs: artifacts,
[35:11] Bob Dobbs: the way the old yogi looked at their sensory processes of their body chemistry.
[35:18] Cameron McEwen: That's right,
[35:18] Cameron McEwen: that's right.
[35:20] Cameron McEwen: So one of the things that's happening in this procedure that you're describing is that human beings forever have done this kind of thinking,
[35:34] Cameron McEwen: and they've often produced tremendously interesting results.
[35:40] Cameron McEwen: So that looking at history as McLuhan did in his thesis or in his Nashe thesis.
[35:45] Cameron McEwen: or in the Gutenberg Galaxy,
[35:48] Cameron McEwen: looking at history finds all sorts of really interesting stuff.
[35:52] Cameron McEwen: So it's not as if people were wrong by going in the cave or sitting on the column or doing whatever and reflecting intensely on their experience.
[36:04] Cameron McEwen: No,
[36:05] Cameron McEwen: they produced all sorts of interesting stuff,
[36:07] Cameron McEwen: but we don't know how to harvest that.
[36:10] Cameron McEwen: We don't know how to understand what was really going on.
[36:13] Cameron McEwen: And that's what pattern recognition is.
[36:15] Bob Dobbs: Yeah,
[36:17] Bob Dobbs: very good.
[36:18] Bob Dobbs: Okay,
[36:19] Bob Dobbs: so we go to this quote on page 120,
[36:21] Bob Dobbs: which you know what it's going to say,
[36:24] Bob Dobbs: and you referred to it.
[36:26] Bob Dobbs: So this is in an article around 1974,
[36:31] Bob Dobbs: 1975.
[36:32] Bob Dobbs: There was a book called Superculture,
[36:35] Bob Dobbs: American Popular Culture and Europe,
[36:39] Bob Dobbs: edited by Mr.
[36:40] Bob Dobbs: Bigsby out there in Bowling Green University in 1975.
[36:45] Cameron McEwen: Just one second,
[36:46] Cameron McEwen: Bob.
[36:47] Cameron McEwen: Notice how contemporary that title is,
[36:52] Cameron McEwen: right?
[36:53] Cameron McEwen: What's going on in Ukraine,
[36:55] Cameron McEwen: what dominates the whole world is American culture in Europe.
[37:00] Bob Dobbs: Yeah.
[37:01] Cameron McEwen: The Europeans are committing suicide because inside their heads they have
[37:09] Cameron McEwen: American ideas and they cannot get out of them.
[37:14] Cameron McEwen: So the American superculture is causing these people to sort of lockstep over a cliff.
[37:25] Bob Dobbs: Yeah.
[37:25] Cameron McEwen: And that's what's going to happen this winter to
[37:28] Cameron McEwen: Europe. Yep.
[37:30] Cameron McEwen: It's captured by this superculture.
[37:34] Cameron McEwen: Sorry,
[37:34] Cameron McEwen: anyway.
[37:35] Bob Dobbs: No,
[37:35] Bob Dobbs: that's good.
[37:36] Bob Dobbs: And so this superculture,
[37:38] Bob Dobbs: the title by McLuhan is The Implications of Cultural Uniformity.
[37:43] Bob Dobbs: McLuhan didn't talk about uniformity too much.
[37:45] Bob Dobbs: That was like a Gutenberg concept.
[37:48] Bob Dobbs: He would emphasize discontinuity,
[37:51] Bob Dobbs: not uniformity.
[37:52] Bob Dobbs: So it's interesting in the
[37:54] Bob Dobbs: 70s, which is different from the
[37:55] Bob Dobbs: 60s, he's noticing some kind of uniformity is happening.
[37:59] Bob Dobbs: So this is what it is.
[38:01] Cameron McEwen: But he's not advocating that.
[38:03] Bob Dobbs: No.
[38:04] Cameron McEwen: Uniformity is a Gutenberg category that is kind of in...
[38:12] Bob Dobbs: imposed on an electric reality yeah so here's what he says one of the conflicts of a progressive and rapidly changing world you know just as a monk one of the conflicts of the rapidly changing perceptions i'm going through here not eating and fasting and my
[38:31] Bob Dobbs: body processes surrounding me right now this is but McLuhan's doing it collectively
[38:37] Bob Dobbs: One of the conflicts of a progressive and rapidly changing world concerns the use of surrounding services,
[38:43] Bob Dobbs: which have been obsolesced by daily innovations and discoveries.
[38:47] Bob Dobbs: A vast new industry has been born from this conflict,
[38:49] Bob Dobbs: and its name is CAMP.
[38:51] Bob Dobbs: And CAMP is in quotes.
[38:53] Bob Dobbs: And its motto is,
[38:53] Bob Dobbs: quote,
[38:54] Bob Dobbs: Throw something lovely away today,
[38:56] Bob Dobbs: help beautify junkyards.
[38:59] Bob Dobbs: Now,
[38:59] Bob Dobbs: he doesn't say it in this 1975 article,
[39:02] Bob Dobbs: but back in the 60s he would quote this.
[39:04] Bob Dobbs: Throw something lovely away today,
[39:06] Bob Dobbs: help beautify junkyards,
[39:08] Bob Dobbs: because it was a sign in a junkyard in Toronto.
[39:13] Bob Dobbs: So he's quoting the sign,
[39:14] Bob Dobbs: and this was the best sign he ever saw,
[39:17] Bob Dobbs: right?
[39:18] Bob Dobbs: So much.
[39:20] Cameron McEwen: Do you know if it was an actual sign?
[39:22] Cameron McEwen: Yes.
[39:23] Bob Dobbs: Yeah?
[39:24] Bob Dobbs: There's somewheres.
[39:25] Bob Dobbs: I don't know where it was,
[39:26] Bob Dobbs: but somewhere he describes it,
[39:28] Bob Dobbs: I think,
[39:30] Bob Dobbs: unless he was making it up.
[39:32] Bob Dobbs: Yeah,
[39:32] Cameron McEwen: you see,
[39:32] Cameron McEwen: that's what I think he might have been.
[39:35] Bob Dobbs: Right,
[39:35] Bob Dobbs: but somehow,
[39:36] Bob Dobbs: once I said,
[39:37] Bob Dobbs: wow,
[39:37] Bob Dobbs: there it is.
[39:38] Bob Dobbs: I remember experiencing that.
[39:41] Bob Dobbs: That's lost in the palimpsest of my archive.
[39:44] Bob Dobbs: You know,
[39:44] Bob Dobbs: I don't know if I have time to go find it,
[39:46] Bob Dobbs: but we'll see if anybody replaying my paths finds it.
[39:53] Bob Dobbs: Throw something lovely away today.
[39:55] Bob Dobbs: Help beautify junkyards.
[39:57] Bob Dobbs: So,
[39:58] Bob Dobbs: and he's saying,
[39:59] Bob Dobbs: he's applying that to camp.
[40:01] Bob Dobbs: When he first has that quote in 65,
[40:05] Bob Dobbs: 66,
[40:05] Bob Dobbs: I don't think camp is popular yet.
[40:08] Bob Dobbs: It's not a major trend.
[40:10] Bob Dobbs: Might be.
[40:10] Bob Dobbs: What do you think?
[40:12] Cameron McEwen: It would depend on when Susan Sontag did her essay on camp.
[40:17] Bob Dobbs: Yeah,
[40:17] Bob Dobbs: she did it by the mid-60s.
[40:18] Cameron McEwen: I'm not sure when that was.
[40:19] Cameron McEwen: It was around the middle 60s,
[40:21] Cameron McEwen: I think,
[40:22] Cameron McEwen: about the time that
[40:23] Cameron McEwen: Wolfe did his article on McLuhan.
[40:25] Bob Dobbs: Yeah,
[40:26] Bob Dobbs: I don't recall him juxtaposing the junkyard sign with the word camp before.
[40:34] Bob Dobbs: He just talked about it in general.
[40:35] Bob Dobbs: It was almost like his own method he was talking about.
[40:38] Bob Dobbs: throw something lovely away today.
[40:40] Bob Dobbs: His books help beautify junkyards.
[40:44] Bob Dobbs: But anyways,
[40:45] Bob Dobbs: that could be corrected if someone gets that fine,
[40:48] Bob Dobbs: detailed perception of the stages of his work.
[40:52] Bob Dobbs: So then he says,
[40:53] Bob Dobbs: despite the grotesque aspect of camp as the incessant revival of that which has scarcely had a chance to register its appearance or existence,
[41:01] Bob Dobbs: get that,
[41:02] Bob Dobbs: things are becoming art form rapidly.
[41:07] Bob Dobbs: It just shows up.
[41:08] Bob Dobbs: then all of a sudden it's surrounded by something,
[41:09] Bob Dobbs: so it becomes an art form or a camp.
[41:13] Bob Dobbs: The incessant revival of that which has scarcely had a chance to register its appearance or existence.
[41:18] Bob Dobbs: I remember Zappa developed that.
[41:21] Bob Dobbs: In my interview with him,
[41:23] Bob Dobbs: he talked about people getting nostalgia for nostalgia and grinding to a halt.
[41:28] Bob Dobbs: He says,
[41:29] Bob Dobbs: despite that grotesque aspect,
[41:31] Bob Dobbs: it has already been itself obsolesced by the popular technology of the video replay.
[41:36] Bob Dobbs: The instant replay...
[41:37] Bob Dobbs: available mainly to the audiences of sporting events,
[41:40] Bob Dobbs: offers,
[41:40] Bob Dobbs: as it were,
[41:41] Bob Dobbs: the meaning minus the experience.
[41:44] Bob Dobbs: Reversing Mr.
[41:45] Bob Dobbs: Eliot's,
[41:45] Bob Dobbs: T.S.
[41:46] Bob Dobbs: Eliot's observation that,
[41:47] Bob Dobbs: quote,
[41:47] Bob Dobbs: we had the experience but missed the meaning.
[41:50] Bob Dobbs: The instant replay is the meaning in that it is less concerned with the input of experience than with the process of perception.
[41:58] Cameron McEwen: So notice how that is exactly what he was researching in 1950,
[42:04] Cameron McEwen: 1951.
[42:07] Bob Dobbs: Yep.
[42:07] Cameron McEwen: And this is 25 years later.
[42:10] Bob Dobbs: Right.
[42:11] Bob Dobbs: The instant replay,
[42:11] Bob Dobbs: indeed,
[42:14] Bob Dobbs: offers not just cognition but recognition.
[42:17] Bob Dobbs: The instant replay is the meaning in that it is less concerned with the input of experience than with the process perception.
[42:24] Bob Dobbs: Yeah,
[42:25] Bob Dobbs: he has a little headline in Culture Is Our Business,
[42:27] Bob Dobbs: 1970,
[42:28] Bob Dobbs: where he says sensory experience is not input,
[42:31] Bob Dobbs: or sensory input is not experience.
[42:33] Bob Dobbs: Maybe that's what it was.
[42:33] Bob Dobbs: Sensory input is not experience.
[42:37] Bob Dobbs: Everybody else is running around trying to have experience,
[42:39] Bob Dobbs: basically in the physical.
[42:43] Cameron McEwen: And that's the leading industry in the world today.
[42:47] Bob Dobbs: Yeah,
[42:48] Bob Dobbs: tourism.
[42:49] Cameron McEwen: Travel and recreation and stuff.
[42:56] Cameron McEwen: What he was talking about there,
[42:58] Cameron McEwen: here we are almost 50 years later,
[43:02] Cameron McEwen: and it's just become squared and cubed.
[43:07] Bob Dobbs: And boring.
[43:09] Cameron McEwen: Yes,
[43:09] Cameron McEwen: very boring.
[43:10] Bob Dobbs: Yeah,
[43:11] Bob Dobbs: so they ended up going into your landscape and doing either eco trips or going down to Peru and taking ayahuasca.
[43:19] Bob Dobbs: That was the new tourism.
[43:22] Bob Dobbs: You know about that.
[43:23] Bob Dobbs: That's what's happened the last 10 years.
[43:26] Bob Dobbs: Yeah,
[43:27] Bob Dobbs: sure.
[43:27] Cameron McEwen: Yeah.
[43:27] Cameron McEwen: So,
[43:28] Cameron McEwen: I mean,
[43:28] Cameron McEwen: that's the leading edge.
[43:30] Cameron McEwen: But for many people,
[43:32] Cameron McEwen: it's simply going from...
[43:35] Cameron McEwen: rural Tennessee to
[43:37] Cameron McEwen: Orlando.
[43:39] Bob Dobbs: Yeah, and he said in the 40s that Henry James showed that the Western mind regarded the world as a museum.
[43:48] Cameron McEwen: Yes.
[43:49] Bob Dobbs: That's an important statement.
[43:51] Bob Dobbs: Absolutely.
[43:53] Bob Dobbs: So then tourism took that over after World War II and presented the world as a museum.
[44:00] Bob Dobbs: Let's see.
[44:01] Cameron McEwen: So then everybody had a camera.
[44:05] Cameron McEwen: And the role of the camera was to mount exhibits of the museum of their experience.
[44:14] Bob Dobbs: Yeah,
[44:14] Bob Dobbs: to prove they'd been somewhere.
[44:18] Bob Dobbs: So the instant replay indeed is after the instant replay is the meaning in that it is less concerned with the input of experience than with the process of perception.
[44:28] Bob Dobbs: The instant replay indeed offers not just cognition but re-cognition,
[44:33] Bob Dobbs: not the word recognition,
[44:34] Bob Dobbs: it's hyphenated but re-cognition and leads the mind to the world of pattern recognition to after sight and foresight.
[44:44] Cameron McEwen: Pattern recognition there,
[44:45] Cameron McEwen: technical term.
[44:47] Bob Dobbs: Right.
[44:47] Bob Dobbs: Living in a new environment of instant electric information has shifted American attention from specific goals to the cognitive thrills of pattern recognition,
[44:57] Bob Dobbs: a change most obviously manifested in the TV service of the instant replay.
[45:02] Bob Dobbs: So the cognitive thrills of pattern recognition are now vulgar pop culture by the 70s and leading to the endless or the newest global industry of tourism.
[45:15] Cameron McEwen: Right.
[45:16] Cameron McEwen: So you have,
[45:17] Cameron McEwen: just as when he was talking about Lindbergh in 1953-54,
[45:24] Cameron McEwen: what he sees is that insight is made,
[45:30] Cameron McEwen: but it's misunderstood and misapplied.
[45:34] Cameron McEwen: And now he's saying the same thing with pattern recognition 25 years later.
[45:42] Bob Dobbs: You know what that is?
[45:43] Bob Dobbs: That's the cognitive skills of chemical body pattern recognition,
[45:47] Bob Dobbs: not knowing how to do
[45:48] Bob Dobbs: TV body and chip body pattern recognition.
[45:51] Bob Dobbs: Or you might take cultural patterns.
[45:56] Bob Dobbs: People didn't know how to do that.
[45:58] Cameron McEwen: Correct.
[45:59] Cameron McEwen: So your different bodies are a good way of thinking about the different ways in which pattern recognition can be exercised.
[46:11] Bob Dobbs: Yeah,
[46:11] Bob Dobbs: yeah.
[46:12] Bob Dobbs: I agree with that assessment of my formula.
[46:17] Bob Dobbs: So this is quite a quote,
[46:19] Bob Dobbs: and it is one of the few new statements in the
[46:24] Bob Dobbs: 70s. He had going out to be alone for Americans.
[46:29] Bob Dobbs: He emphasized the rhetorical structure of Finnegans Wake and the four levels of exegesis.
[46:35] Bob Dobbs: Any other couple of ideas in the 70s?
[46:39] Cameron McEwen: Well,
[46:39] Cameron McEwen: let me just go to...
[46:42] Cameron McEwen: going out to be alone because that relates to what we're just saying about pattern recognition.
[46:49] Cameron McEwen: The whole point of pattern recognition is to recognize that we are never alone in the sense of we are never creating anything unique because
[47:03] Cameron McEwen: everything is already there and all we can do is put on a certain mask that has its own
[47:11] Cameron McEwen: rules that are prior to our exercise of those rules.
[47:17] Bob Dobbs: Yeah.
[47:18] Cameron McEwen: So the,
[47:24] Cameron McEwen: sorry,
[47:25] Cameron McEwen: I've shifted gears here a little bit.
[47:27] Bob Dobbs: I think you bumped into the stop sign.
[47:29] Bob Dobbs: Back up.
[47:30] Bob Dobbs: It didn't wreck your car,
[47:32] Bob Dobbs: but you,
[47:32] Bob Dobbs: yeah,
[47:32] Bob Dobbs: you got stuck at the curb there.
[47:34] Bob Dobbs: You were saying about pattern recognition and maybe talking about a rut that people got into?
[47:41] Bob Dobbs: We're taking it somewhere else.
[47:43] Cameron McEwen: Yeah,
[47:43] Cameron McEwen: I know.
[47:44] Cameron McEwen: A rut is not the important thing.
[47:46] Cameron McEwen: The important thing is that when pattern recognition is exercised,
[47:56] Cameron McEwen: the essential fact that needs to be recognized is that pattern recognition is always going on.
[48:07] Cameron McEwen: It's something that cannot not be done.
[48:10] Cameron McEwen: But
[48:10] Cameron McEwen: It's also something that is not singular.
[48:14] Cameron McEwen: It's a huge plurality.
[48:18] Cameron McEwen: And the only way that pattern recognition can be subject to pattern recognition is to confront that plurality.
[48:28] Cameron McEwen: Yeah,
[48:29] Cameron McEwen: the polyps,
[48:31] Bob Dobbs: the layers.
[48:32] Cameron McEwen: That's correct.
[48:33] Cameron McEwen: Well,
[48:34] Cameron McEwen: it's not only layers,
[48:35] Cameron McEwen: but as the surface,
[48:41] Cameron McEwen: gets expressed as a product or an effect of the forms that are underneath the surface.
[48:54] Cameron McEwen: As that surface gets expressed,
[48:56] Cameron McEwen: it gets expressed in a myriad of ways.
[49:00] Cameron McEwen: So it's very important to look at the plurality both of the underlying forms and of the ways that they express themselves.
[49:09] Bob Dobbs: And that's exactly what
[49:11] Bob Dobbs: I did in the Tiny Note chart.
[49:13] Bob Dobbs: The holeopathic replays in the different quadrants are overlaid like a palimpsest.
[49:20] Cameron McEwen: Yeah,
[49:20] Cameron McEwen: yeah.
[49:21] Cameron McEwen: I must say that
[49:22] Cameron McEwen: I thought that was a good discussion in the sense that
[49:26] Cameron McEwen: I learned a lot from it.
[49:30] Cameron McEwen: Which discussion?
[49:32] Cameron McEwen: I was impressed by the number of things that I didn't see before our discussion.
[49:39] Bob Dobbs: Are you talking about last session?
[49:42] Cameron McEwen: No,
[49:42] Cameron McEwen: no.
[49:43] Cameron McEwen: I'm talking,
[49:44] Cameron McEwen: this is
[49:45] Cameron McEwen: 15 or 20 discussions ago.
[49:48] Cameron McEwen: Oh.
[49:48] Cameron McEwen: went through your chart very carefully.
[49:51] Bob Dobbs: So you've thought more about it,
[49:53] Bob Dobbs: recalled more about it,
[49:54] Bob Dobbs: you're saying.
[49:56] Cameron McEwen: Well,
[49:58] Cameron McEwen: through our discussion then,
[50:00] Cameron McEwen: I understood much more about it.
[50:03] Bob Dobbs: Right,
[50:03] Bob Dobbs: right.
[50:04] Cameron McEwen: And so I am agreeing with what you're saying about it now.
[50:08] Bob Dobbs: Good.
[50:09] Bob Dobbs: Okay,
[50:10] Bob Dobbs: so then underneath that quote,
[50:13] Bob Dobbs: I say in blue,
[50:14] Bob Dobbs: so it's the casual talk.
[50:17] Bob Dobbs: There was a sign in the 60s in a junkyard in Toronto,
[50:20] Bob Dobbs: and the sign said,
[50:21] Bob Dobbs: Help beautify junkyard.
[50:22] Bob Dobbs: Throw something lovely away today.
[50:24] Bob Dobbs: Donate it.
[50:25] Bob Dobbs: Donate it to the junkyard.
[50:28] Bob Dobbs: McLuhan felt he was doing an update of that in the 60s and
[50:32] Bob Dobbs: 70s. Note that the cognitive thrills of pattern recognition,
[50:35] Bob Dobbs: that's in quotes,
[50:36] Bob Dobbs: anticipate the texting,
[50:38] Bob Dobbs: smartphone,
[50:39] Bob Dobbs: black mirror life of today.
[50:41] Bob Dobbs: The digital thrills of excessive pattern recognition.
[50:45] Cameron McEwen: Right.
[50:48] Cameron McEwen: Right,
[50:48] Cameron McEwen: so pattern recognition is the key to everything,
[50:53] Cameron McEwen: but just as chemistry and physics can be used to produce an atomic bomb that destroys the world,
[51:02] Cameron McEwen: so can pattern recognition in the new field of human experience be completely misused to destroy the world.
[51:10] Cameron McEwen: And we're watching that in slow motion right now.
[51:14] Bob Dobbs: Yeah,
[51:14] Bob Dobbs: I remember Walter Bowart.
[51:16] Bob Dobbs: In 1982,
[51:17] Bob Dobbs: telling me there were some studies where they were starting to be able to put things in the brain,
[51:22] Bob Dobbs: let codes and measure things,
[51:24] Bob Dobbs: and they measured this woman.
[51:30] Bob Dobbs: And I don't know what the lab,
[51:32] Bob Dobbs: you know,
[51:32] Bob Dobbs: the content of the experiment was,
[51:34] Bob Dobbs: but the outcome was that she would get eurekas.
[51:37] Bob Dobbs: I think they were pressing the eureka part of the brain,
[51:40] Bob Dobbs: the brain that thought it got an insight.
[51:42] Bob Dobbs: And it was more pleasurable than a sexual orgasm.
[51:46] Bob Dobbs: So we have created that,
[51:48] Bob Dobbs: externalized,
[51:49] Bob Dobbs: and people live,
[51:50] Bob Dobbs: especially today,
[51:51] Bob Dobbs: with their constant looking at their black mirror,
[51:54] Bob Dobbs: they're constantly getting little structures,
[51:56] Bob Dobbs: little thrills of pattern recognition,
[51:58] Bob Dobbs: little eurekas.
[52:00] Bob Dobbs: Just by seeing something new.
[52:02] Bob Dobbs: Never have people been able to see something new every fucking five seconds.
[52:07] Bob Dobbs: When you're a shepherd out there looking,
[52:09] Bob Dobbs: maybe you could look at the flowers and notice that the flowers are different from yesterday.
[52:13] Bob Dobbs: Very slow.
[52:14] Bob Dobbs: They would look at the...
[52:15] Bob Dobbs: content that people take in.
[52:18] Bob Dobbs: We're super,
[52:19] Bob Dobbs: we're stoned on a drug called texting and experiencing new content constantly.
[52:25] Bob Dobbs: And you could call that an addiction,
[52:27] Bob Dobbs: but it is the joy of pattern recognition,
[52:31] Bob Dobbs: but it's not understanding what pattern recognition is.
[52:34] Bob Dobbs: So you could stop it,
[52:37] Bob Dobbs: actually get a bigger pattern.
[52:40] Cameron McEwen: It's a concentration on the new that is actually the old.
[52:45] Bob Dobbs: Yeah.
[52:46] Bob Dobbs: And they don't know what the old is that they're constantly seeing.
[52:50] Cameron McEwen: Let me just talk for a minute about the sentence there,
[52:53] Cameron McEwen: donate it to the junkyard,
[52:56] Cameron McEwen: right?
[52:56] Cameron McEwen: So earlier we were talking about publish or perish and people turning out tons of stuff that is actually just junk.
[53:06] Cameron McEwen: But if we think for a minute about donate in the...
[53:14] Cameron McEwen: in terms of the end of Finnegans Wake,
[53:17] Cameron McEwen: where
[53:18] Cameron McEwen: Joyce says the keys to given,
[53:22] Cameron McEwen: given and donate are the same word,
[53:26] Cameron McEwen: basically.
[53:27] Cameron McEwen: So what happens with creation and creation in the large sense of creation of the universe,
[53:36] Cameron McEwen: but creation also in the sense of an artwork and creation in terms of.
[53:44] Cameron McEwen: every moment of human experience is that there is a dynamic donation going on into the junkyard of the experienced world.
[53:56] Cameron McEwen: And what McLuhan tries to do is to say,
[54:00] Cameron McEwen: don't look at the junkyard,
[54:02] Cameron McEwen: for Christ's sake.
[54:03] Cameron McEwen: Look at the donation going on.
[54:05] Bob Dobbs: Yeah.
[54:07] Bob Dobbs: Now that's Marcel Duchamp's...
[54:10] Bob Dobbs: Is it Étant donnés,
[54:12] Bob Dobbs: the secret art,
[54:13] Bob Dobbs: his last art form?
[54:16] Bob Dobbs: For 20 years,
[54:16] Bob Dobbs: 40,
[54:17] Bob Dobbs: 60,
[54:17] Bob Dobbs: 66,
[54:17] Bob Dobbs: he built this primitive scene of a woman in nice pastoral trees and rivers,
[54:28] Bob Dobbs: and you had to go to a museum in Pittsburgh or someplace and look through a little hole,
[54:34] Bob Dobbs: and you'd see the nude lady.
[54:36] Bob Dobbs: Do you know that?
[54:38] Cameron McEwen: No,
[54:38] Cameron McEwen: but
[54:39] Cameron McEwen: I...
[54:39] Cameron McEwen: I'm sure you're right.
[54:41] Bob Dobbs: Yeah,
[54:41] Bob Dobbs: but it's called Étant donnés.
[54:43] Bob Dobbs: There's your donate,
[54:44] Bob Dobbs: your given.
[54:45] Cameron McEwen: Yeah,
[54:46] Cameron McEwen: yeah.
[54:46] Bob Dobbs: Yeah.
[54:47] Bob Dobbs: And he,
[54:47] Bob Dobbs: remember,
[54:48] Bob Dobbs: he and Joyce at the same time are reading The Meaning of Meaning in the early
[54:52] Bob Dobbs: 20s and talking to
[54:54] Bob Dobbs: Peggy Guggenheim about it.
[54:55] Cameron McEwen: Right.
[54:57] Cameron McEwen: And Duchamp and Cage are playing chess.
[55:01] Bob Dobbs: While thinking about Finnegans Wake and McLuhan.
[55:05] Cameron McEwen: That's correct.
[55:06] Cameron McEwen: That's correct.
[55:07] Cameron McEwen: So Cage is talking.
[55:09] Cameron McEwen: to Duchamp about
[55:11] Cameron McEwen: McLuhan and about the whole idea that both Cage and Duchamp were interested in of mechanizing chess.
[55:23] Cameron McEwen: I believe the first game of that was in Toronto.
[55:26] Bob Dobbs: In Ryerson?
[55:28] Cameron McEwen: Yeah.
[55:28] Bob Dobbs: Oh,
[55:28] Bob Dobbs: I don't know about that.
[55:30] Bob Dobbs: There's a picture of them in 1968,
[55:31] Bob Dobbs: just before he died,
[55:33] Bob Dobbs: playing chess in Ryerson.
[55:35] Bob Dobbs: I don't know if it was the Machinic that you're talking about.
[55:38] Cameron McEwen: Well,
[55:38] Cameron McEwen: there's...
[55:39] Cameron McEwen: I think both of those happened.
[55:41] Cameron McEwen: I think both of those happened.
[55:42] Bob Dobbs: Right.
[55:42] Cameron McEwen: I think there was both a match where
[55:46] Cameron McEwen: Duchamp crushed
[55:48] Cameron McEwen: Cage, as he always did,
[55:50] Cameron McEwen: and then there was the attempt with Cage,
[55:53] Cameron McEwen: known Duchamp,
[55:55] Cameron McEwen: to have a mechanical game.
[55:59] Bob Dobbs: Right.
[56:00] Bob Dobbs: And that may have taken place in the very room where,
[56:03] Bob Dobbs: back in the 50s,
[56:04] Bob Dobbs: McLuhan conducted his first...
[56:08] Bob Dobbs: experiments with students presenting the same material in different media.
[56:12] Bob Dobbs: Remember those experiments?
[56:13] Cameron McEwen: Oh,
[56:14] Cameron McEwen: definitely.
[56:14] Cameron McEwen: Yeah,
[56:15] Cameron McEwen: it's described in several essays in the 50s.
[56:20] Bob Dobbs: Yeah,
[56:21] Bob Dobbs: and that happened in Ryerson.
[56:23] Cameron McEwen: Yeah,
[56:24] Cameron McEwen: but it was,
[56:24] Cameron McEwen: unfortunately,
[56:25] Cameron McEwen: it was a wrong,
[56:27] Cameron McEwen: he went down a one-way street the wrong way on that one.
[56:32] Bob Dobbs: Yeah,
[56:32] Bob Dobbs: and they had to redo it again.
[56:34] Cameron McEwen: Yeah,
[56:35] Cameron McEwen: but the whole problem was that um,
[56:38] Cameron McEwen: You know,
[56:39] Cameron McEwen: McLuhan was constantly urged by colleagues and students to,
[56:45] Cameron McEwen: quote-unquote,
[56:46] Cameron McEwen: demonstrate his ideas.
[56:48] Cameron McEwen: And in order to,
[56:50] Cameron McEwen: quote-unquote,
[56:50] Cameron McEwen: demonstrate them,
[56:52] Cameron McEwen: what he had to do was take some fact or some finding that was,
[57:04] Cameron McEwen: how can I put this,
[57:05] Cameron McEwen: it was a grasp
[57:08] Cameron McEwen: as a figure without a ground.
[57:11] Bob Dobbs: Yeah.
[57:11] Cameron McEwen: So,
[57:13] Cameron McEwen: for example,
[57:14] Cameron McEwen: the left and right hemispheres or media as newspapers,
[57:18] Cameron McEwen: phones,
[57:19] Cameron McEwen: computers and stuff.
[57:21] Cameron McEwen: All of these things are figures that you cannot take to be grounds in the sense of pattern recognition.
[57:30] Cameron McEwen: So here's McLuhan for decades trying to quote-unquote demonstrate his stuff by putting...
[57:37] Cameron McEwen: forward cliches that he's trying to say,
[57:41] Cameron McEwen: well,
[57:42] Cameron McEwen: these are archetypes,
[57:43] Cameron McEwen: but you have to look below the surface to see the archetype.
[57:47] Cameron McEwen: But of course,
[57:47] Cameron McEwen: everybody took the figure as what he was talking about.
[57:52] Cameron McEwen: So media or instant replay in sports or something like this.
[58:00] Cameron McEwen: He was trying to demonstrate something or communicate something,
[58:04] Cameron McEwen: but he had to use words.
[58:07] Cameron McEwen: People simply did not understand what he was talking about because they took his words to be facts or to be ungrounded figures.
[58:18] Bob Dobbs: Yeah.
[58:19] Bob Dobbs: Okay,
[58:19] Bob Dobbs: so I looked up this quote,
[58:21] Bob Dobbs: James Joyce,
[58:22] Bob Dobbs: essay on Joyce,
[58:24] Bob Dobbs: early
[58:25] Bob Dobbs: 50s. I have it in my book.
[58:27] Bob Dobbs: And this is a recap of what you've been saying about what we said about the creative process and then the slightest.
[58:34] Bob Dobbs: As you'll see,
[58:34] Bob Dobbs: he says,
[58:35] Bob Dobbs: any movement of appetite within the labyrinth of cognition.
[58:39] Bob Dobbs: And I remember he wrote an essay on Lewis in 1944 after encountering Lewis in depth.
[58:45] Bob Dobbs: And that gave him the idea that our sensory appetites was a ground for a lot of the new technologies extending our appetite.
[58:54] Bob Dobbs: So he says,
[58:55] Bob Dobbs: any movement of...
[58:56] Bob Dobbs: So the use of the word appetite,
[58:58] Bob Dobbs: I don't know if he used it earlier,
[59:00] Bob Dobbs: but it stood out.
[59:01] Bob Dobbs: He might have even italicized it in that essay on Lewis.
[59:04] Bob Dobbs: In 44,
[59:06] Bob Dobbs: any movement of appetite within the labyrinth of cognition is a minotaur.
[59:11] Bob Dobbs: and that's in quotes,
[59:12] Bob Dobbs: which must be slain by the hero artist.
[59:15] Bob Dobbs: Anything which interferes with cognition,
[59:17] Bob Dobbs: whether concupiscence,
[59:19] Bob Dobbs: pride,
[59:20] Bob Dobbs: imprecision,
[59:21] Bob Dobbs: or vagueness,
[59:22] Bob Dobbs: is a minotaur ready to devour beauty.
[59:25] Bob Dobbs: So that Joyce not only was the first to reveal the link between the stages of apprehension and the creative process,
[59:32] Bob Dobbs: he was the first to understand how the drama of cognition itself was the key archetype of all human ritual myth and legend.
[59:40] Bob Dobbs: So the yogi is studying the stage of apprehension in the creative process within the senses in the cave,
[59:48] Bob Dobbs: but Joyce goes out into the artifacts,
[59:50] Bob Dobbs: building on probably what the symbolists started to notice,
[59:53] Bob Dobbs: that nature was in the cities,
[59:55] Bob Dobbs: not out in the romantic moors.
[59:59] Bob Dobbs: So he's taking the drama of cognition and relating it to clothing,
[1:00:05] Bob Dobbs: technologies,
[1:00:06] Bob Dobbs: or what he says,
[1:00:07] Bob Dobbs: the archetypes of human ritual,
[1:00:09] Bob Dobbs: myth,
[1:00:09] Bob Dobbs: and legend.
[1:00:10] Bob Dobbs: That's cultural,
[1:00:12] Bob Dobbs: you see?
[1:00:12] Bob Dobbs: So he's looking at the shifts.
[1:00:14] Bob Dobbs: So then he says,
[1:00:16] Bob Dobbs: and thus Joyce was able to incorporate at every point in his work the body of the past in immediate relation to the slightest current of perception.
[1:00:26] Bob Dobbs: That's what you were saying.
[1:00:28] Bob Dobbs: The slightest wrinkle,
[1:00:29] Bob Dobbs: the slightest little situation in the culture was the microcosm or the minute.
[1:00:38] Bob Dobbs: expertise of his clear perception,
[1:00:43] Bob Dobbs: and then Joyce,
[1:00:44] Bob Dobbs: he saw,
[1:00:44] Bob Dobbs: was doing it already,
[1:00:46] Bob Dobbs: with the most minute little environmental effects in the middle of a page of many languages and stories.
[1:00:56] Bob Dobbs: See,
[1:00:56] Bob Dobbs: so the slightest current of perception,
[1:00:58] Bob Dobbs: that to me is a yogic-sized perception,
[1:01:03] Bob Dobbs: but it's applied to all of...
[1:01:07] Bob Dobbs: The encyclopedic data of all the cultures that one had access to in the early 20th century.
[1:01:13] Cameron McEwen: Yep.
[1:01:14] Bob Dobbs: The body of work.
[1:01:15] Bob Dobbs: Yeah,
[1:01:15] Cameron McEwen: I agree with that.
[1:01:16] Bob Dobbs: Yeah.
[1:01:17] Bob Dobbs: So it's just a beautiful quote.
[1:01:18] Bob Dobbs: And thus he was able to incorporate at every point in his work the body of the past in immediate relation to the slightest current of perception.
[1:01:26] Bob Dobbs: The more you understand that statement,
[1:01:29] Bob Dobbs: you don't have to read Finnegans Wake.
[1:01:30] Bob Dobbs: You understand what the Wake was doing.
[1:01:33] Bob Dobbs: And it's repeated all the way through.
[1:01:37] Bob Dobbs: And you also understand what Pound was doing,
[1:01:40] Bob Dobbs: or Eliot,
[1:01:41] Bob Dobbs: or Lewis.
[1:01:42] Bob Dobbs: They all were inside the electric effect,
[1:01:45] Bob Dobbs: which swallowed all previous cultures and brought this new level of pattern recognition and new formulas or new perceptions of patterns in culture that were repeated all over the world with different changes in the slightest current of perception based
[1:02:04] Bob Dobbs: on the environment of that culture.
[1:02:07] Cameron McEwen: Right.
[1:02:07] Cameron McEwen: But notice how that generates a problem of communication,
[1:02:14] Cameron McEwen: because you have all of this great insight,
[1:02:17] Cameron McEwen: but at the same time,
[1:02:19] Cameron McEwen: everything is going to shit.
[1:02:21] Cameron McEwen: Everything in individuals,
[1:02:25] Cameron McEwen: families,
[1:02:25] Cameron McEwen: the culture,
[1:02:27] Cameron McEwen: and in international politics,
[1:02:31] Cameron McEwen: everything is going to shit because people,
[1:02:35] Cameron McEwen: although they...
[1:02:36] Cameron McEwen: although there is great thinking going on and always has been great thinking going on,
[1:02:42] Cameron McEwen: there's no way to apply that.
[1:02:45] Cameron McEwen: And so
[1:02:47] Cameron McEwen: McLuhan and
[1:02:48] Cameron McEwen: Joyce and all these people are constantly thinking about how do you go from insight to application?
[1:02:56] Cameron McEwen: And one of the things that happens both to McLuhan and Joyce as they begin to think about
[1:03:05] Cameron McEwen: how the minotaur figure is misused in the passage you were just talking about.
[1:03:13] Cameron McEwen: And it gets misused because the idea is that if there's some minotaur disturbance of the clairvoyance of thought,
[1:03:23] Cameron McEwen: that that's a bad thing.
[1:03:25] Cameron McEwen: And so you have a whole series of opposition set up between good and bad,
[1:03:31] Cameron McEwen: and the minotaur,
[1:03:32] Cameron McEwen: and proper thinking,
[1:03:34] Cameron McEwen: and lost.
[1:03:35] Cameron McEwen: in the labyrinth to illumination.
[1:03:38] Cameron McEwen: All of these dualisms get set up.
[1:03:41] Cameron McEwen: And so both McLuhan and Joyce and in fact Pound and Eliot as well,
[1:03:46] Cameron McEwen: all of these people realize that that way of trying to explain what's going on is itself problematic.
[1:03:55] Cameron McEwen: It's too dualistic.
[1:03:58] Cameron McEwen: It's too authoritarian.
[1:04:01] Cameron McEwen: It's almost dictatorial.
[1:04:03] Cameron McEwen: And so they all try to think about how is it possible to take the sort of the core thought that's being mis-expressed there,
[1:04:15] Cameron McEwen: how can that be put into a different language?
[1:04:19] Cameron McEwen: Yeah,
[1:04:19] Bob Dobbs: how to beautify junkyards.
[1:04:21] Bob Dobbs: They were looking for the right thing to throw away.
[1:04:25] Cameron McEwen: Correct.
[1:04:26] Bob Dobbs: Or to throw into the work.
[1:04:28] Cameron McEwen: Right.
[1:04:28] Cameron McEwen: So one of the things they had to throw away there was this whole minotaur idea of being a disturbance.
[1:04:33] Cameron McEwen: Yeah.
[1:04:34] Cameron McEwen: So what they had to do was they had to advance in the direction of common language.
[1:04:41] Cameron McEwen: So poetry had done that since Baudelaire.
[1:04:45] Cameron McEwen: And here was McLuhan,
[1:04:48] Cameron McEwen: who was very capable of doing very precise writings.
[1:04:54] Cameron McEwen: Some of his essays in the
[1:04:58] Cameron McEwen: 1940s and 50s are great examples of high precision.
[1:05:04] Cameron McEwen: But he begins to think that that itself is a problem with communication.
[1:05:11] Cameron McEwen: And so he begins to go towards popular expression.
[1:05:16] Cameron McEwen: So doing a talk show or doing a lecture that just consists of jokes or something like this.
[1:05:23] Cameron McEwen: It's his reaction to this minotaur symbol,
[1:05:30] Cameron McEwen: which he rejects.
[1:05:32] Cameron McEwen: Yeah,
[1:05:32] Bob Dobbs: which is locked in in the Gutenberg Galaxy.
[1:05:35] Bob Dobbs: And so he's beginning to discover fuzzy logic.
[1:05:38] Bob Dobbs: Remember that phrase?
[1:05:39] Bob Dobbs: It came up in the 80s.
[1:05:40] Bob Dobbs: Yeah,
[1:05:40] Cameron McEwen: yeah.
[1:05:42] Cameron McEwen: But notice how he probably gets this idea that you have to go away from the purity of language from Finnegans Wake.
[1:05:52] Bob Dobbs: Yeah.
[1:05:53] Cameron McEwen: He's reading and rereading Finnegans Wake all the time in these years,
[1:05:58] Cameron McEwen: and the whole idea of sort of pure writing and pure thought is only a joke in Finnegans Wake.
[1:06:10] Bob Dobbs: Yeah,
[1:06:10] Bob Dobbs: that's the Calvinist problem when the printing press comes in,
[1:06:16] Bob Dobbs: the Puritan instinct.
[1:06:18] Bob Dobbs: Correct.
[1:06:19] Bob Dobbs: Yeah,
[1:06:19] Bob Dobbs: to clean up,
[1:06:20] Bob Dobbs: have a clear eyeball.
[1:06:24] Bob Dobbs: something like that clear eyeball yeah yeah yeah yeah so the next quote then let's see so we were just talking about the digital thrills of excessive pattern recognition then
[1:06:43] Bob Dobbs: i find another quote from the same essay the implications of cultural uniformity
[1:06:52] Bob Dobbs: So,
[1:06:53] Bob Dobbs: at the bottom of 120,
[1:06:55] Bob Dobbs: here's what he says.
[1:06:56] Bob Dobbs: For America,
[1:06:57] Bob Dobbs: the electronic revolution from industrial products and consumerism to information and custom-made services,
[1:07:04] Bob Dobbs: that's,
[1:07:05] Bob Dobbs: remember last week,
[1:07:06] Bob Dobbs: two weeks ago?
[1:07:07] Bob Dobbs: Hardware,
[1:07:07] Bob Dobbs: in quotes,
[1:07:08] Bob Dobbs: to software.
[1:07:11] Bob Dobbs: Yeah,
[1:07:11] Bob Dobbs: from industrial products and consumerism to information and custom-made services.
[1:07:17] Bob Dobbs: That electronic revolution is a reversal of the entire way of life.
[1:07:22] Bob Dobbs: with goals and directions suddenly yielding to roles and figures.
[1:07:26] Bob Dobbs: And figures is in italics.
[1:07:28] Bob Dobbs: It's important.
[1:07:30] Bob Dobbs: America has found the path of industrial uniformity and continuity no longer to its taste.
[1:07:36] Bob Dobbs: Living in a new environment of instant electric information has shifted American attention from specific goals to the cognitive thrills of pattern recognition.
[1:07:46] Bob Dobbs: There he repeats that phrase.
[1:07:48] Bob Dobbs: A change that is manifested directly by the TV service of the instant replay.
[1:07:53] Bob Dobbs: So here's an example,
[1:07:54] Bob Dobbs: repeating what we read in the other article,
[1:07:56] Bob Dobbs: or another part of the article.
[1:07:57] Bob Dobbs: He's repeating parts within the article,
[1:08:02] Bob Dobbs: right?
[1:08:04] Cameron McEwen: Yeah,
[1:08:04] Cameron McEwen: I'm not sure,
[1:08:05] Cameron McEwen: because in the previous quote,
[1:08:08] Cameron McEwen: there are omissions.
[1:08:09] Cameron McEwen: So it may be the exact same words,
[1:08:12] Cameron McEwen: but with the omissions filled in.
[1:08:15] Bob Dobbs: Well,
[1:08:16] Bob Dobbs: the first one is from page 44.
[1:08:18] Bob Dobbs: And this is from 10 pages later,
[1:08:21] Bob Dobbs: 54.
[1:08:22] Bob Dobbs: But actually,
[1:08:23] Bob Dobbs: the bottom of the first quote does end on page 54.
[1:08:26] Bob Dobbs: So I see,
[1:08:27] Bob Dobbs: yeah,
[1:08:27] Bob Dobbs: in between 44 and 54 might be this part.
[1:08:32] Cameron McEwen: You're making different points about the same quotation.
[1:08:36] Cameron McEwen: Yeah,
[1:08:37] Bob Dobbs: and somebody might say,
[1:08:38] Bob Dobbs: hey,
[1:08:39] Bob Dobbs: you repeated that sentence.
[1:08:41] Bob Dobbs: You already said that.
[1:08:44] Bob Dobbs: And this is where he made repetition as an art form.
[1:08:47] Bob Dobbs: The palimpsest effect.
[1:08:49] Bob Dobbs: Donald Theall would do that in his books.
[1:08:51] Bob Dobbs: I'd be reading along,
[1:08:53] Bob Dobbs: and he'd have the very same paragraph he had 100 pages before.
[1:08:58] Bob Dobbs: I said,
[1:08:59] Bob Dobbs: is that a mistake,
[1:08:59] Bob Dobbs: or did you do that on purpose?
[1:09:01] Bob Dobbs: He said,
[1:09:01] Bob Dobbs: no,
[1:09:01] Bob Dobbs: I put that in on purpose.
[1:09:03] Bob Dobbs: And most readers would say,
[1:09:05] Bob Dobbs: what?
[1:09:05] Bob Dobbs: It's exactly the same paragraph.
[1:09:07] Bob Dobbs: Why is he repeating it?
[1:09:09] Bob Dobbs: But it's a different context,
[1:09:11] Bob Dobbs: conceptually,
[1:09:12] Bob Dobbs: in your experience
[1:09:14] Bob Dobbs: 100 pages later.
[1:09:18] Bob Dobbs: So that's Paul Klee repeating the pattern in his painting.
[1:09:25] Cameron McEwen: Yeah,
[1:09:26] Cameron McEwen: so it's all a replay.
[1:09:27] Bob Dobbs: Yeah.
[1:09:28] Cameron McEwen: And it's to be understood synchronically,
[1:09:31] Cameron McEwen: that is to say,
[1:09:32] Cameron McEwen: it's the same thing at the same time.
[1:09:35] Cameron McEwen: So the only way to understand it is as a palimpsest where you have different layers.
[1:09:44] Cameron McEwen: And as McLuhan always says,
[1:09:45] Cameron McEwen: you have to flip the figure and ground.
[1:09:48] Cameron McEwen: So it's never clear which level is on top and which level is on the bottom.
[1:09:53] Bob Dobbs: And that's why you would get figures in italics,
[1:09:56] Bob Dobbs: which is the content squared.
[1:09:59] Bob Dobbs: And remember,
[1:10:00] Bob Dobbs: in Playboy interview,
[1:10:01] Bob Dobbs: he talks about content and it's italicized.
[1:10:06] Bob Dobbs: Content becomes the new ground.
[1:10:08] Bob Dobbs: Figure and ground merge,
[1:10:09] Bob Dobbs: as he says on page 11 in Take Today.
[1:10:13] Bob Dobbs: There's no division between man and the technical environment.
[1:10:19] Cameron McEwen: Right.
[1:10:19] Cameron McEwen: So look at how that relates.
[1:10:21] Cameron McEwen: to the title of the article,
[1:10:23] Cameron McEwen: The Implications of Cultural Uniformity.
[1:10:26] Cameron McEwen: When figure and ground merge,
[1:10:28] Cameron McEwen: you have the monster.
[1:10:30] Bob Dobbs: That's right.
[1:10:30] Cameron McEwen: And you think it's uniform,
[1:10:33] Bob Dobbs: but it isn't.
[1:10:34] Cameron McEwen: Right.
[1:10:35] Cameron McEwen: But by proceeding on the notion of uniformity,
[1:10:40] Cameron McEwen: you can destroy the world.
[1:10:42] Cameron McEwen: Yeah.
[1:10:43] Cameron McEwen: So all of these things are bivalent.
[1:10:48] Cameron McEwen: They are bivalent.
[1:10:51] Cameron McEwen: They have different,
[1:10:53] Cameron McEwen: it's the Seven Types of Ambiguity that was a big influence on McLuhan and
[1:11:00] Cameron McEwen: Cambridge.
[1:11:02] Bob Dobbs: Cambridge, Empson's essay.
[1:11:04] Cameron McEwen: Yeah.
[1:11:05] Bob Dobbs: So living in a new environment of instant electric information has shifted American attention from specific goals,
[1:11:11] Bob Dobbs: because they're no longer finding it tasty,
[1:11:17] Bob Dobbs: industrial uniformity and continuity.
[1:11:19] Bob Dobbs: It's now shifted to the cognitive thrills of pattern recognition.
[1:11:23] Bob Dobbs: It changed and it's manifested directly by the TV service of the instant replay.
[1:11:27] Bob Dobbs: So there's the drug experience right there in the home on TV.
[1:11:32] Bob Dobbs: Yeah,
[1:11:33] Cameron McEwen: yeah.
[1:11:34] Cameron McEwen: All of this is taking place in spades today.
[1:11:37] Bob Dobbs: Yeah.
[1:11:38] Bob Dobbs: Is not the instant replay,
[1:11:40] Bob Dobbs: the externalizing of the cognitive principle itself?
[1:11:45] Bob Dobbs: Yes,
[1:11:45] Bob Dobbs: the instant replay.
[1:11:49] Bob Dobbs: That's the stage of apprehension or the creative process,
[1:11:51] Bob Dobbs: what he's calling the cognitive principle.
[1:11:54] Cameron McEwen: Right.
[1:11:55] Cameron McEwen: So we should notice there,
[1:11:57] Cameron McEwen: Bob,
[1:11:57] Cameron McEwen: that he's talking in very difficult language there.
[1:12:02] Bob Dobbs: Yep.
[1:12:03] Cameron McEwen: Because when anybody experiences anything,
[1:12:07] Cameron McEwen: an instant replay is going on because the form of that experience was already there.
[1:12:14] Cameron McEwen: So all experience is an instant replay.
[1:12:17] Cameron McEwen: Instant meaning...
[1:12:18] Cameron McEwen: It got developed in a time,
[1:12:21] Cameron McEwen: but a different time from the time that we're aware of,
[1:12:25] Cameron McEwen: right?
[1:12:25] Cameron McEwen: So if we speak a language,
[1:12:27] Cameron McEwen: then we speak according to certain rules,
[1:12:30] Cameron McEwen: but we don't know those rules.
[1:12:32] Cameron McEwen: We don't exercise those rules consciously.
[1:12:35] Cameron McEwen: But the generation of any word is a selection of a certain sound and a selection of a certain grammatical form that...
[1:12:48] Cameron McEwen: has taken place in the generation of that word,
[1:12:52] Cameron McEwen: but not in regular time and not in consciousness.
[1:12:56] Cameron McEwen: So the instant replay is taking place in all experience.
[1:13:00] Cameron McEwen: And then he says the externalizing of the cognitive principle.
[1:13:05] Cameron McEwen: So the cognitive principle is this instant replay.
[1:13:10] Cameron McEwen: And what happens in the instant replay is that there is an externalization of a form.
[1:13:17] Cameron McEwen: Right,
[1:13:18] Cameron McEwen: so when he says,
[1:13:19] Cameron McEwen: is not the instant replay the externalizing of the cognitive principle itself,
[1:13:25] Cameron McEwen: what he's saying is the cognitive principle is the instant replay at every second of experience,
[1:13:33] Cameron McEwen: and when we see the instant replay,
[1:13:36] Cameron McEwen: let's say on TV,
[1:13:40] Cameron McEwen: that is what's going on at every moment of experience,
[1:13:45] Cameron McEwen: but...
[1:13:46] Cameron McEwen: It's an externalization.
[1:13:48] Bob Dobbs: Right.
[1:13:49] Cameron McEwen: So it's a very interesting and intricate thing that McLuhan is trying to point out,
[1:13:56] Cameron McEwen: but it's very,
[1:13:57] Cameron McEwen: very difficult to do.
[1:13:59] Bob Dobbs: Right,
[1:13:59] Bob Dobbs: and that's why I picked one tetrad.
[1:14:02] Bob Dobbs: At the beginning of the book,
[1:14:04] Bob Dobbs: I offer the tetrad,
[1:14:06] Bob Dobbs: and it's a tetrad of what?
[1:14:08] Bob Dobbs: The instant replay.
[1:14:09] Cameron McEwen: Yeah.
[1:14:11] Bob Dobbs: So that's my model.
[1:14:14] Bob Dobbs: my symbol of what's going on in the book put at the beginning of the book it's the only tetrad in the book the instant replay yeah go ahead
[1:14:25] Cameron McEwen: No,
[1:14:25] Cameron McEwen: no,
[1:14:25] Cameron McEwen: I was just going to say you're absolutely right to emphasize the importance of that for McLuhan.
[1:14:31] Cameron McEwen: That's the heart of what he had to offer.
[1:14:36] Bob Dobbs: Yeah,
[1:14:37] Bob Dobbs: he said he cracked a code of metaphor.
[1:14:39] Bob Dobbs: Norman Mailer in that documentary said he was a hyper guy with metaphor.
[1:14:44] Bob Dobbs: And McLuhan was always explaining metaphor,
[1:14:46] Bob Dobbs: you know,
[1:14:47] Bob Dobbs: to carry across as the meaning.
[1:14:49] Bob Dobbs: But that was another word for instant replay.
[1:14:51] Bob Dobbs: Everything was instant replay.
[1:14:54] Cameron McEwen: Right.
[1:14:54] Cameron McEwen: So we have to,
[1:14:56] Cameron McEwen: McLuhan,
[1:14:57] Cameron McEwen: the medium is the message,
[1:15:00] Cameron McEwen: right?
[1:15:00] Cameron McEwen: The medium is the metaphor.
[1:15:04] Cameron McEwen: And the medium and the metaphor are going on at every second of human experience.
[1:15:10] Cameron McEwen: But it's going on not horizontally.
[1:15:13] Cameron McEwen: The horizontal is the result of the instant replay.
[1:15:17] Cameron McEwen: The instant replay and the externalization are taking place synchronically.
[1:15:24] Cameron McEwen: to say vertically,
[1:15:25] Cameron McEwen: not horizontally.
[1:15:27] Cameron McEwen: And that vertical generation of the horizontal experience is what he says here,
[1:15:37] Cameron McEwen: the cognitive principle itself.
[1:15:40] Cameron McEwen: So what does pattern recognition recognize?
[1:15:45] Cameron McEwen: It recognizes the cognitive principle.
[1:15:47] Cameron McEwen: What is the cognitive principle?
[1:15:49] Cameron McEwen: The instant replay.
[1:15:51] Cameron McEwen: What is the instant replay?
[1:15:52] Cameron McEwen: the externalization of forms.
[1:15:55] Bob Dobbs: Right,
[1:15:55] Bob Dobbs: and Ken Kesey reports in Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test that they would be high on their LSD trips,
[1:16:03] Bob Dobbs: and they would feel they were getting really close to the insight that wrapped it all up,
[1:16:10] Bob Dobbs: and they could never get there.
[1:16:13] Bob Dobbs: They'd take the drug,
[1:16:14] Bob Dobbs: and they never could get the feeling that they were getting really closer,
[1:16:18] Bob Dobbs: got intensified,
[1:16:19] Bob Dobbs: but they would have to deal with the fact they never got there.
[1:16:22] Bob Dobbs: All they had to do was step back,
[1:16:24] Bob Dobbs: not take LSD,
[1:16:26] Bob Dobbs: read this,
[1:16:26] Bob Dobbs: and figure out what instant replay is.
[1:16:28] Bob Dobbs: Because they were becoming aware of the instant replay of the moment in sensation.
[1:16:35] Cameron McEwen: Yes,
[1:16:36] Cameron McEwen: I would say that it would be very interesting to look at what you're talking about with Kesey in terms of Max Planck's discoveries.
[1:16:50] Cameron McEwen: in 1900.
[1:16:52] Cameron McEwen: And what
[1:16:54] Cameron McEwen: Planck showed was that when you try to understand exactly what is going on at the micro level of the world,
[1:17:09] Cameron McEwen: is that the closer you get to sort of the final answer,
[1:17:16] Cameron McEwen: the more you become aware of a limit.
[1:17:18] Bob Dobbs: Yeah.
[1:17:19] Cameron McEwen: And that's right.
[1:17:20] Cameron McEwen: That's the Planck limit.
[1:17:22] Cameron McEwen: That's the what the what he discovered is that the world is discreet.
[1:17:29] Cameron McEwen: That is to say,
[1:17:30] Cameron McEwen: digital.
[1:17:31] Cameron McEwen: There there is no way to merge because as the closer you get to the answer,
[1:17:41] Cameron McEwen: the more the answer is displaced by that movement.
[1:17:45] Cameron McEwen: And so you become aware that.
[1:17:48] Cameron McEwen: There is no way around that limit.
[1:17:50] Cameron McEwen: And this Max Planck idea was what then led to
[1:17:55] Cameron McEwen: Einstein's discoveries.
[1:17:57] Cameron McEwen: So the discovery of the unavoidability of the limit is what drove physics early in the 20th century.
[1:18:09] Cameron McEwen: So what is that limit?
[1:18:11] Cameron McEwen: That limit is metaphor.
[1:18:13] Cameron McEwen: That limit is you cannot get...
[1:18:16] Cameron McEwen: It's not as if you can clarify metaphor because the more clear it is,
[1:18:21] Cameron McEwen: the less metaphor it is.
[1:18:24] Bob Dobbs: So you have the principle of uncertainty is another level of that insight.
[1:18:29] Bob Dobbs: And
[1:18:32] Bob Dobbs: Krishnamurti, you know,
[1:18:35] Bob Dobbs: Eastern wise man promoted by the Theosophical Society,
[1:18:39] Bob Dobbs: he said in the end,
[1:18:42] Bob Dobbs: I don't know if he said in the end,
[1:18:43] Bob Dobbs: but he meant.
[1:18:44] Bob Dobbs: The ultimate insight is that experience is always incomplete.
[1:18:49] Bob Dobbs: You've got to recognize the incomplete or the limit of what your desires are trying to complete.
[1:18:55] Bob Dobbs: So once you understand that you'll never satisfy your hungers,
[1:19:00] Bob Dobbs: you can relax about them.
[1:19:03] Bob Dobbs: They're playing with you by making you think and driving you to complete them.
[1:19:08] Bob Dobbs: And so then you bring in the printing press and that makes you a Puritan.
[1:19:12] Bob Dobbs: But before that...
[1:19:14] Bob Dobbs: If you understood the way your senses and the appetite was fooling you,
[1:19:19] Bob Dobbs: you wouldn't even have to eat as much.
[1:19:24] Cameron McEwen: Definitely.
[1:19:27] Cameron McEwen: So you talk about stuff that's going on as we speak.
[1:19:32] Cameron McEwen: I mean,
[1:19:33] Cameron McEwen: what is McDonald's or what is
[1:19:38] Cameron McEwen: Kentucky Fried Chicken?
[1:19:39] Cameron McEwen: It's simply the idea that you can fill yourself up and here's how to do it.
[1:19:47] Bob Dobbs: Yeah,
[1:19:48] Bob Dobbs: that's a seduction.
[1:19:51] Bob Dobbs: So he says,
[1:19:51] Bob Dobbs: is not the instant replay,
[1:19:53] Bob Dobbs: the externalizing of the cognitive
[1:19:54] Bob Dobbs: principle itself?
[1:19:56] Bob Dobbs: you were saying that,
[1:19:57] Bob Dobbs: for the replay would seem to offer both cognition and recognition.
[1:20:02] Cameron McEwen: Absolutely.
[1:20:03] Bob Dobbs: The same pattern of reversal in the transition from the industrial to the electric age appears in the role of Sputnik in placing the planet inside a man-made environment.
[1:20:14] Bob Dobbs: So
[1:20:15] Bob Dobbs: Sputnik going around the planet is the same pattern of reversal between cognition and recognition.
[1:20:22] Bob Dobbs: in the transition from the industrial to the electric age.
[1:20:24] Bob Dobbs: So that's pretty complex,
[1:20:26] Bob Dobbs: pretty compact.
[1:20:27] Bob Dobbs: Sociology,
[1:20:28] Bob Dobbs: psychology,
[1:20:29] Bob Dobbs: and aesthetics,
[1:20:30] Bob Dobbs: and raw perceptual change all packed in there in that last sentence.
[1:20:37] Cameron McEwen: Yeah,
[1:20:39] Cameron McEwen: oftentimes
[1:20:42] Cameron McEwen: McLuhan wrote sentences that I think he himself did not fully understand.
[1:20:47] Bob Dobbs: Yeah.
[1:20:48] Cameron McEwen: but
[1:20:50] Cameron McEwen: That's not a critique.
[1:20:51] Cameron McEwen: It's to say that he was more or less channeling something.
[1:20:55] Cameron McEwen: And this sentence here,
[1:20:59] Cameron McEwen: I'm positive that if we were to think about it for a long time and tease it out,
[1:21:06] Cameron McEwen: that it would generate very interesting thoughts.
[1:21:10] Cameron McEwen: So this...
[1:21:13] Bob Dobbs: The last sentence.
[1:21:14] Cameron McEwen: Yeah,
[1:21:15] Cameron McEwen: yeah.
[1:21:15] Cameron McEwen: This
[1:21:16] Cameron McEwen: A is to B,
[1:21:17] Cameron McEwen: C is to D that's going on here.
[1:21:20] Cameron McEwen: is one that's certainly not obvious,
[1:21:23] Cameron McEwen: but it probably is some kind of thought generator.
[1:21:32] Bob Dobbs: Cognition and recognition is reversal as aspects of the tetrad.
[1:21:38] Bob Dobbs: He's calling that the same pattern of reversal is in the collective,
[1:21:43] Bob Dobbs: the evolution of technologies or of shifts.
[1:21:47] Bob Dobbs: from the industrial to the electric age.
[1:21:49] Bob Dobbs: That's a reversal.
[1:21:51] Bob Dobbs: That's going from cognition to recognition.
[1:21:53] Bob Dobbs: So he used to always say,
[1:21:55] Bob Dobbs: once you were into a new environment,
[1:21:57] Bob Dobbs: you could see the old environment clearly.
[1:21:59] Bob Dobbs: And while you were experiencing something,
[1:22:01] Bob Dobbs: it always was going to an opposite form from what you thought you were experiencing,
[1:22:07] Bob Dobbs: which is another way of recognizing the incompletion of sensory.
[1:22:11] Cameron McEwen: Right.
[1:22:11] Bob Dobbs: Maybe I was expressing a proprioceptive ideal of incompletion.
[1:22:16] Bob Dobbs: But you can recognize it with the mind's eye.
[1:22:20] Bob Dobbs: You wouldn't necessarily feel it in the guts as much.
[1:22:24] Bob Dobbs: You just recognize the visual structure of the flipping of cognitive and recognition.
[1:22:31] Cameron McEwen: Right,
[1:22:32] Cameron McEwen: right.
[1:22:32] Cameron McEwen: So what you're saying there actually is the key to the last part of this sentence when he's talking about placing the planet inside a man-made environment.
[1:22:44] Cameron McEwen: I think the usual interpretation of that would be some kind of destruction of meaning that used to come from nature or used to come from God.
[1:22:59] Cameron McEwen: It's because the whole planet is placed inside a man-made environment.
[1:23:05] Cameron McEwen: It's kind of a junking of the planet.
[1:23:08] Cameron McEwen: And so people became aware of pollution and stuff.
[1:23:11] Cameron McEwen: But look what he says.
[1:23:12] Cameron McEwen: He says that.
[1:23:14] Cameron McEwen: The transition from the industrial to the electric,
[1:23:18] Cameron McEwen: and you properly point out that that transition allows the industrial to be properly seen for the first time.
[1:23:26] Bob Dobbs: Yeah.
[1:23:27] Cameron McEwen: So then he says the role of Sputnik in placing the planet inside a man-made environment,
[1:23:34] Cameron McEwen: if we take the parallel,
[1:23:36] Cameron McEwen: then he's saying this enables the planet to be understood for the first time.
[1:23:42] Cameron McEwen: because it's in a new environment.
[1:23:44] Bob Dobbs: Right,
[1:23:45] Bob Dobbs: and we were talking about the slightest shift in perception.
[1:23:51] Bob Dobbs: That's going from cognition to recognition.
[1:23:53] Bob Dobbs: So the slightest change in the way your mind is noticing things is a microcosm of a collective replay of the same process,
[1:24:05] Bob Dobbs: cognition and recognition,
[1:24:07] Bob Dobbs: which is pretty amazing,
[1:24:08] Bob Dobbs: right?
[1:24:09] Bob Dobbs: The collective media environments are miming
[1:24:12] Bob Dobbs: The process in your perception.
[1:24:15] Cameron McEwen: Right.
[1:24:15] Cameron McEwen: So notice how that ties back with what we were saying about the minotaur.
[1:24:19] Bob Dobbs: Yeah.
[1:24:21] Cameron McEwen: The problem with the minotaur is it's an individual thing.
[1:24:25] Cameron McEwen: The
[1:24:27] Cameron McEwen: Theseus goes into the labyrinth and kills the
[1:24:31] Cameron McEwen: Minotaur. That's all individual.
[1:24:35] Cameron McEwen: So the movement away from the Minotaur theme is one from individual use of crystal clear language to the collective work of language itself.
[1:24:50] Bob Dobbs: Right.
[1:24:50] Bob Dobbs: And the...
[1:24:52] Bob Dobbs: When you recognize something,
[1:24:55] Bob Dobbs: you kill it.
[1:24:57] Bob Dobbs: It's no longer fascinating you.
[1:24:59] Bob Dobbs: You're not inside it anymore.
[1:25:01] Bob Dobbs: You recognize the pattern and it drops off.
[1:25:04] Bob Dobbs: And you're not interested in that.
[1:25:05] Bob Dobbs: And then you get...
[1:25:08] Bob Dobbs: Yeah,
[1:25:08] Cameron McEwen: but that's the black mirror effect.
[1:25:12] Bob Dobbs: Yeah.
[1:25:14] Cameron McEwen: In real thinking,
[1:25:16] Cameron McEwen: when you recognize something,
[1:25:19] Cameron McEwen: you understand...
[1:25:22] Cameron McEwen: how it applies to things,
[1:25:24] Cameron McEwen: including yourself.
[1:25:27] Cameron McEwen: And so you don't kill it.
[1:25:29] Cameron McEwen: Instead,
[1:25:31] Cameron McEwen: maybe you kill your old self in that recognition,
[1:25:36] Cameron McEwen: but that killing and the recognition gives new life.
[1:25:42] Bob Dobbs: Yeah,
[1:25:42] Bob Dobbs: it's not as negative as it sounds.
[1:25:44] Bob Dobbs: It's not a gloomy situation.
[1:25:47] Cameron McEwen: Absolutely not.
[1:25:48] Cameron McEwen: Yeah,
[1:25:48] Cameron McEwen: so you could say this is the message of the cross.
[1:25:52] Cameron McEwen: The message of the cross for a couple thousand years that's now been lost is the life that comes through death.
[1:26:03] Cameron McEwen: And what is that death?
[1:26:06] Cameron McEwen: The death is the finitude of all things,
[1:26:10] Cameron McEwen: including God.
[1:26:13] Bob Dobbs: Yeah,
[1:26:13] Bob Dobbs: so when I'm sleeping at night,
[1:26:16] Bob Dobbs: I'm going through an experience that's going to flip into something different.
[1:26:21] Bob Dobbs: Awakefulness.
[1:26:23] Bob Dobbs: So the very process of sleeping is going from cognition to recognition,
[1:26:27] Bob Dobbs: because when you wake up,
[1:26:29] Bob Dobbs: you recognize where you've been.
[1:26:34] Bob Dobbs: Maybe you recognize yesterday or the content of your dreams,
[1:26:38] Bob Dobbs: and you're entering into something new.
[1:26:41] Cameron McEwen: Correct.
[1:26:42] Bob Dobbs: The day.
[1:26:43] Bob Dobbs: Correct.
[1:26:44] Cameron McEwen: And what gets transported in that process,
[1:26:48] Cameron McEwen: what wakes up in that process,
[1:26:51] Cameron McEwen: is not...
[1:26:52] Cameron McEwen: the old you.
[1:26:54] Cameron McEwen: It's not the old spectator.
[1:26:56] Cameron McEwen: It's not the old navigator.
[1:26:59] Cameron McEwen: It's a new you.
[1:27:01] Bob Dobbs: Yeah,
[1:27:01] Bob Dobbs: you're not aware yet,
[1:27:02] Bob Dobbs: and you're going to go through the day to discover what it is.
[1:27:05] Cameron McEwen: Correct.
[1:27:08] Bob Dobbs: That is a key point in health.
[1:27:12] Bob Dobbs: When you can live that way,
[1:27:14] Bob Dobbs: understand that process,
[1:27:16] Bob Dobbs: that might override all illnesses or discomforts in the body.
[1:27:21] Bob Dobbs: I don't want to say it's mind,
[1:27:23] Bob Dobbs: the limit to the mental,
[1:27:25] Bob Dobbs: but that perceptual knowing is the key to having energy,
[1:27:30] Bob Dobbs: not whether you have food or not.
[1:27:33] Bob Dobbs: See,
[1:27:33] Bob Dobbs: that gives you new life,
[1:27:34] Bob Dobbs: new energy every day.
[1:27:38] Bob Dobbs: If you can flow with the cognition becoming recognition.
[1:27:43] Bob Dobbs: So I know I'm going to make some discoveries every day.
[1:27:48] Cameron McEwen: Yeah.
[1:27:48] Bob Dobbs: Because.
[1:27:50] Bob Dobbs: I know that I am unfolding into something that's going to surprise me.
[1:27:55] Cameron McEwen: Absolutely.
[1:27:56] Cameron McEwen: Absolutely.
[1:27:58] Cameron McEwen: Every day I wake up,
[1:28:00] Cameron McEwen: I'm excited to get into that.
[1:28:03] Bob Dobbs: Yeah.
[1:28:04] Bob Dobbs: And that excitement is probably the deepest...
[1:28:10] Bob Dobbs: What's that word they had in the
[1:28:13] Bob Dobbs: 19th century?
[1:28:14] Bob Dobbs: The vivand,
[1:28:14] Bob Dobbs: the vivacity,
[1:28:16] Bob Dobbs: some spirit word.
[1:28:21] Bob Dobbs: I think the symbolists used it.
[1:28:23] Bob Dobbs: McLuhan would bring it in.
[1:28:26] Bob Dobbs: Élan,
[1:28:27] Bob Dobbs: I don't know if it's élan,
[1:28:28] Bob Dobbs: but the basic feeling of aliveness or excitement and experience.
[1:28:34] Cameron McEwen: Élan vital.
[1:28:35] Bob Dobbs: Yeah,
[1:28:36] Bob Dobbs: vitality.
[1:28:37] Bob Dobbs: It's the key to vitality or health.
[1:28:39] Bob Dobbs: And they don't stress that in medicine.
[1:28:43] Bob Dobbs: What is it?
[1:28:43] Bob Dobbs: Mind,
[1:28:44] Bob Dobbs: body,
[1:28:44] Bob Dobbs: and spirit.
[1:28:45] Bob Dobbs: They emphasize body and mind.
[1:28:48] Bob Dobbs: That would be psychological.
[1:28:50] Bob Dobbs: health or adjustment,
[1:28:52] Bob Dobbs: but they miss spirit.
[1:28:53] Bob Dobbs: But spirit is not something out there in the woo-woo land in the clouds.
[1:28:59] Bob Dobbs: It's in your action of living,
[1:29:01] Bob Dobbs: in the sensory,
[1:29:02] Bob Dobbs: the mix of mind and body.
[1:29:04] Bob Dobbs: That's an important health thing.
[1:29:06] Bob Dobbs: I occasionally declare this to Carolyn.
[1:29:08] Bob Dobbs: Carolyn,
[1:29:08] Bob Dobbs: I've broken the key to health.
[1:29:10] Bob Dobbs: We don't need to eat this and that or whatever she's recommending.
[1:29:16] Bob Dobbs: You get the principle of vitality.
[1:29:19] Bob Dobbs: Which is a very weird,
[1:29:21] Bob Dobbs: subtle process,
[1:29:23] Bob Dobbs: what we're talking about here.
[1:29:25] Bob Dobbs: And if you tap into that...
[1:29:27] Bob Dobbs: become aware of it,
[1:29:28] Bob Dobbs: you're vital.
[1:29:29] Bob Dobbs: You can't stop being vital,
[1:29:31] Bob Dobbs: like you just expressed,
[1:29:33] Bob Dobbs: that you're excited about waking up.
[1:29:36] Cameron McEwen: Yeah,
[1:29:36] Cameron McEwen: well,
[1:29:36] Cameron McEwen: that's all captured in the sentence.
[1:29:40] Cameron McEwen: Is not the instant replay,
[1:29:42] Cameron McEwen: the externalization of the cognitive principle itself?
[1:29:46] Bob Dobbs: Yeah,
[1:29:47] Cameron McEwen: you could say that's what the drama of spirit is.
[1:29:52] Bob Dobbs: Yeah,
[1:29:52] Bob Dobbs: the drama of cognition,
[1:29:53] Bob Dobbs: he used to call it,
[1:29:55] Bob Dobbs: and that
[1:29:56] Bob Dobbs: That could be.
[1:29:57] Bob Dobbs: be the explanation of the phrase,
[1:30:00] Bob Dobbs: the medium is the message.
[1:30:03] Cameron McEwen: Oh,
[1:30:03] Cameron McEwen: it is the meaning of the message.
[1:30:05] Bob Dobbs: I mean,
[1:30:06] Cameron McEwen: it is.
[1:30:07] Cameron McEwen: It is the meaning of the meaning of the message.
[1:30:09] Cameron McEwen: Absolutely.
[1:30:10] Bob Dobbs: Remember,
[1:30:10] Bob Dobbs: the medium is the message's mind,
[1:30:12] Bob Dobbs: the incarnation.
[1:30:14] Bob Dobbs: So when you wake up,
[1:30:15] Bob Dobbs: you're incarnating.
[1:30:17] Cameron McEwen: Yes,
[1:30:17] Cameron McEwen: absolutely.
[1:30:19] Cameron McEwen: So all of this stuff has to do with the modes of
[1:30:29] Cameron McEwen: figure in ground interplay.
[1:30:31] Bob Dobbs: Yeah.
[1:30:32] Cameron McEwen: These modes depend upon the middle or the medium between the figure in ground,
[1:30:40] Cameron McEwen: and that medium varies over a whole range,
[1:30:47] Cameron McEwen: which one end of the range is only figure and the other end of the range is only ground.
[1:30:53] Bob Dobbs: Yeah.
[1:30:54] Cameron McEwen: And in between those two,
[1:30:56] Cameron McEwen: you...
[1:30:56] Cameron McEwen: you have all of the elementary figures or all of the elementary forms of figure and ground interplay,
[1:31:06] Cameron McEwen: which are in constant dynamic reversal between the two of them.
[1:31:15] Bob Dobbs: Yeah,
[1:31:16] Bob Dobbs: the tetrad,
[1:31:16] Bob Dobbs: the chiasmus,
[1:31:17] Bob Dobbs: the tetrad.
[1:31:19] Bob Dobbs: And that's the endless eye-ear structure he would always present in his books.
[1:31:27] Bob Dobbs: The interplay of eye-ear is your figure on ground.
[1:31:31] Cameron McEwen: Absolutely.
[1:31:34] Cameron McEwen: The great problem with all of this stuff is that when you talk about the eye or the ear,
[1:31:40] Cameron McEwen: or you talk about the medium,
[1:31:43] Cameron McEwen: people always take these to be concrete things that can be identified in the world.
[1:31:49] Cameron McEwen: But all of them are figures on a ground,
[1:31:53] Cameron McEwen: and McLuhan is trying to indicate that ground.
[1:31:56] Cameron McEwen: But McLuhan research remains mired in the treatment of figures.
[1:32:02] Bob Dobbs: Yeah,
[1:32:03] Bob Dobbs: they don't get it.
[1:32:04] Bob Dobbs: So a friend of mine,
[1:32:06] Bob Dobbs: he listens to our conversation.
[1:32:07] Bob Dobbs: He was saying our recent talks were completely mind-blowing.
[1:32:10] Bob Dobbs: Wait till he hears this one.
[1:32:11] Bob Dobbs: This is a mind-blowing.
[1:32:16] Bob Dobbs: No,
[1:32:16] Bob Dobbs: we're sort of interplaying,
[1:32:17] Bob Dobbs: fitting at ease,
[1:32:18] Bob Dobbs: why all these different themes right there in a little paragraph.
[1:32:24] Bob Dobbs: We're getting into the etymology of each word that he's using.
[1:32:27] Cameron McEwen: Correct.
[1:32:29] Bob Dobbs: So then
[1:32:30] Bob Dobbs: I come in with my casual translation of what we were just saying,
[1:32:35] Bob Dobbs: intensely we were saying.
[1:32:37] Bob Dobbs: I go,
[1:32:37] Bob Dobbs: that's another reversal.
[1:32:38] Bob Dobbs: The planet gets obsolesced by Sputnik,
[1:32:41] Bob Dobbs: first artificial Earth satellite launched by the Soviet Union on October 4,
[1:32:44] Bob Dobbs: 1957.
[1:32:46] Bob Dobbs: Technology obsolesces nature.
[1:32:48] Bob Dobbs: Soon they would put humans in the artificial environment.
[1:32:51] Bob Dobbs: and they'd be sent out of their natural terrestrial village.
[1:32:55] Bob Dobbs: Village in quotes.
[1:32:56] Bob Dobbs: They'd be sent out to a place where they couldn't breathe,
[1:32:59] Bob Dobbs: but the little capsule was made so they could breathe.
[1:33:01] Bob Dobbs: It was a little piece of heaven.
[1:33:03] Bob Dobbs: That's in quotes.
[1:33:04] Bob Dobbs: A little piece of earth,
[1:33:05] Bob Dobbs: artificially made.
[1:33:06] Bob Dobbs: It's like you've placed the planet inside this perimetered,
[1:33:11] Bob Dobbs: man-made environment.
[1:33:12] Bob Dobbs: Just think of it.
[1:33:13] Bob Dobbs: You're placing the chemical body inside a capsule,
[1:33:16] Bob Dobbs: a suitcase that you send flying around the planet.
[1:33:21] Bob Dobbs: I don't know.
[1:33:22] Bob Dobbs: It doesn't seem relevant to what we're talking about there,
[1:33:25] Bob Dobbs: but
[1:33:26] Bob Dobbs: I'm not going to delete it.
[1:33:27] Bob Dobbs: What do you make of that?
[1:33:29] Bob Dobbs: I'm just trying to explain how the satellite is the final extension of the human faculties.
[1:33:35] Cameron McEwen: Right.
[1:33:36] Cameron McEwen: No,
[1:33:36] Cameron McEwen: I think it may not be the deepest thing you've expressed in the book,
[1:33:42] Cameron McEwen: but it's good writing.
[1:33:44] Bob Dobbs: Yeah.
[1:33:45] Cameron McEwen: Right?
[1:33:45] Cameron McEwen: Thank you.
[1:33:46] Cameron McEwen: chemical body inside a capsule,
[1:33:49] Cameron McEwen: a suitcase,
[1:33:49] Cameron McEwen: that you said,
[1:33:50] Cameron McEwen: flying around the planet.
[1:33:52] Cameron McEwen: That's funny that it's worth saying.
[1:33:55] Bob Dobbs: Yes,
[1:33:56] Bob Dobbs: thank you.
[1:33:57] Bob Dobbs: So now we come to Barry Nevitt.
[1:34:00] Bob Dobbs: Barry gets a quote in here,
[1:34:02] Bob Dobbs: and this is from his book,
[1:34:03] Bob Dobbs: Keeping Ahead of Economic Panic,
[1:34:04] Bob Dobbs: 1985.
[1:34:07] Bob Dobbs: He was an economist,
[1:34:08] Bob Dobbs: and so he takes what he learns from Finnegans
[1:34:11] Bob Dobbs: Wake,
[1:34:12] Bob Dobbs: and McLuhan and applies it to economics.
[1:34:14] Bob Dobbs: So it's a very interesting statement.
[1:34:19] Bob Dobbs: It begins,
[1:34:21] Bob Dobbs: hitherto futurists and utopians alike have failed to see that not only is the future not what it used to be,
[1:34:29] Bob Dobbs: neither is the past.
[1:34:31] Bob Dobbs: We fake them as we go.
[1:34:33] Bob Dobbs: Fake in quotes.
[1:34:34] Bob Dobbs: So we fake the past and the future.
[1:34:36] Bob Dobbs: We fake them as we go.
[1:34:37] Bob Dobbs: While fact and fiction merge.
[1:34:40] Bob Dobbs: Then he has Latin in brackets,
[1:34:42] Bob Dobbs: facere,
[1:34:43] Bob Dobbs: which means to make.
[1:34:45] Bob Dobbs: So fact is making.
[1:34:47] Bob Dobbs: Today,
[1:34:48] Bob Dobbs: apart from government itself,
[1:34:53] Bob Dobbs: Remember,
[1:34:55] Bob Dobbs: he was quoting a lot in the back of Take Today.
[1:34:57] Bob Dobbs: Today,
[1:34:58] Bob Dobbs: apart from the government itself,
[1:34:59] Bob Dobbs: the biggest show business is putting secrets on display,
[1:35:02] Bob Dobbs: whether of the CIA,
[1:35:04] Bob Dobbs: FBI,
[1:35:04] Bob Dobbs: KGB,
[1:35:05] Bob Dobbs: MI5,
[1:35:06] Bob Dobbs: or Watergate.
[1:35:07] Bob Dobbs: Not like Perry Mason,
[1:35:09] Bob Dobbs: but the real McCoy.
[1:35:10] Bob Dobbs: Real McCoy in quotes.
[1:35:12] Bob Dobbs: As nature imitates art.
[1:35:14] Bob Dobbs: Private history in camera.
[1:35:16] Bob Dobbs: That's in quotes.
[1:35:18] Bob Dobbs: has become public myth by the compression on camera,
[1:35:23] Bob Dobbs: just as the hitherto obscene,
[1:35:25] Bob Dobbs: that's hyphenated,
[1:35:26] Bob Dobbs: OB-scene,
[1:35:28] Bob Dobbs: is now on stage.
[1:35:30] Bob Dobbs: A déjà vu of all times and places now here.
[1:35:34] Bob Dobbs: There's your synchronicity and synchronous.
[1:35:37] Bob Dobbs: And remember,
[1:35:37] Bob Dobbs: it's talking about the replay of the global repertoire.
[1:35:42] Bob Dobbs: A déjà vu of all times and places now here.
[1:35:46] Bob Dobbs: By recognizing this cliche archetype pattern that's hyphenated,
[1:35:50] Bob Dobbs: we can prophesy,
[1:35:51] Bob Dobbs: that's in quotes,
[1:35:52] Bob Dobbs: what has already happened.
[1:35:53] Bob Dobbs: That's what you're saying.
[1:35:55] Bob Dobbs: Scenarios,
[1:35:56] Bob Dobbs: obsolescent at peak performance,
[1:35:58] Bob Dobbs: will proliferate as art forms.
[1:36:01] Bob Dobbs: And then in italics,
[1:36:02] Bob Dobbs: a whole sentence,
[1:36:03] Bob Dobbs: he says,
[1:36:04] Bob Dobbs: while present action moves from sequent or sequential play to simultaneous interplay and instant economic replay.
[1:36:13] Bob Dobbs: That's a pretty dense thing.
[1:36:15] Bob Dobbs: Present action moves from sequent play to simultaneous interplay,
[1:36:19] Bob Dobbs: and then instant economic replay.
[1:36:24] Bob Dobbs: So he's put together,
[1:36:26] Bob Dobbs: McLuhan emphasizes play in the
[1:36:28] Bob Dobbs: 60s and interplay.
[1:36:30] Bob Dobbs: And then he does replay in the
[1:36:33] Bob Dobbs: 70s. But Barry makes him one sentence.
[1:36:35] Bob Dobbs: Very nice.
[1:36:38] Bob Dobbs: Right?
[1:36:39] Bob Dobbs: Moving from sequent play to simultaneous interplay.
[1:36:44] Bob Dobbs: And instant.
[1:36:44] Bob Dobbs: economic replay.
[1:36:46] Bob Dobbs: So,
[1:36:47] Bob Dobbs: is there anything you would want to say about that quote?
[1:36:51] Cameron McEwen: No,
[1:36:52] Cameron McEwen: I really don't know too much about Barry Nevitt.
[1:36:55] Cameron McEwen: I think I have to read him sometime as a person that tried to sort of digest McLuhan and present it in a different form.
[1:37:06] Cameron McEwen: Yeah.
[1:37:07] Cameron McEwen: But I don't disagree with anything he says in this particular passage.
[1:37:13] Bob Dobbs: But he's trying to point out he was in intelligence.
[1:37:17] Bob Dobbs: Marshall always said that Barry was British intelligence.
[1:37:19] Bob Dobbs: He'd say that to colleagues,
[1:37:21] Bob Dobbs: you know,
[1:37:21] Bob Dobbs: privately.
[1:37:23] Bob Dobbs: So Barry is talking about his own,
[1:37:26] Bob Dobbs: if that is true,
[1:37:27] Bob Dobbs: his own understanding of intelligence and why he dropped being in intelligence and hung out with McLuhan,
[1:37:33] Bob Dobbs: because the secrets weren't secrets anymore.
[1:37:35] Bob Dobbs: That's why they're in quotes.
[1:37:38] Bob Dobbs: And that's why he quotes these things all through Take Today.
[1:37:42] Bob Dobbs: Assuming he's making the quotation marks,
[1:37:46] Bob Dobbs: this is
[1:37:48] Bob Dobbs: Barry's signature.
[1:37:51] Bob Dobbs: Private history in camera,
[1:37:53] Bob Dobbs: that means secret,
[1:37:55] Bob Dobbs: secret deep state history,
[1:37:56] Bob Dobbs: private history,
[1:37:58] Bob Dobbs: has become public myth through entertainment by time compression on camera.
[1:38:04] Bob Dobbs: Right.
[1:38:07] Bob Dobbs: Just as the obscene,
[1:38:09] Bob Dobbs: sort of like not seen,
[1:38:11] Bob Dobbs: is now on stage at Deja Vu of all times and places,
[1:38:15] Bob Dobbs: now here.
[1:38:17] Bob Dobbs: He's emphasizing the synchronous to the point,
[1:38:21] Bob Dobbs: the way you would like it emphasized.
[1:38:23] Bob Dobbs: He's putting now here in quotes.
[1:38:26] Cameron McEwen: What also is going on here is that he's taking the ambiguity of language,
[1:38:36] Cameron McEwen: the stuff that
[1:38:37] Cameron McEwen: McLuhan studied in Cambridge,
[1:38:40] Cameron McEwen: in the 1930s where it was seen that there's no word in poetry that just means one thing.
[1:38:53] Cameron McEwen: And when that's applied to human experience,
[1:38:58] Cameron McEwen: there is nothing that has obvious and set meaning.
[1:39:03] Cameron McEwen: Everything is a figure to some other ground.
[1:39:05] Bob Dobbs: Yes.
[1:39:06] Cameron McEwen: Right?
[1:39:06] Cameron McEwen: So the medium is the message means that...
[1:39:09] Cameron McEwen: There's no message that can be understood aside from its ground.
[1:39:15] Cameron McEwen: That's one of the things that that phrase means.
[1:39:17] Bob Dobbs: Yeah.
[1:39:18] Cameron McEwen: So when
[1:39:19] Cameron McEwen: Barry is continually putting things in quotation marks,
[1:39:23] Cameron McEwen: he's saying that we can't understand them as concrete things that are unambiguous.
[1:39:31] Cameron McEwen: Instead,
[1:39:32] Cameron McEwen: we need to pay attention to their ambiguity.
[1:39:35] Bob Dobbs: Yeah.
[1:39:36] Cameron McEwen: Right?
[1:39:36] Cameron McEwen: So when he puts fake,
[1:39:37] Cameron McEwen: for example,
[1:39:38] Cameron McEwen: in quotation marks,
[1:39:39] Cameron McEwen: he's saying don't think that fake
[1:39:44] Cameron McEwen: can be taken monosemantically.
[1:39:50] Cameron McEwen: It can't,
[1:39:51] Cameron McEwen: and neither can anything else.
[1:39:53] Cameron McEwen: So if things dissolve in our hands like this,
[1:39:59] Cameron McEwen: if nothing is fixed,
[1:40:03] Cameron McEwen: then is there some way that that can be applied to life?
[1:40:09] Cameron McEwen: Is there some way that that,
[1:40:10] Cameron McEwen: instead of being something that threatens identity,
[1:40:14] Cameron McEwen: and that drives societies crazy like it is now,
[1:40:19] Cameron McEwen: is there some way of putting that dynamic dissolution to work,
[1:40:26] Cameron McEwen: to understand ourselves in a way that's satisfying?
[1:40:32] Cameron McEwen: And that's the question that I see
[1:40:35] Cameron McEwen: Barry working on here.
[1:40:38] Bob Dobbs: Yeah,
[1:40:38] Bob Dobbs: he has prophecy,
[1:40:39] Bob Dobbs: he quotes,
[1:40:41] Bob Dobbs: because it's already what's happened.
[1:40:46] Bob Dobbs: Not the future.
[1:40:49] Cameron McEwen: Right.
[1:40:51] Bob Dobbs: So,
[1:40:53] Bob Dobbs: what do I say in the blue casual talk?
[1:40:59] Bob Dobbs: In camera means in secret.
[1:41:02] Bob Dobbs: They'll have Senate hearings in camera.
[1:41:04] Bob Dobbs: They're not televised.
[1:41:06] Bob Dobbs: And then if you're actually on camera,
[1:41:08] Bob Dobbs: you have the phrase on camera in quotes,
[1:41:11] Bob Dobbs: not in camera.
[1:41:12] Bob Dobbs: Private history,
[1:41:13] Bob Dobbs: which is secretive.
[1:41:15] Bob Dobbs: has become public myth by this compression on camera.
[1:41:19] Bob Dobbs: Okay,
[1:41:19] Bob Dobbs: so now this brings in Donald Trump.
[1:41:21] Bob Dobbs: Private history,
[1:41:22] Bob Dobbs: which is secretive,
[1:41:23] Bob Dobbs: has become public myth by time compression on camera in the global theater.
[1:41:28] Cameron McEwen: Notice,
[1:41:29] Cameron McEwen: before you go into Trump,
[1:41:30] Cameron McEwen: just notice that the reason that in camera means in secret is that in camera means in a room where the door is locked or something.
[1:41:40] Cameron McEwen: So that's a spatial thing.
[1:41:42] Cameron McEwen: So then...
[1:41:43] Cameron McEwen: when something goes on camera,
[1:41:46] Cameron McEwen: that's not a spatial thing.
[1:41:48] Cameron McEwen: If anything,
[1:41:48] Cameron McEwen: it's a time thing.
[1:41:50] Bob Dobbs: Yeah,
[1:41:52] Bob Dobbs: it's electric maybe.
[1:41:55] Cameron McEwen: Yeah.
[1:41:55] Bob Dobbs: Electric surveillance.
[1:41:57] Bob Dobbs: Donald Trump is the most exposed person in history.
[1:42:00] Bob Dobbs: His private history has become public myth,
[1:42:04] Bob Dobbs: and the hitherto obscene is now on stage.
[1:42:07] Bob Dobbs: So I'm quoting Barry.
[1:42:09] Bob Dobbs: What is hidden in private history and is in camera...
[1:42:13] Bob Dobbs: actually gets broadcast by time compression on camera.
[1:42:18] Bob Dobbs: Just as what was not allowed on stage is now on the stage,
[1:42:22] Bob Dobbs: the obscene,
[1:42:23] Bob Dobbs: you know,
[1:42:24] Bob Dobbs: scene,
[1:42:24] Bob Dobbs: S-C-E-N-E,
[1:42:26] Bob Dobbs: the theatrical scene.
[1:42:28] Cameron McEwen: Let's just stop there for half a second.
[1:42:32] Cameron McEwen: You would think that after years and years and years of going into
[1:42:38] Cameron McEwen: Trump's personal history and financial history,
[1:42:42] Cameron McEwen: history,
[1:42:43] Cameron McEwen: business history,
[1:42:44] Cameron McEwen: all of this sort of stuff,
[1:42:45] Cameron McEwen: you would think that that particular hourglass had emptied out all its sand.
[1:42:53] Cameron McEwen: But in fact,
[1:42:54] Cameron McEwen: it's picking up steam as we go.
[1:42:57] Cameron McEwen: Just today,
[1:43:00] Cameron McEwen: there's more and more and more stuff coming out.
[1:43:03] Cameron McEwen: There's no end to it.
[1:43:07] Bob Dobbs: Yeah,
[1:43:08] Bob Dobbs: because there's no end to Donald Trump.
[1:43:12] Cameron McEwen: Apparently.
[1:43:13] Bob Dobbs: Though everybody who comes at him ends.
[1:43:16] Bob Dobbs: There's 115 people a few years ago listed who got in trouble after going after Trump.
[1:43:22] Bob Dobbs: Take Alec Baldwin.
[1:43:25] Bob Dobbs: His life's a disaster now with that shooting,
[1:43:28] Bob Dobbs: the accidental gun going off.
[1:43:30] Bob Dobbs: And he tried to batter Trump on Saturday Night Live for a long time.
[1:43:36] Cameron McEwen: So,
[1:43:37] Bob Dobbs: you know,
[1:43:38] Bob Dobbs: Trump was like a microcosm of experience.
[1:43:40] Bob Dobbs: experience that you've got to be careful how you try to figure out experience,
[1:43:44] Bob Dobbs: how you conceptualize it,
[1:43:45] Bob Dobbs: which is what we've been talking about.
[1:43:47] Cameron McEwen: Look at how that ties in with what we were saying about Lindbergh in 53,
[1:43:51] Cameron McEwen: 54,
[1:43:53] Cameron McEwen: and then what we were saying today about the black mirror.
[1:43:59] Cameron McEwen: Things,
[1:44:02] Cameron McEwen: no matter how true and how real something is,
[1:44:06] Cameron McEwen: it can be radically misused.
[1:44:10] Cameron McEwen: So that's part of the lesson.
[1:44:13] Bob Dobbs: Yeah,
[1:44:13] Bob Dobbs: so I'm now bringing in Donald Trump.
[1:44:16] Bob Dobbs: I haven't said much,
[1:44:17] Bob Dobbs: have I,
[1:44:17] Bob Dobbs: up to this point about him?
[1:44:20] Bob Dobbs: Let's just see.
[1:44:20] Bob Dobbs: Well,
[1:44:20] Cameron McEwen: you mentioned him here and there,
[1:44:22] Cameron McEwen: but you haven't concentrated on him.
[1:44:24] Bob Dobbs: Right.
[1:44:25] Bob Dobbs: So
[1:44:26] Bob Dobbs: I'm just going to put in the word Trump,
[1:44:28] Bob Dobbs: see how many times.
[1:44:30] Bob Dobbs: So there it is in the title.
[1:44:33] Bob Dobbs: Then you jump way down to page 114 before Trump shows up again.
[1:44:44] Bob Dobbs: And I say,
[1:44:45] Bob Dobbs: We cope with all the information in the news that comes at us as we come up with a slogan about it,
[1:44:49] Bob Dobbs: like,
[1:44:50] Bob Dobbs: Trump's an idiot
[1:44:52] Bob Dobbs: And that covers two weeks'
[1:44:54] Bob Dobbs: worth of stories.
[1:44:55] Bob Dobbs: That's mythic
[1:44:58] Bob Dobbs: Right?
[1:45:00] Bob Dobbs: And so then the next one,
[1:45:02] Bob Dobbs: further down,
[1:45:05] Bob Dobbs: so I said 140,
[1:45:06] Bob Dobbs: oh,
[1:45:06] Bob Dobbs: no,
[1:45:06] Bob Dobbs: it's the next page,
[1:45:07] Bob Dobbs: 115.
[1:45:09] Bob Dobbs: Then you come to Barry.
[1:45:14] Bob Dobbs: 121 or 122 is where we're at right now.
[1:45:18] Bob Dobbs: So it's only mentioned twice before you get to here.
[1:45:22] Cameron McEwen: Yeah.
[1:45:23] Bob Dobbs: So we'll see what comes.
[1:45:25] Cameron McEwen: What you mean is only mentioned twice as figure.
[1:45:31] Bob Dobbs: Yeah.
[1:45:32] Cameron McEwen: But I think what we're going to find is that he's been mentioned all along,
[1:45:36] Cameron McEwen: but below the surface.
[1:45:39] Bob Dobbs: He's the ground.
[1:45:40] Bob Dobbs: He's the tech body.
[1:45:41] Bob Dobbs: He's an image of it.
[1:45:43] Bob Dobbs: He's the most exposed person in history.
[1:45:48] Bob Dobbs: I guess that's true.
[1:45:49] Bob Dobbs: The most exposed person in history.
[1:45:51] Bob Dobbs: Certainly,
[1:45:53] Bob Dobbs: nobody has been filmed and cataloged and probed and progged and bugged.
[1:45:59] Cameron McEwen: Investigated.
[1:46:02] Cameron McEwen: Charged.
[1:46:04] Bob Dobbs: Yeah.
[1:46:05] Bob Dobbs: And,
[1:46:06] Bob Dobbs: you know,
[1:46:06] Bob Dobbs: there are the seven trumpets in the book of Revelation,
[1:46:08] Bob Dobbs: and he's the seventh trumpet.
[1:46:11] Bob Dobbs: He is a phenomenon.
[1:46:13] Bob Dobbs: It's interesting what he is.
[1:46:15] Bob Dobbs: You know,
[1:46:15] Bob Dobbs: he's the all-American guy in the terms of the American materialist hardware dream.
[1:46:20] Bob Dobbs: And then he went into the software dream with his TV shows,
[1:46:23] Bob Dobbs: like The Apprentice.
[1:46:25] Bob Dobbs: And then he got to the center of the resonant node,
[1:46:28] Bob Dobbs: the White House,
[1:46:29] Bob Dobbs: and he got to there.
[1:46:31] Bob Dobbs: What a range of experience he's done.
[1:46:34] Bob Dobbs: You know what I mean?
[1:46:35] Cameron McEwen: Sure.
[1:46:37] Bob Dobbs: What McLuhan called upward mobility.
[1:46:38] Bob Dobbs: He said feminists want upward mobility,
[1:46:41] Bob Dobbs: and men had upward mobility.
[1:46:43] Bob Dobbs: But it also means side mobility,
[1:46:46] Bob Dobbs: to the side,
[1:46:47] Bob Dobbs: often to other areas,
[1:46:48] Bob Dobbs: not just up one tunnel,
[1:46:51] Bob Dobbs: one bureaucracy.
[1:46:53] Bob Dobbs: So déjà vu comes in here.
[1:46:57] Bob Dobbs: What is hidden in private history and is in camera actually gets broadcast by time compression on camera,
[1:47:04] Bob Dobbs: just as what was not allowed on stage is now on the stage,
[1:47:07] Bob Dobbs: the obscene.
[1:47:09] Bob Dobbs: A déjà vu of all times and places now here.
[1:47:13] Bob Dobbs: or nowhere,
[1:47:14] Bob Dobbs: right?
[1:47:15] Bob Dobbs: Now here it can mean nowhere.
[1:47:17] Bob Dobbs: It's being recorded and broadcast.
[1:47:19] Bob Dobbs: We prophesy what is
[1:47:22] Cameron McEwen: We should say that what you're doing there is you're reversing the reversal of Erewhon.
[1:47:30] Bob Dobbs: Of what Barry said.
[1:47:32] Bob Dobbs: No,
[1:47:33] Cameron McEwen: of the novel Erewhon.
[1:47:37] Bob Dobbs: Oh yeah,
[1:47:37] Bob Dobbs: yeah,
[1:47:37] Bob Dobbs: yeah.
[1:47:37] Bob Dobbs: A deja vu of all times and places,
[1:47:39] Bob Dobbs: now here or nowhere.
[1:47:41] Bob Dobbs: It's being recorded and broadcast.
[1:47:43] Bob Dobbs: We prophesy what has already happened.
[1:47:46] Bob Dobbs: The more we realize what has happened.
[1:47:49] Bob Dobbs: We realize 1984 is 1934.
[1:47:53] Bob Dobbs: Then I quote Barry,
[1:47:54] Bob Dobbs: scenarios obsolescent at peak performance will proliferate as art forms.
[1:48:01] Bob Dobbs: Remember,
[1:48:01] Bob Dobbs: obsolescence in McLuhan's world means it gets more and more noticed,
[1:48:06] Bob Dobbs: more and more used.
[1:48:07] Bob Dobbs: It creates wealth,
[1:48:09] Bob Dobbs: you could say.
[1:48:10] Bob Dobbs: So scenarios obsolescent at peak performance,
[1:48:13] Bob Dobbs: when they actually were the unfoldment of an intense situation,
[1:48:17] Bob Dobbs: will proliferate as art forms.
[1:48:19] Bob Dobbs: They will proliferate not as themselves.
[1:48:23] Cameron McEwen: Right.
[1:48:23] Cameron McEwen: So notice peak performance there is a rewriting of pattern recognition.
[1:48:29] Bob Dobbs: Yeah.
[1:48:31] Bob Dobbs: Yeah.
[1:48:31] Bob Dobbs: And it's a tetradic flip,
[1:48:33] Bob Dobbs: perhaps.
[1:48:36] Bob Dobbs: And then I have scenarios,
[1:48:37] Bob Dobbs: obsolescence at peak performance will proliferate as art forms,
[1:48:40] Bob Dobbs: like there's nothing happening.
[1:48:42] Bob Dobbs: We pretend something's happening,
[1:48:44] Bob Dobbs: that's art form.
[1:48:46] Bob Dobbs: Experience becomes an art form.
[1:48:48] Bob Dobbs: The chemical body becomes an art form because we're on camera.
[1:48:52] Bob Dobbs: We're experiencing on-camera life,
[1:48:54] Bob Dobbs: which needs all kinds of content,
[1:48:56] Bob Dobbs: that's your dangling ganglia,
[1:49:00] Bob Dobbs: including the obscene occasionally.
[1:49:03] Bob Dobbs: And it's actually telling us that all kinds of times and spaces are now available,
[1:49:07] Bob Dobbs: especially with the remote control on TV.
[1:49:13] Bob Dobbs: Yeah,
[1:49:14] Cameron McEwen: that's funny.
[1:49:17] Bob Dobbs: Sequent or sequential play would be baseball or football.
[1:49:22] Bob Dobbs: And the simultaneous interplay might be hockey and definitely talk shows.
[1:49:26] Bob Dobbs: So I'm switching sport from chemical body to the gamesmanship of conversation and people calling in and attempting to take down the host or to support the host.
[1:49:41] Bob Dobbs: So they are instant replay.
[1:49:44] Bob Dobbs: So sequent.
[1:49:45] Bob Dobbs: play is baseball or football.
[1:49:48] Bob Dobbs: Simultaneous interplay is hockey and talk shows,
[1:49:52] Bob Dobbs: and then the instant replay.
[1:49:55] Bob Dobbs: Sequent play,
[1:49:56] Bob Dobbs: this is interesting what I've done here.
[1:49:58] Bob Dobbs: Sequent play is ritualized chemical body sport.
[1:50:02] Bob Dobbs: Simultaneous interplay is ritualized TV body sport on the talk shows,
[1:50:08] Bob Dobbs: and then instant replay enhances the mystery body.
[1:50:12] Bob Dobbs: They are nature imitating art.
[1:50:15] Bob Dobbs: these replays.
[1:50:16] Bob Dobbs: One are these different forms of play.
[1:50:19] Bob Dobbs: One is imitating a programmed environment.
[1:50:22] Bob Dobbs: People move around and go to big events,
[1:50:24] Bob Dobbs: sporting events,
[1:50:25] Bob Dobbs: to be programmed because it's happening all around them.
[1:50:28] Bob Dobbs: They're being programmed.
[1:50:29] Bob Dobbs: Their nature,
[1:50:31] Bob Dobbs: it's being programmed.
[1:50:32] Bob Dobbs: So that's quite a mouthful I'm saying there.
[1:50:34] Cameron McEwen: Yeah,
[1:50:36] Cameron McEwen: but it's not only a mouthful,
[1:50:39] Cameron McEwen: it's revelatory.
[1:50:43] Cameron McEwen: Yeah.
[1:50:44] Cameron McEwen: Let's just...
[1:50:45] Cameron McEwen: Let's just look at they are nature imitating art,
[1:50:49] Cameron McEwen: okay?
[1:50:50] Cameron McEwen: So if we go back to that key sentence we had a while back about is not the instant replay the externalizing of the cognitive principle itself?
[1:51:04] Cameron McEwen: Yeah.
[1:51:06] Cameron McEwen: Right?
[1:51:06] Cameron McEwen: That was from the 1975 Implications of
[1:51:10] Cameron McEwen: Cultural Uniformity at the top of 121.
[1:51:14] Bob Dobbs: Yes.
[1:51:15] Cameron McEwen: So then we come down to what you're saying.
[1:51:19] Cameron McEwen: They are nature imitating art.
[1:51:21] Cameron McEwen: Well,
[1:51:22] Cameron McEwen: what is nature?
[1:51:22] Cameron McEwen: Nature is,
[1:51:24] Cameron McEwen: here at least,
[1:51:25] Cameron McEwen: nature is the expression of a form that happens synchronistically at every moment of human experience.
[1:51:36] Cameron McEwen: And imitating art,
[1:51:38] Cameron McEwen: what is art,
[1:51:39] Cameron McEwen: is the form that is being expressed.
[1:51:44] Cameron McEwen: So nature imitating art here,
[1:51:48] Cameron McEwen: the miming that's going on,
[1:51:50] Cameron McEwen: is a replay of,
[1:51:53] Cameron McEwen: is not the instant replay,
[1:51:55] Cameron McEwen: the externalizing of the cognitive principle itself.
[1:51:58] Cameron McEwen: Cognitive principle,
[1:51:59] Cameron McEwen: what's that?
[1:52:00] Cameron McEwen: It's nature imitating art.
[1:52:05] Bob Dobbs: And I had a word to say and you knocked it out.
[1:52:09] Bob Dobbs: I was sitting there waiting to say the word.
[1:52:11] Bob Dobbs: I wonder what it was.
[1:52:14] Bob Dobbs: Sort of wrapping up what you were saying there.
[1:52:17] Cameron McEwen: You were talking about programming.
[1:52:19] Bob Dobbs: Yeah.
[1:52:20] Bob Dobbs: Nature.
[1:52:22] Bob Dobbs: Nature imitates art.
[1:52:29] Bob Dobbs: I don't know.
[1:52:30] Bob Dobbs: I was sitting there ready to pounce this on you,
[1:52:33] Bob Dobbs: but I was following you,
[1:52:34] Bob Dobbs: and you knocked me off my own track.
[1:52:37] Cameron McEwen: Mea culpa.
[1:52:38] Bob Dobbs: Yeah.
[1:52:39] Bob Dobbs: I was paying so much close attention.
[1:52:43] Bob Dobbs: Simultaneous interplay might be hockey.
[1:52:45] Bob Dobbs: I think that's clever.
[1:52:48] Bob Dobbs: Baseball and football are linear.
[1:52:50] Bob Dobbs: You know,
[1:52:50] Bob Dobbs: you go to the goal lines.
[1:52:53] Bob Dobbs: That's sequent play.
[1:52:55] Bob Dobbs: But then hockey,
[1:52:57] Bob Dobbs: you have goals,
[1:52:58] Bob Dobbs: but it's all circling and more in motion.
[1:53:01] Bob Dobbs: Right?
[1:53:02] Cameron McEwen: Well,
[1:53:03] Cameron McEwen: it's some Canadian,
[1:53:04] Cameron McEwen: what can
[1:53:10] Cameron McEwen: I say?
[1:53:12] Cameron McEwen: Canadian.
[1:53:13] Cameron McEwen: pride being expressed there,
[1:53:15] Cameron McEwen: even if it doesn't make a great deal of sense.
[1:53:17] Bob Dobbs: Me?
[1:53:18] Bob Dobbs: I'm expressing putting hockey and Canadian sport into the glorified,
[1:53:24] Bob Dobbs: simultaneous 80s zone.
[1:53:25] Cameron McEwen: That's right.
[1:53:26] Cameron McEwen: That's what we're doing.
[1:53:27] Bob Dobbs: Yeah.
[1:53:29] Bob Dobbs: And definitely talk shows,
[1:53:30] Bob Dobbs: which I do also,
[1:53:31] Bob Dobbs: right?
[1:53:32] Cameron McEwen: Yes,
[1:53:33] Cameron McEwen: absolutely.
[1:53:34] Cameron McEwen: Absolutely.
[1:53:35] Bob Dobbs: And then the instant replay.
[1:53:37] Bob Dobbs: So you have ritualized chemical body sport,
[1:53:39] Bob Dobbs: then ritualized TV body sport.
[1:53:42] Bob Dobbs: And then the mystery body.
[1:53:44] Bob Dobbs: Why would I say instant replay enhances the mystery body?
[1:53:48] Cameron McEwen: Because the instant replay is the exercise of metaphor.
[1:53:56] Cameron McEwen: It's the exercise of tactility.
[1:53:59] Cameron McEwen: But the exercise of metaphor and tactility is not something that can be grounded in something else.
[1:54:06] Cameron McEwen: Yeah.
[1:54:09] Cameron McEwen: That is the mystery of...
[1:54:11] Cameron McEwen: creation.
[1:54:13] Cameron McEwen: It's the mystery of the creation of the universe that human beings then mimic at every moment of their experience.
[1:54:22] Cameron McEwen: So the mystical is what we're always already doing,
[1:54:30] Cameron McEwen: and in doing it,
[1:54:31] Cameron McEwen: we overlook it.
[1:54:35] Bob Dobbs: Yeah,
[1:54:35] Bob Dobbs: and...
[1:54:42] Bob Dobbs: Yeah,
[1:54:42] Bob Dobbs: I think you described well what the instant replay is metaphor.
[1:54:46] Bob Dobbs: And,
[1:54:46] Bob Dobbs: oh,
[1:54:46] Bob Dobbs: yeah,
[1:54:46] Bob Dobbs: McLuhan often,
[1:54:47] Bob Dobbs: every now and then,
[1:54:49] Bob Dobbs: he'd wax,
[1:54:49] Bob Dobbs: he'd bully it,
[1:54:50] Bob Dobbs: and talk about the wonderful mystery of existence,
[1:54:54] Bob Dobbs: of consciousness.
[1:54:55] Bob Dobbs: Yeah.
[1:54:56] Bob Dobbs: The thrill of it.
[1:54:58] Bob Dobbs: So he was hitting the instant replay button,
[1:55:04] Bob Dobbs: which created a state of awe in a way.
[1:55:07] Cameron McEwen: Absolutely.
[1:55:08] Cameron McEwen: Absolutely.
[1:55:08] Cameron McEwen: because the instant replay experience...
[1:55:11] Cameron McEwen: Exposes the creative principle and the creative principle is not something that belongs to us
[1:55:19] Cameron McEwen: We belong to it.
[1:55:21] Cameron McEwen: So the amazing thing or the mystical thing or the wondrous thing is that number one that creation principle
[1:55:30] Cameron McEwen: Exists and number two that we are
[1:55:35] Cameron McEwen: Exposed to it that we are given over to it,
[1:55:40] Cameron McEwen: right?
[1:55:41] Cameron McEwen: So it's the keys to given at the end of the week.
[1:55:46] Bob Dobbs: Yeah,
[1:55:47] Bob Dobbs: the dog again knocked out.
[1:55:51] Bob Dobbs: I don't know.
[1:55:52] Bob Dobbs: I'm losing my bearings.
[1:55:56] Bob Dobbs: They are nature imitating art.
[1:55:58] Bob Dobbs: I wonder if there's something in that.
[1:56:01] Bob Dobbs: Oh,
[1:56:01] Cameron McEwen: there's a ton in that.
[1:56:02] Cameron McEwen: That's what I was trying to say.
[1:56:04] Bob Dobbs: Yeah,
[1:56:05] Bob Dobbs: because we talk about art imitates nature.
[1:56:09] Bob Dobbs: But now nature is imitating art.
[1:56:11] Cameron McEwen: Right.
[1:56:12] Cameron McEwen: That's a good example of how McLuhan's mind worked.
[1:56:15] Cameron McEwen: He was continually reversing things because he found that that was a way of generating insight.
[1:56:22] Bob Dobbs: Yeah.
[1:56:23] Cameron McEwen: So here he reverses art imitating nature,
[1:56:27] Cameron McEwen: and it recalls that
[1:56:32] Cameron McEwen: Sputnik has changed nature into art.
[1:56:36] Cameron McEwen: But more than that,
[1:56:38] Cameron McEwen: it recalls that whatever we do,
[1:56:40] Cameron McEwen: experience,
[1:56:42] Cameron McEwen: that is to say the natural environment around us,
[1:56:46] Cameron McEwen: unknown to us,
[1:56:47] Cameron McEwen: that's already art.
[1:56:48] Cameron McEwen: There's no experience that's not a role.
[1:56:52] Bob Dobbs: Yeah,
[1:56:52] Bob Dobbs: and here's an interesting point.
[1:56:54] Bob Dobbs: McLuhan says,
[1:56:55] Bob Dobbs: once he was defining art,
[1:56:57] Bob Dobbs: and he said it's programming the environment,
[1:56:59] Bob Dobbs: programming,
[1:57:00] Bob Dobbs: I guess,
[1:57:00] Bob Dobbs: for certain effects,
[1:57:01] Bob Dobbs: sort of doing something consciously.
[1:57:04] Bob Dobbs: So people move around and go to big events,
[1:57:06] Bob Dobbs: sporting events,
[1:57:07] Bob Dobbs: to be programmed.
[1:57:09] Bob Dobbs: So they're already programmed in their daily multi-bodied existence,
[1:57:14] Bob Dobbs: but they take a particular chemical body programming as an art form.
[1:57:18] Bob Dobbs: They go and specialize and get programmed at the sporting event.
[1:57:23] Cameron McEwen: Correct.
[1:57:23] Cameron McEwen: So it's like the sporting event becomes a substitute for going to church.
[1:57:30] Cameron McEwen: So you go on Sunday to the NFL game,
[1:57:34] Cameron McEwen: and there's 100,000 people there.
[1:57:36] Bob Dobbs: Yeah.
[1:57:36] Cameron McEwen: And
[1:57:38] Cameron McEwen: You've been programmed to want to go.
[1:57:41] Cameron McEwen: You've been programmed to follow certain procedures when you're there.
[1:57:47] Cameron McEwen: You buy the hot dog,
[1:57:49] Cameron McEwen: you buy the beer,
[1:57:49] Cameron McEwen: you do all that sort of stuff.
[1:57:51] Cameron McEwen: The ritual.
[1:57:52] Cameron McEwen: You're sitting there and all of a sudden,
[1:57:56] Cameron McEwen: all around the stadium are instructions about what you're to do.
[1:58:04] Cameron McEwen: These stadiums say,
[1:58:05] Cameron McEwen: make noise.
[1:58:08] Cameron McEwen: Yeah.
[1:58:09] Cameron McEwen: So the programming has become explicit.
[1:58:14] Cameron McEwen: You go there with 100,000 people and you're told,
[1:58:17] Cameron McEwen: okay,
[1:58:17] Cameron McEwen: make a wave.
[1:58:19] Cameron McEwen: Okay,
[1:58:21] Cameron McEwen: cheer.
[1:58:22] Cameron McEwen: Okay,
[1:58:22] Cameron McEwen: this.
[1:58:23] Cameron McEwen: Okay,
[1:58:23] Cameron McEwen: that.
[1:58:25] Cameron McEwen: It's incredible.
[1:58:26] Cameron McEwen: So human beings are being shown in a way that they don't understand who they are and what they do.
[1:58:35] Bob Dobbs: Yeah.
[1:58:35] Cameron McEwen: But instead of...
[1:58:36] Cameron McEwen: instead of understanding that,
[1:58:38] Cameron McEwen: they turn it sort of into its reverse.
[1:58:42] Cameron McEwen: Instead of allowing it to be creative and to be illuminative,
[1:58:52] Cameron McEwen: they become obscured and lost in a fog.
[1:58:59] Bob Dobbs: Right.
[1:59:00] Cameron McEwen: This is important.
[1:59:01] Cameron McEwen: So now we say nature imitating art,
[1:59:04] Cameron McEwen: right?
[1:59:05] Cameron McEwen: nature is
[1:59:06] Cameron McEwen: In this sense,
[1:59:07] Cameron McEwen: is the fog of inane collective behavior,
[1:59:14] Cameron McEwen: imitating art,
[1:59:16] Cameron McEwen: being programmed by a few
[1:59:20] Cameron McEwen: NFL executives acting on behalf of the cabal of billionaires that owns the teams?
[1:59:29] Bob Dobbs: Okay,
[1:59:31] Bob Dobbs: so this is pointing to a post.
[1:59:35] Bob Dobbs: 1984,
[1:59:36] Bob Dobbs: non-slavery.
[1:59:38] Bob Dobbs: If we're putting being programmed on,
[1:59:43] Bob Dobbs: or being programmed as an art form,
[1:59:45] Bob Dobbs: that means we're not being programmed in actual life.
[1:59:49] Bob Dobbs: And there is a huge decentralization that society doesn't want to notice it.
[1:59:56] Bob Dobbs: That everybody,
[1:59:58] Bob Dobbs: millions of people,
[1:59:59] Bob Dobbs: with all kinds of services around them,
[2:00:01] Bob Dobbs: they can go and do anything.
[2:00:03] Bob Dobbs: What kind of anarchy is going on in terms of maybe a hundred years ago?
[2:00:08] Bob Dobbs: More of a surveilled society where people followed rules and kept a clean nose.
[2:00:14] Bob Dobbs: So they take the whole slavery aspect of being programmed and put it on in sports.
[2:00:23] Bob Dobbs: So it's pointing to a new freedom that's happened in the TV body and the chemical body.
[2:00:31] Bob Dobbs: Those are realms of individual,
[2:00:34] Bob Dobbs: totally untrammeled,
[2:00:36] Bob Dobbs: uncontrolled personal choice.
[2:00:39] Cameron McEwen: Yeah,
[2:00:39] Cameron McEwen: but all of these things can be flipped and are flipped,
[2:00:46] Cameron McEwen: right?
[2:00:47] Cameron McEwen: So it's not,
[2:00:49] Cameron McEwen: you talk about untrammeled freedom,
[2:00:52] Cameron McEwen: but it's the most trammeled existence that ever existed.
[2:00:56] Bob Dobbs: Right.
[2:00:57] Cameron McEwen: Right?
[2:00:57] Cameron McEwen: So it's,
[2:00:58] Cameron McEwen: there is an aspect to it that's a freedom.
[2:01:01] Cameron McEwen: And then there's an aspect to it that's a slavery as there has never been slavery.
[2:01:06] Cameron McEwen: It's a slavery not of the body but of the mind.
[2:01:10] Bob Dobbs: And you have to find the interval.
[2:01:13] Cameron McEwen: It's the slavery of everything.
[2:01:14] Bob Dobbs: Yeah,
[2:01:15] Bob Dobbs: so you have to find the interval of being able to live and survive,
[2:01:20] Bob Dobbs: not too free,
[2:01:22] Bob Dobbs: extreme.
[2:01:23] Bob Dobbs: or if you do it,
[2:01:24] Bob Dobbs: don't get noticed,
[2:01:26] Bob Dobbs: and accept the programming.
[2:01:28] Bob Dobbs: So you see the freedom of,
[2:01:31] Bob Dobbs: I call the chip body as a replay of the natural astral plane or astral body.
[2:01:37] Bob Dobbs: So you have a lot of freedom in the astral plane or when you sleep.
[2:01:42] Bob Dobbs: So then in the chip body,
[2:01:43] Bob Dobbs: you can go anywhere as you want to.
[2:01:45] Bob Dobbs: There's all kinds of places.
[2:01:47] Bob Dobbs: Lots of the content is programmed for you,
[2:01:49] Bob Dobbs: but you can do all kinds of interaction.
[2:01:53] Bob Dobbs: And that's relatively free like the astral body.
[2:01:55] Bob Dobbs: But the chemical body is a slave.
[2:01:57] Cameron McEwen: Wait,
[2:01:58] Bob Dobbs: wait,
[2:01:59] Cameron McEwen: wait.
[2:01:59] Cameron McEwen: Don't go too fast over this.
[2:02:02] Cameron McEwen: We've just been through pages talking about instant replay and rolls and global theater and all that sort of stuff.
[2:02:12] Cameron McEwen: So you have to go slow and relate what you're talking about with the astral body to what we were just saying in terms of rolls.
[2:02:21] Cameron McEwen: Everything is replayed.
[2:02:25] Bob Dobbs: Well,
[2:02:25] Bob Dobbs: the chip body is a replay of the astral body.
[2:02:27] Bob Dobbs: The TV body is a replay of the chemical body.
[2:02:31] Cameron McEwen: Okay,
[2:02:32] Cameron McEwen: but do some talking about the astral body so we can understand how it fits into this context that we're trying to unfold here.
[2:02:43] Bob Dobbs: So,
[2:02:44] Bob Dobbs: apparently when you sleep,
[2:02:46] Bob Dobbs: you might dream,
[2:02:49] Bob Dobbs: but you may be going places.
[2:02:51] Bob Dobbs: There's a school of thought that you're traveling around free from the chemical body.
[2:02:56] Bob Dobbs: So the astral plane,
[2:02:58] Bob Dobbs: the astral body is more mobile,
[2:03:01] Bob Dobbs: more unhinged than the chemical body.
[2:03:06] Bob Dobbs: Wait one second,
[2:03:07] Cameron McEwen: wait one second.
[2:03:08] Cameron McEwen: So what you just defined is the creative principle.
[2:03:15] Bob Dobbs: Yeah.
[2:03:16] Cameron McEwen: Right?
[2:03:17] Cameron McEwen: The human experience from moment to moment to moment.
[2:03:20] Cameron McEwen: is completely unhinged.
[2:03:22] Bob Dobbs: Right.
[2:03:23] Cameron McEwen: It's a traveling that is not done in diachronic time.
[2:03:27] Cameron McEwen: It's done in synchronic time,
[2:03:30] Cameron McEwen: and it is completely free.
[2:03:34] Cameron McEwen: Between one moment to the next moment,
[2:03:37] Cameron McEwen: there is absolutely no determination.
[2:03:41] Bob Dobbs: Yes,
[2:03:42] Bob Dobbs: you're creating your own tourism.
[2:03:46] Cameron McEwen: Yeah.
[2:03:48] Cameron McEwen: But the possibility of your,
[2:03:50] Cameron McEwen: or how can I put this,
[2:03:51] Cameron McEwen: the possibilities to which that tourism is exposed are limited.
[2:03:59] Bob Dobbs: Yeah.
[2:03:59] Cameron McEwen: As to say there's
[2:04:00] Cameron McEwen: X number of roles and that's all there is.
[2:04:05] Bob Dobbs: So you have a lot more autonomy in your computer world.
[2:04:11] Cameron McEwen: Well,
[2:04:13] Cameron McEwen: there's more autonomy in one sense and less autonomy in another sense.
[2:04:17] Bob Dobbs: Right.
[2:04:18] Cameron McEwen: I mean,
[2:04:19] Cameron McEwen: if Amazon is listening to what I'm talking about at this moment on my phone,
[2:04:26] Cameron McEwen: on my computer,
[2:04:27] Cameron McEwen: on my fax machine,
[2:04:29] Cameron McEwen: on my everything in the house is picking up everything that's going on.
[2:04:37] Cameron McEwen: That's not,
[2:04:38] Cameron McEwen: you know,
[2:04:39] Cameron McEwen: a new freedom.
[2:04:41] Cameron McEwen: That's a type of slavery such as the world has never known.
[2:04:46] Cameron McEwen: But there are aspects.
[2:04:47] Cameron McEwen: of what's going on that do enable a new type of freedom as well.
[2:04:54] Bob Dobbs: Yeah,
[2:04:54] Bob Dobbs: so I've got the digital with my computer,
[2:04:57] Bob Dobbs: but I don't have any of the smartphone apps that are surveilling us.
[2:05:02] Bob Dobbs: So
[2:05:04] Bob Dobbs: I do it in harmony.
[2:05:05] Cameron McEwen: Don't fool yourself about that,
[2:05:07] Cameron McEwen: Bob.
[2:05:07] Bob Dobbs: I know.
[2:05:08] Bob Dobbs: Well,
[2:05:08] Bob Dobbs: actually,
[2:05:09] Bob Dobbs: especially me.
[2:05:10] Bob Dobbs: I'm under surveillance,
[2:05:11] Bob Dobbs: okay?
[2:05:12] Bob Dobbs: I know that.
[2:05:13] Bob Dobbs: I even got bodyguards.
[2:05:15] Bob Dobbs: So the...
[2:05:17] Bob Dobbs: But if I am aware of all these dimensions,
[2:05:20] Bob Dobbs: I can sneak through,
[2:05:21] Bob Dobbs: slip through in between.
[2:05:23] Bob Dobbs: So I'm saying the chemical body is more limited.
[2:05:28] Bob Dobbs: It's more obviously programmed,
[2:05:31] Bob Dobbs: like television.
[2:05:32] Bob Dobbs: Basically,
[2:05:33] Bob Dobbs: you look at television and the services the content is given to you.
[2:05:37] Bob Dobbs: You have a selection,
[2:05:38] Bob Dobbs: a menu,
[2:05:39] Bob Dobbs: and it's a more passive experience.
[2:05:42] Bob Dobbs: You can jump around and experience different shows,
[2:05:45] Bob Dobbs: but you can only experience the shows.
[2:05:46] Bob Dobbs: But to get on your computer,
[2:05:48] Bob Dobbs: you can travel all over the place as imagery,
[2:05:52] Bob Dobbs: what we call the content of the computer.
[2:05:54] Bob Dobbs: So the computer chip body is to the astral body as the TV body,
[2:05:59] Bob Dobbs: which is more programmed,
[2:06:00] Bob Dobbs: more limited,
[2:06:01] Bob Dobbs: to the chemical body.
[2:06:04] Bob Dobbs: The chemical body is a couch potato.
[2:06:05] Bob Dobbs: It sits there and is more passive.
[2:06:08] Bob Dobbs: The chip body and the astral body are more active.
[2:06:12] Bob Dobbs: That's a metaphor I've been doing for about 10 years.
[2:06:18] Cameron McEwen: I hope you're not doing it unit directionally.
[2:06:22] Cameron McEwen: I mean,
[2:06:23] Cameron McEwen: it would be ridiculous to think that somebody who's looking at their iPhone 24 hours a day is somehow more free than a shepherd looking after his flock,
[2:06:41] Cameron McEwen: you know,
[2:06:41] Cameron McEwen: a thousand or two thousand years ago or something.
[2:06:45] Cameron McEwen: The shepherd in attending to the stars and attending to all sorts of stuff,
[2:06:52] Cameron McEwen: may be much more free and much more cognizant than the iPhone guy.
[2:06:58] Bob Dobbs: Yeah,
[2:06:58] Bob Dobbs: so you have to be careful how you visualize your experience,
[2:07:04] Bob Dobbs: how you visualize where you're at and what you're doing.
[2:07:07] Bob Dobbs: And that has to engage the interval or the non-visual or the non-categorizable.
[2:07:14] Bob Dobbs: You've got to interplay that.
[2:07:17] Cameron McEwen: That's metaphor.
[2:07:18] Bob Dobbs: Yeah.
[2:07:19] Bob Dobbs: You've got to carry a cross and be careful not to take it all across with you and end up in a new place.
[2:07:25] Cameron McEwen: You can't.
[2:07:27] Cameron McEwen: There is no such thing.
[2:07:29] Cameron McEwen: There's only the attempt to take it across.
[2:07:33] Cameron McEwen: That was the argument that
[2:07:35] Cameron McEwen: McLuhan had with the pipeline communication people.
[2:07:42] Bob Dobbs: What was the pipeline?
[2:07:42] Bob Dobbs: Oh,
[2:07:42] Bob Dobbs: you mean the Shannon model?
[2:07:45] Cameron McEwen: Yeah.
[2:07:48] Cameron McEwen: Shannon Weaver or Weaver Shannon.
[2:07:52] Cameron McEwen: But this gets back to Planck.
[2:07:55] Bob Dobbs: Gets back to what?
[2:07:57] Cameron McEwen: Gets back to Max Planck.
[2:07:59] Bob Dobbs: Oh yeah.
[2:08:03] Cameron McEwen: There is a discontinuity to things.
[2:08:05] Cameron McEwen: And by the way,
[2:08:06] Cameron McEwen: at just this time that we're talking about in the early
[2:08:10] Cameron McEwen: 70s,
[2:08:11] Cameron McEwen: McLuhan was talking a lot about discontinuity.
[2:08:14] Cameron McEwen: I think he was convinced that discontinuity was what people didn't understand.
[2:08:19] Bob Dobbs: Yeah.
[2:08:22] Cameron McEwen: So when we're talking about carrying something across,
[2:08:29] Cameron McEwen: that comes up against a limit because they,
[2:08:36] Cameron McEwen: let's say that you're going from A to B and you're talking about taking everything from A over to B.
[2:08:43] Cameron McEwen: To put it in Max Planck's terms,
[2:08:46] Cameron McEwen: as A approaches B,
[2:08:48] Cameron McEwen: because A is taking everything from A over to B,
[2:08:52] Cameron McEwen: right?
[2:08:53] Cameron McEwen: As A approaches B with more and more A,
[2:08:59] Cameron McEwen: the threat is that
[2:09:01] Cameron McEwen: A takes over B,
[2:09:04] Cameron McEwen: in which case there's no carrying across because there's only A.
[2:09:09] Bob Dobbs: Correct.
[2:09:11] Bob Dobbs: Very astute.
[2:09:13] Bob Dobbs: All right.
[2:09:15] Bob Dobbs: I think we've got to end.
[2:09:17] Bob Dobbs: It's been over two hours,
[2:09:19] Bob Dobbs: and I've got to do something.
[2:09:20] Bob Dobbs: Yeah,
[2:09:21] Cameron McEwen: no problem.
[2:09:23] Cameron McEwen: I enjoyed our conversation today.
[2:09:25] Cameron McEwen: I thought that was good.
[2:09:26] Cameron McEwen: And it turns out that your book is more thick with suggestion than we knew.
[2:09:39] Bob Dobbs: Yes.
[2:09:39] Cameron McEwen: So that's excellent.
[2:09:42] Cameron McEwen: And now we're ending with the post-tactile,
[2:09:46] Cameron McEwen: xenochronous environment.
[2:09:48] Cameron McEwen: So that's a very good place to end and next time begin.
[2:09:54] Bob Dobbs: Yes,
[2:09:55] Bob Dobbs: and I think
[2:09:56] Bob Dobbs: Marshall, he'd report to Barry or something,
[2:09:59] Bob Dobbs: many insights,
[2:10:00] Bob Dobbs: Barry,
[2:10:00] Bob Dobbs: many breakthroughs.
[2:10:02] Bob Dobbs: So that happened tonight.
[2:10:04] Bob Dobbs: We had a full meal.
[2:10:06] Cameron McEwen: That was probably a phone call to two in the morning.
[2:10:09] Bob Dobbs: Yeah.
[2:10:11] Bob Dobbs: Yeah,
[2:10:11] Bob Dobbs: and
[2:10:12] Bob Dobbs: Barry was a cool guy.
[2:10:13] Bob Dobbs: He liked it.
[2:10:14] Bob Dobbs: He didn't care if he was awakened.
[2:10:16] Bob Dobbs: He enjoyed getting discoveries with McLuhan.
[2:10:19] Bob Dobbs: You know,
[2:10:19] Bob Dobbs: he could get them.
[2:10:20] Bob Dobbs: He was smart enough to dig it.
[2:10:23] Bob Dobbs: So we're digging what we're doing here,
[2:10:25] Bob Dobbs: so that's cool.
[2:10:27] Bob Dobbs: And we'll see where the post-tactile,
[2:10:30] Bob Dobbs: xenochronous milieu takes us.
[2:10:34] Bob Dobbs: Sure.
[2:10:34] Bob Dobbs: Now we're starting to get into Bob talk,
[2:10:35] Bob Dobbs: Bob vocabulary.
[2:10:38] Bob Dobbs: Bob terms.
[2:10:40] Cameron McEwen: Right?
[2:10:40] Cameron McEwen: Well,
[2:10:41] Cameron McEwen: I've been,
[2:10:41] Cameron McEwen: one of the,
[2:10:41] Cameron McEwen: you know,
[2:10:42] Cameron McEwen: we've only,
[2:10:43] Cameron McEwen: we only went through about three pages,
[2:10:46] Cameron McEwen: but one of the highlights was some of your language.
[2:10:50] Bob Dobbs: Was what?
[2:10:50] Cameron McEwen: You know,
[2:10:51] Cameron McEwen: the suitcase going around the world and stuff.
[2:10:53] Cameron McEwen: That's great.
[2:10:54] Cameron McEwen: Yeah,
[2:10:55] Cameron McEwen: so,
[2:10:55] Bob Dobbs: so.
[2:10:55] Cameron McEwen: Appreciate it.
[2:10:57] Bob Dobbs: Good.
[2:10:57] Bob Dobbs: But I still wish that,
[2:11:00] Bob Dobbs: that image I had,
[2:11:02] Bob Dobbs: I hope that shows up again someday,
[2:11:03] Bob Dobbs: because I had something there,
[2:11:05] Bob Dobbs: and it got lost,
[2:11:06] Bob Dobbs: got knocked out.
[2:11:07] Bob Dobbs: So,
[2:11:08] Bob Dobbs: we'll see if it comes back.
[2:11:09] Cameron McEwen: Maybe the.
[2:11:10] Cameron McEwen: Maybe via the astral body.
[2:11:14] Bob Dobbs: Yes.
[2:11:14] Bob Dobbs: Maybe I'll do a replay on the astral body.
[2:11:17] Cameron McEwen: Excellent.
[2:11:18] Bob Dobbs: Okay.
[2:11:19] Bob Dobbs: Thanks a lot,
[2:11:19] Bob Dobbs: Cameron.
[2:11:20] Bob Dobbs: Great talking to you.
[2:11:20] Cameron McEwen: Okay,
[2:11:22] Cameron McEwen: bud.
[2:11:22] Cameron McEwen: Take care.
[2:11:23] Bob Dobbs: Yep.
[2:11:23] Cameron McEwen: Talk to you later.