[00:02] Bob Dobbs: Welcome to the latest episode with Cameron McEwen and Bob Dobbs.
[00:05] Bob Dobbs: This is November 17th,
[00:07] Bob Dobbs: 2022.
[00:10] Bob Dobbs: We missed a week last week.
[00:13] Bob Dobbs: Normally we do it every two weeks.
[00:15] Bob Dobbs: And this is the 60th episode.
[00:22] Bob Dobbs: And we're on page 124,
[00:27] Bob Dobbs: 125.
[00:28] Bob Dobbs: We did two Kroker quotes.
[00:31] Bob Dobbs: Page 124,
[00:32] Bob Dobbs: 125,
[00:34] Bob Dobbs: but my blue commentary we didn't get to.
[00:38] Bob Dobbs: So the quotes are at the end of the last session,
[00:42] Bob Dobbs: number 59.
[00:42] Bob Dobbs: You can go back if you want to hear them at about the two-hour,
[00:48] Bob Dobbs: four-minute mark.
[00:51] Bob Dobbs: And the whole thing is two hours and 21 minutes.
[00:54] Bob Dobbs: So what do I say here?
[00:57] Bob Dobbs: We talk about...
[00:59] Bob Dobbs: McLuhan,
[01:00] Bob Dobbs: and he's not writing books,
[01:02] Bob Dobbs: that's 123,
[01:05] Bob Dobbs: for air-stealing causes.
[01:09] Bob Dobbs: He doesn't want to write books.
[01:12] Bob Dobbs: And then the intermedia action,
[01:15] Bob Dobbs: which was his new theme and cliched archetype,
[01:19] Bob Dobbs: talked about that.
[01:21] Bob Dobbs: Then we come to the Kroker quotes.
[01:28] Bob Dobbs: Kroker says,
[01:32] Bob Dobbs: this is 125,
[01:35] Bob Dobbs: 125,
[01:35] Bob Dobbs: let me check.
[01:38] Bob Dobbs: No,
[01:38] Bob Dobbs: 124,
[01:40] Bob Dobbs: halfway down.
[01:42] Bob Dobbs: After Arthur Kroker quote,
[01:43] Bob Dobbs: the will to technology and the culture of nihilism,
[01:46] Bob Dobbs: I say,
[01:46] Bob Dobbs: when,
[01:47] Bob Dobbs: quote,
[01:47] Bob Dobbs: we have broken beyond industrial,
[01:49] Bob Dobbs: that's quoting Kroker in 2004,
[01:53] Bob Dobbs: then we're in this weird zone,
[01:55] Bob Dobbs: as Baudrillard was saying,
[01:56] Bob Dobbs: quote,
[01:56] Bob Dobbs: we're neither active nor passive.
[01:58] Bob Dobbs: but we're fully involved.
[02:00] Bob Dobbs: And then complicit.
[02:03] Bob Dobbs: Does Kroker say complicit or
[02:05] Bob Dobbs: Baudrillard?
[02:08] Bob Dobbs: Yeah, Kroker says complicit.
[02:10] Bob Dobbs: Complicit in quotes.
[02:11] Bob Dobbs: Complicit in the,
[02:12] Bob Dobbs: quote,
[02:12] Bob Dobbs: vectors of an emergent form of finance capital that through the medium of the digital nervous system and biogenetics is reprocessing the classical codes of the commodity form into the flesh trade.
[02:27] Bob Dobbs: Then I say,
[02:27] Bob Dobbs: we're becoming Anthropomorphic Physical,
[02:30] Bob Dobbs: which is my term from my chart.
[02:33] Bob Dobbs: Then
[02:34] Bob Dobbs: Kroker says,
[02:40] Bob Dobbs: back up,
[02:40] Bob Dobbs: just check if it's,
[02:41] Bob Dobbs: I think it's,
[02:43] Bob Dobbs: yeah.
[02:43] Bob Dobbs: He says,
[02:45] Bob Dobbs: of surplus bodies and surplus imagination,
[02:48] Bob Dobbs: and doing so in a traditional capitalist style that is global only in the sense of monopoly.
[02:53] Bob Dobbs: End of quote.
[02:56] Bob Dobbs: And I say we're living a life of five bodies via this advanced technology,
[03:00] Bob Dobbs: but we're anchoring our icon of this complexity in the after image of the bureaucratic chemical body.
[03:09] Bob Dobbs: We're anchoring our icon of this complexity in the,
[03:11] Bob Dobbs: you know,
[03:12] Bob Dobbs: limiting it to the old chemical body.
[03:14] Cameron McEwen: The word anchoring is interesting there,
[03:20] Cameron McEwen: but do you really mean by anchoring only limiting?
[03:24] Cameron McEwen: Or do you mean something like emphasizing within the complex of the five?
[03:32] Bob Dobbs: Yeah,
[03:33] Bob Dobbs: it's a fetish.
[03:33] Bob Dobbs: It's an identity crisis.
[03:38] Bob Dobbs: We're trying to get solid somewheres,
[03:41] Bob Dobbs: land somewheres,
[03:43] Bob Dobbs: and we're doing it in the image of the chemical body because you can't get back to pure chemical body.
[03:49] Bob Dobbs: You've got the other bodies overlaying that.
[03:52] Bob Dobbs: So I say you're dealing with the afterimage of the bureaucratic chemical body.
[03:57] Bob Dobbs: And it's bureaucratic because you can be bureaucratic in the chemical body.
[04:01] Bob Dobbs: You know,
[04:01] Bob Dobbs: you're dealing with other flesh.
[04:03] Bob Dobbs: So Kroker has this term surplus flesh.
[04:06] Bob Dobbs: So I quote that.
[04:09] Bob Dobbs: Does he say that in this quote?
[04:11] Bob Dobbs: He uses it a lot in his writing.
[04:13] Bob Dobbs: Surplus flesh.
[04:16] Bob Dobbs: I don't see surplus flesh in these two.
[04:20] Bob Dobbs: quotes from Kroker just go back up here actually i'm looking at the first quote from Kroker that's what i'm talking about and
[04:35] Bob Dobbs: then the second quote he doesn't have the phrase uh surplus flesh so i'm quoting
[04:49] Bob Dobbs: What I know he says a lot,
[04:51] Bob Dobbs: surplus flesh.
[04:52] Bob Dobbs: So
[04:53] Bob Dobbs: I say surplus flesh is what's sitting on the planet,
[04:56] Bob Dobbs: an old nose cone.
[04:58] Bob Dobbs: And I could have put that in quotes,
[05:00] Bob Dobbs: because McLuhan in Counterblast 69 calls the Earth an old nose cone.
[05:05] Bob Dobbs: Right?
[05:07] Bob Dobbs: Yep.
[05:08] Bob Dobbs: And then I say people's bodies are obsolete.
[05:11] Bob Dobbs: And I'm using the cliche meaning of obsolete,
[05:13] Bob Dobbs: which is not perfect in the McLuhan thing.
[05:16] Bob Dobbs: But you could say when something's obsolete,
[05:18] Bob Dobbs: you get more of it.
[05:19] Bob Dobbs: So we get more and more chemical bodies,
[05:21] Bob Dobbs: and that's called overpopulation.
[05:23] Bob Dobbs: Right?
[05:24] Bob Dobbs: And that's
[05:25] Bob Dobbs: McLuhan obsolescence.
[05:27] Bob Dobbs: People's bodies are obsolete,
[05:28] Bob Dobbs: and surplus minds are obsolete,
[05:30] Bob Dobbs: too.
[05:31] Bob Dobbs: And then I quote him again.
[05:32] Bob Dobbs: And the medium of the digital nervous system and biogenetics is reprocessing the classical codes of the commodity form into our bodies,
[05:40] Bob Dobbs: of which there are too many.
[05:42] Bob Dobbs: Anyway,
[05:43] Bob Dobbs: one should be happy that we're mutating our bodies.
[05:45] Bob Dobbs: We're using them to get a token fee.
[05:48] Bob Dobbs: What the hell does that mean?
[05:49] Bob Dobbs: We're using them to get a token fee.
[05:52] Bob Dobbs: Then I quote Kroker again,
[05:53] Bob Dobbs: and doing so in a traditional capitalist style that is global only in the sense of monopoly.
[05:57] Bob Dobbs: Unquote.
[05:58] Bob Dobbs: This economy is global because it's a monopoly,
[06:01] Bob Dobbs: which is global.
[06:02] Bob Dobbs: It's a small world for the mega capitalists.
[06:04] Bob Dobbs: They can fly over anywhere.
[06:07] Bob Dobbs: So then,
[06:09] Bob Dobbs: I seem to have three Kroker quotes.
[06:13] Bob Dobbs: Let me just check that.
[06:14] Bob Dobbs: Do you see that?
[06:17] Cameron McEwen: You have one on 124,
[06:19] Cameron McEwen: you have one on 125.
[06:22] Bob Dobbs: Okay,
[06:22] Bob Dobbs: all right.
[06:23] Cameron McEwen: I don't see another one.
[06:24] Bob Dobbs: All right,
[06:25] Bob Dobbs: so
[06:26] Bob Dobbs: I mistook from the second quote.
[06:29] Bob Dobbs: I thought it was new.
[06:31] Bob Dobbs: Not in the second quote,
[06:33] Bob Dobbs: but it is in the second quote.
[06:35] Bob Dobbs: So I say they can fly,
[06:39] Bob Dobbs: the mega-capitalists can fly over the little village wherever they want very easily.
[06:43] Bob Dobbs: So then I say capitalism is obsolete,
[06:46] Bob Dobbs: and now we've got a new politics based on chaos theory.
[06:49] Bob Dobbs: It adopts,
[06:49] Bob Dobbs: now there's Trump,
[06:52] Bob Dobbs: right?
[06:53] Bob Dobbs: There's me on my way to explaining Trump and the tech body.
[06:57] Bob Dobbs: It adopts quantum metaphors.
[07:00] Bob Dobbs: And I quote,
[07:01] Bob Dobbs: symbolism,
[07:01] Bob Dobbs: virtuality,
[07:04] Bob Dobbs: perturbations,
[07:05] Bob Dobbs: morphological changes of state,
[07:07] Bob Dobbs: virtual optics that exist only because it is aware of unintended consequences of technology.
[07:13] Bob Dobbs: It knows,
[07:16] Bob Dobbs: it's got a popular McLuhan sensibility.
[07:20] Bob Dobbs: There's been enough accents,
[07:22] Bob Dobbs: you know,
[07:22] Bob Dobbs: from the 60s on that people say,
[07:24] Bob Dobbs: yeah,
[07:24] Bob Dobbs: there's a lot of unintended stuff going on here.
[07:26] Bob Dobbs: They're not sophisticated like McLuhan,
[07:28] Bob Dobbs: but they're intuiting that.
[07:29] Bob Dobbs: And I kind of say,
[07:30] Bob Dobbs: you know,
[07:31] Bob Dobbs: over the last 10 years,
[07:32] Bob Dobbs: people are natural media ecologists in the old sense,
[07:35] Bob Dobbs: or a limited sense,
[07:37] Bob Dobbs: not in a sophisticated sense.
[07:38] Bob Dobbs: But people were becoming,
[07:41] Bob Dobbs: you know,
[07:41] Bob Dobbs: that old quote from Tennyson,
[07:43] Bob Dobbs: the child is father to the man,
[07:44] Bob Dobbs: that becomes popular wisdom.
[07:47] Bob Dobbs: McLuhan paranoid level of media ecology is becoming popular wisdom.
[07:52] Bob Dobbs: You know what I mean?
[07:54] Cameron McEwen: Yep.
[07:55] Bob Dobbs: There is a desire to...
[07:56] Bob Dobbs: slow down things or we we shouldn't be rushing into this stuff um so that is uh westerners becoming tribal again you know they would kill the inventors of machines so
[08:11] Bob Dobbs: we were retrieving the paranoid level of media ecology of primitive societies right they didn't like new technologies so i don't know if i say that but uh i have said that in other places um
[08:26] Bob Dobbs: Which is another way the traditional,
[08:29] Bob Dobbs: no,
[08:30] Bob Dobbs: the limited understanding of McLuhan,
[08:32] Bob Dobbs: which we don't do,
[08:35] Bob Dobbs: that leads to knee-jerk media ecology.
[08:38] Bob Dobbs: You know what I mean?
[08:38] Bob Dobbs: Sure.
[08:39] Bob Dobbs: Because there's actually…
[08:41] Cameron McEwen: That is what media ecology is.
[08:44] Bob Dobbs: Yeah.
[08:45] Bob Dobbs: Well,
[08:46] Bob Dobbs: yeah,
[08:46] Bob Dobbs: media ecology as people use it.
[08:48] Bob Dobbs: But there is a vision of an interacting and a balanced situation that people can't see.
[08:55] Bob Dobbs: a balanced ecology or a interacting,
[08:58] Bob Dobbs: comprehensive,
[08:59] Bob Dobbs: holistic something that
[09:03] Bob Dobbs: McLuhan actually,
[09:04] Bob Dobbs: as a poet,
[09:05] Bob Dobbs: was seeing there was an order in society,
[09:10] Bob Dobbs: but nobody knew how to...
[09:10] Bob Dobbs: Well,
[09:11] Cameron McEwen: that's right,
[09:11] Cameron McEwen: but order doesn't necessarily mean balanced.
[09:14] Bob Dobbs: Right.
[09:16] Cameron McEwen: Balance is one possible order,
[09:20] Cameron McEwen: and what McLuhan saw was...
[09:24] Cameron McEwen: The dynamism of orders,
[09:26] Cameron McEwen: plural.
[09:27] Bob Dobbs: Yeah,
[09:28] Bob Dobbs: and I would say your interior landscape gets to that,
[09:31] Bob Dobbs: that kind of order.
[09:32] Bob Dobbs: It's in the interior landscape,
[09:34] Bob Dobbs: not a visual balancing order.
[09:37] Bob Dobbs: That's a Western bias.
[09:39] Bob Dobbs: It's not trying to balance yourself in relation to some outer world.
[09:42] Bob Dobbs: There's no outer world to balance off.
[09:44] Bob Dobbs: You've got to get an internal balance,
[09:47] Bob Dobbs: which would be your imaging of where you are.
[09:51] Bob Dobbs: And so I say you've got to image that you've got five bodies.
[09:54] Bob Dobbs: That's how you begin to image what you're up against.
[09:58] Cameron McEwen: I agree with that,
[09:59] Cameron McEwen: but remember that
[10:01] Cameron McEwen: I always insist that the interior landscape is not interior,
[10:06] Cameron McEwen: meaning inside somebody's head or anything like that.
[10:11] Cameron McEwen: The interior landscape is the rigorous consideration of media.
[10:20] Cameron McEwen: Media are inherently extensions.
[10:24] Cameron McEwen: So the difference between the interior and the exterior...
[10:27] Cameron McEwen: exterior landscape is that the exterior landscape tries to get rid of the bias of human observation yes to get to the real facts yeah the interior landscape includes
[10:42] Cameron McEwen: the bias of human observation as what needs to be interrogated yes and noticed and uh question looked at and figure out how other ways to look at it
[10:57] Bob Dobbs: not the conventional ways.
[10:59] Bob Dobbs: So that often means you come up with new terms,
[11:04] Bob Dobbs: new words to get out of the cliche ruts of normal words like capitalism.
[11:13] Bob Dobbs: You know,
[11:13] Bob Dobbs: McLuhan criticized journalists in the 60s as he would say,
[11:17] Bob Dobbs: putting together their daily newspaper copy using the handy labels of left and right and so lazily.
[11:26] Bob Dobbs: With those categories,
[11:27] Bob Dobbs: they could make a story up real fast because they're under pressure to produce for every day.
[11:34] Bob Dobbs: That syndrome is so rampant now that the laziness of categorization has become a huge disservice.
[11:44] Cameron McEwen: Sure.
[11:44] Cameron McEwen: Well,
[11:44] Cameron McEwen: people now realize that there's nothing but categorization.
[11:49] Cameron McEwen: That's what lazy media ecology is all about,
[11:52] Cameron McEwen: right,
[11:52] Cameron McEwen: that you can't get outside of the categories.
[11:55] Cameron McEwen: You might as well use them.
[11:57] Cameron McEwen: So there's a kind of global capitalism involved in the financing and publication of categories and nothing else but categories.
[12:13] Bob Dobbs: Right.
[12:14] Bob Dobbs: And Kroker tries to bypass that somehow by coming in with new ideas and not getting stuck with the categories.
[12:22] Bob Dobbs: He's always dismissing the categories.
[12:25] Bob Dobbs: Okay,
[12:27] Bob Dobbs: so the average awareness is because it is aware of unintended consequences of technology,
[12:34] Bob Dobbs: which is what Kroker says.
[12:38] Bob Dobbs: Does he say that?
[12:40] Bob Dobbs: Yes,
[12:41] Bob Dobbs: he's aware that it's normal awareness.
[12:44] Bob Dobbs: You know that letter to Playboy in 1970?
[12:47] Bob Dobbs: Acoustic space was normal awareness,
[12:48] Bob Dobbs: but nobody was aware of Finnegans Wake,
[12:52] Bob Dobbs: multi-sensory awareness,
[12:53] Bob Dobbs: as Marshall McLuhan says in Playboy.
[12:59] Bob Dobbs: so media ecology so I have here
[13:03] Bob Dobbs: I'm outlining some of the discoveries of the global theater everybody was becoming a quote media ecologist by instinct so
[13:10] Bob Dobbs: I say what I just explained to you that's what I was getting at so and I'm saying
[13:16] Bob Dobbs: I'm supplementing that Kroker notices that so
[13:25] Bob Dobbs: I jumped ahead though there.
[13:26] Bob Dobbs: What was I doing?
[13:28] Bob Dobbs: Yeah,
[13:29] Bob Dobbs: the global managers know it's going to be hard to control their crude way of doing media ecology.
[13:36] Bob Dobbs: And which rubs,
[13:37] Bob Dobbs: quote,
[13:38] Bob Dobbs: Kroker says,
[13:38] Bob Dobbs: and which rubs the dreams of digital reality against the chemical body of third world labor camps,
[13:44] Bob Dobbs: environmental shutdowns,
[13:46] Bob Dobbs: genetically engineered food,
[13:47] Bob Dobbs: and the triumph of economic injustice,
[13:50] Bob Dobbs: unquote.
[13:51] Bob Dobbs: Those are all chemical body activities.
[13:53] Bob Dobbs: that are turning into prisons.
[13:55] Bob Dobbs: It,
[13:56] Bob Dobbs: quote,
[13:56] Bob Dobbs: rubs the dreams of digital reality against the human disturbances of third world labor camps.
[14:04] Bob Dobbs: The dreams of digital reality,
[14:05] Bob Dobbs: that's the life of the digital body,
[14:07] Bob Dobbs: the chip body,
[14:08] Bob Dobbs: which people are very engaged in.
[14:11] Bob Dobbs: I'm outlining some of the disservices of the global theater.
[14:16] Bob Dobbs: Everybody was becoming a media ecologist by instinct.
[14:19] Bob Dobbs: Then,
[14:20] Bob Dobbs: the more thought...
[14:20] Cameron McEwen: By the way,
[14:21] Cameron McEwen: notice the...
[14:24] Cameron McEwen: overlay between prisons and categories or media ecology and the gross sense.
[14:37] Bob Dobbs: Yeah.
[14:38] Cameron McEwen: Right?
[14:39] Cameron McEwen: Everybody is aware that categories are prisons but nobody thinks that you can go somehow get out of those prisons.
[14:46] Bob Dobbs: Yeah.
[14:46] Cameron McEwen: And so the whole world is involved in the business of getting used to our prisons.
[14:52] Bob Dobbs: Yes,
[14:52] Bob Dobbs: they have the post-structuralists,
[14:54] Bob Dobbs: you know,
[14:55] Bob Dobbs: Julia Kristeva,
[14:56] Bob Dobbs: write books like The Prison of Language or...
[14:59] Bob Dobbs: Language is desire.
[15:00] Bob Dobbs: You know,
[15:01] Bob Dobbs: they really make a fetish out of that point you just said,
[15:06] Bob Dobbs: the prison of language.
[15:08] Cameron McEwen: Yeah,
[15:08] Cameron McEwen: that was Jameson,
[15:09] Cameron McEwen: by the way.
[15:10] Bob Dobbs: Right.
[15:10] Bob Dobbs: No,
[15:11] Bob Dobbs: I know that.
[15:13] Bob Dobbs: I just found a very interesting speech we played last week on him.
[15:17] Bob Dobbs: I should tell you about it sometime.
[15:24] Bob Dobbs: So then in the non-blue text,
[15:26] Bob Dobbs: the more serious text,
[15:28] Bob Dobbs: so to speak,
[15:29] Bob Dobbs: I go,
[15:29] Bob Dobbs: as the global city was being imagined in the
[15:32] Bob Dobbs: 1960s, we actually were witnessing the creation of the Android meme.
[15:36] Bob Dobbs: In brackets,
[15:37] Bob Dobbs: a phrase I coined in the mid-90s.
[15:40] Bob Dobbs: Then I say,
[15:40] Bob Dobbs: what was lately missed was McLuhan's more relevant phrase,
[15:44] Bob Dobbs: Global Membrane,
[15:45] Bob Dobbs: in December 64,
[15:47] Bob Dobbs: Nation magazine.
[15:49] Bob Dobbs: So then I quote his excellent article on Burroughs,
[15:53] Bob Dobbs: All men are totally involved in the insides of all men.
[15:56] Bob Dobbs: There's no privacy and no private parts.
[15:59] Bob Dobbs: In a world in which we are all ingesting and digesting one another,
[16:03] Bob Dobbs: there can be no obscenity or pornography or decency.
[16:07] Bob Dobbs: See,
[16:07] Bob Dobbs: no obscenity or pornography or decency.
[16:11] Bob Dobbs: Such is the law of electric media,
[16:12] Bob Dobbs: which stretch the nerves to form a Global Membrane of enclosure.
[16:18] Bob Dobbs: Now,
[16:18] Bob Dobbs: this thing about everybody's involved in the insides of all men,
[16:21] Bob Dobbs: and there's no obscenity,
[16:24] Bob Dobbs: no pornography or decency,
[16:26] Bob Dobbs: and everybody's eating each other,
[16:28] Bob Dobbs: that has...
[16:28] Bob Dobbs: that has entered the popular consciousness with this collapse of FTX.
[16:33] Bob Dobbs: And this Sam guy,
[16:34] Bob Dobbs: his name,
[16:35] Bob Dobbs: Bankman Freed,
[16:37] Bob Dobbs: or Fried,
[16:38] Bob Dobbs: right?
[16:38] Bob Dobbs: Post-banking.
[16:42] Bob Dobbs: But he's known as a polyamorist,
[16:44] Bob Dobbs: okay?
[16:47] Bob Dobbs: The top of his staff,
[16:48] Bob Dobbs: the inner circle,
[16:49] Bob Dobbs: were copulating communards.
[16:52] Bob Dobbs: And so it enters into the population,
[16:55] Bob Dobbs: this millennial level.
[16:57] Bob Dobbs: Extreme tribalism with no identity.
[17:00] Bob Dobbs: They fuck anything that moves,
[17:02] Bob Dobbs: and it's part of their business world.
[17:06] Bob Dobbs: So
[17:07] Bob Dobbs: I'm thinking of this Burroughs time with the ingesting and digesting of one another.
[17:12] Bob Dobbs: That is now normal awareness,
[17:14] Bob Dobbs: normal experience.
[17:18] Cameron McEwen: But,
[17:19] Cameron McEwen: you know,
[17:20] Cameron McEwen: McLuhan's not endorsing this.
[17:22] Bob Dobbs: No.
[17:23] Cameron McEwen: This should be read alongside his Prospect
[17:26] Cameron McEwen: essay from a few years before this where he talks about the pain of being alive and having our nerves outside ourselves.
[17:36] Cameron McEwen: So what he saw going on from sort of his Catholic standpoint was very painful,
[17:45] Cameron McEwen: but it was real.
[17:47] Cameron McEwen: So he was definitely advocating research of uh
[17:54] Cameron McEwen: what was going on and how it was going on.
[17:57] Cameron McEwen: But that's very different from saying that it's good.
[18:01] Cameron McEwen: And he made that point lots of times that just because he was saying we need to investigate digital media or electronic media doesn't mean that he supports them.
[18:17] Cameron McEwen: It simply means that it needs to be done.
[18:20] Bob Dobbs: Yeah,
[18:20] Bob Dobbs: if he's talking about something,
[18:21] Bob Dobbs: it doesn't mean he's for it.
[18:23] Cameron McEwen: Correct.
[18:24] Bob Dobbs: That's what he used to say.
[18:25] Bob Dobbs: But this is a great statement.
[18:27] Bob Dobbs: You have to read it carefully.
[18:28] Bob Dobbs: We are all ingesting and digesting one another.
[18:30] Bob Dobbs: There can be no obscenity or pornography,
[18:34] Bob Dobbs: but there can be no good.
[18:36] Bob Dobbs: There can be no decency.
[18:38] Bob Dobbs: See?
[18:38] Bob Dobbs: You have no posture available to pretend that your identity is preserving something or you're standing for something.
[18:47] Bob Dobbs: See,
[18:47] Bob Dobbs: that's really important.
[18:49] Bob Dobbs: It's easy to say there can be no obscenity or pornography because
[18:52] Bob Dobbs: The liberal attitude of the 60s and 70s was,
[18:55] Bob Dobbs: you know,
[18:56] Bob Dobbs: what's it matter?
[18:56] Bob Dobbs: It's just a chemical body.
[18:59] Bob Dobbs: But the liberals think that position of tolerating chaos,
[19:04] Bob Dobbs: so to speak,
[19:06] Bob Dobbs: and not normal social rules,
[19:10] Bob Dobbs: they think that's a decent,
[19:11] Bob Dobbs: up-to-date posture.
[19:13] Bob Dobbs: But that's not even valid.
[19:15] Bob Dobbs: You can't be decent.
[19:16] Bob Dobbs: That's really important.
[19:20] Cameron McEwen: What he's talking about there is...
[19:23] Cameron McEwen: people or the whole world being within the unconscious.
[19:30] Cameron McEwen: And within the dynamics of the unconscious,
[19:34] Cameron McEwen: there is no such thing as some valid category and there's certainly nothing like traditional decency.
[19:45] Bob Dobbs: Right,
[19:45] Bob Dobbs: so that is what was I going to say
[19:51] Bob Dobbs: That's the planet of the dead.
[19:53] Bob Dobbs: And he talks about the Gutenberg Galaxy,
[19:55] Bob Dobbs: about the archetypes of the private postures of mind that Alexander Pope dealt with.
[20:00] Bob Dobbs: anticipating Freud,
[20:02] Bob Dobbs: and then now we're dealing in the 20th century with the archetypes of the collective postures of media communication,
[20:09] Bob Dobbs: and they are being absorbed.
[20:12] Bob Dobbs: They are being disappeared in the intermedia action process,
[20:17] Bob Dobbs: right?
[20:17] Bob Dobbs: And then it looks like Finnegans Wake.
[20:19] Bob Dobbs: So the chemical body issue is gone,
[20:27] Bob Dobbs: and the postures that people can make
[20:29] Bob Dobbs: with their individual mind,
[20:30] Bob Dobbs: their literate brain,
[20:34] Bob Dobbs: is now dealing with the Armageddon,
[20:37] Bob Dobbs: the apocalypse,
[20:39] Bob Dobbs: of the archetypes of collective postures,
[20:41] Bob Dobbs: which are media.
[20:42] Bob Dobbs: They're the archetypes of the social unconscious,
[20:45] Bob Dobbs: he calls them.
[20:46] Bob Dobbs: Page 31 of Counterblast.
[20:48] Bob Dobbs: Those are very profound statements.
[20:50] Bob Dobbs: That's what you've got to understand to get what Marshall McLuhan talking about.
[20:53] Bob Dobbs: And what you just said was a translation of what I'm saying.
[20:58] Cameron McEwen: All right.
[20:59] Bob Dobbs: You know,
[21:00] Bob Dobbs: I'm quoting the McLuhan that you're not quoting,
[21:03] Bob Dobbs: but you're saying what he said on page 31.
[21:06] Bob Dobbs: You know,
[21:07] Bob Dobbs: the archetypes of the private postures of mind,
[21:11] Bob Dobbs: that private posture of mind comes in with literacy,
[21:13] Bob Dobbs: but you have to understand that was already starting to be made conscious because the archetypes of visual space were coming in.
[21:25] Bob Dobbs: The collectivities were starting.
[21:27] Bob Dobbs: a mess.
[21:29] Bob Dobbs: media of the printing press.
[21:31] Bob Dobbs: And this is what Pope wrote about in the Dunciad,
[21:35] Bob Dobbs: right?
[21:36] Bob Dobbs: Talking about the explosion of print,
[21:40] Bob Dobbs: the blurring,
[21:41] Bob Dobbs: the blinding.
[21:44] Bob Dobbs: And these are,
[21:45] Bob Dobbs: when you get these,
[21:46] Bob Dobbs: they're beautiful images.
[21:47] Bob Dobbs: And you see that it began with Pope and ends with
[21:52] Bob Dobbs: Finnegans Wake.
[21:53] Bob Dobbs: And you see Joyce seems to be aware of that.
[21:55] Bob Dobbs: So he goes through the Pope gang.
[21:57] Bob Dobbs: which is
[21:59] Bob Dobbs: Gulliver's Travels,
[22:00] Bob Dobbs: Dean Swift,
[22:02] Bob Dobbs: and Tristan Shandy,
[22:04] Bob Dobbs: and another guy,
[22:05] Bob Dobbs: I can't remember,
[22:07] Bob Dobbs: Stern does Tristan Shandy,
[22:09] Bob Dobbs: you've got Pope and Swift,
[22:12] Bob Dobbs: and maybe some other guy,
[22:13] Bob Dobbs: or somebody,
[22:15] Bob Dobbs: they all were beginning to be collective media ecologists,
[22:21] Bob Dobbs: right?
[22:21] Bob Dobbs: They were seeing a collectivity that was a new unconscious.
[22:24] Bob Dobbs: And then...
[22:25] Bob Dobbs: You get this situation at the end where there is no unconscious other than that the collective consciousness,
[22:34] Bob Dobbs: that's what happened electrically,
[22:35] Bob Dobbs: people aren't aware of.
[22:37] Bob Dobbs: So McLuhan would say that we market the unconscious.
[22:40] Bob Dobbs: The old literate unconscious is the content of pornography or any issue that's considered radical or conservative,
[22:53] Bob Dobbs: any posture.
[22:55] Bob Dobbs: That is what's sold.
[22:57] Bob Dobbs: And so you have the William Buckleys on the right,
[22:59] Bob Dobbs: and you've got the Noam Chomskys on the left,
[23:01] Bob Dobbs: and they're all postures of individual mind,
[23:04] Bob Dobbs: and they're not addressing the collective consciousness.
[23:08] Bob Dobbs: See,
[23:09] Bob Dobbs: that to me is really important.
[23:11] Bob Dobbs: If you understand what I'm saying...
[23:13] Cameron McEwen: They're not addressing it because it's invisible.
[23:15] Bob Dobbs: That's right.
[23:16] Cameron McEwen: And it's invisible because it's environmental.
[23:18] Bob Dobbs: Right.
[23:19] Bob Dobbs: And if you can notice it and say it,
[23:21] Bob Dobbs: then you're not...
[23:23] Bob Dobbs: Fooled by any of the movements and liberatory or retrievals of fascism or old neoconservative values,
[23:31] Bob Dobbs: none of that,
[23:32] Bob Dobbs: you're going to be fooled.
[23:33] Bob Dobbs: So you don't subscribe to any newspaper or any magazine.
[23:38] Bob Dobbs: See,
[23:38] Bob Dobbs: it's a very privileged position I'm talking about here.
[23:42] Bob Dobbs: When you get it,
[23:44] Bob Dobbs: I'm confident that I got it.
[23:45] Bob Dobbs: You know,
[23:46] Bob Dobbs: back in the 80s,
[23:46] Bob Dobbs: went on the radio about it.
[23:48] Bob Dobbs: So I never was.
[23:50] Bob Dobbs: impressed with whatever the chemical bodies were coming up with.
[23:53] Bob Dobbs: But you have to understand that wealth was generated by marketing the old literate unconscious in all its categories and positions.
[24:02] Cameron McEwen: Absolutely.
[24:03] Cameron McEwen: Absolutely.
[24:04] Cameron McEwen: So that's movies or novels have to be edgy,
[24:12] Cameron McEwen: right?
[24:13] Cameron McEwen: And what does edgy mean?
[24:14] Cameron McEwen: It means that they're bringing up stuff that's in the unconscious.
[24:19] Cameron McEwen: And people sort of know about it vaguely,
[24:22] Cameron McEwen: but then somebody names it a little bit.
[24:25] Bob Dobbs: Yes.
[24:25] Cameron McEwen: And this is the marketing process of the collective waters.
[24:32] Bob Dobbs: Yeah,
[24:32] Bob Dobbs: the edgy is point out what I just said in a crude way that there's something collective that's threatening everybody's unconscious strategy in the plot to novels and sitcoms.
[24:46] Bob Dobbs: And they're all up against a problem that is very easy to see.
[24:49] Bob Dobbs: If you take time off and read McLuhan enough to get it,
[24:53] Bob Dobbs: then you can't make a movie about what's happening.
[25:00] Bob Dobbs: You have to fall back on the old literate unconscious and then make that vulnerable.
[25:05] Bob Dobbs: Under stress,
[25:06] Bob Dobbs: which creates the tension of the drama,
[25:09] Bob Dobbs: you know,
[25:09] Bob Dobbs: from Fellini up to
[25:10] Bob Dobbs: Martin Scorsese,
[25:12] Bob Dobbs: and the modern metaphor of the mafia,
[25:14] Bob Dobbs: this fucking thing that's there,
[25:15] Bob Dobbs: that tribe that's come back and it's threatening everybody,
[25:21] Bob Dobbs: the actual reality of,
[25:25] Bob Dobbs: to see what I'm talking about and what you're seeing and agreeing with,
[25:29] Bob Dobbs: cannot be presented in a TV,
[25:32] Bob Dobbs: movie,
[25:33] Bob Dobbs: theater,
[25:34] Bob Dobbs: book.
[25:34] Bob Dobbs: or anything.
[25:36] Bob Dobbs: At best,
[25:37] Bob Dobbs: maybe Finnegans Wake,
[25:39] Bob Dobbs: but who the heck is going to look at Finnegans Wake?
[25:41] Bob Dobbs: You've got to be luckily turned on to it,
[25:44] Bob Dobbs: and then you explore it,
[25:45] Bob Dobbs: and then you find out what McLuhan says.
[25:47] Bob Dobbs: Creativity is obsolete.
[25:49] Bob Dobbs: This is a major point McLuhan says,
[25:51] Bob Dobbs: a cliche archetype.
[25:52] Bob Dobbs: Creativity is a cliche,
[25:55] Bob Dobbs: because it's only dealing,
[25:57] Bob Dobbs: at best,
[25:57] Bob Dobbs: an edgy,
[25:59] Bob Dobbs: inarticulate expression.
[26:02] Bob Dobbs: that it's going to fail because you're making a movie about a bunch of people.
[26:06] Bob Dobbs: I used to say,
[26:07] Bob Dobbs: if you see a movie with humans in it or TV shows,
[26:10] Bob Dobbs: it's obsolete.
[26:11] Bob Dobbs: There ain't no humans today or chemical bodies.
[26:14] Bob Dobbs: You know what I'm saying?
[26:16] Cameron McEwen: Yeah,
[26:16] Cameron McEwen: I do know what you're saying.
[26:18] Cameron McEwen: What you're talking about is related to McLuhan's point that jokes are grievances.
[26:23] Cameron McEwen: So the edgy stuff that gets brought up,
[26:30] Cameron McEwen: which is...
[26:31] Cameron McEwen: marketed as a kind of looking in the bedroom or looking into the hidden motives,
[26:38] Cameron McEwen: things like this.
[26:39] Cameron McEwen: These are really grievances of stuff that's coming to the surface but can't be acknowledged as some kind of...
[26:51] Bob Dobbs: Knee-jerk response.
[26:53] Cameron McEwen: Yeah.
[26:54] Bob Dobbs: Some kind of knee-jerk response to the situation.
[26:57] Cameron McEwen: Right.
[26:58] Cameron McEwen: But that needn't be knee-jerk.
[27:01] Cameron McEwen: Yes.
[27:02] Cameron McEwen: It's a knee-jerk response that cries out for detailed observation and study,
[27:09] Cameron McEwen: but instead of that gets marketed.
[27:12] Bob Dobbs: Right.
[27:12] Bob Dobbs: And it's in the cliches of rock culture,
[27:16] Bob Dobbs: the cliches of any arts scene.
[27:18] Cameron McEwen: Absolutely.
[27:20] Cameron McEwen: Cliches of everything.
[27:21] Bob Dobbs: Right.
[27:21] Bob Dobbs: And everybody gets strung out because they're not aware of what is consciously really stressing them.
[27:28] Bob Dobbs: They can't see it.
[27:29] Bob Dobbs: So
[27:30] Bob Dobbs: They try to assuage old,
[27:32] Bob Dobbs: knowable,
[27:32] Bob Dobbs: unconscious things,
[27:33] Bob Dobbs: and that doesn't work,
[27:34] Bob Dobbs: whatever therapy they come up with.
[27:38] Bob Dobbs: And so they all end up heroin addicts and the whole ridiculous.
[27:42] Bob Dobbs: I mean,
[27:42] Bob Dobbs: the whole population is on fentanyl or something,
[27:45] Bob Dobbs: you know?
[27:47] Bob Dobbs: That's what you hear about,
[27:48] Bob Dobbs: the small towns.
[27:50] Bob Dobbs: So this is so obvious when you get McLuhan,
[27:53] Bob Dobbs: right?
[27:55] Cameron McEwen: I think so.
[27:56] Bob Dobbs: Yeah.
[27:56] Bob Dobbs: And Burroughs is doing a good job here.
[28:00] Bob Dobbs: Or McLuhan's translation of Burroughs,
[28:02] Bob Dobbs: all men are totally involved in the insides of all men.
[28:06] Bob Dobbs: There is no privacy and no private parts.
[28:08] Bob Dobbs: You don't have a fucking dick anymore.
[28:12] Bob Dobbs: In a world in which we are all ingesting and digesting one another,
[28:16] Bob Dobbs: and you can see surrealistic art or even modern,
[28:20] Bob Dobbs: postmodern art,
[28:21] Bob Dobbs: they show bodies involved and forms inner,
[28:24] Bob Dobbs: psychedelically merging with each other.
[28:26] Bob Dobbs: That's what's going on.
[28:27] Bob Dobbs: But it's a rearview mirror image.
[28:29] Bob Dobbs: But it's the closest to the wrong image.
[28:32] Bob Dobbs: It's the best wrong image.
[28:35] Cameron McEwen: So notice,
[28:37] Cameron McEwen: if somebody were to say this about physical atoms,
[28:43] Cameron McEwen: if somebody were to say,
[28:44] Cameron McEwen: you know,
[28:45] Cameron McEwen: some of the oxygen that you were just breathing and then got exhaled,
[28:51] Cameron McEwen: I then inhaled it,
[28:53] Cameron McEwen: right?
[28:53] Cameron McEwen: Or you touched this doorknob and I got some of your skin.
[28:58] Cameron McEwen: molecules on my hand.
[29:00] Cameron McEwen: Nobody would find that exceptional.
[29:03] Cameron McEwen: But if you then say,
[29:05] Cameron McEwen: well,
[29:05] Cameron McEwen: but that's the same way with the mind,
[29:08] Cameron McEwen: that we're all involved ingesting and digesting one another in the mind,
[29:15] Cameron McEwen: then people don't get it.
[29:16] Bob Dobbs: Right.
[29:19] Bob Dobbs: They have to take a drug,
[29:21] Bob Dobbs: an LSD,
[29:22] Bob Dobbs: to get a vision of it.
[29:24] Bob Dobbs: And because they don't know that they can...
[29:27] Bob Dobbs: rethink it.
[29:28] Bob Dobbs: I was reading this book about these therapists now,
[29:31] Bob Dobbs: people take the LSD,
[29:32] Bob Dobbs: and then they have to talk the next day to assess what the hell happened.
[29:36] Bob Dobbs: But I know if you added the McLuhan element,
[29:39] Bob Dobbs: you could get them to see it's in the present.
[29:42] Bob Dobbs: And then they wouldn't need to have that cataclysmic LSD experience,
[29:46] Bob Dobbs: because it's only going to get them up to the edge of what McLuhan's talking about.
[29:50] Bob Dobbs: So you need to have a larger There's...
[29:55] Bob Dobbs: situation a bigger ground than the lsd experience to understand and this i think is what Theall was getting at that McLuhan was the new quote mystic he was the new illuminati he was seeing he was the new seer and the marketed seers like tim leary or
[30:13] Bob Dobbs: Zappa or anybody out there,
[30:15] Bob Dobbs: Warhol,
[30:16] Bob Dobbs: who seems to be edgy,
[30:18] Bob Dobbs: they never got as far as McLuhan did on how to have a poise in this situation.
[30:28] Bob Dobbs: All the religion meditating techniques don't work.
[30:30] Bob Dobbs: Prayer doesn't work.
[30:31] Bob Dobbs: It might work in some community or something accidentally,
[30:35] Bob Dobbs: but it doesn't deal with this collective clairvoyance that we all need to become aware of.
[30:42] Cameron McEwen: For me,
[30:43] Cameron McEwen: the collective clairvoyance that you're talking about is the new science.
[30:49] Bob Dobbs: Yes.
[30:51] Bob Dobbs: And that's why he wasn't,
[30:53] Bob Dobbs: he liked to say,
[30:54] Bob Dobbs: well,
[30:54] Bob Dobbs: I'm trying to match my stuff to what science demands.
[30:58] Bob Dobbs: No,
[30:58] Bob Dobbs: man,
[30:58] Bob Dobbs: he was telling a new science.
[31:01] Bob Dobbs: And regular science was obsolete.
[31:03] Bob Dobbs: But he couldn't really say that much.
[31:05] Bob Dobbs: You know what I mean?
[31:08] Bob Dobbs: Yeah.
[31:08] Bob Dobbs: Yeah,
[31:09] Bob Dobbs: he made the new,
[31:09] Bob Dobbs: the new kind of science.
[31:11] Bob Dobbs: So this is the law of electric media,
[31:15] Bob Dobbs: he says in the Burroughs article,
[31:17] Bob Dobbs: which stretched the nerves to form a Global Membrane of enclosure.
[31:21] Bob Dobbs: So what do I say about that?
[31:22] Bob Dobbs: That's a pretty good quote.
[31:25] Bob Dobbs: So I say,
[31:26] Bob Dobbs: we're announcing we're living with Mick Jagger in a small room.
[31:31] Bob Dobbs: There's no pornography,
[31:32] Bob Dobbs: there's no decency.
[31:35] Bob Dobbs: So that's pretty.
[31:35] Bob Dobbs: And there was an actual movie called Performance about 1970.
[31:40] Bob Dobbs: about Mick Jagger being a rock star,
[31:42] Bob Dobbs: and then some psychopath comes into his life,
[31:45] Bob Dobbs: and eventually they switch identities.
[31:47] Bob Dobbs: Mick Jagger doesn't want to be a rock star anymore,
[31:49] Bob Dobbs: and the psychopath doesn't mind being
[31:51] Bob Dobbs: Mick Jagger.
[31:52] Bob Dobbs: So it ends with Mick Jagger driving out of his home under the other guy's identity,
[31:59] Bob Dobbs: something like that.
[32:00] Bob Dobbs: And
[32:01] Bob Dobbs: McLuhan wrote a review.
[32:02] Bob Dobbs: He was used in ads.
[32:04] Bob Dobbs: He made a statement about it.
[32:06] Bob Dobbs: Have you ever seen that?
[32:08] Cameron McEwen: No,
[32:08] Cameron McEwen: I don't think so.
[32:09] Cameron McEwen: if you have.
[32:10] Cameron McEwen: Stop on that.
[32:10] Cameron McEwen: I'd like to see it.
[32:11] Bob Dobbs: Yeah,
[32:12] Bob Dobbs: and I basically can remember the quote.
[32:13] Bob Dobbs: So he,
[32:14] Bob Dobbs: it's an excerpt from what kind of things he would say in 1970.
[32:19] Bob Dobbs: I think he might have,
[32:21] Bob Dobbs: don't know if he mentioned garbage apocalypse,
[32:23] Bob Dobbs: which was a popular term for him in 1970.
[32:26] Bob Dobbs: But he says,
[32:27] Bob Dobbs: this is,
[32:27] Bob Dobbs: okay,
[32:27] Bob Dobbs: this dramatic changing of identities.
[32:30] Bob Dobbs: And he says,
[32:32] Bob Dobbs: this is notice of cancellation of subscription to a world.
[32:36] Bob Dobbs: So he's saying.
[32:37] Bob Dobbs: When you give up subscribing to a magazine,
[32:40] Bob Dobbs: that's a major crisis for you.
[32:42] Bob Dobbs: And you're now going to have to find another magazine to read.
[32:45] Bob Dobbs: So that was the opening statement.
[32:47] Bob Dobbs: And then he says,
[32:48] Bob Dobbs: well,
[32:50] Bob Dobbs: what does he say?
[32:50] Bob Dobbs: So I remember that.
[32:52] Bob Dobbs: It's notice of cancellation of subscription to a world.
[32:56] Cameron McEwen: That's a great phrase.
[32:58] Bob Dobbs: Yeah.
[32:58] Bob Dobbs: And then he says something following.
[33:00] Bob Dobbs: This is normal.
[33:01] Bob Dobbs: This is everyday activity or something,
[33:03] Bob Dobbs: you know.
[33:04] Bob Dobbs: So it's a great statement.
[33:05] Bob Dobbs: I'll have to see.
[33:08] Bob Dobbs: What if
[33:09] Bob Dobbs: I had to find it and I had to get a guy to find it and eventually got it.
[33:15] Bob Dobbs: So this is my search mechanism.
[33:20] Bob Dobbs: Cancellation of a subscription to a world.
[33:36] Bob Dobbs: A world.
[33:37] Bob Dobbs: Okay.
[33:47] Bob Dobbs: Nothing comes up at that.
[33:51] Bob Dobbs: So that's not working.
[33:53] Bob Dobbs: I'm not,
[33:54] Bob Dobbs: let me put the word McLuhan beside it.
[34:03] Cameron McEwen: Are you looking in your stuff or on the internet?
[34:05] Bob Dobbs: No,
[34:05] Bob Dobbs: my stuff.
[34:06] Bob Dobbs: In my archive?
[34:08] Bob Dobbs: Okay,
[34:08] Bob Dobbs: I'll have to find it.
[34:10] Cameron McEwen: Yes.
[34:11] Cameron McEwen: Well,
[34:11] Cameron McEwen: you mentioned 1970.
[34:13] Bob Dobbs: Right.
[34:14] Cameron McEwen: I don't know if that date is secure,
[34:17] Cameron McEwen: but if it is,
[34:19] Cameron McEwen: you couldn't have that many things in 1970.
[34:21] Bob Dobbs: Right.
[34:24] Bob Dobbs: And it may not have the exact correct words,
[34:27] Bob Dobbs: so
[34:28] Bob Dobbs: I'll go over to my McLuhan inventory and see if it just comes up within that.
[34:36] Bob Dobbs: I just did a general search.
[34:38] Bob Dobbs: So,
[34:40] Bob Dobbs: subscription.
[35:05] Bob Dobbs: No,
[35:06] Bob Dobbs: it just doesn't seem to work.
[35:12] Cameron McEwen: Didn't you say it was in a
[35:17] Cameron McEwen: Jagger?
[35:19] Bob Dobbs: No, Jagger is not mentioned in the quote.
[35:22] Bob Dobbs: No,
[35:22] Cameron McEwen: but is he mentioned in the title of the review?
[35:29] Bob Dobbs: No.
[35:30] Bob Dobbs: See,
[35:30] Bob Dobbs: it's a blurb that McLuhan did to advertise the movie.
[35:35] Bob Dobbs: The director wanted a statement from McLuhan.
[35:38] Bob Dobbs: So I guess they got him to look at the movie,
[35:40] Bob Dobbs: and he came up with this interesting statement,
[35:41] Bob Dobbs: and then they put that in the ads.
[35:44] Cameron McEwen: But didn't you say,
[35:45] Cameron McEwen: isn't the title of the movie Performance?
[35:48] Bob Dobbs: Yes.
[35:49] Cameron McEwen: Yeah,
[35:49] Cameron McEwen: so try looking for that.
[35:50] Bob Dobbs: Yeah.
[35:55] Bob Dobbs: It's funny,
[35:55] Bob Dobbs: what he says,
[35:58] Bob Dobbs: it's not,
[35:59] Bob Dobbs: doesn't help anybody to appreciate the movie.
[36:03] Bob Dobbs: Nobody knows what McLuhan's saying.
[36:09] Bob Dobbs: Okay,
[36:10] Bob Dobbs: so it's not really working.
[36:13] Bob Dobbs: Performance,
[36:17] Bob Dobbs: my comments on the script,
[36:18] Bob Dobbs: Marshall McLuhan notes from Nina Sutton,
[36:23] Bob Dobbs: Marshall McLuhan actor.
[36:26] Bob Dobbs: And I remember it was in
[36:28] Bob Dobbs: Rolling Stone magazine,
[36:30] Bob Dobbs: the ads,
[36:32] Bob Dobbs: throwing a snowball.
[36:33] Bob Dobbs: Well,
[36:33] Bob Dobbs: for some reason,
[36:35] Bob Dobbs: can't find it right now.
[36:36] Bob Dobbs: So let's hold off on that.
[36:41] Cameron McEwen: Give me the quote that you remember once again,
[36:46] Cameron McEwen: the subscription quote.
[36:49] Bob Dobbs: The movie is a notice of cancellation of subscription to a world.
[36:56] Bob Dobbs: Notice of cancellation of subscription to a world.
[37:00] Bob Dobbs: And it doesn't necessarily mean magazine subscription,
[37:03] Bob Dobbs: but I took it that way at the time.
[37:08] Bob Dobbs: People's identities were their magazines that they had.
[37:13] Bob Dobbs: I make the magazine as a key medium in the Dobbs Quadrant on the Tiny Note chart.
[37:18] Cameron McEwen: plus,
[37:22] Cameron McEwen: that's exactly what happened to McLuhan in 1930,
[37:28] Cameron McEwen: let's say,
[37:29] Cameron McEwen: around then.
[37:31] Bob Dobbs: What happened to him?
[37:33] Cameron McEwen: That he had to put in a notice of cancellation of subscription.
[37:38] Cameron McEwen: to the world that he had known in Winnipeg.
[37:40] Cameron McEwen: Yeah,
[37:40] Cameron McEwen: if it's
[37:41] Bob Dobbs: 1930, he's only
[37:45] Bob Dobbs: 20 years old,
[37:46] Bob Dobbs: 19.
[37:47] Cameron McEwen: Right.
[37:49] Bob Dobbs: Right,
[37:49] Bob Dobbs: that's when he says there must be laws in advertising,
[37:52] Bob Dobbs: you know?
[37:53] Bob Dobbs: He has this idea that there's some laws that he could figure out.
[37:58] Bob Dobbs: Okay,
[37:58] Bob Dobbs: so let me go down here to where we were.
[38:08] Bob Dobbs: Okay,
[38:09] Bob Dobbs: all men,
[38:13] Bob Dobbs: Nation Magazine,
[38:15] Bob Dobbs: inside,
[38:16] Bob Dobbs: men are inside.
[38:18] Bob Dobbs: Then I quote a,
[38:22] Bob Dobbs: after saying there's no pornography and there's no decency,
[38:25] Bob Dobbs: so I'm just saying words for people to note what the quote says.
[38:30] Bob Dobbs: So I'm repeating what's said in the quote,
[38:32] Bob Dobbs: but people can't read this stuff,
[38:35] Bob Dobbs: it's too deep.
[38:37] Bob Dobbs: So you have to tell them what they should see,
[38:39] Bob Dobbs: right?
[38:42] Bob Dobbs: Note the words that there's no pornography,
[38:43] Bob Dobbs: there's no decency.
[38:44] Bob Dobbs: That's what I'm pointing out.
[38:46] Bob Dobbs: So in Marshall McLuhan,
[38:49] Bob Dobbs: a rare thing,
[38:50] Bob Dobbs: it was when he was in Texas,
[38:52] Bob Dobbs: I think,
[38:54] Bob Dobbs: this
[38:54] Bob Dobbs: Texas University magazine,
[38:56] Bob Dobbs: The Review of Books and Religion,
[38:58] Bob Dobbs: Volume 3,
[38:59] Bob Dobbs: Number 9,
[39:00] Bob Dobbs: Mid-June 1974,
[39:01] Bob Dobbs: interview with Marshall McLuhan.
[39:03] Bob Dobbs: And,
[39:03] Bob Dobbs: of course,
[39:05] Bob Dobbs: he's dealing with...
[39:06] Bob Dobbs: the crisis of Catholicism,
[39:08] Bob Dobbs: so he's going to talk about Gnosticism.
[39:09] Bob Dobbs: So he says,
[39:10] Bob Dobbs: the theology of discarnate man,
[39:12] Bob Dobbs: I should think,
[39:13] Bob Dobbs: is going to be extremely transcendental and Gnostic.
[39:17] Bob Dobbs: It's not going to have much place for the human being as an incarnate spirit.
[39:21] Bob Dobbs: Perhaps this may be behind the present swing toward abortion and the idea of euthanasia.
[39:27] Bob Dobbs: Then in brackets,
[39:28] Bob Dobbs: why should we have people around when they're of no use?
[39:33] Bob Dobbs: So there's a planet of the dead.
[39:36] Bob Dobbs: chemical bodies obsolesce and they're doing drugs to have a transcendental experience to kind of maybe crystallize a percept that the world's a fallen place and politics is run by he used to say fallen angels so
[39:56] Bob Dobbs: that's the you don't become a knee-jerk catholic to overcome that
[40:04] Bob Dobbs: materialization of the prince of the air you've got to do a different move of the mind
[40:11] Bob Dobbs: or a new kind of percept,
[40:12] Bob Dobbs: or quote,
[40:13] Bob Dobbs: mysticism,
[40:13] Bob Dobbs: or vision,
[40:15] Bob Dobbs: or a new kind of shamanism,
[40:18] Bob Dobbs: to figure out how not to fall into the theology of the discarnate man.
[40:26] Bob Dobbs: So this is an important quote.
[40:28] Bob Dobbs: It's McLuhan's personal,
[40:31] Bob Dobbs: private agenda that he would,
[40:35] Bob Dobbs: why he would say to Barry Nevitt,
[40:36] Bob Dobbs: why aren't you a Catholic yet,
[40:38] Bob Dobbs: Barry?
[40:38] Bob Dobbs: You know?
[40:40] Bob Dobbs: He'd prompt his close friends if they weren't Catholics.
[40:43] Bob Dobbs: That was his,
[40:44] Bob Dobbs: you know,
[40:45] Bob Dobbs: he didn't do that publicly too much.
[40:47] Bob Dobbs: Maybe his books were symbolic of that,
[40:49] Bob Dobbs: but you rarely got him saying this kind of thing,
[40:54] Bob Dobbs: this quote.
[40:56] Bob Dobbs: Most people thought when they read McLuhan and about flux and that,
[41:00] Bob Dobbs: they thought he was talking about a kind of transcendence.
[41:02] Bob Dobbs: They projected a Gnostic image on him.
[41:06] Cameron McEwen: Yep.
[41:08] Bob Dobbs: So that's why you had to read McLuhan enough to find out this other stuff he was saying in obscure little articles that you would normally never see,
[41:16] Bob Dobbs: unless you got access to the archive.
[41:20] Bob Dobbs: So I say,
[41:21] Bob Dobbs: I comment on that,
[41:22] Bob Dobbs: we're on page 127.
[41:24] Bob Dobbs: I go,
[41:24] Bob Dobbs: Gnostic,
[41:25] Bob Dobbs: that's the thinking that McLuhan was against as a Catholic.
[41:29] Bob Dobbs: He was not interested in the mystical.
[41:32] Bob Dobbs: Now,
[41:32] Bob Dobbs: this is limited,
[41:33] Bob Dobbs: because he was interested in a new kind of mysticism.
[41:36] Bob Dobbs: Or...
[41:36] Bob Dobbs: He was accused of a new kind of mysticism.
[41:39] Bob Dobbs: So he used to sign his letters,
[41:41] Bob Dobbs: medium mystically yours,
[41:43] Bob Dobbs: right?
[41:46] Bob Dobbs: Did you know that?
[41:48] Bob Dobbs: He signed his letters in the later 60s,
[41:51] Bob Dobbs: early 70s,
[41:52] Bob Dobbs: medium mystically yours.
[41:55] Cameron McEwen: Uh-huh.
[41:55] Cameron McEwen: But I think he was doing that as a joke.
[41:57] Bob Dobbs: Yeah,
[41:57] Bob Dobbs: it's a joke,
[41:58] Bob Dobbs: but it's also,
[41:59] Bob Dobbs: you see,
[42:00] Bob Dobbs: it's a double-edged thing.
[42:01] Bob Dobbs: You need to understand the mysticism.
[42:05] Bob Dobbs: That's going to be retrieved due to a knee-jerk response to what the media is doing,
[42:10] Bob Dobbs: because it's giving you a mystical experience,
[42:14] Bob Dobbs: a transcendence,
[42:15] Bob Dobbs: a discarnate,
[42:17] Bob Dobbs: but you're doing it unconsciously.
[42:20] Bob Dobbs: So you can see why the gurus,
[42:25] Bob Dobbs: the occult,
[42:26] Bob Dobbs: became marketable.
[42:29] Bob Dobbs: Everybody was doing the occult,
[42:31] Bob Dobbs: which was supposedly,
[42:33] Bob Dobbs: before the 20th century,
[42:34] Bob Dobbs: Just for esoteric geniuses.
[42:36] Bob Dobbs: You know what I mean?
[42:39] Cameron McEwen: Sure.
[42:39] Cameron McEwen: Well,
[42:40] Cameron McEwen: even the Catholic Church got into that business.
[42:42] Cameron McEwen: Everybody was in that business.
[42:43] Bob Dobbs: Yeah.
[42:45] Bob Dobbs: And they were all rearview mirror.
[42:46] Bob Dobbs: And you could notice McLuhan was sitting on the edge smirking at everybody,
[42:53] Bob Dobbs: saying,
[42:53] Bob Dobbs: you guys don't get it.
[42:54] Bob Dobbs: You're all dupes of this process.
[42:57] Bob Dobbs: In a way,
[42:58] Bob Dobbs: to me,
[42:59] Bob Dobbs: he was quite unagitated.
[43:03] Bob Dobbs: It was hopeless.
[43:04] Bob Dobbs: Like,
[43:05] Bob Dobbs: he just occasionally,
[43:06] Bob Dobbs: once every five years,
[43:07] Bob Dobbs: say something like this.
[43:08] Bob Dobbs: You know what I mean?
[43:09] Bob Dobbs: Sure.
[43:10] Bob Dobbs: He wasn't out there talking it every week and making sure everybody understood it.
[43:14] Bob Dobbs: He kind of accepted it,
[43:17] Bob Dobbs: this frailty.
[43:18] Bob Dobbs: And that's why he told Mary,
[43:20] Bob Dobbs: his daughter,
[43:22] Bob Dobbs: in his letters to her when he was concerned about her divorce,
[43:25] Bob Dobbs: he was saying,
[43:25] Bob Dobbs: look,
[43:26] Bob Dobbs: there's going to be a nuclear war by next week.
[43:28] Bob Dobbs: Watch out.
[43:29] Bob Dobbs: These men are handling environments and they don't know what they're fucking doing and it's going to cause a real problem,
[43:35] Bob Dobbs: you know?
[43:35] Cameron McEwen: Right,
[43:36] Cameron McEwen: yeah.
[43:37] Bob Dobbs: And they look like,
[43:38] Bob Dobbs: you could say he's panicking,
[43:40] Bob Dobbs: but I like to think that no,
[43:43] Bob Dobbs: he understood how precarious the thing was.
[43:47] Bob Dobbs: And he was still quite relaxed,
[43:49] Bob Dobbs: still going around having a good time,
[43:52] Bob Dobbs: being funny,
[43:54] Bob Dobbs: being ironic,
[43:55] Bob Dobbs: making little movies,
[43:56] Bob Dobbs: you know what I mean?
[43:57] Bob Dobbs: Sure.
[43:58] Cameron McEwen: Well,
[43:58] Cameron McEwen: you can say that this is the theology of carnate man.
[44:03] Bob Dobbs: Yes.
[44:04] Cameron McEwen: Right?
[44:05] Cameron McEwen: As opposed to the discarnate.
[44:07] Bob Dobbs: Right.
[44:07] Cameron McEwen: So the theology of the carnate man is the theology of a person that knows they make mistakes,
[44:14] Cameron McEwen: knows they smell,
[44:16] Cameron McEwen: knows that they're going to die.
[44:19] Cameron McEwen: But they're at peace with that because it's a theology.
[44:23] Bob Dobbs: Yes.
[44:23] Cameron McEwen: And that was
[44:25] Cameron McEwen: McLuhan. So one of the things he was at peace with...
[44:28] Cameron McEwen: But at the same time,
[44:31] Cameron McEwen: pained by and almost horrified by.
[44:36] Cameron McEwen: In his last interview,
[44:37] Bob Dobbs: he talks about,
[44:38] Bob Dobbs: listen,
[44:39] Bob Dobbs: in the last interview we had,
[44:41] Bob Dobbs: Nelson and I had,
[44:42] Bob Dobbs: 79,
[44:42] Bob Dobbs: he's talking about,
[44:43] Bob Dobbs: I'm into suffering.
[44:45] Bob Dobbs: You know,
[44:46] Bob Dobbs: I'm not trying to be happy.
[44:48] Bob Dobbs: As a
[44:49] Bob Dobbs: Catholic Christian,
[44:49] Bob Dobbs: I got to suffer.
[44:51] Bob Dobbs: And so he was admitting,
[44:53] Bob Dobbs: and he says in War and Peace in the Globe Village,
[44:54] Bob Dobbs: that pain was the new exploratory leading edge.
[44:59] Bob Dobbs: Remember he talks about the exploring of pain.
[45:02] Cameron McEwen: Yeah.
[45:03] Bob Dobbs: Whereas most people were trying to get comfortable.
[45:06] Bob Dobbs: Find a nice little warm place.
[45:10] Bob Dobbs: So there was another point.
[45:12] Bob Dobbs: So the expiration of pain,
[45:14] Bob Dobbs: that's his final comment in the last interview,
[45:17] Bob Dobbs: pretty well.
[45:20] Bob Dobbs: And that is a shock to people.
[45:22] Bob Dobbs: If they ever saw that,
[45:24] Bob Dobbs: they'd say,
[45:24] Bob Dobbs: this guy,
[45:25] Bob Dobbs: he didn't even want to be happy.
[45:26] Bob Dobbs: What's with this guy?
[45:27] Bob Dobbs: You know what I mean?
[45:30] Bob Dobbs: And so he,
[45:34] Bob Dobbs: something about the cath,
[45:35] Bob Dobbs: oh yeah.
[45:36] Bob Dobbs: Have you got the book,
[45:37] Bob Dobbs: Who Is or Who Was Marshall McLuhan?
[45:41] Cameron McEwen: Yes.
[45:42] Bob Dobbs: Well,
[45:42] Bob Dobbs: there's an interview with a Venezuelan professor,
[45:45] Bob Dobbs: some woman I think,
[45:46] Bob Dobbs: and in it he's explaining to her why the Catholic religion is the appropriate religion in a discarnate time.
[45:52] Bob Dobbs: It's the only one that celebrates the discarnate,
[45:55] Bob Dobbs: as an anti-environment,
[45:56] Bob Dobbs: the discarnate.
[45:57] Bob Dobbs: Right.
[45:59] Bob Dobbs: So that's important,
[46:00] Bob Dobbs: that point.
[46:01] Bob Dobbs: So let's see if I say that.
[46:04] Bob Dobbs: He was not interested in the mystical.
[46:06] Bob Dobbs: Gnostics say,
[46:07] Bob Dobbs: quote,
[46:07] Bob Dobbs: it's a fallen world and I've got to get out of here,
[46:10] Bob Dobbs: unquote.
[46:11] Bob Dobbs: The Catholics don't say it's a fallen world,
[46:13] Bob Dobbs: but they sometimes have to use Gnostic techniques to enjoy their drug taking.
[46:18] Bob Dobbs: More and more abortion,
[46:19] Bob Dobbs: which McLuhan was against,
[46:20] Bob Dobbs: was happening.
[46:21] Bob Dobbs: And he was attributed to the discarnate,
[46:23] Bob Dobbs: no body,
[46:23] Bob Dobbs: no moral situation.
[46:26] Bob Dobbs: Then I go,
[46:26] Bob Dobbs: this is the Android meme.
[46:28] Bob Dobbs: Oh,
[46:28] Bob Dobbs: now we're getting somewhere.
[46:29] Bob Dobbs: This is the Android meme phase one,
[46:31] Bob Dobbs: where the Internet was bigger than people.
[46:33] Bob Dobbs: In Android Meme Phase 2...
[46:35] Bob Dobbs: The Internet shrunk,
[46:37] Bob Dobbs: and people had all kinds of small gadgets that they were still attached to,
[46:41] Bob Dobbs: but there was a tinniness that wasn't happening before.
[46:43] Bob Dobbs: The media would shrink.
[46:45] Bob Dobbs: The parachemical body reappeared.
[46:48] Bob Dobbs: The AP,
[46:49] Bob Dobbs: Anthropomorphic Physical,
[46:50] Bob Dobbs: at the end of the analog supernovas.
[46:54] Cameron McEwen: Why do you call it the parachemical body instead of some other body,
[46:59] Cameron McEwen: like the astral body or
[47:01] Cameron McEwen: TV body or something?
[47:03] Bob Dobbs: Because the...
[47:06] Bob Dobbs: Because the media was shrinking and becoming smaller than your chemical body from the eye's point of view,
[47:12] Bob Dobbs: you thought the chemical body reappeared,
[47:15] Bob Dobbs: but it is an embedded chemical body with the other bodies.
[47:19] Bob Dobbs: You can't get back to a pure,
[47:22] Bob Dobbs: standing-alone chemical body.
[47:23] Bob Dobbs: So it's actually a new kind of chemical body or a para-chemical body.
[47:28] Bob Dobbs: It's not a chemical body,
[47:29] Bob Dobbs: but the image is to retrieve it.
[47:33] Bob Dobbs: So you have a lot of people,
[47:34] Bob Dobbs: you know,
[47:35] Bob Dobbs: the exercise.
[47:36] Bob Dobbs: fed and then there was the jackasses the guys would you know hurt their bodies as a sport remember that fed yeah well it's still going on i believe yeah so you have people you know kicking their body around uh to make it feel make
[47:54] Cameron McEwen: it come alive that is a you have the self cutters self piercers yeah so sure
[48:02] Bob Dobbs: I think Eric lists a lot of that kind of phenomena in his formal cause book,
[48:06] Bob Dobbs: Media and Formal Cause or something.
[48:09] Bob Dobbs: He lists a big inventory,
[48:10] Bob Dobbs: basically the fads of the last 50 years.
[48:13] Bob Dobbs: But they're all trying to get back to the chemical body.
[48:18] Bob Dobbs: And so the parachemical body means when you think you've retrieved it,
[48:24] Bob Dobbs: you haven't.
[48:25] Bob Dobbs: It's a para.
[48:26] Bob Dobbs: It's not the chemical body.
[48:27] Bob Dobbs: It's something beside the chemical body.
[48:30] Bob Dobbs: It's a new polluted thing.
[48:31] Bob Dobbs: with the other bodies in it.
[48:35] Cameron McEwen: Let me just ask a question here.
[48:40] Cameron McEwen: Usually you talk about five bodies,
[48:43] Cameron McEwen: right?
[48:43] Cameron McEwen: You sometimes go on to a sixth or even a seventh,
[48:46] Cameron McEwen: but let's say that there's five primary bodies,
[48:53] Cameron McEwen: which are like the five senses.
[48:55] Cameron McEwen: Yeah.
[48:56] Cameron McEwen: And for McLuhan,
[48:58] Cameron McEwen: understanding how media work,
[49:02] Cameron McEwen: can be done in terms of the senses.
[49:06] Cameron McEwen: So the five senses are always there,
[49:10] Cameron McEwen: but they're in different combinations.
[49:13] Bob Dobbs: Well,
[49:13] Bob Dobbs: they've merged with the technological extensions,
[49:16] Bob Dobbs: which have gotten smaller and more invisible in the sensory life.
[49:20] Cameron McEwen: You think of the bodies,
[49:21] Cameron McEwen: that there's always the five there,
[49:24] Cameron McEwen: but they're in different arrangements,
[49:28] Cameron McEwen: and so they can be called
[49:30] Cameron McEwen: para-chemical body,
[49:32] Cameron McEwen: but really it's a molecular body of the five.
[49:36] Bob Dobbs: Yes.
[49:38] Bob Dobbs: They are overlapping,
[49:40] Bob Dobbs: embedding,
[49:43] Bob Dobbs: generally the postmodern view said by the word prosthetics.
[49:48] Bob Dobbs: That's what they,
[49:49] Bob Dobbs: in academia,
[49:50] Bob Dobbs: they talk about prosthetics.
[49:51] Bob Dobbs: McLuhan would say extensions.
[49:52] Bob Dobbs: They like to say prosthetics.
[49:53] Bob Dobbs: And they're more and more inside people.
[49:55] Bob Dobbs: They're made up.
[49:56] Bob Dobbs: Kroker does a lot of analysis of the prosthetics in people.
[50:00] Bob Dobbs: The new organs,
[50:02] Bob Dobbs: technical organs that are in people.
[50:04] Bob Dobbs: So they're all overlaying.
[50:08] Bob Dobbs: Kroker has interesting images that may be made by his wife,
[50:10] Bob Dobbs: Marilouise,
[50:12] Bob Dobbs: showing,
[50:13] Bob Dobbs: I think he talks about the eyes in a chemical body skull are actually laser beams.
[50:21] Bob Dobbs: some science fiction levels coming through the eyes of our person,
[50:25] Bob Dobbs: because they've got the chip body inside themselves,
[50:28] Bob Dobbs: and that's what's emanating through the eyeball,
[50:31] Bob Dobbs: the chemical eyeball,
[50:33] Bob Dobbs: the physical eyeball.
[50:36] Bob Dobbs: So there's all kinds of imagery and art trying to show this merger of machine and man,
[50:41] Bob Dobbs: to use the old clichés,
[50:43] Bob Dobbs: but you have to change the images.
[50:46] Bob Dobbs: It's not a crude,
[50:48] Bob Dobbs: metallic thing that's embedded in you.
[50:50] Bob Dobbs: Remember the Terminator?
[50:52] Bob Dobbs: You know,
[50:52] Bob Dobbs: he wasn't made of metal.
[50:54] Bob Dobbs: He was some kind of weird fluid melting substance,
[51:01] Bob Dobbs: right?
[51:01] Bob Dobbs: You know,
[51:02] Bob Dobbs: he...
[51:03] Cameron McEwen: I didn't see the movie.
[51:05] Bob Dobbs: Okay.
[51:07] Bob Dobbs: The
[51:08] Bob Dobbs: Evergreens, they said to me once,
[51:10] Bob Dobbs: they were channeled through Michael Blake Read,
[51:12] Bob Dobbs: that in the future,
[51:14] Bob Dobbs: you know,
[51:14] Bob Dobbs: a couple hundred years,
[51:15] Bob Dobbs: we'll be
[51:16] Bob Dobbs: 90% metal.
[51:19] Bob Dobbs: But they didn't...
[51:20] Bob Dobbs: mean hard metal.
[51:22] Bob Dobbs: They meant,
[51:23] Bob Dobbs: you might say,
[51:24] Bob Dobbs: minerals,
[51:24] Bob Dobbs: liquid metal,
[51:27] Bob Dobbs: artificial stuff in our chemical bodies,
[51:31] Bob Dobbs: industrial stuff,
[51:33] Bob Dobbs: electronic stuff.
[51:33] Bob Dobbs: So that's the overlay that we are.
[51:37] Bob Dobbs: And that is what's being agitated by the whole situation.
[51:42] Bob Dobbs: So then I say at the end of the analog supernovas,
[51:47] Bob Dobbs: that means there are more movies than ever.
[51:50] Bob Dobbs: more books,
[51:50] Bob Dobbs: more TV shows,
[51:52] Bob Dobbs: all the media before the digital.
[51:55] Bob Dobbs: There's just,
[51:55] Bob Dobbs: that's the wealth of the old literate unconscious that is having a supernova.
[52:02] Bob Dobbs: And then when people start to get into the digital,
[52:04] Bob Dobbs: you have a collapse of the analog,
[52:06] Bob Dobbs: and you've got endless recession and depression.
[52:11] Bob Dobbs: You know,
[52:11] Bob Dobbs: the chemical body is not having,
[52:13] Bob Dobbs: it's had its supernova.
[52:18] Bob Dobbs: Now people are...
[52:19] Bob Dobbs: Dangling ganglia,
[52:21] Bob Dobbs: which would be multi-bodied ganglia that are demanding stimulation,
[52:26] Bob Dobbs: constant stimulation.
[52:29] Bob Dobbs: It's beyond the vistas of Star Wars and traveling out into the universe.
[52:35] Bob Dobbs: That's all shrunk.
[52:36] Bob Dobbs: It's gone away.
[52:41] Bob Dobbs: So
[52:42] Bob Dobbs: I didn't say,
[52:43] Bob Dobbs: and the digital was now so tiny,
[52:45] Bob Dobbs: and people wouldn't believe it was a radio station or whatever they were listening to.
[52:50] Bob Dobbs: Then they forgot about it,
[52:51] Bob Dobbs: and they got interested in this subject.
[52:53] Bob Dobbs: They kept listening.
[52:54] Bob Dobbs: But if you have to look at any situation as a mixture of the...
[52:57] Bob Dobbs: But you have to look at any situation as a mixture of the bodies.
[53:01] Bob Dobbs: Arthur Kroker uses this projection all through a book called Body Drift,
[53:06] Bob Dobbs: a recent book of his.
[53:08] Bob Dobbs: So I cite him as someone who's on to what I'm talking about,
[53:12] Bob Dobbs: the multiple Body Drift.
[53:14] Bob Dobbs: So you have to perceive...
[53:18] Bob Dobbs: There's layers of invisibleness that is occupying you,
[53:24] Bob Dobbs: that's possessing you.
[53:28] Bob Dobbs: So the age of the smartphone and everybody looking at their black mirror,
[53:35] Bob Dobbs: that's another level of media ecology becoming a normal awareness.
[53:40] Bob Dobbs: Everybody sees that everybody else is possessed because they're absurdly staring at their screen.
[53:46] Bob Dobbs: and not engaging in natural social interaction or looking around at what the physical environment is showing you.
[53:53] Bob Dobbs: Everybody looks like a hypnotized zombie now right in front of you,
[53:58] Bob Dobbs: you know,
[53:58] Cameron McEwen: that's it right in front of each other.
[54:01] Bob Dobbs: Yeah.
[54:02] Bob Dobbs: And yeah,
[54:02] Bob Dobbs: we're inside each other.
[54:03] Bob Dobbs: And so it's almost like,
[54:06] Bob Dobbs: you know,
[54:06] Bob Dobbs: this interior landscape of the magic mirror is a way to get out of yourself,
[54:12] Bob Dobbs: to get out of the interior landscape.
[54:15] Bob Dobbs: Bye.
[54:15] Bob Dobbs: hiding in the chip body.
[54:17] Bob Dobbs: But the blatant zombiness of it is sort of unspoken.
[54:26] Bob Dobbs: Because,
[54:27] Bob Dobbs: you know,
[54:27] Bob Dobbs: you walk along here on the beach all the time and everybody's looking at their phone and they're not looking at the beautiful environment.
[54:37] Bob Dobbs: So there's always people walking along seeing that the majority of people in this holiday situation are ridiculously looking at them.
[54:45] Bob Dobbs: object.
[54:46] Bob Dobbs: They're like zombies.
[54:47] Bob Dobbs: You know what I mean?
[54:48] Bob Dobbs: So everybody,
[54:50] Bob Dobbs: they're polite.
[54:51] Bob Dobbs: They don't go around and knock the phone out of the guy's hand and say,
[54:53] Bob Dobbs: hey,
[54:54] Bob Dobbs: wake up.
[54:55] Bob Dobbs: Now,
[54:55] Bob Dobbs: I used to do this.
[54:57] Bob Dobbs: I'd be walking along and I see,
[55:01] Bob Dobbs: I preferred,
[55:02] Bob Dobbs: you know,
[55:02] Bob Dobbs: nice 20-year-olds,
[55:04] Bob Dobbs: nice pretty girls laid out there.
[55:06] Bob Dobbs: And
[55:07] Bob Dobbs: I go,
[55:07] Bob Dobbs: hey,
[55:08] Bob Dobbs: I yell out,
[55:09] Bob Dobbs: hey.
[55:10] Bob Dobbs: And they sort of...
[55:11] Bob Dobbs: get out of their sun trance and look up and see where the voice came from.
[55:15] Bob Dobbs: And when they saw me,
[55:16] Bob Dobbs: I'd be pointing off to the side.
[55:19] Bob Dobbs: So they would look.
[55:21] Bob Dobbs: They would look to see what the hell I was pointing at,
[55:23] Bob Dobbs: which was nothing.
[55:25] Bob Dobbs: And then I would carry along.
[55:26] Bob Dobbs: I would keep walking,
[55:28] Bob Dobbs: ignoring their response,
[55:30] Bob Dobbs: because they'd look back at me and look at what the hell was he warning us about.
[55:34] Bob Dobbs: So I would cause this disruption every now and then.
[55:41] Bob Dobbs: You see?
[55:43] Bob Dobbs: I was doing my,
[55:45] Bob Dobbs: what is it,
[55:47] Bob Dobbs: Menippean guerrilla action every now and then.
[55:49] Bob Dobbs: Had to be careful because since I walked the beach route every day,
[55:55] Bob Dobbs: I could have gotten noticed by the police and the cops and the guards,
[56:00] Bob Dobbs: right?
[56:00] Bob Dobbs: There's that fucking maniac who screams and disturbs the peace of everybody.
[56:05] Bob Dobbs: So
[56:05] Bob Dobbs: I had to be very careful how I did it so I could keep doing it.
[56:10] Bob Dobbs: So then
[56:13] Bob Dobbs: I asked iON about what was the effect,
[56:15] Bob Dobbs: and iON said,
[56:16] Bob Dobbs: well,
[56:17] Bob Dobbs: a couple people died,
[56:18] Bob Dobbs: Bob.
[56:21] Bob Dobbs: They were so shocked,
[56:22] Bob Dobbs: or whatever the hell I did,
[56:25] Bob Dobbs: they died.
[56:26] Bob Dobbs: They had heart attacks.
[56:27] Bob Dobbs: Not right then,
[56:28] Bob Dobbs: but later.
[56:29] Bob Dobbs: So
[56:30] Bob Dobbs: I tempered myself even more so.
[56:32] Bob Dobbs: But anyways,
[56:34] Bob Dobbs: it was trying to just shock them out of their telephone trance.
[56:43] Bob Dobbs: What do you think of that?
[56:46] Cameron McEwen: The phone functions a little bit,
[56:48] Cameron McEwen: one of the functions of the phone,
[56:50] Cameron McEwen: not the entire function,
[56:51] Cameron McEwen: but one of the functions of phones like this is what used to be done by gum,
[56:58] Cameron McEwen: right?
[56:59] Cameron McEwen: And people chewing gum,
[57:01] Cameron McEwen: people smoking cigarettes,
[57:04] Cameron McEwen: used to be a way of saying,
[57:07] Cameron McEwen: I'm concentrating on myself.
[57:11] Cameron McEwen: I don't care if anybody's looking at me because I'm so interesting to myself that
[57:19] Cameron McEwen: I don't care about them.
[57:21] Cameron McEwen: And now the phone says so.
[57:23] Bob Dobbs: Yeah,
[57:23] Bob Dobbs: you're right.
[57:25] Bob Dobbs: I was thinking about that recently,
[57:27] Bob Dobbs: that the reason people don't smoke as much and all those old habits is because of the phone.
[57:33] Bob Dobbs: That replaced it.
[57:35] Bob Dobbs: Yeah.
[57:37] Bob Dobbs: Yeah.
[57:37] Bob Dobbs: The general restlessness of the soul.
[57:41] Bob Dobbs: The uneasiness that needs to hold on to something.
[57:44] Bob Dobbs: Now they got a fucking little phone that has much kaleidoscopic imagery to distract them.
[57:49] Bob Dobbs: It's quite a...
[57:50] Cameron McEwen: An anchor gadget.
[57:52] Bob Dobbs: What?
[57:53] Cameron McEwen: An anchor gadget.
[57:55] Bob Dobbs: Anchor,
[57:56] Bob Dobbs: did you say?
[57:57] Cameron McEwen: Yeah.
[57:59] Bob Dobbs: And then what did you say after anchor?
[58:01] Cameron McEwen: Gadget.
[58:02] Bob Dobbs: Yes,
[58:02] Bob Dobbs: anchor gadget,
[58:03] Bob Dobbs: right.
[58:04] Bob Dobbs: Okay,
[58:05] Bob Dobbs: so now we know what I meant by anchor,
[58:09] Bob Dobbs: anchoring.
[58:11] Bob Dobbs: So,
[58:11] Bob Dobbs: okay,
[58:12] Bob Dobbs: so I'm talking about the present,
[58:14] Bob Dobbs: trying to describe the digital unconscious,
[58:18] Bob Dobbs: and where are we at?
[58:23] Bob Dobbs: Analog supernovas.
[58:26] Bob Dobbs: So then in my series script,
[58:28] Bob Dobbs: I say,
[58:30] Bob Dobbs: This referred to McLuhan's intuiting of the coming digital technology and its ensuing effects,
[58:36] Bob Dobbs: or medium,
[58:37] Bob Dobbs: medium in quotes.
[58:39] Bob Dobbs: Most...
[58:39] Bob Dobbs: students of McLuhan might see this as referring to his prediction of the internet,
[58:43] Bob Dobbs: which he presented as a global information service environment.
[58:46] Bob Dobbs: What nobody noted was his comment on the coming disservices of the digital Copernican revolution.
[58:53] Bob Dobbs: This was stated in late 1968.
[58:57] Bob Dobbs: He says this in the second version of Explorations,
[59:02] Bob Dobbs: the revival in the University of Toronto Varsity graduate magazine.
[59:07] Bob Dobbs: He started doing a lot of
[59:08] Bob Dobbs: Explorations in
[59:10] Bob Dobbs: 66, 67,
[59:11] Bob Dobbs: 68,
[59:12] Bob Dobbs: up to 70,
[59:13] Bob Dobbs: 72 or so.
[59:14] Bob Dobbs: So he has a quote here.
[59:16] Bob Dobbs: This is in
[59:18] Bob Dobbs: November 68.
[59:20] Bob Dobbs: When the movies were new,
[59:21] Bob Dobbs: they used literature as content.
[59:24] Bob Dobbs: When TV was new,
[59:25] Bob Dobbs: it used movies as content.
[59:28] Bob Dobbs: The laser beam will use human dreams and the audience of the intellect right off the court decks.
[59:35] Bob Dobbs: You read this when you first read it.
[59:36] Bob Dobbs: What the hell is this?
[59:37] Bob Dobbs: The laser beam will use human dreams and the audience of the intellect right off the court decks.
[59:43] Bob Dobbs: They will be scrubbed,
[59:44] Bob Dobbs: but good.
[59:46] Bob Dobbs: That's a really great quote.
[59:47] Bob Dobbs: You know,
[59:48] Bob Dobbs: he never went poetic like that very often,
[59:53] Bob Dobbs: right?
[59:53] Bob Dobbs: What is the audience of the intellect?
[59:55] Bob Dobbs: To me,
[59:56] Bob Dobbs: that's the raw center of consciousness that's aware.
[1:00:00] Bob Dobbs: And in Vedanta Buddhism,
[1:00:01] Bob Dobbs: or whatever Vedanta is,
[1:00:03] Bob Dobbs: Hinduism,
[1:00:04] Bob Dobbs: they talk about the eternal self.
[1:00:07] Bob Dobbs: in yourself and it's not
[1:00:10] Bob Dobbs: really linked to your body.
[1:00:12] Bob Dobbs: It leaves your body when you die.
[1:00:14] Bob Dobbs: So
[1:00:15] Bob Dobbs: I used to think that the audience of the intellect is that awareness of your awareness,
[1:00:23] Bob Dobbs: and that awareness is eternal or is ineffable.
[1:00:27] Bob Dobbs: You can't grab it,
[1:00:29] Bob Dobbs: do something to it.
[1:00:30] Bob Dobbs: But McLuhan was pointing out that that was obsolete,
[1:00:34] Bob Dobbs: and that was scrubbed now.
[1:00:37] Bob Dobbs: That's what...
[1:00:37] Cameron McEwen: I think you can see that in...
[1:00:40] Cameron McEwen: Movies.
[1:00:42] Cameron McEwen: Movies have gradually lost their topics.
[1:00:48] Cameron McEwen: It's impossible to have a western,
[1:00:50] Cameron McEwen: it's impossible to have a detective movie,
[1:00:53] Cameron McEwen: it's impossible to have a serious movie about a family.
[1:00:57] Cameron McEwen: Everything has become a kind of cliche plot where some stupid idea is trotted out for an hour and a half.
[1:01:09] Cameron McEwen: and that's the movie.
[1:01:12] Bob Dobbs: With a lot of effects.
[1:01:13] Cameron McEwen: Yeah,
[1:01:13] Cameron McEwen: so human dreams and the audience or the intellect,
[1:01:16] Cameron McEwen: they've been scrubbed.
[1:01:17] Cameron McEwen: It's happened.
[1:01:18] Bob Dobbs: Right,
[1:01:19] Bob Dobbs: so every now and then there's a movie like
[1:01:22] Bob Dobbs: Inception, there's some abstract thing that you can't figure out what the anchor is in it.
[1:01:29] Bob Dobbs: They'll show multi-level things.
[1:01:31] Bob Dobbs: I don't know if you've seen
[1:01:34] Bob Dobbs: Inception. Have you seen that?
[1:01:36] Cameron McEwen: Yeah,
[1:01:36] Cameron McEwen: I've seen it.
[1:01:37] Bob Dobbs: Yeah.
[1:01:37] Bob Dobbs: So the guy goes through like five layers of dream or something.
[1:01:40] Bob Dobbs: You know what I mean?
[1:01:42] Bob Dobbs: And it doesn't get anchored.
[1:01:44] Bob Dobbs: That's why I see what you're pointing out,
[1:01:45] Bob Dobbs: that they know the chemical body,
[1:01:49] Bob Dobbs: the normal story,
[1:01:51] Bob Dobbs: is not valid anymore,
[1:01:53] Bob Dobbs: so they just overwhelm you with effects.
[1:01:55] Bob Dobbs: Ridiculous movies,
[1:01:56] Bob Dobbs: I mean,
[1:01:56] Bob Dobbs: they're boring because it's just endless shooting and blowing up stuff.
[1:02:01] Bob Dobbs: But every now and then,
[1:02:02] Bob Dobbs: some artist tries to show something closing to the edgy.
[1:02:07] Bob Dobbs: And they will not have an anchor,
[1:02:11] Bob Dobbs: a topic.
[1:02:12] Bob Dobbs: Correct.
[1:02:13] Cameron McEwen: Because in decent movies,
[1:02:16] Cameron McEwen: which are nearly entirely foreign movies,
[1:02:20] Cameron McEwen: there's no ending anymore.
[1:02:22] Bob Dobbs: Right.
[1:02:22] Cameron McEwen: There's never an ending.
[1:02:25] Bob Dobbs: Just carry on.
[1:02:27] Bob Dobbs: The torture never stops.
[1:02:29] Cameron McEwen: That's the environment that we live in.
[1:02:32] Bob Dobbs: Yeah.
[1:02:32] Cameron McEwen: We live in an environment without ending.
[1:02:34] Bob Dobbs: And that's the last line in Culture Is Our Business.
[1:02:36] Bob Dobbs: There is no finish line.
[1:02:38] Cameron McEwen: Yeah.
[1:02:40] Bob Dobbs: So,
[1:02:40] Bob Dobbs: okay,
[1:02:40] Bob Dobbs: that's a good way to look at the,
[1:02:42] Bob Dobbs: how to understand the phrase,
[1:02:43] Bob Dobbs: the audience of the intellect.
[1:02:45] Bob Dobbs: It's scrubbed.
[1:02:46] Bob Dobbs: The audience of the intellect.
[1:02:49] Bob Dobbs: Which is,
[1:02:49] Bob Dobbs: that could be your collective,
[1:02:51] Bob Dobbs: our collective consciousness.
[1:02:54] Bob Dobbs: Since the mind,
[1:02:55] Bob Dobbs: you were saying,
[1:02:57] Bob Dobbs: you know,
[1:02:58] Bob Dobbs: everything's revolving around this nebulous thing,
[1:03:01] Bob Dobbs: the mind.
[1:03:02] Bob Dobbs: So...
[1:03:03] Bob Dobbs: a word for that is the intellect,
[1:03:04] Bob Dobbs: and everybody's looking at that.
[1:03:07] Cameron McEwen: Well,
[1:03:09] Cameron McEwen: he talks about human dreams,
[1:03:12] Cameron McEwen: and then he says in the audience of the intellect.
[1:03:15] Cameron McEwen: So with human dreams,
[1:03:16] Cameron McEwen: you're already in the collective unconscious,
[1:03:21] Cameron McEwen: and the audience of the intellect is something within that collective unconscious.
[1:03:26] Bob Dobbs: It's not the content.
[1:03:27] Bob Dobbs: The dreams are the content,
[1:03:29] Bob Dobbs: and the intellect is the form.
[1:03:31] Bob Dobbs: There's always this duality or hendiadys,
[1:03:36] Bob Dobbs: one by means of two.
[1:03:39] Bob Dobbs: And so you've got to have dreams and the knower.
[1:03:44] Bob Dobbs: The known and the knower is going on in here,
[1:03:46] Bob Dobbs: but he's updating it.
[1:03:48] Cameron McEwen: And notice how they will be scrubbed,
[1:03:51] Cameron McEwen: how that relates to what we were just talking about with the
[1:03:55] Cameron McEwen: discarnate theology.
[1:03:57] Bob Dobbs: Yeah.
[1:03:58] Cameron McEwen: The idea that the...
[1:04:02] Cameron McEwen: human dreams,
[1:04:04] Cameron McEwen: the audience of the intellect,
[1:04:06] Cameron McEwen: can be and will be scrubbed.
[1:04:09] Cameron McEwen: It's not something that most people want to acknowledge,
[1:04:15] Cameron McEwen: and especially they don't want to submit themselves to it.
[1:04:19] Cameron McEwen: They want to try to be the exception.
[1:04:25] Bob Dobbs: That's right.
[1:04:26] Bob Dobbs: Their audience of the intellect is untouchable,
[1:04:30] Bob Dobbs: so they want to make that...
[1:04:31] Bob Dobbs: their essence.
[1:04:31] Cameron McEwen: Correct.
[1:04:34] Bob Dobbs: They're anchoring.
[1:04:36] Bob Dobbs: Yeah,
[1:04:36] Bob Dobbs: they're anchoring.
[1:04:37] Bob Dobbs: They're pseudo-anchoring.
[1:04:38] Bob Dobbs: So he writes in the late
[1:04:42] Bob Dobbs: 60s in a letter to Playboy about the lords,
[1:04:45] Bob Dobbs: L-O-U-R-D-E-S,
[1:04:47] Bob Dobbs: of the new scrubbing of identities at Esalen Institute in Big Sur,
[1:04:53] Bob Dobbs: California,
[1:04:54] Bob Dobbs: where people would go and put themselves in hot tubs and do all these therapies.
[1:04:59] Bob Dobbs: They would scrub their chemical body identity.
[1:05:04] Bob Dobbs: Yeah.
[1:05:04] Bob Dobbs: And they would...
[1:05:05] Bob Dobbs: Sure,
[1:05:05] Cameron McEwen: they'd be taking LSD and...
[1:05:06] Bob Dobbs: Yeah.
[1:05:08] Cameron McEwen: Yeah.
[1:05:08] Bob Dobbs: And they would put themselves through the ritual of the stress of that disturbance of their sensory life.
[1:05:15] Bob Dobbs: So they were scrubbing their identity,
[1:05:17] Bob Dobbs: but that was not getting to the collective issue that people were in.
[1:05:21] Bob Dobbs: Yeah.
[1:05:21] Bob Dobbs: So this sense...
[1:05:23] Cameron McEwen: That was the discarnate theology.
[1:05:26] Bob Dobbs: Right.
[1:05:26] Bob Dobbs: And so...
[1:05:27] Cameron McEwen: And so to call that Lourdes is perfect.
[1:05:30] Bob Dobbs: Yeah,
[1:05:30] Bob Dobbs: he says,
[1:05:31] Bob Dobbs: well,
[1:05:31] Bob Dobbs: you know,
[1:05:31] Bob Dobbs: constantly soaking,
[1:05:32] Bob Dobbs: sudsing our identity and scrubbing.
[1:05:36] Bob Dobbs: So that is,
[1:05:37] Bob Dobbs: again,
[1:05:39] Bob Dobbs: much wealth is made marketing that old scrubbing in workshops,
[1:05:45] Bob Dobbs: retreats,
[1:05:46] Bob Dobbs: every kind of therapy going.
[1:05:49] Bob Dobbs: Everybody.
[1:05:50] Bob Dobbs: And then you have life coaches today where,
[1:05:54] Bob Dobbs: you know,
[1:05:54] Bob Dobbs: you have somebody who will scrub your identity for a day or for a few hours.
[1:05:59] Cameron McEwen: Yeah.
[1:06:00] Bob Dobbs: But good.
[1:06:04] Bob Dobbs: So
[1:06:08] Bob Dobbs: I think what I appreciate about iON is that iON is aware of that completely and kind of satirizes it.
[1:06:15] Bob Dobbs: There's a lot of McLuhan awareness.
[1:06:17] Bob Dobbs: The way we're talking about McLuhan tonight,
[1:06:19] Bob Dobbs: there's a lot of that in what iON says.
[1:06:23] Bob Dobbs: They express that at level awareness.
[1:06:25] Bob Dobbs: Now,
[1:06:25] Bob Dobbs: they might be getting it from my brain.
[1:06:27] Bob Dobbs: Often they just pick your brain.
[1:06:30] Bob Dobbs: But
[1:06:30] Bob Dobbs: I'll let them claim they're doing it.
[1:06:33] Bob Dobbs: So we got here,
[1:06:35] Bob Dobbs: that article,
[1:06:35] Bob Dobbs: that quote,
[1:06:36] Bob Dobbs: response to new media.
[1:06:39] Bob Dobbs: Did you see that Playboy art letter about lords,
[1:06:42] Bob Dobbs: the lords of Big Sur,
[1:06:44] Bob Dobbs: and scrubbing the tears,
[1:06:47] Bob Dobbs: he said,
[1:06:47] Bob Dobbs: you know,
[1:06:48] Bob Dobbs: the tears of the hot tubs?
[1:06:50] Cameron McEwen: Yeah,
[1:06:51] Cameron McEwen: I don't know that I have seen that.
[1:06:53] Cameron McEwen: I'll have to remind you to send me that with the
[1:06:56] Cameron McEwen: Bucky Fuller stuff.
[1:06:58] Bob Dobbs: Yeah,
[1:06:58] Bob Dobbs: now I sent you some Playboy letters,
[1:07:01] Bob Dobbs: remember?
[1:07:02] Cameron McEwen: Yeah,
[1:07:02] Cameron McEwen: I have some for sure.
[1:07:03] Bob Dobbs: And it might be one of them,
[1:07:04] Bob Dobbs: because I thought I sent you every one.
[1:07:06] Bob Dobbs: So if you get a chance,
[1:07:08] Bob Dobbs: check that.
[1:07:09] Bob Dobbs: I don't know if I have digital copies of them handy.
[1:07:11] Bob Dobbs: I might.
[1:07:14] Bob Dobbs: So I go,
[1:07:15] Bob Dobbs: this is my comment on that quote.
[1:07:18] Bob Dobbs: This is the hologram.
[1:07:20] Bob Dobbs: This is the later Android memes actual effect.
[1:07:23] Bob Dobbs: But I also place it back near the beginning of this essay to shock the chronology of the global village section.
[1:07:30] Bob Dobbs: We just shake up,
[1:07:32] Bob Dobbs: you know,
[1:07:32] Bob Dobbs: to get to your non-linearity,
[1:07:35] Bob Dobbs: right?
[1:07:37] Bob Dobbs: I don't know where,
[1:07:37] Bob Dobbs: what I,
[1:07:38] Bob Dobbs: I'd have to go back and look to find that.
[1:07:40] Bob Dobbs: So then I say,
[1:07:41] Bob Dobbs: audience of the intellect is a curious phrase.
[1:07:44] Bob Dobbs: A clue to its meaning may be found in these quotations.
[1:07:48] Bob Dobbs: And here you come to your favorite article,
[1:07:50] Bob Dobbs: Prospect.
[1:07:52] Cameron McEwen: Yeah.
[1:07:53] Bob Dobbs: 1962.
[1:07:58] Bob Dobbs: He says,
[1:07:58] Bob Dobbs: this is really a great quote.
[1:08:01] Bob Dobbs: This is before he's famous,
[1:08:02] Bob Dobbs: you know.
[1:08:03] Bob Dobbs: He's laying it out before anybody.
[1:08:05] Bob Dobbs: He's 1970 and 1962.
[1:08:11] Bob Dobbs: He says,
[1:08:11] Bob Dobbs: and I think it is this multiplicity of media that is now enabling man to free himself from media for the first time in history.
[1:08:18] Bob Dobbs: He has been the victim,
[1:08:19] Bob Dobbs: the servomechanism of his technologies.
[1:08:21] Bob Dobbs: His media from the beginning of time.
[1:08:24] Bob Dobbs: But now,
[1:08:24] Bob Dobbs: because of the sheer multiplicity of them,
[1:08:26] Bob Dobbs: he is beginning to awaken,
[1:08:28] Bob Dobbs: because he can't live with them all.
[1:08:30] Bob Dobbs: See,
[1:08:31] Bob Dobbs: there's the collective consciousness.
[1:08:32] Bob Dobbs: There's the extreme mediocrity that's going on,
[1:08:38] Bob Dobbs: being done to people.
[1:08:39] Bob Dobbs: They actually cannot put themselves back into a chemical body culture anymore.
[1:08:47] Cameron McEwen: But notice,
[1:08:49] Cameron McEwen: there's different...
[1:08:51] Cameron McEwen: meanings there.
[1:08:54] Cameron McEwen: When he says that because he can't live with them all,
[1:08:58] Cameron McEwen: that has the sense of not being able to live with a nightmare,
[1:09:04] Cameron McEwen: but it also has the sense of there is a limitation that is native to human being.
[1:09:12] Cameron McEwen: So if people are going to awaken,
[1:09:15] Cameron McEwen: they need to awaken to their inherently limited self.
[1:09:19] Bob Dobbs: Yeah.
[1:09:21] Bob Dobbs: So he says,
[1:09:21] Bob Dobbs: you know,
[1:09:22] Bob Dobbs: in the
[1:09:23] Bob Dobbs: 21st century,
[1:09:23] Bob Dobbs: we won't be able to live with this buzzsaw of technology.
[1:09:27] Cameron McEwen: Correct.
[1:09:28] Bob Dobbs: We can't keep up with them.
[1:09:30] Bob Dobbs: So the multiplicity of media,
[1:09:34] Bob Dobbs: that's really important that you're living in all these different environments,
[1:09:37] Bob Dobbs: which came linearly.
[1:09:41] Bob Dobbs: You know,
[1:09:41] Bob Dobbs: there was a movie era and the radio era that the slowly unfolding the creation of these environments.
[1:09:51] Bob Dobbs: But by the global theater,
[1:09:52] Bob Dobbs: it's all happening at the same time.
[1:09:55] Bob Dobbs: So you can't get back into the movie era or the book era,
[1:10:00] Bob Dobbs: when there was only books before there were electric media.
[1:10:03] Bob Dobbs: You can't experience that.
[1:10:05] Bob Dobbs: condition anymore.
[1:10:06] Bob Dobbs: So that's why I say everything is a meme of itself,
[1:10:09] Bob Dobbs: a meme of when it was an actual environment,
[1:10:12] Bob Dobbs: an afterimage.
[1:10:15] Bob Dobbs: So this is one of his most important quotes.
[1:10:19] Bob Dobbs: It's how we are becoming awake.
[1:10:22] Bob Dobbs: This would be his meaning for Finnegans Wake,
[1:10:25] Bob Dobbs: what Joyce was saying,
[1:10:26] Bob Dobbs: what was waking people up.
[1:10:28] Bob Dobbs: Not that everybody was falling asleep.
[1:10:32] Bob Dobbs: They were.
[1:10:33] Bob Dobbs: But the hidden ground of the environment was a waking process,
[1:10:39] Bob Dobbs: not the woke of the chemical body fetishes,
[1:10:43] Bob Dobbs: but there's a waking going on.
[1:10:45] Bob Dobbs: And the evergreens defined the second coming as a time of perpetual change.
[1:10:54] Bob Dobbs: We have an environmental second coming.
[1:10:57] Bob Dobbs: If you think of the highest levels of awareness that Christ was supposed to have,
[1:11:01] Bob Dobbs: and it becomes an environment.
[1:11:04] Bob Dobbs: that's what Marshall McLuhan pointing to.
[1:11:06] Bob Dobbs: The multiplicity of media,
[1:11:07] Bob Dobbs: you cannot fall back into a trance other than the very subtle trance of not understanding this point.
[1:11:19] Cameron McEwen: Right.
[1:11:19] Cameron McEwen: I think that's important,
[1:11:20] Cameron McEwen: what you just said.
[1:11:22] Cameron McEwen: Because when people become awake,
[1:11:26] Cameron McEwen: they don't become awake in the sense of having some sort of zen.
[1:11:32] Cameron McEwen: A moment of all knowing.
[1:11:35] Bob Dobbs: Yeah.
[1:11:36] Cameron McEwen: Being awake is inherently to be limited,
[1:11:43] Cameron McEwen: to be a certain person in a certain place at a certain time and to be a kind of selection of the possibilities that are before you.
[1:11:57] Bob Dobbs: Yeah.
[1:11:58] Cameron McEwen: So awake.
[1:12:00] Cameron McEwen: needs to be separated from the desire to be God or something.
[1:12:05] Bob Dobbs: Yeah,
[1:12:06] Bob Dobbs: there's a new meaning for awake.
[1:12:08] Bob Dobbs: And so you've got to be aware of the different bodies and how they are each one an awakening.
[1:12:15] Bob Dobbs: But there's a collective synergistic awakening that you have to become aware of caused by the overlaying of all the different levels of realm of awakening that each previous environment was.
[1:12:28] Bob Dobbs: So it's...
[1:12:31] Bob Dobbs: I think when I talk like this around people,
[1:12:34] Bob Dobbs: they basically don't know what I'm talking about.
[1:12:37] Bob Dobbs: You know what I'm talking about.
[1:12:39] Bob Dobbs: But I think if they listen to our dialogue,
[1:12:41] Bob Dobbs: since we're supporting what we're saying to each other,
[1:12:44] Bob Dobbs: then that can be believed and then people say,
[1:12:47] Bob Dobbs: well,
[1:12:47] Bob Dobbs: there is something being understood here.
[1:12:49] Bob Dobbs: So they might be inclined to learn from what we're saying to get that.
[1:12:53] Cameron McEwen: That's the hope.
[1:12:55] Bob Dobbs: Yeah,
[1:12:56] Bob Dobbs: that's the more subtle point here.
[1:13:00] Bob Dobbs: So that's why people say we're the best dialogue on the internet.
[1:13:04] Bob Dobbs: There's no doubt that we are,
[1:13:06] Bob Dobbs: what we're talking here,
[1:13:08] Bob Dobbs: nobody else can say this stuff.
[1:13:13] Bob Dobbs: Maybe if you get the de Kerckhove and Logan together,
[1:13:15] Bob Dobbs: they might get somewheres,
[1:13:17] Bob Dobbs: but I don't think they get as subtle as we're getting.
[1:13:20] Bob Dobbs: And they're not,
[1:13:21] Bob Dobbs: they don't have these quotes handy.
[1:13:23] Bob Dobbs: They don't remember them,
[1:13:25] Bob Dobbs: you know?
[1:13:25] Bob Dobbs: They didn't study enough to remember the quotes.
[1:13:28] Bob Dobbs: This is a good collection.
[1:13:29] Bob Dobbs: This
[1:13:30] Bob Dobbs: book is a key to an advanced dialogue.
[1:13:37] Cameron McEwen: Yeah.
[1:13:38] Cameron McEwen: And it might be good when we came to the AP a few pages ago,
[1:13:45] Cameron McEwen: you said,
[1:13:46] Cameron McEwen: now we're getting somewhere.
[1:13:48] Cameron McEwen: And it might be good every once in a while for you to say or to describe how you see this part of the book.
[1:13:59] Cameron McEwen: relating to where you want to get to with Trump.
[1:14:03] Cameron McEwen: Right.
[1:14:05] Cameron McEwen: For example,
[1:14:05] Cameron McEwen: I have the idea that when you got around to the AP in the book,
[1:14:15] Cameron McEwen: it was in a section of your pamphlet that has to do with chaos.
[1:14:21] Cameron McEwen: And
[1:14:22] Cameron McEwen: I was thinking to myself that you might be thinking that
[1:14:29] Cameron McEwen: In order to understand the phenomenon of Trump,
[1:14:33] Cameron McEwen: you have to be able to see the chaos that's going on and the relationship between him and that chaos.
[1:14:45] Bob Dobbs: Yes,
[1:14:46] Bob Dobbs: which we call a tech body.
[1:14:47] Bob Dobbs: So it's appropriate that you say that because this quote is what I meant in my chart.
[1:14:55] Bob Dobbs: by the AP.
[1:14:56] Bob Dobbs: I have the AP,
[1:14:57] Bob Dobbs: Anthropomorphic Physical,
[1:14:58] Bob Dobbs: is the ground of the chart.
[1:15:00] Bob Dobbs: It's 1960 to 1990.
[1:15:02] Bob Dobbs: The whole period of the unfolding of the Android Meme is an unconscious environment.
[1:15:10] Bob Dobbs: The different quadrants or disciplines or angles,
[1:15:15] Bob Dobbs: they are extensions of the AP.
[1:15:18] Bob Dobbs: So in the end,
[1:15:21] Bob Dobbs: people are grasping for the anthropomorphic.
[1:15:23] Bob Dobbs: Well,
[1:15:23] Bob Dobbs: what is the anthropomorphic?
[1:15:25] Bob Dobbs: That there's something about being human that's at the core of the universe.
[1:15:29] Bob Dobbs: We don't like to think that rattlesnakes are the core of the universe or something,
[1:15:34] Bob Dobbs: right?
[1:15:35] Bob Dobbs: We want to project.
[1:15:37] Bob Dobbs: that there's a human,
[1:15:38] Bob Dobbs: and that's partly the idea of God as a human,
[1:15:40] Bob Dobbs: or some kind of man or something,
[1:15:42] Bob Dobbs: or a woman.
[1:15:43] Bob Dobbs: That is the anthropomorphic projection.
[1:15:47] Bob Dobbs: So,
[1:15:48] Bob Dobbs: all media...
[1:15:49] Cameron McEwen: This is also an anthropomorphic introjection.
[1:15:54] Cameron McEwen: I mean,
[1:15:55] Cameron McEwen: it's not obvious that
[1:15:59] Cameron McEwen: God, and the idea of God as a certain kind of man,
[1:16:03] Cameron McEwen: it's not obvious that we look at ourselves...
[1:16:07] Cameron McEwen: And we say,
[1:16:08] Cameron McEwen: oh,
[1:16:09] Cameron McEwen: the universe must be like us,
[1:16:11] Cameron McEwen: right?
[1:16:13] Cameron McEwen: The other way of doing it is to look at the universe and try and understand what it means to be a human from that.
[1:16:23] Bob Dobbs: Yeah.
[1:16:24] Bob Dobbs: So media as extension of man,
[1:16:29] Bob Dobbs: to say that the book is an extension of man,
[1:16:31] Bob Dobbs: that's anthropomorphic.
[1:16:33] Bob Dobbs: We're saying the book is similar to us,
[1:16:35] Bob Dobbs: comes from us.
[1:16:40] Cameron McEwen: But to say the point I just made again,
[1:16:45] Cameron McEwen: McLuhan is not only saying that the book is like us,
[1:16:48] Cameron McEwen: he's saying we're like the book.
[1:16:50] Bob Dobbs: Yeah.
[1:16:51] Cameron McEwen: That's what the Gutenberg Galaxy is.
[1:16:53] Bob Dobbs: Right.
[1:16:54] Bob Dobbs: So that would be this interplay,
[1:16:55] Bob Dobbs: tactile interplay,
[1:16:56] Bob Dobbs: of the anthropomorphic.
[1:16:58] Bob Dobbs: And we may,
[1:17:02] Bob Dobbs: you might have to,
[1:17:04] Bob Dobbs: I may be advocating dropping the anthropomorphic situation.
[1:17:07] Bob Dobbs: That's the final bias.
[1:17:09] Bob Dobbs: Because when you have multimedia that don't let you fall into any particular culture anymore,
[1:17:16] Bob Dobbs: the sheer multiplicity of them is beginning to awaken.
[1:17:20] Bob Dobbs: He's beginning to awaken and question whether there is a human anthropomorphic level.
[1:17:26] Bob Dobbs: That's the challenge here and why many people would go nuts under this situation.
[1:17:32] Bob Dobbs: You can't find the anthropomorphic.
[1:17:34] Bob Dobbs: So you have a great yearning for the anthropomorphic in...
[1:17:39] Bob Dobbs: in business,
[1:17:40] Bob Dobbs: in tourism,
[1:17:41] Bob Dobbs: in everything that's going on since the global theater came in.
[1:17:45] Bob Dobbs: The Anthropomorphic Physical the hidden ground.
[1:17:48] Bob Dobbs: So that's what I'm going to try to point out.
[1:17:53] Bob Dobbs: Well,
[1:17:53] Cameron McEwen: notice how that's what you just said is built into the medium is the message.
[1:17:59] Bob Dobbs: Yeah.
[1:17:59] Cameron McEwen: Because anytime you want to talk about the subject,
[1:18:04] Cameron McEwen: anytime you want to talk about the anthropomorphic,
[1:18:08] Cameron McEwen: that has some ground.
[1:18:11] Cameron McEwen: And so what that means,
[1:18:12] Cameron McEwen: some medium.
[1:18:13] Cameron McEwen: So what that means is that the subject or the Anthropomorphic Physical not only extended outwards,
[1:18:23] Cameron McEwen: it's also extended inwards infinitely.
[1:18:28] Cameron McEwen: You don't get to the subject or to the anthropomorphic except by...
[1:18:37] Cameron McEwen: throwing out some kind of anchor.
[1:18:40] Cameron McEwen: But no anchor has legitimacy.
[1:18:43] Bob Dobbs: Right,
[1:18:43] Bob Dobbs: that's where
[1:18:44] Bob Dobbs: I understand Joyce made sure the wake had no ground.
[1:18:48] Bob Dobbs: Couldn't find what the anthropomorphic was.
[1:18:51] Bob Dobbs: So yeah,
[1:18:52] Bob Dobbs: what you were saying made me want to say,
[1:18:55] Bob Dobbs: there is no anthropomorphic today.
[1:18:58] Bob Dobbs: That's the problem.
[1:19:01] Bob Dobbs: And everything is...
[1:19:05] Bob Dobbs: Well,
[1:19:05] Bob Dobbs: there's a yearning for old-fashioned anthropomorphism,
[1:19:08] Bob Dobbs: you know,
[1:19:09] Bob Dobbs: the chemical body,
[1:19:10] Bob Dobbs: the nature,
[1:19:11] Bob Dobbs: the romanticization of nature and ecology,
[1:19:14] Bob Dobbs: and the planet,
[1:19:15] Bob Dobbs: the divine planet and all that stuff.
[1:19:17] Bob Dobbs: That's part of this anthropomorphic knee-jerk response.
[1:19:22] Cameron McEwen: Yeah,
[1:19:22] Cameron McEwen: anthropomorphic anchoring.
[1:19:24] Bob Dobbs: Yes,
[1:19:24] Bob Dobbs: looking for an anchor.
[1:19:26] Bob Dobbs: And
[1:19:28] Bob Dobbs: I don't,
[1:19:28] Bob Dobbs: most people,
[1:19:29] Bob Dobbs: they're not going to see it worthwhile to go that far.
[1:19:33] Bob Dobbs: They just want to just...
[1:19:35] Bob Dobbs: tidy up the earth,
[1:19:36] Bob Dobbs: make it friendly,
[1:19:38] Bob Dobbs: and we don't need all this fucking violence and war,
[1:19:40] Bob Dobbs: stupid.
[1:19:41] Bob Dobbs: Let's just get back to what we are.
[1:19:42] Bob Dobbs: We're all human.
[1:19:43] Bob Dobbs: Why can't we get along?
[1:19:44] Bob Dobbs: We're all anthropomorphic.
[1:19:46] Bob Dobbs: You know,
[1:19:47] Bob Dobbs: that's what most people are living for.
[1:19:51] Bob Dobbs: And then it's expressed in particular belief systems,
[1:19:55] Bob Dobbs: concepts about what they find is sacred.
[1:19:58] Cameron McEwen: But there's no way to translate that.
[1:20:05] Cameron McEwen: beneficent
[1:20:06] Cameron McEwen: feeling about the earth and your fellow humans into the political reality.
[1:20:13] Cameron McEwen: So people are sort of celebrating their fine feeling,
[1:20:19] Cameron McEwen: and at the same time,
[1:20:21] Cameron McEwen: the amount of war going on,
[1:20:24] Cameron McEwen: the amount of screwing the planet in every conceivable way is multiplying.
[1:20:32] Cameron McEwen: Yeah,
[1:20:32] Cameron McEwen: and you know,
[1:20:33] Bob Dobbs: politics has been reduced to that.
[1:20:35] Bob Dobbs: They just come out and say,
[1:20:36] Bob Dobbs: you know,
[1:20:38] Bob Dobbs: let's get together,
[1:20:38] Bob Dobbs: people.
[1:20:39] Bob Dobbs: Let's bring America back together.
[1:20:41] Bob Dobbs: You know,
[1:20:41] Bob Dobbs: Trump does this.
[1:20:43] Bob Dobbs: It's a basic,
[1:20:44] Bob Dobbs: hey,
[1:20:45] Bob Dobbs: we're all human.
[1:20:47] Bob Dobbs: You know,
[1:20:47] Bob Dobbs: let's just be accepting of each other or something.
[1:20:53] Bob Dobbs: That's the last meme that you can come up with.
[1:20:58] Bob Dobbs: You know,
[1:20:58] Bob Dobbs: it's another way of saying the Beatles thing,
[1:21:00] Bob Dobbs: all you need is love and all is love or something.
[1:21:02] Bob Dobbs: That is what politics says.
[1:21:06] Bob Dobbs: totally unconscious of the violence that they're part of.
[1:21:10] Bob Dobbs: They think by saying it,
[1:21:13] Bob Dobbs: you've got a break.
[1:21:14] Bob Dobbs: You've got a,
[1:21:16] Bob Dobbs: you're getting out of the problem.
[1:21:19] Cameron McEwen: We know when McLuhan treated advertising in the
[1:21:26] Cameron McEwen: 1940s and then in
[1:21:27] Cameron McEwen: Mechanization Takes Command,
[1:21:29] Cameron McEwen: that's one of the things he was pointing out,
[1:21:31] Cameron McEwen: that advertising is good news.
[1:21:36] Cameron McEwen: And it works in a way that we don't understand.
[1:21:40] Cameron McEwen: So you have the guy with the eye patch selling shirts in some way.
[1:21:46] Cameron McEwen: And nobody knows how it works.
[1:21:50] Cameron McEwen: All people know is that more shirts are getting sold.
[1:21:54] Cameron McEwen: Right?
[1:21:54] Cameron McEwen: And so what media are telling us in their multiplicity is that we're involved in something that we don't understand.
[1:22:06] Cameron McEwen: And in our lack of understanding,
[1:22:10] Cameron McEwen: all we ask from the ads is that they tell us how happy we are,
[1:22:14] Cameron McEwen: and then we'll go and buy what they say we should buy.
[1:22:18] Bob Dobbs: Right.
[1:22:18] Bob Dobbs: But the Anthropomorphic Physical paranoid,
[1:22:21] Bob Dobbs: so you've got to have bad news to make you feel like you're surviving something tragic.
[1:22:29] Bob Dobbs: You know,
[1:22:30] Bob Dobbs: you've bypassed the inevitable death you're going to have.
[1:22:34] Bob Dobbs: So remember he talked about...
[1:22:35] Bob Dobbs: You need a lot of bad news to sell good news.
[1:22:39] Cameron McEwen: Right.
[1:22:40] Cameron McEwen: But I think McLuhan didn't talk enough about the motivations of the socially maladroit.
[1:22:51] Cameron McEwen: A lot of the news about war or about crazy sexuality or about all sorts of stuff is
[1:23:04] Cameron McEwen: an attempt.
[1:23:05] Cameron McEwen: to rub people's faces in stuff they don't want to be rubbed in.
[1:23:10] Bob Dobbs: Yeah.
[1:23:12] Bob Dobbs: That's the bad news.
[1:23:13] Bob Dobbs: That's a new version of bad news.
[1:23:15] Cameron McEwen: Yeah.
[1:23:17] Bob Dobbs: In your face.
[1:23:17] Bob Dobbs: Yeah.
[1:23:21] Bob Dobbs: And so much of news is just these idiots talking disaster.
[1:23:26] Bob Dobbs: Why would anybody even look at it?
[1:23:28] Bob Dobbs: But they can't stop themselves.
[1:23:30] Bob Dobbs: And there is an unconscious fascination with it,
[1:23:32] Bob Dobbs: but I don't know who's doing it anymore.
[1:23:34] Bob Dobbs: Apparently,
[1:23:34] Bob Dobbs: not many people are watching
[1:23:36] Bob Dobbs: TV news anymore in America.
[1:23:39] Bob Dobbs: They're doing TikToks or something,
[1:23:41] Bob Dobbs: or not watching anything.
[1:23:43] Bob Dobbs: Yeah,
[1:23:43] Cameron McEwen: I don't know anybody that watches the news.
[1:23:50] Cameron McEwen: Yeah.
[1:23:50] Bob Dobbs: I don't know anybody,
[1:23:51] Bob Dobbs: but I'm not functioning too much in society.
[1:23:54] Bob Dobbs: But
[1:23:56] Bob Dobbs: I don't see images of people doing the old media,
[1:24:00] Bob Dobbs: but they apparently are looking at stuff on their phones.
[1:24:04] Bob Dobbs: And it might be TikToks and stuff.
[1:24:05] Bob Dobbs: Apparently TikTok is the big medium right now.
[1:24:09] Bob Dobbs: So,
[1:24:10] Bob Dobbs: you know,
[1:24:10] Bob Dobbs: 22 seconds,
[1:24:11] Bob Dobbs: you know,
[1:24:11] Bob Dobbs: you just get this quick disaster message or something.
[1:24:15] Bob Dobbs: But it's so perverse the way we're living compared to the old anthropomorphic values we used to have.
[1:24:22] Cameron McEwen: No question.
[1:24:31] Cameron McEwen: That's another way that...
[1:24:33] Cameron McEwen: People's faces are ground into stuff.
[1:24:39] Cameron McEwen: They really don't know what's going on and they don't know how to react.
[1:24:43] Cameron McEwen: They don't know how to think about it.
[1:24:45] Cameron McEwen: And so that's how the world is.
[1:24:48] Bob Dobbs: And they get anxious and they go on some stupid medication.
[1:24:55] Cameron McEwen: Or find an anchor in drugs or in religion or in whatever.
[1:25:04] Bob Dobbs: I think what we're describing is that part in Revelation where...
[1:25:09] Bob Dobbs: They're talking about the end of the world and all this Armageddon stuff,
[1:25:11] Bob Dobbs: and they say men's hearts fail.
[1:25:14] Bob Dobbs: I can see that.
[1:25:15] Bob Dobbs: People's hearts are failing.
[1:25:17] Bob Dobbs: They're just going to drop dead,
[1:25:18] Bob Dobbs: you know?
[1:25:19] Cameron McEwen: Yeah,
[1:25:19] Cameron McEwen: I like that.
[1:25:20] Cameron McEwen: Well,
[1:25:20] Cameron McEwen: I mean,
[1:25:21] Cameron McEwen: heart is also something metaphorical.
[1:25:24] Bob Dobbs: Yeah.
[1:25:24] Cameron McEwen: And it's,
[1:25:26] Cameron McEwen: yeah,
[1:25:26] Cameron McEwen: their hearts are failing for sure.
[1:25:28] Cameron McEwen: Just families are failing.
[1:25:31] Cameron McEwen: Yeah,
[1:25:31] Cameron McEwen: did I hear you say,
[1:25:32] Bob Dobbs: when I said that,
[1:25:33] Bob Dobbs: you said,
[1:25:33] Bob Dobbs: I like that.
[1:25:34] Bob Dobbs: Did you say that?
[1:25:36] Cameron McEwen: Yeah,
[1:25:36] Cameron McEwen: I did.
[1:25:36] Bob Dobbs: Yeah.
[1:25:37] Bob Dobbs: Yeah,
[1:25:37] Bob Dobbs: you know that quote.
[1:25:39] Bob Dobbs: Yeah,
[1:25:39] Bob Dobbs: and so the heart is,
[1:25:41] Bob Dobbs: the heart of the matter is the heart.
[1:25:42] Bob Dobbs: The heart is the anthropomorphic,
[1:25:45] Bob Dobbs: that there is something that you are connected to with your species,
[1:25:49] Bob Dobbs: with humans.
[1:25:50] Bob Dobbs: That is being threatened by technology,
[1:25:56] Bob Dobbs: you know,
[1:25:56] Bob Dobbs: taking over and there's not any human heart level left.
[1:26:00] Bob Dobbs: And so,
[1:26:02] Bob Dobbs: I know the baby boomers went through a despondency over that.
[1:26:06] Bob Dobbs: Then Generation X.
[1:26:07] Bob Dobbs: Every generation over the last 50 or 60 years has lost heart because it's been the same problem since radio,
[1:26:15] Bob Dobbs: say,
[1:26:16] Bob Dobbs: and the post-human,
[1:26:19] Bob Dobbs: and it's just gotten more intense each generation.
[1:26:23] Bob Dobbs: Sure.
[1:26:23] Cameron McEwen: Part of that is guilt,
[1:26:26] Cameron McEwen: right?
[1:26:26] Cameron McEwen: Part of it is the guilt of letting go things that were very important to your parents and your grandparents.
[1:26:35] Bob Dobbs: Yeah.
[1:26:36] Cameron McEwen: It's built into humans not to do that,
[1:26:40] Cameron McEwen: but modern media are driving humans out of that.
[1:26:45] Cameron McEwen: So modern humans become attenuated through that process,
[1:26:51] Cameron McEwen: and this attenuation is a way of being anxious.
[1:26:56] Bob Dobbs: Yeah,
[1:26:56] Bob Dobbs: and I find it embarrassing.
[1:26:58] Bob Dobbs: I find people are embarrassing me.
[1:27:00] Bob Dobbs: They're so inadequate to talking about this issue,
[1:27:04] Bob Dobbs: you know?
[1:27:05] Bob Dobbs: They're just hiding it all the time.
[1:27:09] Bob Dobbs: So people are not as articulate at funerals or whatever,
[1:27:15] Bob Dobbs: at wakes,
[1:27:17] Bob Dobbs: at weddings.
[1:27:18] Bob Dobbs: It's all like people don't want to notice it too much.
[1:27:22] Bob Dobbs: Get it over quickly because it contradicts everybody's values.
[1:27:28] Bob Dobbs: What's going on,
[1:27:30] Bob Dobbs: the wake,
[1:27:31] Bob Dobbs: the funeral,
[1:27:31] Bob Dobbs: the wedding doesn't solve it.
[1:27:34] Bob Dobbs: Well,
[1:27:34] Cameron McEwen: everybody's conscious of swimming in a sea of cliches.
[1:27:39] Bob Dobbs: Yeah,
[1:27:40] Bob Dobbs: dead cliches.
[1:27:41] Cameron McEwen: Yeah,
[1:27:43] Cameron McEwen: and it's very hard for humans to come to terms with that.
[1:27:48] Bob Dobbs: And so it's understandable why,
[1:27:50] Bob Dobbs: you know,
[1:27:50] Bob Dobbs: the rumor that the kids don't want to leave their bedrooms,
[1:27:54] Bob Dobbs: they're killing themselves,
[1:27:55] Bob Dobbs: you can see why,
[1:27:57] Bob Dobbs: right?
[1:27:59] Cameron McEwen: Yeah,
[1:27:59] Cameron McEwen: they're making a point.
[1:28:01] Bob Dobbs: Yeah.
[1:28:04] Bob Dobbs: Yep.
[1:28:04] Bob Dobbs: So where do I go from there?
[1:28:07] Bob Dobbs: Okay.
[1:28:08] Bob Dobbs: We can't live with them all.
[1:28:10] Bob Dobbs: October 1962.
[1:28:12] Bob Dobbs: So that's the
[1:28:14] Bob Dobbs: Bay of Pigs crisis.
[1:28:16] Bob Dobbs: No,
[1:28:16] Bob Dobbs: not the Bay of Pigs,
[1:28:17] Bob Dobbs: the Cuban Missile Crisis.
[1:28:19] Bob Dobbs: October 62.
[1:28:20] Bob Dobbs: McLuhan is right.
[1:28:21] Bob Dobbs: That's what you would read while waiting to see if Kennedy was going to blow up the world.
[1:28:25] Bob Dobbs: Right?
[1:28:27] Bob Dobbs: You'd read this interview.
[1:28:31] Cameron McEwen: Yeah.
[1:28:31] Cameron McEwen: Well,
[1:28:31] Cameron McEwen: um...
[1:28:34] Cameron McEwen: I hadn't thought of that connection before,
[1:28:37] Cameron McEwen: but certainly if you think of McLuhan's point that our nerves are outside of us,
[1:28:48] Cameron McEwen: the fact that there was pending nuclear war would certainly be one more thing to irritate those exterior nerves.
[1:28:59] Bob Dobbs: Right,
[1:28:59] Bob Dobbs: so if you were in 62...
[1:29:03] Bob Dobbs: It's basically around the
[1:29:05] Bob Dobbs: 22nd. In the 20s,
[1:29:06] Bob Dobbs: this crisis is happening for about a week,
[1:29:08] Bob Dobbs: right?
[1:29:09] Bob Dobbs: So if you were watching the news and wondering what was going to happen,
[1:29:16] Bob Dobbs: and you came across this statement we just read,
[1:29:19] Bob Dobbs: you would be amazed at this statement.
[1:29:21] Bob Dobbs: You'd be open to getting,
[1:29:22] Bob Dobbs: well,
[1:29:22] Bob Dobbs: this guy's talking about how bad things are.
[1:29:25] Bob Dobbs: Yeah,
[1:29:25] Bob Dobbs: this is fucking bad.
[1:29:27] Bob Dobbs: You know what I mean?
[1:29:29] Bob Dobbs: I could see that McLuhan would immediately become very significant to people.
[1:29:34] Bob Dobbs: intellectuals,
[1:29:35] Bob Dobbs: whoever would read this art magazine.
[1:29:38] Bob Dobbs: This is quite,
[1:29:39] Bob Dobbs: this is big enough,
[1:29:40] Bob Dobbs: this statement,
[1:29:41] Bob Dobbs: to get at the mistake humans had gotten themselves into in October 62,
[1:29:47] Bob Dobbs: right?
[1:29:47] Bob Dobbs: They stumbled into this fucking problem.
[1:29:51] Cameron McEwen: I wonder how many people in the history of the world have actually read this article.
[1:29:56] Cameron McEwen: Not very many.
[1:29:58] Bob Dobbs: Three people.
[1:30:00] Cameron McEwen: Yeah,
[1:30:00] Cameron McEwen: and not very many people have thought of it.
[1:30:03] Bob Dobbs: I would say it was Robertson Davies,
[1:30:05] Bob Dobbs: Robert Fulford,
[1:30:06] Bob Dobbs: and
[1:30:07] Bob Dobbs: Kildare Dobbs.
[1:30:08] Bob Dobbs: They're the three guys who read it.
[1:30:11] Bob Dobbs: And maybe
[1:30:12] Bob Dobbs: Don Theall would have read it.
[1:30:13] Bob Dobbs: He always kept up with McLuhan.
[1:30:15] Bob Dobbs: You know what I mean?
[1:30:16] Bob Dobbs: He always was watching what McLuhan was saying.
[1:30:20] Bob Dobbs: I'll have to ask Don through iON.
[1:30:23] Bob Dobbs: Hey,
[1:30:23] Bob Dobbs: Don,
[1:30:23] Bob Dobbs: did you read this article?
[1:30:26] Bob Dobbs: Missile crisis?
[1:30:28] Bob Dobbs: See what he says.
[1:30:30] Bob Dobbs: That's another thing.
[1:30:31] Bob Dobbs: You know,
[1:30:31] Bob Dobbs: I could talk to any of these people,
[1:30:32] Bob Dobbs: right?
[1:30:34] Bob Dobbs: I have access to them all.
[1:30:37] Cameron McEwen: What did you just say?
[1:30:39] Bob Dobbs: I have access to them all.
[1:30:40] Cameron McEwen: Oh,
[1:30:40] Cameron McEwen: I see.
[1:30:43] Bob Dobbs: Well,
[1:30:43] Bob Dobbs: you go,
[1:30:44] Bob Dobbs: well,
[1:30:47] Bob Dobbs: well,
[1:30:47] Bob Dobbs: Bob,
[1:30:48] Bob Dobbs: it's a little extreme.
[1:30:51] Bob Dobbs: So,
[1:30:53] Cameron McEwen: You have always been a person to listen to every possible thing that's out there.
[1:31:02] Cameron McEwen: So I leave that to you.
[1:31:06] Bob Dobbs: You what?
[1:31:06] Bob Dobbs: You leave that to me,
[1:31:07] Bob Dobbs: did you say?
[1:31:09] Cameron McEwen: Yeah.
[1:31:11] Cameron McEwen: I'm happy that you do it.
[1:31:13] Bob Dobbs: Okay.
[1:31:14] Bob Dobbs: Somebody's got to do it.
[1:31:15] Bob Dobbs: So that's really funny.
[1:31:19] Bob Dobbs: Who read this statement?
[1:31:22] Bob Dobbs: Not many people.
[1:31:24] Bob Dobbs: No way.
[1:31:24] Bob Dobbs: You know what I mean?
[1:31:28] Cameron McEwen: They wouldn't even...
[1:31:30] Cameron McEwen: The Art Magazine had a subscription in the hundreds,
[1:31:34] Cameron McEwen: probably.
[1:31:34] Bob Dobbs: Yeah.
[1:31:34] Cameron McEwen: Right?
[1:31:36] Cameron McEwen: And then out of those people,
[1:31:38] Cameron McEwen: how many that actually had the mag read the article?
[1:31:44] Cameron McEwen: Well,
[1:31:46] Cameron McEwen: in the tens,
[1:31:47] Cameron McEwen: maybe?
[1:31:47] Bob Dobbs: Right.
[1:31:48] Bob Dobbs: And they'd be only people in the art industry.
[1:31:51] Bob Dobbs: puny Canadian,
[1:31:51] Bob Dobbs: this is before real Canadian art takes off.
[1:31:54] Bob Dobbs: There's nobody reading this.
[1:31:58] Bob Dobbs: So when I first read this back in the 60s,
[1:32:01] Bob Dobbs: I go,
[1:32:01] Bob Dobbs: wow
[1:32:02] Bob Dobbs: I'd be there in the library or someplace reading this and say,
[1:32:05] Bob Dobbs: Jesus Christ,
[1:32:06] Bob Dobbs: I'd like what I want.
[1:32:07] Bob Dobbs: Everybody,
[1:32:08] Bob Dobbs: please,
[1:32:09] Bob Dobbs: I'm in the book,
[1:32:10] Bob Dobbs: you know,
[1:32:10] Bob Dobbs: in the library.
[1:32:11] Bob Dobbs: Okay,
[1:32:11] Bob Dobbs: everybody,
[1:32:12] Bob Dobbs: shut up Listen You've got to hear this That's how I felt,
[1:32:16] Bob Dobbs: you know what I mean?
[1:32:18] Bob Dobbs: It was one of the most amazing uh
[1:32:21] Bob Dobbs: A bunch of words,
[1:32:22] Bob Dobbs: this quote,
[1:32:23] Bob Dobbs: because he was meta,
[1:32:25] Bob Dobbs: meta,
[1:32:26] Bob Dobbs: he was going meta on the situation.
[1:32:29] Bob Dobbs: Like everybody's thinking,
[1:32:30] Bob Dobbs: everybody's getting numbed.
[1:32:31] Bob Dobbs: He said,
[1:32:31] Bob Dobbs: no,
[1:32:31] Bob Dobbs: no,
[1:32:32] Bob Dobbs: nobody's getting numbed anymore.
[1:32:35] Bob Dobbs: It's gone beyond numbness,
[1:32:37] Bob Dobbs: which is pretty interesting,
[1:32:38] Bob Dobbs: right?
[1:32:40] Bob Dobbs: We've gone to a nowhere zone.
[1:32:42] Cameron McEwen: Without noticing it.
[1:32:49] Bob Dobbs: Right.
[1:32:50] Bob Dobbs: But this guy noticed it.
[1:32:54] Bob Dobbs: You know,
[1:32:56] Bob Dobbs: Eric or somebody said that Marshall would run out of his bedroom or his office at home,
[1:33:01] Bob Dobbs: you know,
[1:33:02] Bob Dobbs: maybe like 8 at night or something.
[1:33:04] Bob Dobbs: Kids are watching TV and he runs out.
[1:33:06] Bob Dobbs: Wow,
[1:33:07] Bob Dobbs: wait till they read this one.
[1:33:11] Bob Dobbs: And he probably just written something like this.
[1:33:13] Bob Dobbs: He knew he was good,
[1:33:16] Bob Dobbs: you know.
[1:33:17] Bob Dobbs: He was saying something that hadn't been done before.
[1:33:19] Bob Dobbs: So I go,
[1:33:19] Bob Dobbs: uh...
[1:33:20] Bob Dobbs: This is the beginning of the autonomy,
[1:33:22] Bob Dobbs: the voluntary ESP.
[1:33:24] Bob Dobbs: We're being disconnected from the electric ESP.
[1:33:27] Bob Dobbs: Now this is really important,
[1:33:28] Bob Dobbs: this is another version of the heart of how we're going beyond the anthropomorphic.
[1:33:35] Bob Dobbs: We're being disconnected from the electric ESP.
[1:33:37] Bob Dobbs: We're being kicked out.
[1:33:39] Bob Dobbs: There's just too much.
[1:33:40] Bob Dobbs: So in a way,
[1:33:40] Bob Dobbs: Marshall McLuhan is recognizing this isn't for him.
[1:33:44] Bob Dobbs: The news is not serving an informing or warning function anymore.
[1:33:48] Bob Dobbs: So in a way,
[1:33:49] Bob Dobbs: Marshall McLuhan has recognized this isn't for him.
[1:33:52] Bob Dobbs: Yeah,
[1:33:52] Bob Dobbs: that there's nothing to be told.
[1:33:54] Bob Dobbs: You can't be fucking told anymore.
[1:33:56] Bob Dobbs: You're beyond that.
[1:33:58] Bob Dobbs: You've been kicked out.
[1:34:00] Bob Dobbs: That's interesting how I'm trying to say this stuff.
[1:34:02] Bob Dobbs: We're being kicked out.
[1:34:05] Bob Dobbs: The news is not serving an informing or warning function anymore.
[1:34:10] Bob Dobbs: So I'm enjoying getting this because this is the important stuff I'm getting to.
[1:34:15] Bob Dobbs: And you had to do the whole introduction.
[1:34:17] Bob Dobbs: 100 pages of background,
[1:34:19] Bob Dobbs: but now
[1:34:21] Bob Dobbs: I'm getting the quotes that deals with a problem that no one talks about in McLuhan land.
[1:34:26] Bob Dobbs: You know,
[1:34:27] Bob Dobbs: what he's really warning about.
[1:34:30] Bob Dobbs: So I appreciate that you have words to respond to what I'm saying.
[1:34:36] Cameron McEwen: But don't you think that the voluntary ESP is a new form of control?
[1:34:47] Bob Dobbs: Yep.
[1:34:48] Bob Dobbs: The voluntary ESP,
[1:34:49] Bob Dobbs: we'll have to see how much more I explain it,
[1:34:51] Bob Dobbs: but there's no,
[1:34:57] Bob Dobbs: I heard a guy say in 1970 on CBC that he was at a conference,
[1:35:01] Bob Dobbs: he was a psychiatrist,
[1:35:02] Bob Dobbs: and McLuhan was there.
[1:35:03] Bob Dobbs: And he said,
[1:35:04] Bob Dobbs: McLuhan said,
[1:35:05] Bob Dobbs: the goal is not to communicate anymore.
[1:35:09] Bob Dobbs: Something like that.
[1:35:10] Bob Dobbs: No more communication.
[1:35:11] Bob Dobbs: And the guy is a therapeutic guy,
[1:35:14] Bob Dobbs: psychiatrist,
[1:35:14] Bob Dobbs: he said,
[1:35:14] Bob Dobbs: I was shocked at this.
[1:35:16] Bob Dobbs: What the hell is this guy saying?
[1:35:17] Bob Dobbs: We're here to improve our communication,
[1:35:20] Bob Dobbs: learn how to connect,
[1:35:21] Bob Dobbs: you know,
[1:35:21] Bob Dobbs: help people,
[1:35:22] Bob Dobbs: massage them,
[1:35:24] Bob Dobbs: give them comfort.
[1:35:25] Bob Dobbs: And McLuhan said,
[1:35:25] Bob Dobbs: nope,
[1:35:26] Bob Dobbs: no more communication.
[1:35:28] Bob Dobbs: I don't know if he ever said that,
[1:35:31] Bob Dobbs: but I'm glad somebody thought he said it.
[1:35:33] Cameron McEwen: Oh,
[1:35:33] Cameron McEwen: I think he did.
[1:35:34] Cameron McEwen: No,
[1:35:34] Cameron McEwen: that sounds very much like
[1:35:36] Cameron McEwen: McLuhan. Yeah,
[1:35:37] Cameron McEwen: it sounds like him,
[1:35:38] Bob Dobbs: but there's no actual statement like that.
[1:35:41] Bob Dobbs: He's saying we're not here to communicate.
[1:35:43] Bob Dobbs: I mean,
[1:35:43] Bob Dobbs: he's called a communication expert.
[1:35:45] Bob Dobbs: He was.
[1:35:46] Bob Dobbs: Well,
[1:35:47] Cameron McEwen: McLuhan does say that communication is a miracle when it happens,
[1:35:51] Cameron McEwen: right?
[1:35:52] Cameron McEwen: And he also says that it's useless to talk about...
[1:35:59] Cameron McEwen: communication resulting from a linear process.
[1:36:02] Bob Dobbs: Yeah,
[1:36:02] Bob Dobbs: matching.
[1:36:04] Cameron McEwen: The linear process just ends up in non-communication.
[1:36:10] Bob Dobbs: Yeah,
[1:36:11] Bob Dobbs: matching,
[1:36:12] Bob Dobbs: the futility of matching.
[1:36:14] Cameron McEwen: Yeah,
[1:36:14] Cameron McEwen: emerging,
[1:36:15] Cameron McEwen: yeah.
[1:36:16] Bob Dobbs: Now,
[1:36:16] Bob Dobbs: if you understood,
[1:36:18] Bob Dobbs: if I'm understanding McLuhan pretty good,
[1:36:20] Bob Dobbs: then I could match with him personally.
[1:36:24] Bob Dobbs: I could say things that he might say,
[1:36:25] Bob Dobbs: yeah,
[1:36:25] Bob Dobbs: I agree.
[1:36:26] Bob Dobbs: That's what I'm trying to say.
[1:36:27] Bob Dobbs: Like we're matching.
[1:36:29] Cameron McEwen: Well,
[1:36:30] Cameron McEwen: I would say it's an intuitive making.
[1:36:34] Bob Dobbs: Yeah,
[1:36:35] Bob Dobbs: yeah.
[1:36:35] Cameron McEwen: Because merging and matching is an impossible goal.
[1:36:41] Cameron McEwen: It's a Gutenberg Galaxy goal,
[1:36:44] Cameron McEwen: and it's not needed.
[1:36:47] Cameron McEwen: When people talk,
[1:36:48] Cameron McEwen: as we're talking now,
[1:36:51] Cameron McEwen: they don't merge their points of view or their personalities.
[1:36:56] Cameron McEwen: They make...
[1:36:57] Cameron McEwen: sense by making.
[1:36:59] Cameron McEwen: And there's an inherent disconnect that's part of the connection.
[1:37:07] Bob Dobbs: Yeah,
[1:37:07] Bob Dobbs: he used to say that making came from faccio,
[1:37:09] Bob Dobbs: you know?
[1:37:10] Bob Dobbs: Matching and making had the same root word.
[1:37:14] Bob Dobbs: There was a making in matching as well as in making.
[1:37:17] Cameron McEwen: Absolutely,
[1:37:18] Cameron McEwen: yeah.
[1:37:18] Cameron McEwen: So matching is impossible.
[1:37:21] Cameron McEwen: When in the
[1:37:23] Cameron McEwen: 1950s
[1:37:24] Cameron McEwen: When McLuhan was on his way to the medium is the message and to the global village,
[1:37:31] Cameron McEwen: he did a lot of work with art theory.
[1:37:36] Cameron McEwen: With what?
[1:37:36] Bob Dobbs: Art theory,
[1:37:37] Bob Dobbs: did you say?
[1:37:38] Cameron McEwen: Art theory,
[1:37:38] Cameron McEwen: yeah.
[1:37:39] Cameron McEwen: Yeah.
[1:37:40] Cameron McEwen: And the thing that he was caught up with was the idea that art is never a merging.
[1:37:47] Cameron McEwen: It's never a matching.
[1:37:50] Cameron McEwen: It's always a way of...
[1:37:54] Cameron McEwen: sort of fooling the audience to look at something in a certain way.
[1:38:01] Cameron McEwen: And so then that made McLuhan think,
[1:38:05] Cameron McEwen: well,
[1:38:06] Cameron McEwen: maybe that's what media are.
[1:38:09] Cameron McEwen: Not media as newspapers,
[1:38:11] Cameron McEwen: radios,
[1:38:12] Cameron McEwen: or whatever,
[1:38:13] Cameron McEwen: but as media as a mode of sensibility.
[1:38:20] Bob Dobbs: You mean a kind of making?
[1:38:22] Cameron McEwen: Yeah.
[1:38:23] Bob Dobbs: Yeah.
[1:38:25] Bob Dobbs: Yeah,
[1:38:25] Bob Dobbs: which is obvious once you get that.
[1:38:27] Bob Dobbs: The media makes new spaces.
[1:38:30] Bob Dobbs: Yeah,
[1:38:31] Cameron McEwen: and you got that from art theory,
[1:38:33] Cameron McEwen: basically.
[1:38:33] Bob Dobbs: Yeah,
[1:38:34] Bob Dobbs: so ESP is a matching.
[1:38:37] Bob Dobbs: You're thinking you've got the other person,
[1:38:41] Bob Dobbs: you know what they're thinking or something.
[1:38:42] Bob Dobbs: You've matched with what you think you've got.
[1:38:45] Bob Dobbs: So as you get more disconnected and the making mania takes over and more and more people semi-consciously recognize,
[1:38:55] Bob Dobbs: So the public becomes the silent majority.
[1:38:57] Bob Dobbs: They don't talk.
[1:38:59] Bob Dobbs: They're silent.
[1:39:01] Bob Dobbs: And when they do or are forced to match or make or pretend they're fellow citizens,
[1:39:08] Bob Dobbs: be anthropomorphic,
[1:39:10] Bob Dobbs: I call that voluntary ESP.
[1:39:12] Bob Dobbs: You pretended you were matching,
[1:39:15] Bob Dobbs: that you were agreeing.
[1:39:18] Bob Dobbs: But more and more,
[1:39:19] Bob Dobbs: it was hard for people to get.
[1:39:22] Bob Dobbs: to get into talking about what they're actually matching about because they found out they weren't.
[1:39:26] Bob Dobbs: So he said by the late 60s,
[1:39:28] Bob Dobbs: language was diminishing.
[1:39:30] Bob Dobbs: People weren't talking as much.
[1:39:33] Bob Dobbs: They were listening to people talk on machines.
[1:39:36] Bob Dobbs: They were listening to music and all the electronic entertainment.
[1:39:40] Bob Dobbs: But between the chemical bodies,
[1:39:42] Bob Dobbs: there was less matching.
[1:39:46] Bob Dobbs: So you had the fake matching.
[1:39:49] Bob Dobbs: I think that's what I'm talking about when I say voluntary ESP.
[1:39:53] Bob Dobbs: We're being disconnected from the electric ESP.
[1:39:55] Bob Dobbs: That means we're into a total,
[1:39:58] Bob Dobbs: the proper way to say it is that everybody's hallucinating.
[1:40:01] Bob Dobbs: There's no matching.
[1:40:02] Bob Dobbs: So the matching part of everybody being in the electric space,
[1:40:09] Bob Dobbs: the Global Membrane,
[1:40:10] Bob Dobbs: has a sight part of it,
[1:40:12] Bob Dobbs: a matching.
[1:40:14] Bob Dobbs: That was a minor thing.
[1:40:16] Bob Dobbs: The disconnected and making aspect of the mixture of making and matching.
[1:40:21] Bob Dobbs: dominated over the matching.
[1:40:24] Bob Dobbs: So we're being disconnected from the electric...
[1:40:27] Bob Dobbs: Unity.
[1:40:30] Cameron McEwen: How do you see that with the hologram?
[1:40:34] Bob Dobbs: The hologram is a framing of this crazy chaos.
[1:40:40] Bob Dobbs: Like,
[1:40:41] Bob Dobbs: the satellites go around the planet,
[1:40:44] Bob Dobbs: and by 1968 they start making news stories from what they're getting on the satellites.
[1:40:51] Bob Dobbs: So they're trying to present a coherent message for the day.
[1:40:55] Bob Dobbs: Walter Cronkite had to say at the end,
[1:40:56] Bob Dobbs: this is the way it is,
[1:40:58] Bob Dobbs: right?
[1:40:59] Bob Dobbs: So you're making an image.
[1:41:01] Bob Dobbs: So the hologram was a frame.
[1:41:03] Bob Dobbs: It's kind of visual space.
[1:41:06] Bob Dobbs: But it was more than that because every little part was as big as the frame.
[1:41:13] Bob Dobbs: There was no center.
[1:41:14] Bob Dobbs: Every point was part of the frame.
[1:41:17] Bob Dobbs: There wasn't a center part.
[1:41:19] Bob Dobbs: And then there was no margins.
[1:41:22] Bob Dobbs: So it was...
[1:41:26] Bob Dobbs: Yeah,
[1:41:26] Bob Dobbs: I would say it was a framing,
[1:41:29] Bob Dobbs: maybe the retrieval of visual space,
[1:41:32] Bob Dobbs: an afterimage of visual space,
[1:41:34] Bob Dobbs: because it was something you could imagine that you saw,
[1:41:38] Bob Dobbs: and it would enclose the earth.
[1:41:42] Bob Dobbs: But it was acoustic in the other senses,
[1:41:45] Bob Dobbs: but in general,
[1:41:47] Bob Dobbs: I guess the dominant effect was you're inside the proscenium arch,
[1:41:53] Bob Dobbs: you're inside a theater.
[1:41:56] Bob Dobbs: Which is a visual thing.
[1:41:57] Bob Dobbs: I don't know,
[1:41:58] Bob Dobbs: what did you say?
[1:41:59] Bob Dobbs: You said something else there.
[1:42:01] Cameron McEwen: I said that the hologram is essentially plural.
[1:42:06] Cameron McEwen: Because as you said,
[1:42:08] Cameron McEwen: all of the parts are mirrors of the whole.
[1:42:12] Bob Dobbs: Yeah,
[1:42:12] Bob Dobbs: did you say it's essentially plural?
[1:42:14] Bob Dobbs: Is that what you said?
[1:42:15] Bob Dobbs: Yeah.
[1:42:16] Cameron McEwen: Now I get your plural point.
[1:42:18] Cameron McEwen: It presents a visual image,
[1:42:20] Cameron McEwen: but in the mode of plurality.
[1:42:22] Bob Dobbs: Yeah.
[1:42:23] Cameron McEwen: So it's a complicated...
[1:42:26] Bob Dobbs: It's a fractal.
[1:42:27] Bob Dobbs: It's all those modern geometries and modern images that designers came up with.
[1:42:32] Bob Dobbs: They're trying to show this.
[1:42:35] Bob Dobbs: It's hard to,
[1:42:38] Bob Dobbs: well,
[1:42:38] Bob Dobbs: you don't have perspective.
[1:42:40] Bob Dobbs: You have a bunch of swirls,
[1:42:42] Bob Dobbs: Baroque spirals,
[1:42:43] Bob Dobbs: I call it in my chart,
[1:42:47] Bob Dobbs: right?
[1:42:48] Bob Dobbs: Orphic Baroque spirals,
[1:42:49] Bob Dobbs: Orphic,
[1:42:49] Bob Dobbs: the whole sphere.
[1:42:51] Bob Dobbs: So it's all the senses and their extensions.
[1:42:56] Bob Dobbs: Creating a coherent consciousness that,
[1:43:01] Bob Dobbs: you know,
[1:43:01] Bob Dobbs: how tactility integrates the senses so you think you have some kind of organized perception.
[1:43:07] Bob Dobbs: And most people live as if they have,
[1:43:10] Bob Dobbs: and it seems they have an organized sensory order in their perceptions.
[1:43:15] Bob Dobbs: The hologram was the beginning of that collectively,
[1:43:20] Bob Dobbs: a sense of something being ordered.
[1:43:22] Bob Dobbs: And in the word that made the market,
[1:43:24] Bob Dobbs: the news.
[1:43:26] Bob Dobbs: And people would sit down every night and watch the news and be told,
[1:43:29] Bob Dobbs: oh,
[1:43:29] Bob Dobbs: yeah,
[1:43:29] Bob Dobbs: this is what's happening.
[1:43:32] Bob Dobbs: And it was a total put on,
[1:43:33] Bob Dobbs: but people needed it.
[1:43:35] Bob Dobbs: And it would give them perspective.
[1:43:39] Bob Dobbs: You know,
[1:43:39] Bob Dobbs: I guess you could say that sitting down watching TV was a purely Western thing.
[1:43:45] Bob Dobbs: Other cultures,
[1:43:46] Bob Dobbs: they didn't have TVs as many as Americans had.
[1:43:49] Bob Dobbs: And they may not be watching it to get a sense of the day.
[1:43:52] Bob Dobbs: I don't know what.
[1:43:54] Bob Dobbs: Africans had one TV,
[1:43:56] Bob Dobbs: or if they even had that,
[1:43:57] Bob Dobbs: they might have a radio,
[1:43:59] Bob Dobbs: but what do they think they were perceiving?
[1:44:02] Cameron McEwen: So this tells us how CNN became such a phenomenon later,
[1:44:10] Cameron McEwen: that
[1:44:12] Cameron McEwen: CNN gave people outside of Western democracies or something,
[1:44:20] Cameron McEwen: it gave them for the first time this idea that you can't do anything.
[1:44:23] Cameron McEwen: You can turn on the machine,
[1:44:25] Cameron McEwen: and it can tell you what's going on.
[1:44:29] Bob Dobbs: Yeah,
[1:44:30] Bob Dobbs: it shapes a design of your outer world.
[1:44:35] Bob Dobbs: This is what's going on around you.
[1:44:37] Bob Dobbs: This is your environment,
[1:44:40] Bob Dobbs: the discarnate mosaic of imagery.
[1:44:43] Cameron McEwen: Yeah,
[1:44:44] Cameron McEwen: and we'll take you there.
[1:44:45] Cameron McEwen: Yeah,
[1:44:45] Bob Dobbs: and that began in 1968.
[1:44:52] Bob Dobbs: with the satellite interaction.
[1:44:53] Bob Dobbs: There's a book called 1968 about the impact of the ability of the satellites to communicate with each other around the world,
[1:45:00] Bob Dobbs: and news agencies could pick up,
[1:45:03] Bob Dobbs: I don't know how,
[1:45:04] Bob Dobbs: I can't remember what I saw then in 1968,
[1:45:08] Bob Dobbs: what footage I saw,
[1:45:09] Bob Dobbs: but this book,
[1:45:11] Bob Dobbs: I saw a talk by the author in New York,
[1:45:13] Bob Dobbs: and there was some kind of reality that was now available through satellite hookup.
[1:45:19] Bob Dobbs: You could be somewhere.
[1:45:21] Bob Dobbs: You know,
[1:45:21] Bob Dobbs: the sender was sent.
[1:45:22] Cameron McEwen: Something like this happened in the
[1:45:25] Cameron McEwen: 1950s.
[1:45:26] Cameron McEwen: I can remember one of the Grey Cups between Edmonton and Montreal was on national
[1:45:34] Cameron McEwen: CBC, and it was for the first time.
[1:45:38] Cameron McEwen: And the way that was achieved in the pre-satellite era was that they put up relay stations across the country.
[1:45:47] Cameron McEwen: And those relay stations would bring you what was happening in Toronto or wherever the Grey Cup was being played.
[1:45:55] Cameron McEwen: It would
[1:45:55] Cameron McEwen: bring you that live.
[1:45:57] Cameron McEwen: But of course,
[1:45:58] Cameron McEwen: it took time for the relay to get from Toronto to Vancouver,
[1:46:03] Cameron McEwen: let's say.
[1:46:04] Cameron McEwen: So you thought it was live,
[1:46:06] Cameron McEwen: but actually you were seeing it 15 minutes or half an hour or something later.
[1:46:11] Cameron McEwen: But this idea of being introduced to what was happening around the world happened in a sort of non-digital fashion,
[1:46:22] Cameron McEwen: non-electric fashion in the 50s.
[1:46:25] Cameron McEwen: and then got realized by satellites in the 60s.
[1:46:29] Bob Dobbs: Yeah,
[1:46:29] Bob Dobbs: that's interesting.
[1:46:30] Bob Dobbs: And as you talk about it,
[1:46:32] Bob Dobbs: a whole bunch of dull images of the
[1:46:36] Bob Dobbs: 50s in Canada and the Grey Cup,
[1:46:37] Bob Dobbs: it's all so puny and far away and a little village I don't have any access to anymore.
[1:46:42] Bob Dobbs: The whole mood you evoke there of the Grey Cup in Canada,
[1:46:48] Bob Dobbs: how puny it all was.
[1:46:51] Bob Dobbs: But we didn't know it was puny.
[1:46:52] Bob Dobbs: We lived in it.
[1:46:53] Bob Dobbs: That's right.
[1:46:55] Bob Dobbs: We thought we were in some place.
[1:46:58] Bob Dobbs: Think of how puny,
[1:46:59] Bob Dobbs: Canada,
[1:46:59] Bob Dobbs: is.
[1:47:01] Bob Dobbs: You know,
[1:47:01] Bob Dobbs: it's just this population strung along the border.
[1:47:07] Bob Dobbs: Huge.
[1:47:07] Bob Dobbs: Yeah,
[1:47:07] Bob Dobbs: we put
[1:47:08] Cameron McEwen: 20 million people in those days,
[1:47:10] Cameron McEwen: and now there's 40.
[1:47:12] Bob Dobbs: Yeah,
[1:47:12] Bob Dobbs: and they're still on that border.
[1:47:14] Bob Dobbs: And,
[1:47:14] Bob Dobbs: you know,
[1:47:14] Bob Dobbs: there's huge wildernesses out there.
[1:47:17] Cameron McEwen: Yeah.
[1:47:21] Bob Dobbs: So,
[1:47:21] Bob Dobbs: but it all seems musty and black and white when you talk that way.
[1:47:25] Bob Dobbs: Or bring back the
[1:47:27] Bob Dobbs: 50s. Yeah,
[1:47:27] Cameron McEwen: it was black and white TV.
[1:47:29] Cameron McEwen: Yeah.
[1:47:30] Cameron McEwen: It wasn't color TV.
[1:47:31] Cameron McEwen: Yeah,
[1:47:32] Bob Dobbs: it was all dingy,
[1:47:33] Bob Dobbs: Diefenbaker,
[1:47:35] Bob Dobbs: puny.
[1:47:38] Bob Dobbs: And the counter to that was the image of New York City.
[1:47:41] Bob Dobbs: I remember a lot of people would go to New York City in the
[1:47:45] Bob Dobbs: 50s to get excitement.
[1:47:47] Bob Dobbs: Oh,
[1:47:47] Bob Dobbs: definitely.
[1:47:47] Bob Dobbs: Yeah.
[1:47:48] Cameron McEwen: And go to Broadway shows.
[1:47:52] Bob Dobbs: Yeah.
[1:47:52] Cameron McEwen: That was the culture.
[1:47:54] Bob Dobbs: A lot of people in Toronto did that in the
[1:47:56] Cameron McEwen: 50s. Yeah,
[1:47:57] Cameron McEwen: yeah,
[1:47:57] Cameron McEwen: absolutely.
[1:47:58] Cameron McEwen: Oh,
[1:47:58] Cameron McEwen: not just in the
[1:47:59] Cameron McEwen: 50s, for decades after.
[1:48:03] Bob Dobbs: Yeah,
[1:48:03] Bob Dobbs: but no,
[1:48:03] Bob Dobbs: it faded off once you had color TV and then jet travel.
[1:48:08] Bob Dobbs: Then you could just go all over the place.
[1:48:10] Bob Dobbs: But that claustrophobic image of Canada,
[1:48:14] Bob Dobbs: determined by the limited technology they had in the
[1:48:16] Bob Dobbs: 50s, it was a big deal to go to New York City.
[1:48:20] Bob Dobbs: And by the 70s,
[1:48:21] Bob Dobbs: I'd go to New York City,
[1:48:21] Bob Dobbs: and people would say,
[1:48:22] Bob Dobbs: where are you going there?
[1:48:22] Bob Dobbs: That's a horrible place.
[1:48:24] Bob Dobbs: It really changed once the,
[1:48:26] Bob Dobbs: you know,
[1:48:27] Bob Dobbs: the riots of the late 60s and then the problems with the blacks and everything.
[1:48:32] Bob Dobbs: People used to think Carol and I were nuts going to New York City.
[1:48:36] Bob Dobbs: The image had completely changed in 10 years.
[1:48:40] Cameron McEwen: Yeah,
[1:48:41] Cameron McEwen: yeah.
[1:48:41] Bob Dobbs: But we knew where to go.
[1:48:44] Cameron McEwen: I went to school just outside of New York in the middle
[1:48:48] Cameron McEwen: 60s. And New York then was a wonderful place.
[1:48:52] Bob Dobbs: Yeah.
[1:48:53] Cameron McEwen: You could go to any part of New York and be safe.
[1:48:58] Cameron McEwen: The
[1:48:59] Cameron McEwen: Greenwich Village was not only safe,
[1:49:03] Cameron McEwen: but it was an interesting place.
[1:49:08] Cameron McEwen: New York in the middle 60s was a great place.
[1:49:12] Bob Dobbs: Yes,
[1:49:12] Bob Dobbs: we went there a lot,
[1:49:14] Bob Dobbs: but we knew in the
[1:49:17] Bob Dobbs: 70s where to go.
[1:49:20] Bob Dobbs: experienced what was new and interesting in the underground culture.
[1:49:23] Bob Dobbs: We were at CBGB's before anybody.
[1:49:27] Bob Dobbs: I performed at CBGB's,
[1:49:29] Bob Dobbs: and there's an album called Underground CBGB's.
[1:49:34] Bob Dobbs: It was recorded the first week of June 1976.
[1:49:37] Bob Dobbs: Hilly Kristal,
[1:49:38] Bob Dobbs: he ran the CBGB's.
[1:49:40] Bob Dobbs: And so Debbie Harry and all the punk bands,
[1:49:43] Bob Dobbs: some of them later became new wave bands,
[1:49:45] Bob Dobbs: they all performed that weekend.
[1:49:47] Bob Dobbs: And
[1:49:48] Bob Dobbs: Carol and I were there for...
[1:49:49] Bob Dobbs: Friday,
[1:49:50] Bob Dobbs: Saturday,
[1:49:50] Bob Dobbs: and Sunday.
[1:49:51] Bob Dobbs: And
[1:49:52] Bob Dobbs: I found that album on YouTube somewheres,
[1:49:56] Bob Dobbs: you know,
[1:49:57] Bob Dobbs: a few years ago.
[1:49:58] Bob Dobbs: And so I took all the songs and put them into my slot.
[1:50:02] Bob Dobbs: And so I would play it on the radio on Saturday,
[1:50:05] Bob Dobbs: and they'd say,
[1:50:06] Bob Dobbs: I'm in the audience jumping up and down.
[1:50:08] Bob Dobbs: I'm in that audience in that little club.
[1:50:11] Bob Dobbs: I'm being recorded,
[1:50:13] Bob Dobbs: you know.
[1:50:14] Bob Dobbs: But there was nobody.
[1:50:17] Bob Dobbs: You know,
[1:50:18] Bob Dobbs: up in Canada,
[1:50:18] Bob Dobbs: where we were living,
[1:50:19] Bob Dobbs: knew this.
[1:50:20] Bob Dobbs: They didn't know.
[1:50:21] Bob Dobbs: We were very avant-garde.
[1:50:22] Bob Dobbs: We knew where things were happening.
[1:50:26] Bob Dobbs: We used to go to the Nova Scotia Art College loft in
[1:50:30] Bob Dobbs: New York City at first and first.
[1:50:33] Bob Dobbs: Down in the bottom of the village,
[1:50:37] Bob Dobbs: the East Village,
[1:50:38] Bob Dobbs: and stay there,
[1:50:39] Bob Dobbs: walk around in Broadway.
[1:50:42] Bob Dobbs: It was a Broadway,
[1:50:43] Bob Dobbs: yeah,
[1:50:43] Bob Dobbs: I think Southern Broadway.
[1:50:45] Bob Dobbs: You know,
[1:50:45] Bob Dobbs: a lot of the bums were in that area.
[1:50:46] Bob Dobbs: And find these little clubs.
[1:50:48] Bob Dobbs: And so we found CBGBs.
[1:50:50] Bob Dobbs: And then we went there.
[1:50:51] Bob Dobbs: And then it becomes a world-defining scene within a couple years.
[1:50:56] Bob Dobbs: And in 1977,
[1:50:58] Bob Dobbs: there was a picture in Time Magazine.
[1:51:03] Bob Dobbs: about the new punk scene at CBGB's and there was a picture of Jello Biafra.
[1:51:08] Bob Dobbs: He was the singer for the Dead Kennedys.
[1:51:11] Bob Dobbs: I remember that.
[1:51:13] Bob Dobbs: Yeah.
[1:51:13] Bob Dobbs: And he's leaping about on the stage at CBGB's.
[1:51:16] Bob Dobbs: And on that stage,
[1:51:17] Bob Dobbs: two years before that,
[1:51:19] Bob Dobbs: on April 25th,
[1:51:20] Bob Dobbs: 1975,
[1:51:22] Bob Dobbs: there was an open mic.
[1:51:24] Bob Dobbs: So
[1:51:25] Bob Dobbs: I went up to present my poetry.
[1:51:26] Bob Dobbs: So what was my poetry?
[1:51:28] Bob Dobbs: I laid a dollar bill on the dirty...
[1:51:32] Bob Dobbs: music platform floor,
[1:51:34] Bob Dobbs: the little stage.
[1:51:36] Bob Dobbs: And I got down and I did push-ups into the dollar bill.
[1:51:41] Bob Dobbs: You know what I mean?
[1:51:41] Bob Dobbs: My face was going into the dollar bill that lay on there.
[1:51:45] Bob Dobbs: And I always remember Hilly Kristal.
[1:51:46] Bob Dobbs: He was the smartest.
[1:51:47] Bob Dobbs: He started laughing.
[1:51:48] Bob Dobbs: He picked up on it.
[1:51:49] Bob Dobbs: And so what was I saying?
[1:51:52] Bob Dobbs: The book is an extension of the eye.
[1:51:54] Bob Dobbs: I said McLuhan stuff.
[1:51:55] Bob Dobbs: That's all I said.
[1:51:57] Bob Dobbs: You know what I mean?
[1:51:58] Bob Dobbs: I was laying down the laws of media because I'd just been reading it.
[1:52:02] Bob Dobbs: and then in Toronto,
[1:52:03] Bob Dobbs: and it got out of the zone in my head.
[1:52:05] Bob Dobbs: So
[1:52:06] Bob Dobbs: I made a poem of McLuhan statements,
[1:52:08] Bob Dobbs: and nobody knew I was doing McLuhan.
[1:52:11] Bob Dobbs: So two years later,
[1:52:13] Bob Dobbs: so what my vision was that I was taking poetry and bringing in kinetic space to it,
[1:52:18] Bob Dobbs: movement,
[1:52:19] Bob Dobbs: athletics,
[1:52:20] Bob Dobbs: which then the punks are starting to show up then and a little later,
[1:52:24] Bob Dobbs: and they're leaping about the stage,
[1:52:26] Bob Dobbs: you know,
[1:52:27] Bob Dobbs: athletically.
[1:52:28] Bob Dobbs: It was hyperkinetic,
[1:52:30] Bob Dobbs: which was...
[1:52:32] Bob Dobbs: a release from the tactility of the global village,
[1:52:34] Bob Dobbs: the global theater of the 60s.
[1:52:36] Bob Dobbs: So you see McLuhan,
[1:52:37] Bob Dobbs: Laws of Media,
[1:52:38] Bob Dobbs: years later,
[1:52:38] Bob Dobbs: he says tactile space,
[1:52:40] Bob Dobbs: when pushed extreme,
[1:52:41] Bob Dobbs: flips into kinetic space.
[1:52:43] Bob Dobbs: Right?
[1:52:44] Bob Dobbs: So the kinetic spaces,
[1:52:46] Bob Dobbs: I was miming,
[1:52:47] Bob Dobbs: I was intuiting it,
[1:52:48] Bob Dobbs: and
[1:52:48] Bob Dobbs: I did this thing.
[1:52:49] Bob Dobbs: And then years later,
[1:52:50] Bob Dobbs: when Flipside magazine would publish interviews with me,
[1:52:54] Bob Dobbs: Jerry Fialka,
[1:52:55] Bob Dobbs: who worked for Zappa,
[1:52:55] Bob Dobbs: he interviewed me in the jungles of Costa Rica.
[1:52:58] Bob Dobbs: And then when he wrote the introduction for the interview,
[1:53:01] Bob Dobbs: which was called Entertainment Sucks,
[1:53:03] Bob Dobbs: he says,
[1:53:04] Bob Dobbs: Bob started punk rock.
[1:53:07] Bob Dobbs: I inaugurated it in April 75 by my actions.
[1:53:13] Bob Dobbs: And in the archetypal picture of Jello Biafra two years later,
[1:53:17] Bob Dobbs: he's leaping about and manifesting what I was expressing on the same spot on the stage.
[1:53:25] Bob Dobbs: Anyways,
[1:53:25] Bob Dobbs: that's an example of us tuning.
[1:53:27] Bob Dobbs: You could find interesting scenes in New York,
[1:53:29] Bob Dobbs: even though it was more dangerous.
[1:53:32] Cameron McEwen: Yeah,
[1:53:32] Cameron McEwen: yeah.
[1:53:34] Bob Dobbs: So,
[1:53:35] Bob Dobbs: anyways,
[1:53:38] Bob Dobbs: that was me doing media ecology.
[1:53:41] Bob Dobbs: There you go.
[1:53:43] Cameron McEwen: Good for you,
[1:53:43] Cameron McEwen: Bob.
[1:53:46] Bob Dobbs: So what were we expressing there,
[1:53:48] Bob Dobbs: New York?
[1:53:49] Bob Dobbs: Yeah,
[1:53:49] Bob Dobbs: oh,
[1:53:49] Bob Dobbs: yeah,
[1:53:50] Bob Dobbs: the Grey Cup.
[1:53:51] Bob Dobbs: Do they still have the Grey Cup?
[1:53:53] Cameron McEwen: Yeah,
[1:53:54] Cameron McEwen: they just are going to have it.
[1:53:55] Cameron McEwen: I think it's...
[1:53:56] Cameron McEwen: either this weekend or the next weekend.
[1:53:58] Bob Dobbs: Wow.
[1:53:59] Bob Dobbs: So what,
[1:54:00] Bob Dobbs: is it a big celebration?
[1:54:02] Bob Dobbs: You know,
[1:54:02] Bob Dobbs: lots of new media?
[1:54:05] Cameron McEwen: I think the CFL is not doing very well.
[1:54:09] Cameron McEwen: I know that in the Western Final between
[1:54:12] Cameron McEwen: Vancouver and Winnipeg,
[1:54:15] Cameron McEwen: which was last weekend,
[1:54:17] Cameron McEwen: they had something like 23,000 people in a stadium that probably holds
[1:54:25] Cameron McEwen: 35 or something.
[1:54:26] Cameron McEwen: I think.
[1:54:26] Bob Dobbs: Right.
[1:54:27] Cameron McEwen: So,
[1:54:29] Cameron McEwen: you know,
[1:54:29] Cameron McEwen: there's there's something wrong with the CFL for sure.
[1:54:33] Cameron McEwen: I don't know exactly what it is,
[1:54:35] Cameron McEwen: but people appreciate that it's not the NFL and they're beginning to express their disappointment in being sort of a minor league.
[1:54:49] Bob Dobbs: Yeah,
[1:54:49] Bob Dobbs: because I hadn't thought of the Grey Cup in years.
[1:54:53] Bob Dobbs: I kind of pick up a glimpse.
[1:54:56] Bob Dobbs: living in American culture,
[1:54:57] Bob Dobbs: of the Stanley Cup.
[1:54:59] Bob Dobbs: But I actually had not heard that Grey Cup term in 50 fucking,
[1:55:03] Bob Dobbs: well,
[1:55:03] Bob Dobbs: let's say 30 years or something.
[1:55:06] Bob Dobbs: You know,
[1:55:06] Bob Dobbs: I just never,
[1:55:08] Bob Dobbs: I didn't remember it.
[1:55:09] Bob Dobbs: So it all seems so,
[1:55:11] Bob Dobbs: you said the word,
[1:55:12] Bob Dobbs: and I immediately went back to 1955.
[1:55:14] Bob Dobbs: That was what my association with it was.
[1:55:18] Cameron McEwen: This year they played a regular CFL game.
[1:55:22] Cameron McEwen: In the Maritimes.
[1:55:24] Cameron McEwen: Really?
[1:55:25] Cameron McEwen: They're trying to get a team into either
[1:55:28] Cameron McEwen: Halifax or maybe someplace sort of on the
[1:55:32] Cameron McEwen: Nova Scotia and New Brunswick border where people could come from St.
[1:55:38] Cameron McEwen: John and Moncton and Halifax and try and get a decent crowd.
[1:55:44] Cameron McEwen: But yeah,
[1:55:45] Cameron McEwen: a game between Toronto and Saskatchewan was played there this year.
[1:55:49] Bob Dobbs: Wow.
[1:55:50] Bob Dobbs: And where was it played?
[1:55:52] Cameron McEwen: In Halifax.
[1:55:54] Bob Dobbs: What stadium would they have?
[1:55:57] Cameron McEwen: I'm not sure.
[1:55:58] Cameron McEwen: Maybe
[1:56:00] Cameron McEwen: Dalhousie has a stadium.
[1:56:01] Cameron McEwen: Oh,
[1:56:01] Cameron McEwen: yeah.
[1:56:02] Cameron McEwen: I'm not sure.
[1:56:02] Cameron McEwen: Right.
[1:56:03] Cameron McEwen: Maybe St.
[1:56:04] Cameron McEwen: Mary's has a stadium.
[1:56:05] Cameron McEwen: Yeah.
[1:56:05] Cameron McEwen: I don't know.
[1:56:06] Cameron McEwen: They didn't get that many people.
[1:56:08] Cameron McEwen: I think it was maybe,
[1:56:09] Cameron McEwen: you know,
[1:56:09] Cameron McEwen: 12,000 or 15,000 or something.
[1:56:13] Bob Dobbs: Right.
[1:56:14] Bob Dobbs: It's also puny.
[1:56:15] Bob Dobbs: I'm sitting here ready to take over the whole fucking global theater.
[1:56:21] Bob Dobbs: I'll try to remember my roots,
[1:56:23] Bob Dobbs: you know,
[1:56:23] Bob Dobbs: when the time comes.
[1:56:25] Cameron McEwen: Yeah,
[1:56:25] Cameron McEwen: yeah,
[1:56:26] Cameron McEwen: yeah.
[1:56:27] Cameron McEwen: Well,
[1:56:27] Cameron McEwen: there's lots of
[1:56:28] Cameron McEwen: Canadian in you yet,
[1:56:30] Cameron McEwen: Bob.
[1:56:30] Bob Dobbs: Yeah,
[1:56:31] Bob Dobbs: yep.
[1:56:32] Bob Dobbs: So
[1:56:32] Bob Dobbs: I've got to end in five minutes,
[1:56:35] Bob Dobbs: so let's see where we're at here.
[1:56:37] Bob Dobbs: So we're going to figure out a voluntary ESP.
[1:56:41] Bob Dobbs: And then we have a quote from
[1:56:45] Bob Dobbs: Ben Stilley.
[1:56:46] Bob Dobbs: Now this was all,
[1:56:47] Bob Dobbs: this struck me.
[1:56:48] Bob Dobbs: 1970,
[1:56:49] Bob Dobbs: Rolling Stone magazine.
[1:56:51] Bob Dobbs: McLuhan comes to San Francisco in the fall.
[1:56:54] Bob Dobbs: He gives a talk and so Rolling Stone covers it.
[1:56:57] Bob Dobbs: And this quote really was amazing.
[1:57:00] Bob Dobbs: When writing was introduced in the 5th century B.C.,
[1:57:03] Bob Dobbs: it scrapped the old tribal traditions of Homer and Hesiod,
[1:57:07] Bob Dobbs: but retrieved the private individual man.
[1:57:10] Bob Dobbs: An ancient form dredged up from way,
[1:57:12] Bob Dobbs: way back.
[1:57:14] Bob Dobbs: Now that quote,
[1:57:15] Bob Dobbs: holy shit,
[1:57:16] Bob Dobbs: there was private man before tribal?
[1:57:18] Bob Dobbs: You know?
[1:57:19] Bob Dobbs: It got me out of the linear phases.
[1:57:24] Bob Dobbs: And then,
[1:57:24] Bob Dobbs: you know,
[1:57:24] Bob Dobbs: what is this private man?
[1:57:26] Bob Dobbs: Is it a caveman or something that's not engaged in speech or something?
[1:57:31] Bob Dobbs: I thought that was a major breakthrough reading that sentence.
[1:57:35] Bob Dobbs: What?
[1:57:36] Cameron McEwen: You have brought that up quite a few times.
[1:57:39] Cameron McEwen: and
[1:57:40] Cameron McEwen: I don't understand it.
[1:57:42] Cameron McEwen: I don't understand what the private individual man is.
[1:57:49] Cameron McEwen: Weren't human beings always social?
[1:57:53] Cameron McEwen: How could there be a human that wasn't social?
[1:57:57] Cameron McEwen: I don't get that.
[1:57:58] Bob Dobbs: Because you go back,
[1:58:00] Bob Dobbs: you know,
[1:58:01] Bob Dobbs: before,
[1:58:02] Bob Dobbs: I don't know,
[1:58:03] Bob Dobbs: before they were social,
[1:58:04] Bob Dobbs: they were wandering around,
[1:58:05] Bob Dobbs: which probably never happened.
[1:58:09] Bob Dobbs: It's in the realm of could have happened.
[1:58:11] Bob Dobbs: You know,
[1:58:12] Bob Dobbs: you've got Atlantis and all these mythologies of...
[1:58:15] Cameron McEwen: But the private individual man had to be born,
[1:58:19] Cameron McEwen: had to be born of two other people before him,
[1:58:24] Cameron McEwen: and the private individual man as a baby couldn't look after itself,
[1:58:29] Cameron McEwen: needed at least a family.
[1:58:32] Bob Dobbs: Yeah,
[1:58:33] Bob Dobbs: but it was almost like an ape,
[1:58:35] Bob Dobbs: and it was quickly on its own.
[1:58:38] Cameron McEwen: Maybe.
[1:58:39] Bob Dobbs: And there was nothing to...
[1:58:40] Cameron McEwen: You think that's what he means here?
[1:58:43] Bob Dobbs: Yeah.
[1:58:43] Bob Dobbs: He's not talking to an illiterate man.
[1:58:46] Cameron McEwen: No,
[1:58:47] Cameron McEwen: of course not.
[1:58:48] Bob Dobbs: He's talking like the private citadel of consciousness,
[1:58:50] Bob Dobbs: you know,
[1:58:50] Bob Dobbs: that phrase in Counterblast.
[1:58:53] Cameron McEwen: He's almost talking about a pre-oral.
[1:58:58] Cameron McEwen: Yeah.
[1:58:58] Cameron McEwen: And the question is,
[1:58:59] Cameron McEwen: what would that be?
[1:59:01] Cameron McEwen: What is a pre-oral man?
[1:59:03] Cameron McEwen: Because other places he says that what defines...
[1:59:07] Cameron McEwen: the human being as language.
[1:59:09] Bob Dobbs: Well,
[1:59:09] Bob Dobbs: they're gods.
[1:59:10] Bob Dobbs: Now,
[1:59:11] Bob Dobbs: I've learned about this kind of thing from iON.
[1:59:15] Bob Dobbs: The caveman didn't know when he died.
[1:59:18] Bob Dobbs: He didn't know he died.
[1:59:20] Bob Dobbs: They had no social defining things.
[1:59:22] Bob Dobbs: They just,
[1:59:23] Bob Dobbs: it's in a blur.
[1:59:24] Bob Dobbs: They're all stone on acid,
[1:59:27] Bob Dobbs: naturally.
[1:59:28] Bob Dobbs: They had nothing shaping them yet.
[1:59:31] Bob Dobbs: Now,
[1:59:32] Bob Dobbs: that's how I see it.
[1:59:34] Bob Dobbs: It's a kind of gods.
[1:59:37] Bob Dobbs: But he says it once.
[1:59:40] Bob Dobbs: I don't know,
[1:59:40] Bob Dobbs: maybe one other time he says it.
[1:59:42] Bob Dobbs: But it's an incredible statement,
[1:59:44] Bob Dobbs: and the world should have stopped.
[1:59:45] Bob Dobbs: Said,
[1:59:46] Bob Dobbs: wait a minute,
[1:59:46] Bob Dobbs: what the fuck are you talking about,
[1:59:47] Bob Dobbs: Marshall?
[1:59:48] Bob Dobbs: You know what I mean?
[1:59:49] Bob Dobbs: Right.
[1:59:50] Cameron McEwen: Yeah,
[1:59:50] Cameron McEwen: that's what I'm trying to do right now.
[1:59:52] Bob Dobbs: Yeah,
[1:59:53] Bob Dobbs: try to stop him.
[1:59:54] Bob Dobbs: I'll ask him.
[1:59:56] Bob Dobbs: I should ask him.
[1:59:57] Bob Dobbs: That's a good question.
[1:59:58] Cameron McEwen: Well,
[1:59:59] Cameron McEwen: that's a good place to stop,
[2:00:00] Cameron McEwen: because that raises a big question to think about.
[2:00:03] Bob Dobbs: Yeah.
[2:00:04] Cameron McEwen: For example,
[2:00:05] Cameron McEwen: it would be good if you find the other mention of this.
[2:00:10] Cameron McEwen: Yeah,
[2:00:10] Cameron McEwen: yeah.
[2:00:11] Cameron McEwen: In the meantime,
[2:00:12] Cameron McEwen: you might even have it in the pamphlet here,
[2:00:14] Cameron McEwen: because
[2:00:16] Cameron McEwen: I remember us briefly talking about this before.
[2:00:20] Bob Dobbs: Yeah,
[2:00:20] Bob Dobbs: we did.
[2:00:21] Bob Dobbs: So what is it I've got to do for you?
[2:00:25] Bob Dobbs: Oh,
[2:00:25] Bob Dobbs: yeah,
[2:00:25] Bob Dobbs: the Burroughs,
[2:00:26] Bob Dobbs: the Fuller,
[2:00:27] Bob Dobbs: Bucky Fuller.
[2:00:28] Cameron McEwen: Yeah,
[2:00:28] Cameron McEwen: the Bucky Fuller letters and the
[2:00:31] Cameron McEwen: 1968 Playboy letters.
[2:00:34] Bob Dobbs: Yeah,
[2:00:35] Bob Dobbs: the...
[2:00:35] Bob Dobbs: Look,
[2:00:36] Cameron McEwen: I don't have it.
[2:00:37] Cameron McEwen: I have a 70 and I have a 72,
[2:00:39] Cameron McEwen: but I don't have a 68.
[2:00:41] Bob Dobbs: And what was it about Lourdes?
[2:00:43] Bob Dobbs: I think it's more 69.
[2:00:44] Bob Dobbs: Yeah,
[2:00:44] Cameron McEwen: about Lourdes.
[2:00:48] Bob Dobbs: Yeah.
[2:00:48] Bob Dobbs: It was about sitting in the tub getting scrubbed.
[2:00:54] Bob Dobbs: It's interesting how McLuhan,
[2:00:55] Bob Dobbs: he was a great poet,
[2:00:56] Bob Dobbs: but very economical in what he used.
[2:01:00] Bob Dobbs: His words,
[2:01:01] Bob Dobbs: his vocabulary is limited.
[2:01:03] Bob Dobbs: He's like writing poetry as a scientist almost,
[2:01:07] Bob Dobbs: and keeping the language limited,
[2:01:09] Bob Dobbs: talking technically,
[2:01:10] Bob Dobbs: and he would wax eloquent only rarely,
[2:01:13] Bob Dobbs: you know what I mean?
[2:01:15] Cameron McEwen: Yeah,
[2:01:16] Cameron McEwen: but when McLuhan talked,
[2:01:18] Cameron McEwen: he always talked in a kind of multiple elusive way,
[2:01:25] Cameron McEwen: and it's strange.
[2:01:30] Cameron McEwen: Not many people can do that.
[2:01:32] Cameron McEwen: And he sort of did it naturally.
[2:01:35] Cameron McEwen: Yeah,
[2:01:35] Cameron McEwen: he would do it in the seminary.
[2:01:37] Cameron McEwen: When you read McLuhan,
[2:01:38] Cameron McEwen: even from very early on,
[2:01:40] Cameron McEwen: in the early
[2:01:41] Cameron McEwen: 1930s,
[2:01:43] Cameron McEwen: And he's got this knack even then where he sees something in terms of something else.
[2:01:52] Cameron McEwen: So it's like Mailer saying that McLuhan always spoke in metaphors.
[2:01:55] Cameron McEwen: And he was,
[2:01:57] Cameron McEwen: that's right,
[2:01:59] Cameron McEwen: Mailer saw something essential there.
[2:02:01] Bob Dobbs: Yeah.
[2:02:02] Bob Dobbs: Okay,
[2:02:03] Bob Dobbs: so that's a good point.
[2:02:04] Bob Dobbs: So I'll make a note about that's what we're talking about.
[2:02:06] Bob Dobbs: So
[2:02:08] Bob Dobbs: I remember he once said to me through the evergreens,
[2:02:14] Bob Dobbs: he says,
[2:02:15] Bob Dobbs: what you and Nelson say about me,
[2:02:17] Bob Dobbs: I wasn't that good.
[2:02:21] Bob Dobbs: And so I,
[2:02:22] Bob Dobbs: you know,
[2:02:23] Bob Dobbs: when I get to talking to a McLuhan enthusiast,
[2:02:26] Bob Dobbs: not too many,
[2:02:26] Bob Dobbs: but as we talk,
[2:02:28] Bob Dobbs: we're really making a big deal out of McLuhan,
[2:02:30] Bob Dobbs: which he might have disagreed with,
[2:02:32] Bob Dobbs: but I think we're justified in doing this.
[2:02:35] Bob Dobbs: Yeah,
[2:02:36] Cameron McEwen: but the big deal that we're talking about is his way of prompting thought.
[2:02:43] Bob Dobbs: Yeah.
[2:02:43] Cameron McEwen: We're not saying that he thought of everything.
[2:02:46] Cameron McEwen: We're not saying that he was some sort of universal genius that people need to respect or something.
[2:02:53] Cameron McEwen: What we're saying is if you read McLuhan,
[2:02:56] Cameron McEwen: you will find yourself stimulated into not only interesting thought,
[2:03:04] Cameron McEwen: but into thought that gives you insight into the world around you.
[2:03:08] Bob Dobbs: Yep.
[2:03:09] Bob Dobbs: Like poetry should.
[2:03:11] Cameron McEwen: Yeah,
[2:03:11] Cameron McEwen: absolutely.
[2:03:13] Cameron McEwen: Absolutely.
[2:03:14] Bob Dobbs: Okay,
[2:03:14] Bob Dobbs: so on that,
[2:03:15] Bob Dobbs: I've got to do some stuff.
[2:03:16] Bob Dobbs: So congratulations for getting through another great dialogue.
[2:03:21] Cameron McEwen: Okay,
[2:03:21] Cameron McEwen: Bob,
[2:03:21] Bob Dobbs: take care.
[2:03:23] Bob Dobbs: Okay,
[2:03:23] Bob Dobbs: Cameron,
[2:03:23] Bob Dobbs: bye.
[2:03:23] Bob Dobbs: Bye-bye.