Dialogue 66 — Transcript

[00:01] Bob Dobbs: Hello,

[00:02] Bob Dobbs: this is

[00:02] Bob Dobbs: Cameron McEwen and Bob Dobbs with episode number 66 of our ongoing analysis of my book.

[00:10] Bob Dobbs: And we're still thinking about the idea of pre-tribal awareness,

[00:17] Bob Dobbs: which we might claim is a new discovery in McLuhan studies,

[00:20] Bob Dobbs: something that's never been talked about.

[00:23] Bob Dobbs: And more than me,

[00:26] Bob Dobbs: Cameron is looking into things and finding other quotes.

[00:30] Bob Dobbs: And so what he found was

[00:33] Bob Dobbs: Wittgenstein.

[00:35] Bob Dobbs: It says Zettel number 445.

[00:37] Bob Dobbs: Is some kind of an encyclopedia of thoughts by him?

[00:41] Cameron McEwen: Yes,

[00:42] Cameron McEwen: Zettel is a box or a drawer.

[00:47] Cameron McEwen: So all of

[00:49] Cameron McEwen: Wittgenstein's work after,

[00:54] Cameron McEwen: or I shouldn't say all,

[00:55] Cameron McEwen: but

[00:56] Cameron McEwen: 95% of his work,

[00:59] Cameron McEwen: after around 1930 was never published.

[01:03] Cameron McEwen: And editors,

[01:07] Cameron McEwen: after his death,

[01:09] Cameron McEwen: started to put together editions of his writings.

[01:14] Cameron McEwen: And one of the editions of his posthumous notes is called Zettel.

[01:21] Cameron McEwen: What does that mean?

[01:22] Cameron McEwen: It means a shoebox or a drawer.

[01:26] Cameron McEwen: It's just a collection of notes.

[01:28] Bob Dobbs: Which is what I found in McLuhan's archive,

[01:30] Bob Dobbs: 60 boxes of miscellaneous articles and clippings thrown in each box.

[01:37] Cameron McEwen: And where is that?

[01:38] Cameron McEwen: Is that in the law?

[01:40] Bob Dobbs: Well,

[01:40] Bob Dobbs: my job was to put them in order,

[01:45] Bob Dobbs: keep whatever was in each box.

[01:47] Bob Dobbs: No,

[01:47] Bob Dobbs: no,

[01:47] Bob Dobbs: not keep in order.

[01:47] Bob Dobbs: So look at every box and then sort of work out a linear sequence.

[01:52] Bob Dobbs: So find articles that I figured would be the 40s,

[01:56] Bob Dobbs: put them in the earlier boxes.

[01:58] Bob Dobbs: So I remade the boxes in sequential order of the articles and stuff.

[02:05] Bob Dobbs: I put the boxes into order.

[02:07] Bob Dobbs: You see what I mean?

[02:08] Bob Dobbs: Yeah,

[02:08] Bob Dobbs: sure.

[02:09] Bob Dobbs: And apparently

[02:10] Bob Dobbs: I'd be one of the few people to do it because I knew his corpus.

[02:14] Bob Dobbs: I knew the whole work so I could figure out which decade something was in,

[02:20] Bob Dobbs: you know?

[02:21] Bob Dobbs: So that's what I did.

[02:23] Bob Dobbs: And that's without the bibliography.

[02:26] Cameron McEwen: That's still in...

[02:28] Cameron McEwen: The early

[02:30] Cameron McEwen: 1980s, right?

[02:30] Bob Dobbs: Yeah,

[02:30] Bob Dobbs: that's

[02:31] Bob Dobbs: November, December

[02:33] Bob Dobbs: 1981, before anything.

[02:36] Bob Dobbs: Other than the inventory that Marg Stewart made.

[02:40] Bob Dobbs: So I organized that,

[02:41] Bob Dobbs: a few other miscellaneous stuff.

[02:44] Bob Dobbs: Then they got someone else to do the letters,

[02:46] Bob Dobbs: I think,

[02:46] Bob Dobbs: or the letters were already done.

[02:48] Bob Dobbs: I'm not sure.

[02:50] Bob Dobbs: But there were a lot of letters,

[02:51] Bob Dobbs: so I think the letters hadn't been done yet.

[02:54] Bob Dobbs: So then...

[02:56] Bob Dobbs: I left and other people took over and then they sold it about 1984 in Ottawa.

[03:05] Bob Dobbs: And then it had to be organized for a couple of years and Philip Marchand organized it,

[03:09] Bob Dobbs: got the job there.

[03:11] Bob Dobbs: I don't know how he figured that out or what he knew or was he already at the archives,

[03:16] Bob Dobbs: but he took advantage of going through and inventorying the archives to write his book,

[03:22] Bob Dobbs: to take notes.

[03:23] Bob Dobbs: That's where his book came from.

[03:25] Bob Dobbs: And the book came out in 89.

[03:27] Bob Dobbs: So then it took us a couple of years to have access to what they organized,

[03:32] Bob Dobbs: right?

[03:34] Bob Dobbs: Maybe by 89,

[03:35] Bob Dobbs: 90,

[03:35] Bob Dobbs: it was ready.

[03:36] Bob Dobbs: I started getting stuff,

[03:37] Bob Dobbs: I think,

[03:37] Bob Dobbs: by 1990.

[03:40] Bob Dobbs: So that's almost 10 years later.

[03:42] Bob Dobbs: So

[03:43] Bob Dobbs: I operated just from understanding what he wrote in different decades.

[03:50] Bob Dobbs: Okay,

[03:51] Bob Dobbs: so then that...

[03:54] Bob Dobbs: was an orderly thing for them and so that's how they helped that helped them sell the archives by putting that into order everything else was in pretty good order you know what i mean just the boxes were all messed up so uh let's see um so

[04:11] Bob Dobbs: that's Wittgenstein box and um he says oh i looked up Wittgenstein was he married i couldn't really find out anything on the

[04:23] Bob Dobbs: on the wikipedia no he wasn't married was he gay well there's a difference of opinion about that but uh i did read about the guy david somebody he hung out with for a while you know right yes so they don't know about that why didn't he publish after 1930 um because

[04:45] Cameron McEwen: uh he um he was in the academy trying to think

[04:52] Cameron McEwen: against the academy.

[04:54] Bob Dobbs: Yeah.

[04:55] Cameron McEwen: And he tried over and over again to order his thoughts.

[05:02] Cameron McEwen: But he was never able to do it.

[05:04] Cameron McEwen: And

[05:05] Cameron McEwen: I think he came to believe that not being able to order was actually what philosophy was about,

[05:13] Cameron McEwen: or at least an important part of what philosophy was about,

[05:17] Cameron McEwen: that any order would distort what needed to be done.

[05:22] Bob Dobbs: Yeah.

[05:23] Cameron McEwen: So

[05:24] Cameron McEwen: I think eventually he thought,

[05:26] Cameron McEwen: well,

[05:27] Cameron McEwen: my job is mostly to

[05:31] Cameron McEwen: do notes and to try to get younger colleagues actually to think.

[05:39] Cameron McEwen: And between the two of those callings,

[05:44] Cameron McEwen: that's sort of what my job is as a philosopher.

[05:48] Bob Dobbs: Yeah,

[05:48] Bob Dobbs: the two being get some colleague and what's the first one?

[05:52] Cameron McEwen: Making the notes.

[05:53] Bob Dobbs: Making the notes.

[05:55] Bob Dobbs: And so putting them in order wasn't a priority.

[05:58] Cameron McEwen: Well,

[05:59] Cameron McEwen: I mean...

[06:00] Cameron McEwen: He kept trying to do it,

[06:02] Cameron McEwen: but he never succeeded.

[06:04] Cameron McEwen: And I think he came to feel that not being able to do it was actually an important part of what he was up to.

[06:14] Bob Dobbs: And that way he was going post-book.

[06:17] Bob Dobbs: It wasn't important to put it into a book form.

[06:20] Cameron McEwen: Correct.

[06:20] Cameron McEwen: But also look at the quotation that we have here.

[06:23] Cameron McEwen: The philosopher is not a citizen of any thought community.

[06:27] Cameron McEwen: And by the way,

[06:28] Cameron McEwen: thought.

[06:29] Cameron McEwen: community there can be translated as tribe.

[06:32] Bob Dobbs: Yeah,

[06:33] Bob Dobbs: yeah.

[06:33] Cameron McEwen: Right?

[06:34] Cameron McEwen: The philosopher is not a citizen of any tribe.

[06:36] Cameron McEwen: So that means that the philosopher exercises pre-tribal awareness.

[06:41] Bob Dobbs: Yeah.

[06:42] Bob Dobbs: And then he says the philosopher is not a citizen of any thought community.

[06:46] Bob Dobbs: This is what makes him into a philosopher.

[06:49] Bob Dobbs: And if you understand philosopher as some kind of detachment about the community,

[06:55] Bob Dobbs: about its involvements and engagements and habits.

[06:58] Bob Dobbs: screw-ups.

[07:00] Bob Dobbs: The philosopher does not want to get trapped in that somehow.

[07:04] Cameron McEwen: Right.

[07:04] Cameron McEwen: But notice the phrase,

[07:07] Cameron McEwen: any thought community.

[07:09] Cameron McEwen: So it's not a question of being detached from one community.

[07:14] Cameron McEwen: It's being detached from all possible communities.

[07:20] Bob Dobbs: Yeah.

[07:20] Bob Dobbs: And that might be platonic,

[07:23] Bob Dobbs: looking at saying thought is the underpinning of all communities.

[07:27] Bob Dobbs: Whereas Aristotle,

[07:28] Bob Dobbs: if you say he looks into the senses,

[07:29] Bob Dobbs: he looks into the cultures,

[07:31] Bob Dobbs: he starts seeing differences in tribes and gets lost in that.

[07:36] Bob Dobbs: If you consider the Platonic method purer,

[07:41] Bob Dobbs: not necessarily,

[07:42] Bob Dobbs: but do you see what I mean?

[07:43] Cameron McEwen: Well,

[07:44] Cameron McEwen: I think I see what you mean,

[07:45] Cameron McEwen: but I don't think I agree with it.

[07:48] Cameron McEwen: Because when the philosopher is not a citizen of any thought community,

[07:53] Cameron McEwen: that's what makes him into a philosopher.

[07:56] Cameron McEwen: I think what he's talking about there is creativity,

[08:00] Cameron McEwen: the creativity that is before any action or any understanding within a tribe.

[08:07] Cameron McEwen: So

[08:08] Cameron McEwen: McLuhan would certainly agree with that.

[08:12] Cameron McEwen: For McLuhan,

[08:14] Cameron McEwen: every moment of perception involves creativity,

[08:18] Cameron McEwen: involves art.

[08:20] Cameron McEwen: So what

[08:22] Cameron McEwen: McLuhan would try to do and what...

[08:25] Cameron McEwen: Wittgenstein was trying to do was question how we can understand this creativity that is before all human action.

[08:43] Bob Dobbs: Yeah,

[08:43] Bob Dobbs: before all human action,

[08:45] Bob Dobbs: which would create society and culture or tribe.

[08:48] Bob Dobbs: So it just sounds a little pure to talk about.

[08:55] Bob Dobbs: But maybe that is the form of cognition before tribal memes,

[09:05] Bob Dobbs: tribal ideas,

[09:05] Bob Dobbs: tribal rigidities.

[09:07] Cameron McEwen: So notice one of the things that does thinking of creativity in this way as something that is always exercised in every moment of human being,

[09:20] Cameron McEwen: no matter how primitive,

[09:22] Cameron McEwen: no matter how sophisticated.

[09:24] Cameron McEwen: is that that makes creativity into a perennial activity,

[09:30] Cameron McEwen: into a simultaneous or all-at-once activity,

[09:34] Cameron McEwen: not a linear one.

[09:35] Cameron McEwen: So you often think,

[09:41] Cameron McEwen: or not think,

[09:42] Cameron McEwen: express yourself,

[09:43] Cameron McEwen: I would say,

[09:44] Cameron McEwen: in terms of linear examples,

[09:48] Cameron McEwen: because...

[09:50] Bob Dobbs: When I'm using a linear medium.

[09:52] Cameron McEwen: That's right.

[09:53] Cameron McEwen: You're trying to communicate in a certain way,

[09:56] Cameron McEwen: number one,

[09:57] Cameron McEwen: and number two,

[09:58] Cameron McEwen: what you're talking about is to say human activity.

[10:03] Cameron McEwen: is linear,

[10:05] Cameron McEwen: right?

[10:06] Cameron McEwen: There is no such thing as human beings standing,

[10:10] Cameron McEwen: you know,

[10:11] Cameron McEwen: outside of time and outside of their community and all that sort of stuff.

[10:15] Cameron McEwen: It's just that in order to be a part of a community,

[10:20] Cameron McEwen: to be a part of language,

[10:21] Cameron McEwen: to be a human being that's experiencing things,

[10:25] Cameron McEwen: you need to be creative.

[10:26] Cameron McEwen: And that creativity is somehow aside from you

[10:31] Cameron McEwen: the very thing that it enables.

[10:33] Cameron McEwen: So it's difficult to talk about.

[10:36] Bob Dobbs: Yeah,

[10:37] Bob Dobbs: now you said all communities are linear.

[10:41] Bob Dobbs: You didn't say that,

[10:42] Bob Dobbs: but what are you saying about linearity?

[10:45] Bob Dobbs: So I'm presenting things linear.

[10:47] Bob Dobbs: Thought is linear?

[10:49] Bob Dobbs: Well,

[10:50] Cameron McEwen: I mean,

[10:51] Cameron McEwen: I'm saying that thought is both linear and all at once.

[10:57] Bob Dobbs: Right.

[10:58] Cameron McEwen: In McLuhan's early terminology,

[11:00] Cameron McEwen: thought is linear and ancient.

[11:03] Cameron McEwen: So you have the ancient quarrel that is always expressed in what's going on linearly,

[11:10] Cameron McEwen: right?

[11:10] Cameron McEwen: And that's,

[11:11] Cameron McEwen: he tries to describe that in his

[11:14] Cameron McEwen: Nashe thesis and in the ancient quarrel in modern America.

[11:22] Cameron McEwen: And the importance of that for McLuhan can be seen in the fact that he makes that the last essay in...

[11:30] Cameron McEwen: The Interior landscape,

[11:33] Cameron McEwen: which is what,

[11:35] Cameron McEwen: 25 years later?

[11:37] Bob Dobbs: Yeah,

[11:37] Bob Dobbs: 1969,

[11:39] Bob Dobbs: right.

[11:40] Bob Dobbs: Well,

[11:40] Bob Dobbs: that one was written in 46,

[11:41] Bob Dobbs: but it goes up to 42.

[11:45] Cameron McEwen: Yeah,

[11:45] Cameron McEwen: it was.

[11:46] Bob Dobbs: No,

[11:46] Bob Dobbs: 62.

[11:47] Bob Dobbs: Collection of stuff up to 62.

[11:50] Cameron McEwen: Yeah,

[11:50] Cameron McEwen: the part from 62 is the chapter out of Gutenberg Galaxy.

[11:58] Bob Dobbs: Yeah.

[12:01] Cameron McEwen: Everything else is prior to that.

[12:02] Cameron McEwen: Everything else before the part of Gutenberg Galaxy that's in there,

[12:08] Cameron McEwen: the latest is the Coleridge essay,

[12:11] Cameron McEwen: which was,

[12:12] Cameron McEwen: I think,

[12:12] Cameron McEwen: 57.

[12:14] Bob Dobbs: Yeah,

[12:14] Cameron McEwen: yeah.

[12:15] Cameron McEwen: The ancient quarrel was actually a lecture in

[12:19] Cameron McEwen: St. Louis in 1944,

[12:23] Cameron McEwen: and it just wasn't published until 46.

[12:28] Cameron McEwen: It was written almost at the same time as the thesis,

[12:31] Cameron McEwen: and it was a way of bringing the thesis up to date.

[12:36] Bob Dobbs: Yeah,

[12:37] Bob Dobbs: and then it didn't get any more coverage for 25 years,

[12:41] Bob Dobbs: until 69.

[12:42] Bob Dobbs: Correct.

[12:44] Bob Dobbs: Okay,

[12:44] Bob Dobbs: so the idea of the perennial wisdom,

[12:48] Bob Dobbs: which people attach to mistakes or gurus and things.

[12:58] Bob Dobbs: I think that McLuhan says this is not good enough,

[13:02] Bob Dobbs: just the perennial wisdom,

[13:04] Bob Dobbs: that to just think of thought and being detached,

[13:08] Bob Dobbs: which is usually a visual bias,

[13:11] Bob Dobbs: is not enough.

[13:12] Bob Dobbs: So he had to get into the dirt and not do what

[13:17] Bob Dobbs: Wittgenstein's doing.

[13:19] Bob Dobbs: He wouldn't say it was a thought community.

[13:23] Bob Dobbs: He would say nonverbal gesture,

[13:25] Bob Dobbs: ESP,

[13:25] Bob Dobbs: mental dance.

[13:27] Bob Dobbs: But he had to get into the Aristotelian to get you somehow not limited if you were following Wittgenstein and going with the thought community.

[13:38] Bob Dobbs: Because a lot of people think that being detached is just thinking out of the box.

[13:43] Bob Dobbs: But it's thinking.

[13:44] Bob Dobbs: It's lost in thought.

[13:45] Bob Dobbs: And usually it's limited by their cultural assumptions.

[13:49] Cameron McEwen: Oh,

[13:49] Cameron McEwen: absolutely.

[13:50] Bob Dobbs: Yeah.

[13:51] Cameron McEwen: Remember that there is no such thing as being assumption-less.

[13:57] Cameron McEwen: The great mystery is that human beings cannot get away from the rearview mirror,

[14:05] Cameron McEwen: but that does not mean that they can't be creative.

[14:08] Cameron McEwen: And so the whole problem is to think together the rearview mirror and creativity.

[14:15] Cameron McEwen: And that problem is a problem that goes back as far back as human beings go.

[14:24] Bob Dobbs: Yeah.

[14:24] Cameron McEwen: So,

[14:25] Cameron McEwen: um,

[14:26] Cameron McEwen: When we're talking about,

[14:29] Cameron McEwen: say,

[14:29] Cameron McEwen: McLuhan and Wittgenstein,

[14:31] Cameron McEwen: I don't think we should say that

[14:33] Cameron McEwen: McLuhan is doing something that Wittgenstein didn't see.

[14:37] Cameron McEwen: I would say that both of them are trying to grapple with a very old problem.

[14:44] Cameron McEwen: Namely,

[14:45] Cameron McEwen: how are we going to express and turn to public use the notion that...

[14:56] Cameron McEwen: Human beings are both creative and tribal.

[15:01] Bob Dobbs: Yeah,

[15:01] Bob Dobbs: so he says the philosopher is not a citizen of any thought community.

[15:06] Bob Dobbs: So the cliche response to uneducated people,

[15:10] Bob Dobbs: unsophisticated people,

[15:11] Bob Dobbs: is that philosophers think.

[15:13] Bob Dobbs: All right?

[15:13] Bob Dobbs: So they would find this odd.

[15:14] Bob Dobbs: What?

[15:15] Bob Dobbs: He doesn't engage in thought?

[15:17] Bob Dobbs: And then it's,

[15:17] Bob Dobbs: this is what makes him a philosopher.

[15:19] Bob Dobbs: So,

[15:19] Bob Dobbs: yeah,

[15:19] Bob Dobbs: that's a good statement.

[15:21] Bob Dobbs: So it just occurred to me while you were talking there that

[15:24] Bob Dobbs: McLuhan would agree with that,

[15:25] Bob Dobbs: but he recognized there were new cultural problems created by Finnegans Wake and modernism.

[15:30] Bob Dobbs: that needed to be gone into to sort out to get back to the thought community.

[15:35] Bob Dobbs: And Wittgenstein didn't know that stuff,

[15:37] Bob Dobbs: apparently.

[15:38] Bob Dobbs: So he got bogged down and isolated.

[15:41] Bob Dobbs: He couldn't put on the culture anymore.

[15:44] Bob Dobbs: Whereas McLuhan took new stuff that he could put on with the same goal as

[15:50] Bob Dobbs: Wittgenstein, but you could see he had something to talk about.

[15:53] Bob Dobbs: And he makes fun of Wittgenstein in

[15:56] Bob Dobbs: Explorations, maybe number eight.

[15:59] Bob Dobbs: And he says,

[16:00] Bob Dobbs: you know,

[16:00] Bob Dobbs: Wittgenstein was afraid to leap into the abyss.

[16:06] Bob Dobbs: Remember that part?

[16:06] Cameron McEwen: Yeah,

[16:08] Cameron McEwen: but I don't,

[16:09] Cameron McEwen: you know,

[16:10] Cameron McEwen: McLuhan often threw out stuff that,

[16:14] Cameron McEwen: you know,

[16:14] Cameron McEwen: he didn't know much about.

[16:15] Cameron McEwen: And he was just,

[16:17] Cameron McEwen: it was like throwing pasta at the wall to see if it would stick.

[16:21] Bob Dobbs: No,

[16:22] Bob Dobbs: I liked McLuhan.

[16:22] Bob Dobbs: He knew that,

[16:23] Bob Dobbs: you know,

[16:24] Bob Dobbs: I cannot speak of what I...

[16:26] Bob Dobbs: what I cannot say or something,

[16:28] Bob Dobbs: whatever that famous line is,

[16:29] Cameron McEwen: you know.

[16:30] Cameron McEwen: But Clued says,

[16:31] Bob Dobbs: you ain't talking,

[16:32] Bob Dobbs: you're not stopping me talking.

[16:34] Bob Dobbs: You know,

[16:34] Bob Dobbs: I'll speak of what I can't say.

[16:37] Bob Dobbs: Yeah,

[16:37] Cameron McEwen: exactly.

[16:37] Cameron McEwen: He was like his father in that respect.

[16:40] Cameron McEwen: Yeah.

[16:41] Cameron McEwen: He spent his whole life talking about stuff that he didn't know what he was talking about.

[16:47] Bob Dobbs: Okay,

[16:48] Bob Dobbs: so let me ask you this before I forget.

[16:51] Bob Dobbs: I just read today,

[16:52] Bob Dobbs: Alan Watts,

[16:52] Bob Dobbs: you know who he is?

[16:54] Cameron McEwen: Yeah,

[16:54] Cameron McEwen: of course.

[16:55] Bob Dobbs: Yeah.

[16:55] Bob Dobbs: He makes a claim somewhere,

[16:56] Bob Dobbs: someone sent it to me,

[16:58] Bob Dobbs: that the phrase rearview mirror or rearview action,

[17:02] Bob Dobbs: anyways,

[17:03] Bob Dobbs: rearview,

[17:04] Bob Dobbs: McLuhan got from him.

[17:07] Bob Dobbs: Does that sound possible?

[17:09] Cameron McEwen: Yeah,

[17:09] Cameron McEwen: it sounds possible.

[17:11] Cameron McEwen: But

[17:11] Cameron McEwen: I would think that probably in cybernetics that came up a lot.

[17:18] Cameron McEwen: Watts was already active in the

[17:20] Cameron McEwen: 40s.

[17:21] Cameron McEwen: And maybe even in the end of the

[17:23] Cameron McEwen: 30s, I'm not quite sure about his years of activity.

[17:28] Cameron McEwen: But

[17:30] Cameron McEwen: I think that that notion was kind of in the air.

[17:35] Bob Dobbs: Okay,

[17:36] Bob Dobbs: because you don't know,

[17:38] Bob Dobbs: you don't recall when he first uses it.

[17:40] Bob Dobbs: Is it the mid-60s when he starts saying it,

[17:43] Bob Dobbs: Marshall McLuhan?

[17:45] Cameron McEwen: Yeah,

[17:45] Cameron McEwen: I don't really recall.

[17:47] Cameron McEwen: But,

[17:47] Cameron McEwen: I mean,

[17:47] Cameron McEwen: certainly in the mid-60s,

[17:49] Cameron McEwen: he is.

[17:50] Cameron McEwen: So it would be a question of wondering if he had talked about it before.

[17:55] Bob Dobbs: Yeah,

[17:56] Bob Dobbs: used it once or twice.

[17:57] Cameron McEwen: I'm not sure.

[17:58] Bob Dobbs: Yeah,

[17:59] Bob Dobbs: I don't think so.

[18:00] Bob Dobbs: It doesn't sound familiar that he used it way back there.

[18:02] Bob Dobbs: But

[18:04] Bob Dobbs: I know that in Culture Is Our Business,

[18:06] Bob Dobbs: I know that Alan Watts visited him,

[18:08] Bob Dobbs: says that he visited McLuhan.

[18:10] Bob Dobbs: That would be 66,

[18:11] Bob Dobbs: 67,

[18:11] Bob Dobbs: the way I time it,

[18:13] Bob Dobbs: because McLuhan's gone to New York in 67,

[18:15] Bob Dobbs: 68.

[18:17] Bob Dobbs: Yeah,

[18:17] Cameron McEwen: but wasn't Watts in San Francisco?

[18:20] Cameron McEwen: He might have hooked up with him in one of McLuhan's San Francisco trips.

[18:26] Bob Dobbs: No,

[18:26] Bob Dobbs: he said he visited him and went to Toronto.

[18:29] Bob Dobbs: Oh,

[18:29] Bob Dobbs: okay.

[18:29] Bob Dobbs: Went to his home,

[18:30] Bob Dobbs: if I read that right.

[18:31] Bob Dobbs: That might be true what you're saying,

[18:33] Bob Dobbs: but in my memory,

[18:33] Bob Dobbs: he,

[18:34] Bob Dobbs: you know,

[18:34] Bob Dobbs: you visualize that when you read it.

[18:37] Bob Dobbs: You say,

[18:37] Bob Dobbs: oh,

[18:37] Bob Dobbs: he went into the house there,

[18:39] Bob Dobbs: you know.

[18:39] Bob Dobbs: My mind visualizes it.

[18:40] Bob Dobbs: So I have that visualization.

[18:42] Bob Dobbs: He's in the house,

[18:42] Bob Dobbs: so he must have said that,

[18:44] Bob Dobbs: I would think.

[18:45] Bob Dobbs: Anyways.

[18:48] Cameron McEwen: McLuhan didn't live in Wychwood Park in the 60s,

[18:52] Bob Dobbs: did he?

[18:53] Bob Dobbs: No,

[18:53] Bob Dobbs: he moved to Wychwood Park in 68,

[18:54] Bob Dobbs: and this would be 66,

[18:56] Bob Dobbs: 67.

[18:58] Bob Dobbs: And then Watts is distracted from 67 on.

[19:00] Bob Dobbs: He becomes a big McLuhan figure himself,

[19:03] Bob Dobbs: doing videos and leading the Ginsburg revolution there,

[19:07] Bob Dobbs: Tim Leary and all that,

[19:08] Bob Dobbs: you know,

[19:08] Bob Dobbs: after the human loving and all those things.

[19:11] Bob Dobbs: So then in 1970,

[19:14] Bob Dobbs: McLuhan takes a pot shot.

[19:16] Bob Dobbs: He says...

[19:17] Bob Dobbs: Watts,

[19:17] Bob Dobbs: he refers to Watts,

[19:18] Bob Dobbs: and he says he's too simple,

[19:21] Bob Dobbs: meaning Gutenbergian.

[19:23] Bob Dobbs: He's too simple.

[19:24] Bob Dobbs: And do you remember that being said?

[19:27] Cameron McEwen: No,

[19:28] Cameron McEwen: but I find it.

[19:28] Bob Dobbs: Yeah,

[19:28] Bob Dobbs: it's in there,

[19:29] Bob Dobbs: one little sentence in passing.

[19:32] Bob Dobbs: So

[19:34] Bob Dobbs: Watts, he should have said,

[19:35] Bob Dobbs: yeah,

[19:36] Bob Dobbs: I turned McLuhan on a rearview mirror,

[19:38] Bob Dobbs: and then later

[19:39] Bob Dobbs: I read a book and he said I was simple.

[19:42] Bob Dobbs: But I bet he never even knew it.

[19:43] Bob Dobbs: He didn't read Culture Is Our Business.

[19:45] Bob Dobbs: And he died in 73.

[19:47] Bob Dobbs: He was a bit of an alcoholic,

[19:48] Bob Dobbs: people say,

[19:49] Bob Dobbs: in that era.

[19:51] Bob Dobbs: The guy who sent it to me said,

[19:52] Bob Dobbs: this is probably bullshit.

[19:53] Bob Dobbs: Watts was an alcoholic.

[19:55] Bob Dobbs: So,

[19:55] Bob Dobbs: anyways,

[19:55] Bob Dobbs: that's a side thing.

[19:58] Bob Dobbs: So back to,

[19:59] Bob Dobbs: so we've talked about

[20:00] Bob Dobbs: Wittgenstein statement,

[20:03] Bob Dobbs: not a citizen of any thought community.

[20:07] Bob Dobbs: This is what makes him into a philosopher.

[20:10] Bob Dobbs: Now,

[20:11] Bob Dobbs: many philosophers knew this,

[20:13] Bob Dobbs: that people are called philosophers in the canon,

[20:16] Bob Dobbs: but they may not have said it this way.

[20:18] Bob Dobbs: What do you think?

[20:20] Cameron McEwen: No,

[20:20] Cameron McEwen: I think you're right.

[20:24] Cameron McEwen: My take on all of this...

[20:27] Cameron McEwen: is always that what is at stake is not something new.

[20:32] Cameron McEwen: What is at stake is the communication of something new.

[20:36] Bob Dobbs: Yeah,

[20:37] Bob Dobbs: yeah.

[20:38] Cameron McEwen: You seem to be saying that lots of people have thought this,

[20:43] Cameron McEwen: and I think that's right.

[20:45] Cameron McEwen: But nobody,

[20:46] Cameron McEwen: including McLuhan yet,

[20:50] Cameron McEwen: has been able to translate that insight Thank you.

[20:56] Cameron McEwen: into something that can be communicated and put to use in the community.

[21:05] Bob Dobbs: Okay.

[21:06] Bob Dobbs: Personally,

[21:07] Bob Dobbs: after

[21:10] Bob Dobbs: 13 years,

[21:11] Bob Dobbs: coming up 14 years with iON,

[21:14] Bob Dobbs: I think I'm the first to do it,

[21:15] Bob Dobbs: and that was my reward.

[21:16] Bob Dobbs: Non-physical showed up and gives me everything.

[21:20] Bob Dobbs: That was what everybody was looking for.

[21:22] Bob Dobbs: No,

[21:23] Bob Dobbs: I kind of agreed with that.

[21:25] Bob Dobbs: So.

[21:27] Bob Dobbs: But we don't emphasize that here.

[21:29] Bob Dobbs: I'm pretending I'm still pre-iON and talking to you.

[21:34] Bob Dobbs: Pretending I don't know.

[21:35] Bob Dobbs: But I actually have to deal with that point that iON says,

[21:39] Bob Dobbs: you've done something that no one else did.

[21:42] Bob Dobbs: And no one evoked non-physical where it talked to people.

[21:47] Bob Dobbs: So that's an amazing point.

[21:49] Bob Dobbs: Now,

[21:50] Bob Dobbs: I can't find more than two people who believe that.

[21:54] Bob Dobbs: You know what I mean?

[21:55] Bob Dobbs: I have a minority in appreciating I in that way.

[21:58] Bob Dobbs: But anyways,

[21:59] Bob Dobbs: I'll just put in the record here.

[22:01] Bob Dobbs: What I think about that,

[22:06] Bob Dobbs: because in some way I talked myself into it.

[22:09] Bob Dobbs: Talk,

[22:09] Bob Dobbs: talk,

[22:09] Bob Dobbs: talk.

[22:09] Bob Dobbs: No one had so much radio time as I did.

[22:14] Bob Dobbs: Do you know what I mean?

[22:15] Cameron McEwen: Right.

[22:16] Cameron McEwen: Nobody could.

[22:17] Bob Dobbs: Yeah,

[22:18] Bob Dobbs: if you're a teacher,

[22:19] Bob Dobbs: yes,

[22:19] Bob Dobbs: you had classes.

[22:21] Bob Dobbs: But you're.

[22:23] Bob Dobbs: You're constrained by the protocols of what you have to teach.

[22:27] Bob Dobbs: There may not be too much freedom there.

[22:29] Bob Dobbs: I've been on the radio since 1984,

[22:32] Bob Dobbs: 40 fucking years almost,

[22:34] Bob Dobbs: making shit up and quoting the best of them.

[22:39] Bob Dobbs: The other guys who are good at making shit up,

[22:41] Bob Dobbs: like McLuhan.

[22:43] Bob Dobbs: So no one has ever said as much as I did and engaged a live audience for so many hours.

[22:49] Bob Dobbs: So that's interesting.

[22:50] Bob Dobbs: It's a new situation.

[22:52] Cameron McEwen: I agree.

[22:53] Cameron McEwen: I agree.

[22:55] Cameron McEwen: It's a strange vocation.

[22:59] Bob Dobbs: That's right.

[23:00] Bob Dobbs: Okay.

[23:01] Bob Dobbs: So then McLuhan comes along in 1946,

[23:03] Bob Dobbs: and you find this quote in Footprints in the Sands of Crime,

[23:06] Bob Dobbs: a very important essay.

[23:08] Bob Dobbs: He says,

[23:09] Bob Dobbs: the sailor in his story,

[23:10] Bob Dobbs: The Maelstrom,

[23:11] Bob Dobbs: that's Edgar Allen Poe's The Maelstrom,

[23:13] Bob Dobbs: is at first paralyzed with horror.

[23:16] Bob Dobbs: But in his very paralysis,

[23:18] Bob Dobbs: there's another fascination which emerges.

[23:21] Bob Dobbs: A power of detached observation.

[23:24] Bob Dobbs: And you highlight the two words,

[23:25] Bob Dobbs: detached observation.

[23:27] Bob Dobbs: And I said to you,

[23:28] Bob Dobbs: that's limited,

[23:31] Bob Dobbs: because later he would say detached and involved.

[23:33] Bob Dobbs: He refined that.

[23:35] Bob Dobbs: But he's a little simpler or hasn't said it enough.

[23:42] Bob Dobbs: He'd just say it once,

[23:43] Bob Dobbs: just getting to it,

[23:45] Bob Dobbs: so it's new,

[23:46] Bob Dobbs: so he's not mulling over,

[23:48] Bob Dobbs: because later he thinks it over.

[23:50] Bob Dobbs: notices it,

[23:51] Bob Dobbs: oh,

[23:51] Bob Dobbs: there's an involved aspect here.

[23:52] Bob Dobbs: You know what I mean?

[23:53] Bob Dobbs: That's my theory,

[23:55] Bob Dobbs: why he added it.

[23:56] Cameron McEwen: You have to ask,

[23:59] Cameron McEwen: in what time and at what place and in what expression is it possible to notice the importance of

[24:14] Cameron McEwen: detachment and involvement?

[24:20] Bob Dobbs: That would be an electric effect.

[24:22] Cameron McEwen: That's right.

[24:23] Cameron McEwen: You're absolutely right there.

[24:24] Cameron McEwen: So we can't say that detached observation has only one meaning.

[24:31] Cameron McEwen: It has a Gutenbergian meaning.

[24:33] Cameron McEwen: It has a tribal meaning.

[24:35] Cameron McEwen: It has an electronic meaning.

[24:38] Bob Dobbs: And maybe an Asian meaning,

[24:40] Bob Dobbs: you know,

[24:40] Bob Dobbs: Buddhism and that stuff.

[24:41] Bob Dobbs: Sure.

[24:42] Cameron McEwen: All kinds.

[24:43] Bob Dobbs: Yeah.

[24:43] Cameron McEwen: So then I would say here that when he says detached observation,

[24:47] Cameron McEwen: He is not talking one-sidedly as if there were no involvement.

[24:52] Cameron McEwen: Remember,

[24:53] Cameron McEwen: the sailor in the maelstrom...

[24:55] Cameron McEwen: He did paralysis.

[24:58] Cameron McEwen: Yeah,

[24:58] Cameron McEwen: but he's involved.

[25:00] Bob Dobbs: Yeah,

[25:00] Bob Dobbs: he's fascinated.

[25:00] Cameron McEwen: You cannot not be involved in the maelstrom.

[25:04] Bob Dobbs: Yeah,

[25:04] Bob Dobbs: there's a fascination.

[25:05] Bob Dobbs: His word fascination might be the clue.

[25:08] Cameron McEwen: Yeah.

[25:09] Cameron McEwen: So if you are always already involved,

[25:13] Cameron McEwen: if you're always already in the rearview mirror,

[25:17] Cameron McEwen: where is the possibility of escape?

[25:21] Cameron McEwen: And what he says is,

[25:23] Cameron McEwen: well,

[25:23] Cameron McEwen: this other fascination,

[25:25] Cameron McEwen: as you underline,

[25:27] Cameron McEwen: is...

[25:28] Cameron McEwen: the power of detached observation.

[25:31] Cameron McEwen: And I would say the power of detached observation is simply creativity.

[25:38] Bob Dobbs: Isn't that the individual consciousness responding to the environment,

[25:43] Bob Dobbs: just like it flips the image that comes through the retina?

[25:46] Bob Dobbs: Remember we talked about how the stubbornness of the human does not accept what's given to him in the senses.

[25:52] Bob Dobbs: It fucks with it.

[25:53] Cameron McEwen: Right.

[25:54] Bob Dobbs: Yeah.

[25:54] Cameron McEwen: Yeah.

[25:55] Cameron McEwen: Cannot accept.

[25:56] Bob Dobbs: Right.

[25:57] Bob Dobbs: That's the creativity.

[25:58] Cameron McEwen: Moment to moment to moment reimagination of the world around.

[26:06] Bob Dobbs: Yeah.

[26:07] Bob Dobbs: So what comes after detached observation?

[26:10] Bob Dobbs: Have you got it handy there?

[26:14] Cameron McEwen: I don't have it handy,

[26:15] Cameron McEwen: but we can talk for a few minutes,

[26:18] Cameron McEwen: and then

[26:20] Cameron McEwen: I'll have it for you,

[26:21] Cameron McEwen: no problem.

[26:22] Bob Dobbs: Yeah,

[26:22] Bob Dobbs: because a power of detached observation.

[26:25] Bob Dobbs: We should see what he adds to that.

[26:28] Cameron McEwen: Uh-huh.

[26:29] Bob Dobbs: Maybe.

[26:30] Bob Dobbs: Sure,

[26:30] Cameron McEwen: I'll get that.

[26:31] Bob Dobbs: Yeah.

[26:32] Bob Dobbs: Okay.

[26:34] Bob Dobbs: So,

[26:34] Bob Dobbs: yes,

[26:34] Bob Dobbs: we're saying that this is the same thought as

[26:40] Bob Dobbs: Wittgenstein, or you're suggesting.

[26:42] Bob Dobbs: It's the same idea.

[26:43] Bob Dobbs: The detached observation is not involved in any thoughts or cultures or social communication,

[26:51] Bob Dobbs: and that is the only way to survive.

[26:56] Bob Dobbs: to enact a detached,

[26:58] Bob Dobbs: involved observation,

[27:01] Bob Dobbs: or maybe not survive.

[27:03] Bob Dobbs: It's the only way you can become a philosopher or someone that stands out among the regulars in the local tavern,

[27:13] Bob Dobbs: right?

[27:14] Cameron McEwen: Yeah,

[27:14] Cameron McEwen: so

[27:15] Cameron McEwen: McLuhan did think that it was the only way to survive,

[27:19] Cameron McEwen: but he wasn't thinking individually.

[27:21] Cameron McEwen: He was thinking socially.

[27:24] Cameron McEwen: And including the Society of Nations.

[27:27] Bob Dobbs: And that's really important.

[27:28] Bob Dobbs: That's why he came up with the collective psychiatry,

[27:33] Bob Dobbs: did he call it?

[27:35] Cameron McEwen: Maybe.

[27:35] Cameron McEwen: I don't remember the phrase,

[27:37] Cameron McEwen: but that sounds right.

[27:38] Bob Dobbs: Yeah,

[27:38] Bob Dobbs: he said there has to be a,

[27:42] Bob Dobbs: not complex clairvoyance,

[27:43] Bob Dobbs: that's another thing.

[27:44] Bob Dobbs: Maybe that's two,

[27:44] Bob Dobbs: but he did say a collective kind of psychiatry,

[27:49] Bob Dobbs: in a sense of a detachment that's psychiatric.

[27:52] Bob Dobbs: Therapists claim to have,

[27:53] Bob Dobbs: right?

[27:54] Bob Dobbs: Some kind of collective detachment.

[27:57] Bob Dobbs: And that would be everybody gets a lot of people,

[28:01] Bob Dobbs: understand McLuhan,

[28:03] Bob Dobbs: get a real understanding,

[28:05] Bob Dobbs: and then see how that applies in their lives and what you would do politically.

[28:09] Bob Dobbs: What would you do?

[28:10] Bob Dobbs: What laws would you pass?

[28:12] Bob Dobbs: Like Eric just blatantly said,

[28:14] Bob Dobbs: we realize that no inventor is going to inflict an invention on a society until it's fully debated,

[28:19] Bob Dobbs: argued,

[28:21] Bob Dobbs: and beat up.

[28:22] Bob Dobbs: before you allow it into the society,

[28:24] Bob Dobbs: right?

[28:25] Cameron McEwen: Correct,

[28:26] Cameron McEwen: correct.

[28:26] Cameron McEwen: But I think what hasn't been seen in the McLuhan community,

[28:32] Cameron McEwen: including not by Eric,

[28:34] Cameron McEwen: or at least in my conversations with Eric,

[28:38] Cameron McEwen: is that this question of going over an invention and figuring out what effects it might have and all that sort of stuff,

[28:48] Cameron McEwen: this is the automatic work of science.

[28:52] Cameron McEwen: So in the physical sciences,

[28:58] Cameron McEwen: it would be very strange to phrase it's working in the way that you were just quoting Eric.

[29:08] Cameron McEwen: It's not as if a chemist goes into the lab and says,

[29:13] Cameron McEwen: oh,

[29:13] Cameron McEwen: here's a funny bunch of stuff.

[29:16] Cameron McEwen: You know,

[29:16] Cameron McEwen: I think I'll take a look at that or something.

[29:19] Cameron McEwen: No.

[29:22] Cameron McEwen: Once science gets going,

[29:25] Cameron McEwen: all stuff is part of what it's investigating,

[29:29] Cameron McEwen: and it's investigating it in terms of laws.

[29:33] Cameron McEwen: So a new invention will simply be part of the stuff that the science of media is looking at in a collective

[29:48] Cameron McEwen: way that produces.

[29:50] Cameron McEwen: recognized results.

[29:52] Bob Dobbs: Yeah,

[29:53] Bob Dobbs: that means the scientist,

[29:54] Bob Dobbs: the traditional scientist in the lab or wherever,

[29:57] Bob Dobbs: has to become aware of the New Science of media that's added to science,

[30:01] Bob Dobbs: traditional science.

[30:02] Bob Dobbs: It's a new development.

[30:03] Bob Dobbs: Right.

[30:03] Cameron McEwen: That's what McLuhan calls second science.

[30:06] Bob Dobbs: Is that what he calls the traditional science,

[30:08] Bob Dobbs: second science?

[30:09] Cameron McEwen: No.

[30:10] Cameron McEwen: No,

[30:10] Cameron McEwen: the traditional science is first science,

[30:13] Cameron McEwen: and then what he proposes is second science.

[30:16] Cameron McEwen: And so first science is the physical sciences that we have.

[30:21] Cameron McEwen: You know,

[30:21] Cameron McEwen: starting with geometry and astronomy and things thousands of years ago,

[30:26] Cameron McEwen: and then coming up through all of the sciences that we now have.

[30:31] Cameron McEwen: But in those sciences,

[30:33] Cameron McEwen: the key thing is to get away from human imagination or human overlay on the nature of things that you're looking at.

[30:46] Cameron McEwen: You're trying to see how the things themselves.

[30:50] Cameron McEwen: operate aside from mythologies or aside from stories that are told in the tribe.

[30:57] Bob Dobbs: Or hype to sell the stuff.

[30:59] Cameron McEwen: Yeah,

[31:01] Cameron McEwen: exactly.

[31:01] Cameron McEwen: So then what McLuhan says is,

[31:03] Cameron McEwen: wait a minute,

[31:04] Cameron McEwen: let's go back to Vico and to Bacon and let's realize that part of what's going on in the world is human action.

[31:16] Cameron McEwen: And so there's a whole New Science that is not

[31:20] Cameron McEwen: just the physical sciences,

[31:24] Cameron McEwen: the first sciences that look at first nature.

[31:29] Cameron McEwen: There's a possibility of a second science that looks at second nature,

[31:35] Cameron McEwen: and that's a nature that includes human action.

[31:39] Cameron McEwen: And so the reason that that's a science of media is that all human action is mediated.

[31:49] Bob Dobbs: Yeah,

[31:49] Bob Dobbs: now you,

[31:51] Bob Dobbs: I've never saw the term second science.

[31:53] Bob Dobbs: Is that written by McLuhan somewhere?

[31:56] Cameron McEwen: I believe in Laws of Media.

[31:58] Bob Dobbs: Oh,

[31:58] Bob Dobbs: okay.

[31:59] Cameron McEwen: It's possible that

[32:02] Cameron McEwen: I'm extrapolating from second nature.

[32:07] Bob Dobbs: Yeah,

[32:07] Bob Dobbs: I've seen that.

[32:08] Bob Dobbs: I think that's in Laws of Media.

[32:09] Bob Dobbs: Yeah,

[32:10] Cameron McEwen: it is.

[32:12] Bob Dobbs: Okay,

[32:14] Bob Dobbs: so McLuhan told me through the Evergreens that

[32:17] Bob Dobbs: nobody saw that he was a scientist,

[32:19] Bob Dobbs: and that's what he was all about.

[32:21] Bob Dobbs: Not an artist,

[32:22] Bob Dobbs: even though he had to play that up when he first got famous and had to indicate something.

[32:27] Bob Dobbs: He couldn't say he was a scientist yet or he didn't want to.

[32:30] Bob Dobbs: But you're right to say that he's a scientist and he's adding it to science.

[32:34] Bob Dobbs: Even their explanation,

[32:36] Bob Dobbs: well,

[32:36] Bob Dobbs: okay,

[32:38] Bob Dobbs: the scientists are angry at me,

[32:42] Bob Dobbs: not...

[32:46] Bob Dobbs: filtering it through scientific tradition.

[32:49] Bob Dobbs: So,

[32:49] Bob Dobbs: okay,

[32:50] Bob Dobbs: Eric,

[32:50] Bob Dobbs: let's maybe first,

[32:51] Bob Dobbs: bearing in mind,

[32:52] Bob Dobbs: let's ask a bunch of questions or let's see if we can make it orderly and make it like a science.

[32:59] Bob Dobbs: That's probably a bit too casual.

[33:01] Bob Dobbs: He says,

[33:02] Bob Dobbs: no,

[33:03] Bob Dobbs: this is science,

[33:04] Bob Dobbs: what I'm doing.

[33:05] Bob Dobbs: What we're going to add to science,

[33:07] Bob Dobbs: to traditional first science.

[33:09] Cameron McEwen: It's actually a whole New Science.

[33:11] Cameron McEwen: So it's a quantum leap.

[33:14] Cameron McEwen: from what we think of as science to another kind of science.

[33:20] Bob Dobbs: Yeah,

[33:20] Bob Dobbs: and he builds on,

[33:22] Bob Dobbs: he completes sociology,

[33:23] Bob Dobbs: psychology,

[33:24] Bob Dobbs: anthropology,

[33:25] Bob Dobbs: all the ologies,

[33:27] Bob Dobbs: and makes a way to put in order,

[33:28] Bob Dobbs: and then has a new scenario anyways,

[33:31] Bob Dobbs: on top of putting the past in order.

[33:34] Bob Dobbs: And whatever psychologists,

[33:35] Bob Dobbs: sociologists,

[33:36] Bob Dobbs: and anthropologists are looking for,

[33:37] Bob Dobbs: he discovered what they got.

[33:40] Bob Dobbs: what they were looking for,

[33:41] Bob Dobbs: and then he said,

[33:42] Bob Dobbs: we need to use this and take me seriously.

[33:45] Bob Dobbs: This is a new thing.

[33:47] Cameron McEwen: Which hasn't happened yet.

[33:48] Cameron McEwen: That's what we're trying to instigate here.

[33:52] Bob Dobbs: Yeah,

[33:52] Bob Dobbs: what I just said is not said in any biographies.

[33:57] Bob Dobbs: Nobody says that.

[33:58] Bob Dobbs: They don't get that.

[34:01] Cameron McEwen: Let me just tell you how the quotation...

[34:06] Cameron McEwen: From the footsteps and the sands of time goes on because it relates directly to what we're talking about here.

[34:13] Cameron McEwen: So we say in this very paralysis,

[34:15] Cameron McEwen: there is another fascination which emerges,

[34:18] Cameron McEwen: a power of detached observation,

[34:21] Cameron McEwen: which becomes a scientific,

[34:24] Cameron McEwen: in quotation mark,

[34:26] Cameron McEwen: interest in the action of the strom.

[34:28] Bob Dobbs: Wow.

[34:29] Cameron McEwen: This provides the means of escape.

[34:33] Bob Dobbs: There's my uncanny psychic ability.

[34:38] Bob Dobbs: I saw that coming.

[34:40] Bob Dobbs: That's incredible.

[34:40] Bob Dobbs: I don't remember that at all.

[34:41] Bob Dobbs: He put scientific in quotes.

[34:44] Cameron McEwen: Yeah,

[34:44] Cameron McEwen: and this is the last paragraph.

[34:47] Cameron McEwen: of the essay.

[34:48] Bob Dobbs: Wow.

[34:50] Cameron McEwen: For McLuhan,

[34:50] Cameron McEwen: the first sentence and the last sentence of any essay are very important.

[34:56] Bob Dobbs: Yeah.

[34:57] Cameron McEwen: He always tried to say,

[34:59] Cameron McEwen: sort of,

[34:59] Cameron McEwen: here's the problem,

[35:01] Cameron McEwen: and then the essay goes through its different paragraphs,

[35:05] Cameron McEwen: and then the very end,

[35:07] Cameron McEwen: here's my answer.

[35:08] Bob Dobbs: Yeah,

[35:09] Bob Dobbs: yeah.

[35:09] Bob Dobbs: And

[35:10] Bob Dobbs: I was thinking,

[35:12] Bob Dobbs: what he goes through between the first and last sentence is the antics.

[35:15] Bob Dobbs: Remember that whole phrase,

[35:16] Bob Dobbs: he had antics of a highway or something?

[35:18] Bob Dobbs: Yeah,

[35:18] Cameron McEwen: yeah,

[35:19] Cameron McEwen: yeah.

[35:20] Bob Dobbs: He goes through the antics.

[35:23] Bob Dobbs: So that's really,

[35:25] Bob Dobbs: read it again.

[35:26] Bob Dobbs: That's incredible.

[35:27] Bob Dobbs: You've got to send me that.

[35:29] Bob Dobbs: I could type it up now,

[35:30] Bob Dobbs: but I'm not.

[35:30] Bob Dobbs: But

[35:32] Bob Dobbs: I could look it up even.

[35:34] Bob Dobbs: And you said Sands of Time accidentally.

[35:36] Bob Dobbs: It's footprints in the sands of crime,

[35:38] Bob Dobbs: which is important.

[35:39] Cameron McEwen: Oh,

[35:40] Cameron McEwen: yeah,

[35:41] Bob Dobbs: Okay,

[35:41] Bob Dobbs: so.

[35:43] Cameron McEwen: That's a pun.

[35:46] Cameron McEwen: By the way,

[35:47] Cameron McEwen: when he sent it in to the Sewanee Review,

[35:54] Cameron McEwen: Allen Tate was the editor.

[35:57] Cameron McEwen: And

[35:59] Cameron McEwen: Allen Tate said,

[36:00] Cameron McEwen: in reply,

[36:02] Cameron McEwen: Allen Tate said,

[36:02] Cameron McEwen: I'm not sure we can use this because the title is no good.

[36:08] Cameron McEwen: And he said,

[36:09] Cameron McEwen: we have to find another title.

[36:10] Bob Dobbs: Wow.

[36:12] Cameron McEwen: I think

[36:13] Cameron McEwen: McLuhan answered and he said,

[36:14] Cameron McEwen: well,

[36:17] Cameron McEwen: I actually like the title,

[36:18] Cameron McEwen: but here's like five others you could use if you want,

[36:23] Cameron McEwen: just so long as you publish it.

[36:25] Cameron McEwen: But at the end,

[36:27] Cameron McEwen: Tate agreed to keep the original title.

[36:30] Bob Dobbs: Good.

[36:31] Bob Dobbs: So what happens?

[36:34] Bob Dobbs: The power of detached,

[36:36] Bob Dobbs: a power of detached observation,

[36:39] Bob Dobbs: comma.

[36:39] Cameron McEwen: I'm sending.

[36:40] Cameron McEwen: I'm sending it.

[36:41] Cameron McEwen: No,

[36:41] Cameron McEwen: well,

[36:43] Cameron McEwen: at least in the note that I have,

[36:45] Cameron McEwen: there's no comma,

[36:46] Cameron McEwen: but I could have just omitted it.

[36:49] Cameron McEwen: So I don't want to say definitively.

[36:52] Cameron McEwen: But it's the power of detached observation,

[36:54] Cameron McEwen: which becomes a scientific interest in the action of the strom.

[36:59] Cameron McEwen: And this provides a means of escape.

[37:03] Cameron McEwen: There it is.

[37:04] Bob Dobbs: Very early.

[37:05] Bob Dobbs: Yeah,

[37:06] Bob Dobbs: very early.

[37:06] Bob Dobbs: Sneaky guy.

[37:07] Bob Dobbs: He throws that word in once.

[37:09] Bob Dobbs: I don't think it ever shows up again for decades,

[37:12] Bob Dobbs: right?

[37:13] Bob Dobbs: In that context.

[37:15] Cameron McEwen: Yeah,

[37:15] Cameron McEwen: exactly.

[37:16] Bob Dobbs: And he puts it in quotes,

[37:17] Bob Dobbs: because it's first science.

[37:19] Bob Dobbs: It's old science.

[37:21] Cameron McEwen: Notice how this goes back to his

[37:24] Cameron McEwen: Nashe thesis,

[37:26] Cameron McEwen: where he talks about the intuitive perception of essentials.

[37:32] Cameron McEwen: So what happens when the power...

[37:39] Cameron McEwen: of detached observation is activated,

[37:44] Cameron McEwen: really it's just a squaring of what's always going on in human perception.

[37:51] Bob Dobbs: Yeah.

[37:51] Cameron McEwen: So when you retrace the labyrinth of human perception,

[37:58] Cameron McEwen: you come down to creativity,

[38:01] Cameron McEwen: which is to say pre-tribal awareness.

[38:05] Cameron McEwen: And that pre-tribal awareness activates some...

[38:09] Cameron McEwen: possibility that is to emerge as tribal.

[38:19] Cameron McEwen: That is to say,

[38:20] Cameron McEwen: as he often quoted Eliot,

[38:21] Cameron McEwen: he has to use words to talk to you,

[38:24] Cameron McEwen: right?

[38:25] Cameron McEwen: So there's no such thing as being untribal.

[38:29] Bob Dobbs: Or undetached.

[38:30] Bob Dobbs: Every human is looking in a,

[38:33] Bob Dobbs: quote,

[38:33] Bob Dobbs: paranoid state at what's going on.

[38:36] Cameron McEwen: Correct.

[38:36] Cameron McEwen: Absolutely correct.

[38:38] Bob Dobbs: Yeah.

[38:39] Bob Dobbs: And they're all looking at each other,

[38:41] Bob Dobbs: and then they go along with the ongoing train of locomotive of communication that just never stops.

[38:49] Bob Dobbs: And so you have different methods in the culture of how to drop off and officially do the detached observation,

[38:57] Bob Dobbs: even though you're always doing it and mixed in with your involvement and responding to whatever the rules are of the tribe for what's being communicated.

[39:06] Bob Dobbs: And that's irony,

[39:07] Bob Dobbs: and that's...

[39:08] Bob Dobbs: humor.

[39:10] Bob Dobbs: If I'm talking to somebody in person,

[39:11] Bob Dobbs: I can see in their eyes,

[39:14] Bob Dobbs: there should be a twinkle about the absurdity of what we're doing,

[39:18] Bob Dobbs: right?

[39:18] Bob Dobbs: We're talking.

[39:19] Bob Dobbs: Yes,

[39:19] Bob Dobbs: sir.

[39:21] Bob Dobbs: And sometimes people see that,

[39:23] Bob Dobbs: or you get into a good conversation,

[39:25] Bob Dobbs: eventually it gets to that point.

[39:27] Bob Dobbs: And people report that when they,

[39:30] Bob Dobbs: and I've seen it happen,

[39:31] Bob Dobbs: people take marijuana back in the 60s,

[39:33] Bob Dobbs: before they did all the later,

[39:34] Bob Dobbs: more powerful stuff.

[39:36] Bob Dobbs: They always ended up giggling.

[39:38] Bob Dobbs: And I know that they were giggling because that awareness of the detached thing and the absurdity of canceling out the attachment when you're talking and you're forced to talk reduces people to laughter.

[39:50] Bob Dobbs: What do you think?

[39:51] Bob Dobbs: Do you think that's it?

[39:52] Cameron McEwen: Yeah,

[39:53] Cameron McEwen: I think that's a very good analysis.

[39:56] Cameron McEwen: But when people were reduced to giggling,

[40:00] Cameron McEwen: they were reduced to pre-tribal awareness,

[40:05] Cameron McEwen: you could say,

[40:06] Cameron McEwen: but without being aware that that's what they were aware of.

[40:10] Bob Dobbs: Exactly.

[40:11] Bob Dobbs: That was it.

[40:11] Cameron McEwen: So that's what McLuhan has to try to do,

[40:14] Cameron McEwen: and I believe that's what Wittgenstein tried to do as well in a whole different way.

[40:19] Cameron McEwen: But this is the great question that's...

[40:22] Cameron McEwen: hangs over humanity.

[40:25] Cameron McEwen: Are we going to be able to understand who we are?

[40:31] Bob Dobbs: Did you say who we aren't?

[40:33] Bob Dobbs: Aren't.

[40:37] Bob Dobbs: Who we are,

[40:38] Bob Dobbs: it might be,

[40:39] Bob Dobbs: okay.

[40:39] Cameron McEwen: Aren't works,

[40:40] Cameron McEwen: too.

[40:41] Bob Dobbs: Yeah,

[40:41] Bob Dobbs: yeah.

[40:42] Bob Dobbs: So,

[40:44] Bob Dobbs: that's right.

[40:44] Bob Dobbs: That's where we're at today,

[40:46] Bob Dobbs: and we've always been,

[40:47] Bob Dobbs: but the stakes are higher.

[40:48] Bob Dobbs: The media's got the edge on us.

[40:51] Bob Dobbs: social communication has congealed,

[40:54] Bob Dobbs: crystallized into bizarre forms that are making people really forget their detached observation.

[41:02] Bob Dobbs: They don't know how to get to it.

[41:03] Bob Dobbs: They actually have to drop the old forms of detached observation,

[41:06] Bob Dobbs: which we're trying to say there's a new way,

[41:08] Bob Dobbs: and you can actually talk about it in the new scientific terms.

[41:14] Cameron McEwen: Yes,

[41:14] Cameron McEwen: absolutely.

[41:15] Cameron McEwen: That was well said.

[41:16] Bob Dobbs: Yeah,

[41:17] Bob Dobbs: we're doing.

[41:18] Cameron McEwen: What I would like to do with it,

[41:20] Cameron McEwen: if

[41:22] Cameron McEwen: your approval is go back to the bottom of 130.

[41:27] Cameron McEwen: There's a very good quotation there From Cliché to Archetype.

[41:31] Cameron McEwen: And then there's your discussion.

[41:34] Cameron McEwen: And we went over your discussion a little bit last time.

[41:38] Cameron McEwen: But I think that there's a lot of meat

[41:42] Cameron McEwen: MEAT in your discussion that we really didn't get to.

[41:47] Cameron McEwen: to because we are kind of running out of time.

[41:49] Cameron McEwen: Yeah,

[41:50] Bob Dobbs: and it took a long time just to read through it.

[41:52] Cameron McEwen: That's right.

[41:54] Cameron McEwen: Personally,

[41:55] Cameron McEwen: I think that the quotation is very important,

[41:58] Cameron McEwen: and then I think what you say is very interesting and relates directly to what we're talking about.

[42:05] Bob Dobbs: Okay,

[42:05] Bob Dobbs: so you read the quote.

[42:08] Cameron McEwen: Yeah,

[42:08] Cameron McEwen: so this is From Cliché to Archetype by McLuhan and Watson,

[42:14] Cameron McEwen: and what we have to do is we have to

[42:16] Cameron McEwen: think of this in the terms that we've been talking about.

[42:20] Bob Dobbs: Yeah.

[42:20] Cameron McEwen: As to say detached observation,

[42:23] Cameron McEwen: pre-tribal awareness,

[42:24] Cameron McEwen: creativity,

[42:26] Cameron McEwen: et cetera.

[42:27] Cameron McEwen: So here we go.

[42:29] Cameron McEwen: The expressionists had discovered that the creative process is a kind of repetition of the stages of apprehension.

[42:38] Cameron McEwen: Now,

[42:39] Cameron McEwen: I'll just stop there and comment for a minute.

[42:41] Cameron McEwen: So

[42:43] Cameron McEwen: McLuhan, especially...

[42:47] Cameron McEwen: between say 1945 and 1950,

[42:51] Cameron McEwen: he came to the idea,

[42:52] Cameron McEwen: I think largely through

[42:54] Cameron McEwen: Mallarmé, that the whole point of art was to begin with any perception whatsoever and go backwards from that perception to its roots.

[43:12] Cameron McEwen: and the roots of...

[43:16] Cameron McEwen: perception always,

[43:18] Cameron McEwen: for McLuhan,

[43:19] Cameron McEwen: lead back to creativity.

[43:22] Cameron McEwen: That is to say that there has to be a kind of freedom at the very basis of all perception that activates that perception and not another one.

[43:32] Bob Dobbs: Yeah.

[43:34] Cameron McEwen: Right?

[43:34] Bob Dobbs: Yeah.

[43:34] Cameron McEwen: Okay.

[43:35] Cameron McEwen: Now,

[43:36] Bob Dobbs: he says somewhere in the interior landscape in an essay that the Catholic or the Christian believes that something comes out of nothing.

[43:42] Bob Dobbs: That might be a pedestrian way to say.

[43:46] Cameron McEwen: Absolutely.

[43:47] Cameron McEwen: Absolutely.

[43:47] Cameron McEwen: So one of the things that I'm talking about in my recent posts is that for some reason,

[43:59] Cameron McEwen: for the last three or four hundred years,

[44:02] Cameron McEwen: people have lost awareness that if something is actual,

[44:07] Cameron McEwen: it must also be possible.

[44:10] Cameron McEwen: Right.

[44:11] Cameron McEwen: And so what does that mean?

[44:12] Cameron McEwen: And it means that the...

[44:15] Cameron McEwen: If human beings are creative,

[44:17] Cameron McEwen: let's say in art,

[44:19] Cameron McEwen: there must be some basis for creativity in the reality of things.

[44:30] Cameron McEwen: So underneath human being,

[44:33] Cameron McEwen: as the ground of human being,

[44:36] Cameron McEwen: and human being understood as involving creativity,

[44:39] Cameron McEwen: underneath human being,

[44:41] Cameron McEwen: there has to be the possibility of creativity.

[44:44] Cameron McEwen: creativity.

[44:45] Cameron McEwen: And what is the possibility of creativity?

[44:48] Cameron McEwen: It's creation out of nothing,

[44:50] Cameron McEwen: as you were just saying.

[44:51] Bob Dobbs: Yeah.

[44:52] Bob Dobbs: But that nothing is something.

[44:53] Bob Dobbs: You're just going along there saying there is something at the root.

[44:58] Bob Dobbs: And you're saying,

[44:58] Bob Dobbs: well,

[44:59] Bob Dobbs: that's creativity,

[44:59] Bob Dobbs: but it's tactility.

[45:01] Bob Dobbs: It's not a sense.

[45:02] Bob Dobbs: It's a nothing.

[45:03] Bob Dobbs: But it is something.

[45:05] Cameron McEwen: You could say,

[45:07] Cameron McEwen: instead of saying it's a nothing in the usual sense of nothing,

[45:12] Cameron McEwen: I would say it's an expression.

[45:18] Cameron McEwen: say it's

[45:21] Cameron McEwen: tactility in the sense of being in between.

[45:25] Cameron McEwen: So you could say there's an original force,

[45:29] Cameron McEwen: and then that original force is creative and ends up with creation.

[45:35] Cameron McEwen: But for McLuhan,

[45:39] Cameron McEwen: that's to misplace what is actually first.

[45:43] Cameron McEwen: What is actually first for McLuhan is not some force that then expresses itself.

[45:51] Cameron McEwen: What is first is the expression,

[45:53] Cameron McEwen: and the expression implicates the quote-unquote prior force and the creation.

[46:01] Cameron McEwen: And he got that largely from

[46:04] Cameron McEwen: Gilson.

[46:06] Bob Dobbs: Gilson, yes.

[46:08] Bob Dobbs: What would happen,

[46:10] Bob Dobbs: well,

[46:10] Bob Dobbs: maybe you can't repeat your exact words before Gilson,

[46:12] Bob Dobbs: but would the original,

[46:16] Bob Dobbs: what you call force,

[46:17] Bob Dobbs: but then cancel that,

[46:18] Bob Dobbs: Is that everything is there at the beginning?

[46:22] Cameron McEwen: Yes.

[46:23] Bob Dobbs: Yeah,

[46:23] Cameron McEwen: well,

[46:23] Cameron McEwen: he says that's what all-at-onceness is,

[46:26] Cameron McEwen: right?

[46:26] Bob Dobbs: Right.

[46:27] Bob Dobbs: So that's why it's nothing.

[46:29] Bob Dobbs: There's too much there to register.

[46:31] Cameron McEwen: Correct,

[46:32] Cameron McEwen: correct.

[46:33] Bob Dobbs: So then you're creative.

[46:34] Bob Dobbs: You take an aspect of it and create something.

[46:37] Bob Dobbs: It's always incomplete or biased or an angle.

[46:41] Cameron McEwen: Correct.

[46:43] Cameron McEwen: It's always in the rearview mirror.

[46:44] Bob Dobbs: Yeah.

[46:46] Cameron McEwen: And from the rearview mirror,

[46:47] Cameron McEwen: both of those.

[46:49] Bob Dobbs: Yeah,

[46:49] Bob Dobbs: he does say,

[46:50] Bob Dobbs: and you know that essay in mid-60s,

[46:53] Bob Dobbs: The Crack in the Rearview Mirror?

[46:54] Bob Dobbs: He points out that all creativity comes from the rearview mirror,

[46:58] Bob Dobbs: where most people think,

[46:59] Bob Dobbs: oh,

[46:59] Bob Dobbs: I don't want to be in the rearview mirror.

[47:01] Bob Dobbs: That's obsolesce.

[47:02] Bob Dobbs: No,

[47:02] Bob Dobbs: you've got to learn how to make the rearview mirror creative,

[47:05] Bob Dobbs: right?

[47:06] Cameron McEwen: Correct,

[47:06] Cameron McEwen: correct.

[47:07] Bob Dobbs: Yeah,

[47:10] Bob Dobbs: okay.

[47:11] Cameron McEwen: Yeah,

[47:11] Cameron McEwen: let me go on with the quotation here.

[47:16] Cameron McEwen: So he says,

[47:17] Cameron McEwen: repetition of the...

[47:18] Cameron McEwen: stages of apprehension somewhat along the lines that relate Coleridge's primary and secondary imagination.

[47:26] Cameron McEwen: So for the primary imagination for Coleridge is what originally activates.

[47:35] Cameron McEwen: So in order to exercise imagination,

[47:40] Cameron McEwen: so you imagine some scene or you imagine some dialogue or you imagine

[47:47] Cameron McEwen: something that is going to be part of a poem or part of a play or something like that.

[47:53] Cameron McEwen: In order for that imagination,

[47:55] Cameron McEwen: which is secondary imagination,

[47:57] Cameron McEwen: to be enacted,

[48:01] Cameron McEwen: there has to be a kind of spark that's before that,

[48:06] Cameron McEwen: but not before in chronological time,

[48:10] Cameron McEwen: before in some,

[48:14] Cameron McEwen: I don't know,

[48:15] Cameron McEwen: pre-tribal awareness.

[48:16] Cameron McEwen: time,

[48:17] Cameron McEwen: you could say.

[48:18] Cameron McEwen: So by bringing in Coleridge's primary and secondary imagination,

[48:26] Cameron McEwen: McLuhan is saying what the stages of apprehension are.

[48:34] Cameron McEwen: There's a primary spark,

[48:38] Cameron McEwen: and then there are words,

[48:41] Cameron McEwen: or then there is a perception,

[48:43] Cameron McEwen: or then there is some action or emotion.

[48:47] Cameron McEwen: Right?

[48:48] Cameron McEwen: So he then says,

[48:51] Cameron McEwen: in the same way,

[48:53] Cameron McEwen: there would seem to be an echo,

[48:55] Cameron McEwen: and echo is a very important word for

[48:57] Cameron McEwen: McLuhan in his later thought,

[48:59] Cameron McEwen: there would seem to be an echo of the formative process of consciousness in the entire content of the unconscious.

[49:08] Bob Dobbs: That would be the everything is in there and the nothing,

[49:10] Bob Dobbs: the entire content of the unconscious.

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

[49:17] Cameron McEwen: included in the entire content of the unconscious is the process of apprehension.

[49:27] Bob Dobbs: Or the formative process of consciousness is in the unconscious.

[49:30] Cameron McEwen: That's right.

[49:31] Cameron McEwen: So what he's saying there is that by turning the kaleidoscope in a certain way,

[49:41] Cameron McEwen: we can become aware of what we are always doing.

[49:46] Cameron McEwen: And when we become aware of what we are always doing,

[49:49] Cameron McEwen: that enables a whole New Science or sciences of the world that now includes...

[49:58] Cameron McEwen: human consciousness.

[50:01] Cameron McEwen: So that's...

[50:02] Cameron McEwen: And that,

[50:03] Bob Dobbs: okay,

[50:04] Bob Dobbs: you said sciences?

[50:05] Bob Dobbs: You said science twice.

[50:07] Cameron McEwen: Yeah,

[50:08] Cameron McEwen: I said science and then sciences,

[50:10] Cameron McEwen: because when a fundamental science becomes possible,

[50:15] Cameron McEwen: it always generates subsidiary sciences.

[50:20] Bob Dobbs: That's right.

[50:20] Bob Dobbs: So the,

[50:21] Bob Dobbs: I want to say it again,

[50:22] Bob Dobbs: when a science becomes general,

[50:23] Bob Dobbs: did you say?

[50:26] Cameron McEwen: No,

[50:26] Cameron McEwen: when it becomes possible.

[50:28] Cameron McEwen: when it manifests itself.

[50:31] Bob Dobbs: Then it what?

[50:32] Bob Dobbs: What's the second part?

[50:34] Cameron McEwen: Then it generates subsidiary sciences.

[50:37] Bob Dobbs: Right.

[50:38] Bob Dobbs: Okay.

[50:39] Bob Dobbs: He says,

[50:40] Bob Dobbs: at the end of Take Today,

[50:43] Bob Dobbs: the recently achieved forms of consciousness.

[50:46] Bob Dobbs: What I'm getting from reading what you just read or following along,

[50:50] Bob Dobbs: we have externalized that highest decibels of awareness where you are witnessing an environment

[50:57] Bob Dobbs: that is doing an echo of the unconscious in the consciousness.

[51:02] Bob Dobbs: See what I'm saying?

[51:03] Cameron McEwen: Yeah,

[51:04] Cameron McEwen: of course.

[51:04] Bob Dobbs: And that might be what I was getting at with the idea of the Android meme,

[51:08] Bob Dobbs: and then something developed beyond that called the tech body.

[51:11] Bob Dobbs: But there's something we can say and remember when we get later into where I'm trying to make the difference,

[51:19] Bob Dobbs: distinguish.

[51:20] Bob Dobbs: It's the idea that something is laid out in front of us.

[51:24] Bob Dobbs: We're watching.

[51:26] Bob Dobbs: Human consciousness merged with the Global Membrane,

[51:32] Bob Dobbs: the macroscopic gesticulation,

[51:34] Bob Dobbs: and it's acting out the way we should be right back at us,

[51:40] Bob Dobbs: because it's just newsreaders.

[51:43] Bob Dobbs: I'm just like Tucker Carlson always saying,

[51:44] Bob Dobbs: look,

[51:45] Bob Dobbs: I'm just telling you this stuff.

[51:45] Bob Dobbs: It's up to you to decide what to make of this,

[51:48] Bob Dobbs: you know?

[51:49] Bob Dobbs: And it's kind of a cop-out,

[51:51] Bob Dobbs: but on a basic level.

[51:54] Bob Dobbs: The news is just telling you what is that you have to be creative with or react to.

[52:02] Bob Dobbs: And so there's a detachment in the news dissemination process.

[52:08] Cameron McEwen: Yeah,

[52:09] Cameron McEwen: an unrecognized one.

[52:10] Bob Dobbs: Yeah,

[52:11] Bob Dobbs: what I'm saying is unrecognized.

[52:13] Bob Dobbs: Like people are running around trying to tap into higher levels of awareness and all kinds of different forms,

[52:18] Bob Dobbs: different cults,

[52:20] Bob Dobbs: just going back to school and taking courses.

[52:23] Bob Dobbs: people do,

[52:24] Bob Dobbs: you know,

[52:24] Bob Dobbs: after working for many years.

[52:26] Bob Dobbs: It's an attempt to tap into an environment of awareness and they don't notice it's right there around them.

[52:32] Bob Dobbs: As McLuhan said,

[52:33] Bob Dobbs: you can stay home and observe this and be as aware as whatever the workshops are trying to create for you.

[52:41] Cameron McEwen: Yeah,

[52:41] Cameron McEwen: yeah.

[52:42] Cameron McEwen: It's like people have some kind of problem with their muscles and so then they

[52:51] Cameron McEwen: they go to the gym and they exercise and they develop their muscles more,

[52:56] Cameron McEwen: but it turns out that that makes the problem worse.

[52:59] Bob Dobbs: Yeah.

[52:59] Cameron McEwen: So these people that are trying to find in a culture,

[53:03] Cameron McEwen: trying to find in some way,

[53:07] Cameron McEwen: you know,

[53:07] Cameron McEwen: sort of a stability,

[53:09] Cameron McEwen: all they're doing is exercising the Gutenberg Galaxy.

[53:12] Bob Dobbs: Yeah.

[53:13] Cameron McEwen: So they're actually making their problem worse in the attempt to make it better.

[53:19] Cameron McEwen: Right.

[53:19] Cameron McEwen: And when they do that,

[53:21] Cameron McEwen: They more or less replicate the whole history of

[53:26] Cameron McEwen: Western civilization.

[53:28] Cameron McEwen: So that's the cul-de-sac that we're in.

[53:30] Bob Dobbs: Yes,

[53:31] Bob Dobbs: and

[53:35] Bob Dobbs: ALP, I laid out an interesting statement.

[53:37] Bob Dobbs: ALP says,

[53:40] Bob Dobbs: Bob,

[53:41] Bob Dobbs: you are doing in baseball a certain kind of a swing.

[53:50] Bob Dobbs: It's called a full...

[53:51] Bob Dobbs: bunt,

[53:51] Bob Dobbs: full bunt.

[53:52] Bob Dobbs: But anyways,

[53:54] Bob Dobbs: you know where people swing.

[53:59] Bob Dobbs: They take a swing and it hits,

[54:01] Bob Dobbs: but it only goes as far as the bunt goes.

[54:04] Bob Dobbs: So it's a full bunt swing.

[54:06] Bob Dobbs: Actually,

[54:07] Bob Dobbs: you're in trouble.

[54:08] Bob Dobbs: The guy,

[54:08] Bob Dobbs: catcher,

[54:09] Bob Dobbs: can throw you out real easily.

[54:11] Bob Dobbs: So he's saying what I do is I full bunt swing into cul-de-sacs.

[54:20] Bob Dobbs: I think he's been listening to us.

[54:21] Bob Dobbs: He's taking our key word and throwing it back at me.

[54:24] Bob Dobbs: You know what I mean?

[54:25] Cameron McEwen: Yeah,

[54:25] Cameron McEwen: sure.

[54:27] Cameron McEwen: Notice that lots of times people actually can beat out a hit like that because when you take a full swing,

[54:37] Cameron McEwen: the natural reaction of seeing that the swing has met the ball is to sort of take a step back and try and figure out

[54:47] Cameron McEwen: Okay,

[54:47] Cameron McEwen: is the ball coming to me or where is it going?

[54:50] Bob Dobbs: Where is it?

[54:50] Cameron McEwen: In fact,

[54:51] Cameron McEwen: the ball is going nowhere.

[54:54] Bob Dobbs: That's right.

[54:55] Cameron McEwen: And so lots of times the catcher or the third baseman or the pitcher,

[54:59] Cameron McEwen: they can't get to the ball.

[55:00] Bob Dobbs: Yeah.

[55:01] Cameron McEwen: And the guy ends up at first base,

[55:03] Cameron McEwen: but his head only went two feet.

[55:05] Bob Dobbs: Well,

[55:05] Bob Dobbs: that's my response.

[55:06] Bob Dobbs: Yeah,

[55:06] Bob Dobbs: I may have been a full-blown sweep,

[55:07] Bob Dobbs: but I got to first base.

[55:09] Bob Dobbs: Nobody knew what the fuck I was doing,

[55:11] Bob Dobbs: and they couldn't see the ball.

[55:13] Bob Dobbs: And I made it.

[55:14] Bob Dobbs: Sure.

[55:15] Cameron McEwen: Yeah,

[55:15] Cameron McEwen: and then when they tried to catch it,

[55:17] Cameron McEwen: first base,

[55:18] Cameron McEwen: they overthrew,

[55:19] Cameron McEwen: and then you got to second base.

[55:21] Cameron McEwen: And when you got to second base,

[55:24] Cameron McEwen: the throw from first base,

[55:26] Cameron McEwen: the shortstop and the ball went out.

[55:28] Cameron McEwen: Yeah,

[55:29] Bob Dobbs: hit the catcher in the head and knocked him out.

[55:32] Bob Dobbs: But that's how I got the whole way.

[55:34] Bob Dobbs: I was the first guy to get the whole,

[55:37] Bob Dobbs: to get a home run from a full bunt.

[55:39] Bob Dobbs: I made it all the way home.

[55:42] Bob Dobbs: Yeah,

[55:43] Bob Dobbs: so that's another.

[55:44] Bob Dobbs: metaphor of what I've done.

[55:47] Cameron McEwen: That's right.

[55:50] Cameron McEwen: Let me continue with a quotation.

[55:52] Bob Dobbs: You've already said,

[55:53] Bob Dobbs: let me just ask this.

[55:54] Bob Dobbs: I don't know if it works.

[55:56] Bob Dobbs: Is primary imagination,

[55:57] Bob Dobbs: secondary imagination,

[55:58] Bob Dobbs: first science and second science?

[56:01] Bob Dobbs: Can we put them on either way?

[56:03] Bob Dobbs: No,

[56:03] Cameron McEwen: it doesn't work.

[56:05] Cameron McEwen: It's almost the reverse of that.

[56:07] Bob Dobbs: Well,

[56:07] Bob Dobbs: that's what I'm saying.

[56:08] Bob Dobbs: Primary is actually second and secondary is first science.

[56:12] Bob Dobbs: Yeah.

[56:13] Bob Dobbs: Okay.

[56:14] Bob Dobbs: We can remember that.

[56:15] Bob Dobbs: All right,

[56:15] Bob Dobbs: go ahead.

[56:17] Cameron McEwen: So then,

[56:17] Cameron McEwen: okay,

[56:17] Cameron McEwen: remember,

[56:18] Cameron McEwen: we're talking about the formative process of consciousness in the entire content of the unconscious.

[56:25] Bob Dobbs: Yeah.

[56:25] Cameron McEwen: Right?

[56:25] Cameron McEwen: So that says that within the unconscious,

[56:31] Cameron McEwen: there is the capability and hence also the potential knowledge of what we're doing all the time,

[56:39] Cameron McEwen: namely becoming conscious of whatever we're becoming.

[56:43] Cameron McEwen: conscious of.

[56:45] Bob Dobbs: So he says in the same way they receive an echo,

[56:48] Bob Dobbs: so in the same way there's not that much of a difference between primary and secondary.

[56:52] Bob Dobbs: They're hendiadys,

[56:53] Bob Dobbs: one by means of two.

[56:54] Bob Dobbs: Is that what you're getting at there?

[56:57] Cameron McEwen: Yes.

[56:57] Bob Dobbs: Okay.

[56:58] Cameron McEwen: And it's one by means of two,

[56:59] Cameron McEwen: but it's also two by means of one.

[57:01] Bob Dobbs: Yeah,

[57:01] Bob Dobbs: yeah.

[57:03] Cameron McEwen: Because that's what the primary is,

[57:07] Cameron McEwen: is the explosion or extension of

[57:12] Cameron McEwen: the two that is ignited by the primary one.

[57:18] Bob Dobbs: Yeah.

[57:19] Cameron McEwen: Yeah,

[57:19] Cameron McEwen: but that primary one is not one of the poles.

[57:23] Cameron McEwen: It's what's in between the poles.

[57:24] Cameron McEwen: That's the difficult thing that most people don't get.

[57:28] Cameron McEwen: Yeah,

[57:28] Bob Dobbs: you can see if early,

[57:32] Bob Dobbs: almost still pre-tribal awareness,

[57:35] Bob Dobbs: early societies,

[57:37] Bob Dobbs: someone might recognize what they were getting bottled up in.

[57:40] Bob Dobbs: And...

[57:41] Bob Dobbs: And then someone would say,

[57:42] Bob Dobbs: well,

[57:42] Bob Dobbs: there's,

[57:43] Bob Dobbs: what,

[57:43] Bob Dobbs: five people here.

[57:45] Bob Dobbs: One,

[57:45] Bob Dobbs: two,

[57:45] Bob Dobbs: three,

[57:45] Bob Dobbs: four,

[57:46] Bob Dobbs: five.

[57:46] Bob Dobbs: The shaman would say,

[57:47] Bob Dobbs: wait a minute,

[57:47] Bob Dobbs: now one ain't one now.

[57:51] Bob Dobbs: You know what I mean?

[57:51] Bob Dobbs: It's multiple.

[57:53] Bob Dobbs: And then you can see when you get to writing and print,

[57:57] Bob Dobbs: you lock the one in so solid,

[57:59] Bob Dobbs: you get lost in thinking there's only one one,

[58:02] Bob Dobbs: or one that's in one.

[58:04] Bob Dobbs: Yes.

[58:05] Bob Dobbs: And then the electric age broke that up,

[58:08] Bob Dobbs: brought back ambiguity,

[58:10] Bob Dobbs: imprecision.

[58:11] Bob Dobbs: And a lot of the arts and sciences were renewing,

[58:14] Bob Dobbs: retrieving that one was not one.

[58:18] Cameron McEwen: Correct.

[58:18] Cameron McEwen: Correct.

[58:20] Cameron McEwen: But that's expressed linearly,

[58:23] Cameron McEwen: right?

[58:23] Bob Dobbs: Yeah.

[58:25] Cameron McEwen: That's the linear story.

[58:26] Cameron McEwen: But the nonlinear story is what he says here.

[58:30] Cameron McEwen: He says that in the same way there would seem to be an echo of the formative process of consciousness in the entire content of the unconscious.

[58:40] Cameron McEwen: So what he's saying there is exactly what you just said in linear fashion,

[58:45] Cameron McEwen: and then he says it here in all-at-once fashion.

[58:49] Bob Dobbs: By saying it in three different sentences.

[58:52] Bob Dobbs: They're each repeating.

[58:53] Cameron McEwen: Oh yeah,

[58:55] Cameron McEwen: that's right.

[58:56] Cameron McEwen: Everything in this quotation is a repetition of what he just said.

[59:00] Bob Dobbs: That's right.

[59:02] Cameron McEwen: Because he's trying to clarify what he's talking about,

[59:07] Cameron McEwen: even to himself.

[59:09] Bob Dobbs: Yes.

[59:10] Cameron McEwen: It's like he says something,

[59:11] Bob Dobbs: and then there's echoes in the unconscious that comes conscious of,

[59:15] Bob Dobbs: oh,

[59:15] Bob Dobbs: well,

[59:16] Bob Dobbs: I have to say this other sentence to include that.

[59:19] Cameron McEwen: Right,

[59:19] Cameron McEwen: but notice that what you said before is you said,

[59:23] Cameron McEwen: well,

[59:24] Cameron McEwen: here's this,

[59:25] Cameron McEwen: there's tribal awareness,

[59:26] Cameron McEwen: and then people lock up the one,

[59:31] Cameron McEwen: for example,

[59:32] Cameron McEwen: in geometry.

[59:35] Cameron McEwen: Instead of taking all possible shapes,

[59:38] Cameron McEwen: which they later would do in the

[59:40] Cameron McEwen: 19th century,

[59:42] Cameron McEwen: what the Greeks did was say,

[59:43] Cameron McEwen: okay,

[59:44] Cameron McEwen: here's what a circle is,

[59:46] Cameron McEwen: right?

[59:47] Cameron McEwen: Yeah.

[59:47] Cameron McEwen: And here's what a square is.

[59:48] Cameron McEwen: square is and here's what a triangle is.

[59:51] Cameron McEwen: And that gave them a new scientific understanding of shapes and of landscaping and of many things.

[1:00:05] Cameron McEwen: But it was achieved by locking in definition.

[1:00:10] Cameron McEwen: So you have a tribal awareness and then you have literary awareness and then you have that.

[1:00:18] Cameron McEwen: the multiplication of that by Gutenberg,

[1:00:20] Cameron McEwen: and then you have the overturning of that in the electric.

[1:00:24] Cameron McEwen: But each of these is a formative process of consciousness,

[1:00:29] Cameron McEwen: each one of them.

[1:00:30] Cameron McEwen: So what McLuhan is saying here is that they are all in the entire content of the unconscious,

[1:00:39] Cameron McEwen: every one of them.

[1:00:40] Cameron McEwen: So that's why when we come to the electric age,

[1:00:43] Cameron McEwen: we have the possibility of seeing all of that.

[1:00:47] Cameron McEwen: for the first time because we have understood correctly in the electronic age,

[1:00:56] Cameron McEwen: we have gotten away from the poles of observation,

[1:01:02] Cameron McEwen: and now we look at the in-between,

[1:01:06] Cameron McEwen: the tactility of the poles.

[1:01:09] Cameron McEwen: And that tactility is what he calls here the formative process of consciousness.

[1:01:15] Cameron McEwen: And to become aware of that is an echo.

[1:01:18] Bob Dobbs: Right.

[1:01:19] Bob Dobbs: And maybe being creative.

[1:01:22] Cameron McEwen: Yeah,

[1:01:22] Cameron McEwen: absolutely.

[1:01:23] Bob Dobbs: Okay.

[1:01:25] Bob Dobbs: So I had this thought.

[1:01:27] Bob Dobbs: In the early social togetherness,

[1:01:32] Bob Dobbs: to get stuck on the one as if it means one creates a leader.

[1:01:37] Bob Dobbs: And then that gets institutionalized into kings,

[1:01:40] Bob Dobbs: queens,

[1:01:41] Bob Dobbs: and emperors.

[1:01:41] Bob Dobbs: But,

[1:01:42] Bob Dobbs: you know,

[1:01:43] Bob Dobbs: they talk about...

[1:01:46] Bob Dobbs: aboriginal societies.

[1:01:48] Bob Dobbs: Someone is not a leader for all activities.

[1:01:51] Bob Dobbs: They're only good at fishing,

[1:01:53] Bob Dobbs: so they lead when they go fishing,

[1:01:54] Bob Dobbs: and then someone else takes over when they're building fires or something,

[1:01:57] Bob Dobbs: right?

[1:01:57] Bob Dobbs: They would disperse,

[1:01:59] Bob Dobbs: so it was more fluid because they hadn't got locked into one meaning only one,

[1:02:06] Bob Dobbs: and then you get the beginning of hierarchy.

[1:02:08] Bob Dobbs: So nowadays,

[1:02:12] Bob Dobbs: Nobody takes responsibility for everybody because everybody else is involved.

[1:02:15] Bob Dobbs: There's not really any leaders.

[1:02:16] Bob Dobbs: That's why the futility of a president or something is if that person is going to decide for everybody what's up.

[1:02:22] Bob Dobbs: It's all on their shoulders.

[1:02:24] Bob Dobbs: People have an awareness of cooperating and more,

[1:02:26] Bob Dobbs: quote,

[1:02:27] Bob Dobbs: dialogue in the electric age because the one that's a literal interpretation,

[1:02:34] Bob Dobbs: one that led to leadership or emperors,

[1:02:36] Bob Dobbs: it got diffused in the 20th century.

[1:02:40] Cameron McEwen: But there's a...

[1:02:41] Cameron McEwen: great nostalgia for that.

[1:02:44] Cameron McEwen: People think that in order to find their identity,

[1:02:49] Cameron McEwen: in order to be who they are,

[1:02:52] Cameron McEwen: they have to find that emperor of the

[1:02:55] Cameron McEwen: I, the ego emperor.

[1:02:58] Cameron McEwen: And what they don't do is say that in order to be a person,

[1:03:04] Cameron McEwen: in order to have an identity,

[1:03:07] Cameron McEwen: you have to go with tactility.

[1:03:12] Bob Dobbs: They don't say that.

[1:03:14] Cameron McEwen: Yeah,

[1:03:14] Cameron McEwen: exactly.

[1:03:16] Cameron McEwen: They don't see that.

[1:03:17] Cameron McEwen: And because they don't see that,

[1:03:20] Cameron McEwen: they fight against the lack of stability that is,

[1:03:26] Cameron McEwen: in fact,

[1:03:27] Cameron McEwen: where they need to go and where they need to identify themselves.

[1:03:31] Bob Dobbs: Right.

[1:03:31] Bob Dobbs: Now,

[1:03:31] Bob Dobbs: I was just thinking,

[1:03:32] Bob Dobbs: what is it that makes people nostalgic?

[1:03:36] Bob Dobbs: That's the...

[1:03:38] Bob Dobbs: Well,

[1:03:38] Bob Dobbs: maybe that's another part of the main question hanging over humanity.

[1:03:42] Bob Dobbs: Why do we make that mistake?

[1:03:44] Bob Dobbs: It's pretty hard to explain why humans do that.

[1:03:48] Bob Dobbs: They just do it.

[1:03:50] Cameron McEwen: Well,

[1:03:50] Cameron McEwen: first off,

[1:03:51] Cameron McEwen: McLuhan didn't say all humans do it.

[1:03:53] Cameron McEwen: He said that humans in the Western tradition have done that for 2,000 years.

[1:04:02] Bob Dobbs: And they made the mistake of imposing that modality on everybody.

[1:04:08] Cameron McEwen: Yeah,

[1:04:08] Cameron McEwen: but it wasn't only a mistake.

[1:04:10] Cameron McEwen: That's the interesting thing.

[1:04:11] Cameron McEwen: You see,

[1:04:14] Cameron McEwen: there's all sorts of aspects of the Western literate tradition that McLuhan was trying to preserve.

[1:04:22] Bob Dobbs: Yeah,

[1:04:23] Bob Dobbs: that's the special manufacturer,

[1:04:27] Bob Dobbs: my manufacturer.

[1:04:28] Bob Dobbs: Yeah,

[1:04:28] Bob Dobbs: there's services in the duality,

[1:04:30] Bob Dobbs: in the literate phase.

[1:04:31] Bob Dobbs: So it becomes poetic.

[1:04:33] Bob Dobbs: You look around and you end up like

[1:04:36] Bob Dobbs: Alexander Pope at the end of his essay,

[1:04:38] Bob Dobbs: What is Man or something,

[1:04:40] Bob Dobbs: and he ends up saying,

[1:04:40] Bob Dobbs: Whatever is,

[1:04:41] Bob Dobbs: is right.

[1:04:42] Bob Dobbs: I understand that.

[1:04:44] Bob Dobbs: You know,

[1:04:44] Bob Dobbs: all this mistaken stuff,

[1:04:46] Bob Dobbs: wars and all that,

[1:04:47] Bob Dobbs: was not necessarily...

[1:04:51] Bob Dobbs: Something we have to be ashamed of or to balance,

[1:04:57] Bob Dobbs: which is like the feminists.

[1:04:58] Bob Dobbs: They want to get rid of the patriarchy.

[1:05:00] Bob Dobbs: You know,

[1:05:01] Bob Dobbs: this is silly.

[1:05:03] Bob Dobbs: You can't get rid of the media.

[1:05:06] Bob Dobbs: This is how Marshall McLuhan explained it.

[1:05:07] Bob Dobbs: All media,

[1:05:08] Bob Dobbs: once they're in an environment,

[1:05:09] Bob Dobbs: you can't get rid of them.

[1:05:10] Bob Dobbs: So we're stuck with the literate era.

[1:05:13] Bob Dobbs: We just have to understand what it was.

[1:05:15] Bob Dobbs: Its services and disservices.

[1:05:19] Bob Dobbs: Go ahead.

[1:05:20] Cameron McEwen: Well.

[1:05:21] Cameron McEwen: we don't need to say that everything that happened was good,

[1:05:26] Cameron McEwen: right?

[1:05:26] Cameron McEwen: I mean,

[1:05:27] Cameron McEwen: with...

[1:05:28] Cameron McEwen: Yeah,

[1:05:28] Bob Dobbs: we understand why it happened.

[1:05:30] Cameron McEwen: Yeah,

[1:05:31] Cameron McEwen: but also,

[1:05:32] Cameron McEwen: I mean,

[1:05:32] Cameron McEwen: a minute ago you said something like,

[1:05:34] Cameron McEwen: so all of these wars and things weren't necessarily bad,

[1:05:38] Cameron McEwen: but affirming part of the tradition doesn't mean affirming all of it.

[1:05:47] Bob Dobbs: Yeah.

[1:05:48] Cameron McEwen: Right?

[1:05:48] Cameron McEwen: So...

[1:05:49] Cameron McEwen: I don't think McLuhan would say,

[1:05:51] Cameron McEwen: you know,

[1:05:52] Cameron McEwen: it was a good thing that

[1:05:54] Cameron McEwen: Troy was destroyed and everybody was killed.

[1:05:58] Cameron McEwen: I think he would say that good things came out of Greek civilization,

[1:06:03] Cameron McEwen: but we don't necessarily want to repeat the whole thing.

[1:06:06] Bob Dobbs: Right.

[1:06:06] Bob Dobbs: And

[1:06:07] Bob Dobbs: I had a thought there.

[1:06:11] Bob Dobbs: Oh,

[1:06:11] Bob Dobbs: yeah.

[1:06:12] Bob Dobbs: I have an update for Eliot when he says,

[1:06:14] Bob Dobbs: I got to use words when I talk to you.

[1:06:15] Cameron McEwen: Uh-huh.

[1:06:16] Bob Dobbs: I've got to use words,

[1:06:17] Bob Dobbs: and also,

[1:06:18] Bob Dobbs: you won't give me two hours to explain what I meant.

[1:06:22] Bob Dobbs: See,

[1:06:22] Bob Dobbs: people don't,

[1:06:24] Bob Dobbs: it's always pretty fast,

[1:06:25] Bob Dobbs: the interaction,

[1:06:26] Bob Dobbs: especially in person.

[1:06:27] Bob Dobbs: So,

[1:06:28] Bob Dobbs: if I say something,

[1:06:30] Bob Dobbs: and if they were talking in service environment,

[1:06:34] Bob Dobbs: that person would have to say to me,

[1:06:37] Bob Dobbs: like you do,

[1:06:38] Bob Dobbs: and correct what I say,

[1:06:40] Bob Dobbs: add to the other meanings to retrieve the polarity that

[1:06:44] Bob Dobbs: I canceled by saying something.

[1:06:47] Bob Dobbs: You get that?

[1:06:48] Bob Dobbs: Yeah.

[1:06:50] Bob Dobbs: And so people do not allow you having the time to always be multiplying what you had just said to make sure everybody knows that nothing was really said there.

[1:07:01] Bob Dobbs: You get into efficient causality.

[1:07:03] Bob Dobbs: There are things people think have to be done.

[1:07:05] Bob Dobbs: Now then that becomes debatable about what needs to be done.

[1:07:08] Bob Dobbs: Do you really need three meals a day?

[1:07:09] Bob Dobbs: There's lots of people who don't need three meals a day,

[1:07:12] Bob Dobbs: so can't make that a rule.

[1:07:15] Bob Dobbs: And then...

[1:07:16] Bob Dobbs: You might not need as much money on your expense account,

[1:07:19] Bob Dobbs: you know,

[1:07:20] Bob Dobbs: if you live frugally.

[1:07:23] Bob Dobbs: So that is,

[1:07:26] Bob Dobbs: you could say,

[1:07:26] Bob Dobbs: that is what people are always engaging.

[1:07:29] Bob Dobbs: They're always adjusting themselves to,

[1:07:33] Bob Dobbs: you could say,

[1:07:33] Bob Dobbs: that future,

[1:07:34] Bob Dobbs: but it's part of the present,

[1:07:36] Bob Dobbs: of where I could do improve on this,

[1:07:38] Bob Dobbs: but I have to deal with my past,

[1:07:40] Bob Dobbs: which is right there with me in the now,

[1:07:42] Bob Dobbs: are my mistakes.

[1:07:44] Bob Dobbs: And your present is the tactile no place.

[1:07:47] Bob Dobbs: Like there is no present.

[1:07:49] Bob Dobbs: There's no past or future.

[1:07:51] Bob Dobbs: There's nothing.

[1:07:52] Bob Dobbs: And you have to adjust that.

[1:07:54] Bob Dobbs: So McLuhan makes a big deal out of the word adjustment in War and Peace in the Global Village,

[1:07:58] Bob Dobbs: talking about the Book of Tea and the way Oriental arts are or Asian arts are,

[1:08:03] Bob Dobbs: right?

[1:08:03] Bob Dobbs: They're adjustment.

[1:08:07] Bob Dobbs: The point of adjustment.

[1:08:08] Bob Dobbs: And that gets into your sensory ratios.

[1:08:11] Bob Dobbs: But you don't have time.

[1:08:14] Bob Dobbs: You're not allowed to talk like this in normal interaction because there's other things that have to be done,

[1:08:24] Bob Dobbs: supposedly.

[1:08:28] Bob Dobbs: So you get that?

[1:08:29] Bob Dobbs: That's a new idea there.

[1:08:33] Bob Dobbs: Not only do I have to use words,

[1:08:34] Bob Dobbs: you won't give me time to explain the disservices of the words I use to you.

[1:08:39] Cameron McEwen: Right.

[1:08:40] Cameron McEwen: So one of the implications...

[1:08:44] Cameron McEwen: of science,

[1:08:45] Cameron McEwen: the way McLuhan was thinking about it,

[1:08:47] Cameron McEwen: is that that problem kind of disappears.

[1:08:55] Cameron McEwen: Like

[1:08:56] Cameron McEwen: Wittgenstein said that the whole point of philosophy was to make problems disappear.

[1:09:01] Cameron McEwen: They don't get answered,

[1:09:03] Cameron McEwen: they just don't appear as problems anymore.

[1:09:05] Cameron McEwen: So if you think of,

[1:09:07] Cameron McEwen: just think of chemistry for a minute.

[1:09:10] Cameron McEwen: Everything that's going on in our bodies,

[1:09:14] Cameron McEwen: in our houses,

[1:09:15] Cameron McEwen: outside the houses.

[1:09:16] Cameron McEwen: Everything is chemistry.

[1:09:20] Cameron McEwen: If we go to the store to pick something up,

[1:09:22] Cameron McEwen: we're not thinking about chemistry.

[1:09:25] Cameron McEwen: It's just chemistry is what is going on.

[1:09:28] Cameron McEwen: It's sort of in the background and people can study it and all of that sort of stuff.

[1:09:33] Cameron McEwen: So this problem of not having the time to explain,

[1:09:38] Cameron McEwen: the problem of multiple meanings,

[1:09:41] Cameron McEwen: the problem of all of the difficulties of communication,

[1:09:45] Cameron McEwen: all that stuff.

[1:09:46] Cameron McEwen: For McLuhan,

[1:09:47] Cameron McEwen: those problems should disappear.

[1:09:50] Cameron McEwen: They don't get answered into some sort of cloud of unknowing or mystic insight or something.

[1:09:56] Cameron McEwen: They just,

[1:09:56] Cameron McEwen: because we have the answer to those things,

[1:10:00] Cameron McEwen: they are there in the same way that chemistry is there.

[1:10:04] Cameron McEwen: We still go to the store,

[1:10:06] Cameron McEwen: we still talk on the phone,

[1:10:08] Cameron McEwen: we do whatever we're doing,

[1:10:10] Cameron McEwen: but we're in a whole new environment.

[1:10:12] Cameron McEwen: And that whole new environment is the medium that is the message.

[1:10:16] Bob Dobbs: So if you get cut off and you can't finish,

[1:10:18] Bob Dobbs: you'll get resolved or...

[1:10:20] Bob Dobbs: not become an issue because of subsequent events that you've set up by the little bit you did say.

[1:10:28] Bob Dobbs: So people are resolving a lot all the time in the sense of it's not a problem anymore in the interval.

[1:10:38] Cameron McEwen: Yeah,

[1:10:38] Cameron McEwen: but that's sort of a hint of the way it could be,

[1:10:43] Cameron McEwen: right?

[1:10:43] Cameron McEwen: The thing about this New Science is that it gives a whole...

[1:10:50] Cameron McEwen: It lends a whole new aspect to language.

[1:10:53] Cameron McEwen: So people won't have the same kinds of problems,

[1:11:00] Cameron McEwen: and they won't have the same kinds of demands.

[1:11:03] Cameron McEwen: It'll be a different world in an analogous way to how the world has changed from

[1:11:11] Cameron McEwen: 1800. The world in the last 200 years is just completely different from...

[1:11:19] Cameron McEwen: the world that was before that.

[1:11:22] Cameron McEwen: And so

[1:11:23] Cameron McEwen: McLuhan isn't trying to say,

[1:11:25] Cameron McEwen: okay,

[1:11:26] Cameron McEwen: I can see this new world and it's going to be all great and all that stuff.

[1:11:29] Cameron McEwen: All he can do is suggest that we become aware of ourselves in a new way and then follow the science.

[1:11:39] Cameron McEwen: Yeah.

[1:11:39] Cameron McEwen: You can't do anything else.

[1:11:42] Bob Dobbs: And it's being done.

[1:11:44] Cameron McEwen: Yeah,

[1:11:44] Cameron McEwen: well,

[1:11:45] Cameron McEwen: we're trying to get there.

[1:11:49] Cameron McEwen: Let me give you a quotation from The Medium is the Massage,

[1:11:52] Cameron McEwen: because you asked maybe five minutes ago,

[1:11:57] Cameron McEwen: how did we get here?

[1:11:59] Bob Dobbs: Yeah.

[1:11:59] Cameron McEwen: And I thought of this quotation from The Medium is the Massage.

[1:12:04] Cameron McEwen: He says,

[1:12:05] Cameron McEwen: ours is a brand new world of all-at-onceness.

[1:12:09] Cameron McEwen: Time has ceased.

[1:12:10] Cameron McEwen: Space has vanished.

[1:12:12] Cameron McEwen: We now live in a Global Village,

[1:12:14] Cameron McEwen: a simultaneous happening.

[1:12:17] Cameron McEwen: We are back in acoustics.

[1:12:18] Cameron McEwen: space,

[1:12:19] Cameron McEwen: we have begun again to structure the primordial feeling,

[1:12:24] Cameron McEwen: the tribal emotions from which a few centuries of literacy have divorced us.

[1:12:32] Bob Dobbs: Is that implying pre-tribal awareness there?

[1:12:35] Bob Dobbs: I think it is.

[1:12:36] Cameron McEwen: But notice that what he elsewhere calls pre-tribal awareness,

[1:12:41] Cameron McEwen: here he calls tribal emotion.

[1:12:43] Cameron McEwen: Yeah.

[1:12:45] Cameron McEwen: Right?

[1:12:45] Cameron McEwen: Yeah.

[1:12:45] Cameron McEwen: Which is funny.

[1:12:46] Cameron McEwen: But

[1:12:47] Cameron McEwen: Because,

[1:12:48] Cameron McEwen: yeah,

[1:12:48] Bob Dobbs: language and social rules try to balance off the emotion.

[1:12:54] Cameron McEwen: That's right.

[1:12:54] Cameron McEwen: Or control it.

[1:12:55] Cameron McEwen: So what he calls here the primordial feeling is pre-tribal awareness.

[1:13:03] Cameron McEwen: So I remember in one of our conversations maybe two or three ago,

[1:13:10] Cameron McEwen: you said that he didn't seem to get into pre-tribal awareness very much.

[1:13:17] Cameron McEwen: in between his Nashe thesis and then 1970,

[1:13:22] Cameron McEwen: when he suddenly begins to talk about pre-tribal awareness.

[1:13:27] Cameron McEwen: But then we said,

[1:13:27] Cameron McEwen: well,

[1:13:28] Cameron McEwen: maybe he did speak about it,

[1:13:29] Cameron McEwen: but he spoke about it in different terms.

[1:13:32] Bob Dobbs: Yep.

[1:13:32] Cameron McEwen: And

[1:13:33] Cameron McEwen: I think that's right.

[1:13:34] Bob Dobbs: We have found a lot.

[1:13:35] Bob Dobbs: You found a lot of cases where he did do it,

[1:13:38] Bob Dobbs: did say it.

[1:13:38] Cameron McEwen: Yeah.

[1:13:39] Cameron McEwen: And here he talks about the primordial feeling.

[1:13:42] Bob Dobbs: Yeah.

[1:13:42] Cameron McEwen: And I think that is pre-tribal awareness.

[1:13:46] Bob Dobbs: Yeah,

[1:13:46] Bob Dobbs: because he'll only say that once.

[1:13:51] Bob Dobbs: When he says rare phrases like scientific from 1946 in that context,

[1:13:58] Bob Dobbs: that's him pointing to something because he'll never say it like that again.

[1:14:01] Bob Dobbs: He'll always repeat the definition of visual space and the stuff he always kept repeating.

[1:14:05] Bob Dobbs: But you come up to a primordial emotion.

[1:14:07] Bob Dobbs: I don't know any other place he ever said that.

[1:14:09] Bob Dobbs: Use those two words.

[1:14:11] Bob Dobbs: So that stands out.

[1:14:13] Cameron McEwen: Yeah.

[1:14:15] Bob Dobbs: Maybe he could make an inventory,

[1:14:17] Bob Dobbs: a PhD could make an inventory,

[1:14:19] Bob Dobbs: or maybe just a master's,

[1:14:21] Bob Dobbs: of all the one-time shots that he did.

[1:14:24] Cameron McEwen: Oh,

[1:14:24] Cameron McEwen: absolutely.

[1:14:25] Cameron McEwen: Absolutely.

[1:14:26] Cameron McEwen: In fact,

[1:14:27] Cameron McEwen: I'm convinced.

[1:14:27] Cameron McEwen: I don't want to sort of blow my own horn here or something.

[1:14:33] Cameron McEwen: No,

[1:14:33] Bob Dobbs: don't do that or I'll be,

[1:14:34] Bob Dobbs: buddy.

[1:14:39] Cameron McEwen: But in the future,

[1:14:42] Cameron McEwen: if we have a future,

[1:14:43] Cameron McEwen: I predict.

[1:14:44] Cameron McEwen: that a very large number of PhD theses will take some post of mine and say,

[1:14:54] Cameron McEwen: okay,

[1:14:55] Cameron McEwen: let's investigate this throughout McLuhan's work.

[1:15:01] Cameron McEwen: Because what I'm doing,

[1:15:03] Cameron McEwen: and I think it's kind of a reflection of what McLuhan was doing,

[1:15:08] Cameron McEwen: is human beings,

[1:15:11] Cameron McEwen: when they're really thinking,

[1:15:13] Cameron McEwen: They can't do anything more than sort of ignite sparks.

[1:15:17] Bob Dobbs: Yeah.

[1:15:19] Cameron McEwen: Maybe that's what you do on the radio all the time.

[1:15:21] Bob Dobbs: Yeah,

[1:15:22] Cameron McEwen: yeah.

[1:15:23] Cameron McEwen: So,

[1:15:25] Cameron McEwen: you know,

[1:15:25] Cameron McEwen: the bureaucrats of the spirit come along later and they do their PhD thesis or they get their tenure,

[1:15:32] Cameron McEwen: whatever they're going to do.

[1:15:34] Cameron McEwen: And basically they take one or two sparks from somebody that generated a million of them

[1:15:42] Cameron McEwen: And

[1:15:42] Cameron McEwen: they create a career out of that.

[1:15:44] Bob Dobbs: Yes.

[1:15:45] Cameron McEwen: So I think that is what's going to happen.

[1:15:47] Cameron McEwen: So people will come along,

[1:15:50] Cameron McEwen: they'll see the phrase here,

[1:15:51] Cameron McEwen: the primordial feeling,

[1:15:52] Cameron McEwen: the tribal emotion,

[1:15:54] Cameron McEwen: and they'll,

[1:15:55] Cameron McEwen: just as you suggested,

[1:15:57] Cameron McEwen: they'll go through the whole corpus and they'll find synonyms for those things.

[1:16:03] Bob Dobbs: Yeah,

[1:16:03] Bob Dobbs: but not those words.

[1:16:04] Bob Dobbs: They're never repeated.

[1:16:06] Cameron McEwen: Yeah,

[1:16:06] Cameron McEwen: and then they'll be given the Order of Canada.

[1:16:12] Bob Dobbs: And you'll send a letter to the editor,

[1:16:13] Bob Dobbs: that's not what you meant.

[1:16:18] Bob Dobbs: Yeah,

[1:16:18] Bob Dobbs: you've got to put a warning every now and then in your blog.

[1:16:20] Bob Dobbs: Listen,

[1:16:21] Bob Dobbs: what you think I'm saying is not.

[1:16:23] Bob Dobbs: If you make a PhD out of this,

[1:16:24] Bob Dobbs: that's a big distraction.

[1:16:29] Bob Dobbs: So that's why we call our colleagues,

[1:16:31] Bob Dobbs: fuck you,

[1:16:32] Bob Dobbs: university.

[1:16:34] Bob Dobbs: You know,

[1:16:35] Bob Dobbs: our discussions on Wednesdays without iON on the radio.

[1:16:39] Bob Dobbs: You know about that?

[1:16:40] Bob Dobbs: Me and Clinton.

[1:16:41] Bob Dobbs: Yes,

[1:16:41] Bob Dobbs: me,

[1:16:42] Bob Dobbs: Clint,

[1:16:42] Bob Dobbs: Greg Duffel,

[1:16:43] Bob Dobbs: and Brian,

[1:16:45] Bob Dobbs: and Chet,

[1:16:46] Bob Dobbs: we have a discussion.

[1:16:48] Bob Dobbs: And

[1:16:50] Bob Dobbs: Chet, Clint and I bring in a lot of McLuhan.

[1:16:53] Bob Dobbs: Greg's a blatant communist.

[1:16:55] Bob Dobbs: He wants to go live in North Korea.

[1:16:59] Bob Dobbs: Brian's an underground

[1:17:01] Bob Dobbs: Gnostic. And he knows very much about subcultures.

[1:17:05] Bob Dobbs: And then Chet's very good on computers and modern technology.

[1:17:09] Bob Dobbs: So it's quite a unique mixture.

[1:17:11] Bob Dobbs: And now why was I bringing this up?

[1:17:14] Bob Dobbs: So we,

[1:17:15] Bob Dobbs: oh yeah,

[1:17:15] Bob Dobbs: we call ourselves Fuck You University.

[1:17:22] Bob Dobbs: And we announce everybody's got the degree.

[1:17:23] Bob Dobbs: I think we do that.

[1:17:24] Bob Dobbs: Clinton wrote up something.

[1:17:25] Bob Dobbs: It's at the top.

[1:17:26] Bob Dobbs: It says,

[1:17:27] Bob Dobbs: you know,

[1:17:27] Bob Dobbs: you already got a degree.

[1:17:28] Bob Dobbs: You already graduated.

[1:17:29] Bob Dobbs: Now get down to work here.

[1:17:30] Bob Dobbs: We don't want anybody to make you other crap like you just complained about as a result of what we're doing.

[1:17:35] Bob Dobbs: Just call in and participate.

[1:17:38] Bob Dobbs: So

[1:17:38] Cameron McEwen: Clinton, Clinton is.

[1:17:40] Cameron McEwen: back in the group.

[1:17:43] Cameron McEwen: I think you said that he had dropped out.

[1:17:47] Bob Dobbs: Yeah,

[1:17:47] Bob Dobbs: because his mother died.

[1:17:48] Bob Dobbs: He had to deal with a lot of stuff there.

[1:17:49] Bob Dobbs: So he came back,

[1:17:51] Bob Dobbs: but he's becoming a bureaucrat.

[1:17:53] Bob Dobbs: He's getting projects that he says should go somewhere as well for him.

[1:18:00] Bob Dobbs: So he's only coming in every second show.

[1:18:03] Bob Dobbs: He didn't come every week.

[1:18:04] Bob Dobbs: He didn't get time.

[1:18:04] Bob Dobbs: So

[1:18:05] Bob Dobbs: I got him to compromise,

[1:18:07] Bob Dobbs: you know,

[1:18:07] Bob Dobbs: because he basically didn't really want to do it anymore.

[1:18:10] Bob Dobbs: even though he would miss it,

[1:18:12] Bob Dobbs: but he thought what he had stumbled into was way more important.

[1:18:15] Bob Dobbs: But I said,

[1:18:15] Bob Dobbs: no,

[1:18:15] Bob Dobbs: nothing's more important than this dialogue.

[1:18:18] Cameron McEwen: He's into stuff where people think he's intelligent and creative,

[1:18:23] Cameron McEwen: right?

[1:18:23] Bob Dobbs: He's getting an identity.

[1:18:25] Cameron McEwen: Of course that's more important.

[1:18:28] Bob Dobbs: He was a

[1:18:30] Bob Dobbs: Canadian gay beer salesman.

[1:18:33] Bob Dobbs: Gay beer salesman is what he's been doing for years.

[1:18:36] Bob Dobbs: And he was very frustrated because he knew...

[1:18:39] Bob Dobbs: He missed dialogue,

[1:18:40] Bob Dobbs: intelligent talk,

[1:18:42] Bob Dobbs: you know?

[1:18:43] Bob Dobbs: There was no place there for him,

[1:18:45] Bob Dobbs: other than on the Internet,

[1:18:46] Bob Dobbs: and he did that all his life,

[1:18:47] Bob Dobbs: so he was sick of that.

[1:18:48] Bob Dobbs: So he decided to get back to reading and not doing the Internet so much,

[1:18:54] Bob Dobbs: and so he got isolated doing that until he read my,

[1:18:58] Bob Dobbs: that long thing on the literary...

[1:19:01] Bob Dobbs: Classroom without walls,

[1:19:03] Bob Dobbs: whatever that thing is I did.

[1:19:04] Bob Dobbs: I did an inventory of all the postmodern people.

[1:19:07] Bob Dobbs: It's a very long thing.

[1:19:08] Bob Dobbs: What's it called?

[1:19:09] Bob Dobbs: Classroom,

[1:19:10] Bob Dobbs: the literary aesthetics of the American classroom without walls.

[1:19:13] Bob Dobbs: Anyways,

[1:19:14] Bob Dobbs: I show how McLuhan did everything that all the

[1:19:17] Bob Dobbs: Pomo guys say later.

[1:19:19] Bob Dobbs: He read that.

[1:19:20] Bob Dobbs: Not many people read it,

[1:19:21] Bob Dobbs: so he got in touch with me.

[1:19:23] Bob Dobbs: So I told him,

[1:19:24] Bob Dobbs: hey,

[1:19:24] Bob Dobbs: I'm doing a radio show in two hours.

[1:19:26] Bob Dobbs: Call in.

[1:19:27] Bob Dobbs: And he called in.

[1:19:28] Bob Dobbs: That's like back in 2016,

[1:19:30] Bob Dobbs: a long time ago.

[1:19:31] Bob Dobbs: 15,

[1:19:31] Bob Dobbs: 16,

[1:19:32] Bob Dobbs: and because I saw that he was interesting,

[1:19:35] Bob Dobbs: he could talk,

[1:19:37] Bob Dobbs: and now he is where he is because he applied engagement with me,

[1:19:44] Bob Dobbs: and that allowed him to meet other people,

[1:19:46] Bob Dobbs: and one thing led to another where now he has access to the McLuhan archives that nobody else has access to.

[1:19:52] Bob Dobbs: He's got permission.

[1:19:54] Cameron McEwen: Yeah,

[1:19:54] Cameron McEwen: yeah.

[1:19:55] Bob Dobbs: But because he,

[1:19:56] Bob Dobbs: and so he recognized,

[1:19:58] Bob Dobbs: he'll say,

[1:20:00] Bob Dobbs: He has to explain it to the know-nothings.

[1:20:03] Bob Dobbs: He said,

[1:20:04] Bob Dobbs: well,

[1:20:04] Bob Dobbs: I was very lost in the Internet world,

[1:20:06] Bob Dobbs: the computer world,

[1:20:07] Bob Dobbs: and decided to get back in my body.

[1:20:09] Bob Dobbs: And that led me to McLuhan,

[1:20:11] Bob Dobbs: who seemed to be writing about that,

[1:20:13] Bob Dobbs: trying to preserve the body.

[1:20:16] Bob Dobbs: And then he was lucky to meet me.

[1:20:18] Bob Dobbs: I stimulated him.

[1:20:19] Bob Dobbs: And now we're doing this university.

[1:20:24] Cameron McEwen: Right.

[1:20:25] Cameron McEwen: But he has to,

[1:20:27] Cameron McEwen: as I've told...

[1:20:30] Cameron McEwen: Clinton,

[1:20:31] Cameron McEwen: he has to get more into tactility.

[1:20:35] Cameron McEwen: This attention to the body very easily becomes one-sided.

[1:20:44] Bob Dobbs: Yeah.

[1:20:45] Bob Dobbs: As a matter of fact,

[1:20:46] Bob Dobbs: most of the trends today are a massive Anthropomorphic Physical projection into the multi-bodied,

[1:20:52] Bob Dobbs: and people are trying to get back into the body through MAGA,

[1:20:56] Bob Dobbs: is one expression.

[1:20:59] Bob Dobbs: Whatever else,

[1:21:00] Bob Dobbs: they're outraged at transgenders is another aspect.

[1:21:02] Bob Dobbs: Or people becoming transgenders because they're trying to figure out the body.

[1:21:06] Bob Dobbs: Yeah,

[1:21:06] Bob Dobbs: you've got to drop the body,

[1:21:07] Bob Dobbs: which is the service of the electric media.

[1:21:12] Bob Dobbs: There's a good point.

[1:21:13] Bob Dobbs: The whole thing,

[1:21:14] Bob Dobbs: the electric virtual thing,

[1:21:15] Bob Dobbs: is an service environment to your natural tendency to stay into your surplus flesh lazily.

[1:21:25] Cameron McEwen: And is that the Anthropomorphic Physical?

[1:21:28] Bob Dobbs: Yeah,

[1:21:28] Bob Dobbs: projecting some image of what you think humans are from previous cultures.

[1:21:37] Bob Dobbs: Also,

[1:21:38] Bob Dobbs: I often say it's the detachment.

[1:21:44] Bob Dobbs: You are,

[1:21:45] Bob Dobbs: Anthropomorphic Physical is the world's out there,

[1:21:51] Bob Dobbs: but it's not me.

[1:21:53] Bob Dobbs: But you have to deal with your natural inclination to look for.

[1:21:57] Bob Dobbs: the world being you.

[1:21:59] Bob Dobbs: So it's a mixture of what we were just saying.

[1:22:02] Bob Dobbs: Anthropomorphic Physical is detached observation.

[1:22:04] Bob Dobbs: Yeah,

[1:22:05] Cameron McEwen: yeah,

[1:22:06] Cameron McEwen: yeah.

[1:22:06] Bob Dobbs: And interplay.

[1:22:08] Cameron McEwen: Yeah.

[1:22:08] Cameron McEwen: So I would,

[1:22:10] Cameron McEwen: tell me if I'm wrong here,

[1:22:11] Cameron McEwen: I would say that that's what might be called the negative echo.

[1:22:17] Bob Dobbs: Yeah.

[1:22:18] Cameron McEwen: And why is it the negative echo?

[1:22:20] Cameron McEwen: Because it's an echo that goes back and forth between and

[1:22:27] Cameron McEwen: the problem of isolation and detachment and the problem of the real world.

[1:22:34] Cameron McEwen: It's going back and forth and it's unable to find stability in either the one pole or the other pole.

[1:22:45] Bob Dobbs: Yeah,

[1:22:45] Bob Dobbs: you didn't say the other pole is more like merger.

[1:22:50] Cameron McEwen: Well,

[1:22:51] Cameron McEwen: yeah,

[1:22:51] Cameron McEwen: I mean...

[1:22:52] Bob Dobbs: Involvement,

[1:22:53] Bob Dobbs: whatever you call...

[1:22:55] Bob Dobbs: Being stuck in the mandates of communication that imposes stuff on you.

[1:23:00] Cameron McEwen: So you have the condition of the echo going back and forth between sort of two false choices.

[1:23:09] Cameron McEwen: And if you then analyze what's going on there,

[1:23:16] Cameron McEwen: you can say that people are looking for merger,

[1:23:23] Cameron McEwen: but they can't.

[1:23:24] Cameron McEwen: find it or looking for matching,

[1:23:26] Cameron McEwen: but they can't find it.

[1:23:27] Bob Dobbs: Because you're not just that.

[1:23:30] Cameron McEwen: Of course.

[1:23:30] Cameron McEwen: So the whole problem is to give up what you think is orientation,

[1:23:36] Cameron McEwen: namely the search for matching.

[1:23:41] Bob Dobbs: And explore that pain is not necessarily tragic.

[1:23:49] Cameron McEwen: Absolutely.

[1:23:49] Cameron McEwen: Well,

[1:23:50] Cameron McEwen: pain,

[1:23:50] Cameron McEwen: in the sense that we're talking about.

[1:23:53] Cameron McEwen: Pain is actually a signpost.

[1:23:55] Bob Dobbs: Yeah,

[1:23:55] Bob Dobbs: you're getting somewhere.

[1:23:57] Bob Dobbs: Yeah.

[1:23:59] Bob Dobbs: Okay,

[1:24:01] Bob Dobbs: so we were saying,

[1:24:03] Bob Dobbs: so Anthropomorphic Physical...

[1:24:07] Bob Dobbs: Remember you have the quote from Keats,

[1:24:09] Bob Dobbs: negative capability.

[1:24:12] Bob Dobbs: Yeah.

[1:24:14] Bob Dobbs: The Anthropomorphic Physical is,

[1:24:16] Bob Dobbs: oh yeah,

[1:24:17] Bob Dobbs: so in my chart,

[1:24:18] Bob Dobbs: I've got five sections,

[1:24:20] Bob Dobbs: but I discuss them as four quadrants.

[1:24:24] Bob Dobbs: And the fifth is the Dobbs quadrant,

[1:24:27] Bob Dobbs: which is the fifth of four,

[1:24:29] Bob Dobbs: but it's because I'm inside each one.

[1:24:32] Cameron McEwen: Right.

[1:24:33] Bob Dobbs: And to the degree

[1:24:35] Bob Dobbs: I cooperate with each quadrant.

[1:24:37] Bob Dobbs: I'm saying that's me.

[1:24:38] Bob Dobbs: That's Anthropomorphic Physical.

[1:24:40] Bob Dobbs: I'm letting into me.

[1:24:41] Cameron McEwen: So you're in them,

[1:24:43] Cameron McEwen: but also they are in you.

[1:24:45] Bob Dobbs: And they don't know it,

[1:24:46] Bob Dobbs: the way I present the chart,

[1:24:48] Bob Dobbs: because I put myself in the winner's circle.

[1:24:50] Bob Dobbs: I'm the guy who's floating in and out,

[1:24:53] Bob Dobbs: right?

[1:24:54] Bob Dobbs: Rumpelstiltskin.

[1:24:54] Bob Dobbs: Yeah,

[1:24:54] Cameron McEwen: yeah.

[1:24:57] Bob Dobbs: But I don't see any advantage in accepting the trophy.

[1:25:06] Bob Dobbs: when i get in the winner's circle yeah of course yeah yeah i reject the trophy give it to someone else some other dupe who wants to be number one so the yeah and that's b number b number one uh

[1:25:22] Cameron McEwen: relates to uh what we were talking about earlier of the one right yeah number one is is Gutenbergian right that's exactly what uh the Gutenberg Galaxy wants

[1:25:36] Bob Dobbs: And that's what all the mystics are saying,

[1:25:38] Bob Dobbs: you know,

[1:25:39] Bob Dobbs: you're in this world,

[1:25:39] Bob Dobbs: but not of it.

[1:25:40] Bob Dobbs: You know,

[1:25:40] Bob Dobbs: don't get carried away with what you think is going on.

[1:25:44] Bob Dobbs: Always be ready to find out,

[1:25:45] Bob Dobbs: oh,

[1:25:46] Bob Dobbs: I didn't realize that ain't going on.

[1:25:49] Bob Dobbs: And that solves that problem.

[1:25:50] Bob Dobbs: So

[1:25:52] Bob Dobbs: I would say that

[1:25:54] Bob Dobbs: I'm good at doing that,

[1:25:56] Bob Dobbs: though

[1:25:57] Bob Dobbs: I'm also don't want to get too good at it.

[1:26:00] Bob Dobbs: Still got to be a doofus,

[1:26:01] Bob Dobbs: you know.

[1:26:04] Bob Dobbs: You don't want to be number one.

[1:26:09] Cameron McEwen: That's because antics are an essential part of human beings.

[1:26:13] Bob Dobbs: Yeah.

[1:26:14] Bob Dobbs: Yep.

[1:26:16] Bob Dobbs: So we're doing a very good job of summing up by words what's going on.

[1:26:22] Bob Dobbs: But as

[1:26:24] Bob Dobbs: I think ALP said about our recent,

[1:26:26] Bob Dobbs: and we've done some really good recordings recently,

[1:26:28] Bob Dobbs: he said,

[1:26:29] Bob Dobbs: it's obscure,

[1:26:30] Bob Dobbs: Bob.

[1:26:33] Bob Dobbs: We're being obscure.

[1:26:35] Bob Dobbs: No.

[1:26:36] Cameron McEwen: When you said ALP before,

[1:26:38] Cameron McEwen: I thought you were talking about Finnegans Wake.

[1:26:40] Bob Dobbs: No,

[1:26:41] Bob Dobbs: no,

[1:26:41] Bob Dobbs: I'm talking about a person.

[1:26:43] Cameron McEwen: Ah,

[1:26:43] Cameron McEwen: okay.

[1:26:43] Cameron McEwen: So who is it?

[1:26:46] Bob Dobbs: It's Jim.

[1:26:50] Bob Dobbs: Online,

[1:26:50] Bob Dobbs: he's known as Anna Livia Plurabelle.

[1:26:53] Cameron McEwen: Ah,

[1:26:54] Cameron McEwen: okay.

[1:26:54] Cameron McEwen: I didn't know that.

[1:26:55] Bob Dobbs: Yeah,

[1:26:55] Bob Dobbs: that's his name.

[1:26:56] Bob Dobbs: And,

[1:26:56] Bob Dobbs: you know,

[1:26:57] Bob Dobbs: Jim,

[1:26:58] Bob Dobbs: good friend of yours.

[1:26:58] Bob Dobbs: Yeah,

[1:26:59] Bob Dobbs: of course.

[1:27:00] Bob Dobbs: Jim is ALP.

[1:27:03] Bob Dobbs: So he made the first criticism,

[1:27:04] Bob Dobbs: whatever it was,

[1:27:05] Bob Dobbs: at the beginning of this dialogue.

[1:27:07] Bob Dobbs: What was it?

[1:27:09] Bob Dobbs: Oh,

[1:27:09] Bob Dobbs: yeah,

[1:27:09] Bob Dobbs: I'm a full bunt swing.

[1:27:11] Cameron McEwen: Yeah.

[1:27:13] Bob Dobbs: Or full swing bunt,

[1:27:14] Bob Dobbs: whatever the phrase was.

[1:27:15] Bob Dobbs: And now the second point he comes up is he says we're being obscurant,

[1:27:20] Bob Dobbs: obscurant or obscure.

[1:27:22] Cameron McEwen: Uh-huh.

[1:27:25] Bob Dobbs: But so what?

[1:27:29] Bob Dobbs: We are.

[1:27:30] Cameron McEwen: that they the

[1:27:31] Cameron McEwen: The matter at stake is obscure.

[1:27:35] Bob Dobbs: Yes.

[1:27:36] Bob Dobbs: Yeah.

[1:27:36] Cameron McEwen: Right?

[1:27:37] Cameron McEwen: There's no getting around obscurity in human beings.

[1:27:41] Bob Dobbs: Yeah.

[1:27:41] Bob Dobbs: It still needs to demand clarity to the extent that you don't include obscure.

[1:27:47] Bob Dobbs: You must include failure.

[1:27:50] Bob Dobbs: Remember?

[1:27:50] Bob Dobbs: McLuhan talks today about,

[1:27:52] Bob Dobbs: you know,

[1:27:52] Bob Dobbs: there's no success like failure and no failure like success.

[1:27:55] Bob Dobbs: Yeah.

[1:27:56] Cameron McEwen: Yeah.

[1:27:56] Cameron McEwen: Yeah.

[1:27:56] Cameron McEwen: But look at human beings need to sleep.

[1:28:02] Bob Dobbs: Yeah.

[1:28:02] Cameron McEwen: Right?

[1:28:05] Cameron McEwen: They need to,

[1:28:08] Cameron McEwen: they breathe,

[1:28:09] Cameron McEwen: but there's breathing out and there's breathing in,

[1:28:12] Cameron McEwen: and the switch in between them is not either one.

[1:28:17] Cameron McEwen: So there's a kind of obscurity in breathing,

[1:28:20] Cameron McEwen: and then speech is stuttering.

[1:28:22] Cameron McEwen: So there's an obscure border in the stutter that allows language.

[1:28:29] Cameron McEwen: So human beings are...

[1:28:31] Cameron McEwen: not even thinkable without obscurity.

[1:28:34] Bob Dobbs: Right.

[1:28:35] Bob Dobbs: So humans instinctively know that.

[1:28:37] Bob Dobbs: But then they meet somebody who can talk a lot,

[1:28:40] Bob Dobbs: like a professor.

[1:28:42] Bob Dobbs: And they get thrown by that.

[1:28:44] Bob Dobbs: They think,

[1:28:44] Bob Dobbs: oh,

[1:28:45] Bob Dobbs: I can't talk like that.

[1:28:46] Bob Dobbs: I should.

[1:28:46] Bob Dobbs: And they don't know if they learn to talk like the professor.

[1:28:49] Bob Dobbs: They end up back with their intuition they already had,

[1:28:52] Bob Dobbs: which is,

[1:28:53] Bob Dobbs: yeah,

[1:28:53] Bob Dobbs: nothing's complete here.

[1:28:55] Bob Dobbs: I like Chris Schmurde.

[1:28:56] Bob Dobbs: He said the truly religious person is incomplete.

[1:29:00] Bob Dobbs: And most people think if you're being religious,

[1:29:02] Bob Dobbs: you're going to get complete.

[1:29:04] Cameron McEwen: Yeah.

[1:29:07] Bob Dobbs: So that's a good aphorism.

[1:29:11] Bob Dobbs: So it's interesting.

[1:29:16] Bob Dobbs: Alan Watts used to say,

[1:29:17] Bob Dobbs: we mentioned him,

[1:29:19] Bob Dobbs: that anybody who comes to him,

[1:29:20] Bob Dobbs: he says they're a Buddha,

[1:29:22] Bob Dobbs: or ascended,

[1:29:24] Bob Dobbs: some complementary point,

[1:29:25] Bob Dobbs: they're enlightened,

[1:29:26] Bob Dobbs: and pretending they're not.

[1:29:28] Bob Dobbs: And so he looks at everybody and says,

[1:29:32] Bob Dobbs: I'm not being fooled by you pretending you don't get it.

[1:29:38] Bob Dobbs: And that's a good attitude.

[1:29:40] Bob Dobbs: I think

[1:29:41] Bob Dobbs: iON said that great healers,

[1:29:43] Bob Dobbs: they work on people because they consider the person already healthy,

[1:29:47] Bob Dobbs: already healed.

[1:29:49] Bob Dobbs: And that somehow imparts in their method.

[1:29:51] Bob Dobbs: So you have to remember,

[1:29:54] Bob Dobbs: you didn't do it.

[1:29:56] Cameron McEwen: Yes.

[1:29:58] Cameron McEwen: The problem with Watts is the reason that he was saying that is that he would say something like,

[1:30:06] Cameron McEwen: There is only now.

[1:30:08] Bob Dobbs: Yeah.

[1:30:09] Cameron McEwen: And so the now is inherently screwed up,

[1:30:17] Cameron McEwen: problematic,

[1:30:18] Cameron McEwen: and all that sort of stuff.

[1:30:20] Cameron McEwen: So then you get to what you were just talking about.

[1:30:24] Cameron McEwen: The presupposition is wrong.

[1:30:27] Cameron McEwen: This idea that there is only now,

[1:30:31] Cameron McEwen: that's only part of all-at-onceness.

[1:30:35] Cameron McEwen: As McLuhan is trying to think all-at-onceness,

[1:30:37] Cameron McEwen: it's not just now,

[1:30:39] Cameron McEwen: it's all nows,

[1:30:40] Cameron McEwen: plural.

[1:30:41] Bob Dobbs: Right.

[1:30:42] Bob Dobbs: So,

[1:30:45] Bob Dobbs: what was I going to say?

[1:30:49] Bob Dobbs: Oh yeah,

[1:30:50] Bob Dobbs: Watts'

[1:30:50] Bob Dobbs: language in the Western world was new.

[1:30:55] Bob Dobbs: Like he had a book titled,

[1:30:56] Bob Dobbs: This Is It.

[1:31:00] Bob Dobbs: It's interesting,

[1:31:00] Bob Dobbs: you go back and you see...

[1:31:03] Bob Dobbs: Guy who made it into the canon,

[1:31:04] Bob Dobbs: Shakespeare,

[1:31:06] Bob Dobbs: they go through the playwrights or go through the poets,

[1:31:08] Bob Dobbs: go through the philosophers.

[1:31:10] Bob Dobbs: Each one added something.

[1:31:12] Bob Dobbs: And there were what McLuhan said on page 31 of Counterblast,

[1:31:16] Bob Dobbs: I think it is.

[1:31:17] Bob Dobbs: I think that's where he said it.

[1:31:18] Bob Dobbs: They were temporary service environment,

[1:31:22] Bob Dobbs: only useful for a while because they hadn't been heard yet.

[1:31:25] Bob Dobbs: So it's almost like we're,

[1:31:27] Bob Dobbs: over the next million years,

[1:31:29] Bob Dobbs: every possible thought...

[1:31:31] Bob Dobbs: Every possible noise will be created,

[1:31:34] Bob Dobbs: and they'll all be finite.

[1:31:38] Bob Dobbs: So the new person,

[1:31:40] Bob Dobbs: the new creative person,

[1:31:41] Bob Dobbs: comes along and drops what everybody thought was new.

[1:31:44] Bob Dobbs: Now they recognize before anybody else,

[1:31:46] Bob Dobbs: it's not new anymore.

[1:31:48] Bob Dobbs: We've got to make something new here.

[1:31:50] Bob Dobbs: And so they'll come up with a bunch of words or movies or TVs or shows or virtual environments that you'll be sucked into that will appear to be new,

[1:31:58] Bob Dobbs: and that'll be a temporary service environment.

[1:32:00] Bob Dobbs: And then McLuhan said on page 31 that what we have for service environment now is a rapid series of innovations.

[1:32:07] Bob Dobbs: That's the only service environment possible,

[1:32:09] Bob Dobbs: and it's an airsats service environment.

[1:32:12] Bob Dobbs: So he's saying that by the Global Membrane time,

[1:32:15] Bob Dobbs: we didn't have a way to have an service environment.

[1:32:20] Bob Dobbs: So that was a new idea,

[1:32:21] Bob Dobbs: so then he wrote on that point,

[1:32:23] Bob Dobbs: and it appeared to be new.

[1:32:24] Bob Dobbs: He was a temporary service environment,

[1:32:26] Bob Dobbs: with the idea that there was no more service environment.

[1:32:32] Cameron McEwen: Are you with me?

[1:32:35] Cameron McEwen: Yeah,

[1:32:35] Cameron McEwen: I'm with you,

[1:32:35] Cameron McEwen: but I'm trying to think through...

[1:32:39] Bob Dobbs: You're trying to recover from the onslaught of sound.

[1:32:43] Cameron McEwen: No,

[1:32:44] Cameron McEwen: no.

[1:32:45] Bob Dobbs: No,

[1:32:46] Cameron McEwen: I think it's interesting,

[1:32:47] Cameron McEwen: but the way I try to dialogue with you is

[1:32:51] Cameron McEwen: I try to say to myself that

[1:32:55] Cameron McEwen: I need to sort of go back,

[1:32:58] Cameron McEwen: be an echo of what Bob said.

[1:33:02] Cameron McEwen: to mine M-I-N-E,

[1:33:06] Cameron McEwen: to mine what is in there,

[1:33:09] Cameron McEwen: to make sure that

[1:33:11] Cameron McEwen: I understand it.

[1:33:12] Cameron McEwen: And once I understand it,

[1:33:14] Cameron McEwen: then I can say,

[1:33:15] Cameron McEwen: well,

[1:33:15] Cameron McEwen: I agree or I don't agree.

[1:33:19] Bob Dobbs: Are you aware of that quote in page 31 where he says,

[1:33:22] Bob Dobbs: a rapid series of innovations is an airsats and environment?

[1:33:26] Bob Dobbs: Had you thought much about that quote?

[1:33:28] Cameron McEwen: No,

[1:33:29] Cameron McEwen: I haven't.

[1:33:29] Bob Dobbs: Yeah,

[1:33:30] Cameron McEwen: so that's why you have to think about it.

[1:33:32] Cameron McEwen: Yeah,

[1:33:32] Cameron McEwen: exactly.

[1:33:34] Cameron McEwen: Thinking for me means to clutch,

[1:33:37] Cameron McEwen: put in the clutch,

[1:33:39] Cameron McEwen: and to ruminate over.

[1:33:43] Cameron McEwen: Well,

[1:33:43] Bob Dobbs: retrieve the stages of apprehension.

[1:33:45] Bob Dobbs: You're going to want to replay them.

[1:33:47] Cameron McEwen: Correct,

[1:33:48] Cameron McEwen: yeah.

[1:33:49] Bob Dobbs: So that's page 31 of Counterblast.

[1:33:51] Bob Dobbs: Want to see it?

[1:33:54] Bob Dobbs: Okay,

[1:33:54] Bob Dobbs: so we didn't do the third sentence yet.

[1:33:59] Cameron McEwen: That's right.

[1:34:00] Cameron McEwen: That's right.

[1:34:00] Cameron McEwen: And just before

[1:34:03] Cameron McEwen: I read that third sentence,

[1:34:07] Cameron McEwen: let me read once again the passage from The Medium is the Massage.

[1:34:17] Cameron McEwen: So he says,

[1:34:18] Cameron McEwen: ours is a brand new world of all-at-onceness.

[1:34:21] Cameron McEwen: Time has ceased.

[1:34:22] Cameron McEwen: Space has vanished.

[1:34:23] Cameron McEwen: We now live in a Global Village,

[1:34:25] Cameron McEwen: a simultaneous happening.

[1:34:28] Cameron McEwen: We are back in acoustic space.

[1:34:30] Cameron McEwen: We have begun again to structure the primordial feeling,

[1:34:33] Cameron McEwen: the tribal emotions,

[1:34:35] Cameron McEwen: from which a few centuries of literacy have divorced us.

[1:34:41] Cameron McEwen: And by the way,

[1:34:43] Cameron McEwen: earlier,

[1:34:45] Cameron McEwen: that is to say in 1954,

[1:34:48] Cameron McEwen: in Five Sovereign Fingers Taxed the Breath,

[1:34:52] Cameron McEwen: he has that same sentence,

[1:34:53] Cameron McEwen: but with a different total of years.

[1:34:56] Cameron McEwen: He says,

[1:34:58] Cameron McEwen: In 1954,

[1:35:00] Cameron McEwen: as opposed to 1967 for the medium as the massage,

[1:35:05] Cameron McEwen: 54,

[1:35:06] Cameron McEwen: he says,

[1:35:06] Cameron McEwen: we are back in acoustic space.

[1:35:09] Cameron McEwen: We begin again to structure the primordial feelings and emotions from which 3,000 years of literacy have divorced us.

[1:35:19] Cameron McEwen: So in 67,

[1:35:22] Cameron McEwen: he thought,

[1:35:23] Cameron McEwen: well,

[1:35:23] Cameron McEwen: I'll just take it back to Gutenberg in 1954.

[1:35:27] Cameron McEwen: before he took it back to Homer.

[1:35:30] Bob Dobbs: Right,

[1:35:30] Bob Dobbs: and he said,

[1:35:32] Bob Dobbs: he said,

[1:35:35] Bob Dobbs: he split it up.

[1:35:36] Cameron McEwen: Yeah.

[1:35:39] Bob Dobbs: Yeah,

[1:35:39] Bob Dobbs: now what was I going to say about that?

[1:35:41] Bob Dobbs: So,

[1:35:43] Bob Dobbs: oh yeah,

[1:35:44] Bob Dobbs: nobody defines the Global Village as a simultaneous happening.

[1:35:49] Bob Dobbs: You ask them to imagine a Global Village,

[1:35:51] Bob Dobbs: they'll just think of,

[1:35:52] Bob Dobbs: oh,

[1:35:52] Bob Dobbs: everything is visible,

[1:35:54] Bob Dobbs: I can get there,

[1:35:54] Bob Dobbs: fly there real fast,

[1:35:56] Bob Dobbs: I can talk.

[1:35:57] Bob Dobbs: On the phone,

[1:35:58] Bob Dobbs: they have all these maybe gadget images in their mind of the Global Village and how it's supposedly tinier.

[1:36:06] Bob Dobbs: They don't think of it as a simultaneous happening.

[1:36:09] Bob Dobbs: And I've never noticed that before.

[1:36:10] Bob Dobbs: That's just definition of a Global Village.

[1:36:14] Cameron McEwen: The reason that the simultaneous happening does not strike people is that everybody has...

[1:36:26] Cameron McEwen: a very singular notion of time.

[1:36:31] Cameron McEwen: And if you have a singular notion of time,

[1:36:34] Cameron McEwen: then you really can't understand simultaneity.

[1:36:39] Bob Dobbs: Yeah,

[1:36:39] Bob Dobbs: you think that it means,

[1:36:43] Bob Dobbs: Global Village means there's less time to get someplace.

[1:36:47] Bob Dobbs: It's linear.

[1:36:48] Bob Dobbs: Get there real fast.

[1:36:50] Bob Dobbs: Get there the same day.

[1:36:50] Bob Dobbs: Yeah,

[1:36:51] Cameron McEwen: so time is all linear,

[1:36:52] Cameron McEwen: and so the simultaneous happening...

[1:36:55] Cameron McEwen: is conceived of as,

[1:36:57] Cameron McEwen: well,

[1:36:57] Cameron McEwen: everything that's going on now.

[1:37:00] Cameron McEwen: But that's not what

[1:37:04] Cameron McEwen: McLuhan means by all-at-onceness or simultaneity.

[1:37:07] Cameron McEwen: What is going on now is first and foremost what is in the unconscious.

[1:37:13] Bob Dobbs: And you're actually everywhere at once,

[1:37:15] Bob Dobbs: electrically,

[1:37:16] Bob Dobbs: on the phone.

[1:37:17] Cameron McEwen: Yes,

[1:37:17] Cameron McEwen: absolutely.

[1:37:18] Cameron McEwen: And so it's like the unconscious is a piano,

[1:37:22] Cameron McEwen: and everything that's going on are different.

[1:37:25] Cameron McEwen: songs and melodies that are being played on the piano.

[1:37:29] Bob Dobbs: Yeah.

[1:37:29] Cameron McEwen: So people think that the Global Village is all of the songs and melodies,

[1:37:35] Cameron McEwen: but that's not what they are.

[1:37:38] Cameron McEwen: They are the dynamic extension of the piano,

[1:37:43] Cameron McEwen: and the piano is the unconscious.

[1:37:45] Bob Dobbs: Yeah,

[1:37:45] Bob Dobbs: remember how I explained the one and the four?

[1:37:55] Bob Dobbs: One is the Global Membrane,

[1:37:56] Bob Dobbs: four is the different states that people get into.

[1:38:01] Bob Dobbs: Simultaneous happening.

[1:38:02] Bob Dobbs: Simultaneous is the one,

[1:38:05] Bob Dobbs: and the happenings are the four.

[1:38:09] Bob Dobbs: The happenings go through tetrad,

[1:38:12] Bob Dobbs: and I reduce the four to,

[1:38:13] Bob Dobbs: well,

[1:38:14] Bob Dobbs: all of the happenings to four.

[1:38:16] Bob Dobbs: Schizophrenia,

[1:38:16] Bob Dobbs: paranoia,

[1:38:17] Bob Dobbs: hysteria,

[1:38:17] Bob Dobbs: panic,

[1:38:18] Bob Dobbs: and ecstasy,

[1:38:18] Bob Dobbs: which is actually five.

[1:38:20] Bob Dobbs: But that's what one four means.

[1:38:23] Bob Dobbs: simultaneous happening.

[1:38:26] Bob Dobbs: It's global and a village.

[1:38:28] Bob Dobbs: It's two things.

[1:38:29] Bob Dobbs: It's simultaneous and a happening.

[1:38:32] Bob Dobbs: Two different phenomena.

[1:38:34] Bob Dobbs: It's a mosaic.

[1:38:36] Cameron McEwen: Yeah.

[1:38:36] Cameron McEwen: So it's at the end of the day,

[1:38:39] Cameron McEwen: to come to terms with that,

[1:38:41] Cameron McEwen: you need to come to terms with tactility.

[1:38:45] Cameron McEwen: That's what is the bridge.

[1:38:47] Bob Dobbs: And it's not a sense,

[1:38:48] Bob Dobbs: which means it's not any characteristic you put into smell,

[1:38:51] Bob Dobbs: sight,

[1:38:52] Bob Dobbs: Kinesis.

[1:38:53] Bob Dobbs: or hearing or movement.

[1:38:56] Bob Dobbs: And so within sight,

[1:38:57] Bob Dobbs: that means there's no linearity.

[1:39:05] Cameron McEwen: There's no sense.

[1:39:06] Cameron McEwen: Well,

[1:39:07] Cameron McEwen: depending on the take on tactility,

[1:39:15] Cameron McEwen: the senses are,

[1:39:18] Cameron McEwen: each of the senses is very different in meaning.

[1:39:24] Cameron McEwen: So,

[1:39:25] Cameron McEwen: for example,

[1:39:25] Cameron McEwen: when McLuhan says that television is tactile,

[1:39:30] Cameron McEwen: it's always been...

[1:39:34] Cameron McEwen: confusing to people that you have something that appears to be very visual and McLuhan denies that it's visual the same thing when he says that symphonic music is visual again people say well wait a minute that's just a sound right

[1:39:51] Cameron McEwen: and what's the reason for this the reason is that the senses each of the senses is not one thing let's say the Gutenbergian hang-up is to you

[1:40:03] Cameron McEwen: attempt to establish stability.

[1:40:06] Bob Dobbs: Yeah,

[1:40:06] Bob Dobbs: it's all categories.

[1:40:08] Cameron McEwen: Yeah,

[1:40:08] Cameron McEwen: it doesn't work.

[1:40:09] Bob Dobbs: The categories don't work.

[1:40:11] Bob Dobbs: And McLuhan says blatantly,

[1:40:13] Bob Dobbs: there are no subjects anymore.

[1:40:15] Bob Dobbs: They don't work.

[1:40:16] Cameron McEwen: Correct.

[1:40:16] Bob Dobbs: And that's what Finnegans Wake showed.

[1:40:18] Bob Dobbs: It had the interplay of all the subjects.

[1:40:23] Bob Dobbs: So the interplay,

[1:40:28] Bob Dobbs: that's simultaneous happening.

[1:40:31] Bob Dobbs: Interplay.

[1:40:31] Cameron McEwen: Yes.

[1:40:32] Cameron McEwen: Yeah,

[1:40:32] Cameron McEwen: you could say that.

[1:40:33] Cameron McEwen: Yeah,

[1:40:34] Cameron McEwen: so you could say it's common sense.

[1:40:36] Cameron McEwen: You could say it's synesthesia.

[1:40:40] Cameron McEwen: You could say it's many things.

[1:40:42] Cameron McEwen: You could say it's the medium that is the message.

[1:40:44] Bob Dobbs: Yeah,

[1:40:45] Bob Dobbs: and you're in two places at once.

[1:40:48] Bob Dobbs: You're an electron.

[1:40:50] Cameron McEwen: Yeah.

[1:40:52] Bob Dobbs: It's interesting how he takes quantum physics.

[1:40:55] Bob Dobbs: Well,

[1:40:55] Bob Dobbs: those guys are just trying to visualize what can't be visualized anymore.

[1:41:01] Bob Dobbs: So,

[1:41:04] Bob Dobbs: yeah,

[1:41:05] Bob Dobbs: there's a lot of people looking around saying,

[1:41:07] Bob Dobbs: we don't need these institutions as people thought they were.

[1:41:10] Bob Dobbs: That's a big problem.

[1:41:11] Bob Dobbs: That's like potential anarchy.

[1:41:14] Bob Dobbs: But then I'd have to say,

[1:41:15] Bob Dobbs: no,

[1:41:16] Bob Dobbs: it's being resolved.

[1:41:18] Bob Dobbs: By the way,

[1:41:18] Bob Dobbs: people are living in a world where you can't have jobs,

[1:41:21] Bob Dobbs: you can't have money,

[1:41:23] Bob Dobbs: just on welfare,

[1:41:24] Bob Dobbs: and it looks like it's going to get blown up any day.

[1:41:27] Bob Dobbs: That's how we live now,

[1:41:29] Bob Dobbs: on the edge.

[1:41:31] Bob Dobbs: All right.

[1:41:32] Cameron McEwen: We call that living.

[1:41:34] Bob Dobbs: Yeah.

[1:41:36] Bob Dobbs: We got to give up living.

[1:41:39] Bob Dobbs: Give it up a little bit.

[1:41:41] Cameron McEwen: Yeah.

[1:41:42] Cameron McEwen: Well,

[1:41:44] Cameron McEwen: we'll see.

[1:41:45] Cameron McEwen: All of the institutions that are under attack are fighting back.

[1:41:51] Cameron McEwen: That's what's going on right now.

[1:41:53] Bob Dobbs: They're the animals.

[1:41:55] Cameron McEwen: Yeah.

[1:41:56] Bob Dobbs: Page 190.

[1:41:57] Bob Dobbs: War and Peace.

[1:41:59] Bob Dobbs: The animals have taken over the role of first nature,

[1:42:05] Bob Dobbs: the old animals.

[1:42:06] Bob Dobbs: The new animals are everything that we supposedly value.

[1:42:11] Bob Dobbs: Culture,

[1:42:11] Bob Dobbs: civilization,

[1:42:13] Bob Dobbs: order,

[1:42:14] Bob Dobbs: decent society,

[1:42:17] Bob Dobbs: progress.

[1:42:18] Bob Dobbs: Make sure your kids get to college or get somewhere similar.

[1:42:23] Bob Dobbs: All that is not there anymore.

[1:42:28] Bob Dobbs: None of it.

[1:42:30] Bob Dobbs: You know,

[1:42:31] Bob Dobbs: and you know what a popular expression of that?

[1:42:32] Bob Dobbs: You see it in commentary.

[1:42:34] Bob Dobbs: Every damn profession is a sham now.

[1:42:37] Bob Dobbs: There's nothing but that.

[1:42:38] Bob Dobbs: Chet was saying this on the show today.

[1:42:40] Bob Dobbs: There's not one,

[1:42:41] Bob Dobbs: quote,

[1:42:42] Bob Dobbs: honest profession anymore.

[1:42:44] Bob Dobbs: They're all struggling and they have to make up crap more and more to be viable or to pretend that you need to have something to do,

[1:42:54] Bob Dobbs: to be done,

[1:42:54] Bob Dobbs: to make money.

[1:42:57] Bob Dobbs: So more and more of the world's confronting.

[1:42:59] Bob Dobbs: that they can't have money anymore.

[1:43:01] Bob Dobbs: What's money?

[1:43:01] Bob Dobbs: It's time.

[1:43:02] Bob Dobbs: Time's linear.

[1:43:03] Bob Dobbs: Money's linear.

[1:43:04] Bob Dobbs: And you have technologies that are offering everything for free.

[1:43:12] Bob Dobbs: Like,

[1:43:12] Bob Dobbs: you know,

[1:43:12] Bob Dobbs: what does Facebook do?

[1:43:13] Bob Dobbs: They make wealth out of grabbing what's free,

[1:43:17] Bob Dobbs: your personal data,

[1:43:19] Bob Dobbs: and then giving it to other institutions who agree,

[1:43:21] Bob Dobbs: yeah,

[1:43:21] Bob Dobbs: this is very valuable.

[1:43:22] Bob Dobbs: We need to know about everybody.

[1:43:23] Bob Dobbs: We need to make profiles and be able to target everybody.

[1:43:27] Bob Dobbs: That's bullshit.

[1:43:28] Bob Dobbs: But that's what runs the economy now.

[1:43:30] Bob Dobbs: That's the knowledge that supposedly Silicon Valley dominates,

[1:43:35] Bob Dobbs: right?

[1:43:35] Bob Dobbs: The gathering of pattern recognition from trivial details about chemical bodies and what environments they consume.

[1:43:45] Bob Dobbs: It's almost a conspiracy to say,

[1:43:47] Bob Dobbs: well,

[1:43:47] Bob Dobbs: okay,

[1:43:48] Bob Dobbs: we are here.

[1:43:49] Bob Dobbs: Everything can be free.

[1:43:51] Bob Dobbs: We are just an environment that's free.

[1:43:54] Bob Dobbs: How are we going to fit ourselves back into the Western linear tradition of property and money and identity?

[1:44:02] Bob Dobbs: Okay,

[1:44:02] Bob Dobbs: well,

[1:44:02] Bob Dobbs: let's pretend that what people post on Facebook,

[1:44:07] Bob Dobbs: and back then it was MySpace,

[1:44:09] Bob Dobbs: you know,

[1:44:10] Bob Dobbs: way back there in 2002,

[1:44:12] Bob Dobbs: and we'll pretend we're trading that.

[1:44:15] Bob Dobbs: And they agreed,

[1:44:16] Bob Dobbs: okay,

[1:44:16] Bob Dobbs: let's pretend that's the economy.

[1:44:19] Bob Dobbs: And every other profession had to line up with that and gradually adapt to it and accept it as the economy.

[1:44:25] Bob Dobbs: And then they turned it into a problem so that Congress would have a job to police these guys.

[1:44:31] Bob Dobbs: But they couldn't police them because nobody

[1:44:34] Bob Dobbs: Zuckerberg says,

[1:44:34] Bob Dobbs: I don't know what really goes on in my company.

[1:44:37] Bob Dobbs: I don't understand this thing completely.

[1:44:38] Bob Dobbs: And the congressman says,

[1:44:39] Bob Dobbs: yeah,

[1:44:39] Bob Dobbs: you're not explaining very well.

[1:44:40] Bob Dobbs: We don't understand.

[1:44:42] Bob Dobbs: There's a great big lack of understanding of

[1:44:45] Bob Dobbs: The ability to be articulate in the old-fashioned way,

[1:44:48] Bob Dobbs: Gutenberg way,

[1:44:49] Bob Dobbs: and therefore you get two phases of the president.

[1:44:52] Bob Dobbs: The leader,

[1:44:53] Bob Dobbs: the one.

[1:44:53] Bob Dobbs: First guy couldn't finish his sentence,

[1:44:55] Bob Dobbs: second guy couldn't finish his syllables.

[1:44:57] Bob Dobbs: And that's where we are today.

[1:45:00] Bob Dobbs: Leadership,

[1:45:01] Bob Dobbs: where nobody could agree that anything has been substantially said.

[1:45:07] Bob Dobbs: And the figure of that is Ukraine,

[1:45:09] Bob Dobbs: right?

[1:45:10] Bob Dobbs: Run by a comedian who is pretending he's leading something.

[1:45:14] Bob Dobbs: And we need to give money to some place so it can be recycled back to us,

[1:45:17] Bob Dobbs: so we give it to them.

[1:45:19] Bob Dobbs: Boy,

[1:45:20] Bob Dobbs: there's lots of fodder for comedy there.

[1:45:28] Bob Dobbs: Are you there?

[1:45:30] Bob Dobbs: Did you disconnect?

[1:45:33] Bob Dobbs: I think you disconnected,

[1:45:34] Bob Dobbs: so we'll leave that monologue in there,

[1:45:39] Bob Dobbs: and I will reconnect with...

[1:45:42] Bob Dobbs: Just a minute,

[1:45:43] Bob Dobbs: I'm getting an echo there.

[1:45:45] Bob Dobbs: Yeah,

[1:45:45] Bob Dobbs: I think we've disconnected.

[1:45:46] Bob Dobbs: So let me reconnect with,

[1:45:51] Bob Dobbs: who was I talking to?

[1:45:55] Bob Dobbs: Cameron,

[1:45:55] Bob Dobbs: right?

[1:45:56] Bob Dobbs: Okay.

[1:47:04] Bob Dobbs: Let me see if there's an echo.

[1:47:05] Bob Dobbs: Hello,

[1:47:07] Cameron McEwen: hello.

[1:47:09] Bob Dobbs: Yeah,

[1:47:10] Bob Dobbs: it's coming through that one.

[1:47:11] Bob Dobbs: So let's assume,

[1:47:12] Bob Dobbs: so what I did,

[1:47:13] Bob Dobbs: I was going on and did a little bit of a rant,

[1:47:17] Bob Dobbs: and I didn't know that no one was listening,

[1:47:20] Bob Dobbs: and you didn't know why I wasn't hearing you.

[1:47:23] Bob Dobbs: Correct.

[1:47:24] Bob Dobbs: So we went into it.

[1:47:24] Cameron McEwen: I heard you until the end.

[1:47:27] Cameron McEwen: I heard you go right down to the last.

[1:47:31] Bob Dobbs: Did you hear me say,

[1:47:32] Bob Dobbs: so who was I talking to?

[1:47:36] Cameron McEwen: Yes.

[1:47:36] Cameron McEwen: And then I heard you say after a while,

[1:47:38] Cameron McEwen: it must have been Cameron.

[1:47:40] Bob Dobbs: Yeah,

[1:47:40] Bob Dobbs: yeah.

[1:47:40] Bob Dobbs: I bet you remembered your name.

[1:47:42] Bob Dobbs: I got so involved in my own language and lost my detachment.

[1:47:47] Bob Dobbs: Okay,

[1:47:48] Bob Dobbs: so I think we're back in and all that got recorded.

[1:47:51] Cameron McEwen: Okay,

[1:47:52] Cameron McEwen: well,

[1:47:52] Cameron McEwen: we'll see.

[1:47:53] Cameron McEwen: So let's see.

[1:47:55] Bob Dobbs: We've been going almost two hours,

[1:47:56] Bob Dobbs: so we still have time,

[1:47:57] Bob Dobbs: but let's do the third sentence.

[1:48:00] Bob Dobbs: What were you telling me?

[1:48:03] Cameron McEwen: I was telling you that what you were talking about related to McLuhan first in 1950 and then in 1960.

[1:48:13] Cameron McEwen: So in 1950,

[1:48:15] Cameron McEwen: he was already talking about consumers as producers.

[1:48:19] Bob Dobbs: Yeah.

[1:48:20] Cameron McEwen: Right.

[1:48:20] Cameron McEwen: And you were talking about how

[1:48:22] Cameron McEwen: MySpace got used to produce wealth out of...

[1:48:34] Cameron McEwen: what the consumers were doing with it.

[1:48:37] Cameron McEwen: And then later you were talking about the sham that has taken over the world where there's no position that's not sham.

[1:48:46] Cameron McEwen: And that's McLuhan's global theater.

[1:48:48] Cameron McEwen: Yeah.

[1:48:49] Cameron McEwen: All there is is roles.

[1:48:51] Cameron McEwen: Right.

[1:48:51] Cameron McEwen: So somebody says,

[1:48:52] Cameron McEwen: I'm the president.

[1:48:53] Cameron McEwen: Somebody else says,

[1:48:54] Cameron McEwen: I'm the secretary of state.

[1:48:56] Cameron McEwen: And they go about their business.

[1:48:59] Bob Dobbs: Yeah.

[1:48:59] Bob Dobbs: So that's 1960.

[1:49:01] Bob Dobbs: In 1950,

[1:49:03] Bob Dobbs: he had different terms.

[1:49:05] Bob Dobbs: Producer.

[1:49:06] Bob Dobbs: I think he said.

[1:49:08] Bob Dobbs: And then Roles.

[1:49:08] Cameron McEwen: The producer as,

[1:49:11] Cameron McEwen: no,

[1:49:11] Cameron McEwen: the consumer as producer.

[1:49:13] Bob Dobbs: Yeah.

[1:49:13] Cameron McEwen: So he already saw in 1950 that roles were sort of the new information environment.

[1:49:23] Bob Dobbs: And then he called it Roles

[1:49:25] Bob Dobbs: 10 years later.

[1:49:26] Bob Dobbs: He started emphasizing that word.

[1:49:29] Bob Dobbs: Okay,

[1:49:30] Bob Dobbs: so what,

[1:49:32] Bob Dobbs: if I was talking and you couldn't hear me.

[1:49:35] Bob Dobbs: and you were talking i could hear you you couldn't hear me okay so were you recorded who knows yeah i don't know what happened there and it may have stopped the recording may have stopped even though when one other phone

[1:49:52] Bob Dobbs: which we have hooked in here is going that means it should be still recording uh but i don't know so yeah uh let's do the third sentence and it may or may not be recorded okay um

[1:50:05] Cameron McEwen: So just remember from the last part that I was talking about from the messages,

[1:50:18] Cameron McEwen: the massage,

[1:50:19] Cameron McEwen: he's talking about the new world of all-at-onceness,

[1:50:23] Cameron McEwen: a simultaneous happening.

[1:50:25] Cameron McEwen: And he's talking about we're trying to structure the primordial feeling,

[1:50:30] Cameron McEwen: the tribal emotions.

[1:50:32] Cameron McEwen: So if we go to the third...

[1:50:34] Cameron McEwen: sentence,

[1:50:35] Cameron McEwen: he says,

[1:50:37] Cameron McEwen: this in turn,

[1:50:38] Cameron McEwen: the fact that the formative process of consciousness in the entire content of the unconscious,

[1:50:46] Cameron McEwen: he says,

[1:50:46] Cameron McEwen: this in turn implies a close liaison between private and corporate awareness.

[1:50:55] Cameron McEwen: So the fact that private awareness,

[1:51:01] Cameron McEwen: that is to say pre-tribal awareness,

[1:51:04] Cameron McEwen: goes together with corporate awareness relates back to the formative process of consciousness.

[1:51:11] Cameron McEwen: Well,

[1:51:12] Cameron McEwen: why?

[1:51:13] Cameron McEwen: Because in order to form consciousness,

[1:51:18] Cameron McEwen: you have to go into the unconscious,

[1:51:22] Cameron McEwen: which is to say the corporate,

[1:51:24] Cameron McEwen: and you have to exercise the private,

[1:51:27] Cameron McEwen: the pre-tribal awareness,

[1:51:29] Cameron McEwen: to select out of that and to activate out of that.

[1:51:35] Bob Dobbs: Correct.

[1:51:35] Cameron McEwen: So are you there?

[1:51:37] Cameron McEwen: Yeah,

[1:51:37] Cameron McEwen: you're there.

[1:51:39] Bob Dobbs: Though which exerts the most effect on the other may depend entirely on the degree of awareness achieved.

[1:51:45] Cameron McEwen: Correct.

[1:51:46] Cameron McEwen: So there he's saying that the genesis of history depends upon the kind of awareness that we have on that process.

[1:51:56] Cameron McEwen: So the whole Gutenberg Galaxy is a kind of suspension of that process.

[1:52:03] Cameron McEwen: at the...

[1:52:04] Cameron McEwen: the Gutenberg Galaxy,

[1:52:06] Cameron McEwen: in order to attain the efficiencies that it did,

[1:52:09] Cameron McEwen: had to abstract from the fact that the pre-tribal awareness and the collective awareness in the unconscious are tremendously vague

[1:52:24] Cameron McEwen: because they're so large.

[1:52:27] Cameron McEwen: They're amorphous because they're sort of before the form.

[1:52:33] Cameron McEwen: That is to say,

[1:52:35] Cameron McEwen: before the morphe.

[1:52:37] Cameron McEwen: So these things are amorphous.

[1:52:39] Cameron McEwen: In the Gutenberg Galaxy,

[1:52:41] Cameron McEwen: they become formed,

[1:52:43] Cameron McEwen: and therefore very efficient,

[1:52:46] Cameron McEwen: very scientific in one sense,

[1:52:49] Cameron McEwen: and so all sorts of progress can be made.

[1:52:53] Cameron McEwen: So that's one kind of awareness achieved.

[1:52:57] Cameron McEwen: But there are other kinds of possible awareness,

[1:53:00] Cameron McEwen: and that's what

[1:53:01] Cameron McEwen: McLuhan wants to...

[1:53:03] Cameron McEwen: sort of ignite as a new degree of awareness on what's going on between private and corporate awareness.

[1:53:12] Bob Dobbs: Yeah.

[1:53:13] Bob Dobbs: And then it gets tricky where he doesn't know where the medium differs from the message.

[1:53:18] Bob Dobbs: And that's what he's saying.

[1:53:22] Bob Dobbs: You don't know which is affecting which.

[1:53:26] Cameron McEwen: Yes.

[1:53:27] Bob Dobbs: And then the degree of awareness achieved,

[1:53:29] Bob Dobbs: that would be the degree of proportions about the factors that are making you think one way or the other.

[1:53:35] Bob Dobbs: And you delineate the figure ground of the proportions of categories.

[1:53:43] Bob Dobbs: And to the degree you can complexify it and talk it in a complicated way,

[1:53:48] Bob Dobbs: you've got awareness.

[1:53:50] Cameron McEwen: Correct.

[1:53:50] Cameron McEwen: So one of the things,

[1:53:54] Cameron McEwen: to use the language you just used,

[1:53:56] Cameron McEwen: one of the things he's talking about here is that there is always private and corporate awareness.

[1:54:02] Cameron McEwen: So you could say there's always figure in ground.

[1:54:05] Bob Dobbs: Yeah.

[1:54:06] Cameron McEwen: But one of the possibilities in ground is.

[1:54:11] Cameron McEwen: that ground be forgotten.

[1:54:14] Cameron McEwen: That's a perennial possibility for humans is to ignore or deny the ground.

[1:54:22] Cameron McEwen: So the whole of Gutenberg Galaxy gets generated out of that possibility of ignoring,

[1:54:32] Cameron McEwen: that possibility of creating an efficiency by forgetting about the ground.

[1:54:38] Bob Dobbs: So that was the experiment.

[1:54:39] Bob Dobbs: That was an attempt to live in that kind of exaggerated unawareness.

[1:54:45] Cameron McEwen: Yes.

[1:54:46] Cameron McEwen: So in the sense that you're using,

[1:54:48] Cameron McEwen: all human activity from the beginning to the end is an experiment or a probe.

[1:54:54] Cameron McEwen: And

[1:54:55] Cameron McEwen: I think you often talk about probes as being the essence of human activity.

[1:55:02] Bob Dobbs: Yeah.

[1:55:03] Bob Dobbs: We're always,

[1:55:04] Bob Dobbs: what do they call it?

[1:55:05] Bob Dobbs: They say...

[1:55:08] Bob Dobbs: The present dilemma in Ukraine and between the powers is existential.

[1:55:14] Bob Dobbs: It's the existential part of living.

[1:55:17] Bob Dobbs: You're probing all the time.

[1:55:19] Bob Dobbs: You're inventing,

[1:55:20] Bob Dobbs: you're creating.

[1:55:22] Cameron McEwen: Yeah.

[1:55:23] Cameron McEwen: The word existential is used in a different way in politics and war than it is in philosophy.

[1:55:33] Bob Dobbs: Yeah.

[1:55:33] Cameron McEwen: So in...

[1:55:36] Cameron McEwen: In terms of Ukraine,

[1:55:39] Cameron McEwen: the existential danger for Russia,

[1:55:41] Cameron McEwen: for Ukraine,

[1:55:42] Cameron McEwen: for NATO,

[1:55:43] Cameron McEwen: for everybody,

[1:55:45] Cameron McEwen: is that the war could cause them to cease to exist.

[1:55:51] Cameron McEwen: That's the existential danger.

[1:55:55] Bob Dobbs: Yeah,

[1:55:55] Bob Dobbs: there comes a war that wipes everybody out.

[1:55:58] Cameron McEwen: So it could just wipe out one or the other.

[1:56:04] Bob Dobbs: Yeah,

[1:56:04] Bob Dobbs: now something has shifted.

[1:56:06] Bob Dobbs: so that people can talk about nuclear war as an option.

[1:56:11] Bob Dobbs: Never was that a really discussed before.

[1:56:13] Bob Dobbs: Now,

[1:56:14] Bob Dobbs: and this shocks a lot of people,

[1:56:16] Bob Dobbs: they'll say what I'm saying.

[1:56:17] Bob Dobbs: How can they be talking about nuclear wars?

[1:56:19] Bob Dobbs: Maybe something we could do,

[1:56:21] Bob Dobbs: you know?

[1:56:22] Bob Dobbs: So that means the action has shifted to somewhere else.

[1:56:25] Bob Dobbs: Because we're not afraid of that.

[1:56:29] Bob Dobbs: We're afraid of something else.

[1:56:30] Bob Dobbs: But we aren't pointing it out.

[1:56:33] Bob Dobbs: And what we're afraid of is...

[1:56:36] Bob Dobbs: Nothing more can be determined to have arrived at anything because every...

[1:56:40] Bob Dobbs: or form of expression fails to communicate.

[1:56:43] Bob Dobbs: And so we want to get something that establishes something has happened,

[1:56:50] Bob Dobbs: and nuclear war is what we got,

[1:56:51] Bob Dobbs: because that's big enough to cover how big the world is today,

[1:56:55] Bob Dobbs: or how imploded it is,

[1:56:56] Bob Dobbs: or how tiny and merged it is.

[1:56:59] Bob Dobbs: Those factors make the acceptance of nuclear war,

[1:57:03] Bob Dobbs: and as Tucker Carlson's always saying,

[1:57:07] Bob Dobbs: there's no peace process.

[1:57:08] Bob Dobbs: Nobody's faking an attempt to have a peace process.

[1:57:11] Bob Dobbs: They always did that before,

[1:57:12] Bob Dobbs: apparently,

[1:57:13] Bob Dobbs: and now they're saying they don't.

[1:57:15] Bob Dobbs: So you have to be detached to discuss the public panic about nuclear war being discussed as an option.

[1:57:25] Bob Dobbs: If you have the comprehensive awareness,

[1:57:29] Bob Dobbs: you can talk about it like I'm just doing right now,

[1:57:32] Bob Dobbs: which would probably say people say,

[1:57:33] Bob Dobbs: that's nuts.

[1:57:34] Bob Dobbs: He's over-talking something that's a terrible threat.

[1:57:38] Bob Dobbs: They want to keep it back to a threat.

[1:57:40] Bob Dobbs: But I'm saying,

[1:57:40] Bob Dobbs: no,

[1:57:40] Bob Dobbs: there's something different that is the bigger threat,

[1:57:43] Bob Dobbs: where we've actually gotten that we can't accept.

[1:57:46] Bob Dobbs: We can't accept it.

[1:57:49] Cameron McEwen: I couldn't hear you,

[1:57:50] Cameron McEwen: and I don't know if you could hear me for the last minute.

[1:57:53] Bob Dobbs: It happened again.

[1:57:55] Bob Dobbs: Yeah,

[1:57:57] Bob Dobbs: yeah.

[1:57:58] Cameron McEwen: Well,

[1:57:58] Cameron McEwen: we might as well keep on going because we're either still recording or we're not.

[1:58:04] Bob Dobbs: Well,

[1:58:04] Bob Dobbs: we should come to an ending point here.

[1:58:07] Cameron McEwen: Okay.

[1:58:08] Cameron McEwen: So let me just say,

[1:58:09] Cameron McEwen: let me just say,

[1:58:11] Cameron McEwen: in regards to people saying we shouldn't be afraid of nuclear war and stuff,

[1:58:16] Cameron McEwen: that's a new kind of advertising.

[1:58:19] Cameron McEwen: What that tells us is that the entire scene in Ukraine,

[1:58:26] Cameron McEwen: this war that's killing hundreds of thousands of people and destroying all of eastern Ukraine,

[1:58:32] Cameron McEwen: that this isn't some kind of accident.

[1:58:35] Cameron McEwen: This isn't something that happened out of the blue.

[1:58:39] Cameron McEwen: In the same way that nuclear war may be an option,

[1:58:45] Cameron McEwen: according to the latest advertising in the Wall Street Journal or the Washington Post or something like this,

[1:58:57] Cameron McEwen: for the same reason that people want us to think that maybe we should turn to nuclear weapons,

[1:59:05] Cameron McEwen: Those same people.

[1:59:09] Cameron McEwen: are engaged in furthering the war in Ukraine,

[1:59:13] Cameron McEwen: rather than negotiation,

[1:59:14] Cameron McEwen: let's say,

[1:59:16] Cameron McEwen: out of a sense of desperation.

[1:59:19] Cameron McEwen: So the deep state in some way has reached such a state of desperation that one of the weapons they want to now deploy is

[1:59:35] Cameron McEwen: to

[1:59:36] Cameron McEwen: propagate the notion through media advertising that maybe nuclear weapons would be a good idea.

[1:59:45] Cameron McEwen: It's total insanity,

[1:59:47] Cameron McEwen: but it tells us that the deep state feels that it is going to need to show its face because of its desperation.

[2:00:03] Cameron McEwen: Yeah,

[2:00:03] Cameron McEwen: exactly.

[2:00:04] Cameron McEwen: We don't know.

[2:00:05] Cameron McEwen: We don't know why it's so desperate.

[2:00:08] Cameron McEwen: We don't know how it's become obsolescent,

[2:00:11] Cameron McEwen: even in its own mind.

[2:00:13] Cameron McEwen: All we know is that that has happened.

[2:00:16] Bob Dobbs: Yeah,

[2:00:16] Bob Dobbs: and I am attempting to explain what it is they're frightened of.

[2:00:20] Bob Dobbs: Their function,

[2:00:21] Bob Dobbs: and every other anthropomorphic function,

[2:00:23] Bob Dobbs: is obsolete now,

[2:00:25] Bob Dobbs: because we've come to a kind of completion.

[2:00:28] Bob Dobbs: Yeah,

[2:00:30] Cameron McEwen: that's the sham.

[2:00:32] Bob Dobbs: That's the sham.

[2:00:33] Bob Dobbs: You mean...

[2:00:36] Bob Dobbs: uh well that's what they can't accept how every nobody nobody has yeah their profession is obsolete yeah you know burton uh George Bernard Shaw said every profession is a conspiracy against the layman well that's been exaggerated with broke spirals of endless wealth in every possible institution and new institutions there's been a great creativity in making uh professions and roles for people but it's flipped

[2:01:04] Bob Dobbs: Now there's no role for anybody to figure out.

[2:01:07] Bob Dobbs: Well,

[2:01:07] Bob Dobbs: the kids can't find a role to fit themselves into.

[2:01:10] Bob Dobbs: They refuse to participate in whatever roles are being offered.

[2:01:15] Bob Dobbs: They see,

[2:01:16] Bob Dobbs: no,

[2:01:16] Bob Dobbs: that's not the issue.

[2:01:18] Bob Dobbs: Because the amazing environment of the matrix,

[2:01:23] Bob Dobbs: the Internet,

[2:01:24] Bob Dobbs: social media,

[2:01:26] Bob Dobbs: is perfect communication,

[2:01:28] Bob Dobbs: which we began with.

[2:01:29] Bob Dobbs: It is this paragraph that we're analyzing manifested.

[2:01:34] Bob Dobbs: We are both detached and involved to the most maximum amount.

[2:01:38] Bob Dobbs: It's like saying,

[2:01:39] Bob Dobbs: well,

[2:01:39] Bob Dobbs: that star is 10 billion miles away.

[2:01:41] Bob Dobbs: Oh,

[2:01:42] Bob Dobbs: no,

[2:01:42] Bob Dobbs: no,

[2:01:42] Bob Dobbs: no,

[2:01:42] Bob Dobbs: it's 40 billion.

[2:01:43] Bob Dobbs: What's the difference?

[2:01:44] Bob Dobbs: You don't know the difference.

[2:01:47] Bob Dobbs: We have extended ourselves to a kind of completion that we can't figure out how to fit our identity to.

[2:01:56] Cameron McEwen: Correct.

[2:01:57] Cameron McEwen: Absolutely,

[2:01:57] Cameron McEwen: yeah.

[2:01:58] Cameron McEwen: So it's like fame.

[2:02:01] Cameron McEwen: Once fame...

[2:02:02] Cameron McEwen: becomes something that you can manufacture,

[2:02:05] Cameron McEwen: then it's over.

[2:02:07] Cameron McEwen: There's no use to having fame.

[2:02:09] Cameron McEwen: And money is like that now.

[2:02:12] Cameron McEwen: You can create a trillion dollars or something because you can catch a ball or because you can kiss somebody on a screen or something.

[2:02:22] Cameron McEwen: And you get all that money and then you have nothing to do with it.

[2:02:27] Cameron McEwen: I mean,

[2:02:28] Cameron McEwen: it's useless because it's manufactured.

[2:02:30] Bob Dobbs: Yeah.

[2:02:31] Bob Dobbs: So.

[2:02:32] Bob Dobbs: Most so young kids,

[2:02:35] Bob Dobbs: they want to become famous,

[2:02:36] Bob Dobbs: but they make strategies that they aren't bothered by it.

[2:02:39] Bob Dobbs: They don't lose their private identity.

[2:02:41] Bob Dobbs: They don't want to let anybody know where they are.

[2:02:43] Bob Dobbs: There's so many disservices of being famous that you lose your ability to have a relaxed,

[2:02:49] Bob Dobbs: anonymous existence for every now and then.

[2:02:53] Bob Dobbs: So they don't want to be traditionally famous.

[2:02:56] Bob Dobbs: And I was just looking at a bunch of people,

[2:02:59] Bob Dobbs: a list of billionaires.

[2:03:01] Bob Dobbs: And a lot of the pictures,

[2:03:02] Bob Dobbs: they're walking around in very casual clothes.

[2:03:06] Bob Dobbs: They're not like the 19th century with Victorian highbrow costumes on.

[2:03:13] Bob Dobbs: They're totally indifferent.

[2:03:14] Bob Dobbs: You see,

[2:03:15] Bob Dobbs: I really thought these people have nothing to buy.

[2:03:18] Bob Dobbs: They got too much money.

[2:03:19] Bob Dobbs: It's meaningless.

[2:03:21] Bob Dobbs: And so they walk around looking for simple little things that don't cost anything to do.

[2:03:27] Bob Dobbs: Yeah,

[2:03:28] Bob Dobbs: so there's...

[2:03:30] Bob Dobbs: So McLuhan once said that obsolescence is,

[2:03:32] Bob Dobbs: no,

[2:03:32] Bob Dobbs: he said everything's becoming obsolescence,

[2:03:34] Bob Dobbs: but then he said obsolescence is obsolete.

[2:03:37] Bob Dobbs: So I think the last 40 years,

[2:03:39] Bob Dobbs: the digital era was,

[2:03:42] Bob Dobbs: I think Barrington Nevitt used to say,

[2:03:43] Bob Dobbs: you know,

[2:03:43] Bob Dobbs: we did what we never needed to do.

[2:03:45] Bob Dobbs: We didn't have to have a digital era.

[2:03:47] Bob Dobbs: If we had Eric McLuhan in charge at the United Nations,

[2:03:49] Bob Dobbs: we wouldn't have had it.

[2:03:52] Bob Dobbs: But we did have it,

[2:03:53] Bob Dobbs: and it showed everything being useless.

[2:03:56] Bob Dobbs: It was a squaring of the process and a needless...

[2:04:01] Bob Dobbs: sham of achievement in every profession,

[2:04:03] Bob Dobbs: where in actuality every profession is failing.

[2:04:08] Bob Dobbs: Where's law?

[2:04:09] Bob Dobbs: Where are the cops?

[2:04:11] Bob Dobbs: You know,

[2:04:11] Bob Dobbs: they're not even around,

[2:04:12] Bob Dobbs: at least in the States.

[2:04:14] Bob Dobbs: Oh,

[2:04:15] Cameron McEwen: everywhere.

[2:04:16] Cameron McEwen: Everyone.

[2:04:17] Bob Dobbs: Right.

[2:04:19] Cameron McEwen: It's an unmasking of the Gutenberg Galaxy.

[2:04:22] Bob Dobbs: And the electric galaxy in some way.

[2:04:27] Cameron McEwen: Well,

[2:04:27] Cameron McEwen: the...

[2:04:28] Cameron McEwen: The electric galaxy has sort of two possible faces.

[2:04:33] Cameron McEwen: It's either the loss of everything or the gain of everything.

[2:04:36] Cameron McEwen: It's like McLuhan at the end of the

[2:04:41] Cameron McEwen: Christian humanism lecture in 54.

[2:04:44] Cameron McEwen: He says it's either the top of Mount Purgatory or the abyss.

[2:04:49] Bob Dobbs: And it seems that you're left to figure it out for yourself because none of the tribal means of...

[2:04:57] Bob Dobbs: giving you comfort of the end what the conclusion is who won works anymore we're back to pre-tribal awareness this is the real McLuhan point we're coming out the new point what we retrieved was

[2:05:13] Cameron McEwen: pre-tribal awareness or as Kroker says post-information society yeah but it's one thing to be back there it's another thing to understand where you are so and how you got there

[2:05:27] Bob Dobbs: And that's why I go through the stages,

[2:05:29] Bob Dobbs: my charts of stages of apprehension.

[2:05:31] Bob Dobbs: And I say,

[2:05:32] Bob Dobbs: okay,

[2:05:33] Bob Dobbs: you're looking at it.

[2:05:33] Bob Dobbs: This is only linear.

[2:05:35] Bob Dobbs: So it's a distortion of it.

[2:05:36] Bob Dobbs: But I've got to use linearity with you because you don't know the non-linearity yet.

[2:05:44] Bob Dobbs: So,

[2:05:44] Bob Dobbs: yeah,

[2:05:44] Bob Dobbs: that's what I've been explaining.

[2:05:46] Bob Dobbs: You know,

[2:05:47] Bob Dobbs: in McLuhan,

[2:05:48] Bob Dobbs: Hot and Cool,

[2:05:49] Bob Dobbs: I think,

[2:05:49] Bob Dobbs: and no,

[2:05:49] Bob Dobbs: Pro and Con,

[2:05:50] Bob Dobbs: one of the essays is,

[2:05:51] Bob Dobbs: Which Way Did the Second Coming Went?

[2:05:54] Bob Dobbs: I always liked that title.

[2:05:58] Bob Dobbs: I have the second coming in an earlier version of my chart,

[2:06:01] Bob Dobbs: a smaller one.

[2:06:02] Bob Dobbs: And

[2:06:03] Bob Dobbs: I say in the 70s we arrived at the second coming collectively.

[2:06:07] Bob Dobbs: And I was using the Evergreens definition.

[2:06:10] Bob Dobbs: I asked them,

[2:06:10] Bob Dobbs: what do you say the second coming is?

[2:06:13] Bob Dobbs: And they didn't give a Christian response.

[2:06:15] Bob Dobbs: They said it's a situation of perpetual change.

[2:06:20] Bob Dobbs: So I knew we were into perpetual change by the 70s,

[2:06:22] Bob Dobbs: and it's just been intensified.

[2:06:26] Bob Dobbs: took on a life of its own and humans are surplus flesh,

[2:06:29] Bob Dobbs: they're sitting on the sidelines,

[2:06:30] Bob Dobbs: watching the perfect environment of endless change.

[2:06:34] Cameron McEwen: Yep,

[2:06:35] Cameron McEwen: yep.

[2:06:35] Cameron McEwen: So

[2:06:37] Cameron McEwen: I just want to add a footnote to what you were saying earlier.

[2:06:42] Cameron McEwen: I forget where,

[2:06:43] Cameron McEwen: but

[2:06:44] Cameron McEwen: McLuhan says,

[2:06:46] Cameron McEwen: Einstein said that

[2:06:50] Cameron McEwen: E equals MC squared.

[2:06:52] Cameron McEwen: And then he says,

[2:06:53] Cameron McEwen: but what happened to the first C?

[2:06:55] Bob Dobbs: Is that right?

[2:06:57] Bob Dobbs: Where does he say that?

[2:06:58] Cameron McEwen: I don't know.

[2:06:59] Cameron McEwen: I'll find it for you.

[2:07:00] Bob Dobbs: That's pretty good.

[2:07:02] Cameron McEwen: That's good,

[2:07:02] Cameron McEwen: yeah.

[2:07:03] Bob Dobbs: Anyone,

[2:07:04] Bob Dobbs: C is the speed of light?

[2:07:06] Cameron McEwen: Yes.

[2:07:07] Bob Dobbs: Yeah,

[2:07:07] Bob Dobbs: so what happened to the first one?

[2:07:11] Bob Dobbs: Well,

[2:07:11] Bob Dobbs: another little childish question from McLuhan.

[2:07:15] Bob Dobbs: Another is,

[2:07:18] Bob Dobbs: I've been accused by certain McLuhan,

[2:07:21] Bob Dobbs: Bob's just a shit disturber.

[2:07:22] Bob Dobbs: That's what McLuhan was,

[2:07:23] Bob Dobbs: a fucking shit disturber with his questions.

[2:07:25] Bob Dobbs: And he used to brag that he had all the questions.

[2:07:27] Bob Dobbs: And they were silly questions.

[2:07:29] Bob Dobbs: Where's the first C?

[2:07:30] Bob Dobbs: Come on.

[2:07:33] Bob Dobbs: And I end with that mocking tone.

[2:07:36] Bob Dobbs: We've got to see,

[2:07:37] Bob Dobbs: we've talked about pretty well close to two hours.

[2:07:40] Bob Dobbs: So when I upload the recording,

[2:07:41] Bob Dobbs: we'll see if it says an hour and

[2:07:43] Bob Dobbs: 40 minutes or something considerably less than two hours,

[2:07:47] Bob Dobbs: then we'll know that some of it didn't get recorded and it may have even shut off 20 minutes ago.

[2:07:55] Cameron McEwen: So I'll just close by saying I sent you the last paragraph of

[2:08:02] Cameron McEwen: Footsteps.

[2:08:03] Cameron McEwen: Okay,

[2:08:04] Cameron McEwen: great.

[2:08:05] Bob Dobbs: All right,

[2:08:05] Bob Dobbs: yeah,

[2:08:05] Bob Dobbs: I see that there.

[2:08:06] Bob Dobbs: Fantastic.

[2:08:07] Bob Dobbs: Okay,

[2:08:07] Bob Dobbs: so let's see what damage we've done.

[2:08:11] Bob Dobbs: And

[2:08:13] Bob Dobbs: I would say that what we said the last 20 minutes,

[2:08:15] Bob Dobbs: it's a tragedy it didn't get recorded because we said a lot of good stuff there in our conclusion.

[2:08:20] Bob Dobbs: Well,

[2:08:21] Cameron McEwen: you may get surprised.

[2:08:23] Bob Dobbs: Yes,

[2:08:23] Bob Dobbs: let's hope it worked.

[2:08:25] Bob Dobbs: I have to figure out.

[2:08:26] Bob Dobbs: I'm actually going to have to go back and re-listen to parts of it,

[2:08:29] Bob Dobbs: which I never do.

[2:08:30] Bob Dobbs: And see,

[2:08:31] Bob Dobbs: what's it sound like when I'm talking and you can't hear me?

[2:08:33] Bob Dobbs: And you're talking,

[2:08:35] Bob Dobbs: I can't hear you.

[2:08:35] Bob Dobbs: What happened there?

[2:08:38] Bob Dobbs: Okay,

[2:08:38] Bob Dobbs: so we'll see.

[2:08:40] Bob Dobbs: Very good.

[2:08:42] Bob Dobbs: We got through a quote.

[2:08:43] Bob Dobbs: We did my book for the whole show.

[2:08:46] Bob Dobbs: We did a quote.

[2:08:46] Cameron McEwen: That's right.

[2:08:48] Bob Dobbs: All right,

[2:08:48] Bob Dobbs: do you think we've exhausted?

[2:08:50] Bob Dobbs: We can move on next week?

[2:08:52] Cameron McEwen: Yes.

[2:08:53] Bob Dobbs: Next time?

[2:08:53] Bob Dobbs: Well,

[2:08:54] Cameron McEwen: what I would like to do,

[2:08:55] Cameron McEwen: I mean,

[2:08:55] Cameron McEwen: I don't know if you want to do it,

[2:08:56] Cameron McEwen: but

[2:08:57] Cameron McEwen: I think...

[2:08:59] Cameron McEwen: You went into a rant in the book.

[2:09:02] Bob Dobbs: You want to do that?

[2:09:03] Bob Dobbs: Okay.

[2:09:03] Bob Dobbs: We got to do that.

[2:09:04] Bob Dobbs: Yeah,

[2:09:04] Cameron McEwen: there's three pages of you talking,

[2:09:08] Cameron McEwen: but I think you make some good points there.

[2:09:11] Bob Dobbs: Okay,

[2:09:11] Bob Dobbs: good.

[2:09:12] Bob Dobbs: All right.

[2:09:13] Bob Dobbs: Great talking to you,

[2:09:14] Bob Dobbs: Cameron.

[2:09:14] Bob Dobbs: We'll talk soon.

[2:09:15] Cameron McEwen: Same here.

[2:09:16] Cameron McEwen: Okay,

[2:09:16] Cameron McEwen: bye.

[2:09:17] Bob Dobbs: Bye.