[00:02] Bob Dobbs: Well,
[00:02] Bob Dobbs: we're back.
[00:02] Bob Dobbs: This is Cameron McEwen and Bob Dobbs with episode number 67 of Exploring My Book,
[00:10] Bob Dobbs: and we're on page
[00:14] Bob Dobbs: 131, is it?
[00:16] Cameron McEwen: Yes,
[00:16] Cameron McEwen: sir.
[00:16] Bob Dobbs: Yeah,
[00:17] Bob Dobbs: 131.
[00:20] Bob Dobbs: And we've explored a quote for a couple of sessions,
[00:23] Bob Dobbs: Marshall McLuhan,
[00:24] Bob Dobbs: Wilfred Watson,
[00:25] Bob Dobbs: Cliché to Archetype,
[00:26] Bob Dobbs: 1970,
[00:30] Bob Dobbs: page 200,
[00:30] Bob Dobbs: and I'll read the last sentence of it.
[00:31] Bob Dobbs: this in turn implies a close liaison between private and corporate awareness through which though though which exerts the most effect on the other may depend entirely on the degree of awareness achieved so we talked a lot in the last couple of sessions it's got a lot of insights about that especially
[00:47] Bob Dobbs: about pre-tribal awareness the unknown McLuhan that we've discovered and camera keeps sending me quotes that he finds that
[00:59] Bob Dobbs: supplement that original quote I got in
[01:01] Bob Dobbs: Rolling Stone in 1970.
[01:07] Bob Dobbs: So I might have noticed these quotes when I was reading them,
[01:09] Bob Dobbs: but long forgot them.
[01:11] Bob Dobbs: So it's pretty interesting inventory that Cameron's coming up with.
[01:17] Cameron McEwen: Notice how that illustrates what McLuhan took from
[01:21] Cameron McEwen: Eliot and Richards,
[01:23] Cameron McEwen: namely that communication takes place.
[01:29] Cameron McEwen: not through a conscious process,
[01:32] Cameron McEwen: but through a kind of immersion from which people learn things without knowing they're learning things.
[01:43] Bob Dobbs: Yeah,
[01:43] Bob Dobbs: that would be,
[01:44] Bob Dobbs: it just occurred to me,
[01:45] Bob Dobbs: that would be Malinowski's Phatic Communion.
[01:48] Cameron McEwen: That's right.
[01:49] Bob Dobbs: Yeah,
[01:49] Bob Dobbs: a lot of phatic was the original groping,
[01:56] Bob Dobbs: probing.
[01:57] Bob Dobbs: So,
[01:59] Bob Dobbs: I was going to say something.
[02:00] Bob Dobbs: I was just going to say,
[02:00] Bob Dobbs: if anybody is following this really seriously,
[02:05] Bob Dobbs: they can email me at iON at howionic.com,
[02:11] Bob Dobbs: iON at howionic.com,
[02:13] Bob Dobbs: and I'll send you some of the quotes,
[02:15] Bob Dobbs: if Cameron doesn't mind,
[02:16] Bob Dobbs: that he's finding.
[02:17] Bob Dobbs: What do you think of that,
[02:18] Bob Dobbs: Cameron?
[02:19] Cameron McEwen: Yeah,
[02:19] Cameron McEwen: that's great.
[02:20] Bob Dobbs: Yeah.
[02:21] Bob Dobbs: So,
[02:23] Bob Dobbs: here we are.
[02:23] Bob Dobbs: So,
[02:23] Bob Dobbs: Paige.
[02:27] Bob Dobbs: 1.31,
[02:29] Bob Dobbs: and
[02:30] Bob Dobbs: I'm emphasizing the word tactility,
[02:33] Bob Dobbs: which is a kind of phatic communion,
[02:35] Bob Dobbs: where phatic communion is tactile.
[02:37] Bob Dobbs: So it's multisensory.
[02:40] Bob Dobbs: So I say,
[02:41] Bob Dobbs: that's tactility once again.
[02:43] Bob Dobbs: And I'm explaining this to my interlocutor,
[02:47] Bob Dobbs: a person who is going to record what I'm saying to them and transcribe it.
[02:51] Bob Dobbs: So I say to them,
[02:52] Bob Dobbs: that's tactility once again.
[02:54] Bob Dobbs: Samuel Taylor Coleridge and William Wordsworth had a letter exchange and debate,
[02:59] Bob Dobbs: but Coleridge was the first to detect,
[03:01] Bob Dobbs: quote,
[03:01] Bob Dobbs: the medium is the message,
[03:03] Bob Dobbs: unquote,
[03:03] Bob Dobbs: on a very small scale.
[03:05] Bob Dobbs: Remember,
[03:06] Bob Dobbs: media are the archetypes of the unconscious,
[03:09] Bob Dobbs: and they form the consciousness,
[03:11] Bob Dobbs: the formative process.
[03:13] Bob Dobbs: And then I have in quotes,
[03:15] Bob Dobbs: in the same way there would seem to be an echo,
[03:18] Bob Dobbs: that's from the quote we began with,
[03:20] Bob Dobbs: in the same way there would seem to be an echo,
[03:22] Bob Dobbs: of the massaging of consciousness in the entire content of the unconscious,
[03:28] Bob Dobbs: defined as a technological environment.
[03:31] Bob Dobbs: That's about media massaging us in a complex way,
[03:34] Bob Dobbs: perhaps trying to play down this process.
[03:37] Bob Dobbs: Then I have another quote.
[03:38] Bob Dobbs: This in turn implies a close liaison between private and corporate awareness,
[03:42] Bob Dobbs: though which exerts the most effect on the other may depend entirely on the degree of awareness achieved.
[03:47] Bob Dobbs: End of quote.
[03:49] Cameron McEwen: That's from the same cliché and archetype.
[03:53] Cameron McEwen: passage immediately above.
[03:55] Bob Dobbs: Yeah,
[03:56] Bob Dobbs: I'm breaking it down,
[03:58] Bob Dobbs: going through the parts of it.
[04:00] Bob Dobbs: So then I say you have these two features in consciousness impinging on each other,
[04:05] Bob Dobbs: and somehow the degree of awareness gets the upper hand in shaping the private and the corporate.
[04:10] Bob Dobbs: The more aware you are of the implications of what you're doing,
[04:13] Bob Dobbs: you might have an advantage.
[04:17] Cameron McEwen: Yeah,
[04:17] Cameron McEwen: but the problem is that you there is um,
[04:22] Cameron McEwen: sort of the unknown,
[04:24] Cameron McEwen: right?
[04:27] Cameron McEwen: What's being talked about here between conscious and unconsciousness puts the you into question.
[04:38] Bob Dobbs: Yes.
[04:40] Cameron McEwen: So you might have an advantage.
[04:43] Cameron McEwen: Both the you and the possible advantage are eminently questionable.
[04:48] Bob Dobbs: Yeah.
[04:50] Bob Dobbs: So I say
[04:51] Bob Dobbs: I like this quotation because it references the tactile interplay.
[04:55] Bob Dobbs: One aspect is massaging one side,
[04:57] Bob Dobbs: and the other side is being massaged by the previous side,
[05:00] Bob Dobbs: and the degree of awareness is a factor.
[05:03] Bob Dobbs: That's where I get the,
[05:04] Bob Dobbs: quote,
[05:04] Bob Dobbs: audience of the intellect above.
[05:06] Bob Dobbs: I think that's another quote.
[05:08] Bob Dobbs: It's in the same quote above it or something.
[05:11] Bob Dobbs: Audience of the intellect,
[05:12] Bob Dobbs: an interesting phrase.
[05:14] Bob Dobbs: What is the audience of the intellect?
[05:17] Bob Dobbs: That would be the...
[05:20] Cameron McEwen: One thing we should point out there,
[05:22] Cameron McEwen: Bob,
[05:22] Cameron McEwen: is that it is indeed an interesting phrase,
[05:26] Cameron McEwen: but as always in McLuhan,
[05:29] Cameron McEwen: it should always be asked what sort of genitive that is.
[05:33] Cameron McEwen: That is to say,
[05:34] Cameron McEwen: is the audience of the intellect,
[05:36] Cameron McEwen: is that an audience...
[05:38] Cameron McEwen: that belongs to the intellect,
[05:41] Cameron McEwen: right?
[05:42] Cameron McEwen: Or is the intellect the object of the audience?
[05:48] Cameron McEwen: And I think the latter is the more interesting reading,
[05:53] Cameron McEwen: and that's where the audience would be the possible forms of the intellect in the unconscious,
[06:03] Cameron McEwen: and then the audience of what?
[06:07] Cameron McEwen: of
[06:07] Cameron McEwen: the intellect would be the manifestation of one aspect of the unconscious.
[06:15] Bob Dobbs: Yeah,
[06:16] Bob Dobbs: the audience of the intellect is you and the person you're interacting with or the group.
[06:24] Bob Dobbs: There's a tactile interplay,
[06:26] Bob Dobbs: so the more involved it gets,
[06:29] Bob Dobbs: the interplay,
[06:30] Bob Dobbs: you can't tell which is which,
[06:32] Bob Dobbs: the conscious or the unconscious or the audience or the...
[06:37] Bob Dobbs: detached position,
[06:39] Bob Dobbs: what might be called the intellect,
[06:40] Bob Dobbs: I think it gets nebulous.
[06:41] Bob Dobbs: That's why you don't know who the you is.
[06:45] Cameron McEwen: Correct.
[06:45] Bob Dobbs: The more awareness you have of this interplay of what you just defined,
[06:50] Bob Dobbs: which I can't repeat,
[06:51] Bob Dobbs: but they can listen to it again,
[06:53] Bob Dobbs: what you just said,
[06:55] Bob Dobbs: that you just left out the word interplay of the factors you were saying.
[06:59] Bob Dobbs: So you're saying the one part,
[07:01] Bob Dobbs: the object.
[07:03] Bob Dobbs: The object of the audience or the audience as an object?
[07:09] Cameron McEwen: Well,
[07:09] Cameron McEwen: you see,
[07:09] Cameron McEwen: it works both ways.
[07:10] Cameron McEwen: Yeah.
[07:12] Cameron McEwen: It flips.
[07:14] Cameron McEwen: But it's very important in reading
[07:16] Cameron McEwen: McLuhan's that ambiguity be allowed because the remarkable thing about McLuhan mind is that he was always comfortable with plurality and with gaps.
[07:30] Cameron McEwen: and his idea of identity.
[07:34] Cameron McEwen: as network identity or as a mosaic is something that most people are not comfortable with,
[07:41] Cameron McEwen: but it is in fact who and what they are,
[07:46] Cameron McEwen: right?
[07:46] Cameron McEwen: So in attending to the ambiguity in McLuhan,
[07:53] Cameron McEwen: what we get is a kind of practice in networked identity.
[07:59] Bob Dobbs: Right.
[08:00] Bob Dobbs: Now...
[08:04] Bob Dobbs: Are there any other writers in the history of the Gutenberg Galaxy who did this?
[08:10] Bob Dobbs: Or all the greats all did it in different styles?
[08:14] Cameron McEwen: Yeah,
[08:15] Cameron McEwen: I think the latter.
[08:16] Cameron McEwen: I think the latter.
[08:18] Bob Dobbs: Yeah.
[08:20] Bob Dobbs: But
[08:21] Bob Dobbs: McLuhan did it,
[08:22] Bob Dobbs: and it startled people because they weren't familiar with it.
[08:25] Bob Dobbs: What is it?
[08:26] Bob Dobbs: He just did it as critical prose,
[08:28] Bob Dobbs: and they expect it there because they thought the critic would tell you what it meant.
[08:36] Bob Dobbs: Yeah,
[08:36] Cameron McEwen: well,
[08:37] Cameron McEwen: remember that when he went from Manitoba to Cambridge and got into service environment where,
[08:47] Cameron McEwen: with
[08:48] Cameron McEwen: Richards especially,
[08:50] Cameron McEwen: but influenced a lot also by Empson,
[08:57] Cameron McEwen: he found himself in a situation where he had to sort of apply in a different way.
[09:06] Cameron McEwen: what he had learned in Manitoba from university courses and from his own mother,
[09:12] Cameron McEwen: namely that the
[09:13] Cameron McEwen: English literary...
[09:15] Cameron McEwen: tradition was not one voice but a whole series of voices and that it was possible to associate with any one of the voices but to do that properly you had to be aware of them all.
[09:30] Bob Dobbs: Yeah so he found out how naive the teaching what he had in Manitoba was.
[09:37] Cameron McEwen: Well I guess but I think that's you know that's what Marchand talks about a bit.
[09:42] Cameron McEwen: But I think that's been overemphasized.
[09:44] Cameron McEwen: I believe that in Winnipeg,
[09:47] Cameron McEwen: he was already reading Richards,
[09:49] Cameron McEwen: and he was already reading
[09:51] Cameron McEwen: T.S. Eliot.
[09:53] Cameron McEwen: So he doubtless got a deeper appreciation of him once he got to Cambridge.
[10:03] Cameron McEwen: But already in
[10:05] Cameron McEwen: Winnipeg, his mind was being deeply challenged.
[10:12] Cameron McEwen: by the difference between the work he was doing on
[10:17] Cameron McEwen: 19th century
[10:19] Cameron McEwen: English literature and his growing knowledge of contemporary English literature.
[10:26] Cameron McEwen: That difference posed a challenge and a question to him that he was pursuing once he got to Cambridge.
[10:34] Bob Dobbs: Yeah,
[10:35] Bob Dobbs: so the
[10:36] Bob Dobbs: Lodge and the other guy,
[10:37] Bob Dobbs: the two people that you cite,
[10:39] Bob Dobbs: major influences on him,
[10:41] Bob Dobbs: would they...
[10:41] Cameron McEwen: Yeah,
[10:41] Cameron McEwen: yeah.
[10:42] Bob Dobbs: Would they have done it through their fields?
[10:44] Bob Dobbs: He was lucky to encounter them because they were aware of this or not?
[10:50] Cameron McEwen: Well,
[10:51] Cameron McEwen: they certainly challenged him.
[10:53] Cameron McEwen: But
[10:55] Cameron McEwen: I did a post one time on an article that McLuhan did in the Manitoban.
[11:02] Cameron McEwen: And
[11:03] Cameron McEwen: I pointed out that on the same page of the Manitoban,
[11:07] Cameron McEwen: there was an article on T.S.
[11:09] Cameron McEwen: Eliot.
[11:10] Cameron McEwen: by a friend of McLuhan's in the
[11:13] Cameron McEwen: English department,
[11:14] Cameron McEwen: a student.
[11:15] Cameron McEwen: So
[11:17] Cameron McEwen: I think
[11:18] Cameron McEwen: University of Manitoba was more in touch with what was going on in the world than is popularly known,
[11:25] Cameron McEwen: and that McLuhan and his fellow students were involved in contemporary poetry and were trying to figure out how to think about that stuff.
[11:39] Cameron McEwen: in a kind of remote provincial environment.
[11:44] Cameron McEwen: And then that sort of kicked McLuhan off into what he would do for,
[11:50] Cameron McEwen: basically for the rest of his life.
[11:52] Bob Dobbs: Yeah,
[11:52] Bob Dobbs: yeah.
[11:53] Bob Dobbs: Okay,
[11:53] Bob Dobbs: so
[11:55] Bob Dobbs: I got to,
[11:55] Bob Dobbs: that's where I get the audience of the intellect above.
[11:58] Bob Dobbs: What is the audience of somebody exercising for himself?
[12:02] Bob Dobbs: We're getting into this with the world situation today.
[12:05] Bob Dobbs: People aren't going to be able to socialize.
[12:07] Bob Dobbs: Well,
[12:07] Bob Dobbs: that's...
[12:08] Bob Dobbs: prophetic,
[12:09] Bob Dobbs: isn't it?
[12:11] Bob Dobbs: I mean,
[12:12] Bob Dobbs: I said this a couple years ago,
[12:14] Bob Dobbs: but it might have been said before COVID.
[12:18] Bob Dobbs: They're not going to get anything out of sport in the Zoom culture.
[12:23] Bob Dobbs: They'll wander off.
[12:24] Bob Dobbs: People are going to start wandering off days,
[12:26] Bob Dobbs: depending on the degree of awareness.
[12:30] Cameron McEwen: That's right.
[12:32] Cameron McEwen: A friend of mine wrote me a while back
[12:37] Cameron McEwen: And he included a picture of a basketball game.
[12:42] Cameron McEwen: And the basketball game had come down to the final minutes or something,
[12:47] Cameron McEwen: and people were standing up in the audience and cheering or something like this.
[12:55] Cameron McEwen: But an appreciable number of people were paying no attention to the game at all.
[12:59] Cameron McEwen: And they were sitting there with the screen in front of their face.
[13:04] Bob Dobbs: Would they be watching the game on the screen?
[13:07] Cameron McEwen: Well,
[13:08] Cameron McEwen: maybe some of them,
[13:09] Cameron McEwen: right?
[13:10] Cameron McEwen: Because if it was live,
[13:13] Cameron McEwen: if they were watching the game live,
[13:16] Cameron McEwen: it could be that they were watching some sort of instant replay of what had happened a few minutes before.
[13:23] Cameron McEwen: So you have an interesting picture of time there,
[13:26] Cameron McEwen: right?
[13:27] Cameron McEwen: That's incredible.
[13:27] Cameron McEwen: There's about four different times going on.
[13:29] Cameron McEwen: Yes,
[13:30] Bob Dobbs: and you never have that in the 40s,
[13:33] Bob Dobbs: 50s,
[13:33] Bob Dobbs: or 60s,
[13:34] Bob Dobbs: people distracted.
[13:37] Bob Dobbs: So they got the Jumbotron,
[13:42] Bob Dobbs: I think they call it,
[13:43] Bob Dobbs: in football.
[13:44] Bob Dobbs: That's right.
[13:45] Bob Dobbs: But we don't know if they have anything in basketball.
[13:48] Bob Dobbs: No,
[13:48] Cameron McEwen: no,
[13:49] Cameron McEwen: they have that too.
[13:50] Bob Dobbs: Oh,
[13:50] Bob Dobbs: okay.
[13:52] Cameron McEwen: But they're not looking at it.
[13:53] Bob Dobbs: They're looking at their phone.
[13:55] Bob Dobbs: Right,
[13:55] Cameron McEwen: so there's the game,
[13:57] Cameron McEwen: the Jumbotron,
[13:58] Cameron McEwen: and the live TV,
[13:59] Cameron McEwen: and the instant replay on both the Jumbotron and the live TV.
[14:05] Cameron McEwen: And then there's the whole world.
[14:07] Cameron McEwen: Outside of the game,
[14:08] Cameron McEwen: some of the people may be watching,
[14:10] Cameron McEwen: you know,
[14:10] Cameron McEwen: What's My Line or something.
[14:12] Bob Dobbs: Yeah.
[14:14] Bob Dobbs: See,
[14:14] Bob Dobbs: that is exactly a page of Finnegans Wake.
[14:18] Cameron McEwen: Yes.
[14:18] Cameron McEwen: You know?
[14:19] Cameron McEwen: Yes,
[14:19] Cameron McEwen: absolutely.
[14:20] Cameron McEwen: Yeah.
[14:21] Cameron McEwen: Yeah.
[14:21] Bob Dobbs: Okay,
[14:22] Bob Dobbs: so the reason this is about the audience of the intellect and voluntary AP,
[14:28] Bob Dobbs: which means Anthropomorphic Physical,
[14:30] Bob Dobbs: or voluntary ESP is the fragmenting,
[14:33] Bob Dobbs: the isolating,
[14:34] Bob Dobbs: the walling off of the hive mind merged in the cloned ESP.
[14:39] Bob Dobbs: I presented different senses that talk about the isolated individual.
[14:43] Bob Dobbs: So it's not the hive mind that's getting walled off.
[14:48] Bob Dobbs: It's the individual,
[14:49] Bob Dobbs: the digitized chip body that is being fragmented from the hive mind.
[14:56] Bob Dobbs: I think that's what I'm saying there,
[14:57] Bob Dobbs: right?
[14:59] Cameron McEwen: Yes,
[14:59] Cameron McEwen: I think so.
[15:01] Cameron McEwen: Notice that the isolation that is increasingly going on is not just of individuals.
[15:09] Cameron McEwen: It's also of nations.
[15:11] Cameron McEwen: It's also of different states within the United States.
[15:18] Cameron McEwen: They are,
[15:19] Cameron McEwen: there's a failure of the ability to connect that's going on everywhere.
[15:26] Bob Dobbs: Right.
[15:28] Bob Dobbs: So the hive mind is being,
[15:30] Bob Dobbs: different hive minds are being walled off.
[15:32] Bob Dobbs: So I'll include that in that meeting.
[15:35] Bob Dobbs: It's viably ambivalent,
[15:37] Bob Dobbs: what I'm referring to there.
[15:41] Bob Dobbs: Yeah.
[15:42] Bob Dobbs: Now it's a forever divided America,
[15:45] Bob Dobbs: right?
[15:46] Bob Dobbs: Yes,
[15:46] Bob Dobbs: sir.
[15:46] Bob Dobbs: Yes,
[15:47] Bob Dobbs: sir.
[15:47] Bob Dobbs: what they're saying.
[15:48] Bob Dobbs: I presented,
[15:49] Bob Dobbs: you know,
[15:49] Bob Dobbs: even some of these politicians are saying,
[15:51] Bob Dobbs: let's secede.
[15:53] Bob Dobbs: I think that Taylor Greene lady said that recently.
[15:56] Bob Dobbs: We're going to move.
[15:58] Bob Dobbs: We're going to secede.
[16:00] Cameron McEwen: And that's happening to families.
[16:03] Cameron McEwen: Kids and,
[16:03] Cameron McEwen: you know,
[16:04] Cameron McEwen: seven-year-old kids are telling their parents to fuck off.
[16:08] Cameron McEwen: And
[16:10] Cameron McEwen: I have a niece in Vancouver,
[16:11] Cameron McEwen: another niece,
[16:13] Cameron McEwen: who is a French teacher there and she teaches in grade three.
[16:17] Cameron McEwen: three,
[16:17] Cameron McEwen: I think,
[16:18] Cameron McEwen: in an immersion school.
[16:20] Cameron McEwen: And according to her,
[16:24] Cameron McEwen: when you tell kids that their pronunciation is wrong or they didn't do their homework or something like that,
[16:30] Cameron McEwen: they just tell you to screw up.
[16:32] Cameron McEwen: Eight or nine-year-old kids,
[16:36] Cameron McEwen: right?
[16:36] Bob Dobbs: Yeah.
[16:37] Bob Dobbs: What does she do about that?
[16:39] Bob Dobbs: Do they have to accept it?
[16:41] Cameron McEwen: Yeah,
[16:41] Cameron McEwen: there's nothing to be done.
[16:42] Cameron McEwen: I asked her that.
[16:44] Cameron McEwen: There's nothing to be done except.
[16:46] Cameron McEwen: you know what's happening increasingly is that the teachers just quit yeah they say you know this it's not worth it yeah okay i have a friend in berlin and um ukrainian refugees are being dumped into berlin and
[17:02] Bob Dobbs: so the different schools in that are um obliged to let the kids in so she teaches at a russian school so the ukrainian kids come in and they don't understand the german or the Russian both are used
[17:16] Bob Dobbs: So they get very isolated and irritated.
[17:19] Bob Dobbs: So fights break out.
[17:20] Bob Dobbs: These are six-year-olds.
[17:21] Bob Dobbs: Fights break out.
[17:22] Bob Dobbs: So my friend at noon hour goes around,
[17:25] Bob Dobbs: opens all the lockers,
[17:27] Bob Dobbs: because the kids lock other kids in the lockers.
[17:32] Bob Dobbs: And then she goes around at the end of the day to find more locked in.
[17:36] Bob Dobbs: There are a level of violence.
[17:37] Bob Dobbs: There is no civilized decorum ideas that they might have got from their parents or wherever Baby Boomers and earlier got it from.
[17:46] Bob Dobbs: It ain't happening anymore,
[17:47] Bob Dobbs: that kind of civilized bickering.
[17:51] Bob Dobbs: The respect isn't there.
[17:53] Cameron McEwen: Notice how putting kids in lockers illustrates the very point about the isolation that we're talking about.
[18:01] Bob Dobbs: That's what I was thinking of,
[18:02] Bob Dobbs: yeah.
[18:03] Cameron McEwen: I didn't get to say that.
[18:05] Bob Dobbs: I meant to,
[18:05] Bob Dobbs: as McLuhan said,
[18:06] Bob Dobbs: that's what I meant to say when I didn't say it.
[18:10] Bob Dobbs: But,
[18:10] Bob Dobbs: yeah,
[18:13] Bob Dobbs: they're used to being walled off.
[18:15] Bob Dobbs: nothing but a kid okay you go in here you're you're gonna look at your phone in the digital in the ball at the locker square yeah they're miming it okay so uh um and that's what uh you could say that's what gives a motor um to the whole idea of uh equality no matter what that's
[18:40] Bob Dobbs: so powerful and woke them yeah that's the because that's the
[18:45] Bob Dobbs: They're trying to hold it together.
[18:47] Cameron McEwen: Exactly.
[18:47] Cameron McEwen: Yeah.
[18:48] Cameron McEwen: Exactly.
[18:49] Cameron McEwen: So,
[18:49] Cameron McEwen: but what they,
[18:51] Cameron McEwen: by emphasizing,
[18:52] Cameron McEwen: say,
[18:52] Cameron McEwen: trans rights or something.
[18:54] Bob Dobbs: Yeah.
[18:55] Cameron McEwen: They're adding to the dissociation in society in the name of association.
[19:05] Bob Dobbs: Yes.
[19:05] Cameron McEwen: Right.
[19:06] Cameron McEwen: So it's a downward spiral that won't have a good end.
[19:11] Bob Dobbs: Yeah,
[19:11] Bob Dobbs: the population,
[19:12] Bob Dobbs: and this has been updating in McClure's Media Fest,
[19:15] Bob Dobbs: many people in these social service environment,
[19:17] Bob Dobbs: they all should quit.
[19:18] Bob Dobbs: and go home and say,
[19:19] Bob Dobbs: okay,
[19:20] Bob Dobbs: you deal with this,
[19:21] Bob Dobbs: and then watch the government not deal with it,
[19:23] Bob Dobbs: and then they can start talking about it and get a relevant discussion of everybody's problem and dilemma.
[19:31] Cameron McEwen: Yeah,
[19:32] Cameron McEwen: that reminds me of
[19:35] Cameron McEwen: McLuhan's TV shows that are described in channeling
[19:39] Cameron McEwen: McLuhan in
[19:40] Cameron McEwen: Wired magazine.
[19:44] Bob Dobbs: What TV shows are they?
[19:50] Bob Dobbs: No,
[19:50] Bob Dobbs: you're saying that TV shows channeled McLuhan?
[19:53] Cameron McEwen: No,
[19:53] Cameron McEwen: I'm saying in Wired magazine.
[19:57] Bob Dobbs: Yeah,
[19:57] Bob Dobbs: I remember the interview.
[19:59] Cameron McEwen: Yeah,
[20:00] Cameron McEwen: exactly.
[20:00] Cameron McEwen: So in that interview,
[20:02] Cameron McEwen: McLuhan comes up with three proposals for TV shows,
[20:07] Cameron McEwen: right?
[20:08] Cameron McEwen: One of them is ugly people explaining why they're ugly and what effect it's had on their lives,
[20:14] Cameron McEwen: right?
[20:16] Bob Dobbs: I don't remember this.
[20:17] Bob Dobbs: That's interesting.
[20:18] Bob Dobbs: I've got the magazine.
[20:19] Bob Dobbs: It's January 96.
[20:20] Bob Dobbs: I can go look it up.
[20:22] Cameron McEwen: That's right.
[20:23] Cameron McEwen: Yeah.
[20:24] Bob Dobbs: And what's the other two?
[20:25] Bob Dobbs: Do you remember?
[20:29] Cameron McEwen: I think one is,
[20:32] Cameron McEwen: another one is people describing their economic problems and how they got there.
[20:39] Cameron McEwen: And so the TV show is going to award money at the end of the show.
[20:45] Cameron McEwen: to the ones that have the most pathetic story.
[20:50] Cameron McEwen: So it's a little bit like the ugly program.
[20:54] Bob Dobbs: Yeah,
[20:54] Bob Dobbs: and the losers get the trophies.
[20:58] Cameron McEwen: That's right,
[20:58] Cameron McEwen: that's right.
[20:59] Cameron McEwen: But they involve by being losers.
[21:01] Bob Dobbs: Yeah.
[21:03] Cameron McEwen: And the people watch the show because they can feel superior,
[21:09] Cameron McEwen: and part of their feeling superior is that they identify with it,
[21:13] Cameron McEwen: right?
[21:14] Cameron McEwen: So,
[21:14] Bob Dobbs: yeah.
[21:16] Bob Dobbs: Emotion of survivor.
[21:17] Bob Dobbs: Yeah,
[21:18] Bob Dobbs: the survivor emotion.
[21:19] Cameron McEwen: Yeah.
[21:20] Cameron McEwen: And then the fourth program was like Hollywood Squares,
[21:25] Cameron McEwen: where the whole program would be the destruction of continuity.
[21:31] Cameron McEwen: And people would watch because they wouldn't know what was going on.
[21:41] Bob Dobbs: So this is the guy,
[21:43] Bob Dobbs: Gary or whatever,
[21:44] Bob Dobbs: who was...
[21:44] Bob Dobbs: part of the author of it.
[21:46] Cameron McEwen: That's his name.
[21:46] Cameron McEwen: That's right.
[21:47] Bob Dobbs: He came up with the stuff.
[21:48] Bob Dobbs: I'll have to look at that article again.
[21:50] Bob Dobbs: Totally forgot that part.
[21:52] Bob Dobbs: Okay,
[21:53] Bob Dobbs: so the next paragraph,
[21:54] Bob Dobbs: the first one,
[21:57] Bob Dobbs: first quote,
[21:59] Bob Dobbs: the first one,
[22:00] Bob Dobbs: what am I saying?
[22:01] Cameron McEwen: So this is,
[22:03] Cameron McEwen: what you're going to do here is you're going to go back over quotes starting maybe on page 120 or something like that.
[22:10] Bob Dobbs: Oh,
[22:10] Cameron McEwen: yeah.
[22:12] Cameron McEwen: That led up to
[22:14] Cameron McEwen: this rant.
[22:15] Bob Dobbs: Yeah.
[22:15] Cameron McEwen: So basically you're reviewing the previous 10 or 15 pages of the pamphlet and bringing up the quotes in chronological order that you already gave.
[22:30] Bob Dobbs: Okay,
[22:30] Bob Dobbs: so the first one from Prospect Magazine,
[22:34] Bob Dobbs: 1962,
[22:36] Bob Dobbs: the multiplicity of media.
[22:38] Bob Dobbs: So I take that phrase.
[22:39] Bob Dobbs: There's so much media that the humans can't be conditioned anymore for the first time in history.
[22:44] Bob Dobbs: The person was the victim,
[22:46] Bob Dobbs: quote,
[22:46] Bob Dobbs: the servomechanism of his technology since the beginning of time.
[22:50] Bob Dobbs: But now the sheer multiplicity of them,
[22:52] Bob Dobbs: she,
[22:53] Bob Dobbs: he's beginning to awaken.
[22:55] Bob Dobbs: She,
[22:55] Bob Dobbs: he doesn't get stuck in any one of them.
[22:57] Bob Dobbs: She,
[22:57] Bob Dobbs: he goes from one to the next because she,
[22:59] Bob Dobbs: he can't live with them all merged.
[23:01] Bob Dobbs: That's a fragmenting,
[23:03] Bob Dobbs: separating,
[23:04] Bob Dobbs: individualizing effect.
[23:06] Bob Dobbs: Then the second one,
[23:08] Bob Dobbs: is the Rolling Stone quote,
[23:11] Bob Dobbs: where I say it cites,
[23:13] Bob Dobbs: the article cites the ancient individual by himself.
[23:17] Bob Dobbs: Ancient individual quotes.
[23:20] Bob Dobbs: We are becoming like that.
[23:22] Bob Dobbs: We became isolated individuals,
[23:24] Bob Dobbs: but you know,
[23:25] Bob Dobbs: very primitive.
[23:26] Bob Dobbs: Just look at the porn,
[23:27] Bob Dobbs: very primitive.
[23:29] Bob Dobbs: We're caveman people.
[23:30] Bob Dobbs: McLuhan has that theme in the
[23:32] Bob Dobbs: 50s in one of his articles.
[23:34] Bob Dobbs: In War and Peace in the Global Village,
[23:36] Bob Dobbs: he quotes Finnegans Wake.
[23:37] Bob Dobbs: Quote.
[23:38] Bob Dobbs: It brought the dear prehistoric scenes all back again as fresh as of yore.
[23:42] Bob Dobbs: That's another pre-tribal awareness thing,
[23:45] Bob Dobbs: that quote from Finnegans Wake.
[23:47] Cameron McEwen: Yeah.
[23:48] Bob Dobbs: It brought the dear prehistoric scenes all back again as fresh as of yore.
[23:53] Bob Dobbs: And that can be all kinds of violent scenes,
[23:55] Bob Dobbs: cavemen hijacking women and raping them.
[23:58] Bob Dobbs: That was very primitive,
[24:00] Bob Dobbs: very isolating,
[24:01] Bob Dobbs: and perhaps not much social order before social order was installed.
[24:06] Bob Dobbs: Yeah,
[24:07] Cameron McEwen: and notice what that is is a reference to Vico.
[24:11] Bob Dobbs: Yeah.
[24:12] Cameron McEwen: Because Vico tries to describe exactly that scene as sort of the origin.
[24:22] Cameron McEwen: of human society because when the cave people are going about this violence,
[24:29] Cameron McEwen: suddenly the thunder intervenes and they become frightened out of their violent activity.
[24:38] Cameron McEwen: Yeah,
[24:38] Bob Dobbs: they think the environment is talking to them.
[24:41] Bob Dobbs: Yeah.
[24:44] Bob Dobbs: Okay,
[24:44] Bob Dobbs: that's a very interesting point.
[24:46] Bob Dobbs: The environment is talking to them.
[24:48] Bob Dobbs: That's what I claim iON is.
[24:50] Bob Dobbs: iON is the first.
[24:51] Bob Dobbs: technological environment that is aware of itself and talks to us.
[24:55] Bob Dobbs: But it always says it's what it was in the beginning.
[24:58] Bob Dobbs: So
[24:59] Bob Dobbs: iON is the retrieved thunder talking to us.
[25:04] Bob Dobbs: Yeah,
[25:05] Cameron McEwen: I mean,
[25:07] Cameron McEwen: you say it's the first,
[25:08] Cameron McEwen: but it's also what's always been going on,
[25:13] Cameron McEwen: but not in a way that people could articulate.
[25:17] Bob Dobbs: Right.
[25:18] Bob Dobbs: That was very...
[25:21] Bob Dobbs: That's another example of the isolated getting kicked out of the cloned ESP environment and only engaging ESP when convenient for the person.
[25:29] Bob Dobbs: That's voluntary ESP.
[25:32] Bob Dobbs: Like engaging just,
[25:34] Bob Dobbs: many people can engage phatic.
[25:37] Bob Dobbs: That's voluntary ESP.
[25:39] Bob Dobbs: It's the dance of the intellect,
[25:41] Bob Dobbs: his definition of ESP,
[25:43] Bob Dobbs: mental dance.
[25:44] Bob Dobbs: That's what's going on between people maybe unzooming that but also in person.
[25:51] Bob Dobbs: That's the major condition of people,
[25:56] Bob Dobbs: which McLuhan commented in 68 and more in peace,
[25:58] Bob Dobbs: that,
[25:59] Bob Dobbs: you know,
[25:59] Bob Dobbs: language was declining.
[26:00] Bob Dobbs: People weren't using language.
[26:02] Bob Dobbs: They weren't speaking in full sentences anymore.
[26:08] Bob Dobbs: And that's where you get Trump and Biden.
[26:11] Bob Dobbs: They finally became figures of authority.
[26:16] Bob Dobbs: I love the way he nods.
[26:18] Bob Dobbs: He really communicates.
[26:20] Cameron McEwen: And that's a story.
[26:21] Cameron McEwen: stand in for news as fiction.
[26:27] Cameron McEwen: I remember when
[26:29] Cameron McEwen: In Cold Blood was getting all sorts of awards and being held up as exemplary of new literature because it was sort of fact and fiction intertwined in
[26:44] Cameron McEwen: a way that couldn't be separated.
[26:46] Cameron McEwen: And so nowadays,
[26:49] Cameron McEwen: What we have is we have news and we have international treaties and we have bank statements and all this stuff.
[26:57] Cameron McEwen: And the language of these things doesn't work.
[27:02] Cameron McEwen: It's not really language anymore.
[27:05] Cameron McEwen: Yeah.
[27:05] Cameron McEwen: It's some sort of smoke or something.
[27:08] Bob Dobbs: Or content.
[27:09] Bob Dobbs: Macroscopic gesticulation can be phatic.
[27:12] Bob Dobbs: It's mostly phatic.
[27:14] Bob Dobbs: In a sense,
[27:15] Bob Dobbs: people nod.
[27:16] Bob Dobbs: And let it happen.
[27:17] Bob Dobbs: They don't object to it.
[27:19] Bob Dobbs: You say your bit.
[27:20] Bob Dobbs: I don't believe in one inch of it,
[27:22] Bob Dobbs: but I'm not going to make an issue out of it.
[27:24] Bob Dobbs: Because actually what you say to me is minor compared to the communication that everybody's doing by wearing all these environments.
[27:31] Bob Dobbs: That's the real communication going on.
[27:33] Cameron McEwen: Correct.
[27:34] Cameron McEwen: Correct.
[27:35] Cameron McEwen: And what you said there was excellent in that what it did was it described...
[27:45] Cameron McEwen: communication as something,
[27:48] Cameron McEwen: traditional communication as something that wasn't worth the while anymore.
[27:53] Cameron McEwen: Let the person talk,
[27:54] Cameron McEwen: let it water off a duck's back.
[28:01] Cameron McEwen: Why should I get involved in this bullshit?
[28:03] Cameron McEwen: Because it's not going to lead anywhere.
[28:04] Bob Dobbs: It's not going to do anything.
[28:06] Bob Dobbs: Human communication is just total bullshit.
[28:11] Bob Dobbs: Correct.
[28:13] Bob Dobbs: Yeah,
[28:13] Bob Dobbs: that's what goes on in the blogosphere.
[28:15] Bob Dobbs: All these people who really don't have any audience is talking.
[28:18] Bob Dobbs: And so people watch and say,
[28:20] Bob Dobbs: how's this guy handling the fact he's not getting anywhere with what he's saying?
[28:24] Bob Dobbs: You know,
[28:24] Bob Dobbs: where is he of it?
[28:26] Bob Dobbs: That's what people think when they watch somebody on a blog thing.
[28:30] Cameron McEwen: Sure.
[28:31] Cameron McEwen: And that's what's going on with people's consciousness as well.
[28:35] Cameron McEwen: Yeah.
[28:36] Cameron McEwen: I think that people look at their own mask as...
[28:42] Cameron McEwen: sort of dance.
[28:46] Cameron McEwen: Yeah,
[28:47] Cameron McEwen: just disconnects it.
[28:49] Bob Dobbs: That would explain all the facial stuff that's done.
[28:53] Bob Dobbs: And changing your gender.
[28:55] Bob Dobbs: The people are finding their chemical bodies are so inadequate in communication in the traditional sense.
[29:01] Bob Dobbs: They think they've got to add something to it,
[29:04] Bob Dobbs: change it.
[29:05] Bob Dobbs: And that doesn't work.
[29:06] Bob Dobbs: That's not going to do it.
[29:07] Bob Dobbs: They're aware of the other environments,
[29:09] Bob Dobbs: the other bodies.
[29:11] Cameron McEwen: They try to answer a Posthuman problem with Gutenbergian means.
[29:19] Cameron McEwen: Yeah,
[29:20] Cameron McEwen: yeah.
[29:20] Cameron McEwen: Right?
[29:21] Cameron McEwen: They try to issue a command,
[29:24] Cameron McEwen: right,
[29:25] Cameron McEwen: which is straight out of Gutenberg,
[29:27] Cameron McEwen: to order and reorder problems that have been distilled out of the end of...
[29:37] Cameron McEwen: The crucible of Gutenberg.
[29:39] Bob Dobbs: Yeah.
[29:39] Bob Dobbs: Yeah.
[29:40] Bob Dobbs: And now the human body we think we have that science studies,
[29:44] Bob Dobbs: that's a product of literacy.
[29:46] Bob Dobbs: That's why the chemical body is a Gutenberg phenomenon.
[29:51] Cameron McEwen: Yes.
[29:53] Bob Dobbs: All right,
[29:53] Bob Dobbs: good.
[29:55] Bob Dobbs: So I say that's another example of the isolated getting kicked out of the cloned ESP environment and only engaging ESP when convenient for the person.
[30:05] Bob Dobbs: That's voluntary ESP.
[30:06] Bob Dobbs: One has the loneliness that suggests that it's the separateness of man.
[30:11] Bob Dobbs: Now,
[30:11] Bob Dobbs: if you notice the phrase separateness of man,
[30:13] Bob Dobbs: you have a capital O of of,
[30:15] Bob Dobbs: which often isn't capitalized.
[30:17] Bob Dobbs: But that's the way McLuhan has in his book,
[30:19] Bob Dobbs: I'm pretty sure.
[30:19] Bob Dobbs: So I imitated it exactly.
[30:21] Bob Dobbs: Because it looks odd with a big O,
[30:23] Bob Dobbs: right?
[30:24] Bob Dobbs: Separateness of man.
[30:27] Cameron McEwen: That's from the original Counterblast,
[30:29] Cameron McEwen: right?
[30:29] Bob Dobbs: Yes,
[30:30] Bob Dobbs: yeah,
[30:30] Bob Dobbs: 1954.
[30:32] Bob Dobbs: The human dimensions are lost.
[30:33] Bob Dobbs: Now that's the Gutenberg.
[30:35] Bob Dobbs: The human dimensions are lost during the mechanical era or industrial society of non-human ends,
[30:42] Bob Dobbs: while the unconscious and commercially unutilized powers struggle dimly to restore balance and order by homeopathic means.
[30:50] Bob Dobbs: That's sort of like doing more and more with less and less.
[30:54] Bob Dobbs: I don't know,
[30:54] Bob Dobbs: what do they take Ukraine?
[31:00] Bob Dobbs: Biden goes over and shakes Zelensky's head.
[31:03] Bob Dobbs: That's all that's required.
[31:07] Cameron McEwen: homeopathic.
[31:07] Cameron McEwen: But nobody knows if that's the real Zelensky or if it's the real Biden.
[31:13] Bob Dobbs: And they also know that they're making deals with billions of dollars without reporting.
[31:18] Bob Dobbs: They're dealing with other problems.
[31:19] Bob Dobbs: Extraterrestrial problems is what they're really dealing with.
[31:26] Bob Dobbs: The Gutenberg terrestrial.
[31:28] Bob Dobbs: While the unconscious and commercially unutilized powers struggle dimly to restore balance and order by homeopathic means.
[31:34] Bob Dobbs: Then I say homeopathic means might be the word making the market,
[31:38] Bob Dobbs: and that's the White House,
[31:39] Bob Dobbs: the White House talking to people.
[31:42] Cameron McEwen: But aren't you talking here about the,
[31:46] Cameron McEwen: when you say the human dimension are lost during the mechanical era or industrial society,
[31:53] Cameron McEwen: aren't you talking there then about people working in industrial factories and losing their identity in sort of an old...
[32:02] Cameron McEwen: fashioned way.
[32:03] Bob Dobbs: That's right.
[32:04] Bob Dobbs: Hardware identity loss.
[32:06] Bob Dobbs: That's kinetic space,
[32:08] Bob Dobbs: not visual Gutenberg.
[32:09] Bob Dobbs: Gutenberg's part of it,
[32:10] Bob Dobbs: but you might think that Gutenberg includes the 19th century and industrial stuff.
[32:16] Bob Dobbs: No,
[32:17] Bob Dobbs: it's there,
[32:17] Bob Dobbs: but it's a kinetic era.
[32:20] Bob Dobbs: The extension of our muscles,
[32:21] Bob Dobbs: pulleys and levers,
[32:23] Bob Dobbs: is the factory.
[32:25] Bob Dobbs: You see what I'm saying?
[32:25] Bob Dobbs: That's why it's not just Gutenberg.
[32:29] Bob Dobbs: Right.
[32:29] Bob Dobbs: Well,
[32:29] Cameron McEwen: it's never just...
[32:32] Cameron McEwen: anything right but what happens in history is that there are times when things get well
[32:44] Cameron McEwen: I shouldn't say there are times all the time things are out of balance right so although there is something kinetic and tactile going on the expression of that tactility
[33:00] Cameron McEwen: is completely one-sided.
[33:03] Cameron McEwen: And what happens is that the world becomes mesmerized by the sides,
[33:10] Cameron McEwen: and they lose the tactile interplay that's actually making those sides.
[33:16] Bob Dobbs: Yeah,
[33:16] Bob Dobbs: and the tactile interplay is the interplay of Marconi and Gutenberg,
[33:21] Bob Dobbs: very opposite dynamics.
[33:24] Bob Dobbs: So homeopathic means might be the word making the market.
[33:28] Bob Dobbs: That's another isolated,
[33:29] Bob Dobbs: fragmating situation.
[33:31] Bob Dobbs: And,
[33:32] Bob Dobbs: you know,
[33:32] Bob Dobbs: I go on to use homeopathic,
[33:33] Bob Dobbs: and then it gets applied to the hologram,
[33:36] Bob Dobbs: which gets smaller and smaller.
[33:38] Bob Dobbs: So these press conferences are holograms coming out,
[33:43] Bob Dobbs: and they're very tiny.
[33:47] Bob Dobbs: So
[33:49] Bob Dobbs: I'm using McLuhan's homeopathic to create the word holeopathic cliche probes.
[33:52] Bob Dobbs: So there's an antecedent for it,
[33:55] Bob Dobbs: you know what I mean?
[33:56] Cameron McEwen: Yeah,
[33:57] Cameron McEwen: yeah.
[33:57] Cameron McEwen: Absolutely.
[33:58] Cameron McEwen: Tell me one thing,
[33:59] Cameron McEwen: Bob.
[34:00] Cameron McEwen: I don't know anything about the technology of the green screen,
[34:05] Bob Dobbs: you know,
[34:05] Cameron McEwen: where they can situate Zelensky anywhere they want.
[34:09] Cameron McEwen: Yeah.
[34:12] Cameron McEwen: Is that some sort of...
[34:15] Bob Dobbs: That's a hologram.
[34:17] Cameron McEwen: Is it?
[34:18] Cameron McEwen: That's what I'm wondering.
[34:19] Bob Dobbs: Yeah,
[34:19] Bob Dobbs: that's the visualization of the hologram.
[34:23] Bob Dobbs: You're presenting that the person is somewheres,
[34:28] Bob Dobbs: and in a press conference,
[34:31] Bob Dobbs: everybody is in it.
[34:33] Bob Dobbs: Everybody's there with them,
[34:35] Bob Dobbs: so it's an environment.
[34:37] Cameron McEwen: There in the nowhere.
[34:38] Bob Dobbs: Yeah,
[34:38] Bob Dobbs: there in the green nowhere.
[34:41] Bob Dobbs: Now,
[34:41] Bob Dobbs: here's the very interesting thing about Finnegans Wake that Eric points out.
[34:45] Bob Dobbs: At the end...
[34:48] Bob Dobbs: The TV section,
[34:49] Bob Dobbs: there's a lot of green.
[34:51] Bob Dobbs: Green,
[34:52] Bob Dobbs: people are green.
[34:53] Bob Dobbs: Well,
[34:53] Bob Dobbs: it turned out in the late
[34:56] Bob Dobbs: 30s, somebody was at a TV station in New York in the late 30s,
[35:00] Bob Dobbs: and everybody wore a green paint because the electronic technology that America had,
[35:09] Bob Dobbs: as opposed to the mechanical in Europe,
[35:10] Bob Dobbs: but the American had to have this green paint on.
[35:14] Bob Dobbs: Because the actors were more visible.
[35:18] Bob Dobbs: So actually,
[35:19] Bob Dobbs: the greening of America is the green effect of the cathode tube.
[35:27] Bob Dobbs: It emphasized a green environment.
[35:29] Bob Dobbs: So I don't know if Joyce knew that,
[35:31] Bob Dobbs: but it was an interesting idea that that's what people did.
[35:33] Bob Dobbs: They favored green at the beginning of TV.
[35:38] Cameron McEwen: Yeah.
[35:39] Cameron McEwen: So you could say the spectrum of colors were there.
[35:44] Cameron McEwen: But green was emphasized out of the spectrum.
[35:49] Cameron McEwen: And so it's a kind of representation of tactility because of the difference between the selection and the spectrum out of which the selection is made.
[36:02] Bob Dobbs: Okay,
[36:02] Bob Dobbs: so then the third quote from Counterblast,
[36:06] Bob Dobbs: 1968.
[36:08] Bob Dobbs: No matter how many walls have fallen,
[36:10] Bob Dobbs: the citadel of individual consciousness has not fallen.
[36:13] Bob Dobbs: nor is it likely to fall,
[36:14] Bob Dobbs: for it is not accessible to the mass media.
[36:17] Bob Dobbs: Look at that.
[36:17] Bob Dobbs: It is not accessible.
[36:19] Bob Dobbs: So the mass media is trying to touch the private citadel.
[36:24] Bob Dobbs: It's like the mass media are alive.
[36:26] Bob Dobbs: They're trying to get access to the individual consciousness.
[36:30] Cameron McEwen: Or take it the other way.
[36:33] Bob Dobbs: It is not accessible.
[36:35] Bob Dobbs: The private consciousness can't connect to the mass media.
[36:40] Cameron McEwen: Sure,
[36:40] Cameron McEwen: both ways,
[36:41] Cameron McEwen: and there's probably others.
[36:43] Cameron McEwen: But that's a good description of advertising,
[36:47] Cameron McEwen: right?
[36:48] Cameron McEwen: Yeah.
[36:49] Cameron McEwen: Where they are trying to manipulate people at a fundamental level,
[36:57] Cameron McEwen: and they succeed,
[36:59] Cameron McEwen: right?
[37:00] Bob Dobbs: Yeah.
[37:01] Cameron McEwen: But meanwhile,
[37:03] Cameron McEwen: the citadel of individual consciousness has not fallen,
[37:08] Cameron McEwen: nor is it likely to fall.
[37:11] Cameron McEwen: However,
[37:12] Cameron McEwen: the...
[37:13] Cameron McEwen: people exercising individual consciousness are not aware that they're doing it and don't know how to do it.
[37:21] Bob Dobbs: Yeah,
[37:23] Bob Dobbs: and they don't know how to express it if they became aware of it.
[37:29] Bob Dobbs: So the basic structure of humans may be private,
[37:33] Bob Dobbs: but then you start creating society and they're not so private,
[37:36] Bob Dobbs: not so independent.
[37:37] Bob Dobbs: But McLuhan says,
[37:38] Bob Dobbs: quote,
[37:39] Bob Dobbs: in the end,
[37:39] Bob Dobbs: media don't affect the essence of a person.
[37:42] Bob Dobbs: You know,
[37:42] Bob Dobbs: it became popular in postmodern studies to talk about essentialism,
[37:46] Bob Dobbs: right?
[37:47] Bob Dobbs: And that was a limited,
[37:48] Bob Dobbs: probably they really meant it was a Gutenberg effect,
[37:51] Bob Dobbs: essentialism.
[37:52] Bob Dobbs: And it didn't apply in the postmodern era.
[37:55] Bob Dobbs: But they get ideological about it.
[37:58] Bob Dobbs: They accuse you of being essentialist from some way.
[38:01] Cameron McEwen: But notice that essence and essential are very ambiguous terms.
[38:09] Cameron McEwen: So
[38:09] Cameron McEwen: McLuhan sometimes...
[38:11] Cameron McEwen: uses it positively and sometimes negatively.
[38:15] Cameron McEwen: But we've brought up in the past this great quote from the Nashe thesis in 1943 where he talks about the intuitive perception of essentials.
[38:32] Bob Dobbs: Yes.
[38:36] Cameron McEwen: The reason that media don't affect the essence of a person
[38:41] Cameron McEwen: is that it is the essence of a person to be able to enter into media.
[38:47] Cameron McEwen: So if you think of a child learning language,
[38:50] Cameron McEwen: for example,
[38:51] Cameron McEwen: the child cannot learn language on the basis of language.
[38:55] Cameron McEwen: It cannot learn media on the basis of media.
[38:58] Cameron McEwen: There has to be something prior to media and language that enables that engagement.
[39:07] Cameron McEwen: And what is prior to the engagement with language in media is the essential perception,
[39:19] Cameron McEwen: intuition of the isolated person.
[39:22] Cameron McEwen: As I say,
[39:23] Cameron McEwen: the isolated person is by nature essentially related to something bigger than the isolated person.
[39:33] Bob Dobbs: Right,
[39:33] Bob Dobbs: and I'm calling that ESP.
[39:36] Cameron McEwen: Yeah.
[39:37] Bob Dobbs: Yeah.
[39:43] Bob Dobbs: Did Marshall McLuhan finish writing his PhD in 1942,
[39:46] Bob Dobbs: mailed it to England,
[39:47] Bob Dobbs: and he gets there in 1943 and it's marked,
[39:50] Bob Dobbs: but he actually finished in
[39:52] Bob Dobbs: 1942? Have you ever worked that out?
[39:54] Cameron McEwen: Yes.
[39:56] Cameron McEwen: I believe that he sent it in March of 1943,
[40:01] Cameron McEwen: and in December of 1943,
[40:06] Cameron McEwen: he got the notice that it had been approved.
[40:07] Bob Dobbs: Yeah,
[40:08] Bob Dobbs: so he finished it in 42 probably.
[40:12] Cameron McEwen: Oh,
[40:12] Cameron McEwen: maybe.
[40:13] Cameron McEwen: Yeah,
[40:13] Cameron McEwen: so.
[40:14] Cameron McEwen: You know,
[40:14] Cameron McEwen: it all depends what we mean by finish.
[40:17] Bob Dobbs: Well,
[40:17] Bob Dobbs: he,
[40:17] Bob Dobbs: most people say,
[40:18] Bob Dobbs: oh,
[40:19] Bob Dobbs: he's scribbling the last pages in 43.
[40:22] Bob Dobbs: He gets his piece in 43.
[40:23] Bob Dobbs: No,
[40:23] Bob Dobbs: it takes a whole year to get it acknowledged.
[40:27] Bob Dobbs: So he's not doing anything with it in 43.
[40:31] Bob Dobbs: Maybe in January and February.
[40:33] Bob Dobbs: Well,
[40:34] Cameron McEwen: certainly,
[40:34] Cameron McEwen: yeah,
[40:35] Cameron McEwen: because he sends it off in March.
[40:39] Cameron McEwen: We really don't know what was going on in January and February.
[40:42] Cameron McEwen: Probably
[40:44] Cameron McEwen: Corinne was typing like crazy,
[40:47] Cameron McEwen: and he was correcting mistakes or something.
[40:51] Cameron McEwen: I don't know.
[40:52] Cameron McEwen: But what's interesting there is that's 1943,
[40:55] Cameron McEwen: and then in 1951,
[40:59] Cameron McEwen: in his letter to
[41:00] Cameron McEwen: Innis, that's also sent off in March.
[41:05] Cameron McEwen: the um
[41:06] Cameron McEwen: March letter is a rewrite of what he had already sent in either earlier in the year in 1951 or at the end of 1950.
[41:18] Cameron McEwen: So we have a replay of the same situation as happened with the thesis in 42,
[41:26] Bob Dobbs: 43.
[41:26] Bob Dobbs: Yeah,
[41:26] Bob Dobbs: and
[41:27] Bob Dobbs: I think he's on the cover of Newsweek in March 67 or
[41:32] Bob Dobbs: 66. I can't remember which it was.
[41:34] Bob Dobbs: But the...
[41:36] Bob Dobbs: Things happened to Marshall in March.
[41:40] Cameron McEwen: Yeah,
[41:41] Cameron McEwen: and March comes from Mars.
[41:44] Bob Dobbs: Yeah,
[41:44] Bob Dobbs: and it's the beginning of spring.
[41:46] Bob Dobbs: You know,
[41:47] Bob Dobbs: his PhD might have activated the ethereal realms and caused the turnaround in the war,
[41:54] Cameron McEwen: because it's not around the time Russia stopped Hitler.
[41:57] Bob Dobbs: 42,
[41:58] Bob Dobbs: 43,
[42:02] Bob Dobbs: I think that's the famous...
[42:03] Cameron McEwen: That's right.
[42:04] Cameron McEwen: Yeah.
[42:04] Bob Dobbs: Yeah.
[42:05] Cameron McEwen: 40...
[42:05] Cameron McEwen: 1942 is when
[42:08] Cameron McEwen: Germany reached its furthest penetration into Russia,
[42:14] Cameron McEwen: I believe.
[42:14] Bob Dobbs: In 1942.
[42:16] Cameron McEwen: Yeah.
[42:17] Bob Dobbs: Yeah.
[42:18] Bob Dobbs: And then they get bogged down and have the terrible winter of 1942 going into 1943.
[42:23] Bob Dobbs: Yeah.
[42:24] Bob Dobbs: Yeah.
[42:24] Bob Dobbs: Marshall's book.
[42:26] Bob Dobbs: Marshall's law is coming.
[42:27] Bob Dobbs: The poet,
[42:28] Bob Dobbs: his legislator,
[42:29] Bob Dobbs: is going to put a stop to this nonsense in March.
[42:33] Bob Dobbs: Okay.
[42:33] Bob Dobbs: So.
[42:40] Bob Dobbs: McLuhan says in the end media don't affect the essence of a person.
[42:43] Bob Dobbs: That's another idea of isolation and detachment from the merged condition of social communion.
[42:49] Bob Dobbs: Social communion,
[42:50] Bob Dobbs: phatic.
[42:52] Bob Dobbs: Another idea of isolation and detachment from the merged condition of social communion.
[42:56] Bob Dobbs: Now the phatic is the interplay of the essence and the whatever acknowledgment is going on between humans.
[43:06] Bob Dobbs: Which can,
[43:06] Cameron McEwen: again,
[43:07] Cameron McEwen: be positive or negative.
[43:09] Bob Dobbs: Yeah.
[43:10] Bob Dobbs: So I kind of get at this by saying one is simulating the ESP,
[43:13] Bob Dobbs: which surrounds everybody and penetrates.
[43:17] Bob Dobbs: I have merged slash interpenetrated.
[43:19] Bob Dobbs: That's the popular mythology of ESP.
[43:22] Bob Dobbs: Everybody intimately inside each other.
[43:24] Bob Dobbs: It's a merger of humans via the global theater.
[43:28] Bob Dobbs: And you would say,
[43:29] Bob Dobbs: well,
[43:29] Bob Dobbs: it's always been the case,
[43:30] Bob Dobbs: Bob.
[43:35] Cameron McEwen: But there's a difference between something always being the case and that being articulated.
[43:44] Bob Dobbs: Extended.
[43:45] Cameron McEwen: So if you think of chemistry,
[43:47] Cameron McEwen: for example,
[43:49] Cameron McEwen: since the universe began,
[43:51] Cameron McEwen: chemistry has been operating.
[43:57] Cameron McEwen: the for
[44:01] Cameron McEwen: 99.9999999%
[44:05] Cameron McEwen: of that 14 billion years,
[44:08] Cameron McEwen: nobody knew what was going on.
[44:10] Cameron McEwen: And then starting just a couple hundred years ago with the isolation of the chemical element,
[44:16] Cameron McEwen: people began to figure that out.
[44:18] Bob Dobbs: Yeah.
[44:19] Cameron McEwen: So there's always these two things going on.
[44:21] Cameron McEwen: There's what's going on,
[44:22] Cameron McEwen: and then there's the articulation of what's going on.
[44:25] Cameron McEwen: And those are very different.
[44:27] Bob Dobbs: Yeah,
[44:27] Bob Dobbs: the articulation is his word extension.
[44:31] Cameron McEwen: Sure.
[44:31] Bob Dobbs: Yeah.
[44:33] Bob Dobbs: Okay.
[44:34] Bob Dobbs: Articulation.
[44:35] Bob Dobbs: I wonder what he said.
[44:36] Bob Dobbs: Understanding the articulation of man,
[44:39] Bob Dobbs: that might be a better word.
[44:42] Cameron McEwen: Yeah.
[44:43] Cameron McEwen: Well,
[44:43] Cameron McEwen: articulation and extension work well together.
[44:46] Bob Dobbs: Yeah.
[44:47] Bob Dobbs: Yeah.
[44:48] Bob Dobbs: It's a merger of humans via the global theater.
[44:50] Bob Dobbs: Then capitalism,
[44:51] Bob Dobbs: the after image of the printing press,
[44:54] Bob Dobbs: couldn't continue to function while everybody's sharing the same disembodied space and not having to own anything.
[45:01] Bob Dobbs: And now they're trying to make that,
[45:03] Bob Dobbs: that's such an obsolete,
[45:04] Bob Dobbs: been around for so long,
[45:05] Bob Dobbs: they're now trying to make a global new society based on not owning anything,
[45:10] Bob Dobbs: which is making laws and legislation rearview mirror.
[45:15] Bob Dobbs: And it's always the past,
[45:17] Bob Dobbs: he says,
[45:17] Bob Dobbs: and Take Today when you make legislation.
[45:20] Bob Dobbs: You're always talking down what has come and gone.
[45:23] Cameron McEwen: The whole idea of nobody owning anything is in service of a few people owning everything.
[45:33] Bob Dobbs: Yeah.
[45:34] Cameron McEwen: You see,
[45:36] Cameron McEwen: the dead hand of Gutenberg is organizing the world these days.
[45:42] Bob Dobbs: Yeah,
[45:42] Bob Dobbs: the homogeneous effect.
[45:45] Bob Dobbs: Homogeneity.
[45:46] Bob Dobbs: So that's a pretty good one.
[45:49] Bob Dobbs: Did Marx know that capitalism was the afterimage of the pretty press?
[45:52] Bob Dobbs: That's a pretty good new definition.
[45:54] Bob Dobbs: Yeah,
[45:55] Cameron McEwen: no,
[45:55] Cameron McEwen: I like that.
[45:56] Bob Dobbs: Yeah.
[45:57] Bob Dobbs: Couldn't continue to function while everybody's sharing the same disembodied space and not having to own anything.
[46:01] Bob Dobbs: The meme of literate individuality started to allow pay TV and Walkmans and all the specialized electronic delight.
[46:10] Bob Dobbs: Well,
[46:10] Bob Dobbs: that's a little poetic.
[46:12] Bob Dobbs: And then the computer digital technology can...
[46:16] Bob Dobbs: When do I say computer digital technology?
[46:18] Bob Dobbs: That's redundant.
[46:19] Bob Dobbs: And then the computer digital technology continued to throw people back,
[46:23] Bob Dobbs: maybe the computer phase of digital is what I'm saying.
[46:27] Bob Dobbs: And then the computer digital technology continues to throw people back into isolated,
[46:31] Bob Dobbs: walled-off spaces,
[46:32] Bob Dobbs: which would exaggerate personal consumerism.
[46:35] Bob Dobbs: Accompanying this retrieval of a virtual visual space,
[46:39] Bob Dobbs: the patina of the archetypal silent print condition,
[46:43] Bob Dobbs: the Android meme digitized and atomized every digital user.
[46:47] Bob Dobbs: So accompanying this retrieval of a virtual visual space,
[46:52] Bob Dobbs: that's the patina of the archetypal silent printing condition,
[46:54] Bob Dobbs: but the Android meme...
[46:56] Bob Dobbs: modulated it,
[46:58] Bob Dobbs: shaped it.
[46:58] Bob Dobbs: The Android media digitized and atomized every digital user.
[47:02] Bob Dobbs: That's a popular word,
[47:03] Bob Dobbs: atomized.
[47:03] Bob Dobbs: A few years ago,
[47:06] Bob Dobbs: everybody knew that word.
[47:07] Bob Dobbs: They'd say,
[47:07] Bob Dobbs: we're becoming atomized,
[47:09] Bob Dobbs: you know?
[47:10] Bob Dobbs: But they don't,
[47:11] Bob Dobbs: it's a word.
[47:11] Bob Dobbs: They don't get the technical ground of it.
[47:15] Cameron McEwen: Correct.
[47:16] Cameron McEwen: That's why the word patina is a good word there.
[47:19] Bob Dobbs: Yeah.
[47:20] Bob Dobbs: The patina of the archetypal silent print condition.
[47:22] Bob Dobbs: So accompanying that.
[47:25] Bob Dobbs: Parallel to that is the Android meme,
[47:30] Bob Dobbs: which is another kind of more integral atomization.
[47:36] Bob Dobbs: You're atomizing all the senses as a coherent chemical body,
[47:41] Bob Dobbs: as the content.
[47:45] Cameron McEwen: Can you tell me more about that?
[47:46] Cameron McEwen: I don't understand what you meant there.
[47:49] Bob Dobbs: Okay,
[47:50] Bob Dobbs: so print highlights the visual.
[47:56] Bob Dobbs: So the visual is atomized,
[47:58] Bob Dobbs: but when the visual part of the chemical body,
[48:02] Bob Dobbs: and it enhances the chemical body.
[48:04] Bob Dobbs: But when you get the Android meme,
[48:06] Bob Dobbs: the whole panoply of chemical body forms is the content of the Android meme.
[48:12] Bob Dobbs: But I'm trying to say that the Android meme itself is going to become atomized,
[48:17] Bob Dobbs: not just the chemical body content.
[48:20] Bob Dobbs: It's already beginning to get atomized in the Gutenberg phase.
[48:25] Bob Dobbs: Visually,
[48:26] Bob Dobbs: but the whole,
[48:27] Bob Dobbs: all the sentences are atomized in the Android meme phase.
[48:33] Bob Dobbs: And then that gets to synesthesia and drug taking and mixing of media and mixing of environments.
[48:38] Bob Dobbs: So that article in 74 in New York Times,
[48:42] Bob Dobbs: Media Approach to Inflation,
[48:43] Bob Dobbs: he talks about the marketing of the tactile space known as futures.
[48:49] Bob Dobbs: Tactile becomes the content.
[48:52] Cameron McEwen: So tell me if this is right.
[48:55] Cameron McEwen: I see what you're talking about here as lines that are coming out of the
[49:03] Cameron McEwen: Gutenberg Galaxy.
[49:05] Cameron McEwen: So on the one hand,
[49:07] Cameron McEwen: you have inventions starting already with the telegraph that are being built on the basis of
[49:17] Cameron McEwen: Gutenbergian discoveries,
[49:19] Cameron McEwen: but they're contradicting the technology and the underlying...
[49:26] Cameron McEwen: consciousness of the Gutenberg Galaxy.
[49:30] Cameron McEwen: So you have these inventions and these social conventions that relate to the inventions that are going to overturn
[49:46] Cameron McEwen: the Gutenberg Galaxy and increase the speed of the world.
[49:50] Cameron McEwen: But at the same time,
[49:52] Cameron McEwen: as these things,
[49:53] Cameron McEwen: another line comes in,
[49:54] Cameron McEwen: coming out of the Gutenberg Galaxy is the consciousness that lives in.
[50:02] Cameron McEwen: this new environment.
[50:04] Cameron McEwen: And so you have these two lines coming out.
[50:07] Cameron McEwen: One is ever-increasing speed,
[50:10] Cameron McEwen: ever-increasing inventiveness,
[50:12] Cameron McEwen: ever-increasing types of new technology.
[50:17] Cameron McEwen: And on the other one,
[50:18] Cameron McEwen: you have people's second science changing with those rapidly changing environments.
[50:30] Cameron McEwen: I guess what's necessary is for those parallel lines through a Gutenbergian process to begin to merge at some point,
[50:44] Cameron McEwen: but without identification between the two.
[50:49] Bob Dobbs: Yeah,
[50:49] Bob Dobbs: that might be what the fractal is.
[50:52] Cameron McEwen: Yeah,
[50:53] Cameron McEwen: good point,
[50:53] Cameron McEwen: good point.
[50:54] Cameron McEwen: So then
[50:55] Cameron McEwen: I guess what would happen is...
[50:58] Cameron McEwen: And what you're doing in the pamphlet might be said to be looking at the history of these lines and identifying where we are in
[51:12] Cameron McEwen: regard to them.
[51:14] Cameron McEwen: So notice that with the two lines,
[51:15] Cameron McEwen: of course,
[51:16] Cameron McEwen: there's tactility between the two lines,
[51:19] Cameron McEwen: and that's changing all the time.
[51:23] Cameron McEwen: We might say that your pamphlet is a dynamic map of that changing tactility.
[51:32] Bob Dobbs: Yeah,
[51:33] Bob Dobbs: and the changing tactility is the holeopathic cliche probes radio,
[51:37] Bob Dobbs: TV,
[51:38] Bob Dobbs: computer,
[51:38] Bob Dobbs: satellite on the left column of the Tiny Note chart.
[51:41] Bob Dobbs: That tiny process,
[51:43] Bob Dobbs: each one of those is,
[51:43] Bob Dobbs: quote,
[51:44] Bob Dobbs: a line,
[51:45] Bob Dobbs: a thread,
[51:47] Bob Dobbs: and they're that subtle and tiny,
[51:50] Bob Dobbs: so that's holeopathic cliche probes.
[51:51] Bob Dobbs: And so that's why I put...
[51:52] Bob Dobbs: subatomic particles beside them.
[51:55] Bob Dobbs: You know,
[51:56] Bob Dobbs: subatomics are attempts to visualize the lines.
[52:00] Cameron McEwen: Correct.
[52:01] Cameron McEwen: That's good.
[52:03] Bob Dobbs: Yeah,
[52:03] Bob Dobbs: and then I'm thinking at the end of Take Today when he says the recently achieved forms of consciousness.
[52:08] Bob Dobbs: That's what comes to me as you were talking about what the private second science was going through.
[52:14] Bob Dobbs: It's becoming,
[52:17] Bob Dobbs: in a way,
[52:18] Bob Dobbs: encapsulating.
[52:19] Bob Dobbs: It's becoming the ground.
[52:22] Bob Dobbs: So there's an interesting point that humans,
[52:25] Bob Dobbs: whatever the consciousness is,
[52:27] Bob Dobbs: which is their tactility,
[52:28] Bob Dobbs: is getting solidified as the literate part of themselves is dispersed and just lost in the merged environment.
[52:38] Bob Dobbs: But there is another kind of identity being formed.
[52:41] Cameron McEwen: Correct.
[52:42] Cameron McEwen: That's how,
[52:43] Cameron McEwen: at the very start of our conversation,
[52:45] Cameron McEwen: I can't remember if it was before we recorded or after,
[52:49] Cameron McEwen: I was...
[52:50] Cameron McEwen: talking about network identity.
[52:53] Cameron McEwen: Is this tonight?
[52:56] Cameron McEwen: Yeah,
[52:57] Cameron McEwen: today.
[52:58] Bob Dobbs: Okay,
[52:58] Bob Dobbs: network identity.
[53:00] Cameron McEwen: Yeah,
[53:00] Cameron McEwen: so
[53:03] Cameron McEwen: I think what you just said,
[53:04] Cameron McEwen: and which is very important,
[53:06] Cameron McEwen: is that an atomized identity is a typical effect of the Gutenberg Galaxy.
[53:14] Cameron McEwen: Yeah.
[53:15] Cameron McEwen: And that gets imploded.
[53:18] Cameron McEwen: And the only...
[53:20] Cameron McEwen: way out of the problems that are precipitated by that implosion is to move to network identity.
[53:32] Bob Dobbs: And that would be adopting different electric media.
[53:35] Bob Dobbs: So that's what I call myth.
[53:37] Bob Dobbs: The mythic stage is your new identity,
[53:40] Bob Dobbs: and it's a particular electric media you use.
[53:42] Bob Dobbs: So you could be in the newspaper industry.
[53:46] Bob Dobbs: you know the electrified newspaper industry you could be in movies you could be in television you could be in music you could be in business and counting they're all um electrifications of uh forget what i was saying there the the uh oh yeah you're wearing different environments and they're mythic because they're electric yes yes
[54:07] Bob Dobbs: and so but mostly they're unconscious at this stage oh yeah and so i was explaining this in my memo to prince charles in 1987 it's in the booklet for...
[54:15] Bob Dobbs: Bob's Media Ecology.
[54:17] Bob Dobbs: And the mythic stage was my term for people becoming media environments because they're shrinking.
[54:29] Bob Dobbs: The electronic smallness is happening,
[54:31] Bob Dobbs: doing more and more of less and less.
[54:33] Bob Dobbs: So it's not a culture war.
[54:35] Bob Dobbs: It's mythic stages warfare.
[54:39] Bob Dobbs: People allegiance to different kinds of media,
[54:43] Bob Dobbs: electric media.
[54:44] Bob Dobbs: Do you see what I mean?
[54:45] Cameron McEwen: Oh,
[54:46] Cameron McEwen: absolutely.
[54:46] Cameron McEwen: That's what we mentioned,
[54:48] Cameron McEwen: the civil war of media.
[54:50] Bob Dobbs: Yeah.
[54:51] Cameron McEwen: In the non-recorded part of our conversation.
[54:56] Bob Dobbs: Yeah.
[54:57] Cameron McEwen: Yeah.
[54:58] Bob Dobbs: Okay,
[54:58] Bob Dobbs: so now we're into 134.
[55:01] Bob Dobbs: And stepping out of my rant part,
[55:08] Bob Dobbs: I say this would lead to the rise of the Anthropomorphic Physical.
[55:11] Bob Dobbs: Now,
[55:12] Bob Dobbs: that's what
[55:13] Bob Dobbs: I was just describing.
[55:15] Bob Dobbs: The sense that reasonably achieved forms of consciousness,
[55:18] Bob Dobbs: you probably project an anthropomorphic dimension to it.
[55:21] Bob Dobbs: So a lot of people,
[55:23] Bob Dobbs: and now you see the kids telling other anthropomorphic forms,
[55:27] Bob Dobbs: adults,
[55:28] Bob Dobbs: to fuck off.
[55:30] Bob Dobbs: See,
[55:30] Bob Dobbs: that's...
[55:31] Bob Dobbs: That's the,
[55:34] Bob Dobbs: you could say,
[55:34] Bob Dobbs: the essence of the private-sittled consciousness becoming figure or maybe figure ground,
[55:41] Bob Dobbs: and that is what people's identity are.
[55:43] Bob Dobbs: So in the world of mystical literature,
[55:46] Bob Dobbs: they're beginning to feel they're gods.
[55:49] Bob Dobbs: They're impervious to anything that's going on because of that pattern.
[55:52] Bob Dobbs: Remember back in the 60s,
[55:54] Bob Dobbs: media is not affecting you.
[55:56] Bob Dobbs: That was under the global theater.
[55:58] Bob Dobbs: But you get into the global end.
[56:00] Bob Dobbs: global meme,
[56:02] Bob Dobbs: Global Membrane,
[56:03] Bob Dobbs: and then the tech body,
[56:05] Bob Dobbs: the Anthropomorphic Physical is more and more subject to your own orchestration.
[56:11] Bob Dobbs: And then that gets into the transgender people.
[56:14] Bob Dobbs: So the massaging of the AP is the content of the Android meme phase,
[56:19] Bob Dobbs: is what I'm saying here.
[56:21] Bob Dobbs: This will lead to the rise of the Anthropomorphic Physical,
[56:25] Bob Dobbs: an outcome based on the following reasoning.
[56:27] Bob Dobbs: McLuhan saw that the notion of the medium is the message or message was soon not to be applicable to the law of the situation,
[56:36] Bob Dobbs: which is another term he came up with from Mary Parker Follett.
[56:40] Bob Dobbs: So to explain this,
[56:41] Bob Dobbs: I say a business consultant in the 20s,
[56:43] Bob Dobbs: Mary Parker Follett,
[56:45] Bob Dobbs: came up with a sort of a medium is the message,
[56:47] Bob Dobbs: figure ground situation,
[56:48] Bob Dobbs: which he called the law of the situation.
[56:51] Bob Dobbs: McLuhan used the phrase once or twice.
[56:53] Bob Dobbs: The law of the situation is an answer evoked by the question.
[56:56] Bob Dobbs: What's the context?
[56:58] Bob Dobbs: Many people see the medium as mere context.
[57:01] Bob Dobbs: What's the context of the event?
[57:02] Bob Dobbs: But that's freezing it as a concept.
[57:05] Bob Dobbs: It's not getting the sensory shaping,
[57:07] Bob Dobbs: the numbing process.
[57:09] Bob Dobbs: Then I go back to my prose.
[57:13] Bob Dobbs: The Android meme,
[57:15] Bob Dobbs: AM,
[57:15] Bob Dobbs: as opposed to Anthropomorphic Physical,
[57:17] Bob Dobbs: which is AP,
[57:18] Bob Dobbs: induced humans to think the AM's content is subject to human massage.
[57:23] Bob Dobbs: So the content is more and more the AP.
[57:26] Bob Dobbs: But as we get into,
[57:28] Bob Dobbs: say,
[57:28] Bob Dobbs: Web 2.0,
[57:29] Bob Dobbs: the AP starts to massage the AM.
[57:33] Bob Dobbs: And that's why you would get people thinking they're gods in such perverted ways of manifesting it,
[57:42] Bob Dobbs: like the kids not listening to the adults,
[57:46] Bob Dobbs: way more radical than previous generations.
[57:51] Bob Dobbs: They're not,
[57:52] Bob Dobbs: you know,
[57:53] Bob Dobbs: if they have a global ESP,
[57:54] Bob Dobbs: then everybody's in the same spot.
[57:56] Bob Dobbs: Everybody's equal.
[57:57] Bob Dobbs: So don't you tell me anything.
[58:00] Bob Dobbs: You know and I know the same thing.
[58:02] Bob Dobbs: There's no point talking about it.
[58:04] Bob Dobbs: But I will assert my difference.
[58:07] Bob Dobbs: So then you start massaging your chemical body or older media content as your identity.
[58:13] Bob Dobbs: So let's see if that's what I say here.
[58:15] Bob Dobbs: The Android meme's induced humans to think the Android meme content is subject to human massage.
[58:21] Bob Dobbs: Humans are actually not manipulated or brainwashed by the Android meme.
[58:24] Bob Dobbs: They do appear to everybody else.
[58:26] Bob Dobbs: They appear to be,
[58:27] Bob Dobbs: everybody else thinks they're brainwashed.
[58:29] Bob Dobbs: They do appear to be,
[58:31] Bob Dobbs: they do appear to everybody else.
[58:33] Bob Dobbs: In brackets,
[58:34] Bob Dobbs: each one of us appears one of the following ways.
[58:37] Bob Dobbs: They have symptoms of paranoia,
[58:38] Bob Dobbs: schizophrenia,
[58:39] Bob Dobbs: hysteria,
[58:40] Bob Dobbs: panic,
[58:40] Bob Dobbs: or ecstasy in their newly isolated,
[58:43] Bob Dobbs: disconnected condition of surplus flesh.
[58:46] Bob Dobbs: That's from Kroker,
[58:46] Bob Dobbs: surplus flesh.
[58:48] Bob Dobbs: Surplus Gutenberg,
[58:49] Bob Dobbs: surplus chemical body.
[58:50] Bob Dobbs: This is why everybody today keeps frantically monitoring their black mirrors.
[58:54] Bob Dobbs: that's their cell phones or texting,
[58:57] Bob Dobbs: and texting to see if there are any others out there,
[59:00] Bob Dobbs: any other nano communities.
[59:02] Bob Dobbs: So that's a pretty good statement of what's been going on for the last 10 or more years under Web 2.0,
[59:09] Bob Dobbs: but I can see it might be very hard to understand what I'm saying,
[59:13] Bob Dobbs: but I'm sure you get it.
[59:14] Bob Dobbs: What do you think?
[59:15] Cameron McEwen: I don't know,
[59:16] Cameron McEwen: but let me ask a few questions here.
[59:20] Cameron McEwen: You say...
[59:23] Cameron McEwen: They do appear to everyone else,
[59:25] Cameron McEwen: each one of us appears in one of the following ways,
[59:27] Cameron McEwen: to have symptoms of paranoia,
[59:29] Cameron McEwen: schizophrenia,
[59:30] Cameron McEwen: hysteria,
[59:31] Cameron McEwen: panic,
[59:32] Cameron McEwen: or ecstasy.
[59:33] Cameron McEwen: So are you saying that what happens in the
[59:37] Cameron McEwen: Android meme environment is that people begin to act out the fact that their Gutenberg identity,
[59:52] Cameron McEwen: this
[59:52] Cameron McEwen: Their chemical body is not their...
[59:58] Cameron McEwen: primary identity.
[1:00:00] Cameron McEwen: Instead,
[1:00:00] Cameron McEwen: their primary identity is an effect of one of these structures,
[1:00:06] Cameron McEwen: the paranoia structure,
[1:00:07] Cameron McEwen: the schizophrenia structure,
[1:00:10] Cameron McEwen: all this sort of stuff.
[1:00:11] Bob Dobbs: Those are articulations of people trying to be different.
[1:00:17] Bob Dobbs: Yes,
[1:00:19] Cameron McEwen: but these define the people,
[1:00:20] Cameron McEwen: right?
[1:00:21] Cameron McEwen: Not the people define these things.
[1:00:23] Cameron McEwen: Right.
[1:00:25] Cameron McEwen: But they don't know that.
[1:00:26] Cameron McEwen: That's right.
[1:00:29] Cameron McEwen: The whole point of the Android meme is to give people the impression that they are controlling these things as they are being controlled by them.
[1:00:38] Bob Dobbs: Yeah,
[1:00:38] Bob Dobbs: and the fact they're being controlled is more obvious to the outsider who's not engaged in it.
[1:00:43] Bob Dobbs: They're being subject to it too,
[1:00:45] Bob Dobbs: but we're all looking disgusting to each other.
[1:00:49] Cameron McEwen: Yeah.
[1:00:49] Cameron McEwen: So then what is the,
[1:00:52] Cameron McEwen: from that condition to the AP,
[1:00:56] Cameron McEwen: Is it that under the
[1:01:01] Cameron McEwen: Android meme,
[1:01:02] Cameron McEwen: people are the effect of these structures,
[1:01:06] Cameron McEwen: and then in the AP,
[1:01:08] Cameron McEwen: they attempt to get out of the AM.
[1:01:11] Bob Dobbs: And the AM becomes an effect.
[1:01:13] Bob Dobbs: And they usually select one particular electric medium,
[1:01:16] Bob Dobbs: their mythic stage,
[1:01:17] Bob Dobbs: to do that in.
[1:01:19] Cameron McEwen: Right,
[1:01:19] Cameron McEwen: right.
[1:01:20] Cameron McEwen: So it's an attempt to no longer be an effect.
[1:01:24] Cameron McEwen: Instead,
[1:01:24] Cameron McEwen: to be a cause is what is the bridge between or the tactility between the Android meme and the AP.
[1:01:36] Cameron McEwen: So do you see the
[1:01:41] Cameron McEwen: AP as inherently inflationary?
[1:01:47] Bob Dobbs: Yes,
[1:01:49] Bob Dobbs: it causes endless problems.
[1:01:53] Bob Dobbs: You know,
[1:01:54] Bob Dobbs: no coherent social communication going on anymore.
[1:01:58] Bob Dobbs: Everybody is in exaggeration.
[1:02:01] Cameron McEwen: Correct.
[1:02:02] Cameron McEwen: By exaggeration,
[1:02:03] Cameron McEwen: that's what I mean by inflation,
[1:02:04] Cameron McEwen: right?
[1:02:05] Cameron McEwen: Yeah,
[1:02:05] Bob Dobbs: okay.
[1:02:08] Cameron McEwen: It's an attempt,
[1:02:10] Cameron McEwen: you could say,
[1:02:11] Cameron McEwen: to manage the unmanageable situation of being in effect.
[1:02:17] Bob Dobbs: Yeah,
[1:02:17] Cameron McEwen: yeah.
[1:02:17] Cameron McEwen: And so you can see the work of
[1:02:20] Cameron McEwen: Samuel Beckett as an example.
[1:02:23] Cameron McEwen: of the problems that are at stake here.
[1:02:26] Cameron McEwen: What Beckett does is he shows that in order to make a picture,
[1:02:32] Cameron McEwen: the artist has to select colors,
[1:02:34] Cameron McEwen: they have to put the brush to canvas,
[1:02:39] Cameron McEwen: and they have to make particular forms,
[1:02:42] Cameron McEwen: and then at some point they have to say,
[1:02:45] Cameron McEwen: it's done now.
[1:02:47] Cameron McEwen: And each one of those things is a kind of command.
[1:02:52] Cameron McEwen: So then...
[1:02:52] Cameron McEwen: Beckett says,
[1:02:53] Cameron McEwen: well,
[1:02:53] Cameron McEwen: but by what right is the command made?
[1:02:58] Bob Dobbs: Yes.
[1:02:59] Cameron McEwen: And there is no right.
[1:03:01] Cameron McEwen: And so the only picture that actually portrays the way things are is a picture that has no commands to it.
[1:03:13] Bob Dobbs: Right.
[1:03:13] Bob Dobbs: So everybody is trying to do the commands,
[1:03:16] Bob Dobbs: and they come across as paranoid and schizophrenia and hysterical.
[1:03:22] Cameron McEwen: Which they try to use at the very moment that they're being used by them.
[1:03:27] Cameron McEwen: And this dialectic or this interplay between this attempt to use and being used by,
[1:03:43] Cameron McEwen: that sets up a whole new kind of environment that...
[1:03:50] Cameron McEwen: where our nerves are on the outside of us because our identities are on the outside of us and we're trying to identify with them in order to have an identity.
[1:04:04] Cameron McEwen: But these things are inherently beyond our capacity to identify with.
[1:04:10] Bob Dobbs: And as you say all that,
[1:04:12] Bob Dobbs: remember,
[1:04:12] Bob Dobbs: this book is explaining Trump.
[1:04:14] Bob Dobbs: That is what Trump expressed.
[1:04:17] Bob Dobbs: What you were describing,
[1:04:18] Bob Dobbs: He was the extreme extension.
[1:04:20] Bob Dobbs: of what everybody was doing and he was right in front of everybody unnaturally or unconditionally and catapulted into prison which was the white house you know he was successful in quotes McLuhan says today there's no success like failure and no failure like success but is he
[1:04:37] Bob Dobbs: became so ugly to people because he was expressing these five conditions paranoia schizophrenia hysteria panic and yet to those that don't know anything about it which is most of us
[1:04:50] Bob Dobbs: It was charismatic,
[1:04:51] Bob Dobbs: what he did.
[1:04:52] Cameron McEwen: Yes,
[1:04:53] Cameron McEwen: yes.
[1:04:54] Cameron McEwen: I like that a lot.
[1:04:55] Bob Dobbs: Yeah.
[1:04:55] Cameron McEwen: So it's like the sacrificial lamb.
[1:04:59] Bob Dobbs: Yeah.
[1:05:01] Cameron McEwen: Here's this guy proclaiming that he's the greatest know-it-all that ever lived.
[1:05:10] Cameron McEwen: That's AP.
[1:05:11] Bob Dobbs: It's not trying to dominate the AM.
[1:05:13] Bob Dobbs: Yeah,
[1:05:16] Cameron McEwen: that's good.
[1:05:16] Cameron McEwen: I didn't understand that before,
[1:05:18] Cameron McEwen: but that's great.
[1:05:19] Bob Dobbs: It makes total sense,
[1:05:20] Bob Dobbs: doesn't it?
[1:05:20] Bob Dobbs: It makes all sense.
[1:05:21] Bob Dobbs: It explains what he's doing.
[1:05:24] Bob Dobbs: It had to be a guy like that.
[1:05:26] Bob Dobbs: They had to find the guy with the biggest ego in New York City to be a candidate.
[1:05:31] Cameron McEwen: That's right.
[1:05:32] Cameron McEwen: That is absolutely right.
[1:05:34] Bob Dobbs: That's pretty neat.
[1:05:35] Bob Dobbs: So very good.
[1:05:36] Bob Dobbs: This is what the book is about,
[1:05:39] Bob Dobbs: finding out.
[1:05:42] Bob Dobbs: So that's why it's interesting to have you pretty close to understanding me so that you see
[1:05:49] Bob Dobbs: say it back to me.
[1:05:50] Bob Dobbs: So it's been articulated to me.
[1:05:52] Bob Dobbs: I had nobody to articulate it back to me,
[1:05:54] Bob Dobbs: which helps me understand what I'm saying,
[1:05:56] Bob Dobbs: right?
[1:05:57] Bob Dobbs: Well,
[1:05:59] Cameron McEwen: I would say what I do is I try to spark things that you know.
[1:06:04] Bob Dobbs: Yeah,
[1:06:05] Bob Dobbs: yeah.
[1:06:06] Bob Dobbs: Well,
[1:06:06] Bob Dobbs: I said it.
[1:06:07] Bob Dobbs: I wrote it.
[1:06:08] Bob Dobbs: We find out what I wrote.
[1:06:11] Bob Dobbs: What is it?
[1:06:12] Bob Dobbs: It's not I've got to use words to talk to you.
[1:06:14] Bob Dobbs: I need to have contact with someone else to find out what I'm saying.
[1:06:19] Cameron McEwen: But note how that ties with this idea of communication being a kind of after image of talking or of writing,
[1:06:35] Cameron McEwen: where the after image is,
[1:06:43] Cameron McEwen: it's not predictable and it's certainly not controllable.
[1:06:48] Cameron McEwen: But it's something that has been driving civilization from the start.
[1:06:56] Bob Dobbs: Yeah.
[1:06:56] Cameron McEwen: So that people were acting out social conventions and telling their tales of the tribe and doing all that sort of stuff.
[1:07:06] Cameron McEwen: But they were also participating in something larger than themselves.
[1:07:12] Cameron McEwen: And the great question posed by McLuhan.
[1:07:18] Cameron McEwen: Maybe,
[1:07:19] Cameron McEwen: what is that medium?
[1:07:21] Bob Dobbs: Yeah.
[1:07:22] Cameron McEwen: That medium that was larger than the people that were acting it out.
[1:07:28] Bob Dobbs: What was the formal cause?
[1:07:30] Cameron McEwen: Yeah.
[1:07:31] Bob Dobbs: So we came to this end point of media simulating some kind of completion,
[1:07:38] Bob Dobbs: and therefore someone explaining the whole process via Finnegans Wake is what McLuhan did.
[1:07:44] Bob Dobbs: He had the last word.
[1:07:45] Bob Dobbs: You know...
[1:07:46] Bob Dobbs: There's a book by John Brockman.
[1:07:48] Bob Dobbs: Have you ever seen it?
[1:07:49] Bob Dobbs: 1977,
[1:07:51] Bob Dobbs: 100 thinkers,
[1:07:52] Bob Dobbs: and it's 100 people.
[1:07:55] Bob Dobbs: He and the present husband of Caroline Kennedy,
[1:07:59] Bob Dobbs: Edwin Schlossberg,
[1:08:01] Bob Dobbs: they were reading McLuhan in the
[1:08:03] Bob Dobbs: 70s, and they decided to pick the main philosophers,
[1:08:07] Bob Dobbs: going back 2,000 years from many cultures.
[1:08:12] Bob Dobbs: So they would present quotations.
[1:08:16] Bob Dobbs: And then you would turn the page to find out who said them.
[1:08:19] Bob Dobbs: And then that's how you'd find out that particular philosopher.
[1:08:22] Bob Dobbs: But they put McLuhan at the end.
[1:08:25] Bob Dobbs: I thought that was correct.
[1:08:27] Bob Dobbs: He was the last.
[1:08:28] Bob Dobbs: And he got to the formal cause,
[1:08:32] Bob Dobbs: which was natural to be discovered.
[1:08:34] Bob Dobbs: It was the final poetic act in the history of unfolding.
[1:08:38] Bob Dobbs: And then after that was the extension of technology itself and the Android meme.
[1:08:44] Bob Dobbs: And now we're up against the tech body.
[1:08:46] Bob Dobbs: So
[1:08:48] Bob Dobbs: McLuhan, nobody knew how to get past McLuhan.
[1:08:54] Bob Dobbs: They fell back and then
[1:08:57] Bob Dobbs: I call the wealth-making process,
[1:08:59] Bob Dobbs: it's all the older analog media being sold,
[1:09:02] Bob Dobbs: Baroque spirals of it.
[1:09:04] Bob Dobbs: So you had more movies,
[1:09:05] Bob Dobbs: more music,
[1:09:05] Bob Dobbs: more dance,
[1:09:06] Bob Dobbs: more everything,
[1:09:08] Bob Dobbs: but all of it was garbage because we couldn't...
[1:09:12] Bob Dobbs: really get to the present condition,
[1:09:15] Bob Dobbs: which was completing everything.
[1:09:16] Bob Dobbs: That's the cloned ESP.
[1:09:19] Bob Dobbs: All communication was completed.
[1:09:23] Cameron McEwen: Now,
[1:09:24] Cameron McEwen: this reminds me that somewhere
[1:09:28] Cameron McEwen: I saw or heard that you did an essay on the thinkers that came after
[1:09:39] Cameron McEwen: McLuhan, and that's
[1:09:41] Cameron McEwen: Oh,
[1:09:41] Cameron McEwen: yeah,
[1:09:42] Bob Dobbs: that's the big one.
[1:09:43] Bob Dobbs: Yeah,
[1:09:43] Cameron McEwen: is that the five stages or six stages or whatever?
[1:09:45] Cameron McEwen: Yeah,
[1:09:45] Cameron McEwen: the five schools.
[1:09:49] Cameron McEwen: Yes.
[1:09:50] Cameron McEwen: I was wondering if it was an essay I didn't know,
[1:09:53] Cameron McEwen: but I do know the stages.
[1:09:54] Bob Dobbs: Yeah,
[1:09:54] Bob Dobbs: that's the one.
[1:09:56] Bob Dobbs: It was all replays of McLuhan.
[1:09:59] Bob Dobbs: So the first school was the Toronto School.
[1:10:01] Bob Dobbs: That's Barry Nevitt,
[1:10:03] Bob Dobbs: Eric McLuhan,
[1:10:04] Bob Dobbs: and Nelson Thall and me,
[1:10:05] Bob Dobbs: Bob Bosney,
[1:10:06] Bob Dobbs: and Colsey.
[1:10:06] Bob Dobbs: That's in the 90s.
[1:10:08] Bob Dobbs: And then you have the New York School,
[1:10:11] Bob Dobbs: which is Sylvère Lotringer,
[1:10:13] Bob Dobbs: promoting all the French postmodernist spinoffs of McLuhan,
[1:10:17] Bob Dobbs: like Baudrillard,
[1:10:19] Bob Dobbs: in his magazine called Semiotext(e).
[1:10:22] Bob Dobbs: Okay?
[1:10:23] Cameron McEwen: Let me just interrupt for half a sec.
[1:10:25] Cameron McEwen: I noticed that when you're speaking of...
[1:10:29] Cameron McEwen: Toronto,
[1:10:29] Cameron McEwen: and this may be true of all the different stages,
[1:10:33] Cameron McEwen: the people you mention are completely different in their takes,
[1:10:40] Cameron McEwen: right?
[1:10:40] Cameron McEwen: So you talk about Barry and you talk about Nelson,
[1:10:46] Cameron McEwen: and you mention yourself,
[1:10:48] Cameron McEwen: but they're very far,
[1:10:51] Cameron McEwen: this group is very far from being cohesive.
[1:10:54] Bob Dobbs: Yeah,
[1:10:55] Bob Dobbs: but we know the basics that a lot of people,
[1:10:57] Bob Dobbs: Other schools don't know,
[1:10:58] Bob Dobbs: like Sylvère.
[1:11:00] Bob Dobbs: He is promoting all these post-McLuhan-McLuhanites,
[1:11:03] Bob Dobbs: like Derrida and
[1:11:05] Bob Dobbs: Baudrillard and Deleuze and Guattari and Virilio.
[1:11:08] Bob Dobbs: People,
[1:11:09] Bob Dobbs: some of them,
[1:11:10] Bob Dobbs: got Explorations in the
[1:11:11] Bob Dobbs: 50s and Roland Barthes.
[1:11:15] Bob Dobbs: So when I came out here in 2008,
[1:11:17] Bob Dobbs: he called me up one day,
[1:11:18] Bob Dobbs: and he said,
[1:11:19] Bob Dobbs: this is 2008,
[1:11:20] Bob Dobbs: this is 40 years,
[1:11:22] Bob Dobbs: 30 or 40 years later.
[1:11:24] Bob Dobbs: He said,
[1:11:24] Bob Dobbs: hey,
[1:11:24] Bob Dobbs: Bob,
[1:11:25] Bob Dobbs: I'm reading McLuhan's Understanding Media.
[1:11:27] Bob Dobbs: I've never read it before.
[1:11:28] Bob Dobbs: That's a good book.
[1:11:32] Bob Dobbs: I laughed for 10 minutes when he said that.
[1:11:34] Bob Dobbs: I said,
[1:11:35] Bob Dobbs: Jesus Christ,
[1:11:36] Bob Dobbs: buddy.
[1:11:36] Bob Dobbs: You know,
[1:11:37] Bob Dobbs: you did McLuhan through these other spin-offs all those years,
[1:11:41] Bob Dobbs: and you hadn't read where it came from.
[1:11:44] Bob Dobbs: So that kind of shocked him,
[1:11:46] Bob Dobbs: you know?
[1:11:47] Bob Dobbs: So,
[1:11:48] Bob Dobbs: but then,
[1:11:48] Bob Dobbs: that's the second school,
[1:11:49] Bob Dobbs: the New York school.
[1:11:50] Bob Dobbs: The third school is Kroker and those guys at Concordia.
[1:11:55] Bob Dobbs: And they're swallowing Semiotext(e).
[1:12:02] Bob Dobbs: And when they start showing up at conferences,
[1:12:05] Bob Dobbs: Kroker and his wife and David Cook,
[1:12:08] Bob Dobbs: Sylvère told me that he said,
[1:12:09] Bob Dobbs: they were like termites that came out of the woodwork.
[1:12:13] Bob Dobbs: They didn't understand where they came from.
[1:12:15] Bob Dobbs: But they were exaggerated McLuhanites who knew more about McLuhan than
[1:12:20] Bob Dobbs: Sylvère did.
[1:12:21] Bob Dobbs: I mean,
[1:12:22] Bob Dobbs: he used to compliment
[1:12:23] Bob Dobbs: Kroker's book in 84 on McLuhan,
[1:12:26] Bob Dobbs: Innis and Grant,
[1:12:27] Bob Dobbs: where he was talking about the Aquinas ratios of senses.
[1:12:32] Bob Dobbs: Nobody had really done that in the McLuhan world.
[1:12:34] Bob Dobbs: Nobody got into that part.
[1:12:36] Bob Dobbs: So anyway,
[1:12:38] Bob Dobbs: that's the third school.
[1:12:39] Bob Dobbs: Then the fourth school is what I call the diasporic school.
[1:12:42] Bob Dobbs: And that's de Kerckhove,
[1:12:43] Bob Dobbs: Neil Postman,
[1:12:46] Bob Dobbs: Bruce Powe,
[1:12:48] Bob Dobbs: Logan,
[1:12:49] Bob Dobbs: all those visually biased guys who were trying to retrieve the...
[1:12:53] Bob Dobbs: book and they they knew a lot about new media and when i was making a problem for books but they were dedicated to making books and these are books you don't read right de Kerckhove Postman logan bad books if you really understand McLuhan and
[1:13:09] Bob Dobbs: uh but that was and they they were all individualists like Gutenbergian they're all off in their own little world uh whereas barry in the toronto school me barry and nelson we
[1:13:19] Bob Dobbs: worked together,
[1:13:19] Bob Dobbs: we were on the radio together,
[1:13:20] Bob Dobbs: we did lots of things together,
[1:13:22] Bob Dobbs: and we had seminars.
[1:13:23] Bob Dobbs: We were,
[1:13:24] Bob Dobbs: quote,
[1:13:24] Bob Dobbs: more tribal,
[1:13:26] Bob Dobbs: or we weren't literary trying to make a career out of some book or something.
[1:13:32] Bob Dobbs: So the Diasporic School,
[1:13:34] Bob Dobbs: William Irwin Thompson was part of it.
[1:13:37] Bob Dobbs: That's the fourth school.
[1:13:38] Bob Dobbs: Then the fifth school was the
[1:13:41] Bob Dobbs: 90s itself and the McLuhan Revival.
[1:13:45] Bob Dobbs: Wired Magazine,
[1:13:47] Bob Dobbs: my album.
[1:13:49] Bob Dobbs: We were the Android meme replay of McLuhan,
[1:13:52] Bob Dobbs: because everything after 1990 was Android memic,
[1:13:56] Bob Dobbs: an afterimage of the analog phase.
[1:14:00] Bob Dobbs: So
[1:14:01] Bob Dobbs: I have in the essay what those four schools do in the
[1:14:06] Bob Dobbs: 70s and 80s,
[1:14:07] Bob Dobbs: and then I have what they do in the
[1:14:09] Bob Dobbs: 90s, and they all become more well-known,
[1:14:11] Bob Dobbs: but they're all extensions of the
[1:14:13] Bob Dobbs: Android meme.
[1:14:15] Bob Dobbs: who is promoting McLuhan for...
[1:14:17] Bob Dobbs: Because it resonates with parts of the Android meme sensibility.
[1:14:25] Bob Dobbs: The Global Village idea,
[1:14:27] Bob Dobbs: or the global theater,
[1:14:27] Bob Dobbs: or the Global Membrane,
[1:14:30] Bob Dobbs: that is what the Android meme could wake up to show,
[1:14:35] Bob Dobbs: that side of itself,
[1:14:37] Bob Dobbs: of the merger,
[1:14:38] Bob Dobbs: the implosion.
[1:14:39] Bob Dobbs: And McLuhan was the closest to that in popular consciousness.
[1:14:42] Bob Dobbs: Because they thought the Global Village was some amazing integrated situation that nobody had expected to arrive,
[1:14:49] Bob Dobbs: you know,
[1:14:50] Bob Dobbs: so
[1:14:51] Bob Dobbs: That's the complication of the fifth school.
[1:14:55] Bob Dobbs: And then I say at the end of the essay,
[1:14:57] Bob Dobbs: the sixth school of media ecology.
[1:15:01] Cameron McEwen: You're looking at him.
[1:15:02] Bob Dobbs: You're looking at him.
[1:15:04] Bob Dobbs: That was me back again.
[1:15:08] Bob Dobbs: So
[1:15:09] Bob Dobbs: I've been swallowing everybody ever since.
[1:15:12] Bob Dobbs: Yeah.
[1:15:18] Bob Dobbs: So that's what the book is,
[1:15:19] Bob Dobbs: right?
[1:15:20] Bob Dobbs: Absolutely.
[1:15:21] Bob Dobbs: interesting quotes,
[1:15:22] Bob Dobbs: interesting variations of McLuhan,
[1:15:23] Bob Dobbs: but you start off saying,
[1:15:26] Bob Dobbs: yeah,
[1:15:26] Bob Dobbs: everything was in an afterimage of the last guy,
[1:15:31] Bob Dobbs: the last sort of writer,
[1:15:34] Bob Dobbs: thinker,
[1:15:35] Bob Dobbs: integrated,
[1:15:38] Bob Dobbs: I don't know,
[1:15:38] Bob Dobbs: Gutenbergian projector or something.
[1:15:41] Cameron McEwen: Yeah.
[1:15:45] Cameron McEwen: Could we say that the great problem with what...
[1:15:50] Cameron McEwen: maybe termed
[1:15:52] Cameron McEwen: McLuhan scholarship,
[1:15:55] Cameron McEwen: is that people make the attempt to make McLuhan understandable according to some model.
[1:16:05] Bob Dobbs: Yeah.
[1:16:06] Cameron McEwen: But
[1:16:07] Cameron McEwen: McLuhan cannot be put into a model because he's talking about models,
[1:16:14] Cameron McEwen: plural.
[1:16:16] Bob Dobbs: And he's getting you to be...
[1:16:18] Bob Dobbs: explore the pain of not getting an answer to it.
[1:16:21] Cameron McEwen: Correct.
[1:16:22] Cameron McEwen: Well,
[1:16:23] Cameron McEwen: the pain and the ecstasy and everything else.
[1:16:26] Bob Dobbs: Yeah.
[1:16:28] Cameron McEwen: I mean,
[1:16:28] Cameron McEwen: that's very much related to his Catholicism,
[1:16:30] Cameron McEwen: right?
[1:16:31] Bob Dobbs: Yeah.
[1:16:32] Cameron McEwen: The pain is related to the answer.
[1:16:36] Bob Dobbs: Now,
[1:16:36] Bob Dobbs: this is another aspect of the paranoia of schizophrenia,
[1:16:40] Bob Dobbs: the five conditions.
[1:16:41] Cameron McEwen: Correct.
[1:16:41] Bob Dobbs: Entertainment became these things acted out by an indifferent global audience.
[1:16:48] Bob Dobbs: The problems were worse than that.
[1:16:50] Bob Dobbs: And so,
[1:16:51] Bob Dobbs: you know,
[1:16:51] Bob Dobbs: Jack Nicholson,
[1:16:52] Bob Dobbs: anybody else you come up with,
[1:16:53] Bob Dobbs: they just acted nuts in the films and in music.
[1:16:59] Bob Dobbs: Psychotic music started happening,
[1:17:01] Bob Dobbs: heavy metal and all that,
[1:17:02] Bob Dobbs: right?
[1:17:03] Bob Dobbs: People turned what were bad emotions in the Gutenberg age into marketable supporters of identity.
[1:17:12] Bob Dobbs: That's another part of why those five conditions are in each quadrant.
[1:17:18] Cameron McEwen: Yes.
[1:17:19] Cameron McEwen: Can we say that human beings are driven to mime?
[1:17:24] Bob Dobbs: To mime,
[1:17:25] Bob Dobbs: M-I-M-E.
[1:17:26] Cameron McEwen: Yes,
[1:17:27] Cameron McEwen: sir.
[1:17:28] Cameron McEwen: They cannot help miming what they know and don't know.
[1:17:34] Cameron McEwen: And
[1:17:36] Cameron McEwen: I might see what you do as a kind of reading of the miming that's going on.
[1:17:42] Bob Dobbs: Me in particular or just anybody?
[1:17:44] Bob Dobbs: Yeah,
[1:17:45] Cameron McEwen: no,
[1:17:45] Cameron McEwen: you.
[1:17:45] Bob Dobbs: Yes.
[1:17:47] Bob Dobbs: Yep.
[1:17:48] Bob Dobbs: I'm a mime.
[1:17:51] Bob Dobbs: No,
[1:17:51] Cameron McEwen: but I'm talking about you're conscious of miming.
[1:17:56] Cameron McEwen: And your miming is a reading of the unconscious miming that's going on everywhere.
[1:18:04] Bob Dobbs: That's my xenochrony.
[1:18:05] Bob Dobbs: Have I ever talked to you about my xenochrony?
[1:18:09] Cameron McEwen: No,
[1:18:09] Cameron McEwen: but I know the word and I like the word.
[1:18:12] Bob Dobbs: Yeah,
[1:18:13] Bob Dobbs: Zappa would take a bass from one concert.
[1:18:18] Bob Dobbs: and a guitar solo or a drummer,
[1:18:20] Bob Dobbs: and he didn't want them to cohere.
[1:18:23] Bob Dobbs: He was trying to create dissonance or fragmentation or something.
[1:18:27] Bob Dobbs: So he would put them together in his editing console,
[1:18:30] Bob Dobbs: and they always,
[1:18:32] Bob Dobbs: most times,
[1:18:33] Bob Dobbs: started to cohere.
[1:18:35] Bob Dobbs: So it was a strange synchronization.
[1:18:38] Bob Dobbs: They would synchronize,
[1:18:39] Bob Dobbs: and he wasn't wanting that.
[1:18:41] Bob Dobbs: So it became xenochrony,
[1:18:43] Bob Dobbs: strange synchrony.
[1:18:45] Bob Dobbs: So
[1:18:45] Bob Dobbs: I took that and I said,
[1:18:47] Bob Dobbs: A lot of people are experiencing synchronicity.
[1:18:50] Bob Dobbs: They think they are,
[1:18:51] Bob Dobbs: right?
[1:18:52] Bob Dobbs: They see coincidence more and more because of the implosion of information and so much information,
[1:18:57] Bob Dobbs: you're going to find yourself in there somewhere.
[1:19:00] Bob Dobbs: So
[1:19:00] Bob Dobbs: I used to say that the spread of synchronicity or a kind of ESP in the phatic communion level,
[1:19:12] Bob Dobbs: I said I was aware of that process so that the Android meme
[1:19:17] Bob Dobbs: took the person who was the most aware of it and reflected that person back into the global media.
[1:19:25] Bob Dobbs: And that was a standard of what people could aspire to.
[1:19:32] Bob Dobbs: But they would never get to the xenochrony because...
[1:19:36] Bob Dobbs: Other people had to notice that I was in the media.
[1:19:39] Bob Dobbs: It first happened with Nelson sometime in the early
[1:19:43] Bob Dobbs: 80s. When he was a rich playboy in late
[1:19:46] Bob Dobbs: 70s in Toronto,
[1:19:47] Bob Dobbs: he befriended
[1:19:48] Bob Dobbs: Aykroyd and Belushi when they were making the Blues Brothers in Toronto.
[1:19:54] Bob Dobbs: And so he was looking at it like five years later,
[1:19:57] Bob Dobbs: mid-80s or something,
[1:19:58] Bob Dobbs: and he said,
[1:19:58] Bob Dobbs: Jesus,
[1:19:59] Bob Dobbs: Bob,
[1:20:00] Bob Dobbs: they're dancing like Bob.
[1:20:02] Bob Dobbs: And so he pointed this out to me.
[1:20:03] Bob Dobbs: I had not noticed it.
[1:20:05] Bob Dobbs: And I looked at it,
[1:20:06] Bob Dobbs: and I said,
[1:20:06] Bob Dobbs: you're right.
[1:20:07] Bob Dobbs: So that triggered us.
[1:20:09] Bob Dobbs: We kept finding me in the media.
[1:20:11] Bob Dobbs: I didn't.
[1:20:12] Bob Dobbs: He did.
[1:20:13] Bob Dobbs: So if you have synchronicity,
[1:20:15] Bob Dobbs: I don't know what you're identifying with.
[1:20:17] Bob Dobbs: I wouldn't know what you're seeing that is you in the media.
[1:20:21] Bob Dobbs: But I have other people saying,
[1:20:23] Bob Dobbs: that's Bob.
[1:20:24] Bob Dobbs: That's different.
[1:20:25] Bob Dobbs: You know what I mean?
[1:20:26] Bob Dobbs: It's like it's reflecting me.
[1:20:29] Bob Dobbs: Now,
[1:20:29] Bob Dobbs: that's not megalomania.
[1:20:31] Bob Dobbs: It's a damn fact.
[1:20:33] Bob Dobbs: It's...
[1:20:34] Bob Dobbs: spread further and further until Hollywood put out a movie about me called Man of the Year.
[1:20:41] Bob Dobbs: Robin Williams becomes a guy who becomes president by accident.
[1:20:45] Bob Dobbs: Well,
[1:20:46] Bob Dobbs: I became the head of the secret council by accident in the exact same way.
[1:20:50] Bob Dobbs: And an old friend of mine,
[1:20:51] Bob Dobbs: Harold Channer in New York,
[1:20:53] Bob Dobbs: he had a TV show.
[1:20:55] Bob Dobbs: He saw the movie and he said,
[1:20:56] Bob Dobbs: that sounds like what Bob talks about.
[1:20:58] Bob Dobbs: So he called me up and he's telling me about this movie that I know nothing about.
[1:21:02] Bob Dobbs: And then I watch it and I say,
[1:21:03] Bob Dobbs: yeah,
[1:21:04] Bob Dobbs: that's me.
[1:21:04] Bob Dobbs: And he was so intrigued,
[1:21:06] Bob Dobbs: he hadn't interviewed me in a few years,
[1:21:07] Bob Dobbs: that he got me down and interviewed me again.
[1:21:10] Bob Dobbs: So I started a second round of interviews with him on Manhattan TV.
[1:21:14] Bob Dobbs: But anyways,
[1:21:15] Bob Dobbs: do you get my point?
[1:21:17] Bob Dobbs: I'm not looking for me.
[1:21:19] Bob Dobbs: Other people find me and tell me
[1:21:21] Bob Dobbs: I'm that.
[1:21:22] Bob Dobbs: You know what I mean?
[1:21:23] Bob Dobbs: It's because
[1:21:26] Bob Dobbs: I'm in the media talking and maybe mentioning it.
[1:21:30] Bob Dobbs: but I'm not looking at looking at but where it's everybody else is trying to get an identity from some synchronicity so on my uh my uh media site in the in the zeros in 2005 and 6 it started fivebody.com of
[1:21:45] Bob Dobbs: people who would come in and they'd engage me and I'd be talking whatever then they'd start getting synchronicity and everybody who came in got synchronicity uh in a way that disturbed them it was happening so much they kept seeing themselves in the media so
[1:22:00] Bob Dobbs: They were picking up.
[1:22:01] Bob Dobbs: Okay,
[1:22:02] Bob Dobbs: I had created an environment,
[1:22:03] Bob Dobbs: weirdly,
[1:22:04] Bob Dobbs: at Five Bodies,
[1:22:05] Bob Dobbs: and maybe the concepts and percepts triggered this.
[1:22:08] Bob Dobbs: They're unconscious.
[1:22:09] Bob Dobbs: They started to think that they were in the media everywhere.
[1:22:13] Bob Dobbs: And it happened to all the people that came in.
[1:22:15] Bob Dobbs: There was about 20 of them,
[1:22:17] Bob Dobbs: largely younger people.
[1:22:18] Bob Dobbs: But so everybody said,
[1:22:20] Bob Dobbs: geez,
[1:22:20] Bob Dobbs: Bob's generating synchronicity.
[1:22:23] Bob Dobbs: So
[1:22:24] Bob Dobbs: I call it synarchony.
[1:22:25] Bob Dobbs: And when you say I'm conscious of the miming,
[1:22:28] Bob Dobbs: yeah.
[1:22:28] Bob Dobbs: The Android meme is mining me,
[1:22:30] Bob Dobbs: but I have a level of consciousness of it.
[1:22:34] Cameron McEwen: Yeah,
[1:22:34] Cameron McEwen: so there's two processes going on at the same time,
[1:22:41] Cameron McEwen: which are kind of mirroring each other,
[1:22:44] Cameron McEwen: but as in a house of mirrors with distorted mirrors that aren't entirely flat and that give distorted representations of each other.
[1:22:57] Cameron McEwen: There's the...
[1:22:57] Cameron McEwen: miming that people do of a situation that they do not understand,
[1:23:05] Cameron McEwen: but they can't help being it.
[1:23:08] Cameron McEwen: And then there is the situation itself,
[1:23:14] Cameron McEwen: which is miming.
[1:23:17] Cameron McEwen: So the Android meme...
[1:23:24] Bob Dobbs: The
[1:23:25] Bob Dobbs: Android mime.
[1:23:26] Cameron McEwen: That's right.
[1:23:26] Cameron McEwen: The Android.
[1:23:27] Cameron McEwen: meme must be the Android mime because what human consciousness turns out to be is a miming.
[1:23:38] Cameron McEwen: Right,
[1:23:38] Bob Dobbs: and AI that's a key part of AI.
[1:23:42] Bob Dobbs: So we're already experiencing AI for decades under the Android meme conditions.
[1:23:47] Cameron McEwen: And remember that one of the great things that happened to
[1:23:52] Cameron McEwen: McLuhan when he went to
[1:23:54] Cameron McEwen: Cambridge is
[1:23:56] Cameron McEwen: that he studied
[1:23:58] Cameron McEwen: Aristotle's Poetics with the professor that was called Q,
[1:24:05] Cameron McEwen: who was sort of the dean of the
[1:24:09] Cameron McEwen: Cambridge English School.
[1:24:11] Cameron McEwen: And in one of his letters,
[1:24:15] Cameron McEwen: McLuhan says that he went to Q to be in his class about Aristotle's Poetics
[1:24:26] Cameron McEwen: And there were only two people in the class,
[1:24:29] Cameron McEwen: and so it turned out to be a kind of tutorial.
[1:24:34] Bob Dobbs: Yeah.
[1:24:35] Cameron McEwen: And what was at stake in that tutorial was mimesis,
[1:24:42] Cameron McEwen: right?
[1:24:43] Cameron McEwen: So at the sort of the formal beginning of
[1:24:50] Cameron McEwen: McLuhan's thought is this question of what miming is in human action as first.
[1:25:04] Cameron McEwen: to be seen in Greek tragedy.
[1:25:07] Bob Dobbs: Yeah,
[1:25:10] Bob Dobbs: he often,
[1:25:11] Bob Dobbs: many times on Monday night,
[1:25:13] Bob Dobbs: would bring up that point about mimesis.
[1:25:15] Bob Dobbs: We learn by mimesis.
[1:25:16] Bob Dobbs: That was a major point that he was making all the time.
[1:25:21] Bob Dobbs: That's in Poetics by Aristotle,
[1:25:23] Bob Dobbs: right?
[1:25:24] Cameron McEwen: Yes,
[1:25:24] Cameron McEwen: sir.
[1:25:24] Bob Dobbs: It's talked about.
[1:25:29] Bob Dobbs: So you'll see in Don Theall book on Joyce,
[1:25:33] Bob Dobbs: two of them,
[1:25:33] Bob Dobbs: He has a lot about miming.
[1:25:35] Bob Dobbs: He plays a lot with that word.
[1:25:38] Bob Dobbs: He was aware of that.
[1:25:39] Bob Dobbs: He emphasized that,
[1:25:40] Bob Dobbs: and probably in the McLuhan book,
[1:25:42] Bob Dobbs: too,
[1:25:43] Bob Dobbs: the virtual McLuhan.
[1:25:44] Bob Dobbs: So this miming,
[1:25:48] Bob Dobbs: I'm thinking that when people,
[1:25:50] Bob Dobbs: when they start communicating,
[1:25:52] Bob Dobbs: or just talking,
[1:25:55] Bob Dobbs: I start off my Cloned ESP article by saying,
[1:25:57] Bob Dobbs: there's blocking and there's merging.
[1:26:00] Bob Dobbs: So humans like to merge,
[1:26:01] Bob Dobbs: but not too far.
[1:26:03] Bob Dobbs: So they block.
[1:26:05] Bob Dobbs: So there's that interplay between agreeing with somebody up to a point.
[1:26:09] Bob Dobbs: They want to lose their identity and their separateness.
[1:26:12] Bob Dobbs: And so,
[1:26:13] Bob Dobbs: you know,
[1:26:13] Bob Dobbs: in earlier,
[1:26:15] Bob Dobbs: more broody societies,
[1:26:16] Bob Dobbs: it was cruder.
[1:26:17] Bob Dobbs: But that's the miming that's going on,
[1:26:21] Bob Dobbs: the moving toward resonance and sympathy and becoming inside the person.
[1:26:27] Bob Dobbs: But then that flips into withdrawing from the person.
[1:26:30] Bob Dobbs: And that's probably the basic.
[1:26:34] Bob Dobbs: dynamic in all relationships you have with people.
[1:26:37] Bob Dobbs: The juggling of how much you're going to be involved with them and not be involved.
[1:26:43] Cameron McEwen: Correct.
[1:26:44] Cameron McEwen: And notice,
[1:26:45] Cameron McEwen: Bob,
[1:26:45] Cameron McEwen: how that is exactly what we've been talking about in terms of pre-tribal awareness.
[1:26:50] Bob Dobbs: Yeah.
[1:26:52] Bob Dobbs: Yeah,
[1:26:52] Bob Dobbs: we're describing the pre-tribal awareness dialectic or interplay,
[1:26:57] Bob Dobbs: this miming.
[1:26:58] Bob Dobbs: And you can see without literacy in that.
[1:27:03] Bob Dobbs: It's a crazy kind of miming which is merged.
[1:27:07] Bob Dobbs: All the characteristics of tribal and pre-tribal awareness peoples.
[1:27:10] Bob Dobbs: And then you can see with the fragmentation of the visual space,
[1:27:13] Bob Dobbs: that creates another kind of miming which is so different.
[1:27:16] Bob Dobbs: And then it's surprised by the electric miming,
[1:27:19] Bob Dobbs: which is a collective ESP,
[1:27:20] Bob Dobbs: which is very confusing coming out of the Gutenberg.
[1:27:24] Bob Dobbs: So no wonder this is nothing but war all the time.
[1:27:29] Cameron McEwen: Right.
[1:27:29] Cameron McEwen: So then...
[1:27:30] Cameron McEwen: what I would say and what I tried to talk about when we met in New York in 99,
[1:27:37] Cameron McEwen: I think it was.
[1:27:37] Cameron McEwen: No,
[1:27:37] Bob Dobbs: it was November 98.
[1:27:39] Cameron McEwen: Okay.
[1:27:40] Cameron McEwen: So what I was saying was that in all of these different varieties of miming,
[1:27:45] Cameron McEwen: I didn't use these words then.
[1:27:48] Cameron McEwen: I probably talked about chemistry or something.
[1:27:50] Bob Dobbs: Yes.
[1:27:50] Cameron McEwen: But if I were to describe my topic then at the present,
[1:27:56] Cameron McEwen: describe it at the present moment,
[1:27:58] Cameron McEwen: I would say that miming
[1:28:00] Cameron McEwen: is a constant in human experience.
[1:28:04] Bob Dobbs: Yeah.
[1:28:05] Cameron McEwen: And in order to understand the different varieties of miming,
[1:28:11] Cameron McEwen: what you have to do is you have to look at the different varieties of tactility.
[1:28:15] Bob Dobbs: Yeah.
[1:28:15] Cameron McEwen: And when you look at the different varieties of tactility,
[1:28:20] Cameron McEwen: then you can see an order of human experience that amounts to a New Science.
[1:28:28] Bob Dobbs: Yeah.
[1:28:28] Cameron McEwen: And just as...
[1:28:30] Cameron McEwen: just as with any science,
[1:28:32] Cameron McEwen: the more you discover about this New Science,
[1:28:37] Cameron McEwen: the more you discover that you don't know.
[1:28:40] Cameron McEwen: But this dialectic between knowing and not knowing is really what the human identity is.
[1:28:49] Cameron McEwen: And when a person really understands McLuhan,
[1:28:57] Cameron McEwen: what is understood,
[1:28:59] Cameron McEwen: is that we need to participate in the human identity as this process of discovery and...
[1:29:12] Cameron McEwen: Well,
[1:29:12] Bob Dobbs: here's two words in a Cliché to Archetype,
[1:29:14] Bob Dobbs: knowing and growing.
[1:29:17] Cameron McEwen: Yeah,
[1:29:17] Cameron McEwen: probing,
[1:29:18] Cameron McEwen: yeah,
[1:29:18] Cameron McEwen: absolutely.
[1:29:19] Bob Dobbs: Knowing and growing.
[1:29:21] Cameron McEwen: I like those two words.
[1:29:22] Cameron McEwen: It always involves learning something,
[1:29:26] Cameron McEwen: which in turn...
[1:29:28] Cameron McEwen: Identify something that you don't know.
[1:29:30] Bob Dobbs: Yeah,
[1:29:31] Bob Dobbs: yeah.
[1:29:31] Cameron McEwen: And you...
[1:29:33] Cameron McEwen: So then what you don't know needs to get probed.
[1:29:36] Cameron McEwen: Something gets illuminated there,
[1:29:39] Cameron McEwen: which then exposes another darkness.
[1:29:41] Bob Dobbs: Another gap.
[1:29:43] Cameron McEwen: That's right.
[1:29:43] Cameron McEwen: And that dynamic is really what the human being is.
[1:29:51] Bob Dobbs: Yeah,
[1:29:52] Bob Dobbs: you've defined consciousness.
[1:29:53] Bob Dobbs: You know,
[1:29:54] Bob Dobbs: people can't explain the mind or the mystery of consciousness.
[1:29:57] Bob Dobbs: We're saying what it is right there.
[1:29:59] Bob Dobbs: Now,
[1:29:59] Bob Dobbs: we might not completely get it,
[1:30:01] Bob Dobbs: but those are the correct words to describe what mind or tactility or...
[1:30:05] Bob Dobbs: Or the mystery of human consciousness is the mystery of the human citadel is what you're describing there.
[1:30:13] Cameron McEwen: Trying to,
[1:30:14] Cameron McEwen: yeah.
[1:30:15] Bob Dobbs: And,
[1:30:15] Bob Dobbs: you know,
[1:30:15] Bob Dobbs: you can think you get it,
[1:30:17] Bob Dobbs: 50%
[1:30:18] Bob Dobbs: of it,
[1:30:19] Bob Dobbs: but the more you acknowledge you're not getting it,
[1:30:21] Bob Dobbs: then it slips back into,
[1:30:22] Bob Dobbs: oh,
[1:30:22] Bob Dobbs: well,
[1:30:22] Bob Dobbs: I get that,
[1:30:23] Bob Dobbs: that I'm not getting it.
[1:30:26] Cameron McEwen: Yeah.
[1:30:27] Bob Dobbs: You know,
[1:30:28] Bob Dobbs: that's the subtlety of it all.
[1:30:31] Bob Dobbs: The term Phatic Communion was so important to James Joyce,
[1:30:34] Bob Dobbs: Marcel Duchamp,
[1:30:35] Bob Dobbs: and then McLuhan when he read it.
[1:30:37] Bob Dobbs: It's a key word.
[1:30:38] Bob Dobbs: So
[1:30:39] Bob Dobbs: I came up with,
[1:30:41] Bob Dobbs: how could you make a book title after McLuhan knowing that he wrapped it up?
[1:30:48] Bob Dobbs: Well,
[1:30:48] Bob Dobbs: I said,
[1:30:48] Bob Dobbs: well,
[1:30:49] Bob Dobbs: the key thing in his world is Phatic Communion.
[1:30:51] Bob Dobbs: So I'm going to call my book Phatic Communion,
[1:30:53] Bob Dobbs: which is redoing McLuhan,
[1:30:55] Bob Dobbs: but with a little angle that hadn't been noticed before.
[1:30:58] Bob Dobbs: We're just like...
[1:30:58] Bob Dobbs: He did that to Finnegans Wake or to Joyce or to Pound.
[1:31:02] Bob Dobbs: He did a new wrinkle and repeated them with a new wrinkle using the new word media.
[1:31:09] Cameron McEwen: You could even say he mimed them.
[1:31:11] Bob Dobbs: Yeah,
[1:31:11] Bob Dobbs: no,
[1:31:11] Bob Dobbs: that's what he did.
[1:31:12] Bob Dobbs: He mimed them,
[1:31:13] Bob Dobbs: yeah.
[1:31:13] Bob Dobbs: Yeah,
[1:31:13] Cameron McEwen: yeah.
[1:31:14] Cameron McEwen: And we should point out to people that the word phatic comes from Malinowski and comes from the appendix that he did to meaning of meaning.
[1:31:26] Bob Dobbs: Yeah,
[1:31:26] Bob Dobbs: the miming of miming.
[1:31:28] Bob Dobbs: Yeah.
[1:31:28] Bob Dobbs: The Meaning of Meaning.
[1:31:30] Bob Dobbs: And you'll hear McLuhan say that,
[1:31:31] Bob Dobbs: or somebody says it on his album in 67,
[1:31:34] Bob Dobbs: you know,
[1:31:34] Bob Dobbs: they go,
[1:31:34] Bob Dobbs: the meaning,
[1:31:36] Bob Dobbs: you know,
[1:31:36] Bob Dobbs: they draw it out.
[1:31:39] Bob Dobbs: You remember that on the album?
[1:31:40] Cameron McEwen: Yeah,
[1:31:41] Cameron McEwen: yeah.
[1:31:41] Bob Dobbs: The Meaning of Meaning,
[1:31:43] Bob Dobbs: sort of distorted acoustically.
[1:31:47] Cameron McEwen: Yeah,
[1:31:48] Cameron McEwen: and I think it's right around then that he actually writes to Richards,
[1:31:55] Cameron McEwen: and he was...
[1:31:57] Cameron McEwen: becoming increasingly conscious in the late
[1:32:01] Cameron McEwen: 60s of how much he had learned from Richards
[1:32:05] Cameron McEwen: 30 years before,
[1:32:07] Cameron McEwen: but had not really realized it had been phatic communication from
[1:32:15] Cameron McEwen: Richards to McLuhan,
[1:32:16] Cameron McEwen: but McLuhan was only becoming aware of it 30 years later.
[1:32:23] Bob Dobbs: On the album it says,
[1:32:25] Bob Dobbs: first,
[1:32:26] Bob Dobbs: we shape our tools and then they shape us but in the album before that line or those two lines you hear this first we shape our tools then our tools ape us yeah
[1:32:45] Bob Dobbs: it's important that's not shaping that's aping that's your mind yeah and that's from lewis yeah the apes of god yeah
[1:32:55] Bob Dobbs: So the,
[1:32:56] Bob Dobbs: but nobody,
[1:32:57] Bob Dobbs: people are always quoting the shaping of us.
[1:33:00] Bob Dobbs: But what about the aping,
[1:33:02] Bob Dobbs: which is actually maybe the later understanding,
[1:33:05] Bob Dobbs: but it's before it in the album.
[1:33:08] Bob Dobbs: The second one is presented first,
[1:33:10] Bob Dobbs: then the shaping,
[1:33:12] Bob Dobbs: which is the first idea,
[1:33:14] Bob Dobbs: that's presented second.
[1:33:15] Bob Dobbs: So some kind of conscious is going on there,
[1:33:18] Bob Dobbs: conscious awareness happening there,
[1:33:20] Bob Dobbs: whoever is putting that album together.
[1:33:22] Bob Dobbs: I don't know how much McLuhan.
[1:33:24] Bob Dobbs: talk to i did phone up the guy john whatever his name is you know famous record producer he did the album and uh talked to me mark Postman called talked to him in 99 or 2000 or something and we invited him come down but he was too busy so we didn't do it he probably didn't care about the album anymore long time ago but we
[1:33:43] Bob Dobbs: did try to get him to talk about the process but we didn't get much out of him you know what was going on there uh when they were in the studio making it
[1:33:53] Cameron McEwen: That's right.
[1:33:54] Cameron McEwen: That would have been important for him to recall as much as he could.
[1:33:58] Bob Dobbs: And he couldn't.
[1:34:00] Cameron McEwen: He was so bribed.
[1:34:02] Bob Dobbs: He was McLuhan after Richards.
[1:34:04] Bob Dobbs: He's probably just realizing this week,
[1:34:06] Bob Dobbs: oh,
[1:34:06] Bob Dobbs: that's what I did.
[1:34:08] Bob Dobbs: Probably overheard something from Bob's Media Ecology that triggered his mind.
[1:34:13] Bob Dobbs: He finally got it today.
[1:34:16] Bob Dobbs: Now,
[1:34:16] Bob Dobbs: that's synarchity.
[1:34:17] Bob Dobbs: That happens in my life.
[1:34:20] Bob Dobbs: Now,
[1:34:20] Bob Dobbs: what was interesting is...
[1:34:22] Bob Dobbs: I partly,
[1:34:23] Bob Dobbs: when Zappa died in 93,
[1:34:25] Bob Dobbs: I heard his wife talk about him,
[1:34:28] Bob Dobbs: you know,
[1:34:29] Bob Dobbs: a couple days later.
[1:34:30] Bob Dobbs: And she said that often he'd make songs or something.
[1:34:34] Bob Dobbs: And then they would appear out in the world as a news item.
[1:34:39] Bob Dobbs: And so she pointed out the world reflecting back Zappa.
[1:34:43] Bob Dobbs: So that's,
[1:34:45] Bob Dobbs: I think that,
[1:34:47] Bob Dobbs: I didn't,
[1:34:48] Bob Dobbs: I came up with the word xenochrony in the
[1:34:50] Bob Dobbs: 90s, I think,
[1:34:50] Bob Dobbs: or applied it that way.
[1:34:51] Bob Dobbs: But hearing his wife talk about it and then finding out that I was being mirrored in the media,
[1:34:58] Bob Dobbs: which was actually happening in the 80s,
[1:34:59] Bob Dobbs: but not as frequently as later.
[1:35:02] Bob Dobbs: That's,
[1:35:03] Bob Dobbs: I'm just saying that's the clue when she told that story,
[1:35:06] Bob Dobbs: you know.
[1:35:08] Cameron McEwen: So we should say for anybody that happens to be listening,
[1:35:13] Cameron McEwen: the word xenos means stranger in
[1:35:18] Bob Dobbs: Greek. Yeah,
[1:35:19] Bob Dobbs: X-E-N-O.
[1:35:20] Bob Dobbs: That's what I'm saying.
[1:35:21] Bob Dobbs: Strange synchronicity.
[1:35:22] Bob Dobbs: Xeno,
[1:35:23] Bob Dobbs: crony.
[1:35:24] Cameron McEwen: That's right.
[1:35:25] Cameron McEwen: But then the word for hotel in Greek is xenos.
[1:35:34] Cameron McEwen: So the words...
[1:35:38] Cameron McEwen: Stranger does not only mean different and alien.
[1:35:44] Cameron McEwen: It also implies the possibility of coming together.
[1:35:49] Bob Dobbs: And what's the word?
[1:35:51] Cameron McEwen: The word for hotel?
[1:35:52] Cameron McEwen: Xeno dohio.
[1:35:53] Cameron McEwen: And dohio means a receptacle,
[1:36:02] Cameron McEwen: you could say.
[1:36:02] Cameron McEwen: So a hotel is a receptacle of strangers.
[1:36:07] Bob Dobbs: All right.
[1:36:08] Bob Dobbs: Okay,
[1:36:08] Bob Dobbs: so in Interior landscape,
[1:36:10] Bob Dobbs: around page 32 at the top,
[1:36:12] Bob Dobbs: he talks about James Joyce waiting for the slips of speech in that that would give him a pattern.
[1:36:19] Bob Dobbs: Do you remember that sentence?
[1:36:20] Cameron McEwen: Correct.
[1:36:21] Cameron McEwen: No,
[1:36:21] Cameron McEwen: I don't,
[1:36:22] Cameron McEwen: but I know that Joyce did that.
[1:36:24] Bob Dobbs: Yeah,
[1:36:24] Bob Dobbs: and that was his way of looking at whatever he was interested in was going to be mimed back at him,
[1:36:29] Bob Dobbs: I think.
[1:36:30] Bob Dobbs: Have you got Interior landscape right there?
[1:36:33] Cameron McEwen: No,
[1:36:33] Cameron McEwen: sorry.
[1:36:35] Bob Dobbs: You don't?
[1:36:36] Cameron McEwen: I don't think so.
[1:36:37] Cameron McEwen: Let me,
[1:36:37] Cameron McEwen: I'll just take a...
[1:36:38] Bob Dobbs: Yeah,
[1:36:38] Bob Dobbs: take a quick look there,
[1:36:39] Bob Dobbs: because we want to...
[1:36:40] Bob Dobbs: Yeah,
[1:36:40] Cameron McEwen: my wife cleaned my desk the other day,
[1:36:42] Cameron McEwen: and I...
[1:36:43] Bob Dobbs: Changed everything.
[1:36:44] Cameron McEwen: Now I can't find it.
[1:36:45] Bob Dobbs: Yeah,
[1:36:45] Bob Dobbs: damn it.
[1:36:46] Cameron McEwen: Yeah.
[1:36:48] Cameron McEwen: No,
[1:36:48] Cameron McEwen: I don't see it.
[1:36:49] Cameron McEwen: Sorry.
[1:36:49] Bob Dobbs: Okay,
[1:36:50] Bob Dobbs: so maybe I'll read the quote in one of these shows at the top of the page.
[1:36:55] Bob Dobbs: But it's important.
[1:36:57] Bob Dobbs: He recognized that artistic perception of how events come to you,
[1:37:04] Bob Dobbs: mime you.
[1:37:04] Cameron McEwen: Right,
[1:37:05] Cameron McEwen: right.
[1:37:06] Bob Dobbs: And you can get patterns out of them.
[1:37:08] Cameron McEwen: There's an interesting article in,
[1:37:16] Cameron McEwen: I think the journal is called Genetic
[1:37:18] Cameron McEwen: Joyce. It's produced in
[1:37:21] Cameron McEwen: Belgium. Yeah.
[1:37:22] Cameron McEwen: And appears,
[1:37:24] Cameron McEwen: I think it's one issue a year.
[1:37:28] Cameron McEwen: But it always has very,
[1:37:29] Cameron McEwen: very interesting articles in it.
[1:37:31] Cameron McEwen: and they're always about...
[1:37:36] Cameron McEwen: Finnegans Wake.
[1:37:37] Cameron McEwen: And a few years ago there was an article about the sort of the seed of
[1:37:45] Cameron McEwen: Finnegans Wake.
[1:37:47] Cameron McEwen: And what the article described was the eye problems that
[1:37:54] Cameron McEwen: Joyce was having,
[1:37:57] Cameron McEwen: I think around 1924,
[1:38:00] Bob Dobbs: let's say.
[1:38:01] Cameron McEwen: And he was unable to read.
[1:38:06] Cameron McEwen: So he and his wife and daughter went on vacation,
[1:38:13] Cameron McEwen: I believe,
[1:38:14] Cameron McEwen: to the east coast of
[1:38:16] Cameron McEwen: England.
[1:38:17] Cameron McEwen: And because Joyce couldn't read,
[1:38:21] Cameron McEwen: he had
[1:38:22] Cameron McEwen: Nora and
[1:38:24] Cameron McEwen: Lucia read to him.
[1:38:27] Cameron McEwen: And they constantly made errors in what they were reading.
[1:38:34] Cameron McEwen: It was,
[1:38:36] Cameron McEwen: you know,
[1:38:36] Cameron McEwen: they would say the wrong word or the wrong pronunciation,
[1:38:40] Cameron McEwen: or they wouldn't see the end of the sentence and it would run into the next sentence and stuff.
[1:38:45] Cameron McEwen: And as Joyce was sitting there with these patches over his eyes and just listening to them read,
[1:38:52] Cameron McEwen: he realized that their mistakes were more important than the stuff where they didn't make a mistake.
[1:39:01] Cameron McEwen: So that the text spoke...
[1:39:04] Cameron McEwen: better when it was distorted than when it wasn't distorted.
[1:39:10] Cameron McEwen: And so according to the people in Genetic Joyce,
[1:39:21] Cameron McEwen: and I think the authors both live in
[1:39:23] Cameron McEwen: Dublin, although I'm not positive about that,
[1:39:26] Cameron McEwen: that's just my memory,
[1:39:28] Cameron McEwen: that this then sparked the idea in Joyce that there's
[1:39:34] Cameron McEwen: as we were saying earlier in the same conversation,
[1:39:36] Cameron McEwen: by the way,
[1:39:37] Cameron McEwen: that there's something deeper than communication.
[1:39:44] Cameron McEwen: that is constantly going on and that actually enables communication from below communication.
[1:39:53] Bob Dobbs: Yeah.
[1:39:54] Cameron McEwen: Right?
[1:39:55] Cameron McEwen: Remember that line,
[1:39:56] Bob Dobbs: before understanding,
[1:39:58] Bob Dobbs: the poet communicates before understanding.
[1:40:00] Cameron McEwen: Correct.
[1:40:01] Cameron McEwen: Yeah.
[1:40:02] Cameron McEwen: I think that's from an Eliot essay on Dante.
[1:40:08] Bob Dobbs: Yeah.
[1:40:09] Cameron McEwen: If I remember correctly.
[1:40:09] Bob Dobbs: 1950 or so.
[1:40:14] Cameron McEwen: That seems late to me,
[1:40:15] Cameron McEwen: but
[1:40:17] Cameron McEwen: I would have said it was from
[1:40:22] Cameron McEwen: 1920. But I don't know.
[1:40:24] Bob Dobbs: Oh,
[1:40:24] Bob Dobbs: I think it's a McLuhan.
[1:40:25] Cameron McEwen: Oh,
[1:40:25] Bob Dobbs: yeah.
[1:40:26] Bob Dobbs: You're talking about
[1:40:28] Bob Dobbs: Beckett's essay,
[1:40:31] Bob Dobbs: Dante
[1:40:32] Bob Dobbs: Bruno Vico Joyce in the.
[1:40:35] Cameron McEwen: Oh,
[1:40:35] Cameron McEwen: well,
[1:40:36] Cameron McEwen: I mean,
[1:40:36] Cameron McEwen: that that's a great essay.
[1:40:40] Cameron McEwen: from,
[1:40:40] Cameron McEwen: I think,
[1:40:41] Cameron McEwen: 1929,
[1:40:43] Cameron McEwen: and it's certainly related to what we're talking about,
[1:40:46] Cameron McEwen: but I'm talking about what you quoted,
[1:40:50] Cameron McEwen: the notion that communication takes place beyond the text.
[1:40:57] Cameron McEwen: That is something that appears in an Eliot essay,
[1:41:03] Cameron McEwen: I think on Dante.
[1:41:05] Cameron McEwen: Oh,
[1:41:05] Cameron McEwen: I see.
[1:41:05] Bob Dobbs: Okay,
[1:41:06] Bob Dobbs: I didn't hear you say Eliot.
[1:41:07] Bob Dobbs: Yeah.
[1:41:08] Cameron McEwen: Yeah.
[1:41:08] Cameron McEwen: Then get.
[1:41:09] Cameron McEwen: repeated by
[1:41:11] Cameron McEwen: McLuhan a lot.
[1:41:12] Bob Dobbs: Yeah,
[1:41:12] Bob Dobbs: that would be around 1920.
[1:41:16] Bob Dobbs: Yeah.
[1:41:22] Bob Dobbs: So we're talking about the miming process.
[1:41:24] Cameron McEwen: Correct.
[1:41:25] Bob Dobbs: Now,
[1:41:25] Bob Dobbs: in the
[1:41:27] Bob Dobbs: Android meme is the machines miming themselves,
[1:41:32] Bob Dobbs: the machinic,
[1:41:34] Bob Dobbs: and then the tech body is like a psychopathic.
[1:41:38] Bob Dobbs: miming that makes people think we're coming to the end of the world,
[1:41:44] Bob Dobbs: that we're witnessing now.
[1:41:46] Bob Dobbs: The mimesis process,
[1:41:48] Bob Dobbs: and that's another thing I'm trying to communicate.
[1:41:50] Bob Dobbs: I don't know if I get much into it in the end of the book,
[1:41:53] Bob Dobbs: but maybe.
[1:41:55] Bob Dobbs: This mimesis process is,
[1:41:57] Bob Dobbs: you know,
[1:41:57] Bob Dobbs: an Android meme.
[1:41:58] Bob Dobbs: It takes on a life of its own.
[1:41:59] Bob Dobbs: But then there's something crazier.
[1:42:03] Bob Dobbs: It might even be the tech body counters mimesis as much as possible.
[1:42:08] Bob Dobbs: interrupts it doesn't allow it to appear so just people more and more perceive chaos going on so i'm not sure we'll have to see if i developed that at the end of the book but the uh that's why i'm thinking uh you know on the mime theme i
[1:42:26] Bob Dobbs: was thinking about the difference between the McLuhan era and then the Android meme and then the tech body around mimesis yeah so um i'm
[1:42:38] Cameron McEwen: What I hear there is a kind of hint that the tools of mimesis can be turned against it.
[1:42:47] Bob Dobbs: Yeah.
[1:42:48] Cameron McEwen: So that language blows itself up,
[1:42:56] Cameron McEwen: you could say.
[1:42:57] Bob Dobbs: Yeah.
[1:42:58] Cameron McEwen: Yeah.
[1:42:59] Cameron McEwen: Which is definitely happening.
[1:43:00] Cameron McEwen: I mean,
[1:43:01] Cameron McEwen: words don't mean anything anymore to anybody.
[1:43:04] Bob Dobbs: Well,
[1:43:04] Bob Dobbs: the greatest phenomenon.
[1:43:06] Bob Dobbs: of the president of the administration in the White House is Biden fluffing his words.
[1:43:15] Bob Dobbs: He just says a sentence,
[1:43:16] Bob Dobbs: but halfway through,
[1:43:17] Bob Dobbs: he'll put in a bunch of sounds,
[1:43:19] Bob Dobbs: guttural sounds.
[1:43:20] Bob Dobbs: Nobody knows what he said,
[1:43:21] Bob Dobbs: right?
[1:43:22] Cameron McEwen: I mean,
[1:43:23] Bob Dobbs: if you talk that way 50 years ago,
[1:43:25] Bob Dobbs: man,
[1:43:25] Bob Dobbs: you'd be arrested.
[1:43:28] Bob Dobbs: Everybody is so indifferent to the president that they just sort of look at this and say,
[1:43:33] Bob Dobbs: well,
[1:43:33] Bob Dobbs: that guy needs to be removed or something.
[1:43:36] Bob Dobbs: They have different interpretations,
[1:43:38] Bob Dobbs: or they ignore it.
[1:43:39] Bob Dobbs: But it's so ridiculous.
[1:43:42] Cameron McEwen: It's the reverse of what Vico describes for the cave people.
[1:43:47] Bob Dobbs: Yeah.
[1:43:48] Bob Dobbs: See,
[1:43:48] Bob Dobbs: there it is.
[1:43:49] Cameron McEwen: This is the tech body doing the opposite.
[1:43:51] Cameron McEwen: And he's going back into the guttural.
[1:43:53] Bob Dobbs: Yeah.
[1:43:57] Bob Dobbs: What is it?
[1:43:57] Bob Dobbs: Okay,
[1:43:58] Bob Dobbs: I love the way he nods.
[1:43:59] Bob Dobbs: He really communicates.
[1:44:00] Bob Dobbs: So this is what
[1:44:02] Bob Dobbs: Joyce's wife and daughter are doing.
[1:44:04] Bob Dobbs: They're fucking up the sentences.
[1:44:05] Bob Dobbs: And that was useful.
[1:44:07] Bob Dobbs: So he is doing that.
[1:44:09] Bob Dobbs: He may be expressing the gap,
[1:44:11] Bob Dobbs: you know,
[1:44:12] Bob Dobbs: way more extremely than
[1:44:14] Bob Dobbs: Trump did.
[1:44:15] Bob Dobbs: You know,
[1:44:15] Bob Dobbs: Trump couldn't finish his sentences,
[1:44:17] Bob Dobbs: but but Biden doesn't finish the syllables.
[1:44:23] Bob Dobbs: So it's just preposterous.
[1:44:26] Bob Dobbs: If you can remember previous times,
[1:44:28] Bob Dobbs: what is happening today in the in the White House?
[1:44:31] Bob Dobbs: That's pretty incredible.
[1:44:34] Bob Dobbs: I mean,
[1:44:35] Bob Dobbs: you never would have seen the president turn around and try to shake a head.
[1:44:39] Bob Dobbs: There's nobody there.
[1:44:42] Cameron McEwen: But that's a perfect image of if the White House may be taken as human identity or individual identity.
[1:44:51] Cameron McEwen: And that's become exploded and imploded at the same time.
[1:44:56] Bob Dobbs: Nobody shake your hand.
[1:44:57] Bob Dobbs: That's right.
[1:44:59] Bob Dobbs: So he's acting out.
[1:45:01] Bob Dobbs: It's a kind of deep poetry or deep,
[1:45:04] Bob Dobbs: the language function you were describing a couple minutes ago,
[1:45:07] Bob Dobbs: the underlying understanding before understanding.
[1:45:10] Bob Dobbs: Sure.
[1:45:12] Cameron McEwen: Well,
[1:45:12] Cameron McEwen: it's the mimesis that you were talking about.
[1:45:14] Bob Dobbs: Yeah.
[1:45:15] Bob Dobbs: Now,
[1:45:16] Bob Dobbs: here's interesting.
[1:45:16] Bob Dobbs: iON talks a lot about this.
[1:45:18] Bob Dobbs: He says non-physical is in all the great arts.
[1:45:22] Bob Dobbs: And it's in the David,
[1:45:26] Bob Dobbs: the famous sculpture by Michelangelo.
[1:45:28] Bob Dobbs: Yeah.
[1:45:28] Bob Dobbs: David,
[1:45:29] Bob Dobbs: I think it's called,
[1:45:29] Bob Dobbs: or David or something.
[1:45:30] Bob Dobbs: Yeah.
[1:45:31] Cameron McEwen: Yeah.
[1:45:32] Cameron McEwen: In Florence.
[1:45:33] Bob Dobbs: Yeah.
[1:45:34] Bob Dobbs: And so
[1:45:35] Bob Dobbs: iON says all art has this other level,
[1:45:38] Bob Dobbs: which iON calls non-physical,
[1:45:40] Bob Dobbs: communicating Thanks.
[1:45:41] Bob Dobbs: Through the artist,
[1:45:42] Bob Dobbs: it's whatever it's trying to say.
[1:45:45] Bob Dobbs: And so there's a lot of that in Finnegans Wake.
[1:45:48] Bob Dobbs: So iON lays out,
[1:45:50] Bob Dobbs: to me,
[1:45:52] Bob Dobbs: the third ring that's in the wake that Joyce didn't know was being made by the language itself.
[1:45:59] Bob Dobbs: So that's where language communication is its own weird reality,
[1:46:04] Bob Dobbs: like a species that is in between humans and the world.
[1:46:08] Bob Dobbs: And it has its own laws.
[1:46:10] Bob Dobbs: And maybe that's what McLuhan was starting to intuit.
[1:46:13] Bob Dobbs: Oh,
[1:46:13] Cameron McEwen: I think so.
[1:46:14] Bob Dobbs: Yeah.
[1:46:14] Cameron McEwen: I think so.
[1:46:15] Cameron McEwen: Because if you think about Joyce for a minute and him seeing something more valuable in the distortions than in the text that they were reading,
[1:46:31] Cameron McEwen: What he's trying to get a grasp of is what is...
[1:46:37] Cameron McEwen: the pre-tribal awareness of language.
[1:46:41] Cameron McEwen: What is it that allows language to function when it functions,
[1:46:46] Cameron McEwen: right?
[1:46:47] Cameron McEwen: And so the present complete dissolution of language can be seen as one way of attempting to come to grips with what language is.
[1:47:01] Bob Dobbs: Yeah,
[1:47:02] Bob Dobbs: we're back in the pre-tribal awareness.
[1:47:04] Cameron McEwen: That's right,
[1:47:05] Cameron McEwen: but doing it...
[1:47:07] Cameron McEwen: consciously that was not done before.
[1:47:12] Cameron McEwen: So now what you were talking about as this different level,
[1:47:24] Cameron McEwen: as always being present in works of art,
[1:47:31] Cameron McEwen: isn't this different level what Joyce was trying to mine?
[1:47:35] Bob Dobbs: Yep.
[1:47:36] Cameron McEwen: He was trying to mime something that can't be mimed.
[1:47:40] Bob Dobbs: And he became aware of it because the electric environment was doing that.
[1:47:46] Bob Dobbs: The electric environment is the underlying mimesis.
[1:47:51] Cameron McEwen: I can see that.
[1:47:53] Bob Dobbs: Electricity.
[1:47:54] Cameron McEwen: Yeah,
[1:47:54] Cameron McEwen: yeah,
[1:47:55] Cameron McEwen: absolutely.
[1:47:56] Cameron McEwen: And electricity as tactility.
[1:47:58] Cameron McEwen: But it would be a mistake if people concretized that.
[1:48:05] Cameron McEwen: I mean,
[1:48:05] Cameron McEwen: we're not talking...
[1:48:06] Cameron McEwen: We're not talking about a technological environment that consists of this invention and that invention and this invention.
[1:48:13] Cameron McEwen: We're not talking about boxes like the TV box or the hi-fi box or something like that.
[1:48:19] Cameron McEwen: We're talking about environments.
[1:48:22] Bob Dobbs: We're talking about the mimesis.
[1:48:24] Cameron McEwen: Absolutely.
[1:48:25] Bob Dobbs: The realm of where the mimesis takes part or engages itself.
[1:48:30] Bob Dobbs: Yeah.
[1:48:32] Cameron McEwen: What brings it forth,
[1:48:33] Cameron McEwen: the springboard of mimesis.
[1:48:37] Bob Dobbs: So let me just see where we can wrap it up here.
[1:48:43] Bob Dobbs: What am I saying?
[1:48:46] Bob Dobbs: So
[1:48:46] Bob Dobbs: I have my commentary is I'm trying to take,
[1:48:49] Bob Dobbs: I say,
[1:48:50] Bob Dobbs: I'm trying to take McLuhan's vision through the barriers and into the Android meme zone.
[1:48:55] Bob Dobbs: Now,
[1:48:55] Bob Dobbs: that's what we were just talking about.
[1:48:57] Bob Dobbs: But I have to go along with the fact that nobody is being massaged.
[1:49:01] Bob Dobbs: The Android meme is doing it to itself.
[1:49:03] Bob Dobbs: Humans.
[1:49:04] Bob Dobbs: And then I quote myself,
[1:49:05] Bob Dobbs: humans are actually not manipulated or brainwashed.
[1:49:09] Bob Dobbs: Everybody's staring out from their isolated platform and noticing the emotions,
[1:49:13] Bob Dobbs: paranoia,
[1:49:13] Bob Dobbs: schizophrenia,
[1:49:14] Bob Dobbs: in other people.
[1:49:16] Bob Dobbs: And all I can see is other people in a diminished state.
[1:49:19] Bob Dobbs: I remember McLuhan saying television made the domestic environment menacing.
[1:49:27] Bob Dobbs: So then I go to the pros.
[1:49:29] Bob Dobbs: The Android meme encourages humans to think they are the agency of doing.
[1:49:33] Bob Dobbs: Encourages people to think they're doing it.
[1:49:36] Bob Dobbs: But the sidelining of the benching of humans continues,
[1:49:41] Bob Dobbs: which is what you were saying at the beginning.
[1:49:45] Cameron McEwen: That's a great term.
[1:49:46] Bob Dobbs: Yeah,
[1:49:47] Bob Dobbs: for Canadians,
[1:49:48] Bob Dobbs: right?
[1:49:48] Bob Dobbs: That's hockey.
[1:49:49] Bob Dobbs: It benched.
[1:49:51] Bob Dobbs: Even some Silicon Valley billionaires are advocating some kind of media ecology.
[1:49:56] Bob Dobbs: And Tim Berners-Lee,
[1:49:57] Bob Dobbs: one of the fathers of the Internet,
[1:49:59] Bob Dobbs: is too.
[1:50:00] Bob Dobbs: And then my rant self comes in and says,
[1:50:03] Bob Dobbs: Tim Berners-Lee and his team invented the HTTP protocols while employed at CERN in Geneva.
[1:50:08] Bob Dobbs: He made the Internet available to the planet of the dead,
[1:50:11] Bob Dobbs: which was the world of the 70s.
[1:50:15] Bob Dobbs: When we'd run the course of analog media,
[1:50:17] Bob Dobbs: we're in the global theater,
[1:50:19] Bob Dobbs: but the digital Android meme hadn't become environment yet.
[1:50:23] Bob Dobbs: So you see,
[1:50:24] Bob Dobbs: the internet activated the planet of the dead.
[1:50:30] Bob Dobbs: It put the dead making them think that they're doing something.
[1:50:33] Bob Dobbs: So you had the boom of 1983 in the economy that went on for
[1:50:39] Bob Dobbs: 25 years or something.
[1:50:43] Bob Dobbs: The Android meme is encouraging people to think they're doing it because it's disappearing itself,
[1:50:48] Bob Dobbs: but it's surreptitiously on the sidelines,
[1:50:51] Bob Dobbs: possessing people invisibly.
[1:50:53] Bob Dobbs: That's why some of the Silicon Valley digerati are worried.
[1:50:56] Bob Dobbs: They're saying with disbelief,
[1:50:57] Bob Dobbs: quote,
[1:50:58] Bob Dobbs: damn,
[1:50:58] Bob Dobbs: this thing is taking people over.
[1:51:00] Bob Dobbs: We can't stop it.
[1:51:02] Bob Dobbs: Now,
[1:51:04] Bob Dobbs: the more you become aware of that process,
[1:51:06] Bob Dobbs: you are stopping it.
[1:51:09] Bob Dobbs: Now,
[1:51:09] Bob Dobbs: I don't know what you do with yourself.
[1:51:13] Bob Dobbs: You might have to keep showing up at work.
[1:51:15] Bob Dobbs: Don't quit your day job as you become aware of this process.
[1:51:18] Bob Dobbs: But there's too much panic going on about it.
[1:51:22] Bob Dobbs: Do you know what I mean?
[1:51:25] Cameron McEwen: Yeah,
[1:51:25] Cameron McEwen: that kind of that relates to a question that I would ask you.
[1:51:30] Cameron McEwen: In the previous blue text,
[1:51:34] Cameron McEwen: you said humans are actually not manipulated.
[1:51:37] Bob Dobbs: Yeah,
[1:51:38] Bob Dobbs: that's Marshall McLuhan statement in 65.
[1:51:42] Bob Dobbs: There's too much
[1:51:43] Cameron McEwen: conflicting environments massaging the person that he doesn't get massaged in any particular culture or any particular okay okay and okay i can see that so you you get massaged but you don't get massaged particularly yeah there's
[1:51:58] Bob Dobbs: no no um consolidation of a new sensory ratio yeah so that for the person would feel i don't know anymore i don't have a way to put on knowing correct Okay.
[1:52:12] Cameron McEwen: I don't have a mask.
[1:52:14] Bob Dobbs: Right.
[1:52:15] Bob Dobbs: I don't have a mask for my mind.
[1:52:17] Bob Dobbs: And so you could see that began intensely for the baby boomers and then the Generation X.
[1:52:22] Bob Dobbs: And each generation goes through the same pattern,
[1:52:25] Bob Dobbs: probably going back to the telegraph.
[1:52:28] Bob Dobbs: We were talking an hour or two ago about the identity crisis of the Gutenberg Galaxy for the last 150 years.
[1:52:35] Bob Dobbs: It's the same pattern being intensified and other,
[1:52:41] Bob Dobbs: you know,
[1:52:41] Bob Dobbs: Oh,
[1:52:41] Bob Dobbs: animized.
[1:52:42] Bob Dobbs: and shrunk,
[1:52:44] Bob Dobbs: holeopathized,
[1:52:46] Bob Dobbs: you know,
[1:52:46] Bob Dobbs: all these different terms of a complex weirdness,
[1:52:50] Bob Dobbs: but it's replaying what we need,
[1:52:54] Bob Dobbs: I used to say on the album,
[1:52:55] Bob Dobbs: it's on the album,
[1:52:56] Bob Dobbs: we never left 1945,
[1:52:57] Bob Dobbs: we've been running on the same spot since then.
[1:53:00] Cameron McEwen: Correct.
[1:53:00] Bob Dobbs: And,
[1:53:01] Bob Dobbs: you know,
[1:53:02] Bob Dobbs: back,
[1:53:02] Bob Dobbs: we've been stuck in the electric environment since the telegraph.
[1:53:06] Cameron McEwen: Yep,
[1:53:06] Cameron McEwen: yep.
[1:53:07] Bob Dobbs: So that identity crisis now is being imitated by the Android meme.
[1:53:12] Bob Dobbs: It's acting out our identity crisis for itself.
[1:53:15] Cameron McEwen: Yeah,
[1:53:16] Cameron McEwen: that's good.
[1:53:17] Bob Dobbs: And then that becomes,
[1:53:17] Bob Dobbs: so our schizophrenia becomes,
[1:53:21] Bob Dobbs: absorbs into the Android meme schizophrenia,
[1:53:23] Bob Dobbs: and that's where you get quadrophenia.
[1:53:26] Cameron McEwen: Yeah,
[1:53:26] Cameron McEwen: and the
[1:53:30] Cameron McEwen: AP would be the attempted identification with these exaggerations.
[1:53:39] Bob Dobbs: The attempt to articulate it.
[1:53:41] Bob Dobbs: in any medium possible.
[1:53:43] Bob Dobbs: So somebody will make an album,
[1:53:45] Bob Dobbs: CD,
[1:53:45] Bob Dobbs: or a rap song,
[1:53:46] Bob Dobbs: or they'll make a movie,
[1:53:47] Bob Dobbs: or they'll write a book.
[1:53:48] Bob Dobbs: And there's lots of creativity like that going on.
[1:53:51] Bob Dobbs: Probably you could say it's the most creative time in the history of humans is all the media that's been made the last 60 years or so.
[1:53:58] Bob Dobbs: And these people are trying to articulate it.
[1:54:00] Bob Dobbs: But as McLuhan said,
[1:54:01] Bob Dobbs: creativity is the biggest cliche.
[1:54:03] Bob Dobbs: We don't need to make anything.
[1:54:05] Bob Dobbs: That doesn't help you.
[1:54:07] Cameron McEwen: Right.
[1:54:08] Cameron McEwen: And that's because creativity is always going on.
[1:54:11] Cameron McEwen: That's where right around 1950 all of McLuhan's essays are about how art is the retracing of ordinary experience.
[1:54:20] Cameron McEwen: As I say,
[1:54:21] Cameron McEwen: ordinary experience takes its springs forward from creativity.
[1:54:29] Cameron McEwen: And that creativity is pre-tribal awareness.
[1:54:32] Cameron McEwen: So there is no such thing as human experience that isn't creative.
[1:54:39] Cameron McEwen: However...
[1:54:41] Cameron McEwen: the great problem is that humans have,
[1:54:44] Cameron McEwen: by and large,
[1:54:46] Cameron McEwen: exercised their creativity in order not to be creative.
[1:54:51] Bob Dobbs: Right.
[1:54:51] Bob Dobbs: So we have broken into the silent sea,
[1:54:55] Bob Dobbs: and that's a solution,
[1:54:57] Bob Dobbs: but there's a lot of noise interrupting that.
[1:55:00] Cameron McEwen: Yes.
[1:55:01] Bob Dobbs: That was McLuhan's favorite line.
[1:55:03] Bob Dobbs: He and Carpenter from the ancient Mariner,
[1:55:05] Bob Dobbs: they were the first to break into the silent sea.
[1:55:08] Bob Dobbs: And then you bring in John Cage and silence is not necessarily nothing being heard.
[1:55:14] Cameron McEwen: Correct.
[1:55:15] Cameron McEwen: And I think,
[1:55:16] Cameron McEwen: I'm not positive about this,
[1:55:18] Cameron McEwen: but
[1:55:19] Cameron McEwen: Heidegger and his brother,
[1:55:23] Cameron McEwen: Fritz,
[1:55:24] Cameron McEwen: used that line from Coleridge to describe what Heidegger was trying to do.
[1:55:31] Bob Dobbs: Oh,
[1:55:31] Bob Dobbs: yeah?
[1:55:31] Cameron McEwen: And,
[1:55:32] Cameron McEwen: yeah.
[1:55:33] Cameron McEwen: And his
[1:55:35] Cameron McEwen: McLuhan friend at the U of T.
[1:55:38] Cameron McEwen: Tom Langan started as a Heidegger scholar and knew,
[1:55:43] Cameron McEwen: I believe he knew that from,
[1:55:47] Cameron McEwen: he actually had met
[1:55:49] Cameron McEwen: Heidegger. I'm not sure if he had met his brother,
[1:55:52] Cameron McEwen: but certainly he had met
[1:55:54] Cameron McEwen: Heidegger personally.
[1:55:55] Cameron McEwen: And he may have told
[1:55:59] Cameron McEwen: McLuhan about Heidegger using
[1:56:02] Cameron McEwen: Coleridge.
[1:56:05] Cameron McEwen: you know,
[1:56:05] Cameron McEwen: in this particular way,
[1:56:06] Cameron McEwen: and then McLuhan may have taken it over from that.
[1:56:10] Bob Dobbs: Yeah,
[1:56:10] Bob Dobbs: because McLuhan was sitting there being attentive,
[1:56:12] Bob Dobbs: waiting for opportunities to show up to him.
[1:56:15] Cameron McEwen: That's right.
[1:56:16] Bob Dobbs: And so
[1:56:17] Bob Dobbs: Carpenter writes that essay.
[1:56:18] Cameron McEwen: That's what you do,
[1:56:19] Cameron McEwen: Bob.
[1:56:19] Bob Dobbs: That's right,
[1:56:20] Bob Dobbs: exactly.
[1:56:22] Bob Dobbs: It's funny when my friends become aware of it.
[1:56:24] Bob Dobbs: They say,
[1:56:24] Bob Dobbs: you've been ripping me off for years.
[1:56:28] Bob Dobbs: But the,
[1:56:31] Bob Dobbs: he...
[1:56:34] Bob Dobbs: I was just going to say that he...
[1:56:35] Bob Dobbs: Sorry,
[1:56:36] Bob Dobbs: I distracted you.
[1:56:36] Bob Dobbs: He realized...
[1:56:39] Bob Dobbs: Oh,
[1:56:39] Bob Dobbs: yeah.
[1:56:40] Bob Dobbs: Joyce quote,
[1:56:41] Bob Dobbs: waiting for the slips in language to give you some resonant,
[1:56:44] Bob Dobbs: meaty patterns.
[1:56:46] Bob Dobbs: He knew that,
[1:56:47] Bob Dobbs: and it was always showing.
[1:56:48] Bob Dobbs: Oh yeah,
[1:56:48] Bob Dobbs: Carpenter,
[1:56:49] Bob Dobbs: in his essay at the end of Stearn's book,
[1:56:52] Bob Dobbs: he talks about how McLuhan steals from everybody.
[1:56:56] Bob Dobbs: But that's not the case in the way we're talking about it here.
[1:56:58] Bob Dobbs: He knew,
[1:57:00] Bob Dobbs: because he was conscious,
[1:57:01] Bob Dobbs: that language and the communicating environment would show him stuff.
[1:57:05] Bob Dobbs: You just have to be waiting for it.
[1:57:07] Cameron McEwen: You have to notice it.
[1:57:09] Cameron McEwen: You bring up a good point there.
[1:57:10] Cameron McEwen: What
[1:57:11] Cameron McEwen: Carpenter talks about is McLuhan,
[1:57:14] Cameron McEwen: what he calls his lack of originality.
[1:57:16] Bob Dobbs: Yeah.
[1:57:17] Cameron McEwen: Right?
[1:57:17] Cameron McEwen: But the thing is,
[1:57:18] Cameron McEwen: for McLuhan,
[1:57:20] Cameron McEwen: all human experience without any exception is original.
[1:57:25] Bob Dobbs: Yeah.
[1:57:26] Cameron McEwen: Because you cannot have human experience without exercising pre-tribal awareness.
[1:57:32] Cameron McEwen: Now,
[1:57:32] Cameron McEwen: what is pre-tribal awareness?
[1:57:35] Cameron McEwen: It's the original creativity.
[1:57:37] Cameron McEwen: that engages some collective possibility.
[1:57:44] Bob Dobbs: Yeah.
[1:57:45] Cameron McEwen: Right?
[1:57:45] Cameron McEwen: And humans are the coming together of individual creativity with collective possibility.
[1:57:54] Bob Dobbs: Yeah,
[1:57:55] Bob Dobbs: collective miming of each other.
[1:57:58] Cameron McEwen: Yeah,
[1:57:58] Cameron McEwen: that's what language is like.
[1:58:00] Bob Dobbs: Yeah.
[1:58:00] Cameron McEwen: Collective sounds,
[1:58:02] Cameron McEwen: collective words,
[1:58:03] Cameron McEwen: collective grammar,
[1:58:05] Cameron McEwen: collective meanings,
[1:58:06] Cameron McEwen: all this sort of stuff.
[1:58:07] Cameron McEwen: but it needs to be ignited.
[1:58:11] Bob Dobbs: And so the individual hallucinator comes in and ignites it.
[1:58:15] Bob Dobbs: That's right.
[1:58:17] Cameron McEwen: Absolutely.
[1:58:17] Cameron McEwen: That's a good description.
[1:58:19] Bob Dobbs: Yeah.
[1:58:20] Bob Dobbs: So the,
[1:58:22] Bob Dobbs: okay,
[1:58:23] Bob Dobbs: let me just see what I say here.
[1:58:25] Bob Dobbs: He made the Internet available,
[1:58:27] Bob Dobbs: Tim Berners-Lee,
[1:58:27] Bob Dobbs: made the Internet available to the planet of the dead.
[1:58:30] Bob Dobbs: The Android,
[1:58:32] Bob Dobbs: oh,
[1:58:32] Bob Dobbs: I did that.
[1:58:33] Bob Dobbs: That's why some of the Silicon Valley digerati are worried.
[1:58:36] Bob Dobbs: Oh yeah,
[1:58:36] Bob Dobbs: I'm pointing out that there is this panic going on right now,
[1:58:42] Bob Dobbs: and anyway,
[1:58:43] Bob Dobbs: for most of the 20th century,
[1:58:45] Bob Dobbs: you could say.
[1:58:46] Bob Dobbs: And McLuhan would sit there very calm,
[1:58:49] Bob Dobbs: in the middle,
[1:58:50] Bob Dobbs: not panicking.
[1:58:52] Bob Dobbs: He would tell people,
[1:58:53] Bob Dobbs: don't leave your home.
[1:58:55] Bob Dobbs: Stay home.
[1:58:56] Bob Dobbs: Don't go shopping.
[1:58:57] Bob Dobbs: Don't go to the movies.
[1:58:58] Bob Dobbs: Stay home.
[1:58:59] Bob Dobbs: You'll learn a lot more.
[1:59:03] Bob Dobbs: You'll have a better time.
[1:59:08] Bob Dobbs: entering silence,
[1:59:09] Bob Dobbs: probably that's what
[1:59:10] Bob Dobbs: McLuhan meant by the church.
[1:59:12] Bob Dobbs: Yeah,
[1:59:13] Cameron McEwen: I was just going to say,
[1:59:14] Cameron McEwen: that's very much related to his Catholicism.
[1:59:16] Bob Dobbs: Yeah.
[1:59:17] Cameron McEwen: Being able to relax in the middle of the maelstrom is what he thought the church was.
[1:59:25] Bob Dobbs: Yeah,
[1:59:25] Bob Dobbs: yeah.
[1:59:26] Bob Dobbs: So,
[1:59:29] Bob Dobbs: and remember he said in around 1977 when he started saying he was an apocalyptic,
[1:59:35] Bob Dobbs: that
[1:59:36] Bob Dobbs: you get down to two people.
[1:59:38] Bob Dobbs: He says the church probably needs to be suppressed,
[1:59:42] Bob Dobbs: oppressed,
[1:59:42] Bob Dobbs: harassed,
[1:59:43] Bob Dobbs: the Vatican.
[1:59:45] Bob Dobbs: And he said if you just end up with two members,
[1:59:48] Bob Dobbs: one of them's got to be the pope.
[1:59:53] Cameron McEwen: But when he talks about the need for the church to be harassed,
[1:59:57] Cameron McEwen: I mean,
[1:59:59] Cameron McEwen: the symbol of the church or the deepest reality of the church is the cross,
[2:00:04] Cameron McEwen: right?
[2:00:05] Bob Dobbs: Yeah.
[2:00:05] Cameron McEwen: So the attempt to erect an organization and rituals and all that sort of stuff is a truly great thing that goes back to the very origins of
[2:00:22] Cameron McEwen: humanity.
[2:00:23] Cameron McEwen: But that can never be isolated from the fact of the cross,
[2:00:29] Cameron McEwen: from the fact of pain,
[2:00:32] Cameron McEwen: from the fact that...
[2:00:34] Cameron McEwen: pure organization is only part of the picture.
[2:00:40] Bob Dobbs: Yeah,
[2:00:41] Bob Dobbs: the cross is the interplay of two consciousnesses.
[2:00:44] Cameron McEwen: Absolutely.
[2:00:45] Cameron McEwen: And two times,
[2:00:47] Cameron McEwen: two levels,
[2:00:48] Cameron McEwen: two meanings,
[2:00:49] Cameron McEwen: all sorts of stuff.
[2:00:50] Bob Dobbs: The doubleness.
[2:00:51] Bob Dobbs: In Wyndham Lewis's twoness Doctrine.
[2:00:54] Bob Dobbs: He didn't believe in oneness,
[2:00:55] Bob Dobbs: he believed in twoness.
[2:00:55] Bob Dobbs: Correct.
[2:00:57] Bob Dobbs: Okay,
[2:00:58] Bob Dobbs: so then,
[2:01:00] Bob Dobbs: what do I say here?
[2:01:05] Bob Dobbs: Okay,
[2:01:05] Bob Dobbs: now you got to go soon,
[2:01:06] Bob Dobbs: right?
[2:01:08] Cameron McEwen: Yeah,
[2:01:08] Cameron McEwen: well,
[2:01:10] Cameron McEwen: I think usually you have something you have to do around six.
[2:01:14] Bob Dobbs: Yeah,
[2:01:15] Cameron McEwen: I don't have to do that tonight.
[2:01:16] Cameron McEwen: I'm okay,
[2:01:18] Cameron McEwen: but whatever fits your schedule.
[2:01:20] Bob Dobbs: Okay,
[2:01:20] Bob Dobbs: so we're trying to get this,
[2:01:24] Bob Dobbs: bring this up.
[2:01:26] Cameron McEwen: You're trying to see if something is going to come to you from the book that looks like a good ending.
[2:01:32] Bob Dobbs: That's right,
[2:01:33] Bob Dobbs: waiting for the ending.
[2:01:36] Bob Dobbs: So I have their thinking,
[2:01:38] Bob Dobbs: but I can't...
[2:01:39] Bob Dobbs: I can't get the screen to get over it.
[2:01:41] Bob Dobbs: Is the far left,
[2:01:42] Bob Dobbs: where it says humans are now surplus flesh Kroker,
[2:01:45] Bob Dobbs: underneath it,
[2:01:46] Bob Dobbs: I have their thinking.
[2:01:48] Bob Dobbs: Oh,
[2:01:48] Bob Dobbs: maybe it's up above the blue.
[2:01:51] Bob Dobbs: It's continuing up above the blue.
[2:01:55] Cameron McEwen: I think it's just a misprint.
[2:01:56] Bob Dobbs: Yeah,
[2:01:58] Bob Dobbs: there's nothing to the left of their thinking,
[2:02:00] Bob Dobbs: is there?
[2:02:01] Cameron McEwen: No.
[2:02:02] Bob Dobbs: Yeah,
[2:02:02] Bob Dobbs: so that's not meant to be there.
[2:02:04] Bob Dobbs: Their thinking has nothing to connect with.
[2:02:07] Bob Dobbs: Well,
[2:02:07] Bob Dobbs: unless I'm describing...
[2:02:09] Bob Dobbs: Humans are now surplus flesh.
[2:02:10] Bob Dobbs: Their thinking is nothing to connect with,
[2:02:12] Bob Dobbs: no reference.
[2:02:14] Bob Dobbs: So then I say that's what occurs.
[2:02:15] Cameron McEwen: It may be that those two lines were put in to highlight the
[2:02:21] Cameron McEwen: Kroker quotation,
[2:02:23] Cameron McEwen: but the lines distort the fact that their thinking actually was to come after
[2:02:32] Cameron McEwen: Kroker.
[2:02:33] Bob Dobbs: Yeah. Okay,
[2:02:35] Bob Dobbs: so humans are now surplus flesh.
[2:02:37] Bob Dobbs: their thinking has nothing to connect with,
[2:02:39] Bob Dobbs: no reference.
[2:02:41] Bob Dobbs: So then I say that's what Derrick de Kerckhove said on the
[2:02:44] Bob Dobbs: 12-hour McLuhan-esque marathon exploring the post-pandemic world.
[2:02:47] Bob Dobbs: More ancient,
[2:02:48] Bob Dobbs: separated individuals.
[2:02:50] Bob Dobbs: I don't know what Derek said.
[2:02:52] Bob Dobbs: I don't know what I'm referring to there.
[2:02:54] Bob Dobbs: That's what Derek said.
[2:02:55] Cameron McEwen: I didn't listen to that,
[2:02:56] Bob Dobbs: so I can't help.
[2:02:59] Bob Dobbs: Maybe he mentioned something,
[2:03:01] Bob Dobbs: more ancient,
[2:03:01] Bob Dobbs: separated individuals.
[2:03:04] Bob Dobbs: But see,
[2:03:04] Cameron McEwen: that would be a false concretion.
[2:03:08] Cameron McEwen: Because what we're talking about with ancient separated individuals is something that has always gone on and that is inherent to human experience.
[2:03:22] Cameron McEwen: It's an all-at-once phenomenon,
[2:03:25] Cameron McEwen: not a chronological phenomenon.
[2:03:29] Cameron McEwen: So that would be an example of if de Kerckhove was talking about this as being sort of a condition in the world.
[2:03:39] Cameron McEwen: he would be right only insofar as humans are now miming what is going on with them in an attempt to understand what is going on with them,
[2:03:50] Cameron McEwen: but they're doing it in a fog.
[2:03:53] Bob Dobbs: Yeah,
[2:03:55] Bob Dobbs: nobody's articulating correctly.
[2:03:59] Bob Dobbs: You know,
[2:04:01] Bob Dobbs: Biden,
[2:04:01] Bob Dobbs: Trump,
[2:04:02] Bob Dobbs: anybody,
[2:04:03] Bob Dobbs: they don't say something.
[2:04:09] Bob Dobbs: hypnotizing charismatic and McLuhan wrote that way back there he says i think in the 40s he says the uh the leaders in our society the experts in that they are very ineffective in their public communications and he thought he had come up with a way to public communicate that everybody could share it was a new esperanto media
[2:04:30] Bob Dobbs: awareness so that was what you talk about you don't talk in Yeah.
[2:04:36] Bob Dobbs: language or culture or nation or government,
[2:04:39] Bob Dobbs: you make these,
[2:04:40] Bob Dobbs: well,
[2:04:40] Bob Dobbs: the poet takes over,
[2:04:42] Bob Dobbs: so to speak.
[2:04:43] Bob Dobbs: So that's partly what I thought I was doing in CKLN Radio.
[2:04:48] Bob Dobbs: But like
[2:04:51] Cameron McEwen: McLuhan, both you and McLuhan also knew that that attempted communication through new media was breaking down and wasn't working.
[2:05:02] Cameron McEwen: So both of you also turned to humor.
[2:05:05] Bob Dobbs: That's right,
[2:05:05] Bob Dobbs: a lot of laughter.
[2:05:07] Cameron McEwen: That's right,
[2:05:08] Cameron McEwen: to try another way of communicating.
[2:05:11] Cameron McEwen: So McLuhan was driving himself crazy trying to communicate and never succeeded.
[2:05:17] Cameron McEwen: And you've kind of taken up the mantle.
[2:05:21] Bob Dobbs: With a little more slack.
[2:05:23] Bob Dobbs: I let him be the canary in the mind,
[2:05:25] Bob Dobbs: right?
[2:05:28] Cameron McEwen: That's funny,
[2:05:29] Cameron McEwen: yeah.
[2:05:29] Bob Dobbs: Yeah,
[2:05:30] Bob Dobbs: no,
[2:05:30] Bob Dobbs: I really am fully aware of that.
[2:05:32] Bob Dobbs: I was aware of that.
[2:05:35] Bob Dobbs: And Nelson was aware of it because he hung out with McLuhan.
[2:05:38] Bob Dobbs: So he picked up that I was sort of,
[2:05:40] Bob Dobbs: he could see the similarities,
[2:05:41] Bob Dobbs: you know what I mean,
[2:05:42] Bob Dobbs: in the approach.
[2:05:44] Bob Dobbs: So he liked hanging out with it.
[2:05:47] Bob Dobbs: I met the last guy to do anything with McLuhan is a guy that lives here in Maui.
[2:05:55] Bob Dobbs: None of us ever heard of him.
[2:05:57] Bob Dobbs: David
[2:05:58] Bob Dobbs: Steinberg or something,
[2:05:59] Bob Dobbs: I think that's his name.
[2:06:00] Bob Dobbs: So what happened is...
[2:06:01] Cameron McEwen: I think you said
[2:06:02] Cameron McEwen: Greenberg.
[2:06:03] Bob Dobbs: David Greenberg?
[2:06:04] Bob Dobbs: Maybe.
[2:06:05] Bob Dobbs: Have I told you this story?
[2:06:07] Cameron McEwen: Yeah.
[2:06:08] Cameron McEwen: Yeah.
[2:06:08] Bob Dobbs: So he was the last guy to have a project for McLuhan,
[2:06:13] Bob Dobbs: and they were working on it.
[2:06:14] Bob Dobbs: And so McLuhan was going to move to California to do it.
[2:06:17] Bob Dobbs: And then he had a stroke,
[2:06:18] Bob Dobbs: so it didn't happen.
[2:06:20] Bob Dobbs: But it came because he knew Mary,
[2:06:23] Bob Dobbs: and he and Mary got together at some point in the late 70s.
[2:06:26] Bob Dobbs: So then she introduced him to McLuhan,
[2:06:29] Bob Dobbs: and then he was able to inspire McLuhan with that.
[2:06:33] Bob Dobbs: series they were going to do a you know jacob Bronowski ascent of mankind kind of series on media yeah yeah on television
[2:06:40] Bob Dobbs: Yeah,
[2:06:40] Bob Dobbs: so he,
[2:06:41] Bob Dobbs: I may have told you that when he met me,
[2:06:43] Bob Dobbs: he,
[2:06:45] Bob Dobbs: after a few days,
[2:06:46] Bob Dobbs: he said,
[2:06:46] Bob Dobbs: you're just like McLuhan.
[2:06:48] Bob Dobbs: Could you go up on stage and just be McLuhan?
[2:06:53] Bob Dobbs: And I said,
[2:06:53] Bob Dobbs: sure,
[2:06:54] Bob Dobbs: you know,
[2:06:54] Bob Dobbs: I could say his stuff and that.
[2:06:56] Bob Dobbs: So then he got distracted with the Chinese Olympics.
[2:06:59] Bob Dobbs: He was a designer.
[2:07:00] Bob Dobbs: So they took him off.
[2:07:01] Bob Dobbs: This is in August 2008.
[2:07:04] Bob Dobbs: So he went off to China.
[2:07:05] Bob Dobbs: I haven't seen him since.
[2:07:07] Bob Dobbs: So...
[2:07:10] Bob Dobbs: He picked up on that,
[2:07:11] Bob Dobbs: having hung out with McLuhan,
[2:07:12] Bob Dobbs: you know?
[2:07:13] Bob Dobbs: He said,
[2:07:14] Bob Dobbs: I've never noticed anybody else be like McLuhan.
[2:07:17] Bob Dobbs: So I was.
[2:07:18] Bob Dobbs: So,
[2:07:18] Bob Dobbs: as de Kerckhove once said in a magazine,
[2:07:20] Bob Dobbs: he said,
[2:07:21] Bob Dobbs: Bob eats,
[2:07:21] Bob Dobbs: sleeps,
[2:07:22] Bob Dobbs: and drinks McLuhan.
[2:07:25] Bob Dobbs: So yeah,
[2:07:25] Bob Dobbs: I became him,
[2:07:26] Bob Dobbs: in a way.
[2:07:27] Bob Dobbs: But you might say,
[2:07:29] Bob Dobbs: it's not megalomaniac for me to say,
[2:07:31] Bob Dobbs: no,
[2:07:31] Bob Dobbs: when you get to that level of awareness,
[2:07:33] Bob Dobbs: it's a common perception,
[2:07:35] Bob Dobbs: maybe a common vibe you give off.
[2:07:38] Bob Dobbs: The tradition,
[2:07:38] Bob Dobbs: they called it,
[2:07:39] Bob Dobbs: right?
[2:07:40] Bob Dobbs: It's a kind of Menippean sensibility.
[2:07:44] Bob Dobbs: Anyways,
[2:07:44] Bob Dobbs: yep,
[2:07:45] Bob Dobbs: I did that.
[2:07:46] Bob Dobbs: So here's the final quote.
[2:07:49] Bob Dobbs: Laws of Media,
[2:07:50] Bob Dobbs: probably written by Eric,
[2:07:51] Bob Dobbs: 1988.
[2:07:53] Bob Dobbs: The second last sentence is,
[2:07:55] Bob Dobbs: as the information that constitutes the environment is perpetually in flux,
[2:07:59] Bob Dobbs: so the need is not for fixed concepts,
[2:08:01] Bob Dobbs: but rather for the ancient skill of reading that book,
[2:08:04] Bob Dobbs: for navigating through an ever uncharted and uncharitable milieu.
[2:08:09] Bob Dobbs: They spelt Melio wrong there.
[2:08:12] Bob Dobbs: So what is that?
[2:08:14] Bob Dobbs: I mean,
[2:08:14] Bob Dobbs: that's Finnegans Wake,
[2:08:15] Bob Dobbs: but that's not communicating.
[2:08:20] Bob Dobbs: You're navigating through an uncharted and unchartable,
[2:08:22] Bob Dobbs: so it's not communicating anything.
[2:08:24] Bob Dobbs: It's communicating silence to you.
[2:08:27] Bob Dobbs: And the fools rush in.
[2:08:29] Bob Dobbs: They start being paranoid and to fill up the gap.
[2:08:34] Bob Dobbs: So you have to mirror that silence.
[2:08:38] Bob Dobbs: the uncharted and uncharitable back to it,
[2:08:41] Bob Dobbs: to it.
[2:08:43] Bob Dobbs: And it would be the meme,
[2:08:45] Bob Dobbs: the miming meme in between us.
[2:08:48] Bob Dobbs: You know...
[2:08:50] Cameron McEwen: I agree with your language more than I agree with what Eric wrote at the end of
[2:08:56] Cameron McEwen: Laws of Media there.
[2:08:58] Cameron McEwen: Yeah.
[2:09:00] Cameron McEwen: As soon as you talk about flux on the one hand and fix,
[2:09:07] Cameron McEwen: concepts on the other and all this.
[2:09:10] Cameron McEwen: You're back in Gutenberg.
[2:09:11] Bob Dobbs: Yeah.
[2:09:13] Bob Dobbs: So the final sentence is what I was thinking of a couple hours ago when we were describing the process of the brain or the process of perception.
[2:09:20] Bob Dobbs: We were describing how consciousness happens.
[2:09:24] Bob Dobbs: I always thought this was pretty good.
[2:09:25] Bob Dobbs: Barry Nevitt says in his book ABC of Prophecy,
[2:09:29] Bob Dobbs: Marshall McLuhan foresees that consciousness,
[2:09:32] Bob Dobbs: consciousness in quotes,
[2:09:33] Bob Dobbs: will prove to be an effect of speeding up
[2:09:36] Bob Dobbs: Cliché to Archetype processes in the brain.
[2:09:40] Bob Dobbs: Now,
[2:09:40] Bob Dobbs: we were talking about in the brain was echoes of private and corporate awareness.
[2:09:46] Bob Dobbs: This is a parallel statement by Barry to that.
[2:09:49] Bob Dobbs: So if you want to know what consciousness is,
[2:09:52] Bob Dobbs: it's an interplay of cliche archetype.
[2:09:56] Bob Dobbs: And then it's constantly being sped up.
[2:10:01] Bob Dobbs: And then that's what people mind when they take drugs.
[2:10:03] Bob Dobbs: They speed up the cliche archetype.
[2:10:07] Bob Dobbs: Processing.
[2:10:08] Bob Dobbs: What do you think of that sentence?
[2:10:09] Bob Dobbs: Is that okay for you?
[2:10:12] Cameron McEwen: I think it would...
[2:10:16] Cameron McEwen: A cliché to archetype is not isomorphic with pre-tribal awareness and tribal awareness.
[2:10:27] Cameron McEwen: So it would take some teasing apart to understand how those things work.
[2:10:37] Cameron McEwen: I would say that pre-tribal awareness is what sparks the cliché to archetype interrelation.
[2:10:47] Bob Dobbs: Yeah,
[2:10:47] Bob Dobbs: maybe that's the coming effects that unfold as the history of technology.
[2:10:52] Cameron McEwen: Yeah.
[2:10:53] Bob Dobbs: Okay,
[2:10:54] Bob Dobbs: so let's end with that point,
[2:10:57] Bob Dobbs: what you said there.
[2:10:58] Bob Dobbs: That's good.
[2:10:59] Bob Dobbs: And so we're on page 135.
[2:11:02] Cameron McEwen: Starting 136.
[2:11:04] Bob Dobbs: Yeah,
[2:11:04] Cameron McEwen: starting at the bottom 135.
[2:11:10] Bob Dobbs: So that was good.
[2:11:13] Bob Dobbs: We're managing to eke out new statements while repeating ourselves for 67 times.
[2:11:22] Cameron McEwen: Well,
[2:11:22] Cameron McEwen: I'm learning stuff,
[2:11:23] Cameron McEwen: Bob,
[2:11:23] Cameron McEwen: so I thank you for that.
[2:11:25] Bob Dobbs: Well,
[2:11:25] Bob Dobbs: that's great.
[2:11:28] Bob Dobbs: That's what we do here,
[2:11:28] Bob Dobbs: right?
[2:11:30] Cameron McEwen: That's right.
[2:11:30] Bob Dobbs: I'm ripping you off.
[2:11:31] Bob Dobbs: I'm making you think you're learning something.
[2:11:36] Bob Dobbs: Yeah,
[2:11:37] Bob Dobbs: the great line on the radio show was this guy called up one time and he said...
[2:11:42] Bob Dobbs: I,
[2:11:44] Bob Dobbs: uh,
[2:11:44] Bob Dobbs: what did he say?
[2:11:44] Bob Dobbs: Um,
[2:11:50] Bob Dobbs: I,
[2:11:51] Bob Dobbs: he,
[2:11:51] Bob Dobbs: I don't know which order it was,
[2:11:52] Bob Dobbs: but he said,
[2:11:53] Bob Dobbs: uh,
[2:11:55] Bob Dobbs: I completely agree with what you're saying,
[2:11:57] Bob Dobbs: Bob,
[2:11:57] Bob Dobbs: but I have no idea what you are saying.
[2:12:02] Bob Dobbs: And that's the two processes.
[2:12:03] Bob Dobbs: There's your knowing and growing.
[2:12:04] Bob Dobbs: It's a perfect statement.
[2:12:06] Bob Dobbs: You have glimpses of matching or understanding,
[2:12:09] Bob Dobbs: but then it's always,
[2:12:11] Bob Dobbs: it's sped up.
[2:12:12] Bob Dobbs: Under electric conditions,
[2:12:14] Bob Dobbs: you get to the unknowing pretty fast.
[2:12:16] Bob Dobbs: Older societies didn't get to the unknowing thing too much.
[2:12:20] Cameron McEwen: Right,
[2:12:21] Cameron McEwen: right.
[2:12:21] Bob Dobbs: There's a good point.
[2:12:22] Cameron McEwen: So you can see what we said earlier about Joyce finding the misstatements of his wife and daughter being interesting,
[2:12:32] Cameron McEwen: is that he realized that his own thinking and his own reading went through the same process.
[2:12:39] Bob Dobbs: Yeah.
[2:12:40] Cameron McEwen: That it was the distortions.
[2:12:43] Cameron McEwen: Where did I see,
[2:12:45] Cameron McEwen: oh,
[2:12:46] Cameron McEwen: in the channeling
[2:12:48] Cameron McEwen: McLuhan interview in Wired,
[2:12:51] Cameron McEwen: it ends by talking about the need not to be efficient.
[2:12:57] Cameron McEwen: And that's what
[2:13:00] Cameron McEwen: Joyce discovered,
[2:13:01] Cameron McEwen: you could say.
[2:13:01] Bob Dobbs: Yes.
[2:13:03] Bob Dobbs: Now,
[2:13:03] Bob Dobbs: what's interesting,
[2:13:04] Bob Dobbs: he also says it doesn't matter who you're talking to.
[2:13:08] Bob Dobbs: There's room for co-creativity to happen.
[2:13:11] Bob Dobbs: If you want to be aware of the process of the potential,
[2:13:14] Bob Dobbs: right?
[2:13:14] Cameron McEwen: Yeah.
[2:13:15] Cameron McEwen: Well,
[2:13:15] Cameron McEwen: you know,
[2:13:15] Cameron McEwen: the co-creativity is already happening.
[2:13:18] Bob Dobbs: Yeah.
[2:13:19] Bob Dobbs: Yeah.
[2:13:20] Bob Dobbs: That's what I realized in the show on CKLN.
[2:13:23] Bob Dobbs: Now,
[2:13:23] Bob Dobbs: I had said that I actually messed up a lot of minds in the 80s on Toronto Radio.
[2:13:30] Bob Dobbs: But
[2:13:31] Bob Dobbs: I wasn't trying to do that,
[2:13:33] Bob Dobbs: I don't think.
[2:13:33] Bob Dobbs: But the people picked up that there was something going on.
[2:13:37] Bob Dobbs: They had not experienced someone.
[2:13:40] Bob Dobbs: genuinely interested in non-smartness is okay.
[2:13:48] Bob Dobbs: You can communicate within that.
[2:13:49] Bob Dobbs: You don't have to be smart.
[2:13:51] Bob Dobbs: Just say anything.
[2:13:51] Bob Dobbs: I used to say,
[2:13:52] Bob Dobbs: just say anything,
[2:13:54] Bob Dobbs: and we can work with it,
[2:13:55] Bob Dobbs: whatever you utter.
[2:13:57] Bob Dobbs: So no one had ever heard that in a public performance.
[2:14:00] Bob Dobbs: You know what I mean?
[2:14:01] Bob Dobbs: Right.
[2:14:02] Cameron McEwen: Well,
[2:14:03] Cameron McEwen: nobody had ever heard somebody being a disc jockey.
[2:14:09] Cameron McEwen: out of a deep space.
[2:14:11] Bob Dobbs: Yeah,
[2:14:13] Bob Dobbs: and making speech music.
[2:14:16] Cameron McEwen: Yeah,
[2:14:17] Cameron McEwen: yeah.
[2:14:18] Bob Dobbs: The simple sharing of creativity,
[2:14:20] Bob Dobbs: of making and matching,
[2:14:23] Bob Dobbs: that's what humans down deep require.
[2:14:26] Bob Dobbs: It's all they require.
[2:14:28] Cameron McEwen: Correct.
[2:14:30] Bob Dobbs: Someone that they're not lonely with,
[2:14:31] Bob Dobbs: so to speak.
[2:14:33] Bob Dobbs: And then they'll accept certain crude,
[2:14:37] Bob Dobbs: not very sharing.
[2:14:39] Bob Dobbs: just to be around the person.
[2:14:41] Bob Dobbs: So humans are addicted to humans,
[2:14:44] Bob Dobbs: and that is a problem.
[2:14:48] Bob Dobbs: And you see,
[2:14:48] Bob Dobbs: technology is making,
[2:14:49] Bob Dobbs: there's a service to the isolating of everybody.
[2:14:54] Cameron McEwen: Yep.
[2:14:54] Cameron McEwen: Oh,
[2:14:54] Cameron McEwen: absolutely.
[2:14:55] Bob Dobbs: Yeah.
[2:14:56] Cameron McEwen: That's what,
[2:14:57] Cameron McEwen: yeah,
[2:14:57] Cameron McEwen: I mean,
[2:14:59] Cameron McEwen: we probably don't want to go too far in there because it would take a lot of time to...
[2:15:04] Bob Dobbs: Yeah,
[2:15:04] Bob Dobbs: let me write that down.
[2:15:05] Bob Dobbs: We'll make that something to go into.
[2:15:10] Bob Dobbs: That statement.
[2:15:12] Bob Dobbs: Okay.
[2:15:13] Bob Dobbs: All right.
[2:15:13] Bob Dobbs: Thanks a lot.
[2:15:14] Bob Dobbs: It was fun talking to you,
[2:15:15] Bob Dobbs: whoever you are.
[2:15:19] Cameron McEwen: Okay,
[2:15:19] Cameron McEwen: Bob.
[2:15:20] Bob Dobbs: Okay,
[2:15:20] Bob Dobbs: Cameron.
[2:15:21] Bob Dobbs: Talk to you later.
[2:15:21] Bob Dobbs: Ciao,
[2:15:22] Cameron McEwen: ciao.
[2:15:22] Bob Dobbs: Yeah.