Transcribed by Linda R.
Bob 0:01
Welcome, this is Cameron McEwan and Bob Dobbs doing episode number 61. In our investigation of what my book on Trump and the Tech Body and what was it about? What was it attempting to say? And Cameron is helping me make a lot of discoveries about what the book shows. But, if you are listening to us in Episode 60, I brought up this quote, and it's an article in Rolling Stone magazine, November 12 1970, by a guy named Bren Stilley(?). He writes on a McLuhan talk I think in San Francisco. And McLuhan went to some University auditorium, a lot of people were there. And it was titled, "Marshall McLuhan: Culture Becomes Showbiz". And I don't know how accurate this quote was, but there seems to be a quote in the article saying, McLuhan saying, that the author highlighted, "When writing was introduced in the fifth century BCE, it scrapped the old tribal traditions of Homer and Hesiod but retrieved the private individual man. An ancient form dredged up from way, way back." Now, it's an astounding quote, because generally the word "private" is a literate effect. So, he's saying that the private individual man, the literate effect, is back there in caveman days, Paleolithic days, so to speak. But we know he doesn't mean the literal effect. So, we got discussing it, Cameron and I. I suggested it refers to the "private citadel of consciousness". No, he doesn't say that in “Counterblast”, he says, "the citadel of consciousness". He doesn't say “private” I don't think. You have that book there Cameron and you can quickly look it up. But the “citadel of consciousness”, says McLuhan, is not affected by media. So, I was aware of that quote, back in '69 early '70s. I saw this article in 1970 so, I would think about this. So, I had certain ideas about it. So, after we talked about it, because Cameron was still vague on it, he found some quotes. So, in a letter to Joe Keough, July 6 1970, Letter 413, McLuhan says,
Cameron 2:21
Page number
Bob 2:22
Oh, oh, this is in the book. Okay. I said letter number 413. Okay, yep. PAGE 413, "Havelock's preface to Plato shows how the phonetic alphabet scrapped tribal man but retrieved the primordial role of individual and pre-tribal awareness". Wow. And that's more what I imagined it was. But I never noticed that letter. You know, that was answering my question I had for all these years, about what is this retrieved privacy. So, he's saying it's pre-tribal. And he's not saying, private, he's saying primordial. Now that guy may have got the quote wrong in the article. But the point is, something is back there that's individual. So that's really important. Now, Cameron, you were saying you didn't understand that quote when I mentioned it. I don't think you knew about it until I brought it up last week, right?
Cameron 3:24
Well, I'd read it. I'd read it before.
Bob 3:27
Okay. But
Cameron 3:32
You've actually brought it up a few times.
Bob 3:34
Yeah.
Cameron 3:35
But I've never really understood what McLuhan was getting at. And even now, even though I've assembled a bunch of quotations about it, I'm still vague about what he was thinking about.
Bob 3:52
This is the first time you found the quote, on page 413, in line with this quote from the “Rolling Stone” magazine, which was a puzzle, and this gives you a bit of an answer. He gives you closer stuff, right?
Cameron 4:06
But that's not the only quotation I found. I found a whole series of them,
Bob 4:12
Right, you would never noticed these quotes in relation to the “Rolling Stone” quote, about this mystery?
Cameron 4:17
Correct.
Bob 4:18
So, it's a great find.
Cameron 4:19
Same as you Bob.
Bob 4:21
Yeah, same as what, what was the same?
Cameron 4:23
Same as you, hadn't noticed them.
Bob 4:25
I did not notice these quotes? No, I didn't know there was anything more. I always thought that was the only statement ever. But you got to read the letters closely. And there's a lot in the letters, so you miss things. So, I haven't read the letters in years. I mean, I look at parts. Anyways, McLuhan to Lynn White, August 17, 1970, I guess you found this in Andrew Crystal's thesis, right? He found this at probably Ottawa, page 207. Because it's not in the letters book. Says, "The liquidating of the tribal Encyclopedia of the Bards, (dot, dot, dot) was done by phonetic literacy. But there was retrieved something of great antiquity, namely pre-tribal, metaphysical man". These are like the most important quotes ever in McLuhan to me. I mean these are tremendous, eh? What is pre-tribal, metaphysical man? Now, in some other letter, he says that the 20th century retrieved the metaphysical exploration of Greek culture. I think Greece, invented metaphysics sort of,
Cameron 5:31
Yeah, well, obviously he's using terms like metaphysical in various ways.
Bob 5:39
Yeah. Yeah, in McLuhan ways.
Cameron 5:41
Yeah, I mean McLuhan really didn't care, to define those terms very closely. So, he was always just thinking. And then once he had done his thinking, his talking, his writing, he would sort of look back to see if anything had bubbled up to the surface.
Bob 6:03
Yeah, you were saying he would be doing his thinking and then he'd write something out, are you saying?
Cameron 6:08
No, I'm saying that thinking, writing, talking that was all one to McLuhan. Yeah. And he was, in all of those activities, he was just trying to see if something would bubble up to the surface.
Bob 6:22
And this is a thought that bubbled up that he really was just interested in because he repeats it. So, here you have a 1970s note in the “Global Village”, but the “Global Village” is done in the mid ‘70s. Right?
Cameron 6:38
Yeah, well, the editor didn't bother to be very precise about where the stuff came from and when and all that. The “Global Village” itself was published, I think, in "88 or '89.
Bob 6:55
'89. And, you know, the important note, he was going to put it out in '88, Oxford University Press, but Eric stopped it because Eric was putting out "Laws of Media" in '88 and he didn't want to be, you know, upstaged by Bruce Power, who had a bunch of tetrads. So, somehow, he had to back off, I don't know, based on what legalities or what actions were taken. So, he put his book out in 1989, and on the inside page Forward he has a note saying this book should have come out in '88. And he signs that note, the date of Eric's foreword in "Laws of Media". He takes the same date. You could look that up. So, it was a little big there. But I never heard anything about Bruce Powers when McLuhan was alive. It turns out Bruce Powers was visiting McLuhan; it seems to be in the mid ‘70s. McLuhan wasn't doing much in '75-'76, really. So, he might have been started working on "City as Classroom", but that was slow. So
Cameron 7:07
And that was nearly all old stuff that was just assembled for the book.
Bob 8:15
Yeah. You mean "City as Classroom"?
Cameron 8:18
Yeah.
Bob 8:18
Yeah. So, he now has this guy at Niagara Falls University or something? Some University,
Cameron 8:27
Niagra University, yeah.
Bob 8:28
Yeah, and he was apparently former CIA and that came out somehow. Did you ever hear about that?
Cameron 8:34
No.
Bob 8:35
Yeah. So, you have seen his book. He's interested in Intelligence issues, Global Empire and stuff and Satellite Intelligence. So, his interest in Intelligence is in the book. It's more of that kind of stuff than anybody else.
Cameron 8:51
But McLuhan at the time was also trending in that direction.
Bob 8:54
Yeah, because that's where it was going. It was post-Watergate and all that stuff. The Global Theater surveillance was starting. So, he was the perfect guy for McLuhan at that time. And so, we take the mid ‘70s. So, you have here a 1970s note, it does not mean 1970, it means mid ‘70s. So, this quote is page 98, "The electronic society (dot, dot, dot) can become boundless, directionless, falling easily into the dark of the mind". Now, the phrase "the dark of the mind" is the bog of speech in "Counterblast" before literacy. He talks about the “dark swamp bog of speech”, tribal world. Yeah, remember that?
Cameron 9:42
Yeah, I have that quote. Right…
Bob 9:46
All right, so "into the dark of the mind", usually doesn't use the word “mind” too much. You know what I mean? It's too vague. What the hell's the mind? "Falling easily in the dark of the mind and the world of primordial intuition." So, good, we got primordial role, pre-tribal, metaphysical, and primordial intuition. Then he says, "loss of individualism invites, once again, the comfort of tribal loyalties". That's the electronic society bringing back the comfort of tribal loyalty. And we have the loss of individualism, but that's generally seen as literate individualism, but he is saying, “the dark of the mind, the world of primordial intuition", so you link that back to the primordial role of individual. You agree with me?
Cameron 10:33
Yeah, but look, I mean, this sentence is very interesting. "Loss of individualism, invites, once again, the comfort of tribal loyalties." So, take out "once again", "loss of individualism invites the comfort of tribal loyalties",
Bob 10:52
Right.
Cameron 10:52
So, what you are saying there is that there was a kind of individualism prior to tribal.
Bob 10:59
Yeah. And that is never talked about?
Cameron 11:02
Correct.
Bob 11:03
Yeah, that's very good.
Cameron 11:04
As far as I'm concerned,…people don't read McLuhan closely.
Bob 11:11
They don't even know he said it.
Cameron 11:13
But it's also a very, very difficult topic.
Bob 11:17
Yeah.
Cameron 11:18
I have an idea, now, of what he meant. But, you know, I'm not sure about it.
Bob 11:28
Right. But the thing is, when he's talking about electric media, he says "mass man is not tribal". So, there's the autonomy factor, which I call chip body, TV body and those things, this autonomy factor is coming in. Which means the human is beyond any cultural conditioning, or any government institutions. He is a new floating astronaut, cybernaut, going around the planet, even though it's not literally around the planet, but it's in their in your interior landscape. That autonomy, I think he is thinking, that's a retrieval of his early pre-tribal condition.
Cameron 12:07
I agree with that. Yeah, I agree with that. I would go a little bit further than that. I would say that, this is just my guess, I think that he's thinking about the pre-fall condition.
Bob 12:24
Yeah. Yeah.
Cameron 12:26
And that we're coming, again, to a crisis point where human beings either are going to retrieve their true inheritance, or they're going to fall squared.
Bob 12:50
Would did you say? Fall squared?
Cameron 12:52
Yeah.
Bob 12:54
That's a good one. And people, that's the squared aspect is in my chart, the Tiny Note Chart, so Cameron has picked up on that.
Cameron 13:03
I take that from you, Bob.
Bob 13:04
Yeah, it's an interesting way to talk about it. So, now, I see this is what iON is all about. He talks about getting back to source energy, and iON has this vision of people. The more ascended you are, the more whatever it is. You're not engaged in social communication that much; you don't need people. Now, this is tricky. If you go into the environment of the Tech Body, it's going to give everybody almost everything, but you'll be isolated. So, you got to figure out how to retrieve “what's the mind for?”, “what's communication for?”, any kind of communication with others, and “how much do you need it if you're feeling lonely or isolated?” So, that's the dilemma we're in. And so, actually, I would say, what did McLuhan talk about? He talked about the retrieval of preliterate man, pre-tribal man. These quotes are very important because it brings McLuhan up to today and what the digital environment is doing to us. You know what I mean?
Cameron 14:10
Well, where did where did you get them?
Bob 14:10
Where did I get what? The quotes?
Cameron 14:11
Yeah,
Bob 14:11
Well, from a guy named Cameron McLuhan. The long, lost Uncle of Marshall. But yeah, I got them from you. You found them. Both. Well, that's what we do. We remind each other stuff and you go off and look and find stuff, and then you find stuff I didn't know. So, this is the (collaboration) isn't it? Is that what it's called?
Cameron 14:35
Yeah.
Bob 14:37
So, but you know, I would say I'm the only person (who) ever thought about it. I didn't know you were thinking about it. But I would think about this quote and the way we're talking about it. A pre-tribal, pre-cultural thing might be ascended position. I mean, there's all kinds of mythologies and this theosophy about Atlantis and whatever is going on back there. If there was a “back there”. But I never got beyond just thinking the way I'm talking about it. But these quotes support what I was thinking (and) clarify it and even crystallize it. So, I'm thinking clearer about it, now, reading these, and we'll announce that the new McLuhan that nobody noticed is about this retrieval. And I was just saying on the other show today, or the other day, that the Enlightened ascended person, the aware person, is not dependent on social communication so much. And the fall was into speech, a sort of major innovation, and then everybody got lost in speech, and then all the emotional bonding of that led to what he says here, "the comfort of tribal loyalties". That's a fallen state in relation to pre-tribal awareness. So, I was explaining the comfort of communication. That's what we're addicted to today. Always been.
Cameron 16:16
But it's important to note that words, like communication, or social activity, or something like, this have very different meanings. So, it's not the case that there's some kind of pre-communication state of humans. It's that communication is fundamentally different then. And what happens is you have a fall from the communications that is native to humans into a type of communication that they see as profit, but in fact, robs them of themselves.
Bob 17:04
Yeah. It moves them out of the ESP, what, mental gesture? The phrase on "Counterblast" page 23. He talks about the communication before speech. Now, I think he calls it "mental gesture".
Cameron 17:20
Yeah, I think so too.
Bob 17:21
Yeah. And that's so the words are another gesture.
Cameron 17:24
That's another passage that could be added to this list.
Bob 17:29
Yeah, that's a good point. And the beginning, page 16 or so, "Finnegan's Wake", Joyce has Mutt and Jute, two guys talking. And I think he's showing the meeting of two individuals. This, whatever they were, non-tribal, pre-tribal people. And so, it's the beginning of effects -like they could bond after that. Or they could bond and that leads to all these other obligations and problems. So, it's interesting that Joyce begins the Wake with two people talking. Two people interacting with mental gesture. And it's covered because it's not just univocal, it's multiple language. You don't even know what they're saying. But that's a way of showing mental gesture. Because it shows what little bit of words you can sort of guess at, what they're saying, what they're matching on. So, this really important.
Cameron 18:29
It's all anybody can do in any language.
Bob 18:34
Yeah. And you know, iON likes to say, “well, these states that you're aspiring to they're right there beside you, you're already engaged in them”. So, this way of mental gesture communication is happening in people today, always. It always was. But it got overlaid by technologies.
Cameron 18:53
Yeah, you can't, you can lose yourself only to a certain extent.
Bob 18:59
Yeah. Yeah. You can never totally lose yourself.
Cameron 19:04
Right.
Bob 19:05
So now,
Cameron 19:06
That's the citadel.
Bob 19:08
Yes. And now iON says that in death, you do lose yourself. And that's a fallen state. iON says that dying is not necessary. But people can't take the pain of existence, for whatever reason. Maybe they start to fall into this technological hypnosis, beginning with speech and that, and so it creates pain so every death suicide, iON says, “so they die and they go into the guf, the Jewish term, and everybody feels really good. And there's no thought.” So that's an aberrated state. And the new metaphysics, which are pretty profound, is that the guf has been cancelled. It's not there anymore. So, you're forced to live forever in the here, in this situation, but it can expand and not be limited to 3d world. But you can't die to a comfortable place anymore. So, that's another deep and unstated situation that's unique to what iON says. And I find McLuhan, these kind of quotes, shows him groping towards that awareness of what I think iON means. You know what I mean? What I project. So, I find that's why McLuhan fits into what iON says. Because, you know, once again, "the comfort of tribal loyalties". That's a problem. Remember, McLuhan says, "I'm not into happiness". He says, "I'm into suffering". That means being able to take the existential condition of whatever it is, your expanded awareness, whatever the citadel is; it's not obliterating itself. You can by dying. But you don't have to. So, these are very profound situations which I will build a temporary religion and cult on Cameron -over the next 20 years. I'm just telling you my secret plan. But anyways, that's a great quote. The loss of individualism invites the comfort of tribal loyalties. So, then you go to 1954 "Counterblast", the original "Counterblast", "Until writing was invented, we lived in acoustic space". Now, why would he sometimes say acoustic? Why wouldn't he say tactile space?
Cameron 21:31
Well, in '54, acoustic space was a new thing.
Bob 21:37
That's right. You say he doesn't really get "tactility" until '59-'60.
Cameron 21:42
Yeah, exactly.
Bob 21:43
Okay, that fits. Okay, that's good. We lived in acoustic space where the,
Cameron 21:48
He was, at this time and in '54, and for years after, he was thinking that acoustic space was the kind of answer to the problems of literate space. Visual space. And then he realized that no, there's just as many problems. They're different, but there's just as many problems to acoustic space. So, the whole question is, is one of needing balance between the two.
Bob 22:18
Yeah, he resolves with tactility. It'd be interesting, if anybody's listening, to see if they can see intimations of tactility in McLuhan's '53-'54, 1955 writings? Is it in there? Is Cameron correct? He really doesn't spell it out till '59-'60. Have you done that research? Can you say you have not found something?
Cameron 22:45
No, I wouldn't even make that statement definitively. In my blog, I have done some tracing of "tactility". So, I would have to go there and look up when he really begins to think about that. Just off the top of my head, I think it's '60-'61, in that time period, when he begins to think more about tactility because he's thinking about vision and hearing, needing balance. (a break here as they Bob and Cameron figure out if session is still recording)
Bob 25:31
So, we're doing this quote, what were we just saying?
Cameron 25:47
You were just starting to read,
Bob 25:49
Tactility. Yeah. Okay, so I can look up on your blog "tactility" and see what you wrote? See the quote you find?
Cameron 25:59
Sure.
Bob 26:01
So, you would say that the myth is that Carpenter came back from an Eskimo land and made him more aware of tactility. Right? And that might have been in the late '50s? Carpenter was up there in the North?
Cameron 26:15
He was up there all during the 1950s off and on.
Bob 26:20
Okay. So anytime in there, he's bringing information back to McLuhan.
Cameron 26:25
Right.
Bob 26:25
Okay. So, there's them. Williams introduces acoustic space and Carpenter introduces tactile space, we'll say, right?
Cameron 26:36
Maybe. I really don't know about Carpenter and tactile space. Maybe, maybe not.
Bob 26:44
Well, somehow, I read that, you know, his comprehensive description of Eskimo culture, now called Inuit culture, brought out tactile aspects, and remember, he puts out "Eskimo Realities" in '59? That book. And that probably has got lots of samples of tactility in it.
Cameron 27:04
Yeah, that's "Explorations. 9".
Bob 27:07
Yes. And Carl Williams, another guy from Winnipeg, came up with "acoustic space" notion apparently, in the seminar in '54-'55, right?
Cameron 27:19
Right.
Bob 27:19
Yeah. Okay.
Cameron 27:20
The end of '54.
Bob 27:22
Yeah. So, you have here 1954 "Counterblast". McLuhan says, "Until writing was invented we lived in acoustic space where the Eskimo now lives. Boundless, directionless, horizonless was the dark of the mind". There's that phrase again, "the dark of the mind", "the world of emotion, primordial intuition, terror", now you put in "tribal” question mark?
Cameron 27:54
Yeah, because I was referring potentially back to tribal loyalties. So, I was qualifying speech, which is the next word, as potentially "tribal speech".
Bob 28:12
Right. "And the primordial role of an individual in pre-tribal awareness." So typical McLuhan, "primordial" can be pre-tribal, and also tribal. But then that's okay because you don't give up on the previous condition. It's there. So, it's accurate to have it vague. You know what I mean? Primordial, seems to be pre-tribal. But here, you're asking "no, it's refers to tribal too".
Cameron 28:45
Yeah, well, as we said, before, McLuhan constantly used words in more than one sense. So, that's why you can think that maybe he was not very precise. Or you can think that his thinking was very pregnant. And I choose to regard him in the latter way.
Bob 29:08
Yeah, I see that he should blur the meanings. Because it's just speech or writing. And it's limited. It can't cover the whole situation. So, speech is always limited. Thought is limited. So, like the "Wake", it blurs finally, where the beginning is, where that leaves off and becomes a middle and then becomes the end, right? These divisions get enhanced by visual space and they're more vague before that. So, I think it's correct, to not be precise. And he's saying "now I can appear to prophesize when I write books", but it's not about just writing books. When I'm talking then people start saying I'm contradicting myself and it's vague and blah, blah, blah. But that is the different condition than writing is to speech. And that's what he's pointing out the differences of precision in each medium. Right?
Cameron 30:08
Yes, sir.
Bob 30:09
Yes, so you say speech. McLuhan says, "speech is a social chart of this dark bog". And you say, "is that tribal?". So your questions are accurate. You should point out that there's a vagueness or an imprecision here, but then I explained why it has to be imprecise. Then McLuahn has speech capitalized, "Speech structures the abyss of mental and acoustic space". So, it structures the abyss. So, the abyss is the primordial condition of the individual. Pre-tribal. It's an abyss. "Speech structures the abyss of mental and acoustic space." Now, iON goes on about words shape your reality. They're very powerful, and that's what they always do. You make realities with speech. So, McLuhan includes that thought. Speech structures the abyss of mental and acoustic space, shrouding the race. You know, that's what people need comfort from. Right? The abyss of mental and acoustic space. "It is a cosmic, invisible, architecture of the human dark." Thiel (Don Thiel) used to note whenever McLuhan used the word "cosmic". It was rare. And Thiel thought it as a nod to the Gnostic ideas to use the word "cosmic". Not that he was a Gnostic, but he included the Gnostic idea. He even said to me, through the Evergreens, that there was some usefulness in Gnosticism, or whatever you call that kind of vagueness. It can be used, you know, not as self salvation, but in perception.
Cameron
The Gutenberg Galaxy is inherently Gnostic. And the Gutenberg Galaxy, contributed a great deal to human destiny. It was McLuhan's whole bent to try to rescue that heritage before it was destroyed by the Electric Universe.
Bob
Right, the electric abyss. To the degree Robert Fulford, and them, say that Marshall created a myth, preliterate or literate and tribal man, and then literate man, and then electric man. And sometimes people say, "Well, there's a fall with literacy". So, the fall is often a Gnostic idea
. So, that's where the book puts on the fall aspect of the Gutenberg Galaxy. Now he has a quote somewhere.
Cameron 32:59
In a Playboy interview.
Bob 33:00
Yeah. Where he has three phases. He has the fall and then, the something else, the sin. Literacy was a sin and industrial man was a fall. Do you remember that? That's the quote.
Cameron 33:13
Yeah, but he brings that up to reject it. He's making fun of himself. He says that in the 1940s, that was his idea, that the Industrial Revolution represented the fall of man and all this. He says that was ridiculous “and I had to become a student and give up all that stuff”.
Bob 33:40
Right. Okay, so, "Speech is a cosmic, invisible, architecture of the human dark, (dot dot dot). Radio returns us to the dark of the mind to the invasions from Mars and Orson Welles. It mechanizes the well of loneliness that is pure," well you're putting in "pure", "that is acoustic space. The human heartthrob put on a PA system provides a well of loneliness in which anyone can drown". So, pre-tribal, individual citadel conditions is about whether you're lonely or not. And the Emerald Tablets, iON says, are the fountain of all religions come from the Emerald Tablets -which were done 32,000 years BCE. That's the message to the little man how to get out of his loneliness. So, we wouldn't know where the emotion of loneliness came from, unless it was just an incompleteness that a person, a being of that era, felt. So, anyways, I'm just throwing in what I think from iON about these things. These quotes are very familiar to me. I'm telling you how I add to it after talking to iON.
Cameron 34:59
I think that it's accurate to say that what McLuhan is doing. And all of these passages are to set up a kind of difference within human beings. That difference regarding, for example, two different kinds of loneliness. And one kind of loneliness leads to what he calls "the comfort of tribal loyalties", which amounts to what kind of fall because it's an attempt to get away from loneliness, that is, in fact, inherent to human beings. So, unless loneliness were divided between a loneliness that is what human beings are, and at the same time, is what human beings largely reject. Unless loneliness were divided like that, then you wouldn't have the Genesis of history. And it's not just loneliness is like that. The abyss is like that. What are the things he says here? Metaphysical man is like that, divided into these two pieces, or these two forces, one of which is inalienable to humans, and the other of which humans are always trying to escape from.
Bob 36:40
Yeah. Now that's very important, well said. And that gives us a clue to what metaphysical man is. So, then you say that, so then you come in with your thoughts, and you go “some are”, you know, how do you wrap this up? So, you say individual and pre- tribal awareness equals metaphysical man, which is what I was doing earlier when I was discovering the quotes, I was saying, "hey, that's metaphysical man". So, you come up with the same point: "equals primordial intuition, equals individualism, equals a dark of the mind, equals the world of emotion, primordial intuition and terror, equals the human dark, equals the well of loneliness, equals the human heartthrob, equals the point in which anyone can drown?" There's a question there, well, all of this is a question, "in which anyone can drown". Then you say, "the Gutenberg Galaxy retrieves this individualism, when it eventually finds that the subject is an empty fiction", and you have after subject in brackets, “its subject”.
Cameron 37:45
So, the Gutenberg Galaxy subject.
Bob 37:48
Yeah, "the Gutenberg Galaxy retrieves his individualism, when it eventually finds that the subject, its subject, is an empty fiction". So, is the subject a literate effect or the original individual effect? What is that?
Cameron 38:05
You have the division.
Bob 38:07
Yeah.
Cameron 38:08
Right? The whole motor at work, it seems to me in these quotations, is that all of these things are at least two.
Bob 38:20
Yep.
Cameron 38:21
And trying to understand what's going on in history amounts to trying to understand how these doubles react with, and against, each other.
Bob 38:35
Yeah. And you know, Lewis said he wasn't into oneness he was into twoness. He understood that. iON says, from the very, very beginning, first talking to it, that there was always two conversations to every situation. Two conversations. That's the doubleness that's going on always in the human condition. It's an aspect of a self-awareness. Right?
Cameron 38:58
Absolutely!
Bob 38:58
Yeah. So, the Galaxy retrieves his individualism when it eventually finds that the subject is an empty fiction. Does it find that it's individualism, that's retrieved, is an empty fiction?
Cameron 39:11
Definitely, that's what happens with Nietzsche, for example. It turns out that the subject, which determines, for example, when a poem is finished, or when an artwork is finished, with Nietzsche, and then especially with Beckett, you have a questioning of "okay, if the subject needs to determine that the artwork is finished, does the subject also determine when it knows the subject?". And of course, that's ridiculous, right? Because the subject is on both sides of the equation. And subject cannot guarantee its own reality. And so, the dynamic of the Gutenberg Galaxy destroys the Gutenberg Galaxy notion of the subject.
Bob 40:14
So, is that the mass effect of the printing press? Or is it the electric environment that does that?
Cameron 40:19
No, well, I mean, the electric environment is the realization of that loss of subject. The Gutenberg Galaxy subject is the subject of perspective. So, it's perspective comes to a point. So, the Gutenberg Galaxy is really the search for the undivided point. And electricity is structured by tactility for McLuhan, so there is no point. And what electricity realizes is that the point subject of the Gutenberg galaxy is not. It's nothing.
Bob 41:11
Right. So, you're saying, the Gutenberg era, there's this confused individualism that doesn't get out of his dilemmas until the electric age swamps him?
Cameron 41:24
Correct. But it gets out of the dilemma by completely abrogating that whole idea of subject. Electricity, like magnetism, is inherently bipolar.
Bob 41:36
Right. So, then the question becomes, "how much can you retrieve the individualism of the primordial or the literate individual?". That's where McLuhan gets into his media ecology -the balancing of that. You don't have to be totally obliterated. Maybe? That was his ongoing question.
Cameron 42:00
Absolutely, absolutely! So, although the electric realizes the obliteration of the subject, the electric, also shouldn't be taken by itself. Taking the electric by itself just swamps everything. So, McLuhan wants to know, "how is it possible to retain these aspects of the past that are essential?" And so, he says, the goal is to marry the moderns and the ancients.
Bob 42:34
Right, and the ancients can mean pre-literate, pre-tribal.
Cameron 42:40
It can mean there's a whole bunch of ancients.
Bob 42:44
Right? So then, this is where McLuhan quotes a saint in the Catholic Church. He knows there's a new problem. And he is really the only one groping or is trying to say, look, there might be a way to resolve this, otherwise, the church is over. No more Christianity. Right?
Cameron 43:04
Right.
Bob 43:04
This questioning he posed to people. They didn't know he was doing that. But study, you eventually see, that he's really, really an important anti-environment to the numbness of the church -of what Christians were going through.
Cameron 43:21
Yeah, so, when McLuhan converts in '37, and when he continues as a Catholic for the rest of his life, one of the things he's saying is that he was attempting to live this marriage between the ancient and the modern. Right? And that he thought that the life of the church consisted in that movement.
Bob 43:51
So, what we're talking about is very important. I don't think any of them McLuhanites have ever said this, that I know of. They might have said it somewhere in their private conversations, a bunch of professors or something, or maybe some artists, but this is the most interesting point of McLuhan's Catholicism. He was really consciously, responsibly, saying we've got an issue here. And you can read it in the book of Revelation, you know, it's the Armageddon, the apocalypse, and all that stuff on a personal level. So, what we're saying is really important to understand. Why George Thompson says McLuhan's not a Catholic. He's not a Catholic. He questioned the comforts, the tribal comforts, of that. And knew that we were retrieving a pre-tribal situation, an existential suffering. So, that's why he says in the "War and Peace in the Global Village" that the big discovery of the 20th century is pain. So, the exploring of pain is, in a way, the tapping into the pre-tribal loyalties and comforts of this metaphysical condition -which then he says that the Greeks were the first to discover metaphysical man. Because I guess the alphabet brought in enough of individualism to get them out of the tribal. And, you know, are they retrieving preliterate tribal? I don't know.
Cameron 45:49
There, the use of the word “metaphysical”, the use of the word “individual”, there, is completely different from their use in the quotes what they were reading. So, it's just one more example of McLuhan not caring about specific definitions.
Bob 46:12
Yeah, every theme there is always two: acoustic and visual.
Cameron 46:16
At least,
Bob 46:17
Yeah,
Cameron 46:18
Sure. Well, when he was at Cambridge, that was the rage, right? There was an understanding of language going on in the English school. Also with Wittgenstein, in philosophy there. People were very conscious of the ambiguities of language.
Bob 46:40
Yes, spoken language was starting to be made transparent. The hypnosis was dying, going away.
Cameron 46:48
Yes, yes. And let me Bob, let me go back though, before I lose the thought. When we were talking about McLuhan and Catholicism, and you were talking about him wanting to retrieve something of this very ancient metaphysical man, a primordial intuition. And then you got into pain. And notice that, in the mass, what is going on in the second part of the mass is the sacrifice. And the sacrifice, of course, is pain. And what is retrieved in that pain is the beginning of things. The creation, right? So, the Catholic mass, although it is fallen on very hard times, both in terms of its ritual, and in terms of who bothers to go to it anymore, that is an attempt to relive, to re-be in the time when things first began. So, it's, in that respect, it's not different from some sort of Temple to Athena, in Athens, or temple to Zeus in Crete. This need of humans to remember, before there was anything, is perennial. And I think myself that that's what these quotes that we're looking at are all about.
Bob 48:42
Yes, iON says that (about) taking the RNA drops -which keep your body alive forever. We did a recent talk on LSD effects on the mind, confuses. There are all kinds of things to the brain. But the RNA drops go into the cell. LSD doesn't do that. And you rejuvenate your body and that's why you can live forever. So, iON says that taking the drops, and our products, is the new mass, is the new celebration. So, another quirky point I'm putting in there. Whoever is listening, they don't have they may not know what I'm talking about, but I'm just putting on the record what I think while thinking of these McLuhan ideas. Because I thought about these McLuhan ideas, you know, for 50 years. Never could find a buddy to talk about it with. But then with iON I could. Then something came from iON where I got new ideas about it, or new solutions. So, I'm telling you how I see that we are completing McLuhan's probing on retrieving the metaphysical or the original mass. What the mass meant. You know. The function of eating, you know, engaging with substance and digesting is an act to keep yourself going. Supposedly, unless you can survive without food, maybe Yogi's, or you can develop yourself. So, the question of how much food you need, the mass, is a question, "okay, I'm gonna take some more substance to keep going". That's an affirmation of, well, iON defines faith as not the way normally people think of faith, it's your self-image. So, I'm going to keep my self-image going by eating. And then we have really good stuff to eat, that makes it even better. So, I add that, for those that are interested.
Cameron 50:45
One of the first things that communion says is that the human being is fed by its environment.
Bob 50:58
Yes. Which can be an abyss, or spirit, or some vague something.
Cameron 51:05
Yeah.
Bob 51:07
Were you raised a Catholic?
Cameron 51:09
No, no, but I spent time in Greece and got to know the Orthodox liturgy. And as McLuhan himself says, the Eastern Church has preserved the essence of Catholicism better than the Roman church. And I think that's correct.
Bob 51:34
Yeah, that was the argument over the (?).
Cameron 51:37
Well, but I would say that sort of thing is sort of fallen by the wayside. But the big difference between the churches now is that the Eastern Church has retained its ritual and has retained the original ceremony of the Catholic, small "c" catholic, mass far better than the Western Church has.
Bob 52:14
Do people fall away from the Orthodox Church as much as the Catholic Church? Do you know?
Cameron 52:21
Well, I do know something about that. And certainly, there's a lot of falling away. One of the big problems with the Orthodox Church is that it's often very national. So, there's the Greek Orthodox, the Russian Orthodox, the Romanian, et cetera, et cetera. And so, when kids are growing up, and they don't feel Romanian anymore, like their parents did. Then they may not understand the language of the liturgy. And they may feel that it kind of limits them and makes them not feel American, or Canadian, or whatever. So, there's that that goes on in the Orthodox Church. That's different from what goes on in the Catholic Church. So, there's a falling away from both of them. But in different senses.
Bob 53:19
Right. And just remember that quote, from I think it's “Prospect”, where he says, you know, “Mid '60s man can't handle the multiple media effects in the global theater, so he doesn't get hypnotized by any particular culture”. So, that puts them into the existential pain of pre-tribal comforts. And then that's what you have to explore. And McLuhan is trying to help you explore that.
Cameron 53:49
Now, I would go along with that. That's why, in the past, we've talked about how it's complete nonsense when McLuhan talks about him never having any problem. Everything's been hunky dory my whole life and all this stuff.
Bob 54:06
But then you've got to find the next day, he's telling somebody I'm into suffering.
Cameron 54:12
Exactly, exactly.
Bob 54:14
So, see the millennials and younger they're in that statement that McLuhan said in the mid '60s about "can't be involved with any medium environment, because there's a nothingness" that's beyond this Tech Body, weird virtual world, and they're not being helped how to think about it. We, today, are presenting a way for these young people, who are interested and capable of thinking about it, how to look at what has happened to them. They've been made isolated. They've gone beyond tribal literate, the whole gamut of cultural variation, and they've been put in this metaphysical condition.
Cameron 54:56
Or potentially,
Bob 54:57
Yeah, well, they're in it. And no one is helping them define it. They're just saying they don't talk. They don't get married. They don't do this. They don't do that. They're just dummies, you know. But they're missing the effect that McLuhan predicted that we would not be cultural anymore. In the way culture was. We have too much variety of experience every day to fucking say what it is. Most of it's not even conceptualized.
Cameron 55:22
What's happened is that the emptiness is experienced in a Gutenberg Galaxy way. That's experienced as something "out there”, something beyond, or something different from me.
Bob 55:40
That you fell out of and you're supposed to get back into.
Cameron 55:44
That's right. But in fact, the emptiness is in the middle. That's the tactility. So, the emptiness and the loss is, in fact, where everything's at. That's at the very back of the temple. Doesn't matter if it's pagan temple, or Christian temple, Orthodox temple, whatever. There's the part of the church, which is not available to anybody, because it's the sort of the dark heart of everything.
Bob 56:25
Right. That's a position in the temple, an area?
Cameron 56:25
Sure. Sure.
Bob 56:25
So, nobody can go in there? How's it designated?
Cameron 56:35
Right. Well, in the Catholic Church, it has gotten smaller and smaller and smaller, until it's the little box holding the wafers. It's gone down to nothing. But in the Orthodox Church, is the area behind the iconostasis.
Bob 56:58
So, that's behind, that's in the very front of the church?
Cameron 57:03
No, well, front or back. Usually, it's called the back. In the front of the church
Bob 57:22
Behind the altar?
Cameron 57:15
Yeah, I wouldn't really say it's behind the altar. The main altar is, how can I put this, the architecture of the Orthodox Church is one where the iconostasis, the iconostasis is the wall of the icons, that has three gates in it. Right? So, everything in the Orthodox church circles, around, through that iconostasis. So, what happens is the first half of the liturgy is the coming of the word. And so, the word comes out of one door, on the right side, looking at us on the right side of the iconostasis, the word comes out of the Holy of Holies in the back, and comes forth to the world.
Bob
And as we're looking at the back, it's coming out of our right?
Cameron
No, our left.
Bob 58:22
On our left side. So, if you're in the back, looking at us, it would be their right. So, it's our left coming out. And it's gonna go over into the other side?
Cameron 58:41
Yes, but it stops. And then the passages are read from the Bible in the front of the church, and then it goes in the other gate.
Bob 58:52
Wow!
Cameron 58:52
And what designates the architecture, or the action of the architecture that's going on, is a circling. A circling from what is hidden, to what is open, and back into what is hidden.
Bob 59:08
One is conscious and one is unconscious. The drama of cognition.
Cameron 59:12
Correct. So, then, in the second half of the liturgy, the action is in the center gate. And again, the offering comes from the back to the front, and then it's going to be taken back again. But instead of being the circular motion, it's the motion of the center.
Bob 59:46
Like a pulse out and back.
Cameron 59:48
Yes, exactly. Exactly. Exactly. But again, there's a sharing. But the first sharing is the sharing of the literate word by the oral announcement. Right? But the next one is tactile.
Bob 1:00:11
Is the communion part of that?
Cameron 1:00:13
Yeah, that's what I'm saying is what is tactile.
Bob 1:00:16
Yeah, that's where you eat something.
Cameron 1:00:19
Yes.
Bob 1:00:20
Very interesting. Is there a name for that part? A technical name for the hidden part behind?
Cameron 1:00:27
Yeah, there is and I'm a dummy. And I can't tell you what it is. But I believe in the Greek temples that preceded Christianity, I believe it was called the "adyton" or "adding time". And what it's called in the back of the Christian churches, I'm not sure, but I'll have to look that up.
Bob 1:00:54
Yeah. How do you spell "adyton"
Cameron 1:00:57
I know. I "adyton" a, d, y, t, o, n.
Bob 1:01:03
t, o, n as in "ton"? "Adyton"?
Cameron 1:01:05
Yeah. "Dyton" probably means "to designate", "to be open". And the "a" is the "alpha privative", which means "not open", right? So, it's what is necessarily hidden. What can never be shown. Because it's the source of what is shown.
Bob 1:01:29
Yeah, what was the two terms again? Do it again? "Adyton"? What was it?
Cameron 1:01:35
Yeah, "adyton". That's just one word.
Bob 1:01:37
Yeah,
Cameron 1:01:38
"A, d, y t, o, n".
Bob 1:01:40
And "o, n" was "open"?
Cameron 1:01:44
No, the "o, n" is the end of the word.
Bob 1:01:47
Right. But you had two meetings? You said somebody "a, d" the "a", "the alphabet"?
Cameron 1:01:52
Oh, I'm sorry. Okay. Yeah. So, the "adyton", that's probably related to like German "deutlich", which means "clear". It probably has to do with "what is open", "what is clear" the "dyton"part. And then the "a" is an "alpha privative". So, you know, many words we have an English like "amoral" or "asexual". We take the alpha privative from Greek, and we use it as a "not" Right? "Amoral" is "not moral", "asexual" is "not sexual", right? "Apolitical" is "not political". So, the "adyton" means what is "not open", what is "not shown". It's what is the "hidden aspect of reality that is the source of what is manifest".
Bob 1:02:48
Yeah, this architecture is a picture of what we started off talking about. The transition, the interplay, of metaphysical, pre-tribal and tribal.
Cameron 1:02:59
Right.
Bob 1:03:00
Yeah, the tactile interplay. And I want to add that the Evergreens, channeled by Michael Blake Reed, saw that children, this is in the early '90s, were getting their corpus callosum expanded with the media diet that they were having. The mixed media diet. So, the corpus callosum, maybe that's the interval part of the interplay of the hemispheres, that is what's being extended with the digital.
Cameron 1:03:27
Yeah, that's possible.
Bob 1:03:28
Yeah. That's what Michael saw. He saw the children's corpus callosum expanding. So, that is what's happening to the millennials and younger, and the culture is in complete ignorance about how to talk to them about it. You see, they say that, you know, the kids don't want to be told anything because it's all on Google. And so, these categories of knowledge, it's all out there. They don't need to be told by you. But they're wondering where they are. And it's not being explained. So, their indifference to categories is proper. Because they're living beyond categories. And therefore, there's no cultural instruction they require, other than what we're talking about, which is the larger ground explanation, which would help anybody who was smart enough to get it. What we're saying here is that this is the knowledge, the expression of a fact, which is a figure ground relationship, that nobody is telling them what their dilemma is, so it gets beyond calling them stupid or socially apathetic. All these stupid categories...They are not in any known culture anymore. They're in a new situation. And it's symbolized by the growing of the corpus callosum. So, this is very important. And what I'm saying here. What we're discovering through what you're saying, this is what I thought I always had to say to young people. If I was given the opportunity, I would explain what we're doing. But never had the opportunity, really, I've said it on the show, sort of talked about it with iON. But now that we've done this, it’s a really important recording, because this can be excerpted, what we're doing, or the whole show. And we're telling people something that's never been heard before. In the McLuhan context.
Cameron 1:05:35
On page 129, there's an interesting passage about this, where Bob says that McLuhan says, "less the locomotive whistling on the prairie".
Bob 1:05:48
Oh, yeah.
Cameron 1:05:49
"Proclaiming the separateness of man."
Bob 1:05:51
Yeah, that's a tremendous statement.
Cameron 1:05:54
Yeah, yeah. But that's, more or less, what we've been talking about for the last half hour. But just in different terms.
Bob 1:06:02
Yeah. And we're talking about the increasing autonomy that digital media is doing to people, the increasing separateness. But it's not a literate separateness, or acoustic, it's a multi-level, weird, complex, five bodied separateness, which cannot be categorized in any cultural terms, and maybe not met by any movies or poetry or editors, columns, or painting, or sculpture, or football games. Those things do not provide "spiritual sustenance", which is what real art does, real, good, explicit, accurate statements. They provide comfort for the mind. It states something, you know, it's actually a beauty if it's said correctly.
Cameron 1:06:52
Right,
Bob 1:06:53
People require that.
Cameron 1:06:55
In this statement, "bless the locomotive whistling on the prairies, proclaiming the separateness of man", it's very important that the separateness of man not be thought of as a subject of genitive. That is to say, the separateness doesn't belong to man. Instead, it's the separateness of man where man is the object of the separateness. So, it's the separateness, if we think back for a minute, what we're saying about the Orthodox Church, the separateness from the "what is hidden to what is apparent", to "what is not said to what is said", to "what is not tasted to what is tasted", the separateness between those things, it is the heart of everything. That separateness can never be shown, can never be described, because it's what makes the separateness between the hidden and the shown possible.
Bob 1:08:01
And it explains McLuhan's personality. He always was acting that out. He always was disconnecting himself from whatever was going on. Right? He's trying to say, I'm not being fooled, seduced by whatever this situation is in front of us, or around us. So, that sentence was amazingly important sentence. So, that was one I would bring up occasionally. You know, everybody's talking about fusion and tribal unity and all the sentiments that were put into McLuhan's work and in the '60s. What about the separateness point? So, then did McLuhan talk about the internet or what was coming, digital? Yeah, with the separateness point. That's what was being extended. And I think Thiel is good on pointing out the synesthetic and the co-anesthetic. The co-anesthetic is increasingly putting you in the director's chair -which is a separateness position. Right? So, those are terms I use to explain this strange new situation of retrieving the original separateness.
Cameron 1:09:06
So, I forget which of the Joyce essays, but in one of the early 1950s Joyce essays, McLuhan talks about how in the humanities, or the arts, just like in physics, fission precedes fusion. So, that fission is the separateness that we're just talking about. And it doesn't mean that, in linear terms, there's first the one than the other. That's Gutenbergian.
Bob 1:09:54
And that's nature mysticism he's always detached himself from.
Cameron 1:09:59
Yeah, when he says that it has precedence, what he means is, if you're going to understand meaningful fusion, you first have to understand meaningful fission.
Bob 1:10:14
Yeah. Yep. Okay, so, let's finish. You have here after the empty fiction thing, you say, "So, speech", this is you, your writing, "So, Speech”, capitalized, “would be the addition of some limited visuality, to overwhelming orality and literacy". No, I'm going to do that again. "So, speech would be the addition of some limited visuality to overwhelming orality. And literacy would be the mining of this visuality for use. And the electric would be the mining of morality for use, threatening to become the complete loss of visuality into the boundless, directionless, horizonless, the dark of the mind, the world of emotion, primordial intuition and terror." That's a very good accurate statement. So, speech would be the addition of some limited visuality, to overwhelming orality and tactility, maybe. And then literacy later would be the mining of this visuality of speech, speech is the content of the alphabet, and that leads to applied knowledge -especially with the printing press. Right? For use, the mining of this visuality for use. And then the electric would be the mining of orality for use. That's the wealth of culture, that's the rearview mirror, the content of our culture is orality. That's efficient causality for wealth making, or comforts of media, threatening to become the complete loss of visuality, which will be the loss of Christianity, "into the boundless, directionless, horizonless, dark of the mind, the world of emotion, primordial intuition and terror".
So, that's a very good statement. That sums up all that we were the excavating here, the last hour or so.
Cameron 1:12:09
Notice, I put a question mark behind a lot of these things, because the idea of sort of making a formula, or making an equation, is not fitted to what we're talking about. So, I was doing that, kind of, as a thought exercise, but aware that it wasn't an appropriate form.
Bob 1:12:38
Right. Okay. So, then we go to page 129. And what was it? 128. So, remember we talked about the audience of the intellect. I think I have on my note, the bottom of...we did the multiplicity of media. There's a quote from "Prospect" 1962. I'll just read it. It was what I was talking about 10 minutes ago. And I think McLuhan says, and I think this is an interview so, it's conversational, he says, "And I think it is this multiplicity of media that is now enabling man to free himself from media for the first time in history. He has been the victim, a servile mechanism of his technologies, his media, from the beginning of time". Time is tribal. "But now because of the sheer multiplicity of them, he's beginning to awaken, because he can't live with them all". See, that's a really important statement. Praise Bob for highlighting it. And bringing it back. Then Bob's conversational self and the blue text says, "this is the beginning of", yeah, this is saying what I meant, "this is the beginning of the autonomy, the volunteer ESP, the subtle communication of metaphysical man before speech is mental gesture, voluntary ESP". How much are you actually going to pretend you get what the other person's communicating? "Now we're being disconnected from the electric ESP. We're being kicked out. That's just too much". So, in a way, Marshall McLuhan is recognizing this isn't for him. The news is not serving and informing or warning function anymore. So, that means I guess that he's on another level of alert, the distant early warning. The news is not warning enough. It's too content oriented. It's too much the old media. It’s not warning about the situation where you can't live with all this and you're not in culture anymore. You're "acultural". Okay. Get that?
Cameron 1:14:44
Yeah. Yeah. The news isn't anything new.
Bob 1:14:50
Right. It's old. So, that's where I have this quote. So, you see how I'm positioning these quotes, when I was composing this, we have talked our way to this issue. And that's where this issue should be, at page 128. And there it is, the Bren Stilley(?) quote, "When writing was introduced the fifth century BC it scrapped the old tribal traditions of Homer and Hesiod but retrieved the private individual man in ancient form dredged up from way, way back". Now, you would point out the simultaneity of all this, right?
Cameron 1:15:28
Yes, sir.
Bob 1:15:29
Yeah. Now, as you think of what McLuhan is doing here, get familiar with it, you see how beautiful "Finnegans Wake" is because it's describing this situation, in book form. Joyce said to me, through the Evergreens, "I want it so that you could not find an underlying idea". There's a void being communicated, or there's no communication at the bottom, which is this early condition of indifference to establishing anything with anybody else. That is what his book is. His book is an expression of that autonomous, metaphysical situation McLuhan was talking about. Now, he probably never said it. Unless we can find a quote. But Joyce was expressing that condition, for him. The Wake was. So, that's like you get all enthusiastic about Joyce every now and then say, "wow, this guy laid out the perfect communication". It's more important than any scientific formula. So, somebody invents things, then the society has to deal with the effects of that. "Finnegans Wake" is the best warning about new inventions that are coming. New environments. You get what I'm saying?
Cameron 1:16:58
Is it a warning? Or is it a
Bob 1:17:00
It's a warning, a celebration. It's the ineffable. It's the metaphysical void, its non-communication, it is awareness of it, being awake about it. What McLuhan is trying to say, back there with that, quote, you know, the sheer multiplicity of everything, all the multiplicity of every form of expression that Joyce puts in "Finnegans Wake", he is beginning to awaken to the sheer multiplicity, because he can't live with them all. And you know, that's the frustration of, McLuhan said, “It was exhilarating reading the Wake but extremely frustrating”. So, he's getting both things going on there. And because you can't live with the Wake. Why all this stuff? You know? It's frustrating to people. If they're looking for Gutenberg collusion. So, it's a kind of yoga to get used to confronting the Wake. Talking to the Wake. He says, "the new yoga is self-entertainment". The Wake, the book, is a great means of self-entertainment. With all the purposes -which are two: awakening and suffering. So, it's so perfect the way Joyce wrote it. And for cultural Gutenbergian content, he's got everything there. He's got all the stories, all the all the nursery rhymes, all the languages, all the myths, histories of different cultures. You know, and the content, the hints of content, which is like seeing all that's gonna unfold from some point. A "beginning", and then you're gonna see the cycle of inventions and he's got it all. So, he's actually showing what, what Seers, or whatever, saw when they saw everything like Nostradamus, they were having the "Finnegans Wake" experience. And then how do they react to that? And Joyce includes your drama in response to it.
Cameron 1:19:06
Now, you know I don't claim any expertise and "Finnegans Wake", so,
Bob 1:19:12
Well, have you looked at it?
Cameron 1:19:14
What you're saying seems tenable but really, I don't know.
Bob 1:19:24
What you say it sounds what?
Cameron 1:19:26
Tenable
Bob 1:19:28
terrible?
Cameron 1:19:30
tenable
Bob 1:19:30
Tenable, tenable. Yeah. I've spent sixty years looking at it. Now. You've looked at a little bit, but you haven't really put a long-range study of it.
Cameron 1:19:40
Correct.
Bob 1:19:42
Yeah. Are you prompted to do it?
Cameron 1:19:44
Yeah, at some point, at some point if I live long enough and my being continues to work. I hope to do that. But I got other stuff that I have to do and when I turn to the Wake, as I wrote in a post the other day, I said that the varieties of human reality are shown in the different chapters of "Ulysses". But in the Wake, they're shown in the individual words.
Bob 1:20:18
Right.
Cameron 1:20:19
The conclusion I came to is that every word in "Finnegans Wake" is a chapter.
Bob 1:20:25
Yeah, McLuahn says in "Take Today" that Joyce figured out how to make a whole universe out of one word.
Cameron 1:20:32
Yeah. So that makes a very heavy demand on the reader.
Bob 1:20:50
So, Ulysses is the archetypes of the postures of the individual mind. "Finnegans Wake" is the archetypes of the postures of collective experience, or collective media, or of language, or extension of word. That's the difference. And he says that in "From Cliche to Archetype". So, I have something to mention to you when we finish recording. So, remember, I have something to tell you. Okay?
Cameron 1:21:16
Okay.
Bob 1:21:16
I don't want to put on the tape. Okay, so, this is very important what we've gotten to. So, where am I going to go with this? You know, what is the Tech Body? Which is like a crystallization of all that "Finnegans Wake" is. The Tech Body is gonna have everything in it. So, how do I go from getting to the core of McLuhan, the most up to date interpretation of what he's wrestling with, as a Catholic, that is not familiar to anybody that he has actually probed into a new problem, and maybe a kind of solution. But it's not important to have a solution. So, where am I gonna go with that? So, we have that quote at the bottom of 128. And then yeah, I say, this is way back before social media, and it puts "social media" in quotes, which is such a ridiculous term, all media is social. Social media is a way of communication, that squared, which is the Android meme. The whole history of technologies, is analog media, and the digital becomes a squaring of it, right? So, we actually call it "media media", instead of "social media". I said, "I'm trying to show the separateness of humans". Wow, it's pretty neat. You can understand what I'm saying, based on our whole conversation last hour and a half. Had you read this part? You probably hadn't read it yet.
Cameron
Oh, I had when I first read your pamphlet.
Bob
Right,
Cameron 1:22:54
This was not my first time going through it. It's not even our first time going through it. We jumped around in it and now we're going through it more systematically,
Bob 1:23:06
That's right, it's us more conscious. And I'm trying to show the separateness of humans and as before I have the separateness quote that you talk about, the whistling and the prairies. And I'm talking about it before I show the quote. So, I'm saying, "I'm trying to show the separateness of humans" so, that means I saw the separateness was the condition evoked by the "Prospect" interview, where the sheer multiplicity is awakening, but also too much to live with. Right? That's leading into the separateness point or retrieving what he said back in the '50s. So, I say this is way back before social media. I'm trying to show the separateness of humans here. Before there were societies and tribes, McLuhan is saying, quote, "individual man was private". There were people moving around and they were, quote, “isolated individuals”. That's what he's saying in the quotation above the Rolling Stone quotation. And that's like today. We're isolated individuals. However, McLuhan doesn't say that's an unfortunate situation. All right, that's important. So, the isolated individuals become multi-bodied beings.
Right? So, I'm going to expand that into the five bodies later in the paper, which is on the route to the Tech Body. So, then we have the quote from "Counterblast" page 10, "Bless the locomotive". This is 1954 "Counterblast". "Bless the locomotives whistling on the prairies proclaiming the separateness of man". And "Bless," "Whistling," and "Separateness" is capitalized in the original. Then I say, "McLuhan says, quote, 'Blesses the locomotive Whistling on the Prairies', proclaiming the separateness of man”. Which must be so autobiographical, right? You know, if he's out there in the prairies, hearing the whistle, he grows up with that. And it probably is always a prompt of meditation for him. You know what I mean? Like what emotions is he feeling?
Cameron 1:25:14
There is, or at least was, I don't know if it's still there today, but there was a rail line running down along the Pembina highway in Winnipeg and Fort Rouge were McLuhan lived. Butts right up against the Pembina highway.
Bob 1:25:35
Wow!
Cameron 1:25:35
So, he would have heard
Bob 1:25:39
every day
Cameron 1:25:40
for sure. Yeah.
Bob 1:25:42
Maybe twice a day. That's something I could ask him about. Okay, so, McLuhan says "Bless the locomotive Whistling on the Prairies proclaiming the separateness of man. So, then I say, "bless those locomotives that he had heard from his Winnipeg home", like I assumed that, but you're telling me something I didn't know, that they went right by his home. Right?
Cameron 1:26:08
Well, yeah, I was. I would say maybe six blocks, or maybe eight blocks away, to the... trying to think of the direction, that's to the east is where the rail line was, or maybe still is.
Bob 1:26:32
So, the toot of the horn is like Zappa's Big Note; it contains all harmonies, all orchestrations, right?
Cameron 1:26:41
Yeah. McLuhan quotes German Philosopher about that. I forgot the guy's name.
Bob 1:26:49
Yes. In "Understanding Media", yeah, that's a quote we knew a long time ago. So, then I say, "The Homer quotation above", that's the one about private man, pre-tribal, "The Homer quotation above is the only time I've only ever talked about private individuals before tribalism". So, I wasn't aware of these other quotes that you found. "His evolution", in quotes "evolution", "his 'evolution' of culture, always began with tribalism, then individuality with the Gutenberg galaxy. But here he's located a private, individual human before any source of information. In the next quotation, McLuhan is celebrating the separateness of man. He doesn't mean private, that means formed by visual space in the phonetic alphabet. He means isolated, separate, narcissistic, involved his own reality". You remember how he liked the quote, you know, this famous criminal comes out of jail, and said, "What are you looking forward to? Now that you're not in jail, he said solitude". You know that quote?
Cameron 1:28:00
I do remember that, yeah. I forget where it is. But I remember seeing the quote.
Bob 1:28:05
I think it's in "Taped Today". You know, the guy, he was, he had no solitude in jail for all the years he was in there. And so, he was stuck in tribal noise. Right? So, he saw the value of isolation and separateness, that "man, I can't wait to be isolated". And yet you think he's isolated in prison? He's not. There's a deeper isolation. So, that's an important story. "He means isolated, separate, narcissistic, involved in his own reality." Narcissistic, that's debatable, but maybe that's why I quote...what did you say?
Cameron 1:28:42
Well, we need to keep in mind the duality that we were talking about earlier. The separateness, there's a good and the bad separateness, there's a good and the bad private, good and bad isolated, etc. So,
Bob 1:28:59
And, you know, that there's been common number five or six years about the growing narcissism in our society. That's the autonomy we're talking about, with a negative spin on it. But people are becoming apparently narcissistic. No, they're too involved creating their own reality, because there's no guidelines that anybody else can recognize other than their own effort to suffer or struggle through making some sense of the moment, for a while. Then that's going to be collapsed, and they got to do it again. You get me? So that looks like narcissism happening in society.
Cameron 1:29:38
Yeah, well, I personally, I think it is a narcissism. But it's a narcissism that hasn't recognized its own vacuity.
Bob 1:29:47
Yeah, its own ground. In other words, we are providing a solution to the narcissism. The unconscious, new condition that people have put into, is expressed in the "Prospect" interview that no one has addressed. Now, ...people always saying yeah, "people are all by themselves or isolated" and blah, blah, blah. "It's always journalistic valuations and subjective concerns about it". No, technical talk about it. We're talking technically about this…
….
Bob 1:32:00
Okay. So, that's why I quote, the 1970 statement, it's a rare one time quotation, talking about the human social condition before the establishment of tribal life.
Cameron 1:32:13
It occurs to me that the separateness of man could be a description of Christ. Christ is separate within the Trinity. And he's also separate as a man as an "Ecca Homo".
Bob 1:32:37
Like a what? A homeless?
Cameron 1:32:40
No "Ecce Homo", a Latin phrase.
Bob 1:32:43
Yeah,
Cameron 1:32:44
You know, "that man" ("behold the man").
Bob 1:32:48
So, he is put on the separateness of the human condition?
Cameron 1:32:54
Well, or the, the inverse of that. In the incarnation he does that. But prior to that, he is the separate man within the Trinity.
Bob 1:33:09
Yeah. And then they wondered if that was equal to God or not. The argument.
Cameron 1:33:19
Yeah, that was the driver of many of the heresies, had to do with that question. And Joyce talks about that a lot in "Library" chapter in "Ulysses".
Bob 1:33:34
So, off the top of my head, first impulse, is to say the heresy is detecting it's anti-tribal, anti- social. It's not enjoying the comforts of tribal loyalties and being human. So, that pre-cultural condition is seen as a heresy by the church. Right? Because it's holding together the falling condition of tribal comforts.
Cameron 1:34:08
Well, the heresies mostly said that either Christ was actually God, or that Christ was actually only man. The heresies went in both directions, whereas the Catholic/orthodox position was that Christ was both. So, the separateness of man
Bob 1:34:52
is both
Cameron 1:34:53
It's the fission that is a part of the fusion.
Bob 1:34:57
Yeah. So, the culture can't address that issue, because you're into speech, and you require matching. So, isn't that like (Ludwig) Wittgenstein? "There are certain things we cannot speak."
Cameron 1:35:26
Right,
Bob 1:35:27
That famous line. So, he's pointing to the beginning of retrieving autonomous man beyond culture -which is coming in 100 years ago with the electric anarchy, the electric obliteration of Gutenberg, and maybe that's what he was picking up on. He was intuiting, this new isolated separateness condition, or its retrieval.
Cameron 1:35:54
Yeah. So that, you could say that the separateness of man, in one respect, has to do with the fact that when we begin, for example, begin to speak, or begin to feel, or begin to look, we've already determined ourselves. So, the separateness of man is that we are always, already separated. Yeah, and the only way in which we can regain our wholeness is to go back before we began. And that's, that's a very tricky, sort of somersault motion that I believe McLuhan talks about a lot. But it's something that normally people can't read it because they read it in their terms, rather than seeing their terms, in terms of it.
Bob 1:37:03
Yeah. So, when Buddhism or Zen says the "mind is our problem", what to do with the mind, and you’ve somehow got to get over the mind without losing it, you were just expressing that dilemma. And so, in simple terms, what do you do with the mind? And that's what you say is a very tricky use of the mind without being trapped by it. That's the trick of enlightened social interaction.
Cameron 1:37:42
Yeah. It's the heart of understanding separateness.
Bob 1:37:48
So, would you say that all the great philosophers were dealing with that question?
Cameron 1:37:54
Well, in order to be a great philosopher, you have to touch on that question. You don't necessarily have to focus on it. But the truly great philosophers do focus on it.
Bob 1:38:07
And that's where McLuhan is part of that tradition.
Cameron 1:38:11
Yeah, I mean, because McLuhan didn't really care about precision and definition and stuff, I don't know that you would say he was part of that tradition. But what McLuhan did, that we did that’s so interesting, to me at least, is that he undertook to rethink all of these questions that generate the philosophical tradition. So, with McLuhan, you can go back before these things have achieved formulation and try to think through how to formulate them.
Bob 1:38:50
Yeah, probably most of the greats were still within a bit of a cultural hypnosis. When you come to the end of the line, today, McLuhan is the thinker of that. He sees the end. So, you can be vague,
Cameron 1:39:09
yes.
Bob 1:39:10
Okay
Cameron 1:39:11
He needs to be vague, in a certain sense,
Bob 1:39:16
Yes, include that part of the expression of the spectrum. So, then we come to an important quote, 1947, his essay "Inside Blake in Hollywood" from SEWANEE REVIEW, October 47, pages 714 to 715, volume 55. So, he says, "For all the conscious intellectual activity of an industrial society is directed to non-human ends. Its human dimensions are systematically distorted by every conscious resource while the unconscious and commercially unutilized powers struggled dimly to restore balance in order by homeopathic means." Wow, what a statement.
Cameron 1:40:03
Oh, you like the word "homeopathic" there?
Bob 1:40:04
Yeah, that's addressing what we're talking about. When you mentioned the "word evokes all words", that's the hologramic, right? The whole idea that everything is contained little particles is in the larger structure. And then I put the two together. So, I'm leading into this new idea of the holeopathic, the hologram of the global theater and it's increasing homeopathic shrinking. Which, remember, homeopathy is about the shrinking, but memory is retained. The memory of the substance, or whatever it is, is still there, even though it's becoming more and more non existing. That's the homeopathic principle. So that's what's happening to us, the shrinking, the disappearance of us. And that's going into the overwhelmed, electric, tactility squared, where we lose something. Is it memory? Not necessarily. What is it that's left? Or what is it that survives the obliteration of the Gutenbergian? So, you know, McLuhan says in "Understanding Media" that "mono fracture by manufacturer", I get the phrase, "mono fracture by manufacturer". He's talking about the glorious service of the Gutenberg galaxy, right? It's bringing heightened individuality. But it's visual bias. And it's got to figure out how to survive the electric swamp, the deep state, “the Deep State's gonna wipe you out”. So, it's human dimensions. Now a lot of humanity is created by visual space, by the alphabet and then the printing press. Before that, everybody's an expendable slave, right? For the Pharaoh there's no subjectivity, or something, "For all the intellectual activity of an industrial society is directed to non-human ends”. So, we're all going non-human, and that includes the electric effect. So, what is the human that is enhanced by the Gutenbergian? "Its human dimensions are systematically distorted by every conscious resource,” so, that means every new usable technology, right? A conscious resource?
Cameron 1:42:36
Absolutely, even slang. New clothing, new music.
Bob 1:42:44
Yes, “While the unconscious and commercially unutilized powers". You can't commercialize Menippean satire it seems. But today we can. While we couldn't in McLuhan’s day and before. "While the unconscious and commercially unutilized powers." That's the services of metaphysical condition, of the original condition, "struggled dimly to restore balance and order by homeopathic means"-which would means doing more with less. Why McLuhan books are repetitions, he's not making creative affluence, baroque spirals. He’s keeping it simple. Do you know what I mean? He's being homeopathic. He sticks with the memory of what should be remembered. That's what he's expressing in all his books.
Cameron 1:43:35
Sure. If you don't believe in some sort of linear progress, if you don't believe there's anywhere to go, then that's inevitable, right?
Bob 1:43:52
Yeah, you then run on the spot homeopathically -slowly erode yourself. While maintaining the awareness that you're still here. So, I don't know what he means by what homeopathic means, right? He doesn't this explain that. That's where he was aware of alternative medicine and all that stuff. Maybe he got it from his parents. But this is really, early. Even though people were aware of homeopathy before the Germans and Rockefellers, you know, changed the medical schools in the 20s -that's Carolyn's history, she talks about. So, there were a lot of Homeopaths by the end of the 19th century. So, what do you think he means? Different from what I'm saying? "Dimly to restore balance in order by homeopathic means." Does that mean doing more by less?
Cameron 1:44:49
I think so. I think he's talking about "the force of the unutilized".
Bob 1:44:59
Yeah. Right. Yeah, because small is powerful, though "the unconscious and commercially unutilized powers" are there. Now, digital media is homeopathic in the sense that it hoicks up the individual through co anesthesia, puts you in the driver's seat more and more and you don't have to do much to communicate. Just press a button, turn on the mic. So, the electric and the digital is naturally homeopathic doing more with less.
Cameron 1:45:17
But at the same time, as he says in the quote, "human dimensions are systematically distorted". So, this person sitting in the driver's seat thinks that he or she is gaining ground but actually they're losing ground at an accelerating rate.
Bob 1:45:59
Yeah, McLuhan is not interested in cultural fame or any of those normal awards, or achievements and recognition by the culture. He's staying outside of those issues.
Cameron 1:46:19
Well, he was always interested in the phenomenon of fame. He believes that fame could be manufactured. And then he proved it. That fame is a commodity that we now manufacture.
Bob 1:46:39
How did he prove that?
Cameron 1:46:42
By becoming famous.
Bob 1:46:43
Okay. Yeah, yeah, he acted it out, showed the drama and remained detached. I always remember talking to Morris McLuhan, around '71. And he said, "Marshall will not be doing lectures in public, he's going to withdraw for a while". There was the Media Ecology. You know, he didn't have to keep being famous and making more novels, he could retreat and be a nobody. You know what I mean? And that's homeopathic. So, I got that when Morris told me. You know, they made a point of telling people this at the front desk. He was the George Thompson, his brother, before George was. So, he's the guy at the front desk and somehow got into a conversation and he said that to me -which was very interesting. I'm glad he did. It's like a very confidential statement. Unless he was always saying it to people. But it's interesting saying "We are retreating; we've had enough noise, we've been part of the noise and actually, people are turning against us". You know, Jeffrey's PhD, and so, "I don't need to be fighting all the time". You know, so he went homeopathic. So, that's pretty neat to talk about that.
Cameron 1:48:08
Let me ask a question. Just a little while ago, you said something like, "everything is in the Wake, just like everything is in the Tech Body". And you seem to be saying that there's a negative side to the Wake?
Bob 1:48:32
Don't know, it's predicting what technology will create. The Tech Body, it's just like Google and that, they got a lot of stuff in them.
Cameron 1:48:43
Is there a good side to the Tech Body then?
Bob 1:48:45
Yes. It's gonna bring a lot of pleasure, paradise to people, but it is a comfort, and you'll lose your ability to suffer. It's like a soma. This is what iON said, "Tech Body is going to solve everybody's problems". Even our cold fusion, you know, our endless electricity device, is part of making a better situation for people to live more comfortably, not be based on oil consciousness, oil technologies, no pollution. I can see this seduction of the unfolding of a better technological environment that our technology is going to do. I'm not fooled by that. I'm detached from the success of it. But it's inevitable. This technological paradise is inevitable. As I used to say, there may not be many people around to enjoy it. But it will happen of its own course. So, Joyce saw where technology's going so, he anticipated the Tech Body and that's what McLuhan saw. iON says McLuhan was the first to really see the Tech Body. So, I see his talking about "Finnegans Wake" is his way of saying what the Tech Body is going to be -with the Android Meme as an earlier phase of that.
Cameron 1:50:16
Yeah, so, I still do not really understand the difference between the Android Meme and the Tech Body.
Bob 1:50:32
Well, let's see if I can explain that. We'll see if that unfolds in the rest of the book. Yeah, that's the question. Okay. That's good. So, after that quote about homeopathy, get to page 130, and that's where I talk a bit about that, quote, I say all of it, quote "'is directed to non-human ends' -that's the mechanical Gutenberg era because", remember, McLuhan talks about it in Take Today, “the mechanization of humans is balanced off by this super humanization of humans in the electric age -the super humanization.” That's important. Take Today saying, "the supernatural", “some will call this supernatural", you know that quote at the end? When the recently chief forms of consciousness, and I asked Barry Nevitt, "what's that?" and he said, "Finnegans Wake". This is the last paragraph in Take Today, The Yestermorrow. I think it is the last paragraph. So, McLuhan said, you know, "this amazing abundance of something", he said, "some will consider it supernatural", whatever that means. But it's an important distinction. So, "'all of it is directed to non-human ends' -that's the dehumanization of the Gutenberg era", but I called them the mechanical Gutenberg era, "because the electric age turns his back to human scale conditions", but also superhuman, "and is organic and alive -it's not dead". Then I quote, McLuhan, "It's human dimensions are systematically distorted by every conscious resource while the unconscious and commercially unutilized power struggled dimly to restore balance and order by homeopathic means", end quote. So, then I say, "I was discussing this with someone else the other day, who knew about homeopathy. I said: quote, 'look at this, McLuhan's talking about homeopathy as a metaphor 70 years ago.'" And so, I'm just pointing "Oh, wow, look at that. McLuhan knew". So, I was saying that to somebody, which I've done many times. So, then I quote the article, the quote, "it's human dimensions are systematic, distorted by every conscious resource while" and then I say, end of quote and "it's human dimensions are distorted while the industrial entities attempt to retrieve some semblance of 'human scale' by applying futile and puny homeopathic means". So, you're getting the electric age is retrieving human scale, virtually. So, it's not really. It's an environment by default. Like the Tech Body, it's an environment by default.
Cameron 1:53:30
Don't we have to say that, for example, with the Prospect essay, that electronic conditions create the means, or create the situation, in which people can become awake. But, at the very same time, it creates the conditions for sleep.
Bob 1:53:55
Yeah, so, they don't know what woke them up. See, the becoming awake is a pseudo-event, because you have to be aware that the electric age woke you up from the Gutenberg. That's what you're waking up. That's not necessarily a comprehensive wakefulness. So, McLuhan called it "millennial ecstasies". The celebration of getting out of the prison of Gutenberg galaxy is what the ‘60s were all about. They thought they were being released into an open field, but that open field was even more cage like then the Gutenberg era. So, you got the "open society" versus the "closed society". So, electric environment is retrieving the closed tribal society -which we're now witnessing even more so.
Cameron 1:54:45
So, the only way out of the wire cage, according to McLuhan, and he saw this very early, the only way out of the wire cage is to understand all media.
Bob 1:55:02
Sit there. Don't go anywhere, stay home, and contemplate it.
Cameron 1:55:08
There is nowhere to go.
Bob 1:55:09
Yeah, you get to realize that more and more. And that would be homeopathic. That's like, that's another aspect to doing more with less. I mean people generally go out to socialize, to get stimulated mentally, emotionally in different ways, physically, McLuhan said "Wow, I've got everything right here. I just need to turn TV on for five seconds, and I'll get some patterns". You know? Instant people. He says, in the Playboy interview, "we're flooded by instant people. Instant social life". So, why go look for chemical bodies, and you can enjoy the stimulation of the electric situation. So, that's a kind of service but of course, it's gonna have a lot of disservices too -for the consequences on older media. So, we're on 130.
Cameron 1:56:09
You're about to get one of your favorite passages from Counterblast,
Bob 1:56:15
Right. Okay, so 130, And I got down to "the human dimensions are distorted while the industrial entities attempt to retrieve some semblance of human scale". So, you helped explain that. "The electric retrieves human scale," in quotes, "by applying futile and puny homeopathic means". That's me, pointing out the disservices of the homeopathic. Okay, so then, page 135. Counterblast 1969. So, he's not private consciousness, it's individual. He says, "and no matter how many walls have fallen, the citadel of individual consciousness" now that's, that's the original metaphysical mind, right? Metaphysical man. "The citadel of individual consciousness has not fallen nor is it likely to fall. For it is not accessible to the mass media". I remember first reading that. What? We just learned all about what media does to us. What? there's something that’s not affected by this? Right? I don't think many people have dealt with that statement. It's like the big clunker in the middle of it all. "Sorry. I didn't mean anything I said in the last 70 pages." There's something there that's not being affected. Isn't that interesting?
Cameron 1:57:38
Sure. I think he's talking about the source of media. The source of media can't fault the media.
Bob 1:57:48
That's right. And the separateness never goes away...I was thinking that the multiplicity is too much for humans. So, you're not being programmed anymore. I don't know if that works. But let's see what I say in my explanation below. Yeah, so I say, "No matter how many walls have fallen, the citadel of individual consciousness has not fallen nor is likely to fall". So, I quote it. And then I said, "Gnosticism believes it did fall". And then I have the quote, "For is not accessible to the mass media", unquote. And I say, "More autonomy for the individual". So, I understand the autonomy. I've got McLuhan's line "the mass man is not tribal", in my mind, "More autonomy for the individual. We're beginning to move into the 'autonomous Anthropomorphic Physical (AP) social effect. It's not blatant AP, but I've explained that memes are also coming out of it. I'm attempting to describe how both conditions are happening: the Android Meme (AM) and Anthropomorphic Physical (AP) -the merger parallel to the separate intelligence. These five 'separateness' quotations above help to illustrate McLuhan's vision of what's unfolding toward full development". Then I asked if that's "final cause". So, what are the five quotes? Going back up here...so the Prospect is one, Rolling Stone is two, the locomotive three and then "Inside Blake in Hollywood" four "homeopathic". So, is there a fifth? Yeah, Counterblast. Those are the five quotes. The five separateness quotations dealing with this autonomy, this citadel of consciousness. So, I wonder whether there was another point there? We're getting the separateness squared. See, I'm pointing how McLuhan said, "All media is pseudo-events". So, if you're a fully conscious being you wouldn't need any technologies. So, that's the romantic notion of being a god. And he talked to Christians. They don't like that idea that you can be a god. Maybe they'll call that Gnosticism, or heresy. But that is an ongoing situation, because the technology is making you a god. The problem is, it's an environment that's being done to you. You're not doing it on your own, unless you say, it's a collective effort of technology. And everybody's contributed to make everything that we have today, right? All the different contributions by cultures and societies inside the Peerless Project, you could say. So, everybody's helping to make our prison; it's gonna be a very comfortable prison. And you won't be able to escape by going to the Guf. That's the sad part. So then, I go into these imaginations...which is primary and secondary, secondary imagination, some type of tactility, archetypes, tactile interplay. So, I think I'm moving out of the separateness point. So, I think we should save that for the next time. But we can talk more about the separateness fact. So, the Anthropomorphic Physical is humans thinking there's still a human aspect.
Cameron 2:02:15
So, is it entirely an illusion? Or is it a last gasp?
Bob 2:02:30
Yeah, I think it's, it's both. It's always going to be both. It's simpler to say both. It's hard to make a decision. We're beginning to move into the autonomous Anthropomorphic Physical, social effect. So, they teach courses in college now how we're in a post human era. So, as we move to what people think is post human, that would be post Gutenberg, they're going to be massaged into like a Brave New World kind of soma, but soma is not a drug, it's an environment. It's the Tech Body. So, we're gonna think that is an element of humanness. Or we accept the post human as a success, and we don't care about being human. So, that would be just endless semantics arguing over how you describe what's happening. So, I say, "It's not blatant AP", not sure what I mean by that, "but I've explained that memes are also coming out of it". So, memes, our creativity, our culture. So, we're not this raw consciousness that I guess Anthropomorphic Physical comes from. So, maybe I'm asking about what is the fate of the citadel of individual consciousness? Which a lot of people would say that McLuhan couldn't take the fall of the citadel of conscious. That it wasn't correct what he was saying. A lot of people today would say, all our separateness did collapse, did fall. But we seem to be saying, no, if you see this deeper, you'll see there's a part of you that hasn't fallen. Or that you can invent a part of yourself that's not fallen. So, that was the wager, they say, that was the bet or the dream that something was preserved homeopathically -a memory. So, those are all questions that we're going into now. And we're showing how that's what McLuhan was talking about -helped along by Finnegans Wake. So, you see it's so silly in the media. Marshall said, "we're becoming tribal" and all this stuff, right? Nothing to do with the real issue. Now, maybe nobody famous, in cultural terms, ever gets discussed accurately. Right?
Cameron 2:05:05
Well, thinking doesn't eventuate in set conclusions. Right? So, McLuhan was a thinker. And to understand McLuhan means to think along with him. And thinking along with him is a dynamic process. It's not a coming to summation process. It's not adding up.
Bob 2:05:41
Yeah, that's where there's no finish line. So, now William Irwin Thompson, you know, a student of McLuhan, talks about five phases of cultural history, cultural ecologies, and each one has a victim. And I think the first victim is the animal. So, that's used in sacrifices and that. And then, woman is the next victim, and then man, I think, and then culture. But the fifth phase in our time, well, 50 years ago, when he was writing, this was the mind, the mind was the final victim. So, I always think of that in relation to this thinking point. Like part of McLuhan's thinking is aware of the lack of having content in his thinking, which is expressed by Finnegans Wake. There's, you know, whole passages where you can't really say what the content is. So, the mind was the original problem, and that's the final victim or challenge, or we don't know what part of our minds to return to preserve? Or what is it that we're preserving is the mind like the whole body? You know, there's cognitive scientists, they'd like to think the mind is in the environment. And they've blurred the Gutenbergian outlines of the body. So, they can't see where cognition is, or they're focusing on it in strange places. You know about that stuff, right? That trend?
Cameron 2:07:20
This is, more or less, what I meant by the disappearance of the subject in the Gutenberg galaxy.
Bob 2:07:29
So, that would be the homeopathic disappearance of memory, or the subject, or the mind?
Cameron 2:07:37
...I don't see that. Because to me that the first thing that comes to mind with homeopathic is the efficacy of the small.
Bob 2:07:50
Yeah, the memory is preserved.
Cameron 2:07:53
Yeah, so you seem to be you seem to be saying that the disappearance was the homeopathic principle? I thought it would have been that preservation,
Bob 2:08:04
I'm seeing the homeopathic failing, or you can be deluded into thinking it's gone. So maybe preserving -with the accurate definition of homeopathy that it preserves. You have to know that to understand the shrinking. That this small is not a threat; most people would take it as a threat.
Cameron 2:08:24
Here, you could say, just as the fission needs to be first understood in order to understand fusion, so with the homeopathic. Unless you understand disappearance, you can't understand preservation.
Bob 2:08:41
That's right. Disappearance, very important, postmodern term. So, that's why right now, we know lawyers and that, that are working with the Homeopaths, because Big Pharma is trying to wipe out all that alternative stuff. And they got a real problem with homeopathy. Because if homeopathy is correct, and the scientists that did prove that in late '80s, forget his name, he was a friend of Baudrillard, and I discussed that with Baudrillard because this guy was aware of what Carolyn was doing with Mihr, that early technology that could solve AIDs in New York in the '90s, so, he proved homeopathy. And then he was invaded by Amazing Randy and the skeptics, and they had destroyed his lab and did all kinds of bad things. And then he eventually got, you know, isolated by the scientific community. But it was an open nerve to touch that point and say there's homeopathy. That is an idea which can become a service idea for the increasing obliteration of the Tech Body of us. So, there's a service in homeopathy that technology, Gutenberg technology, would not want to acknowledge. So, it is a big battle. Here's this harmless little thing and they want to get rid of it, and outlaw it. And their drugs do way worse than homeopathy in side effects. There are no side effects from homeopathy. So, it's an irrational attack. But, in McLuhan terms, it is the essence of what's happening. And McLuhan's use of homeopathy, we should hope is correct, that it does get preserved something. He's looking for what's preserved.
Cameron 2:10:42
You use the word "obliteration" throughout your remarks. You said obliteration of something?
Bob 2:10:52
Yeah, of the private citadel. See, you know, a lot of promoters are people afraid of what Silicon Valley is doing to us. And every now and then they pop up and say, "abandon all this stuff, we're gonna be wiped out". As a matter of fact, here's an interesting thing that the Evergreens, channeled through Michael Blake Reed, said. I asked him back in the '90s when is the Armageddon? what is the Armageddon? And they said, "the final Armageddon, approximately in 500 years, is when we will invent a technology, and we will know that if we implement it, we will forget everything we ever knew", that will be the effect of it. And there will be a battle over whether to press the button and implement it. So, when I heard that I said, "wow, media ecology is the ultimate battle". McLuhan is telling you to study the effects. So, we'll be studying the effects inevitably over the next five hundred years to the point where we can see, "look, we got this thing, look what it's going to do to us". It's not an environment yet, but if we implement it, we're out. That is, to me, an obliteration of the private citadel. The end of memory, you forget everything that we know. And I don't know what that means, but somehow, we don't know where we are already more, or we don't have a mind to know or something.
Cameron 2:12:15
Yeah, I think that obliteration is happening as we speak, and that it takes place through the evisceration of meaning. Words don't mean anything.
Bob 2:12:29
That's what I mean by my chart. Each phase is a homeopathic obliteration. And that's why I have each quadrant is a subatomic particle, it gets smaller and smaller particles -we're being obliterated. That's what the chart shows. But then, it predicts, anticipates, hopes for, prays for a breakthrough -which is in the sentence at the bottom of this chart, where it says "waiting for organic bodies, the spinning clothing crystals have danced the hexad (vertisement)"....but the hexadic is what we got into and then they found out that iON is the hexadic. The breakthrough. But how much is it a breakthrough? If you have a collective environment that gives you endless energy, electricity, and you have products that make you never die, what does that mean to you? You're forever available to celebrate your situation and enjoy technologies. Probably that leads to a meaning crisis. So, we've had, you know, various phases of the meaning crisis since Nietzsche or whatever and 1850 with the telegraph. So, that crisis that you're talking about, the Armageddon, was what I was portraying because I formed that chart after the Evergreens told me about the Armageddon. So, that was influencing my mind, you know, about what I thought we were going to, the final Armageddon, where we would have the choice of not knowing what it's going to do to us. So, those are some of the thoughts in what I thought was making me make the chart, you know what I mean? Who knows? There are other things going on in the unconscious, or in my environment, that are making the chart happen too. So, I'm describing what I was conscious of. So, it's almost like the holeopathic gets tetraded. It flips and doesn't work anymore.
Cameron 2:14:43
Well, do you run together the homeopathic and the holeopathic in some way?
Bob 2:14:48
Well, the holeopathic is the global hologram -which began with the proscenium arch in the ‘60s and that's been shrunk by fiber cables and the digital technology. So, we are not inside the theater today. We're outside of it with all of media and your little, 20 years ago, your palm pilot -now in your smartphone. We are bigger, we have popped out of the leviathan of the global theater. So, that's where you get into the global membrane, and then the Android Meme, and then the Tech Body. So, I welcome that. We got to this point where I answer your question about what is the difference?
Cameron 2:15:33
So, am I right that the homeopathic (holepathic) is the gigantic, the escape from which is the homeopathic -which is the miniature.
Bob 2:15:57
That's right. The holeopathic is the huge environment of the 60s, the global theatre, that shrinks, miniaturized in the last 60 years. So, that's homeopathic. So, the hologram of the global theater is going through a homeopathic process. And so, the question is, is it gonna end up with an ultimate disservice or service breakthrough? So, basically, I'm saying my term means it's the verb to explain the process of what happens to the global theater.
Cameron 2:16:34
Right. And what's the relationship between human subjects, if that's not a stupid term, what's the relationship between human subjects and this theater that becomes fragmented?
Bob 2:16:51
The whole world shrinking? Well, it becomes more and more integrated. Homeopathic is a kind of doing more with less; it's more powerful.
Cameron 2:17:02
But doesn't it become fragmented into all of these different media?
Bob 2:17:07
Well, the AP becomes fragmented. The Anthropomorphic Physical. That anthropomorphic means there's communication between you and something else. If you don't believe that you're human, or anything, then you wouldn't look for something to match with. So, the AP is a final delusion, that it is a human universe. Right? So, theologically, you know, there's a whole science of philosophy about that. That the Universe is for us. So, I raised that as a question. The Anthropomorphic Physical is my term for the citadel of consciousness. And is that going to survive? And does it require throwing out the AP human element? So, those questions are discussed a lot and in a lot of fields, in advanced science and computers and cognitive science, whatever they're doing, they're all wondering, are we in…we're in trouble. You know, every night. Like, Monday, Wednesday, Friday, people throw up "we're in trouble, it's over." And then Tuesday, Thursday and Saturday, the other guy "so now we're doing okay, we found Mr. Jeffrey Epstein, we put him away, he's not here anymore, we're okay." So, you see the drama there? What I'm talking about?
Cameron 2:18:40
Yeah, sure. That's like a bellows. Going in and out. And the question will be, I think when we arrive at the Tech Body,
Bob 2:19:00
Which we're always in a state where we can say we've gotten there. We got there with the telegraph and then radio. There's a slight change of frequency, and all that, but the electric implosion we never left.
Cameron 2:19:16
Yeah. Yeah. I understand all that. Yeah. You, often in the sentences you just spoke, use the word "we". And it seems to me that the word "we" is exactly the question in all this. Okay, that there is even a "we".
Bob 2:19:33
That's right. That's the Anthropomorphic Physical. And the separateness is the "we" cancelled out by the separateness. So, you see, where have I heard this? They were discussing whether humans were becoming more psychopathic, I'm not sure where I saw that, this trend towards psychopathy, which McLuhan predicted, but you know, as people become less controlled by cultural boundaries, they become violent. So, you got more and more violence all over the place, you know, irrational outbursts. That's a big, big thing that's the struggling of the AP. Looking for meaning and meaning becomes just getting a reaction. Okay, so I go shoot some people, and then they come and arrest me. "Okay. Oh, there's something out there that recognizes me. I exist."
Cameron 2:20:31
Yeah. It's also like self-cutting is part of that syndrome.
Bob 2:20:36
Yeah. Self-cutting? With the kids? Yeah, yeah. So, how many people have to cut themselves to say that we've arrived? If you got 2 million doing it, in the last two years say, do we have to wait until 50 million do it, then "Oh, now we've arrived at the Tech Body". You know what I mean?
Cameron 2:21:00
Well, maybe the first World War is one answer to that.
Bob 2:21:04
Yeah. McLuhan said that the concentration camps showed that the human chemical body was obsolete. But there already was the Conservation Camp in the trenches in the in the World War One. Yeah. Four years of ridiculous slaughter. Right?
Cameron 2:21:22
Yeah. And similarly, in the Civil War.
Bob 2:21:27
Yes. So, you see, the electric implosion caused this global crisis. And that's why McLuhan would occasionally say, "somebody should have written what I'm writing 100 years ago. It was all obvious 100 years ago", you know what I mean? And then he would say, "well, but some of the poets caught on to it". But it's interesting how there is a constancy, but also a shifting, new wrinkles added, new nuances or rhythms or, or radiation, from what I say on the Bob’s Media Ecology album, "we never left 1945. We've been just running on the same spot and layering over on us subsequent electronic and digital environments, or variations of the telegraph effect".
Cameron 2:22:19
Yeah, I can see that.
Bob 2:22:21
Okay, I'm then going to try to say something pops out of that. First, the Android Meme, and then Tech Body. So that's, we arrived at the Global membrane understanding.
Cameron 2:22:38
Yeah, so it's just about six. So, maybe we should take that as a good place to start next time.
Bob 2:22:48
Yeah, I think this is a tremendous recording. I'm gonna promote this one, because we address that the deeper part of McLuhan's Catholicism was very important point that, you know, no one has ever thought about or talked about.
Cameron 2:23:03
I'm not, maybe that's the case. But he had a lot of dealings with some very smart Catholics. Including some very smart priests.
Bob 2:23:16
There might be letters to these guys, that we have not found, you know, where he says that? Yeah, I would say that's possible. But they still were priests. He had the guts to not be a priest. He had the guts to say, "this ain't working boys, we're not gonna win this". You know what I mean?
Cameron 2:23:39
That's true. But he also he wrote to his brother in the '30s. If he had known how to think about Catholicism in the early '30s, he would have become a priest.
Bob 2:23:56
Right. But he didn't. And I think he was lucky to not. He couldn't have been the prophet. He did that.
Cameron 2:24:06
Probably not. Probably not. He probably had to be sort of the outside on the inside.
Bob 2:24:14
Yeah. And he's always a question mark for people. Once people, starting in the '60s, found out he was Catholic says, "what? how can a smart guy be a Catholic?" These are people who weren't impressed, Protestants, weren't impressed with Catholics. So, there was those prejudices, but he is a question mark to people. And I think that's, I don't know if he could say it was consciously staged, but that was the fate of his image. His Catholicism puzzled everybody. And people do discuss it and say, "what kind of Catholic was he?" you know, "what was he?" And the Vatican, they appointed him a Communication Adviser but didn't know what to do with him.
Cameron 2:24:59
Yeah, well, they didn't do anything with him.
Bob 2:25:01
They couldn't. So, he was a correct Catholic, I'd say. He was appropriately ecological, or he had the perfect pitch as a Catholic. And the only guy that I ever heard who noticed that was George Thompson. Of course, he was with Marshall every day, watched. And George is running over to St. Michael's Library, he's dealing with the whole Catholic environment for Marshall all the time. And so, it was an accidental point where we're talking, I don't know how, who said what first, and I said, "I don't know if the clue was a Catholic". And he says, "You're right. He wasn't". So, that was a very important communication for me with a guy so close to McLuhan, you know, what I mean? And he had the guts to say that. He says McLuhan was not a Catholic. Now who would say that around him? Nobody would say that in public, in front of him, I don't think. Right?
Cameron 2:25:59
Well, but that's, you know, the meaning of that would have to be teased out for many people like his kids. He was too much of a Catholic. Right?
Bob 2:26:11
But they didn't pick up his questioning of it. His coolness about it. They didn't realize how cool of a Catholic he was.
Cameron 2:26:24
Because I don't think we have the time to,
Bob 2:26:29
No, that's a good point. We'll will have to end on that laughter. All right. Excellent! We've actually made it an incredible recording, Cameron. You may not understand it, but I tell you, it was pretty fucking probing. So, thanks a lot for helping me do this. Thank you.
Cameron 2:26:48
I say well, look forward to next time.
Bob 2:26:49
All right. Thank you very much.
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