Literary/Aesthetic

**1**
Michael Edmonds: Welcome, my name is Michael Edmonds, associate director of the McLuhan program, and it's really nice to see Bob here, who I've known for a few years and gone through a few battles with of one kind or the other............ so I wanted to start with a few words -- within all these words, don't get worried -- about McLuhan's thesis, he starts: the problem of understanding Thomas Nashe is the same problem as that of discovering the main educational traditions, from Zeno, socrates, parimedes, cicero, varo, [[]]augustine. And of course he's going to go on primarily to talk about the rise and fall of dialectics and grammar from antiquity to the renaissance, then he's going to get to Thomas Nashe. That's the trivium, and Bob knows the thesis very well. If one had it, actually, which I don't 'cause it's never been published, but if you had it you could search and you could look at the quadrivium, which Bob will talk about, and I just want to read one part where he talks about that. I'mnot sure how to say this guy's name..... Alcuen. [[[[[[[[[but the grammatica begins by inviting the student to the love of true wisdom, provided they learn it only for the sake of God]]]]]]]]]]]]]]]]]] Alcuen?? [[[[The necessary were how phlisophers, statesmen, and kings of old would]]]He seems also to have been behind the school reform outline in Charlemagne's famous letter to the bishop...........Charlemagne was convinced that the ideal of Christian culture was the patristic one ........ 'Oh, that I only had twelve scholars like ?? and Augustine'. God only had two, and you wanted twelve. Well we only have one with us tonight. Bob, he's a good friend, and I have no idea exactly where he's going to go with this, but Bob, welcome back to the program....
Bob Dobbs: Thank you.
ME: And this is your first official presentation here, is it not??
BOB: Yes.
ME: So it's a momentous night.......
BOB: So what's the title

ME: It's on the wall over there.
BOB: Pull that piece of paper off there, Antonio, just behind you.
ME: Read it to us, Antonio.
**2**
Antonio: "How McLuhan emphasized the quadrivium: our four stomachs"
BOB: That's the subtitle, 'our four stomachs'. So the trivium was dialectics, rhetoric and grammar, and the quadrivium was arithmetic, geometry, music and astronomy, those are the seven arts, and that was education from 500 BC all the way up to the printing press, and it carried on into about the seventeenth century, then [Ramis] 's dialectics, and Newtons' calculus and Liebniz's calculus, that took over, what we call science, but really it was an extension of dialectics. That's the background. So McLuhan always emphasized formal causality. [I think I'll stand up at first, okay, just to get loosened up. So I'll just stand still, is this okay to stand up?] So, McLuhan emphasized formal causality, so in that spirit, I ask you, what kind of talk would you like tonight? Would you like me to do the 5 schools of media ecology that happened after McLuhan died in 1980? Would you like me to do a detailed history of McLuhan himself? Would you like to hear some scintillating abstraction, kind of a rant? Or would you like to hear a lot about me? These are the options, this is like a focus group. Let's have hands on the five schools of media ecology? That guy there..... one..... okay two....... How about history of McLuhan in detail.... four hands. How about scintillating abstraction? Okay, four. And me?? [murmurs] Okay, so they're all tied......
?: All of the above. All of the above.
BOB: That's my line! So of course I'm going to do all of them given the chance, you see........ So McLuhan is on record to have said, when he was meeting with the editor of Ramparts magazine, who was a friend, can't remember his name, he also was a guy who attended the topless clubs, what were they called, silicon breasts? in the mid60's topless clubs was a new thing, and Tom Wolfe writes about how cool McLuhan was in that situation, but one of the guys who attended that later got irritated by McLuhan at some meeting and said 'you know, you're always going on about the same stuff.' And McLuhan said: 'that's what I meant when I didn't say it.' So, with that principle in mind, if I'm saying something and you disagree or are thinking of the opposite, or 'the other point is just as valid', I agree with you, I just can't say all double points at the same time. So "I gotta use words when I talk to you", as T. S. Eliot said in one of his poems. So that's the point. I'm also saying what you don't hear, the other view at the same time. So, we have here, a new book called 'Media Unlimited' by Todd Gitlin, does anybody know who Todd Gitlin is?? Do you recognize the name?
?: California politician.
Eric: Wasn't he in the SDS?
BOB: Right, Todd Gitlin is one of the famous radicals in the sixties.
X: The Weathermen.
BOB: No, he didn't go that far.....
X: He was against the Weathermen.
BOB: Yeah, he was more mainstream......
Kenzie Quatrale: Oh, that one. I didn't like him.
BOB: What did you say?
Linus Minimax: There's a documentary on the Weather Underground playing right now, it's really good.
Eric: It's a fabulous documentary, but he was kind of.........
Kenzie: He's jealous or something, he was bitter.
BOB: Todd's in it?
Eric: Oh yeah, he was denouncing the Weather Underground. Really strongly.
Linus: Yeah, as if it was a simple matter to realize the error.........
Kenzie: 'They're taking our fan base away.'
BOB: So Todd Gitlin, he must be 55, 56 now, so he was part of the original SDS, and then he became probably a big anti-Vietnam guy, and he carried on that activity well into the 70's and 80's. I live in Manhattan now, so I, through the 90's, would go to different talks by him, and-- I think we got someone coming in...... [ silence ] .... it's just McLuhan.
E: The spirit of McLuhan.
BOB: Yeah. Come on in, Marshall, right there......... So I would go to a few lectures in the nineties that he'd put on, and it'd be about ten people there, and he's there, a community activist trying to get something going on, everybody had disappeared, public space had disappeared as Kroker and the postmodernists explained, and it was sort of odd watching this guy, he still believed in activism on a community level, a sort of a socialist..... so then in '97 or '98 I went to visit Neil Postman who is a great disciple of McLuhan in New York City and is the most well-known McLuhanite in the United States, and he just died I think in October, but he had a department of media ecology at New York University, and he spoke here on a symposium on McLuhan at York University, and I went up and talked to him and I said I want to see you in New York about some things. So I go visit him, and we talk and we did this and that, and then I'm walking outside and lingering around, and there's Todd Gitlin walking around in the office, you know, sort of lost, like 'what's he doing here?' So then I notice he goes in and sits down in a particular office, so I go over and it has his name there! See, to me, these kind of guys never studied McLuhan, they never understood "the media" in quotes, these radicals in the sixties and seventies, they were too young anyways to have the time to study it, but I used to always go around and listen to them and see what they're missing. So here he is, he's sitting in a McLuhan office with his name on it, so I go in and introduce myself, I didn't know him but I had watched his floundering career...... now, he'd been a professor out in Berkeley I think, in the 80's and 90's and he always did books on the media, always content stuff, I think he did something on Disney in the early 90's, so here he is with Neil Postman, so I asked him 'what are you doing here?', and he didn't have anything to say, he wasn't very communicative, you know? "I'm doing media...... ecology......." "Oh, okay". So he's very withdrawn. So I go to the Barnes and Noble, which is like your Borders here, you have Barnes and Noble here? It's like Chapters, you know.

?: We just have it online.
BOB: Right, it's a big chain. So I go there a couple months ago, and he's got a new book out with another guy, and he's sitting up there and he does a talk. And then after I go up and started talking to him, and I bring up McLuhan to him -- this is what I do, I go to these places, and wait until the lecture's over, and then I go up and attack the person privately, you know? I might do a question in public, it's usually always McLuhan. Anybody who's wached me at these things through the years --which is not likely 'cause there's so many people there that nobody's seeing you the next time-- then I always bring up McLuhan points, like I did with Yoko Ono, that was interesting, I'll go back to that maybe........ so I asked something in general, he didn't have a very good answer, so I went up and saw him after, and I said you were in the department of media ecology, you learn anything about McLuhan? He says yeah, I said why don't you write about him he says I do in this book called 'media unlimited', so this was the book! So I went over and bought it, I didn't know anything about it, and read it. Now let's look up what he says about McLuhan. Now this is after teaching media ecology in a McLuhanesque department, not necessarily like McLuhan but it's in that realm. So you look up McLuhan, and..... there's no McLuhan in here! Just joking.... page 10...... so I don't know, you may not know anything about McLuhan, but here's what he says: "Neither are the media themselves messages, that is, statements about the world. Marshall McLuhan's glib formulation turns out to mean next to nothing. This is partly because because he was not clear or convincing about just what he meant by medium. A television set, a commercial channel, a sitcom? But McLuhan was not precise either in his use of the word message. (That's italicized.) Media did not simply deliver information. An image or a soundtrack is not simply a set of abstract signs that describe, point to, or represent reality standing elsewhere. Not only do they point, they are. (He's saying an image or a soundtrack is, and that's italicized.) They are wraparound presences with which we live much of our lives. McLuhan was closer to the truth when, in a playful mood, he titled one of his later books The Medium is the Massage." Now, he's saying this distinguishes from McLuhan. McLuhan always pointed out that media are, they're Nature, they exist. So here's a guy, doesn't even get point one about McLuhan, alright? He thinks he's making a new point about McLuhan! Okay, page 25......... "It's easy to see how individuals grow up expecting their lives to be accompanied by image flow, plenitude, and choice, but for society as a whole, how did this blessing come to pass? Media saturation is not a gift of the gods, nor of the unprovoked genius of technological wizards. The Edisons, Marconis, Sarnoff's, Deforest's, and Gates' devise and organize the media that Marshall McLuhan called "extensions of man" (and he has that in quotes). But humanity first came with his hungers and competencies. Nor are our desires the unwelcome product of vast corporations determined to halt human time with their commodities, with products that people would be so eager to purchase, on which they would become so dependant that they will be willing to exchange their time for money to bring these products home." So he goes on about that.......... So that's the next reference to McLuhan, he just cites the obvious theme that comes from McLuhan then you go to page 176: "Everywhere the media flow defies national boundaries, this is one of its obvious but at the same time amazing features. A global torrent is not, of course-- I should tell you, [the title is] "Media Unlimited: How the Torrent of Images and Sounds Overwhelms Our Lives" --a global torrent is not, of course, the master metaphor to which we have grown accustomed. We are more accustomed to Marshall McLuhan's 'global village', (that's in italics). Those who resort to this metaphor casually often forget that if the world is a global village, some live in mansions on the hill, others in huts; some dispatch images and sounds around town at the touch of a button, others collect them at the touch of their buttons. Yet McLuhan's image reveals an indispensible half-truth: if there is a village, it speaks American. It wears jeans, drinks Coke, eats at the golden arches, walks in swish shoes, plays electric guitars, recognizes Mickey Mouse, James Dean, ET, Bart Simpson, R2D2, and Pamela Anderson." And the final reference is......... 207....... he's talking about Hollywood, the new effects movies, special effects: "Drowning language in gaudy and grotesque images, the mainstream hollywood movie is driven by a hideous zero-sum principle of the senses, as if in imitation of Marshall McLuhan's most simple-minded idea - the belief that when artistic work plays on one sensory capacity (sight), it is obliged to sacrifice the previously dominant sense (the capacity for language)." So that's, in a way, the simple eye-ear dialectic. So then I'm reading the book, and the book is totally making McLuhan's point, if you knew what McLuhan was talking about. So he critiques McLuhan, doesn't even have a proper understanding, and when Neil Postman retired a year ago, probably 'cause he was going to die, and then he died a year later, they mentioned Todd Gitlin had left and gone to Columbia, and he made some snarky remark about authoritarian figures in the department, so looks like he couldn't even handle Neil Postman, and probably left. That's okay, Neil Postman was a stick-in-the-mud, you know, you're not going to learn real McLuhan from Neil Postman, but he is.... this is an example of: people have to write books, and keep the industry going, and I say they can't get past McLuhan, which is really getting past Finnegans Wake. So, I'm going to explain that in more detail, but that's an interesting thing, if you really know McLuhan, you'll see that this guy is pointing at a big aspect of what McLuhan wrote about, but doesn't even know it, and actually comes to McLuhan's point at the end, at least a beginner's point. So when I went over to the U of T bookstore today, there's hundreds of books on media. The word media is now overwhelming-- well, it's a word that's accepted in people's lives since the internet, this is what all these books say, you know "media overwhelm us". Now, I'm going to prove that media don't overwhelm us anymore. So this phenomenon of media taking over us happened thirty years ago and McLuhan dealt with it then. So why are we having these repeats? Because we're running on the same spot, we need content for the media, we can't get past the E=MC2 that McLuhan came up with, so we're just stuck and we replay these things within particular linguistic cultures and different media. And I say it's a hologram, which doesn't mean it's not real, it's a hologram environment we live in, and it's getting smaller and smaller and smaller, like homeopathic. The homeopathic principle; so the hologram is getting tinier and tinier and tinier and people have less and less to write about, so it's always one media image that dominates, like Bill Clinton was the main figure for all through the nineties-- movies about him, scandals about him, other things about him, it all revolved around the White House-- so, you merge hologram with homeopathy and you come up with the word 'holeopathic'. So we're having holeopathic replays of McLuhan's insight by people who can pretend to come up with something new because they don't know the holeopathic principle that McLuhan intuited and he got from Finnegans Wake.
**3**
So, we begin with the fact that McLuhan described the situation...... (just for some more emphasis, I should do this) .....see, now look at the language, I'm standing up I'm going to make a point, I'm going to have an authoritative vibe, I'm not going to be in the dialoguing thing so I must establish the theme, right? I have to stand up and be authoritative, and remember 'awe', a-w-e is the root of authority, and author. So, I say that when McLuhan says that the media, the television, the electric environment of the sixties was a seamless web, that means you have to say: 'if it's a seamless web, there's no division between TV, radio, movies, magazines, speech, sports, bulldozers, buildings, all media', because McLuhan meant, by 'media', anything that humans made, from clothing to satellites. So we know that people mean by 'media'......... what? News? When they say 'the media's just going all crazy on it', what do they mean, the news? Everybody agree on that? The news, which is like Walter Kronkite, or Dan Rather, or Barbara Fromm, or whoever you got now, John Pope? What's his name? Mansbridge, yeah. Which is..... that's the definition of 'pope': Man's Bridge. John Pope, so...... is his name John?
?: No, Peter.
BOB: Oh, Peter Mansbridge, right. Peter Pope, that's even better! And I'll put in a prediction: the last pope will be called 'Peter', which will happen over the next twenty years. So if the next guy is Peter, it's over, after him. [At least as] a centralized organization. If it's Sammy, won't be him, it'll be after the guy after him, Peter. 'Cause it's going to have to end where it began, it began with Peter, right? The first pope. So, the news is the pope, here in Canada, and that's what people mean by 'media'.

Now, subconsciously it is right, because the whole world is run by the news: what the White House says, or what Wall Street says, which is obviously a reflection of the White House, or some other place, Tokyo........ but it's always the same impetus, everyday, the market needs to know what's happening so they listen to the news. So the news runs the world. And the news is usually press releases, coming [from], and anchored and responding to the White House. So if it's a seamless web....... when you lived in the '50's and 60's, you'd watch TV, turn it off, listen to radio, get in your car, put on some clothes, dance to the Beatles, go golfing, go swimming, have an affair......... remember, women were the first medium, the first extension of man, because it was [makes rib gesture] pulled out of man, in myth. So, the metaphor is, is that when Eve put a fig on herself, that was the first clothing, that was the first extension, which numbed them, therefore put them out of the Garden of Eden. So, that's interesting. So one can understand why anthropologists say that woman is going to be the last thing that man civilises, that was the first medium. So if you have the seamless web, it doesn't seem........ what's McLuhan talking about? It doesn't seem that it's seamless when you're going from one clunky medium to another, but you're also listening to music, so you can get a........ you say: 'yeah, when I listen to radio, the Beatles, it's seamless', 'cause you're in acoustic space. But now, when a little kid's got a laptop, and they've got movies radio magazines and every media in there, we can understand it's a seamless web. Could we see that all media have disappeared? What I'm saying is, the 'now' media, or medium, does not refer....... well, the definition of particular 'media' like television and radio: those media don't exist anymore. Everything that Marshall wrote about in Understanding Media, telephones..... they do not exist. They were separate media, now it's all in a seamless web. So McLuhan saw the seamless web. And if it's a seamless web, there's no division, then there's only one thing existing. It's boundless, has no centre, and if you put a human face on it, it's the President of the White House. President of the United States. We all are that. Now, if you look back there, you'll see a picture of McLuhan, it's a review of a book he did in the '60's, and it has him standing on the whole globe, and it actually has a....... looks like an egg, behind him. So he could be Humpty Dumpty 'cause he did write about how electric media reunited the world. All the king's men couldn't put fragmented Humpty Dumpty together, but they could, once the electric environment started, create a seamless web, then the egg came back. So this is a pretty interesting picture, and that's 35 years ago, I think. So, but that is...... that could be anybody, but we anthropomorphize this one seamless thing that exists, and we say it's a human being, and usually it's the White House. So the news is the White House...... this wasn't so obvious before the Berlin Wall went down, but it actually was a factor, because the CIA and the KGB always shared information on their station cheifs, just as an example in one bureaucracy: they pretended there was a Cold War, but there was a lot of 'seamless web' within the information world. So it became obvious to people when there was only one world after the Berlin Wall, or the war fear, disappeared. So we are one thing --I don't know if you want to call it a human being --we're in this seamless web. So, how can we get perspective on that? Now, we're all separate bodies here, but it's language that's in the seamless web. We speak, then that became writing, then that became printed books, and then that became bulldozers and railroads...... all these inventions, McLuhan said, have the characteristics of words, and language. But, what is language? Is it thought? Is it grunting? How did they first communicate? Was it ESP, or what would we call ESP, a sharing of gesture-image? How did they connect? So that desire to connect between humans created a shared environment --which was language and media, every medium after-- now we're all back in the beginning, and language and media have integrated. The bodies haven't, but what extended from the bodies has become one resonating thing. So how can we get separate from that, how can we stand back, how can we express it

Because any means of expression, from a movie (say The Matrix), to going to a theme park, Disneyland, or going to a baseball game, or going to a doctor and taking a pill, those are all media, and they're all fragments of the resonating thing we all live in. Now, maybe that has come........ if we think that it's just one thing, and it's an extension of us, and the human and the seamless web are together, then consciousness can shift from the human to the machine, or the technological extension. So we can say 'it's alive', and it can say 'we're not alive', or we can say 'we're alive and it's not alive', but even in that interval, the question of what's alive and what isn't, is an effect of this seamless web we're in. Okay. In Todd Gitlin's book, he says he's gonna attempt to....... he talks about his other books, and how he talked about different media....... and he says: "in this book" (in his introduction) "I'm going to try to make a total picture of the situation we're in. I'm going to try to get a holistic, or a whole total view. I'm going to attempt to understand our reality, this (what he calls) being-with-media." Being-with-media, (it's italicized) is a way, in print form, to express what I'm saying. We're being with this one seamless web, this one node, resonating digital node, whatever that is. When we say this digital world is 0s and 1s, on and off?? That's a visualization of it. So we could take turns being the 0 or the 1. Visualization, that means alphabetic, literate, ABC level: 0, 1. Numbers were not like that before, primitive societies used to make numbers just clumps, and just take a bunch of people and say 'there's 5 people there'. There'd just be a clump, maybe 23 actual human beings, but they would just vaguely approximate, because they didn't have the visual precision of writing and the phonetic alphabet. So that's where 0 and 1comes in, so that's a visual definition, and visual extension, of 'being-with-media'. Being, we could capitalize it, Being with Media. Who's being? Us or the machine?? And by machine I don't mean a mechanical thing, it's an organic, seamless web..... see, what word are we going to use? So, when McLuhan says 'the medium is the message', he was intuiting that we're inside a medium, it was one medium! So therefore he wrote about the history of media in his books, but that was a rear-view mirror, that was an artform. He was trying to lead up to an image...... to show you the image of how we got to the post-media, post-classifications of the seamless web. But it had already been done by James Joyce. But we'll go into that later.

**4**
So, Gitlin tries to....... he says 'I'm going to try to swallow the big picture'. The point he makes, in the end, he says 'Americans are kinetic', we're a kinetically motivated culture. He picks a sensory bias and says we're kinetic, he picked that much up from McLuhan. Now here's the interesting thing: is that McLuhan says, on page 136 of the book 'From Cliche To Archetype', he says every culture has an expression that tries to give the sense of 'I know it all', 'I mastered the topic', 'I mastered the situation'. He calls it plenary awareness, just like 'full awareness'. So every culture has a phrase that indicates 'I've mastered it, I have full awareness of it, full mastery.' So he goes and does a little inventory of eight cultures. He says the English (meaning the British), they say: "I know it like the back of my hand". Marshall puts in brackets: 'visual bias?' You look at the back of the hand, that's a visual bias. You'll see why it is in relation to the palm of the hand in a minute. He then says, 'well, let's go to the palm of the hand'....... the Russians, when they want to say in their language, 'I know it, I've totally mastered it', they say "I know it like the palm of my hand." So McLuhan puts in brackets the sensory bias of that culture, he's saying the preference, the feeling of full command of a situation has a sensory bias in it, the cultural indication of the bias of the culture. So the Russians say "I know it like the palm of the hand", Marshall says that's 'iconic-tactile'. Think of iconic art in traditional Russian culture. Then he says the Germans, they say "I know it like the inside of my pocket". He says that's 'tactile interface'. Tactile is not just contact, it's the releasing and letting go. Touch, and then non-touch. If I grab this and I can't let go, the hand is useless. The fact that you can let go, and re-grip, that interval is what McLuhan understands as tactility, the ability to touch and let go. So "I know it like the inside of my pocket", McLuhan sees that........ see,he puts a question mark behind each sensory bias, I don't know if he's indicating audience participation so people will think he's not being authoritative, he's just saying 'hey, think about it, I'm not sure'. So he says "I know it like the inside of my pocket" is tactile interface. Then he has the American bias, which gives a sense of mastery; "I know it like--"..... does anybody know what Americans say, can you think of it? When they say "I know it........".....as soon as I say it, you'll recognize it.
Dave: By heart?
BOB: What?
Dave: Off by heart?
BOB: Yeah....... it's not that. But, um........ see if this is it-- *very faint voice says 'inside-out?'
Nigel: "I know it by heart" they say, yeah........
BOB: Is that what they say? Okay. What McLuhan had in there, was "I know it inside-out".
X: That's what I just said!
BOB: Oh, did you say that?? Is that what you said right now? Oh, very good.
[??? -faint]
BOB: So, you have heard Americans say that, you think.
X: I think.
BOB: But that's the one you've heard, when you hear the phrase "I know it........" Yeah, when I read that I said: 'Yeah, that's the one you hear a lot, around here, I don't know if it's Canada or the States. So, he has "I know it inside-out", so guess what the sensory bias is? In brackets, McLuhan says 'kinetic, manipulatory'.
Eric: What do you mean by kinetic, just active?
BOB: Movement. Moving around.
Eric: And manipulatory.
BOB: And he has ',manipulatory', which is interesting, because America has become the policeman, the cop, and they are given the job, for the global village, of manipulating things, through CIA and propaganda. But it's a sensory bias. And, so I'm reading this, and he [Gitlin] makes this big insight that America is kinetic! And he thinks he's telling a new thing! If he had read his McLuhan, he's just arrived at page 136 of 'From Cliche to Archetype' written 33 years ago!! 35 years ago, in the sixties, it was published in 1970. So it's interesting that he is saying kinetic....... it's these kind of things, if you know McLuhan, you find that are really revealing. If you don't know McLuhan you would never even know that, you would actually be impressed with the kinetic insight! Because McLuhan......... many people thought McLuhan would say North Americans were a visually biased people, because they saw an eye vs. an ear, which was his popular dialectic he presented. But he was really pointing out the tactile environment, and in his books, which was a print medium, which includes the eye-ear dialectic because voice and language is the content of printed works, he was..... I don't want to go into this too much yet, just to probe here..... he was showing eye-ear as the content dialectic that was necessary, a law, of the book medium. If you're going to do books, you're going to work within the eye-ear dialectic. So, after a while, if you read McLuhan closely, you'd see he says the Americans are not visually biased like the British who say "I know it like the back of my hand", they are kinetic! And that comes in with industiralism, with railroads, and then cars! And think, as McLuhan said, the most common phenomenon in American culture is dancing! That's kinetic! That is the popular artform of American culture, which is jazz, swing, rock n' roll and on. Americans are the ones who propogate........ you know, you read other cultures, they say Americans are good in rock n' roll, movies, and...... maybe they'd say cars or something, but rock n' roll and movies are kinetic. Movies are a kinetic medium, because it's an extension of your eye and your foot (according to McLuhan). So, just to finish this...... I'm leading in to how he was a kinetic-bias guy, and McLuhan had already said that. He then says the Spanish say: "I know it as if I've given birth to it". [Kenzie laughs] .....you laugh. What's the [joke] there?
Kenzie: It's too much.
BOB: Oh, you mean you know it?
Kenzie: No.
BOB: Oh, okay. So what's the sensory bias of "I know it as if I've given birth to it"? It's proprioceptive, our inner-sense dynamics.
Linus: It's also kind of 'inside-out', literally.
BOB: Right.
Nigel: And it also ties into the cursing of different cultures, kind of ties into that as well. Like, most of the Spanish curses have to do with your mother.....
BOB: Is that right?
Nigel: Whereas in Britain it's-- or in America it's about sex and defecation.
BOB: Right, yeah.
Nigel: In France it's the church, you know, you can kind of........
BOB: See, now that's something you could do a little paper on, or look into that. That's good. So, it's 'proprioceptive, visceral'. I mean, that's one of our senses, the sense of balance, the sense of what you feel inside. I call it the 'inner-kinetic', whereas the pushing, lifting, and using your muscles is kinetic. And industiralism, the mechanical era of the 18th century was an extension of our muscles, the mechanical connecting which became steel and then the huge weights they could lift. So the Spanish. So the French are "I know it au fond". A-u f-o-n-d, it's italicized, so that's a French word. It means 'in depth' I think, but he says it's auditory. The French are auditory, that's their bias. So "I know it au fond", apparently has an ear-meaning in the phrase 'au fond'. The Thailanders say "I know it like a snake swimming in water". So McLuhan-- this is really important, what we're going to get to-- he says 'that's the dance of thought among words'. Dance of thought among words. Now we get back to the original thing, when humans first interacted, how much is thought interacting and connecting before........ and they're grunting --we assume not speaking-- before words come in, it's thought, and thought can be gestural. If I go like this [big arm sweeps] that'll mean something to you, you know, you'll pick it up. So the Thailanders have an ancient sensibility: "I know it like a snake swimming in water". Okay, so we've done the French, Thailander...... so, the Japanese, who McLuhan said were the most tactile culture, therefore they're going to have a tactile bias, so their pharase is " I know it from head to toe". Head to toe, there's a gap in between, there's an interval, so they're expressing a gap sensibility, and they're masters of tactility: Zen, which is the tactile religion. It deals with the interval between thought and words, in a way. So you could kind of make a general thing of: 'the west is more eye-ear, and the east is more tactile, and more subtle, more primitive'. Not as industrialized, but we know that happened in their history. One side thing that's very important to know is that McLuhan said 'when you put television, a tactile medium, around the whole world, each culture has an identity crisis and they'll hop into another culture's sensibility to get out of the pressure that tactility is putting on them'. So the East became West..... that's why all these Asian students flooded into the colleges and taken over the left-hemisphere activity over the last thirty years, and all of the Western kids, boomer generations, go East! They either do it by Jack Kerouac, or they go to Tokyo, or they go to the Peace Corps, they go to Africa, or they take drugs! The point is, we can't handle the tactile implications, 'cause no culture had ever experienced the extension of tactility, which is television. The extension of the operations of the central nervous system, which is a ratio, organizing the ratio-proportions of different senses. Tactility organizes your sensory inputs: eye, ear, touch, smell, and then it makes a coherent consciousness. The thing that does that is tactility.

But don't just think it's in the mind or the brain, it's in the heart. Because if you look at the systole-diastole action...... you ever seen footage of a heart pumping? You know, blood's going in, blood's going out........ if you look at it, you can't see it precisely, it's like a blur 'cause it's going in four directions at the same time. That is an image of tactility, that's push-pull, at the same time. So, tactile... when McLuhan emphasized that electricity was an extension of the central nervous system, the nervous system's not just in the head, that's all through the body. So think of the heart, think of breathing....... we've extended our breath-spirit as a medium with television, and so wouldn't the culture express that?? Yellow Submarine, "all you need is love", hearts and love and all that stuff in the late 60's, which is well after the TV era in the 50's, it's computers and sattelite that's the hidden new technology in the 60's. So we have the English "I know it like the back of my hand", the Russian "I know it like the palm of my hand".......
Eric: What's the English significance, the back of my hand, that's just also tactile?
BOB: No, that's visual. McLuhan thinks that's visual. And it also has lines, look at it. Think of the linear.
Dave: You also write on it.
BOB: You write on it........ and you do more touching with that [indicating palm], you don't touch with the back of your hand, it's kind of just something you look at, people look at their fingernails, right? You feel with this, so that's tactile. So Russians I know it like the palm of my hand, that's ......
Eric: That's also visual, isn't it? The Russians?
BOB: Um, what do you mean..... 'I know it like the palm of my hand' is also still kind of visual? Yeah, well..... remember, they've always identified with the West, they were Chrisitanized, they were manuscriptized, you know, in the Dark Ages and Middle Ages, so yes, they have the--
Eric: An icon is very visual.
BOB: Yeah, it's light-through, as McLuhan talked about........ they're more Western than China, so, but they're taking this [palm]......... yeah, you could have Anglish, Russia, that's the English side of eye-culture and that's the tactile side of eye-culture. And, the Spanish thing of 'I know it like I've given birth to it', that's proprioceptive-visceral, the Germans say 'I know it like the inside of my pocket', that's tactile-interface. Now, the Germans did really well in the '90s. They basically..... they're still doing well, they're buying up all the publishing, and these people, they have big power in the internet world, they own a lot of companies...... it's interesting that Germany took over in the '90s like the Japanese took over in the '70s. We were in a tactile culture in the '70s and '80s: one-way tactile, mass medium of tactility, so the Japanese, unconsciously or whatever- or, we let them come in because they had that sensus, they could ride the tactile nature of industry in the '70s and '80s, but then they collapse in the early '90s 'cause we move into tactile-interface because the internet provides interactivity and interface, you're interacting, it's not just one-way. So it's interesting that Germans ride in on that. And so they're 'tactile-interface', good description of the internet, your experience when you're on the computer. So the French are 'I know it au fond', they're auditory, now what's interesting about the French is, they were popular- Paris was the cultural head in the first half of the 20th Century. In the radio era, which is acoustic, the French can ride that wave of their sensibilities. So you can see the Parisians, with their Jean-Paul Sartre existentialism, which is a real acoustic primitive sensibility (a retrieval of acoustic sensibility), the Parisians are the cultural centre in the first half of the 20th Century, but what's interesting is: who were the famous artists of the Parisian world?? Picasso and [Braque?] and these people, they came from Spain! Salvador Dali! So within Art, the Spanish thing did a nice twist on the acoustic effect of movies and telephone and radio, so they had the Spanish proprioceptive, because the electric nervous system, the extension of the nervous system is tactile and your inner space, your proprioceptive, so it's interesting in retrospect how cultures rise under the bias of a particular medium, and nobody's aware of it. But Marshall became aware of that process. So who did I leave out? the Thailanders: 'I know it like a snake swimming in water', the dance of thought among words........ uh, there's eight of them...... oh, Americans, so 'I know it inside-out': kinetic-manipulatory. It's interesting that they built the car culture and the assembly lines, what's known as the Fordist economy, all over the world, and that means top-down management, so they would be manipulatory, that's the kinetic bias of the industry level, of the industry medium of the 19th and early 20th Century. And McLuhan said America would eventually have the biggest identity crisis, because it was visually biased-- he never said it was kinetic biased, but it was visually biased, and that it would suffer the most. America has suffered the most, as a culture: everyone thinks it violent, and guns and all this stuff. So, it suffered that, but really it was because it was a kinetic-bias culture, and kinetic bias culture couldn't handle the tactile television situation. Now, here's the next important point: television itself is tactile because it has a lot of the senses: eye, ear, smell, and movement, the camera moves, many people when they see something in vivid color TV, they'll smell the rose..... it's not smell-o-vision, but it's activating that sense. So, it's the medium with the most sensory life, in the 50's. Now then what happens, the computer goes around it, and then the satellite goes around it, now the satellite is going around the whole planet, and it's an extension not of parts of our body, but an extension of the whole planet! This is the end point. We have extended our arms through tools, our eyes through writing, industrialism is kinetic and muscles, and we extended the tactile and proprioceptive system with electricity, and then--- and that's just parts of the human body! Then the whole planet was extended, the whole organism, because the satellite is a little programmed earth that someone can live inside of, because you can't do it...... you know, you can't live out in space. But we created an environment that you could live out in space! So we created a little Earth-medium that you can live in, so it's like an extension of the planetary organism. So that is the final punchline. So the satellite is going around the planet, and people are starting to feel that the planet is the content of the satellite, and therefore its a stage, 'cause the satellite creates a proscenium arch around the planet, and that means every previous medium becomes an actor. Not just people become an actor...... think of the demand in the 60's and 70's for performance in industry, and performance art, everybody had to perform! There's a stage metaphor there, that's because the 'global-theatre' effect of the satellite made all media and its contents become actors. McLuhan called them 'actors in the global theatre', but most people didn't understand that he meant media were actors. Now, when different media are interacting within the envelope of satellite.....
KNOCK KNOCK KNOCK
When the different media are interacting within the satellite proscenium...... [hi, bob! sorry to be late, but I'm here]..... it is a simulation of a tactile organism. Think of each medium as an extension of a sense, think of the satellite as a coherency or a detachment that's looking at the whole theatre, planetary theatre and watching the media interact, its extensions. It can be orchestrated, if it's done consciously, an orchestration of the different media..... that's miming the orchestration that the tactile organism does of all the sensory input. So, the important point about McLuhan was, yes, people say 'TV is tactile', but he was describing in the 60's the programmed environment, due to the sattelite, which meant that the environment among media had arrived at tactility. Alright? This is an important point. The environment was tactile: the interplay of all the media. Not just television as a tactile extension itself; television becomes just another player by the 60's and 70's, and the proscenium arch contains the interplay. So the mixed-corporate-media of the world, mixed-corporate-media is the interplay of all these media, so it's literally gone beyond TV per se as tactile..... all the media are interacting in a tactile way. So here's a quote, from my long essay on our site, here's a quote, first one I use, from 1962, the satellite's just gone up, listen to this, McLuhan 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." --this is Finnegans awake, because every culture was subliminally controlled by the medium it used in developing a sensory bias, like I indicated of the plenary awareness of 'I know it blah blah blah', you can see historically and technologically the bias of each culture-- he says, "[Modern man] has been the victim, the servomechanism of his technologies, his media from the beginining of time, but now because of the sheer multiplicity of them [meaning the media], he is beginning to awaken, because he can't live with them all."

*5*
Now this is a really interesting point, this is the point to begin with. What does it mean to awaken when we're doing out of pressure, what are we awakening to? Are we awakening to the fact that the mixed-corporate-media tactile media environment is forcing us to awake, so the awakening is ersatz! That's the sophisticated level McLuhan was talking about, and the only medium he could use to really lay it down like commandments from MOses was the book. See, McLuhan did not identify with being a writer, he used all media, he was intersted in the dynamics of all media. Being a writer was a minor operation. Bob Logan knows.... did the book 'Mother of Invention', the problems of doing the book in the 70s when McLuhan was half into it, you'd have to write..... it was halfhazard the way he'd do a book. And all the other writers had halfhazard times with him, you know he'd just dictate a bit and get you to fill in the other part. It wasn't that important doing a book.
Bob Logan: He couldn't write.
BOB: He couldn't write! He was just oral, he just dictated. So the thing is that he did do Understanding Media, though Ted Carpenter, his close colleague says that he wrote a lot of it, and Ted when he dies or whenever he's going to reveal his archives can prove it, he claims, with his notes from writing it. So many people think Marshall wrote Understanding Media alone. But maybe Ted did do it. But the point is, a book, McLuhan said we need books, so we can put down these incredible insights so people can think about it, to become aware of the word 'awaken', what's it mean? It doesn't mean, as the New Agers say, you wake up and you're in a rapture, you have to become aware of what's motivating you to wake up. What medium is happening? So Marshall is in a very difficult position, and the only way that he can point to the sophisticated level he's talking about, where the medium is the message, and the medium is waking us up, which on the surface would be a good thing ('man is no longer a servomechanism'), but we're only waking up because of the effect of the satellite. So he then has to be satirical, he has to prod you, so that's why McLuhan would say that all his writings are satire. Everything he wrote was satirical, no one took it that way in the 70s and 60s, they thought he was: 'I say the medium is an extension of man, blah blah blah'. If they had known that Finnegans Wake had already done all this......... McLuhan wrote a letter to Playboy in 1970, he said 'TsEliot's doctrine of the auditory imagination is already a cliche in our cutlure today, [because that's after radio and rock n roll and jazz by the 70s] but what the population is not aware of is Finnegans Wake.' They have not awakened to the meaning of Finnegans Wake. So there's the hidden ground, Finnegans Wake, he understood it no one understood it, but the Wake is the way that someone would write a tactile book. And the media are embedded, nomenclatured in there, so Marshall was always spending his life translating Finnegans Wake. Not that he worshipped the book, but the insights and the way it was written pointed to something, because Marshall later would say that Finnegans Wake and Eliot, Joyce Lewis and Pound were knee-jerk reflections of the radio effect. They were unaware of radio.... Joyce came closest to it, and he was able to project ahead to what the TV effect was. But you gotta understand that McLUhan was not a scientist, artist, sociologist, politician or anything, 'cause he realized that we were resonating on this one zone, and that one cannot be anything in the resonating zone, the tactile interval that had been digitized. You could only be something as an artform, as an afterimage. So therefore he would be an artist, he'd write a book for artists, he'd write a book for economists, likeTake Today, he'd write a book for linguists, like Cliche to Archetype, he'd write books for the populous, pop-culture, The Medium is the Massage, he'd write an academic book, The Gutenberg Galaxy, and he'd emphasize an academic as the source of it, Harold Innis. You have a building down here named after him. He was the top scholar, in a lot of ways, in Canada, so he'll emphasize Innis, but he doesn't emphasize Innis in other books, he'd emphasize James Joyce, Ezra Pound, or himself, what he'd written before. So the thing is, here is a guy who doesn't identify with any medium, he is acultural. You know like amoral, acultural? Jean Baudrillard said that McLuhan was a musician, has anyone thought of him as being a musician? But if they knew the history...... and there's a new book out called 'McLuhan in Space' by Richard Cavell, an art teacher out in British Colombia.... it's very good, he shows you what space McLuhan was working with, tactile space. You have read enough of the book to see? [To Bob L, who says 'yeah'] You see how he had to write many chapters to get you to see that? And it needs to go that, 'cause he's gotta wear away your visual bias of what you think space is. And so he does arrive and show you waht tactility is. And McLuhan's in tactile space..... so, McLuhan's definiont of imagination was: 'that faculty that is not embedded in any sense or extension of a sense [technology]', it's not embedded. To be free to play with a medium, you can't identify with it, you have to be aware of its subliminal effects on you. So, a really good artist is not merging with the medium, they're detached and working with its components, they learn to understand its components, but that requires a detachment, so McLuhan is advocating a detachment, therefore he's not going to identify with any cultural product he makes, because to stay in tune to the resonating node that was existence, a simulation of existence, he had to not identify with anything hew as doing. So June Collwood did an interview with him in 1974 and I have a copy of it.... McLuhan gets personal, talks a bit about his life, he says all his kids have an identity crisis. And June Collwood says "he says it as if they've lost their mittens!" But I have the tape of that interview that she cribbed from, or just summarized, and in it, McLuhan says.... right in the middle of it he says 'you know I have ESP', and she goes "What??". Now here's a print, academic, university guy, you couldn't talk about having ESP in the 60's and 70s and this is 1974, he says 'I have ESP', that's pretty neat. He says 'I can feel it, when a friend of mine is in New Guinea......' which would be Te Carpenter, who was in New Guinea, 'When a friend of mine is in New Guinea, I can feel it.' So she was stunned by that, you can hear it in the interview, but she didn't put that in the print version. Now you go back to an essay, in 1957 Explorations, called 'Electronics as ESP'. Now this is the key point, how is electronics ESP?? And then in later books he points out that ESP is a nineteenth-century knee-jerk concept, ESP is this and that. See, he knows that you have a certain literate version of ESP, and he needs to break that down, so he doesn't mean 'ESP' as you normally think when he says 'Electronics is ESP', he really means tactility is ESP. So here we have elctronics, an extension of ESP, which is the most paleolithic intimate environment. When humans first interacted, they didn't call it ESP but they had a very sensitive response ..... cm'on in, take a chair right here (Kevin arrives, I think) ..... they had a very intimate response with their sensory environment. In retrospect we romanticize the shaman awareness, and we call it right-hemisphere and all this, but it's natural. But as McLuhan said each new invention they made would push their awareness out into an environment, so the tools they made would limit, change the ratios in their initial sensitivity. So if electronics has brought us back to a paleolithic sensitivity, then for me to say that we are resonating in one node, and only one person, one thing can represent it, and therefore there's no relationship, there's no connection with anything, then you understand why Carpenter and McLuhan's book 'They Became What They Beheld', starts off with the phrase: "only connect", okay? What are you going to connect with? If we're all one thing, then....... as McLuhan was once asked, 'will there ever be silence?', and he said: 'objects are unobservable, only relationships among objects are observable.' So that was his answer to 'will there ever be silence?', well silence is one object, one thing, they're unobservable. We are in a situation now where we cannot observe our situation. So McLuhan would take old media like a book, and he would offer this as a mirror, but the content of the book would be writing about all the other media, making you aware of the dynamics, so that this one book like Perseus' mirror, is held up 'cause you can't look at the Gorgon monster, which is just oneness and has no relationship to anything. You can't get detached from it, so you look at a rear-view mirror media. So we have tremendous baroque spirals and effluence of media, a great renaissance of all former media! Movies, TVs, writing, books, song, poetry, bulldozers, wars, destruction, architecture, the renaissance of the twentieth century was the greatest century of making things, all of it having the room to run around because people needed any medium to be a mirror, to get a perspective on the resonance. But in the end, none of these media have any staying power, none of them! Every one of those media are in a state of panic all the time. So in the end, no medium, rear-view mirror media, have any content. And that's why McLuhan would come back to Finnegans Wake, a book that in the end has no content! No meaning, no sign that you can say 'this is what it's about', but that was a perfect way to mirror the tactile environment which has no content.

To have content you gotta have a relationship, you can't observe tactility when it's extended into a digital node. So, the term I came up with was 'Adroid Meme' to describe this, because language or any sharing between humans with any medium from ESP language and words up to now, creates a collective habit, which Richard Dawkins calls a meme, but it is a simulated meme now, it's an android meme, and it's resonating and it has nothing to connect with. So the image of that Android Meme is always the White House, the President. So George Bush....... [door creak] I just want to take a break here, the jest of honor: Dave Neufeld coming in, he's the man who made the 'McLuhan is the Message album', and my album, and he's finally arrived at the McLuhan Centre, and even Eric told them that was a good album. And he said to his mother that it was a good album. Sit here, Dave. [Thank you]
*6*
So why does George Bush apparently not finish his sentences? Why does he seem to be dumb? Why doesn't he seem to care what his media image is? Because he's totally appropriate for now. We have now arrived at the point where we're not swamped by a torrent of images and media, because the media is shrinking holeopathically, being miniaturized! These kids today feel superior to the media and information environments, it's instinctive in them. Even in their hip-hope culture, they just sample, they take fragments from different things, just put it into collage! They're not looking- they're doing Finnagans Wake! It's finally gotten down to ghetto culture. But that was because the media moulded people all through the twentieth century and made their environments tiny. So the population is not interested in communication as a sense of matching, or establishing a point, they just swim through all the media, all different forms of communication. So the sensibility, the Jerry Springer sensibility, is to get on the major centralized media and spit in its face, be an idiot in front of it, and another thing was talk radio, just rant about Bill Clinton or whatever the icons are, Hillary...... what icons the old centralized media put out, the New York Times and CBS and that. So this anarchy toward any communication in the old meaning of communication as a kind of control-matching situation has been satirized by the population, and they did that all through the '90s, so by 2000 you're going to have a President who looks like a thug and a cannibal who doesn't even care about the media, he doesn't even want to finish his sentence!! And he still can be popular! He is expressing a sensibility, and we can actually now confront the point: yeah, why should George Bush say anything, 'cause there's nobody there!! It's only him!!! It's only George Bush. So the industrial structure that he represents is running around in an identity crisis trying to locate an enemy, locate a focus for oil (where we're going to move into post-oil things), so we're seeing the Pentagon having a huge identity crisis, and it's a minor identity crisis compared to all the other media. The biggest killer in America is medicine. We've just proven it...... traditionally they say heart disease and cancer. But the biggest....... three-quarters of a million people die a year! There was only five thousand people died in Iraq in a little puny war!! Okay? So, the larger media violence is happening in other realms, and we take the old industiral hardware guys and do what Kroker calls 'abuse-value', put 'em in the White House and then laugh at them, and they run around........ but they've caught on, Bush comes and says "yeah I know you're laughing at me and I don't give a damn about you, I'm just going to ignore you! I have a job here to do for my industrial meme!!" You know what I mean? He said: 'Go shopping! Go about your business! Don't worry about me, I'm just working for my friends! For my meme!" His mean meme. I remember Frank Zingrone, when Bush was campaigning, Frank goes: 'that guy, man, he'd eat his mother.' Some people respond that way....... Now, Frank's an old P.O.B, a literate person, (Print Oriented Bastard) and so he would be really irritated by a kinetic-manipulatory who was really Chinese..... (that's why we have a great relationship with China)...... Here's an interesting thing McLuhan said about China, in the 60s, he said China was the hidden ground of all the things that were going on in the 60s, because it was the most tactile culture, it's Asian, and it was the most paleolithic compared to the industrial, a very primitive society-- not in historic, but in terms of industry, it was the most backward of the Communist Bloc. So Stuart Brand or somebody came up with the phrase in the 90s that the 90s are the 60s upside down. So what becomes-- if in the 60s China was the ground, then China becomes the figure in the 90s, and it resonates through all the culture: everyone's worried Clinton had Chinese spies in the White House, he was working with Chinese people, and China becomes the future for industry, Kissinger spends all the 90s running over the China. So China becomes figure when you reconvert...... tip over the 60s. Now how was that done? Now we get into the five schools of media ecology. So, even though I don't expect to really........ I'm miming George Bush. I don't expect people to match what I'm saying, other than little glimmerings, and it doesn't matter that you match because whatever I'm saying is just a verbal medium and very puny compared to the mixed-media that's swarming around us now and inside us. All that media storm, the torrent of images is happening inside us.
*7*
So....... um, most of you haven't read Finnegans Wake I imagine, right? Nobody knows? Well, take a look at it, you can't read the book. You can't read it! There is not one complete anything in there! But there are fragments ad you can read for a few seconds and pretend you're seeing something, but Joyce even frustrates that, he puts 60 to 100 languages in there, on one page!! So, you look for english in there. Okay, so you don't know Finnegans Wake, but you have to your homework eventually and understand that McLuhan spent his life, when he was writing books, re-doing Finnegans Wake, okay? He was re-doing the methods. But, he had the advantage, later, of being at the end of technological evolution with the TV, computer and satellite, and he could look back and see that Joyce was a reflex responding to radio, and the rest of them were. So then he could say 'well, I'm not going to talk about the cultural products of radio, study the cultural products, I'm going to study the sensibility of radio, and how it formed cubism and all the arts in different cultures, with their particular bias, and the general bias of Art as a category in western culture. So he looked at the medium. So people running around worrying about Big Brother conditioning us? McLuhan could see that the Big Brother top-down conditioning was happening in media, but it was something that people naturally swam in because you create a new environment, people are going to swim in it, because they're gonna learn from it. So that's why he said Orwell described 1900. At best 1934. So McLuhan said he was going to create a distraciton on the sidelines, to distract the triggermen, that would be the assassins Big Brother guys, and uh, what's the rest of it? Stimulate the somnambulists, to wake up the somnambulists, I think it was. So distract the bureaucrats, and yet the population swimming around in the TV-computer environment, he's going to try to wake them up. So he had two media he had to work at, that's why Don Theall thinks he was schizophrenic. Don doesn't realize he wasn't schizophrenic, he was just operating with many audiences, he had to put on a different medium, different approach-- that's formal causality, studying the audience, figure out how you want to shape the audience, how do you want to respond to their bias. Formal causality was his principle so he would be different media* in relation to different people*. So when you're writing a book, he knows that books are dead as a medium that's shaping people, but he always said 'the best book was Finnegans Wake, so I'm going to explain Finnegans Wake, and update it.' So, I've written an essay, it's called 'Literary/Aesthetic Cliche-Probes In The American Classroom-Without-Walls'........ McLuhan's favourite word for the TV world was the classroom-without-walls. And it's American because, as I said there, American culture, which contains all the media..... America produces a lot of these media, and culture contents, so they're the content of the global classroom. So how would you write a book? What would book culture produce, after McLuhan??

So, McLuhan dies in 1980. The first person to have the McLuhan awareness, and get his books published, and continue what's called the Toronto school of media ecology was Barrington Nevitt. So he put out some very good books in the early 80s. He was qualified to do it because he understood Finnegans Wake as Marshall did. Not any Joyce scholar understood McLuhan [Joyce?] like Eric, his son, and Barry Nevitt did. So Barry rolled with that, so I say that's the first replay of McLuhan's school of media ecology after he did. It's a holeopathic retrieval: he's a hologram, a real thing, emphasizing the book medium. So the first one is Barry Nevitt, replaying the Toronto school of media ecology. The next one, a couple years later, is the New York school of media ecology, and that's what's called Semiotext(e): a professor at Columbia named Sylvere Lotringer, he started putting out French thinkers like Baudrillard, Deleuze and Guattari, Lyotard, Foucault........ I think there's another one there, I can't remember......
Linus: Virilio?
BOB: Virilio, right. Those five. They swamped the Pages bookstore in the early 80s, middle 80s, they became very popular, the hip culture was into them, and eventually they became established as academic people, academic books, they were required curriculum in the universities. But Sylvere took the risk of bringing these people over, and I don't know if Sylvere knew it, I know Sylvere would discuss a little bit of this stuff, but every one of those guys was a student of McLuhan. Virilio had met McLuhan. Foucault was always being urged to meet McLuhan but he refused to. Deleuze and Guattari talk about McLuhan, and Derrida, and Baudrillard admits he was a McLuhanite. Baudrillard's first published work is a review of McLuhan's 'The Medium is the Massage' in 1967. So the point is, you now have another replay of McLuhan, out of New York City. So I call it the New York school of media ecology. The next one--- oh, I should say this. Barrington Nevitt...... this place was called the 'Centre for Culture and Technology', so Barry said 'okay......'
?: Still is.
BOB: Is it still?
?: Yeah.
BOB: Okay. Barry, as an engineer, he'd emphasize cultural products like Finnegans Wake, to satirize technological developments. The New York school did the reverse. Foucault and these guys would emphasize technological developments, and show how cultural products reflected that. So they took the opposite tack. But the third school of media ecology came out of Concordia University in Montreal, the Montreal school of media ecology, around Arthur Kroker. Arthur Kroker satirized the Toronto school of media ecology--- he had met Barry Nevitt, Barry used to speak a lot at Concordia in the early 80s--- and he satirized the New York school of media ecology. He realized, rather than get stuck in the dialectic between culture and technology, that culture and technology had merged, and come alive! That technology had taken on a life of its own. Now there's a particular quote, from 'War and Peace in the Global Village', that we have up on our website, where McLuhan says: ['people do not realize that our electric environments are organic in the fullest sense'] "The important thing to realize is that electric environments are live environments in the full organic sense." McLuhan said media were alive, if you want to take that dialectic and make an emphasis, that technology under electric conditions had become organic. So Kroker knew that, he being a Canadian was better than a New Yorker, and Barry Nevitt was..... how will I say this? replaying McLuhan litteral-- literate-- literace-- literately, replaying the..... literally, and was not aware of the newer media that the younger Generation-X kids were dealing with, and those were Kroker's students. So being a younger professor, he's in touch with the later media, so he had to come up with a newer language, so I would compliment him for getting past Barry, and getting past New York. Now the fourth school of media ecology I call the diasporic school, and that is people who were students, or........ most of them were students of McLuhan, or very involved with McLuhan, and they scattered around the world. One of them stayed here in Toronto. One of them is Bob Logan, right there, he's a member in my terms of the diasporic school. You have William Irwin Thompson, Bruce Powe, Derrick [de Kerkhove], and Neil Postman, all very involved in McLuhan. But their angle is: they, being essentially POBs, Print-Oriented-Bastards and literate academics, they saw the meaning of McLuhan's warning about literate culture. These guys were all academics, Bruce Powe is still trying to be an academic, and he does teach but he was an academic when he was first influenced, he tried to become a novelist....... But the point is: these guys love books, and they're worried about book culture, and they know McLuhan's warning, they understand enough about McLuhan that it's a serious warning, and they still want to hoick up the values, the humanist values of individualism, creativity, freedom, what we call artistic thinking and making the public smarter in literate terms....... they walked a nervous line. They would do their books but in the books say, you know, they'd be almost like McLuhan: 'this book is expendable, we're gonna try and warn you, but we could, with the computer, make people more literate and read more'. So the diasporic school, in a way, as Neil Postman is classified, as a neo-conservative media ecology. He's neo-conservative not politically, he's a liberal anarchist, but in media terms, he's for preserving 18th century literate values. So 'diasporic school' is the guys who nervously try to keep book culture going, and try to maybe stop the torrent of images, and celebrate McLuhan's preservation of literate values. They all celebrate McLuhnan as a book man, 'cause there was a bumper sticker that went around in the 60s saying: "MCLUHAN READS BOOKS!", 'cause everybody had thought that McLuhan was putting down books and was watching TV like a couch potato all the time. But, nobody understood Finnegans Wake so what do you expect, right?
Bob Logan: We should point out, though, he only read every other page.
BOB: That's right. He was a double-agent, a triple-agent, all told [?].
Bob Logan: No, he literally read every other page.
BOB: And so do you.
[pause]
Bob Logan: I don't know if I would........ [laughter muddles a few words] ....... I don't read EVERY page. Just the good ones.
BOB: But he read every other page only in serious academic books, he read every book, every page, every word in pulp fiction, and in non-serious books. He read every word!
Bob Logan: Mysteries, yeah, that was entertainment.
BOB: Because, well he said the serious books tended to be redundant, they always repeated themselves, 'cause they probably had some compex academic concept they had to keep referring to, but that's actually what print is, is a ditto device. He said it repeats itself, so if someone is really into book culture, they'll seriously repeat themselves. But pulp fiction is actually people-- Mickey Splaine [?], they write books just to get money so they can go to movies and TV and they ain't teaching kids literate values, so pulp ficiton is guys just faking books, and those were more interesting from McLuhan's point of view, right? And also they don't repeat themselves, because they don't have book sensibility, really. They're writing books so they can be made into movies! So that's the fourth school of media ecology, and so each...... Nevitt had his books out first-- I'm saying these people, these schools because these are people [who were] studying McLuhan, and understood him to a great degree, so they're qualified to be a replay of the school of media ecology. So you had the Toronto school with Barry Nevitt, then you have Semiotext(e) comes out in the early Middle Ages, then Kroker gets his books out in the late 80s, Bob and De Kerkhove get books out in the late 80s....... [to Bob Logan] You just got one out in the 80s, The Alphabet.....................right?
Bob Logan: The Alphabet of Canadian States [?]
BOB: And Powe gets a few books out, and........
Bob Logan: Let's not forget '95.
BOB: No that's later, we're coming up to that. I'm going to talk about before '95......
Bob Logan: Oh, I see. Maybe we'll make it into the fifth school.
BOB: .....and Derrick gets one book out and Thompson gets a couple books out....... there was, just for the record, Conrad Black was lobbying for William Irwin Thompson to take over the centre and oust Eric in the early....... in 83, 84, Derrick told me that. So you were going to say something, Bob?
Bob Logan: Well, I just wanted you to be able to catch your breath.
*8*
[laughter] .....but there were a couple of ideas that resonated with me. The idea that electric media is an organism.
BOB: Yeah.
Bob Logan: Electric media recalls oral culture. I'm working now on trying to understand the origin of spoken language, and there's a fellow by the name of Morton Christiansen, who came up with the hypothesis in 1994, that language is an organism which evolved in order to be easily learned by children. And that therefore you can get rid of Chomsky....... which is something that's desirable as far as I'm concerned.

BOB: Well you know, Robert, in McLuhan's thesis, the grammarian's point, he says it, is that they were the ones that understood that language was a living organism. That was the grammarian tradition. The dialecticians got too abstract and missed that point, therefore they became nominalistic, and thought you could casually name something anything! They didn't know that the name for something came out of that object, was intimately linked with it. That was the living rhetorical/grammarical tradition, whereas the nominalists had a bit of a visual bias and would split the name off from the object and think that you could put any name in there, not knowing that the name had to resonate with the characteristics of the object. So that's where I see your point, but they knew that, and McLuhan knew that, historically. Now I'm saying that organism is really tactile....... now, Marshall said that language was tactile, we don't want to just emphasize the ear.
------ Android Meme stops listening, as if in agreement.

can only post 10,000 characters (including spaces) at a time, so we've got something like 75000 characters there, woo-ha. Would you believe he went on for a whole other 74minute disc, then for hours afterward at Sleeper's place, while getting over a cold which was also showing through during the previous day's 7-hours or so of talking at Ryerson????

So that's where I see your point, but they knew that, and McLuhan knew that, historically. Now I'm saying that organism is really tactile....... now, Marshall said that language was tactile, we don't want to just emphasize the ear.

continues....

A living organism is cohering all the sensory input making coherant consciousness, so, its all the inputs and the word for all that, that interplay is tactility, right?

(audience member) That's what Merlin Donald said in the book called the origin of the modern [Mind?]

Bob: Right, he's an acedemic here, a friend was telling me about him --- Queens, right, but he's very popular right now. He's moving into Mcluhan areas unconsciously isn't he?

[yeah well we book bastards sometimes are useful arent we laughter].

Bob: Well I praise you in the end, I say that you guys do point out the rich values and create rich books within that motive and agenda.

(audience member) But in the origin of the modern mind what Merlin Donald says[meta]-communication that is facial gestures, hand signals, vocalization not verbalization, body language, that that was the first language, that had intentionality and its your tactile

Bob: that's tactile ESP, and McLuhan has on page 23 of Counterblast that he's doing the content thing, like the content of TV as movies, content of movies is novels, the content of books is speech, and either its a question or a statement - the content of speech is what? He says, non-verbal mental dance, ESP.

(audience member)Oh my Godthat's just

He always had it first, but he got that from Joyce - from Finnegans Wake, is a book of ESP, you gotta have ESP to figure out what he really meant but he's showing the dance of cognition, the drama of cognition of non verbal mental dance, and mental is gestural. Primitive man didn't know where the mind was, they didn't know it was located in the skull - we know later cultures thought it was breath that's where their consciousness was but..

(audience member) Even in his thesis he covers thisabout the gesture

Bob: Oh yeah that's very basic

(audience member) In the beginning was the word..

**************
GAP
****************

In the future, people in med schools will look at the body and the anatomy classes and they'll have the TV body melded on there maybe in the form of a tattoo - they'll also have the post mediumof TV - the chip body. Now, the popular culture always expresses this. What is popular - which is what your mother would have 'died' if she knew about in the 1950's that everybody in the 80's and 90's would have been running around with tattoos all over them at the age of 13. They also wouldn't have liked the fact of putting little studs in their ears, genitals, chest tits, wherever, you know what I mean? I see the tattoo as McLuhan said TV tattoos are our skin, skin is tactile, thats the external metaphor of tactility - its the thing that holds the whole body together and is the physical or whatever, biological version of the internal tactility. So we, TV , tattoos to tactility, so kids and everybody adopted tattooness so tattoo became a non-verbal way of communicating and acknowledging the TV body.and the chip body which comes later, is like a little crystal, its moving towards that, that's the stud you put in your ear, or your nose or your tongue alright? Thats the symbol of the chip body, which is spread through the culture, McLuhans point that popular culture, and high brow culture is always reflecting the present which is not known cause the fish don't know they're in waterso, we have to realize that we have a physical body, no, we don't know what our bodies are and I call that the mystery body - we have been exploring our body for a millenia, over the last hundred years we were told the body was made up of chemicals, and chromosones and cells and genes and all that IG Farben stuff, "biology" in quotes - that's what we think our physical body is but unbenonced to us other bodies have been growing. Many cultures aknowledge the spiritual body, which is, I call the astral body and its just the part of the body that the mystery body, which is what we're made - we don't know what we are made up of but we do know that that mystery body longs for something greater than itself, or another dimension, some release or whateverand some cultures believe there is another place and they [coughing] (go there?)

So we have the astral body, there's our basic doubleness, the physical body and the astral body.excuse me, the mystery body - but the west says its a bag of chemicals. The east or other non west cultures say there's also the astral body. We express the astral body just by having a religion. So we have the physical body and the astral body, that's our basic doubleness. You could say it's mind-body, soul-body. The Android Même has simulated that doubleness with the TV body which is what we can see and experience [ ] so its a miming of our physical IG Farben chemical body from the west point of veiw. The chip body is a miming simulation of the astral body because nobody can see the chip network, youre just thereas Arthur Clarke says all technology is magic, you think its magic, you do this and there it is, you are cloned ESP, you've cloned the astral parts of ourselves. So we have four bodies, for the west, their interpretation of this mystery body is physical, then we have the astral body. The simulation is the TV of the physical and the chip as simulation to the astral, but there are five bodies. We are still exploring what we are and we've just realized now we have four constituents there may be more things to discover, where we're at that point in a hundred years where everything's disappeared, what body is that? And what's the body that knows if it presses that button in 500 years and we'll forget everything So we're still exploring what we are - and what we are is a mystery body that we're still learning about. So we are mystery body, we now know it seems we have a physical component, an astral component, but Bob knowledge brings in the TV component and the chip component so always insist that we have four bodies and my wife did it on CNN a couple weeks ago. She was on talking about colds and flu's and alternative remedies with these three android même processors, three women imitating The Veiw it seems to be a même you cant have a talk show unless you have three women because you clone every standard neilsen rating breaker so the veiw format, which has four women is on this little fringe channel, the Financial Network within CNN, so these three women are interviewing Carolyn, so they say well these are all great to have these remedies, but, I'll take them when I feel I got a cold, but I would like to know I'm gonna have a cold, so I can take it, I can't feel the cold in me until I feel it, then its too late so Carolyn said Well the solution to that is become aware of your physical body, tune into it several times a day, just start feeling it, say, do I feel anything off? So she advocated that but then she said, but the problem is, we have a TV body and a chip body and that distracts us from our awareness of the physical body so its very hard to tune in to your physical body and they said hmmmm ok. [laughter] then they said Well great having you here, Dr. Dean [laughter] so it was over, but, there's someone using Bob knowledge, I recommend you all do it it will explain a lot of things.

BonEcho
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Re: Bob at the Mcluhan Centre
« Reply #14 on: Mar 16^th, 2004, 10:37pm »

I met someone last week who works with ghetto criminals in New York City, kids, and she says they don't care about having social community and respect. They just like listening to their walkmans and watching tv. I said youre talkingyoure interpretting that "being" there as a physical body that has social community that's only one fifth of themselves or one quarter - don't bring in the mystery body that confuses everybody but one quarter, the physical astral tv and chip - youre just talking to one quarter of that person. When a person says I don't care about social community that's the TV body speaking, the one that must consume and breathe, like oxygen all the media diet that the tv and chip body provides. So she says yeah that makes sense, once you say it, it makes total sense. We got more than one organ, than what we're taught [ comment in bkgd, "distracting the others.vying for the attention" ] They all need to be fed, you need to breathe, the physical body needs oxygen, media content, which is what this guy realizes in the end.Media are REAL we breathe this stuff, were not gonna stop it its just going to keep coming! Get USED to it! And so he lays out the eight ways you can respond think of the [laughter] and this is the punchline [more laughter] I started with this, I gotta go full circle - he has eight types of media consumption, trying to control the sense of a media torrent, the first thing is to become a fan, one strategy is to become a totally obsessed fan, over one, some media content. The next strategy is to become a content critic, he got that much from McLuhan and Neil Postman that there's form and content, so you argue with the content, that's another mental posture as you consume the android même. The third level is the paranoid, he actually thinks something is being said, somethings being controlled and he's got to deal with that, doesn't know there's nothing there controlling anything, alright? That's the paranoid, the next one is the exhibitionist.the one who says well, since its all phatic I'll just do something absurd, that's the Jerry Springer show, alright, that's another stance. All these would be the mythic stages of the resonating around the nowhere zone and adopting transitory stages. We all go through all these stages, ourselves at different points. So the fifth one is the ironist, and he goes in to describes it, I just assume you getting a general meaning of what it means, the ironist takes an ironic veiw, accepts the media, puts it down but still loves watching it the next day, sorta half believes it. The next strategy is the jammer, a whole alternative culture is geared around jamming media, hackers, alright? They think its worth hacking, they believe it. Then there's the secessionist, who says I won't even adopt media, forgetting that speech is media, see they still think media-electric, that media is only electric media but anyway they try to seceed. Then the final strategy is to abolish the whole stuff, the abolitionist. So you can be a fan, a content critic, an exhibitionist, a paranoid, an ironist, a jammer , an abolitionist or a secessionist. Those are the eight strategies the gurdieffian archetypes if you want to get cool - that's the new Android Meem octave - and I rest my case with that amazing abstract scintilation about gurdieff - thank you [laughter & applause]

Michael Edmonds: Bob, just by way of thanks, I hope you will come back .even by [ ], 'cause I know you're in New York now or maybe we could get you on a video conference or something and do part 2

Bob: Android Même would like that

[laughter]

"A culture of quantum fluctuations where you can only know that you have never seen what you thought you were looking at because you have never really heard what you were listening to."