The postmodern theorist Bob cites as his best guide to the vocabulary of the 1980s–90s postmodernists, and the fourth figure of the Tiny Note Chart (with LaRouche, McLuhan, and William Irwin Thompson). Kroker stands for the postmodern/"holeopathic" register and is mapped to the homeopathy of the MIHR device. Bob returns to him for vivid images of how "flatlined" the culture is. New to it — start with dialogue 12.
Across the dialogues
Enters as the chart's fourth figure — the postmodern register, mapped to the device's homeopathy
Bob reads Kroker as the best inventory of postmodern jargon (e.g. "recombinant commodity"), replaying the terms with a spin of his own.
"Kroker was a... good replay of a lot of these terms. But he had a nice spin on it. He'd add something to it."Bob Dobbs, The Resonant Interval, Dialogue 12 (28 Jan 2021), 23:41
Kroker's image for how dire the flatline is — the genes have abandoned the body for the virtual.
"Kroker says our genes left our bodies and leaped into the virtual technologies. Our genes abandoned us."Arthur Kroker, read by Bob Dobbs, The Resonant Interval, Dialogue 12 (28 Jan 2021), 1:07:40
In the MIHR-parts mapping, Kroker is the homeopathy, a process Bob traces to Baudrillard.
"Kroker is easy. He's holeopathic because it comes from Baudrillard."Bob Dobbs, The Resonant Interval, Dialogue 12 (28 Jan 2021), 2:14:38
The man behind the figure — Data Trash and the virtual class, his turn to Marxism, and the Cape Breton confession after his wife's death
Kroker's book with Michael Weinstein — Data Trash (1994), a year before the internet went popular — updates Marx's Capital with a new "virtual class" beyond the old class structure.
"they did Data Trash in 1994. That's a year before the Internet becomes a popular phenomenon."Bob Dobbs, The Resonant Interval, Dialogue 14 (18 Feb 2021), 51:31
In a newly posted, unusually personal talk after his wife's 2018 death, Kroker "goes to Cape Breton to find out who he is" — the private register he never allowed in his writing.
"he goes to Cape Breton to find out who he is."Arthur Kroker, read by Bob Dobbs, The Resonant Interval, Dialogue 14 (18 Feb 2021), 54:40
Cameron's standing objection to Kroker (and "many Canadian intellectuals") — he leans on Heidegger in bad translations with no German; if Heidegger is that important, "you have to learn good German."
"then you have to learn good German. That's just the law of the thing."Cameron McEwen, The Resonant Interval, Dialogue 14 (18 Feb 2021), 57:46
Made the template for quadrophrenia — his refusal to choose among Innis, McLuhan, and Grant becomes the model juggling Bob generalizes into the four-part split
Bob relays a 2009 interview as the template for quadrophrenia — refusing to choose among Innis, McLuhan, and Grant, Kroker "juggle[s] all three," casting McLuhan as "technological humanism," Innis as "technological determinism," and Grant as the theory of it.
"McLuhan is technological humanism."Arthur Kroker, quoted by Bob Dobbs, The Resonant Interval, Dialogue 35 (26 Aug 2021), 1:13:01
Cited for the archiving mania — Kroker's name for the internet-age compulsion Bob folds into the Android Meme as archive
Bob invokes Kroker's "archiving mania" as the diagnosis of the internet-age compulsion to archive — the personal-archivist role that is the Android Meme's afterimage.
"And Kroker talks about this in some of his books, the archiving mania."Arthur Kroker, quoted by Bob Dobbs, The Resonant Interval, Dialogue 36 (9 Sep 2021), 59:22
Enlisted and corrected in one motion — his latest book adds Cochrane and Macpherson to the Toronto School, but his "foundational" Havelock–McLuhan debate is thrown out for mistaking McLuhan's tactile culture for a revived oral one, and his snub of Cameron made the type case of "Canadianism"
Bob's rejection of Kroker's closing thesis — Kroker ends his latest book making the Havelock–McLuhan debate "the foundational debate of our issues today," Havelock grasping oral culture's reactionary nature while McLuhan naively celebrated its return; Bob answers that McLuhan "predicted the tactile culture, not the oral culture," so Kroker has invented an issue to write himself into the Toronto School.
"McLuhan predicted the tactile culture, not the oral culture."Bob Dobbs, The Resonant Interval, Dialogue 49 (19 May 2022), 1:50:46
Turned from a quoted authority into the series' negative example — the figure whose prose is granted real power precisely so that the line between naming a condition and finding the way out of it can be drawn on him, and whose ambition to supersede McLuhan is read as the very move that forecloses it
The objection is put on competence before it is put on method — the German lineage Kroker builds his book from is one he reads in translation, which is where Cameron's larger charge of description-without-exit starts.
"And all of them are Germans, and Kroker doesn't know German very well."Cameron McEwen, The Resonant Interval, Dialogue 59 (27 Oct 2022), 1:56:41
Cameron's most generous and most damaging reading — Kroker is credited with sensing the magic circle he cannot name, so the failure is of articulation rather than of insight.
"Kroker may have some sort of unconscious... understanding of what that new magic circle must be. But instead of articulating that, what he does is articulate the problems of the old system."Cameron McEwen, The Resonant Interval, Dialogue 59 (27 Oct 2022), 2:05:50
Kroker is placed in a role rather than judged — he stands to the series as Nietzsche stood to Heidegger, a thinker whose problems have to be taken over and turned by someone else.
"So what Heidegger does with Nietzsche is more or less what we were just talking about Kroker."Cameron McEwen, The Resonant Interval, Dialogue 59 (27 Oct 2022), 2:07:24
The formula that lets the dialogues keep quoting him — the solution is present in the text as an implication its author cannot cash, which makes reading him a retrieval operation rather than an endorsement.
"Kroker actually kind of implicates the solution to what he's talking about, but he does not know that he does so."Cameron McEwen, The Resonant Interval, Dialogue 59 (27 Oct 2022), 2:07:49
The ambition itself is the error — "beyond" is a Gutenbergian move, so trying to supersede McLuhan is what guarantees falling short of him.
"Kroker wants to go beyond McLuhan. The problem with that is it gets into linearity and it gets away from what I regard as the only possible solution."Cameron McEwen, The Resonant Interval, Dialogue 59 (27 Oct 2022), 2:08:36
Bob extends the diagnosis past the man to a generation trained by him — problem-finding as a professional habit, the vocational form of the same locked-in description.
"they use the word problematic. They're always writing and they've learned in their their Kroker world to Find new problems."Bob Dobbs, The Resonant Interval, Dialogue 59 (27 Oct 2022), 2:13:31
The pendulum swings back from the previous session's negative example — Kroker is used rather than judged, supplying the body-vocabulary Bob needs, even as the session shows the citing running ahead of the page actually open
Bob attributes the session's governing phrase to Kroker and then, checking the page, finds it in neither quoted passage — an unusually clear instance of the archive being quoted from memory of the whole corpus rather than from the text in hand.
"So Kroker has this term surplus flesh."Bob Dobbs, The Resonant Interval, Dialogue 60 (17 Nov 2022), 4:03
Kroker enlisted as the empirical wing of Bob's five-body scheme — where McLuhan said extensions, Kroker catalogues the same process as organs already interior to the body, which is what makes him usable rather than merely quotable here.
"Kroker does a lot of analysis of the prosthetics in people. The new organs, technical organs that are in people."Bob Dobbs, The Resonant Interval, Dialogue 60 (17 Nov 2022), 49:56
A rare citation of Kroker as corroboration rather than as foil — Body Drift's multiplicity of bodies is read as independent arrival at Bob's own overlay, the one place in the series where Kroker is credited with being "on to what I'm talking about."
"Arthur Kroker uses this projection all through a book called Body Drift, a recent book of his."Bob Dobbs, The Resonant Interval, Dialogue 60 (17 Nov 2022), 53:01
Cited once and only as a symptom — the recent book appears not as a source but as evidence that the one-sided reading the session traces to 1970 is still running, so a figure the series has spent whole sessions weighing is here reduced to a data point in someone else's argument
The book is introduced as continuation rather than contribution — its Havelock is set against a McLuhan who "can't see any problem to modernity," which is exactly the caricature the session dates to Carey's 1970 essay.
"The book that was just published a few years ago by University of Toronto Press, by Kroker, is specifically on Havelock being more insightful about the modern world than McLuhan."Cameron McEwen, The Resonant Interval, Dialogue 62 (22 Dec 2022), 1:13:48
Attached to a specific cell of Bob's 1995 chart — the Kroker quadrant is identified with tactility squared and with the Android Meme, fixing a name that had floated free of the diagram
The naming is also a dating device — the chart that carries Kroker's name was drawn before Bob had the Tech Body at all, so the quadrant marks how far the scheme reached in 1995 and where it stopped.
"So I have the Kroker quadrant is tactility squared."Bob Dobbs, The Resonant Interval, Dialogue 64 (2 Feb 2023), 1:14:17
His quadrant put to work as a diagram of the isolated individual — "satellite squared" and "surplus flesh" carry the session's account of the one-four, with Cameron reading the satellites as the Gutenberg Galaxy's failed consolidation
The quadrant is read as a portrait of a person rather than a period — the merged one and the four spinning fragments are what an individual now is.
"the Kroker quadrant is about the Chip Body and the Android Meme. And it's symbolized by the number 14."Bob Dobbs, The Resonant Interval, Dialogue 65 (16 Feb 2023), 38:02
The name gives the chart its image — satellites orbiting not a planet but a subject, each one a candidate identity the subject keeps mistaking for itself.
"the Kroker quadrant is called satellite squared. So exactly, we're becoming satellited individually."Bob Dobbs, The Resonant Interval, Dialogue 65 (16 Feb 2023), 39:43
Kroker supplies the term for what is left of the body once the machine takes over the extending — flesh in excess of any function.
"That's a Kroker phrase, surplus flesh."Arthur Kroker, quoted by Bob Dobbs, The Resonant Interval, Dialogue 65 (16 Feb 2023), 1:20:43
Reduced to a single title doing precise work — Panic Encyclopedia is produced as the name for the escalation Bob has just traced from McLuhan's 1946 hasty accusation to present-day crossfire, so Kroker supplies the period's label rather than its analysis
Kroker is invoked as a namer rather than a theorist here — the escalation from argument to outrage already has its account from McLuhan, and what was missing was the word for the condition it produced.
"That's Kroker's book, Panic Encyclopedia."Bob Dobbs, The Resonant Interval, Dialogue 69 (11 May 2023), 1:22:29
Raised from chart-figure to the only writer who kept going — credited with a Baroque spiral on McLuhan and with describing, in 2012, a body the Tech Body had not yet arrived to occupy
Kroker placed in the same succession Bob has spent the night building — each figure elaborating rather than replacing, which puts Kroker where McLuhan stands relative to Lewis.
"he does add a Baroque spiral to McLuhan. I guess like McLuhan did to Lewis."Bob Dobbs, The Resonant Interval, Dialogue 70 (25 May 2023), 2:15:12
The one point in the session where McLuhan is said to stop short — discarnation named as a limit Kroker's vocabulary passes.
"Definitely Kroker is describing a lot more than the simple word discarnate, which is as far as McLuhan got."Bob Dobbs, The Resonant Interval, Dialogue 70 (25 May 2023), 2:15:18
Kroker's phrase for what Bob calls the machines extending the machines — the body left on the sidelines of an evolution it no longer supplies the terms for.
"flesh becomes surplus."Arthur Kroker, quoted by Bob Dobbs, The Resonant Interval, Dialogue 70 (25 May 2023), 1:22:37
The sentence from Bob's own book that fixes Kroker's place in it — sole occupant of a field, which is what licenses the long unglossed quotation that ends the session.
"it seemed that the only writer tackling the new shrunken digital membrane was Dr. Arthur Kroker."Bob Dobbs, The Resonant Interval, Dialogue 70 (25 May 2023), 1:41:23
The apparatus of Body Drift is three thinkers Bob has no independent use for, which sets up the session's one unresolved debt.
"That's Arthur Kroker in a book called Body Drift, subtitled Butler, Hayles, and Haraway. Those are three feminists."Bob Dobbs, The Resonant Interval, Dialogue 70 (25 May 2023), 2:14:22
Bob registers the mismatch and declines to settle it — the writer he calls the only one describing the Tech Body builds on figures Bob reads against, so the endorsement has to survive its own foundations.
"The people investigating it go back to... Butler, but Kroker is celebrating Butler here, and Hayles and Donna Haraway."Bob Dobbs, The Resonant Interval, Dialogue 70 (25 May 2023), 2:14:39
The credit granted last session is priced — the long quotation finally gets worked clause by clause rather than admired whole, and the verdict that comes out is generous and fatal at once, since he is reaching for something real and the reaching is itself the problem, so the prose that made him indispensable is also what keeps him from arriving
The night's verdict, and the one that reverses last session's — Kroker's difficulty is diagnosed as reaching rather than obscurity, which credits the ambition while denying it the landing.
"His metaphor exceeds his grasp."Bob Dobbs, The Resonant Interval, Dialogue 71 (15 Jun 2023), 13:27
The source of the vocabulary is named as a survey, not a system — Kroker's terms are inherited from the six figures he anthologized, which is why Bob can treat "possessed individualism" as a citation rather than a thesis.
"He's done a book on about six of the postmodern people called The Possessed Individual, and he has these very complex essays about all of them."Bob Dobbs, The Resonant Interval, Dialogue 71 (15 Jun 2023), 11:15
Cameron's more forgiving reading, and the one Bob then sharpens — the prose is a working-out rather than a finished account, which makes its excess a symptom of honest labour rather than of style.
"I read this sort of passage in Kroker as him trying to come to terms with it himself."Cameron McEwen, The Resonant Interval, Dialogue 71 (15 Jun 2023), 13:14
Used twice as the archive's naming instrument — the screenal economy for what analog media became, and the flip of Deleuze and Guattari for what a body now is
Kroker supplies the word for the condition the whole first hour describes — a screenal existence not confined to any one device, which Bob then routes into his own indoor-meme and tech-body terms.
"Kroker has it down when he calls it a screenal economy, and maybe other people did too."Arthur Kroker, read by Bob Dobbs, The Resonant Interval, Dialogue 72 (13 Jul 2023), 17:21
Kroker's method named as inversion — "bodies without organs" turned into organs without bodies, which fits the floating, splayed Chemical Body better than the original did.
"Kroker flipped it, as he did with all the postmodern archetype guys."Arthur Kroker, read by Bob Dobbs, The Resonant Interval, Dialogue 72 (13 Jul 2023), 42:32
Given his sharpest assessment yet — the panic writing is credited as accurate and then bounded, with the Catholic question named as the exact place his sight stops
The vagueness is doing work — Bob needs disappearance to be the shared postmodern subject rather than anyone's discovery, so that Kroker's contribution can be measured as degree.
"I mean, I think it was Virilio, he talked about the disappearance of the postmodern era."Bob Dobbs, The Resonant Interval, Dialogue 73 (27 Jul 2023), 23:18
The limit is located precisely — not in what Kroker perceived, which matches McLuhan's, but in whether the perception left an exit; and Cameron ties that difference to the freedom that let McLuhan stay Catholic.
"Kroker only saw McLuhan up to a certain point, right? That McLuhan had seen what Kroker saw, but he saw the way to get out of that cul-de-sac, and Kroker didn't."Cameron McEwen, The Resonant Interval, Dialogue 73 (27 Jul 2023), 23:49
Kroker's method is quoted in his own terms — the prose is not describing panic from outside but conceding that the writer is inside the possession he is documenting.
"I'm doing panic writing. I can't get beyond the possession."Arthur Kroker, quoted by Bob Dobbs, The Resonant Interval, Dialogue 73 (27 Jul 2023), 24:16
Bob extends Kroker's own term past where Kroker took it — if the body is surplus then so is the thinking, which is what makes the writer irrelevant to what he is witnessing.
"So it's not only surplus flesh, it's surplus pattern recognition, surplus minds."Bob Dobbs, The Resonant Interval, Dialogue 73 (27 Jul 2023), 25:00
The collaborator the byline omits — Bob puts Mary Louise Kroker in the role the archive keeps finding beside a named body of work, the one it assigns to Marge Stewart with McLuhan.
"Arthur couldn't do what he was doing without Mary Louise."Bob Dobbs, The Resonant Interval, Dialogue 73 (27 Jul 2023), 1:03:01
A systems-theory training sits oddly under the panic prose, and Bob leaves the mismatch standing rather than resolving it into a development.
"I think Kroker wrote his thesis on Talcott Parsons, another influence."Bob Dobbs, The Resonant Interval, Dialogue 73 (27 Jul 2023), 1:06:06
Used purely as a naming instrument for a second session running — Kroker supplies neither diagnosis nor despair here, only two coinages precise enough to carry Bob's own periodization, so his standing in the archive shifts from rival theorist to supplier of vocabulary
The one word that collapses Bob's own five-stage sequence into a single condition — which is why he can concede a viewer who has never seen television is nonetheless fully inside it.
"I like the way Kroker subsumes these stages, television, instant replay, the digital, the Android Meme, what's the other one, and the Global Theater, as the screenal."Bob Dobbs, The Resonant Interval, Dialogue 74 (17 Aug 2023), 1:18:13
Kroker's term is given a limit as well as a use — it names the stage that still only massages, so the Tech Body is what the screenal becomes when it stops being passive, and Bob keeps the more violent half of the sequence for himself.
"The screenal is the passive massager compared to the Tech Body."Bob Dobbs, The Resonant Interval, Dialogue 74 (17 Aug 2023), 1:18:33
Kroker earns his place by inverting a canonical phrase rather than adding to it — and the inversion is what lets Bob describe an afterimage made of detachable parts with no body left to belong to.
"Deleuze and Guattari talk about the body without organs. But Kroker comes along and talks about organs without bodies."Bob Dobbs, The Resonant Interval, Dialogue 74 (17 Aug 2023), 2:04:00
The abstraction cashed out organ by organ, which is what makes the flesh left behind measurable as surplus — the parts are in circulation as figures while the body they came from is not.
"The digital ear, the digital tongue that Kroker talks about, the floating parts of the splayed S-P-L-A-Y-E-D of the Chemical Body."Bob Dobbs, The Resonant Interval, Dialogue 74 (17 Aug 2023), 2:04:18
Stops being only a source and becomes a comparison case — his prose set beside a dying man's as two instances of the same straining, and his own reading of McLuhan named as the misreading to avoid
Kroker named as a carrier of the misreading rather than an authority on it — the page's most direct statement that his McLuhan is not the archive's.
"even today there's all sorts of articles or books even, and even by people like Kroker, that continue to see McLuhan as some sort of utopian TV guy."Cameron McEwen, The Resonant Interval, Dialogue 77 (9 Nov 2023), 26:49
The long passage they never reach gets read anyway, as a style rather than a thesis — Kroker's prose treated as symptom of the trap it describes.
"is very close to what Kroker was doing in this long quote where we are. That is, he's trying to use language to see if somewhere there's a trap door or some sort of balloon that again. can be used either up or down to get out."Cameron McEwen, The Resonant Interval, Dialogue 77 (9 Nov 2023), 56:27
Put to work at last — the passage deferred across two sessions is finally read, and Kroker's role in the book is stated outright as a gauge of extremity rather than a source of doctrine
Kroker's function in the book is stated without flattery — he is selected for going further than Bob's own prose would, which makes the citation a measuring instrument rather than an endorsement.
"I picked Kroker. I'm glad I can find a quote that illustrates what I'm trying to get at. And it's usually very complicated, but it's extreme enough about the situation you were just describing."Bob Dobbs, The Resonant Interval, Dialogue 78 (16 Nov 2023), 1:46:02
The verdict repeated after the reading, with the extremity now demonstrated rather than promised — the quote earns its place by being unbelievable on its face.
"I'm glad I read Kroker to have this quote to stick it in here to show how extreme it is."Bob Dobbs, The Resonant Interval, Dialogue 78 (16 Nov 2023), 2:10:39
Supplies the frame the book's last chapter is built inside — his dark Tetrad is read out entire and then annotated rather than adopted, absorbed into the chart as a fourth quadrant with Bob's own vocabulary written over it
The citation is exact to the page, which is how Bob signals that this is the chapter's structural borrowing rather than another illustrative quote.
"I think it's in his book, yeah. Arthur Kroker, Exits to the Post-Human Future, 2014, page 177."Bob Dobbs, The Resonant Interval, Dialogue 80 (14 Dec 2023), 2:21:08
The dark Tetrad inverts each of McLuhan's four laws into a subtraction — the same instrument run backwards, measuring loss instead of extension.
"not what is enhanced, but what is disappeared by very technological, maybe it should be every, by every technological innovation. Not what is retrieved, but what is abandoned by the fast technological recycling of the natural and social worlds."Arthur Kroker, read by Bob Dobbs, The Resonant Interval, Dialogue 80 (14 Dec 2023), 2:22:58
Bob annotates rather than adopts — Kroker's four subtractions are relabelled as holeopathic effects, which folds a rival's schema into Bob's chart without discarding it.
"the mirror image is what's disowned, prohibited and excluded that's what the Tech Body does to everybody so what it says what he actually says now I add in holeopathic effect"Bob Dobbs, The Resonant Interval, Dialogue 80 (14 Dec 2023), 2:22:44
The sentence Bob rates as Kroker's best is the one that names technology's pull as appetite rather than utility — the point at which Kroker reaches something McLuhan did not live to describe.
"that is at the heart of what Hannah Arendt called the negative being of technological society, a technological destiny that can be so deeply seductive because it contains the tangible, palpable scent of a death drive in hypermotion."Arthur Kroker, read by Bob Dobbs, The Resonant Interval, Dialogue 80 (14 Dec 2023), 2:31:56
Connections
The chart's fourth figure — the postmodern/homeopathic register, crystallized 1980 (Reagan, "the virtual president").
In the chart's "vortices," Kroker is the afterimage whose analog-era ground is Yeats.
Kroker has plural bodies already; Bob narrows his own claim to having put them in order.