T. S. Eliot's phrase for the feeling for syllable and rhythm that reaches below conscious thought, retrieves the most ancient material, and fuses it with the newest — quoted by McLuhan more often than almost any other borrowed sentence. In this series it functions less as a doctrine than as a threshold: Bob mastered it in the 1960s and then had to work out what it means that machines now do it. Dialogue 78 has the full reading and the reversal.
Across the dialogues
Read out in full for the first time and then immediately demoted — Bob turns Eliot's definition from a possession into a rear-view mirror, which is how a phrase the series had been citing becomes something it has to get past
The frequency is offered as evidence of load-bearing use rather than fondness — a sentence McLuhan returns to that often is doing structural work in the theory.
"I have a post somewhere where I set out all the different times that McLuhan quotes that. I think there's like 11 or 12 times that he quotes it verbatim."Cameron McEwen, The Resonant Interval, Dialogue 78 (16 Nov 2023), 49:36
The definition read out at length so the mechanism is visible: a descent and a return, which is the same shape Cameron has been ascribing to McLuhan's whole method.
"What I call the auditory imagination is the feeling for syllable and rhythm penetrating far below the conscious levels of thought and feeling, invigorating every word, sinking, sinking to the most primitive and forgotten... returning to the origin and bringing something back, seeking the beginning and the end."TS Eliot, read by Bob Dobbs, The Resonant Interval, Dialogue 78 (16 Nov 2023), 51:35
The turn that makes the phrase a media-theoretical object — once machines perform the descent and return, the poet's faculty stops being a human achievement and becomes an environment.
"well, it's being mimed by technologies, the new electric organicism."Bob Dobbs, The Resonant Interval, Dialogue 78 (16 Nov 2023), 52:28
Bob dates the demotion precisely, which lets him argue that anyone still working the auditory imagination is operating a retrieved form rather than a live one.
"he says in the letter to Playboy that that quote is talking about ordinary awareness by 1970."Marshall McLuhan, read by Bob Dobbs, The Resonant Interval, Dialogue 78 (16 Nov 2023), 52:49
What replaces the aesthetic faculty is given a period-appropriate name, which measures the size of the shift Bob is claiming: not a better reading practice but a different order of perception.
"To look at the drama of the interplay of the forms of technology, that's the new LSD trip without taking LSD."Bob Dobbs, The Resonant Interval, Dialogue 78 (16 Nov 2023), 53:23
Connections
Eliot's definition, from the 1933 Use of Poetry lectures, which McLuhan quotes verbatim eleven or twelve times.
Bob takes McLuhan's Playboy letter to mean the auditory imagination had become ordinary awareness by 1970, while the Wake's reality had not.