McLuhan's 1969 typographic book, designed with Harley Parker and named after Wyndham Lewis' Blast. It recurs across the dialogues more often than any other McLuhan title of its size, and almost never as an argument — Bob cites it by page for single compressed sentences that say in one line what the major books take chapters to approach. New to it — dialogue 60 shows the characteristic use, two separate page-citations deployed as evidence within a single session.
Across the dialogues
Enters the vault as the series' most-cited short text, the book Bob reaches for when he needs a formulation McLuhan never repeated at length — here supplying both the earth as spent nose cone and the sentence that relocates the archetype into media
The book's most consequential single line for the series — it is where McLuhan relocates the archetype out of the private psyche and into the media themselves, the move Bob elsewhere credits as his overwriting of Jung.
"They're the archetypes of the social unconscious, he calls them. Page 31 of Counterblast."
The citation habit at its most typical — a four-word image lifted from the book to carry an argument about surplus population that Kroker's prose had been labouring at length.
"And I could have put that in quotes, because McLuhan in Counterblast 69 calls the Earth an old nose cone."
The book pressed into service as a gloss on a harder text — when McLuhan's claim that writing "retrieved the private individual man" stalls the session, Bob reaches for a Counterblast phrase to say what the Rolling Stone line meant.
"He's talking like the private citadel of consciousness, you know, that phrase in Counterblast."
Stops being quarried for phrases and is read as a position — two of its lines, the 1954 blessing and the 1969 citadel, anchor opposite ends of a five-quotation argument, so the book becomes the spine of a doctrine rather than a source of epigraphs
The 1969 sentence is treated as the book's unassimilated remainder — a flat exemption from media effect dropped into a text otherwise devoted to them, which Bob reads as undoing seventy pages of argument and nobody has answered.
"The citadel of individual consciousness has not fallen, nor is it likely to fall, for it is not accessible to the mass media."
The 1954 blessing is promoted from an aphorism to evidence, joining four other passages to make separateness a doctrine McLuhan held rather than a mood he occasionally struck.
"bless the locomotives whistling on the prairies, proclaiming the separateness of man,"
The opening of the 1954 text is used to date McLuhan's vocabulary rather than to state a thesis — the absence of tactility here is what lets Cameron place the tactile turn six years later.
"Until writing was invented, we lived in acoustic space"
Supplies the form for a contemporary figure — its spectre of communism is transposed onto "the algorithm," the name Bob says the nerd world has given to an environment it cannot see
Bob puts a 1954 rhetorical device to work on a 2023 vocabulary — the point is not that the algorithm is communism but that both are names for an environment felt as lurking, which is what makes the borrowing legitimate rather than decorative.
"Well, we have the specter of the matrix, and people are calling it the algorithm, which is lurking there."
Its authorship reopened as a dispute in the room — Bob's account that George Thompson did the design work in New York meets Cameron's flat contradiction, leaving the credit unsettled on the record
A first-hand account, relayed second-hand, that reassigns the book's making — and the strongest form of a claim the series has only gestured at before.
"Thompson did all the work he told me down in New York making Counterblast Harley wasn't doing it he was partying in New York"
Cameron grants Thompson the assembly but not the design, which is precisely the half Bob is trying to hand him.
"Thompson uh just took a whole bunch of fragments that McLuhan had been throwing out since the early 1950s, right? And then put them together in Counterblast."
The book's p.135 supplies the session's most explicit McLuhan statement of the private pole — a citadel defined by what media cannot reach.
"no matter how many walls have fallen, the citadel of individual consciousness has not fallen, nor is it likely to fall, for it is not accessible to the mass media."
Recruited as the earliest dated statement of the hijacking — Hollywood named as Barnum and Bailey hijackers in 1969, before the 1971 essay
The book is enlisted to corroborate the hijacking thesis — McLuhan named the entertainment industry as the hijacker two years before the essay that gave the operation its title.
"he says in Counterblast in 69 that Hollywood is Barnum and Bailey hijackers."
Connections
McLuhan's 1969 typographic book, designed with Harley Parker — the source Bob returns to for its compressed formulations rather than its argument.
Parker's typographic design is what makes the book quotable in fragments — Bob cites it by page for single sentences.