Marshall McLuhan's term, from From Cliché to Archetype, for the iconic unit that recurs in every electric structure — the rippling repetition of profiles in an ad, the verbal module Mallarmé and Joyce built by pushing past semantic frontiers. Bob Dobbs retrieves it in dialogue 72 as the answer to a problem he had been carrying: he needed a word that would make "holeopathic cliché probe" mean what "meme" now means, and rather than coin one he found McLuhan's. Its companion is the mini-state — the bureaucratized media institution that, communicating in the language of the TV and chip bodies, has become a module. New to it — start with dialogue 72.
Across the dialogues
Enters as the word that closes a thirty-year gap — Bob goes looking for something his own coinage could be translated into and finds McLuhan already had it, which retroactively makes the meme a McLuhan phenomenon rather than a digital-era novelty
The quotation Bob builds the retrieval on — McLuhan names the mini-module as the unmet structural problem of the electric age, which is the slot Bob's meme has been occupying without the word.
"Philosophy and management alike have yet to come to terms with the mini-module or the new structure of the electric age."
The literary pedigree that makes the term usable for Bob — the module is not an advertising artifact but the same operation Joyce performs, which is what lets the Wake reading and the meme argument be one argument.
"Mallarmé and Joyce are masters of this kind of verbal module, which is achieved by pushing beyond semantic frontiers."
The session's two halves joined — the bureaucratized scape, once it has to communicate in the language of the TV and chip bodies, shrinks to a brand-sized icon, so the mini-states now fight each other as modules.
"The mini-state has become a mini-module."
Why the module leaves science fiction obsolete — the imaginable has already happened, so the work is no longer to picture what is coming but to picture what has already gone.
"The unconscious today is to visualize the disappearance of. What you can imagine was and has now disappeared. That's the task."
Put at the centre of the memory-theatre sentence — a satiric retrieval rather than a neutral unit, and later cashed out as rippling repetition running from ad copy to the modes of consciousness
The mini-module is placed at the centre of the session's densest sentence — a retrieval performed satirically, which is what links the memory theatre, the print mirror and quadrophrenia in one clause.
"So McLuhan's satiric retrieval of the mini-module..."
Connections
The term is McLuhan's, from pages 152 and 155 — the book Bob searched when he needed a word that would mean what "meme" means.
Bob's identification — module is McLuhan's term for meme, so the digital meme was already described in 1970.