Bob's name for the discarnate human of the electric age — McLuhan's refinement of Wyndham Lewis' "superhuman," a being that, unlike an angel bound to one place at a time, is everywhere at once. Bob makes it the payoff of his page-146 detour and the true content of what others call "the Posthuman." Named since dialogue 11, it gets its fullest statement in dialogue 39.
Across the dialogues
Arrives as a new concept page and the detour's payoff — Bob folds Lewis' angelic humans and McLuhan's discarnate man into a single figure and makes it the hinge of his whole internet-era reading
Bob ranks the super angel as McLuhan's decisive bequest to the internet age — the extended human as "a greater extension than the angelic."
"the concept of the super angel is probably the most important contribution by McLuhan to the internet and worldwide web era."
The super angel outdoes the angel — where an angel can be only "there," moving from there to there in sequence, the discarnate human is everywhere at once, "no tactility involved."
"the human engaging in electronic services of the global membrane, what McLuhan termed the discarnate condition, could be everywhere simultaneously and immediately, no tactility involved."
The super angel is McLuhan's upgrade of Lewis' "superhuman" — a wholly different order of consequence, so that "McLuhan had upgraded Lewis's insights."
"No angel could do this, but the human cum superangel did. This capacity would result in a completely different consequence from that of the old superhuman."
Once inside the internet, the super angel "became her own intelligence agency" — which Bob claims is the real content of the phrase "the Posthuman," McLuhan having "got there first."
"the super angel became her own intelligence agency. This is precisely the meaning of the vague phrase, the Posthuman."
Turned from a rank into a condition — the question of what could even display a super angel forces the concept onto non-physical ground, and the exceptional figures become instances of what everyone is said to already be
Cameron turns the concept back on itself with the question the archive had not yet asked — not what a super angel is but what medium could possibly display one, forcing Bob to name a ground rather than extend a description.
"What's the ground on which something like super angels is exposed?"
Bob's answer, delivered as improvised channelling, completes the extension series — after faculties, the planet, and technologies extending technologies, the super angel is what makes visible the one register that was never physical to begin with.
"So maybe something about the super angel exposes the non-physical."
The concept's decisive democratization — where earlier sessions reserved the term for exceptional figures, here Howard Hughes and Epstein are only the ones who got photographed, and the scapegoat's function is to act out a condition everyone already occupies.
"But everybody is a super angel."
Given its defining contrast — the angel can be anywhere but only one there at a time, so what makes the super angel super is simultaneity, and the concept finally has a mechanism rather than an image
The angel's limit stated as a structure, which is what the concept had been missing — sequence, not scale, is the thing the electric human breaks.
"an angel could be anywhere, but only there before moving on to another there, so in a sequential manner."
The super angel defined by subtraction — remove sequence from the angel's mobility and the resulting condition exceeds it, which is how a theological category becomes a media one.
"However, the human, engaging the electronic services of the Global Membrane, what McLuhan termed the discarnate condition, could be everywhere simultaneously and immediately, no sequentiality involved."
The mechanism made concrete and, crucially, analog — the simultaneity is a property of broadcast, not of the digital, which is why Bob dates the condition to the 1940s rather than the 1990s.
"Imagine that you were broadcasting on the radio to half a million people."
Bob's claim of priority over the going term — "post-human" names something McLuhan's vocabulary had already specified, so the newer word marks a loss of precision rather than an advance.
"the superangel became her own intelligence agency. This is precisely the meaning of the vague phrase, the post-human."
Connections
reworks Lewis' "superhuman" (from Self-Condemned) into the discarnate super angel.
Bob credits McLuhan with the concept — "the most important contribution… to the internet era."