The French-born literary theorist who founded Semiotext(e) in New York and used it to bring Baudrillard, Derrida, Deleuze, Guattari, and Virilio to English-language readers. The magazine is inseparable from him here: it is the infrastructure that makes his position a school rather than a reading, and later the supply line the third school is said to have fed on. In Bob's scheme of the schools that succeeded McLuhan, he is the second school — the channel through which McLuhan returned to North America wearing French clothes. He matters here less as a theorist than as a transmission route, and the series' interest in him is what that route did and did not carry. Start with dialogue 67, where Bob tells the story that turns the whole arrangement inside out.
Across the dialogues
Enters the series as a position on a map rather than a person — the name Bob uses to distinguish the New York that matters from the New York of media-ecology academics, with the magazine as the instrument that lets that position transmit rather than merely exist
Lotringer enters the archive as an editorial act rather than a body of work — the impact credited to him is a publishing operation, not a thesis.
"but Sylvère Lotringer, who created Semiotext(e) and started publishing Baudrillard and all the French guys, and he created a big impact with that."
The placement is structural: Bob's five-school scheme runs Toronto first and New York second, which makes Lotringer the hinge on which McLuhan's afterlife swings from Canada to France.
"So he's the second school of Media Ecology."
Turns from a marker into a character, and the marker turns ironic — the man who transmitted McLuhan to France for four decades is revealed to have arrived at the source last, and his magazine acquires a downstream that consumes it, so the second school becomes the series' clearest case of influence running without its origin
The word "spinoffs" does the work — the French theorists are cast not as parallel thinkers but as derivatives, which makes Lotringer a distributor of a product whose origin is elsewhere.
"And then you have the New York School, which is Sylvère Lotringer, promoting all the French postmodernist spinoffs of McLuhan, like Baudrillard, in his magazine called Semiotext(e)."
The entire French canon is folded into a single genealogy running from Toronto, so post-structuralism becomes a late chapter of McLuhan studies rather than a rival to it.
"He is promoting all these post-McLuhan-McLuhanites, like Derrida and Baudrillard and Deleuze and Guattari and Virilio."
The anecdote that undoes the transmission — the man who spent four decades publishing McLuhan's French descendants reports in 2008 that he has only just opened McLuhan, so the channel was carrying an influence its own operator had never read.
"He said, hey, Bob, I'm reading McLuhan's Understanding Media. I've never read it before. That's a good book."
Bob's reaction is the argument in miniature — the comedy is not Lotringer's ignorance but the demonstration that a media environment propagates perfectly well without anyone having read its source.
"I laughed for 10 minutes when he said that."
The verb reverses the flow — the magazine stops being something read and becomes something consumed wholesale, which is how Kroker's Concordia group is said to have arrived at McLuhan second-hand.
"And they're swallowing Semiotext(e)."
Relayed from Lotringer, the line marks the moment the third school arrives uninvited — Kroker's Concordia group turning up at conferences feeding off Semiotext(e) without acknowledging where it came from.
"And when they start showing up at conferences, Kroker and his wife and David Cook, Sylvère told me that he said, they were like termites that came out of the woodwork."
Bob grants the termites the thing their host lacked — direct knowledge of the source — which completes the inversion: each school down the chain reads McLuhan better than the school that transmitted him.
"But they were exaggerated McLuhanites who knew more about McLuhan than Sylvère did."
Connections
In Bob's five-school scheme, Lotringer's New York operation is the second school, following the Toronto group Nevitt anchored.
Baudrillard reached English-language readers through Semiotext(e), which is how the French spinoffs of McLuhan arrived.