McLuhan's 1972 book with Barrington Nevitt, subtitled The Executive as Dropout — the late, corporate-facing McLuhan that Bob returns to more than any other single text, treating it as the master key to the whole oeuvre. He mines it for one-line summations of McLuhan he wants readers to memorize, and pins recurring arguments to exact pages (11, 22, 137). New to it — start with dialogue 14, where Bob calls p.22 "the key page for all of McLuhan."
Across the dialogues
Enters as Bob's one-quote distillation of the late McLuhan — the Catch-22 passage he wants readers to memorize as "what McLuhan said"
Bob makes a single Take Today line — McLuhan on Catch-22, war merging with the black market — his chosen distillation of the whole late McLuhan, the quote to give "next time someone asks you what McLuhan said."
"where the war merges with the black market... this leads to a situation where every financial transaction drips blood."Bob Dobbs, The Resonant Interval, Dialogue 2 (10 Nov 2020), 17:42
Read as the pivot book where McLuhan declares prophetic and artistic awareness obsolete and turns toward a new second sight
Bob reads Take Today as the pivot where McLuhan pronounces prophetic and visionary awareness obsolete and turns toward a new kind of second sight.
"ESP is old hat."Marshall McLuhan, read by Bob Dobbs, The Resonant Interval, Dialogue 3 (19 Nov 2020), 51:12
Bob takes the book's convergence thesis — art and science trading places in the century — as one of its load-bearing formulas.
"Art tends to go towards science, and science tends to go toward art in the 20th century."Marshall McLuhan, read by Bob Dobbs, The Resonant Interval, Dialogue 3 (19 Nov 2020), 2:11:31
Mined for the psychic-ecology line and for the p. 11 claim that man is figure and ground, not an extension of a medium
Bob reads the book's ecology as psychic ecology — the transcending of every regional interest — rather than the environmental cause it is usually taken for.
"the future of ecology lies not in a national or international basis but in the realm of psychic ecology"Bob Dobbs, The Resonant Interval, Dialogue 11 (21 Jan 2021), 22:30
Bob dates the reversal to p. 11 — man is no longer an extension of a medium but its creator or part, the point at which "the medium becomes content."
"man becomes both figure and ground. So man becomes not an extension of a medium, but a creator."Marshall McLuhan, read by Bob Dobbs, The Resonant Interval, Dialogue 11 (21 Jan 2021), 4:44
Named outright — "the key page for all of McLuhan is Take Today 22," the eye–ear spectrum with tactility in the middle
Cameron endorses Bob's elevation of one page — Take Today 22, the eye–ear spectrum with tactility in the middle — as "the key page for all of McLuhan," the focus for reading the interior landscape.
"there are only two extreme forms of human experience, the eye and the ear"Marshall McLuhan, read by Cameron McEwen, The Resonant Interval, Dialogue 14 (18 Feb 2021), 3:05:01
Turned on Trump — the "automated presidential surrogate is a superlative nobody" that Trump is said to have violated
Bob turns the book's "nobody" on Trump — the automated presidential surrogate McLuhan foresaw, whom Trump is said to have "violated" by arriving as a somebody from the business world.
"the automated presidential surrogate is a superlative nobody"Marshall McLuhan, quoted by Bob Dobbs, The Resonant Interval, Dialogue 19 (25 Mar 2021), 1:41:05
Grounded to the text against the manhunt — "man is still the content, page 11"
Bob grounds the whole search for who is in charge in a page reference — man as content, so the manhunt is part of the Anthropomorphic Physical.
"man is still the content, page 11 of Take Today"Marshall McLuhan, quoted by Bob Dobbs, The Resonant Interval, Dialogue 26 (17 Jun 2021), 1:25:48
Gives the series its terminal quote — the money line Bob wants readers to memorize to "update McLuhan"
Bob offers a Take Today line as the series' terminal quote — "a really unknown McLuhan quote," his proof that McLuhan "was dealing with corrupt money world," the one he wants readers to memorize to "update McLuhan."
"all money transactions begin to drip blood."Marshall McLuhan, read by Bob Dobbs, The Resonant Interval, Dialogue 27 (24 Jun 2021), 1:12:26
The terminal quote finally read out in full and cited — page 211's Catch-22 passage, war and market merged into a blood-dripping monster, fixed as the line meant to displace "the medium is the message"
The terminal quote read out in full and cited to its page — the italic "drip blood" of p.211, the economic McLuhan Bob wants carried in place of the worn slogan.
"when war and market merge, all money transactions begin to drip blood."Marshall McLuhan, read by Bob Dobbs, The Resonant Interval, Dialogue 28 (1 Jul 2021), 34:09
Mined for its one-line archive — "art and science and nature converge through understanding media," the convergence Bob says should replace "the medium is the message"
Bob lifts Take Today's line — "at electric information speeds, art and science and nature converge through understanding media" — as the statement of total convergence that "should replace the medium as a message."
"art and science and nature converge through understanding media."Marshall McLuhan, read by Bob Dobbs, The Resonant Interval, Dialogue 36 (9 Sep 2021), 1:10:44
The "sacred page 137" read in full — "causes become effects via concepts, whereas effects merge with causes... via percepts," the quotation-marked "causes"/"effects" as moralized singularities dissolving into "gap plurality" — and page 294's "extension of the planet" tied back to the War and Peace connubium
The "sacred page 137," Bob's candidate for McLuhan's most complex sentence — causes become effects via concepts (italicized, "on another level"), so to conceptualize a cause reduces it to just another effect; Cameron adds that "causes" and "effects" sit in quotation marks because they've been "moralized into singularities," dissolving into "gap plurality" only as percepts.
"Causes become effects via concepts."Marshall McLuhan, read by Bob Dobbs, The Resonant Interval, Dialogue 46 (17 Mar 2022), 1:44:18
Page 294's "extension of the planet" — technology "did not come from man" but from the previous environment, the Earth — which Cameron ties back to the War and Peace connubium and will footnote into his own essay.
"the extension of the planet itself meant that the technology was not transported by individual or collective man, but by his previous environment, the Earth."Marshall McLuhan, read by Bob Dobbs, The Resonant Interval, Dialogue 46 (17 Mar 2022), 1:51:27
Mined across its last pages as the Global Theater's operating manual — the "rim spin" to be governed, satellite man as concertmaster re-auditioning the Manhattan Project for its effects, and "no success like failure" as the anthropology underneath
The book's "rim spin" — a new term for the Global Theater — poses an ungrasped demand: having spun the whole of human transaction into being, "we now have to discover the means of adjusting the speed of this spin," a creativity "who the heck even dared to see how you would do."
"having engineered into existence this giant rim spin around all human transactions,"Marshall McLuhan, read by Bob Dobbs, The Resonant Interval, Dialogue 47 (14 Apr 2022), 49:30
The dissolving of spectator into spectacle — satellite man's audience "consists of all the resonances awakened everywhere," so "everything becomes an actor," inhabiting "a resonating acoustic space whose boundaries are nowhere."
"The audience of Satellite Man includes the actors,"Marshall McLuhan, read by Bob Dobbs, The Resonant Interval, Dialogue 47 (14 Apr 2022), 53:24
The book's terminal aphorism as anthropology — "no success like failure" and "every remedy [worse] than the next," the line Bob and Cameron take to mean that human beings "at the end of the day can only fail."
"no success like failure."Marshall McLuhan, quoted by Bob Dobbs, The Resonant Interval, Dialogue 47 (14 Apr 2022), 1:13:08
The cover text taken apart word by word — the scare quotes promoted from tic to argument, and the title's "hang-up" re-read by Cameron as an opening rather than a dead end, so the book becomes a question the pair are still inside
The scare quotes read as the argument itself — every term the jacket puts in quotation marks names a category the electric environment has already voided, so the passage is not a description of surveillance but a notice that its vocabulary no longer refers.
"There is no hardware age. There are no haves or have-nots. And they're not under surveillance."Bob Dobbs, The Resonant Interval, Dialogue 57 (29 Sep 2022), 3:32
Cameron turns the book's title term from diagnosis into aperture — the hang-up is not the dead end it names but the unresolved place that points past itself, making Take Today "a meditation on that question" rather than a verdict on it.
"So, to me, the word hang up has to do with something that is sort of unresolved and points the way to something else."Cameron McEwen, The Resonant Interval, Dialogue 57 (29 Sep 2022), 21:04
Read for its ending rather than its argument — the "recently achieved forms of consciousness" it closes on become the marker Bob says the Tech Body has since overrun
Bob uses the book's last move as a period marker — what McLuhan could close on in 1972 is precisely what Bob says has since fallen apart, so the citation dates McLuhan rather than confirming him.
"that's why McLuhan ends Take Today with the recently achieved forms of consciousness."Bob Dobbs, The Resonant Interval, Dialogue 64 (2 Feb 2023), 1:20:00
The phrase Bob retrieves to answer Cameron on the ineffable — McLuhan had already refused the mystical escape hatch, which is why "the ineffable is always effable" reads as his position rather than Cameron's paradox.
"the tangibility of the intangibles."Marshall McLuhan, quoted by Bob Dobbs, The Resonant Interval, Dialogue 64 (2 Feb 2023), 35:19
Its quotation marks read as method rather than mannerism, and its line on identity as a violent process supplied as the explanation for the anger the session keeps circling
The typography is treated as argument — each quoted term marks a word whose ordinary sense has to be suspended before the sentence can be read.
"you've often talked about how the use of quotations in Take Today is very important to pay attention to."Cameron McEwen, The Resonant Interval, Dialogue 65 (16 Feb 2023), 1:04:27
The book supplies the session's account of contemporary anger — violence is the cost of making an identity, not evidence that something has gone wrong.
"Social achieving, creating social identity is a necessarily violent process."Marshall McLuhan, read by Bob Dobbs, The Resonant Interval, Dialogue 65 (16 Feb 2023), 1:28:22
Mined twice for the session's two arguments — page 289 supplies the sentence that turns outrage from an emotion into a structure, and the audience-as-employer passage is read as McLuhan already describing the reversal Bob wants to claim as post-McLuhan
Cameron supplies the citation Bob should send the columnist — the line that separates rage from feeling and so makes the industrialization of outrage a structural claim rather than a complaint about tone.
"It's from page 289. And the headline is, you can hurt a man's feelings, but you can't hurt his rage."Marshall McLuhan, read by Cameron McEwen, The Resonant Interval, Dialogue 69 (11 May 2023), 1:22:53
The passage is read as McLuhan having already inverted the manipulation model, which puts Bob's own hyperprojection thesis inside the book rather than after it.
"The audience is the employer, he says in Take Today. The audience is the superior factor in the equation. It's not dumb people being manipulated to become consumers."Marshall McLuhan, read by Bob Dobbs, The Resonant Interval, Dialogue 69 (11 May 2023), 2:13:12
Supplies the terminal formulation the session ends on — superhumanization wrecking the system, with the cul-de-sac restated as having no way to go forward or back
The book supplies the session's closing diagnosis — the damage has changed target, from individuals to the arrangement that was supposed to manage them, which is why neither progress nor retreat is left as a direction.
"Whereas mechanical dehumanization, that's the 19th century, wrecked the person, electric superhumanization wrecks the entire system."Marshall McLuhan, read by Bob Dobbs, The Resonant Interval, Dialogue 73 (27 Jul 2023), 2:17:38
The book supplies the cul-de-sac in two words — if innovation and obsolescence have both stopped working, the standard directions out are closed simultaneously.
"so then we come to 'innovation is obsolete'."Marshall McLuhan, read by Bob Dobbs, The Resonant Interval, Dialogue 73 (27 Jul 2023), 2:16:24
Reaches its own last page after seventy-odd sessions of quotation, and the ending turns out to be a program rather than a peroration — the book stops being a quarry of lines and becomes a text with a stated task for the period after it, which the pair spend the whole session trying to say they are carrying out
The book's last page opens by promoting its readers from reporters to makers — a move that only lands once "make" is heard in McLuhan's technical sense, against merging and matching, rather than as a boast about influence.
"The familiar idea of making the news now yields to making the world itself."Marshall McLuhan, read by Bob Dobbs, The Resonant Interval, Dialogue 74 (17 Aug 2023), 20:46
The sentence Bob calls astounding, and the reason he suspects Nevitt's hand in it — the scare quotes on "natural" refuse the very naturalness the sentence proposes, so the program arrives already warning against being read as inevitable.
"the complementary of this process would seem to be the natural program for the period ahead."Marshall McLuhan, read by Bob Dobbs, The Resonant Interval, Dialogue 74 (17 Aug 2023), 26:04
The italicized clause the whole session orbits — it reverses the century's direction of traffic, and by leaving "recently achieved" undefined it hands the book's closing task to whoever can say what those forms are.
"programming the unconscious with the recently achieved forms of consciousness."Marshall McLuhan, read by Bob Dobbs, The Resonant Interval, Dialogue 74 (17 Aug 2023), 26:17
Bob classifies the closing pages by genre — not prophecy or summary but instructions, which is why the next sentence can promise to evoke a consciousness rather than merely describe one.
"So now all this is a procedure, a formula, a method, you know, like an update of Francis Bacon's method."Bob Dobbs, The Resonant Interval, Dialogue 74 (17 Aug 2023), 53:16
The book signs off in Joyce's words rather than its own, which puts Finnegans Wake at the end of the argument as well as inside it — the same answer Nevitt gave when asked what the recently achieved forms of consciousness were.
"Array! Surrection!"James Joyce, read by Cameron McEwen, The Resonant Interval, Dialogue 74 (17 Aug 2023), 1:09:41
The ending's refusal of a technological exit, stated as a therefore — and the concession clause is what keeps the book from being read as either a humanist retreat or a transhumanist welcome, since McLuhan's late work attacks the superhuman elsewhere.
"There is therefore no technical alternative to humanism, even though for many this would include the divine grace of the superhuman."Marshall McLuhan, read by Cameron McEwen, The Resonant Interval, Dialogue 74 (17 Aug 2023), 1:10:07
The book's last page moves from epigraph to text — quoted in passing across dozens of sessions, page 297 is finally opened, read whole and treated as an instruction, which makes the closing paragraph the frame the rest of the Trump manuscript will be read through
The book's closing sentence is finally read whole rather than cited — the shift it names is from reporting a world to manufacturing one, which is the premise the rest of the session tests against the woke period.
"The familiar idea of, quote, making the news now yields to making the world itself."Marshall McLuhan, read by Bob Dobbs, The Resonant Interval, Dialogue 75 (28 Sep 2023), 1:04
The italicised half-line at the centre of p.297, which the series has quoted in passing for seventy sessions and now takes as an instruction whose only unresolved term is what those forms actually were.
"Programming the unconscious with the recently achieved forms of consciousness."Marshall McLuhan, read by Bob Dobbs, The Resonant Interval, Dialogue 75 (28 Sep 2023), 1:37
Cameron supplies the reading key — the paragraph is a single hinge, its opening naming the old consciousness and its close naming the new, which dissolves the puzzle of what "the recently achieved forms" refers to by making the passage self-glossing.
"You have to put the first sentence of this passage together with the last sentence, where you have the new form of consciousness radically different from former consciousness."Cameron McEwen, The Resonant Interval, Dialogue 75 (28 Sep 2023), 46:58
Connections
McLuhan's 1972 book with Barrington Nevitt — the late, corporate-facing McLuhan that Bob treats as the master key to the whole oeuvre.
Bob dates "man becomes both figure and ground" — man as content rather than extension of a medium — to Take Today, p. 11.
Reading the jacket's scare-quoted "software," Bob decides software-in-quotes is memes — the seed of the Android Meme.