The Resonant Interval

A Series of Dialogues between Cameron McEwen & Bob Dobbs

The Inflation Crowd: Humiliation, the Flatline, and the Tiny Note Chart

Dialogue 11 · January 21, 2021 · Transcript

The Bob Dobbs Formula Chart reaches its bottom levels — the holeopathic Cliché Probes, the Anthropomorphic Physical, and the “flatline” where the ground gives out — before Bob and Cameron read McLuhan’s 1974 essay “Media and the Inflation Crowd” end to end . The session closes with the companion Tiny Note Chart and Bob’s account of xenochrony .

Key Topics

  • The chart’s bottom line is a “flat line, like a heart monitor in the hospital” : once humans become both figure and ground — “creators of creation” — the attempt at stability “falls through itself and is finally revealed as groundless.”
  • Reading “Media and the Inflation Crowd,” Cameron takes McLuhan’s claim that Sputnik extends “the planet itself, creating a new ground for man in the sky” and maps it onto the chart’s flip from earthly to celestial ground.
  • “The inflation crowd” is the runaway turnover of memes and fads ; as the individual is overtaken by the anti-environment, the rising tension between individuality and universality forces “the turn to the crowd,” the abdication of an individuality that can no longer be maintained.
  • McLuhan closes the essay on Elias Canetti: the depreciated crowd “never forgets its depreciation” and seeks “a dynamic process of humiliation” — letting McLuhan name the Watergate affair precisely that.
  • Cameron reaches back to Plato’s gigantomachia — sky-gods against earth-titans, with a third member, the child, who sees that both are necessary — as the ancient figure for the media “eating each other.”
  • “Lockdown Bob Rule,” coined in 1995 , is the notion Bob returns to twenty-five years on, at the flatline.
  • Bob took the archetype of interrogation over from McLuhan : not his chemical body inflated into “the meaning of everything,” but a mask anyone can wear — “everybody in a certain way is Bob if they understand the archetype of interrogation.”
  • The Tiny Note Chart recasts the Formula Chart simultaneously rather than sequentially, titled after Frank Zappa’s “big note” (as a “tiny note”) and built on xenochrony — Zappa’s “strange synchronization” of performances recorded at different times.

Notable Quotes

"The Watergate affair is precisely such a dynamic process of humiliation."
Marshall McLuhan, quoted by Cameron McEwenreported
"You aren't the archetype, but the archetype can be called you."
Cameron McEwenasserted

Outline

  • 0:00:46 — Finishing the chart: cliché probes and the flatline
  • 0:06:50 — “Media and the Inflation Crowd”: ground in the sky
  • 0:18:08 — The inflation crowd: runaway memes, deflation, stagflation
  • 0:25:08 — Canetti: depreciation, humiliation, Watergate
  • 0:30:07 — McLuhan’s method: the painter’s strokes
  • 0:40:33 — The ALP–HCE flip: ecology and the erosion of feminism
  • 0:45:54 — Richards and Leavis: the Cambridge inheritance
  • 0:54:20 — Jung retrieved; Nietzsche and postmodernism
  • 0:57:22 — The gigantomachia: Plato’s threefold battle
  • 1:05:11 — Lockdown Bob Rule and the archetype of interrogation
  • 1:18:43 — Carl Scharfe: a McLuhan devotee
  • 1:22:59 — Individual versus collective: from literacy to the digital
  • 1:25:29 — The Church of the SubGenius and the Bob Dobbs archetype
  • 1:28:30 — Me / media / me-dia: dying every day
  • 1:38:25 — The Tiny Note Chart: xenochrony and the Grand Wazoo
  • 1:57:29 — Carolyn’s New York practice: potentized herbs

Mentioned Resources

Works by McLuhan

  • “Media and the Inflation Crowd” (1974) — read end to end; one of a cluster of period op-eds with “McLuhan, McLuhan, McLuhan” (on Watergate, 1973) and “A Media Approach to Inflation”
  • Take Today — cited for “man becomes both figure and ground” (p. 11) and “causes” merging with effects (p. 137)
  • Counterblast (1969) — its preface on Wyndham Lewis in “a cyclotron of his time”
  • “Poetic and Rhetorical Exegesis” (1944) — Leavis versus Richards

Other Works

  • Elias Canetti, Crowds and Power — the account of inflation, depreciation, and humiliation McLuhan quotes
  • Finnegans Wake — the “letter in a dung heap” behind the chart’s “chain letter of phase shifts”
  • Bob Dobbs Formula Chart and the Tiny Note Chart — the two documents under discussion
  • The Book of the SubGenius (1983) — origin of the J.R. “Bob” Dobbs archetype
  • Barrington Nevitt, ABC of Prophecy — source of the “Decad”

People

  • Marshall McLuhan (media theorist at the center of the dialogue)
  • Elias Canetti (author of Crowds and Power)
  • Plato (source of the gigantomachia)
  • Carl Jung (the psychologist “retrieved” in the 1970s–80s)
  • I.A. Richards and F.R. Leavis (McLuhan’s Cambridge influences)
  • Frank Zappa (composer behind xenochrony and the Grand Wazoo)
  • Derrick de Kerckhove (McLuhan successor on literacy and the individual)
  • Bob Dylan (cited McLuhan as a guide to the 1960s)
  • William Burroughs, James Joyce, Wyndham Lewis, Ezra Pound, Friedrich Nietzsche, Donald Theall (figures invoked across the session)

Closing

Finishing the chart turns its bleakness into a thesis: at the flatline, the only way through the inflation crowd is the humble, shared mask of interrogation McLuhan modeled and Bob calls “Bob.”

← The Bob Dobbs Formula Chart: Media Archetypes and American Political History · The Tiny Note Chart: The Android Meme as Afterimage →

Contents