The third straight session on the Tiny Note Chart divides in two. Bob first walks the chart cell by cell — the DNA/RNA row, the subatomic particles, the Shakespeare tragedies, the Platonic solids, and the five “numbers” that head its columns — until Cameron proposes that the phrase “all four plus stages of apprehension” is what really names it . From there the conversation becomes an argument about what to do with a chart: can pattern recognition be turned into a science, or does it only certify the personality of the one who drew it? That splits into two ways out — Bob’s “Lockdown Bob Rule,” which absorbs everything, and Cameron’s “abrogation of personality” — and closes on Fritz Senn’s answer to whether anyone can bend the arc of history .
Key Topics
- Cameron seizes on Bob’s word “made” — the chart’s labels are suggestions, so its method is “more like the cliché of art than the cliché of science,” not the fixed things science studies .
- The fifth column is not a fifth item but a ground: the Anthropomorphic Physical is “the mystery body, the unknown factor,” and it swallows the four analog quadrants that project it .
- Bob turns to Kroker the man — the Professor of Political Science who wrote Data Trash (1994) and its “virtual class” , and who, in a newly posted talk after his wife’s death, “goes to Cape Breton to find out who he is” .
- Cameron’s thesis: pattern recognition raises “what is the pattern of the pattern recognition?”, and McLuhan’s answer is the science of the interior landscape — reached, as chemistry was, by igniting an investigation rather than handing over an answer .
- To hold linearity and simultaneity together you need a gap, and “peace is a condition of the gap” — but so far the digital, “inherently gapped,” has only built weapons of mass destruction .
- The chart’s two exits are named precisely: “the overwhelming question of Prufrock” against “the plotting science” that makes prosaic discoveries day after day .
Notable Quotes
"There is no such thing as a human without gaps."
"Not the willingness to admit other points of view, but the technique of how not to have a point of view."
"I'll absorb you regardless of what you say."
Outline
- 0:00:02 — Continuing the chart: DNA, RNA, and iON
- 0:10:18 — The chart’s method: the cliché of art
- 0:17:43 — Figure and ground: “had to be” and the Anthropomorphic Physical
- 0:26:16 — “I, Bob Dobbs, am the truth”
- 0:34:02 — Cultural evolution, 1947–1992
- 0:46:55 — Kroker: Data Trash and the Cape Breton confession
- 1:01:57 — The five numbers and the Global Membrane
- 1:23:56 — Naming the chart: the generations and the moiré
- 1:46:06 — Lockdown Bob Rule and the question of the name
- 2:08:52 — The gap, tactility, and peace
- 2:18:36 — Two sciences: chemistry as the analogy
- 2:36:03 — Two ways out: Prufrock versus plotting science
- 2:50:57 — The technique of how not to have a point of view
- 3:03:33 — The physicist and the poet: the same situation
- 3:15:48 — Bending the arc: Joyce, the drama of cognition, and fate
Mentioned Resources
Works by McLuhan
- “The Humanities and the Electronic Age” (1961) — read at length; the source of “the technique of how not to have a point of view”
- “Dos Passos: Technique vs. Sensibility” (1951) and the 1950 Renascence review of eleven books on Eliot — read as statements of what the chart does
- Take Today — cited for p.22, “there are only two extreme forms of human experience, the eye and the ear”
- Laws of Media — the brain-hemispheres chart on p.68 (credited to R. H. Trotter)
- The Interior Landscape and From Cliché to Archetype — the stages of apprehension and the drama of cognition
- “Out of the Counting House” (1946) — on feminism and the family
Other Works
- Arthur Kroker and Michael Weinstein, Data Trash (1994), and Kroker’s Technology and the Canadian Mind (1984)
- William Irwin Thompson, Pacific Shift (1985) — Atlantis, Tokyo, and the Lemurian
- John Brockman, Einstein, Gertrude Stein, Wittgenstein & Frankenstein — source of the subatomic particles
- F.R. Leavis and Denys Thompson, Culture and Environment (1933); Wyndham Lewis, Blast (1914)
People
- Marshall McLuhan (media theorist at the center of the dialogue)
- Arthur Kroker (the postmodern theorist behind the chart’s fourth figure)
- Lyndon LaRouche and Thompson (the chart’s other two figures)
- Fritz Senn (Joyce scholar at the Zurich James Joyce Foundation)
- John Brockman (McLuhan student and literary agent of the “Third Culture” authors)
- Joseph Beuys (the German artist who drew the ascending and descending lines)
- Sidney Crosby (the hockey player Bob reads as his “unrealized creation”)
- Ezra Pound, James Joyce, Wyndham Lewis, Harold Innis, I.A. Richards, William Empson, F.R. Leavis, Plato, Friedrich Nietzsche (figures invoked across the session)
Closing
The dialogue turns a static chart into a live question — whether pattern recognition ends in one man’s name or in a shared, open-ended science — and lets Bob and Cameron stake out the two answers without collapsing them into one.
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