The question the Tiny Note Chart left hanging comes back open: is McLuhan the ground of the chart’s four figures, or just one figure caught inside a larger pattern? Cameron presses it through a sustained analogy — reporters visiting the labs of alchemists and chemists around 1800 — to ask Bob for his “principle of recognition,” what in a blind paragraph lets him say “this is LaRouche” or “this is McLuhan.” Bob answers with specialization and the emotions he assigns each quadrant; Cameron unfolds it into a four-level reading of McLuhan and, later, the etymology of ecstasy as Being’s “leaping out of itself.” The session ends by recovering the chart as a “cloud of faces” and voices — a collective mask — read through McLuhan the comedian and, finally, Finnegans Wake as the real ground beneath it all.
Key Topics
- Bob refuses McLuhan as the ground: each quadrant is a rotating era, and the Dobbs quadrant — the digitizing Android Meme — is the Ground for the other four.
- Pressed for his “principle of recognition,” Bob answers that he is “showing specialization” — and that the Android Meme had already overcome specialization by “presenting a non-specialized situation.”
- Siding with Thompson, Cameron holds that “there’s nothing new under the sun” — humans “forever have been in extremis,” always hanging by the thread the Greek Fates cut.
- Later he turns the chart’s own logic back on Bob — the chart “names the problem” but adds nothing to its proper naming, “failing the Rumpelstiltskin test,” while Bob insists it was “a new kind of naming.”
- McLuhan the comedian: an auditor’s line that “amusement is the only possible strategy” sends the pair through McLuhan’s USC self-identification and the Rabelaisian “put-on,” to humor as the one strategy that can make “a point that cannot be made in any other way.”
- The chart resolves as a “cloud of faces” and voices — a collective mask — and Bob relocates its ground beneath McLuhan entirely: Finnegans Wake is the ground, the chart a palimpsest of “unused” Joyce.
Notable Quotes
"I'm in the cul-de-sac, man. It's hard to get out of it."
"There's something about existence that's always already outside of itself."
Outline
- 0:00:44 — Is McLuhan the ground, or part of the pattern?
- 0:05:08 — Each quadrant a technology: the holeopathic satellites
- 0:07:18 — The alchemist and the chemist: the principle of recognition
- 0:13:55 — The necessary flip and the necessary implosion
- 0:22:13 — “They’re all the same”: Thompson’s reply
- 0:25:22 — “I’m trying” / “the Android Meme is trying”
- 0:32:33 — The emotions of the quadrants and the etymology of ecstasy
- 0:38:04 — Information overload with an order
- 0:47:18 — Nothing new under the sun: the fates and the Rumpelstiltskin test
- 1:07:31 — The chart’s intentionality: hologram and the cloud of faces
- 1:15:50 — McLuhan the comedian: amusement as the only possible strategy
- 1:47:24 — The cloud of voices and the collective mask
- 1:58:45 — Finnegans Wake as the ground
Mentioned Resources
Works
- Finnegans Wake (James Joyce, 1939) — named the ground beneath the chart; its p.309 opening, HCE “indistinguishable from a radio,” and its “17 years” of making
- Phatic Communion with Bob Dobbs — Bob’s book collecting the “better quotes” from the four figures, the source of the chart’s content
- Take Today: The Executive as Dropout (McLuhan and Nevitt) — invoked for “the management of human identity”
- The Gutenberg Galaxy (McLuhan) — cited for Alexander Pope “anticipating Freud”
- The Mechanical Bride / Explorations-era pamphlet — “education has to be entertaining”
People
- Bob Dobbs (the host; author of the Tiny Note Chart and the “Android Meme”)
- Cameron McEwen (McLuhan scholar and Bob’s interlocutor)
- Marshall McLuhan (Canadian media theorist the dialogue orbits)
- Lyndon LaRouche (one of the chart’s four figures — “dialectics,” management)
- Arthur Kroker (political theorist — the chart’s “anarchism” and panic quadrant)
- William Irwin Thompson (cultural philosopher — the chart’s Buddhist “grammar” quadrant)
- James Joyce (author of Finnegans Wake)
- Frank Zappa (musician; the “tiny note” answers his “big note”)
- Ted Carpenter (anthropologist, McLuhan’s Explorations collaborator)
- Georges Seurat (painter of pointillism, McLuhan’s cathode-ray anticipation)
- Rabelais (Renaissance satirist of the Menippean “put-on”)
- Barry Day (British interviewer of McLuhan, c. 1968)
- Pat Paulsen (comedian who “ran for president,” McLuhan’s self-comparison)
Closing
The dialogue turns the chart inside out — from a diagram of four thinkers into a self-portrait of one man putting on a cloud of voices, and asks, with McLuhan’s comedy as its model, whether naming a pattern is the same as understanding it.
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