Having read the end of Bob’s Trump book across the previous sessions, the two turn back to the second Part (the book)‘s opening pages — and Cameron names the method the book shares with its subjects: to reveal things “in and through” Trump the way Bob reveals them “in and through” McLuhan, channeling a phrase McLuhan never developed, “the global village theater” . What follows is a near line-by-line reading toward the book’s political core, the “superlative nobody,” before the back half turns philosophical — cliché and archetype, frictionlessness, and the two forms of mind .
Key Topics
- Reading from the front, the two press the book’s central correction of the received McLuhan: against the “conventional bullshit wisdom” that he “missed politics,” his whole surveillance vision is “darkly political” — Big Brother, once the police “walking around” in fascist states, moving inside after the bomb into invisible information-age surveillance .
- Cameron’s refrain threads the session: “all of the important words in McLuhan are in quotation marks” , questions with no bottom or ground, to be sounded “almost like a bell” rather than defined .
- Surveillance runs “from advertising to Echelon” , and the Explorations line reframes it — “not Big Brother is watching, but all the brothers” — a participatory mutual surveillance McLuhan calls “society is an art form.”
- “The superlative nobody” is McLuhan’s phrase for a presidency that is pure vacancy, the office “imitated” rather than held; Cameron hears in it a Joyce-like humor, since “nobody” has no degrees yet people “spend all of their lives and all of their fortunes” to become one . Trump, Bob argues, “did know a lot about the Establishment” but never learned to alter, expose, or “communicate” it .
- In From Cliché to Archetype, an archetype is “a cliché that’s put in quotes” — a reading Bob turns on McLuhan himself, who “became an archetype” the year the book appeared ; Mandeville’s “private vices, public benefits” gets reversed into “public vices, private benefits.”
- The closing movement makes technology “frictionless” — a resonance that can drive “limitless generation of energy” or “limitless generation of violence” — and lands on tactility as the “comfortable dualism” the Gutenberg Galaxy strips away, the two forms of mind held together in all-at-onceness .
Notable Quotes
"The automated presidential surrogate will be the superlative nobody."Marshall McLuhan, quoted by Bob Dobbs, The Resonant Interval, Dialogue 31 (22 Jul 2021), 1:01:07
"All of the important words in McLuhan are in quotation marks."Cameron McEwen, The Resonant Interval, Dialogue 31 (22 Jul 2021), 17:48
Outline
- 0:00:01 — Reading the book from the front
- 0:04:18 — The 1951 letter to Pound: the master usurer
- 0:07:13 — Big Brother goes inside; the darkly political McLuhan
- 0:15:11 — The Big Con and the Five Bodies
- 0:17:03 — Words in quotation marks; advertising as education
- 0:20:02 — Probing, the bell, and acoustic space
- 0:24:50 — The page-8 list: Android Meme to Anthropomorphic Physical
- 0:28:30 — Surveillance to Echelon; “all the brothers”
- 0:33:09 — Language, groundlessness, and Finnegans Wake
- 0:48:17 — Culture Is Our Business: the rearview mirror
- 0:52:09 — The superlative nobody: Nixon, Zappa, and Trump
- 01:04:26 — Making order and disorder; two kinds of wisdom
- 01:14:10 — All words in quotation marks; the collage
- 01:17:40 — From Cliché to Archetype; private vices, public benefits
- 01:24:23 — McLuhan and “the finish line”; frictionlessness
- 01:29:27 — The Gutenberg rearview mirror: Kelso, Marconi, Zingrone
- 01:40:09 — All-at-onceness and the two forms of mind
- 01:43:15 — Tactility, the comfortable dualism, everybody-as-nobody
- 01:49:13 — Preliterate nihilism; society in the singular
Mentioned Resources
Works by McLuhan
- Take Today: The Executive as Dropout — the “Utopians and Menippean” epigraph (p. 75) and the Mafias as developers and “hijackers”
- The Gutenberg Galaxy (1962) — “as our senses have gone outside us, Big Brother goes inside” (p. 32)
- Culture Is Our Business (1970) — the page-104 line on decision makers “totally out of touch,” and its last line on “the finish line”
- From Cliché to Archetype (with Wilfred Watson, 1970) — the p. 46 “private vices, public benefits” passage and the cliché/archetype definition
- The Mechanical Bride — advertising that “functions through surveillance”
- Laws of Media — the radio Tetrad flipping into “the global village theater”
- “Explorations” (1957) — “not Big Brother is watching, but all the brothers”
Other Works
- James Joyce, Finnegans Wake — HCE, the “hundred conversations,” and language as “something out of nothing”
- Bernard Mandeville, The Fable of the Bees — “private vices, public benefits”
- George Orwell, 1984 — Orwell’s obsolete vision McLuhan dates back to the world of 1930
- Frank Zingrone, Who Was Marshall McLuhan? and The Essential McLuhan (with Eric McLuhan)
- Nicholas Negroponte, Being Digital — invoked on broadcasting and its successors
People
- Marshall McLuhan (media theorist at the center of the dialogue)
- Ezra Pound (recipient of the 1951 “master usurer” letter)
- Donald Trump (subject of Bob’s pamphlet (Part one) and book (Part two))
- James Joyce (author of Finnegans Wake)
- Frank Zappa (source of the “Byzantine process” on running for president)
- Frank Zingrone (McLuhan student and editor who “couldn’t teach Understanding Media — too out-of-date for my students”)
- Louis Kelso, Nicholas Negroponte, Jacques Derrida, Arthur Kroker, Sigfried Giedion (figures invoked across the session)
- Richard Nixon, Dick Gregory (the out-of-touch candidate and his radical foil)
Closing
Read from its opening pages, the book’s wager comes clear: the McLuhan everyone took for an apolitical optimist is the one who saw surveillance, the vacant Presidency, and the frictionless world most exactly — and the slow reading is the method for learning to hear it.
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