On p.27 of Bob’s Trump book sits a long passage from Jean Baudrillard’s Simulations — the one text, Bob argues, to have caught the disappearance of medium and message alongside Marshall McLuhan . Across the thirty-third session the two read it line by line: Cameron hears the whole passage as the cul-de-sac described from inside, its real subject the genesis of a world where life and TV have dissolved into each other, while Bob hears in it the book’s first real word on the Trump phenomenon .
Key Topics
- Cameron warns that “the disappearance of medium and message” carries many meanings, and that McLuhan’s — the medium as a scientific problem — is “richer than Baudrillard,” who he says takes back the very perspective he declares gone.
- Bob reads Baudrillard trying to “get past Guy Debord,” whose “society of the spectacle” gives way to the age of the Louds — the California family taped “where there was no privacy,” so that “we are all Louds” — and to a formula that is no longer “the medium is the message” but “the merging of the two.”
- Cameron insists McLuhan’s 1950s talk of “TV sets or radio” was “a strategy for communication,” never a literal identification, and that “over 60 years” later “the McLuhan industry still very frequently talks about media in a literal sense.”
- The passage’s pivot — “imagine the media… as a genetic code which controls the mutation of the real into the hyperreal” — turns, for Cameron, on genesis: the hyperreal must be taken as “something original,” not a relation between the already-known terms TV and life.
- Pressed on what thinking is, Cameron answers that “if we think of making as contrasted to matching, then that’s exactly what thinking is” — the painter’s courage before an unmatched canvas.
- Bob lands the book’s Trump moment on Baudrillard’s insistence that the whole process can be read only negatively , while the reading’s endpoint is “absolute manipulation… the non-distinction of active and passive.”
Notable Quotes
"This whole process only makes sense to us in the negative form."
"The best lack all conviction, while the worst are full of passionate intensity."
"Simulation cannot be singular. A simulation is inherently plural."
Outline
- 0:00:01 — Setting up: the Baudrillard quote on p.27
- 0:04:58 — The end of perspective and panoptic space
- 0:06:15 — Society of the Spectacle: Debord, the Situationists, the Louds
- 0:11:56 — The medium is no longer literal
- 0:29:58 — The genetic code and the DNA model of TV
- 0:49:04 — The cul-de-sac and the meaning gap
- 01:05:00 — Making versus matching
- 01:07:46 — Finnegans Wake as the experiment already done
- 01:21:26 — “Only makes sense in the negative form”: nihilism and Trump
- 01:29:27 — Simulation begins
- 01:34:22 — Absolute manipulation: the non-distinction of active and passive
- 01:36:14 — The radar station and media hypocrisy
- 01:47:38 — Communication before understanding; the task
- 01:53:46 — We are all Louds; the nebula indecipherable
- 02:05:42 — Closing: a temporary understanding
Mentioned Resources
Works by Jean Baudrillard
- Simulations (Semiotext[e], 1981) — the essay, “The Precession of Simulacra,” read from p.27 of Bob’s Trump book; Bob dates the writing to 1977–78
- The Ecstasy of Communication (1987) — named as Baudrillard’s later book on communication without questioning
Works by Marshall McLuhan
- Through the Vanishing Point — the “Vanishing Point book” invoked on perspective and Gutenberg visual space
- Laws of Media — cited on the “unchartable” media environment of the late 1970s
- War and Peace in the Global Village — recalled for its Finnegans Wake quotations
Other Works
- Guy Debord, The Society of the Spectacle (1967) — the “spectacle book” Baudrillard works past
- James Joyce, Finnegans Wake and Ulysses — the experiment Bob says Baudrillard is unknowingly redoing; Ulysses “ends in a dot”
- W.B. Yeats, “The Second Coming” — the source of “the best lack all conviction…”
- Captain Beefheart, Doc at the Radar Station (1980) — Bob’s image of himself as “a doctor at the radar station”
Documents & Media
- An American Family (PBS, 1973) — the Loud family taping behind “we are all Louds”
People
- Jean Baudrillard (French theorist of simulation and the hyperreal)
- Marshall McLuhan (media theorist at the center of the dialogue)
- Guy Debord (Situationist author of The Society of the Spectacle)
- James Joyce (author of Finnegans Wake)
- W.B. Yeats (poet of “The Second Coming”)
- T.S. Eliot (invoked on continuing Joyce’s experiment “like a scientist”)
- Arthur Kroker (Canadian theorist who wrote on Baudrillard and McLuhan)
- Captain Beefheart (musician; Doc at the Radar Station)
- Meister Eckhart (source of “only the hand that erases writes the true thing”)
- Donald Trump (the book’s subject, read as legible “only in the negative form”)
- iON (the “Para-Environment” JW channels, who tells Bob he is most like Job)
Closing
The session is the series’ one sustained reading of Baudrillard — a test of whether French theory’s dead end and McLuhan’s gap are the same country seen from two sides, and of what it takes to think a cul-de-sac from the inside.
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