A page-by-page reading of Jean Baudrillard’s “Precession of Simulacra” becomes the occasion for a larger wager: that everything the French theorist gropes toward, McLuhan had already said. Cameron keeps returning Baudrillard’s simulation to a single diagnosis — the modern world talking its way into a cul-de-sac it cannot exit — while Bob turns the reading toward his own project, updating McLuhan so he “anticipated the Tech Body,” technology come alive and orchestrating every digital medium , with Donald Trump as its unconscious artist. It closes on a 1971 interview in which McLuhan names the collapse of the medium/message distinction before Baudrillard ever circled it .
Key Topics
- Baudrillard’s DNA model of television and “the merging of the medium and the message,” with Guy Debord’s spectacle pronounced “obsolete” once TV folds into the flow of the Global Theater.
- McLuhan’s late Catholicism — the body as “the appropriate anti-environment to the discarnate state,” a reversal of his 1950s line that “you can’t become a Catholic conceptually.”
- Bob’s method for updating McLuhan: from “quotes about ESP” building “to holeopathic cliché probes,” the Android Meme’s “phase two.”
- Quadrophrenia — media conditioning makes the human “schizoid,” the Android Meme “mirrors that back,” and “two schizoids” make “four parts,” a strategy Bob says the Tech Body has now overtaken.
- Cameron’s method caution: McLuhan works by “rubbing one medium against the other,” not by claiming Eliot, Pound, and Lewis literally “were talking about television.”
- The Marconi Galaxy against the Gutenberg print galaxy — Baudrillard’s “nebula indecipherable… as to its truth” , which Bob recasts as the chart’s fifth quadrant, RNA, “a metaphor of the extreme messaging going on.”
Notable Quotes
"It's not possible to get out of the cul-de-sac by going down one more road."Cameron McEwen, The Resonant Interval, Dialogue 35 (26 Aug 2021), 39:09
"He's an unconscious artist. He's an artist expressing the present."Bob Dobbs, on Donald Trump, The Resonant Interval, Dialogue 35 (26 Aug 2021), 1:11:36
"McLuhan is technological humanism, Innis is technological determinism, and Grant is a theory about technological determinism."Arthur Kroker, quoted by Bob Dobbs, The Resonant Interval, Dialogue 35 (26 Aug 2021), 1:13:01
Outline
- 0:00:05 — Picking up Baudrillard: visual space and simulation
- 0:02:55 — Finnegans Wake as method: the audience takes over
- 0:07:47 — The unread McLuhan and the history of literature
- 0:14:05 — Afghanistan, empire, and the kinetic culture
- 0:31:39 — The DNA model and the merging of medium and message
- 0:33:40 — Baudrillard’s cul-de-sac and McLuhan’s Catholic body
- 0:46:31 — Academia, debt, and the failed guardians
- 0:54:20 — Trump as anti-environment
- 01:03:33 — The Tech Body: technology come alive
- 01:11:36 — Quadrophrenia and the chart: LaRouche, Kroker, Thompson
- 01:15:26 — iON, the Bible, and the genealogy of technology
- 01:26:24 — Shamans, withdrawal, and the celebration of anti-environment
- 01:48:10 — Closing: the Marconi Galaxy and the medium/message gap
Mentioned Resources
Works by McLuhan
- Laws of Media (1988) — its closing lines on “the ancient skill of reading” and “navigating through an ever uncharted and unchartable milieu”
- Cliché to Archetype — the “verbal modules” behind Bob’s “holeopathic cliché probes”
- Father Patrick Peyton interview (1971) — McLuhan on why “it’s hard to know now where the medium begins and where it ends”
Other Works
- Jean Baudrillard, “The Precession of Simulacra” — the passage read line by line, on simulation and the DNA model
- Finnegans Wake — the book McLuhan “translated” and applied, where “the audience takes over the art form”
- Guy Debord, The Society of the Spectacle — pronounced obsolete once the spectacle folds into the medium
- The Man Who Would Be King (1888, short story by Rudyard Kipling, then became a film directed by John Huston in 1975) — read as an allegory of the West in the East
- The Social Dilemma — the documentary whose “media ecologist,” Tristan Harris, warns the takeover “already has”
- 2001: A Space Odyssey — HAL “based on IBM,” Kubrick “reading McLuhan”
- Bob’s Explorations: Trump and the Tech Body — the long essay under running commentary
People
- Jean Baudrillard (French theorist of simulation, read across the session)
- Marshall McLuhan (media theorist at the center of the dialogue)
- Harold Innis (the Canadian economic historian who saw the failed “guardians of Western civilization”)
- Guy Debord (French Situationist, author of The Society of the Spectacle)
- Donald Trump (read as the Tech Body’s “unconscious artist”)
- Lyndon LaRouche (the “left hemisphere engineer” and his Christian philosophy of technology)
- Arthur Kroker (theorist whose “juggling” of Innis, McLuhan, and Grant models quadrophrenia)
- William Irwin Thompson (who “goes back further than McLuhan” to the “original cultures”)
- R. Murray Schafer (the composer, newly dead, whom McLuhan taught around 1950)
- Marcel Duchamp (source of the idea that “the audience takes over the art form”)
- Tristan Harris (the media ecologist featured in The Social Dilemma)
- Jacques Derrida, Ezra Pound, Wyndham Lewis, T.S. Eliot (figures invoked across the session)
Closing
By folding Baudrillard back into the cul-de-sac and McLuhan forward into the Tech Body, the session turns a page-by-page gloss into a single wager: that the collapse the French theorist only names, McLuhan had already learned to read.
← The Magic of Gutenberg: Innis’ Nineteenth Century, Bulwer-Lytton’s Vril, and Tactility Squared into AI · The McLuhan Industry and the Archive: Signing the Counterfeit Check, Archive Fever, and the Battle of the Colossi →