Can Art get anyone out of the cul-de-sac? The thirty-sixth dialogue turns Cameron McEwen’s answer — no, because the artist must “sign” the work and the signature rests on nothing but itself, what McLuhan called “signing a counterfeit check” — into a single sustained figure: the archive. What the modern world has in place of an exit is a compulsion to catalogue itself, and Bob Dobbs traces that compulsion from the archivist Barry Nevitt first named through the Android Meme and its afterimage to the Tech Body as surveillance capitalism, closing on McLuhan’s 1964 letter calling Lewis, Yeats, Joyce, and Pound “world engineers.”
Key Topics
- Cameron argues Art “can be an anti-environment” but “can’t provide an intelligible account” of what an anti-environment is, because the artist must sign a work whose only ground is the artist — “a fly in a fly bottle.”
- McLuhan’s Explorations seminar reserved “the right for self-correction,” a “strategic intervention” meant to overturn the four “convinced Gutenbergian” editors that collapsed the moment they refused to follow.
- Freed by the “acoustic space” of the 1954 seminar, McLuhan untangled the “counter-visualism” of comics, film, and advertising, and arrived at “the medium is the message.”
- Cameron reads Western exhaustion through Hegel’s three “absolute forms” — philosophy, religion, Art — each “cancelled” a century apart, with the only way out being to relativize the cul-de-sac across the “transitive” gap of metaphor.
- The archive becomes the master figure: the Android Meme as “the Ground from 60 to 90,” the Internet its afterimage that “made everybody an archivist,” and Jacques Derrida’s Archive Fever the name for the fever.
- The close stages a “battle of archives” — iON against the Tech Body — through Goya’s El Coloso and Plato’s Gigantomachia, and McLuhan’s letter on the artist as “world engineer.”
Notable Quotes
"I think the tech body is the archive incarnate."
"The sign of a great mind is the ability to understand in fundamentally different ways."
"They were to be world engineers who shaped the totality of human awareness."
Outline
- 0:00:09 — Art as anti-environment: signing the counterfeit check
- 0:05:55 — Amateur against professional
- 0:07:01 — McLuhan’s self-correction and the Explorations seminar
- 0:12:07 — Counter-visualism and acoustic space
- 0:19:26 — The de Kerckhove interview and the McLuhan industry
- 0:35:59 — Thinking big, thinking small
- 0:46:44 — Relativizing the cul-de-sac: the transitive gap
- 0:58:23 — The archivist and archive fever
- 01:06:24 — The Android Meme as archive and its afterimage
- 01:26:07 — Surveillance capitalism as the Tech Body
- 01:37:52 — The battle of archives: Gigantomachia
- 01:46:52 — The Wilfred Watson letter: world engineers
Mentioned Resources
Works by McLuhan
- Culture Is Our Business (1970) — the title Bob glosses as art “waiting for Godot”
- Counterblast (1969) — “page 31,” where arts and sciences “cease to be anti-environment”
- Take Today — “at electric information speeds, art and science and nature converge through understanding media”
- The Mechanical Bride (1951) — the late-1940s “Pollstergeist” Cameron reads forward into surveillance capitalism
- Understanding Media — the project that grew out of the acoustic-space seminar
- “Culture Without Literacy” (Explorations No. 1) — the seminar’s “right for self-correction”
- Letter to Wilfred Watson, October 4, 1964 — Lewis, Yeats, Joyce, and Pound as “world engineers”
- Review of William Burroughs (NATION Magazine, December 28, 1964) — read as an echo of the Watson letter
Other Works
- Jacques Derrida, Archive Fever (1995/96) — the name for the archiving compulsion
- John Gordon, Finnegans Wake: A Plot Summary — Joyce as lifelong “mimic in the root sense”
- Wyndham Lewis, The Diabolical Principle (1931) — art as “totally environmental”
- Jean Baudrillard, The Conspiracy of Art — “capital-A” art
- Paul Levinson, Digital McLuhan — New Yorkist media ecology
- Finnegans Wake — “the archetypal archive,” the “mega scene”
- Goya, El Coloso (c. 1810) — the colossus dwarfing the tiny fleeing figures
People
- Marshall McLuhan (media theorist at the center of the dialogue)
- Ted Carpenter (the seminar member McLuhan hoped would convert)
- Harold Innis (source of the idea that communication is the key to cultures)
- Hegel (the triad of philosophy, religion, and art)
- Jacques Derrida (author of Archive Fever)
- Barrington Nevitt (who first named the “comprehensive archivist”)
- Arthur Kroker (diagnostician of the “archiving mania”)
- Goya (painter of El Coloso)
- Plato (source of the Gigantomachia)
- Wilfred Watson (addressee of McLuhan’s 1964 letter)
- Wyndham Lewis, W.B. Yeats, James Joyce, Ezra Pound (the would-be “world engineers”)
- Derrick de Kerckhove (the McLuhan successor whose interview Bob dissects)
- Neil Postman, Harold Bloom, Frank Zappa, Guy Debord, John Gordon, Paolo Granata (figures invoked across the session)
Closing
By making the archive the shape of the cul-de-sac, the dialogue turns a media-history quarrel into one question: who signs the reality we can no longer get behind?
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