An archive begins here as something almost banal — a place where you stop. Prompted by Cameron McEwen’s reading of Jacques Derrida’s Archive Fever, the two hosts follow that stopping-place from Hermes’ roadside markers to the pyramids and the Alexandrian library, then collapse it into the present as Bob Dobbs’s governing formula: the Tech Body is “the archive incarnate” . From there the archive turns ephemeral, and Finnegans Wake becomes its prophet. The back half reconstructs Harold Innis — his lost “balance,” his century of peace turned century of war — and closes on the shared insistence that Innis and McLuhan were never the technological determinists they are taken for.
Key Topics
- The archive is traced from Hermes’ roadside markers and the pyramids — “a huge visual marker” of acoustic space — to letters that “concretize time” and make the library “a kind of bridge in time.”
- Finnegans Wake is read as the prophecy of an age that processes information rather than content — Barrington Nevitt’s “Process as Figure” — with Joyce’s obsessive, lifelong overlaying recast as “a diary.”
- Hans Selye’s endocrinology and Adolphe Jonas’s book on counter-irritation are named as the twin sources behind McLuhan’s account of why humans are “numbed” by their own media.
- Modern art’s search for the medium runs from Pollock and Barnett Newman to Warhol’s indifference and McLuhan’s “there is no finish line,” the postmodern acceptance that the process has no ending.
- Harold Innis is reconstructed against his department head E.J. Urwick and the “Know-Nothing School,” his nineteenth-century balance giving way to a “century of war,” with Cameron insisting he and McLuhan were never technological determinists.
- The session closes on media making new kinds of archives, McLuhan as a reluctant guru, and Cameron’s claim that what shocked McLuhan in the early 1950s was the discovery that society was being unbalanced intentionally.
Notable Quotes
"The pyramid is a huge visual marker, but what it marks is acoustic space."
"when radio came in, we evolved a million years."
"the human mind is decisively shaped by technology, but at the exact same time, technology is shaped by the human mind."
Outline
- 0:00:01 — Archive Fever and the archive as a marker on the way
- 0:09:48 — The Tech Body as the archive incarnate
- 0:17:21 — Processing as figure: Finnegans Wake
- 0:29:11 — Stilling the plurality: fixities and the silent majority
- 0:35:56 — The six bodies and iON
- 0:46:19 — Selye, Jonas, and the numbing
- 0:50:07 — Modern art and the search for the medium
- 0:53:54 — Implication, the fold, and Krishnamurti
- 0:57:46 — All-at-onceness, fragmentation, and solitude
- 01:04:40 — Innis, Urwick, and the two rival schools
- 01:14:46 — Mass man: the beehive and the private person
- 01:22:56 — Balance: the century of peace and the century of war
- 01:27:47 — McLuhan’s diagnosis: the psychopath and the therapy
- 01:34:36 — Technological determinism and tactility
- 01:40:06 — Media make new archives, and McLuhan’s 1950s shock
Mentioned Resources
Works by McLuhan
- Understanding Media — where McLuhan says he “figured out how to explain” media numbing, “based on Selye”
- Laws of Media — its penultimate sentence, “we’re in an uncharted, unchartable [sea],” traced to Coleridge via Heidegger
- Culture Is Our Business — its closing - “there is no finish line” - read as the postmodern discovery
- From Cliché to Archetype — invoked on the cliché/archetype interplay of consciousness
Works by Innis
- Political Economy in the Modern State — the essays (c. 1942–46) where Innis quotes Bulwer “on Gutenberg”
- “The Economic Significance of Culture” (1944) and “Minerva’s Owl” (1947) — where Innis quotes Victor Hugo
- “This Has Killed That” — an unpublished Innis essay on the Hugo theme
Other Works
- James Joyce, Finnegans Wake (1939) — read as “process as figure” and “a diary”
- Jacques Derrida, “Archive Fever: A Freudian Impression” (1995) — the dialogue’s launch text
- Jean Baudrillard, The Ecstasy of Communication
- Tom Wolfe, The Painted Word — Abstract Expressionism into Pop Art
- John Gordon, Finnegans Wake: A Plot Summary; Joseph Campbell, A Skeleton Key to Finnegans Wake
- David Bohm, The Implicate Order — “folding in”
- Adolphe Jonas — a book on irritation and counter-irritation, source of “auto-amputation”
- Hans Selye — an article in Explorations No. 1 (1953)
- Alan Harrington — a Playboy article on “the rise of the psychopath”
- Edgar Friedenberg, The Vanishing Adolescent
People
- Bob Dobbs (co-host; media theorist of the Tech Body and the previous Five Bodies)
- Cameron McEwen (co-host; McLuhan scholar behind the McLuhan’s-New-Sciences work)
- Marshall McLuhan (the media theorist whose whole project the series reads through Finnegans Wake)
- Harold Innis (Toronto political economist of communication and “balance”)
- Jacques Derrida (French philosopher; author of Archive Fever)
- James Joyce (author of Finnegans Wake)
- Hans Selye (endocrinologist of stress and homeostasis)
- Adolphe Jonas (physician McLuhan credited, with Selye, for auto-amputation)
- Andy Warhol, Jackson Pollock, Barnett Newman (the modern painters processing the medium)
- Clement Greenberg, Harold Rosenberg (the critics of Tom Wolfe’s “The Painted Word”)
- David Bohm (physicist of the implicate order)
- Krishnamurti (the Theosophists’ repudiating “chosen son”)
- Edward Bulwer-Lytton (novelist at the head of the Theosophical line)
- E.J. Urwick (Innis’ chair in Political Economy; the “Know-Nothing School”)
- W.T. Easterbrook (Innis associate; author of the 1960 article naming the McLuhan and Know-Nothing schools)
- Donald Theall (McLuhan student whose PhD board furnished the “new school” anecdote)
- Barrington Nevitt (McLuhan collaborator; “Process as Figure”)
- Rudolf Steiner (Anthroposophist of the “Eighth Sphere”)
- Gurdjieff (esoteric teacher who “upsets” people into awareness)
- Wyndham Lewis (“the enemy,” read as artist-psychopath)
- Alan Harrington (author on the rise of the psychopath)
- Marcel Duchamp (art as “something you point at”); Victor Hugo (“this will kill that”)
- Edgar Cayce (occult figure McLuhan and Theall studied); Frank Zappa (the “new fad every 18 months”)
Closing
By reading the archive as the Tech Body “incarnate” and Finnegans Wake as its prophecy, the dialogue turns Derrida’s keyword into a bridge back to Innis and McLuhan — and to the older question of how a culture keeps its balance while its media keep erasing it.
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