Chapter 6 of Bob Dobbs’ Trump book closes on a four-power Tetrad — Trump enhancing the Rumpelstiltskin effect over the Android Meme, obsolescing the continuous iconic presidency, retrieving the knight and the vampire, and reversing into an emperor-cum-saint . But the reading keeps opening onto McLuhan himself: a p.11 line from Take Today on man as “both figure and ground” , a 1949 letter that meets “the absolute squalor and anemia of mind” with a shrug , and, at length, the optophone — Joyce’s eye-ear word that turns out to name a real reading machine whose Royal Society sponsor was the uncle of McLuhan’s Winnipeg mentor .
Key Topics
- Cameron argues McLuhan means the figure-and-ground formula in an electric, tactile sense, not a Gutenbergian one: a finite being “can never be more than a finite delimited figure,” yet is “related to ground, which is figures plural.”
- In a 1949 letter to the Houston art dealer Bill Simpson, McLuhan calls the mind’s squalor “now universal” and mocks the campus shrug — “So what? Who cares?” — a self he would shed in “his second conversion” from “a Gutenbergian Catholicism” to “an electric Catholicism.”
- The 1947–1951 “explosion” is traced to the move to the University of Toronto: an anti-environment of Innis, Havelock, and a skeptical English department, plus Giedion’s 1944 charge to “start doing French poetry,” put McLuhan’s ideas “into a kind of cement mixer.”
- The Tetrad turns on naming: Rumpelstiltskin “got away with his rape and pillage if nobody knew his name,” so the chart itself becomes “a naming of Rumpelstiltskin,” an evil “mask of a mask.”
- Reading Finnegans Wake’s “‘Tis the optophone which ontophanes,” Cameron unfolds the optophone as the eye-ear ratio “which shines forth our realities,” the “optophone principle” of McLuhan’s 1954 essay that “his whole life was about.”
- The thread closes on a coincidence: the author of Quo Vadimus?, a future-book Joyce mined for the Wake, is E. E. Fournier d’Albe, who invented the real optophone — announced to the Royal Society by Sir Oliver Lodge, uncle of McLuhan’s Winnipeg mentor, Rupert Lodge.
Notable Quotes
"the absolute squalor and anemia of mind, which is now universal."
"the way to be a somebody in the present environment is to be a nobody."
"mind your media men or you'll catch a cold environment."
Outline
- 0:02:20 — The book’s point: Trump and the Tech Body
- 0:04:19 — Figure and ground in Take Today
- 0:12:44 — The victim of the mind, and the 1949 “so what” letter
- 0:21:38 — The explosion: Pound, Innis, and the move to Toronto
- 0:28:04 — The Android Meme and the obscene
- 0:33:31 — McLuhan in the 90s; the comedian’s mask
- 0:36:36 — The Tetrad of Trump: Rumpelstiltskin and the Android Meme
- 0:39:59 — John Brockman and the influence McLuhan did not want
- 0:48:05 — The plurality of grounds and quadrophrenia
- 0:56:24 — Realizing Trump: exemplar versus understanding
- 01:02:13 — The optophone: eye, ear, and Joyce
- 01:09:39 — Knight, vampire, and emperor-cum-saint
- 01:20:43 — Quo Vadimus: Fournier d’Albe and the Lodges
- 01:28:06 — The God’s-eye view of 1939
- 01:35:30 — Quadrophrenia, drift, and the inadequate medium
- 01:53:09 — Closing: you’ve got to deal with Trump
Mentioned Resources
Works by McLuhan
- Take Today — cited for man as “both figure and ground” (p. 11) and for Barry Nevitt’s use of “E = mc²”
- The Mechanical Bride — the book McLuhan was “doing” in the 1949 letter
- “New Media as Political Forms” (1954, Explorations 3) — the essay on the “optophone principle”
- From Cliché to Archetype — Gerd Stern named on p.198
- “The Reversal of the Overheated Medium” (Playboy, December 1968) — headline promo behind “mind your media men or you’ll catch a cold environment”
- The Trump / Tech Body essay — Bob’s book under discussion (chapter 6 opening on p.172)
Other Works
- James Joyce, Finnegans Wake — “‘Tis the optophone which ontophanes” and the Wake’s thunder
- Ezra Pound, Guide to Kulchur — behind McLuhan’s “Baedeker, a Guide to Kulch”
- E. E. Fournier d’Albe, Quo Vadimus? — the future-book Joyce mined, by the optophone’s inventor
- Donald Theall, The Medium Is the Rear View Mirror (1971) — on the Toronto milieu
- John Brockman, By the Late John Brockman (1969)
Documents
- McLuhan’s 1949 letter to William Dallam (“Bill”) Simpson — from the Pound collection, University of Texas
- McLuhan’s 1964 letter to Wilfred Watson — “art must be totally environmental”
People
- Marshall McLuhan (media theorist at the center of the dialogue)
- Ezra Pound (whose precision “took a knife to McLuhan”)
- James Joyce (the Wake’s optophone and roundabout method)
- Frank Budgen (painter and Joyce’s interpreter, source of the “everyday roundabout”)
- Laszlo Moholy-Nagy (Bauhaus artist who “made a kind of optophone machine”)
- E. E. Fournier d’Albe (physicist who invented the optophone and wrote Quo Vadimus?)
- Oliver Lodge (physicist who communicated the optophone paper to the Royal Society)
- Rupert Lodge (McLuhan’s Winnipeg mentor, Oliver Lodge’s nephew)
- Harold Innis, Eric Havelock, Sigfried Giedion, Tom Easterbrook (the Toronto circle)
- Ted Carpenter, Donald Theall, Hugh Kenner, Wyndham Lewis, Buckminster Fuller (figures across the session)
- John Brockman and Gerd Stern (the New York literary-agent and mixed-media digression)
- Jean Baudrillard (“the demon of images”), Arthur Kroker (“abuse value”), Barrington Nevitt, Marcel Duchamp
Closing
The Tetrad is only the frame; this Dialogue’s real find is the optophone — the figure that lets Bob and Cameron braid Joyce, McLuhan’s Catholicism, and a blind man’s reading machine into a single argument about why we still cannot read our own images.
← The Archive Incarnate: Archive Fever, Process as Figure, and Innis’ Balance · The Super Angel and the Global Membrane: Lewis’ Angels, Kroker’s Body Drift, and the Annotated Wake →