A session that opens on p.174 of the Trump book and turns straight back to p.146, until the detour becomes the episode. Bob Dobbs sets the Global Membrane — the unseen ground of the 1960–90 world, which he ties to the Android Meme’s first phase — against the merely scenic “global theater,” then builds toward the super angel: the discarnate human who, unlike an angel fixed to one “there,” is everywhere at once. The frame is Wyndham Lewis’ Self-Condemned and The Human Age, whose “superhuman” McLuhan is said to have upgraded; around it runs a meditation on McLuhan the tireless repeater, and a reading of Arthur Kroker’s Body Drift, before the back half turns to how Bob came to xerox McLuhan’s annotated Finnegans Wake over one 1990 weekend.
Key Topics
- Reading p.146, Bob identifies the Global Membrane (phase one of the Android Meme) as the hidden Ground of the 1960–90 period, unnoticed until the Internet reached “the super angelic consumer after 1995.”
- The Global Theater is only “artificial scenery” in front of the Membrane — and in today’s Hollywood, Cameron observes, “there’s no scenery anymore, there’s no actors,” only digital representation.
- The “super angel” is McLuhan’s upgrade of Lewis’ “superhuman” concept: whereas an angel can be only “there” one moment at a time sequentially, the discarnate human (the super angel) is “everywhere simultaneously and immediately” like a page of FINNEGANS WAKE.
- Online, Bob argues, “the super angel became her own intelligence agency” — for him the real meaning behind the vague phrase “the Posthuman.”
- Reading Kroker’s Body Drift, Bob prizes its “gender drifters” and “hauntology” as poetry of the dispersed Bodies, while Cameron places it beside Baudrillard as description of the cul-de-sac without an exit.
- Bob recalls McLuhan’s personal marginal annotation in the Skeleton Key — that Joseph Campbell “misses the role of the Prankquean” in Finnegans Wake, which character symbolized, for McLuhan, the phonetic alphabet.
Notable Quotes
"There was probably never a man who said the same thing so many times in the world of ideas."
"Nothing is as imaginary as the material body."
"Right now we've reached the point where in Hollywood, not only is there no scenery anymore, there's no actors."
Outline
- 0:00:01 — The holeopathic detour: satellite, hologram, and Bob’s coinage
- 0:06:03 — The Global Membrane vs the Global Theater
- 0:15:03 — Where “global membrane” comes from: the two 1964 uses
- 0:23:35 — McLuhan the repeater: thinking out loud
- 0:29:11 — Opened by McLuhan, but they left
- 0:36:38 — The super angel: Lewis’ superhuman upgraded
- 0:47:15 — Kroker’s Body Drift
- 01:00:37 — The occult and understanding McLuhan
- 01:02:02 — The annotated Finnegans Wake
- 01:14:26 — The aborted TV series and the Coach House collapse
- 01:25:14 — Mary McLuhan and the Foundation
- 01:32:49 — Closing: the Five Bodies and the Meme
Mentioned Resources
Works by McLuhan
- The 1964 review of William Burroughs — where Bob traces McLuhan’s use of “global membrane”
- Foreword to Harold Innis, The Bias of Communication (1964) — the second, near-simultaneous use of the phrase
- Take Today — the shortened version McLuhan was working on with Barry Nevitt in 1974
- Understanding Media — source of the “edible spaceships”
- EXPLORATIONS #8 (1957) — where McLuhan credited Lewis with being the first to use the media “en bloc”
- The Interior Landscape — the book that showed Bob McLuhan was “working with the occult”
Works by Wyndham Lewis
- Self-Condemned (1954) — the character named “Professor Ian McKenzie” is based on McLuhan
- The Human Age — the Trilogy (Childermass [1928], Monstre Gai [1955], Malign Fiesta [1955]) about Hollywood’s “discarnate angels” (human actors)
Other Works
- Arthur Kroker, Body Drift (2012) — the “post-imaginary body” Bob reads at length
- B.W. Powe, The Global Membrane — the recent book that revived McLuhan’s phrase
- James Joyce, Finnegans Wake — McLuhan’s four annotated copies, and the Scribbledehobble
- Joseph Campbell, A Skeleton Key to Finnegans Wake — McLuhan’s copy has his personal “Prankquean” annotation
- Bob Dobbs, Phatic Communion — the ordered McLuhan quotes a reader found “so clear”
People
- Marshall McLuhan (media theorist at the center of the conversation)
- Wyndham Lewis (painter, novelist, and the source of the “superhuman” concept)
- Arthur Kroker (theorist of the drifting, “post-imaginary body”)
- Cameron McEwen (the McLuhan scholar in dialogue with Bob)
- Bob Dobbs (co-host, author of the “Trump and the Tech Body” book)
- Harold Innis (the one contemporary Bob and Cameron say “understood”)
- William Irwin Thompson (a thinker McLuhan inspired but who “took a smell”)
- Leon Surette (McLuhan-and-Pound scholar Bob once interviewed)
- Joseph Campbell (mythologist who “missed the Prankquean”)
- Jacques Derrida (source of Kroker’s “hauntology”)
- Nelson Thall (Bob’s collaborator who borrowed McLuhan’s four annotated Wake volumes from Corinne McLuhan for a weekend)
- Robert Logan (McLuhan associate; the day-of-death letter and the Thomas Fisher Rare Book Library project)
- Corinne McLuhan (who lent the annotated Wake volumes)
- Mary McLuhan (Founder of the Marshall McLuhan Foundation in the early 1980s)
- David Greenberg (planned the aborted McLuhan TV series)
- Barry Nevitt (McLuhan’s collaborator on Take Today)
- Richard Dawkins (who coined “meme” in 1976)
Closing
The detour is the argument: by folding Lewis’ “super human” and Kroker’s “drifting body” into the “super angel” concept, Bob makes the case that McLuhan already named the “discarnate condition” the Internet would only later reveal.
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