Touch, in McLuhan’s sense, is not a fifth sense but contrast — the interplay of the merging and the abruptly interrupting — and the whole session turns on the half everyone drops. Reading p.77 of the What We/You Didn’t Know About Trump book, Bob Dobbs argues that the “merged” globalist bias discounted tactility’s abrasive-confrontational pole and so never saw the tribal, Trump-symbolized return coming; that the computer-and-satellite “Global Theater” is “tactility squared.” From there the talk flips the leviathan of tactile, mixed-corporate media into the autonomy of the individual God-self — the discarnate super angel’s condition mistaken for divinity — reads it through Donald Theall’s co-anesthetic (the director at the still center of the media storm), and ends on Bob’s claim that William Gibson’s Neuromancer turned McLuhan’s discarnate cliché into an archetype — the sign that cliché-into-archetype McLuhan is now obsolete (McLuhan used the word “obsolete” to refer to the fact that an artifact works so well, it’s taken for granted).
Key Topics
- McLuhan defined tactility as contrast, a “brusque interface,” not one thing — and Cameron McEwen calls it “the secret generator of all things,” equally the abrasive and the merging.
- The Global Theater of computer, satellite, TV, and radio anti-environment is “the squaring of the particular tactility in the TV screen” — the global village of the 50s raised to a second power.
- The God-self depends on certifying the very identity it nominates, so, taken seriously, it “falls through itself like a black hole.”
- Theall’s co-anaesthetic — the Internet seating you as director at the center of your media clothing — is a deceptive power that gives a sense of power while removing the Ground the tribe once supplied.
- Bob reads Wyndham Lewis’ 1929 confessional portrait of himself as a Communist, Fascist, Monarchist, and Anarchist simultaneously as the perfect snapshot of the “juggling” of identity Bob calls “quadrophrenia.”
- Everybody is now a crude “media ecologist,” so cliché McLuhan is now “hypertrophy” — everyone’s doing it with no personal, private, self-aggrandizing success.
Notable Quotes
"You've got to get your toe chopped off, and then you wake up."
"Now disregarding, if you can, whatever your political views may be. Bracket. And here's mine. Mine are partly communist and partly fascist, with a distinct streak of monarchism in my Marxism, but at bottom anarchist with a healthy passion for order."
"It's people acting more or less as holograms from 50 years ago."
Outline
- 0:01:04 — p.77: Tactility as Contrast
- 0:05:00 — The Merged Meme and the Confrontational Return
- 0:06:50 — Tactility Squared: From Global Village to Global Theater
- 0:13:24 — Technology Coming Alive, and Two One-Sided Takes
- 0:21:44 — Solar Government and the Resonant Node
- 0:24:44 — The God-Self and the Super Angel
- 0:30:39 — The Co-anaesthetic
- 0:37:04 — The Teacher’s Package and the Chip Body
- 0:50:39 — Ethics, the Book, and the Church
- 0:59:18 — Quadrophrenia and the Grade-10 Question
- 01:10:24 — Gibson’s “Cyberspace” and Cliché McLuhan Made an Archetypal Cliché-Probe
Mentioned Resources
Works by McLuhan
- War and Peace in the Global Village (1968) — makes “violence as an identity question” its theme
- Take Today: The Executive as Dropout (1972, with Barrington Nevitt) — “put on the whole world as your mask of power,” and the conceptualization works “equally to events outside as inside”
- From Cliché to Archetype (1970) — the “great leap forward” past Understanding Media
- Understanding Media (1964) — the book whose title becomes the method for reconceptualizing the classroom
- Playboy interview (1969) — the electric anti-environment as “organic” - ALIVE!!
Other Works
- Edmund Carpenter, They Became What They Beheld (1970) — tactility as the interplay of merging and interrupting
- William Gibson, Neuromancer (1984) — coined “cyberspace”; read as re-describing McLuhan’s “discarnate state”
- Derrick de Kerckhove, Connected Intelligence (1997) — which “didn’t get” that the Internet was disconnected in effect
- James Joyce, Finnegans Wake — “the closest picture of what we’re dealing with”
- Arthur Kroker — “crash theory” is ecstasy as probe and crash
People
- Bob Dobbs (media theorist; author of the What We/You Didn’t Know About Trump book)
- Cameron McEwen (McLuhan scholar)
- Marshall McLuhan (media theorist at the center of both men’s reading)
- Donald Theall (McLuhan’s learned student and critic; source of the co-anaesthetic/synaesthetic distinction)
- Edmund Carpenter (anthropologist and McLuhan collaborator; co-founder of Explorations)
- Wyndham Lewis (modernist painter and writer; the 1929 political confession)
- William Gibson (science-fiction novelist; author of Neuromancer)
- Arthur Kroker (Canadian theorist of “crash theory” and body drift)
- Jean Baudrillard (French theorist Bob says Kroker went “further than”)
- Eric Voegelin (political philosopher; McLuhan’s correspondent on Gnosticism)
- Derrick de Kerckhove (McLuhan’s collaborator on the French translation of From Cliché to Archetype; author of Connected Intelligence)
- Buckminster Fuller (designer who said “think big”)
- James Joyce (author of Finnegans Wake)
- Frank Zingrone (McLuhan scholar who “struggled” with the obsolescence of McLuhan’s themes so much that he came up with the “Pentad” to bypass McLuhan’s “Tetrad”)
- Benjamin Spock (pediatrician whose “permissive” advice for parents in the 60s Bob says Lewis “pre-updated” with his understanding in 1929 that young people would have to contend with a “quadrophrenic” personality in the near future)
Closing
This Dialogue matters because it recasts McLuhan’s least-understood term — “tactility” as contrast — into a working account of the Internet-Age’s “quadrophrenic” self (possessed by Five Bodies), and then turns that account on the McLuhan industry itself, arguing that the cliché-probe has become an archetypal form and so is already obsolete (“obsolete” as defined by McLuhan).
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