Is the Global Membrane one thing or many? Resuming at the top of p.77 of his book on the Tech Body and Trump , Bob Dobbs holds that the membrane is a single timeless, contentless space “that goes out past the moon,” while Cameron McEwen counters that it is singular only in chronological time and, read synchronically, “naturally plural” . Between those poles the session works through tactility’s “knotted” both/and , the Android Meme as tools that “ape” rather than shape us , and the 1953 essays in which Bob says McLuhan “discovered the techne meme” inside Finnegans Wake .
Key Topics
- Bob traces “Global Membrane” to McLuhan’s December 1964 review of Burroughs and inventories its handful of appearances — the Gutenberg Galaxy’s “cosmic membrane,” a “single cohesive field or membrane,” a “Global Membrane of enclosure.”
- Tactility is “both/and,” but Cameron ties a knot in the definition: to be genuinely both/and it “must include either/or,” which makes it “a very knotted concept.”
- “Going with the flow” is reread as the retrieved smooth surfaces of the hot auto era — undone once Rock ‘n’ Roll brought the “abrupt interfaces” — with Cameron grounding it in old Gillette razor-blade ads.
- The Android Meme is the second phase of McLuhan’s tools — no longer “shaping us” but “aping us,” media that “look like people” through the graphic user interface.
- Bob dates McLuhan’s “discovery of the techne meme” to 1953 - the year Crick and Watson found the “gene” - when McLuhan began seeing “media anti-environments” rather than sixty languages per page in Finnegans Wake.
- Reading p.79, Bob calls the post-1970s chase for shareholder value “tactility squared… popularly known as ‘Wall Street’” and argues McLuhan’s neglected Quadrivium matters more than the Trivium, seizing Baudrillard’s line that McLuhan was “a musician.”
Notable Quotes
"The Global Membrane is one space that has no content and that's always there, there's only one."
"In my way of reading McLuhan, which is not chronological but is synchronic, then membrane is naturally plural."
"All future technologies are in Finnegans Wake."
Outline
- 0:00:12 — P.77: the break-up of tactility in the Global Membrane
- 0:02:15 — McLuhan’s membrane: the archival citations
- 0:05:16 — Tactility as a both/and knot
- 0:06:20 — Going with the flow: the smooth surfaces of the auto era
- 0:12:01 — The McLuhan family
- 0:31:37 — A present-day example: Amazing Polly (a podcaster)
- 0:45:18 — Is the membrane singular or plural?
- 0:56:35 — Wyndham Lewis and “back to the one”
- 0:59:49 — Quadrophrenia: five states of autonomy (Five Bodies)
- 01:10:48 — Aping us, not shaping us
- 01:37:12 — 1953: McLuhan “discovers the techne meme”
- 01:49:30 — Tactility squared and the Quadrivium
- 01:56:17 — McLuhan as musician: Frank Zappa and Barrington Nevitt
- 02:04:37 — The overlay formula and a global language
- 02:12:06 — Carolyn’s clinic as McLuhan’s seminar
Mentioned Resources
Works by McLuhan
- Gutenberg Galaxy (1962) — cited for Teilhard de Chardin’s “cosmic membrane… snapped around the globe”
- “Electronic Age — The Age of Implosion” (1962) — “electricity has wrapped the planet in a single cohesive field or membrane”
- Review of Burroughs, Nation (December 28, 1964) — the “Global Membrane of enclosure”
- Take Today (1972) — the helmsman and the oversized rudder (p. 217)
- Understanding Media — “the desire for more money is a tactile expression”
- War and Peace in the Global Village (1968) and the Playboy interview (1969) — the digital anti-environment is called “organic” because it’s ALIVE!!
Other Works
- James Joyce, Finnegans Wake — the book Bob says McLuhan read the techne meme out of, in 1953
- The Medium Is the Massage (album) — “we shape our tools and thereafter our tools ape us”
- Hugh Kenner’s study of Wyndham Lewis — McLuhan’s review ends: “Let us go back to the one”
- From Cliché to Archetype — where Lewis’ “twoness” is quoted
- “Five-Bodies Model explained” in Paranoia Magazine, Spring 2007, Issue #44 — Bob’s interview on the five states of autonomy
- Bob Dobbs’ book on the Tech Body and Trump — the broadside under close reading
People
- Marshall McLuhan (media theorist at the center of the dialogue)
- Wyndham Lewis (for McLuhan, “the greatest ‘tactile eye’ thinker”)
- Frank Zappa (the “only musical Para-Media Ecologist… keeping up with McLuhan”)
- Barrington Nevitt (the one colleague who “could take this talk”)
- Jean Baudrillard (source of “McLuhan is a musician”)
- William Burroughs (subject of McLuhan’s NATION Magazine “Global Membrane” review, Dec.28, 1964)
- Teilhard de Chardin (the “cosmic membrane” enthusiast McLuhan cites)
- Mary McLuhan and Bernard Muller-Thym (the family favoring anecdote)
- Peter Montgomery (the student who noticed McLuhan “shifted around 1962”)
- Mae Brussell and Lyndon LaRouche (figures in Bob’s CKLN overlay formula)
- Carolyn Dean (Bob’s bride of 55 years, whose clinical practice served as his “lab”)
- Amazing Polly (the online personality used as a present-day example)
Closing
The dialogue’s real stake is a disagreement about time: whether the membrane is one space we keep re-entering or many read all at once — the fault line between Bob’s narrative eye and Cameron’s synchronic one.
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