Back at the top of p.81 of his book on the Tech Body and Trump, Bob reads out a passage by the adman Howard Gossage — a new medium runs from last word to cliché to art form to archetype — and recognizes it as the seed McLuhan distilled into From Cliché to Archetype . The first half turns that four-phase pattern every way it will go: mapped onto the Trivium and Quadrivium, sped into “baroque spirals,” and read through a McLuhan who “blurs” every category the way Finnegans Wake does. The second half is a slow reading of the last page of War and Peace in the Global Village, where Mayr’s outbreeding and inbreeding resolve into a “connubium of a superterrestrial kind” — a phrase Bob says he has never once worked through aloud with a reader following along, until now .
Key Topics
- Howard Gossage’s four phases — last word, cliché, art form, archetype — printed in Hot and Cool and distilled into From Cliché to Archetype, with McLuhan “messy” about which way the sequence runs.
- McLuhan as a “musician,” his symphony metaphor traced to Giedion’s Space, Time and Architecture, and the four phases mapped onto the Trivium and Quadrivium in “cyclic simultaneity.”
- Menippean satire’s unwritten history in Eric McLuhan’s PhD, retrieval and shamans, Jeff Koons, and McLuhan’s “great religious age” against Cameron’s insistence that ontology is plural.
- A biographical interlude — Cameron’s advisor Thomas Kuhn, his Nietzsche thesis and L.A. software years, and Andrew McLuhan’s newly found stash of Monday-night seminar tapes.
- The 1951–52 letters to Pound (“the word is now the cheapest, most universal drug”) and the contested route by which cybernetics reached McLuhan — Theall or Giedion.
- A close reading of War and Peace in the Global Village’s last page: Mayr’s outbreeding/inbreeding and the “connubium of a superterrestrial kind” Bob reads theologically and Cameron as the shift of plural ontology.
Notable Quotes
"That's when you become a musician. That's when you realize Marshall was a musician."Bob Dobbs, The Resonant Interval, Dialogue 44 (20 Jan 2022), 4:10
"McLuhan is trying to show that religion is not a singular last word. It's what gets precipitated out of the dynamic of last words plural."Cameron McEwen, The Resonant Interval, Dialogue 44 (20 Jan 2022), 34:49
"McLuhan knew that humility was endless and that it was ridiculous to talk about being a unique seer or something."Cameron McEwen, The Resonant Interval, Dialogue 44 (20 Jan 2022), 2:04:12
Outline
- 0:00:02 — Gossage’s four phases and the blurring of categories (p.81)
- 0:04:10 — McLuhan the musician; the symphony metaphor
- 0:06:30 — The artist and the atomic bomb; the millennial phatic
- 0:14:51 — The four phases mapped onto the Trivium and Quadrivium
- 0:18:20 — “Many times over”: baroque spirals and the speeding-up process
- 0:21:20 — Identity, cliché, and the gap of dialectic
- 0:25:47 — Cyclic simultaneity, the Tetrad, and Menippean satire
- 0:32:44 — From cliché to archetype speeds up; retrieving religion
- 0:35:14 — McLuhan, the virus, and the humility of pain
- 0:42:23 — Biographical interlude: Cameron’s cul-de-sac
- 01:00:30 — The Monday-night seminar tapes
- 01:05:20 — The 1951–52 letters to Pound
- 01:15:45 — Theall, cybernetics, and the end of the Gutenberg era
- 01:27:19 — War and Peace in the Global Village (p.190): outbreeding, inbreeding, and the connubium
- 01:43:08 — The connubium read theologically
- 01:51:51 — McLuhan’s circle and its limits
- 02:05:35 — Closing
Mentioned Resources
Works by McLuhan
- From Cliché to Archetype (1970, with Wilfred Watson) — the four-phase pattern’s home
- War and Peace in the Global Village (1968, designed with Quentin Fiore) — its last page (190) closely read
- Culture Is Our Business — the “expendable jujube,” the opera-ad, the supernova of the arts
- Take Today — “art, science, and nature merge through understanding media”
- City as Classroom (1977) — “cliché to archetype or backwards”
- McLuhan: Hot and Cool (Gerald Stearn, editor) — where Gossage’s passage is printed
- The Interior Landscape — the artist “becomes all things”; Baudelaire’s humility before pain
- “Prospect” (1962) — the essay Cameron reads for its tone of pain
- Letters of Marshall McLuhan — the June 1951–52 Pound letters
Other Works
- Sigfried Giedion, Space, Time and Architecture (1941)
- Hugh Kenner, The Pound Era (1971)
- Barrington Nevitt, ABC of Prophecy (1980)
- Eric McLuhan, doctoral thesis on Menippean satire and Finnegans Wake (1982); The Role of Thunder in Finnegans Wake (1997)
- Norman Mailer, The Naked and the Dead (1948)
- Carlos Castaneda — the Don Juan books (beginning in 1968)
People
- Marshall McLuhan (media theorist at the center of the dialogues)
- Howard Gossage (adman whose four-phase passage anchors the session)
- Jean Baudrillard (French theorist who called McLuhan a musician)
- Sigfried Giedion (architectural historian, McLuhan’s 1940s influence)
- Eric McLuhan (McLuhan’s son; his PhD carries the Menippean history)
- Ezra Pound (poet; the 1951–52 letters’ addressee)
- James Joyce (author of Finnegans Wake, the session’s structural key)
- Wyndham Lewis (the Menippean, by Theall’s typology)
- Harold Innis (Toronto communications theorist)
- Ted Carpenter (anthropologist who brought McLuhan “Eskimo” reality)
- Donald Theall (McLuhan student who claimed to introduce cybernetics to McLuhan)
- Barrington Nevitt (engineer and Take Today co-author)
- Harley Parker (McLuhan’s Art and Museums collaborator)
- Bernard Muller-Thym (“the first huge personal influence”)
- Daniel Capon (“the computer guy” among the collaborators)
- Norbert Wiener (MIT founder of cybernetics)
- Thomas Kuhn (Cameron’s junior-year advisor at Princeton)
- Friedrich Nietzsche (subject of Cameron’s thesis)
- Andy Warhol (“In the future, everyone will be world-famous for fifteen minutes”)
- Jeff Koons (artist who “put anything in the museum”)
- Ernst Mayr (biologist behind “outbreeding/inbreeding”)
- Dave Worcester (the Cosmic Awareness channel whose “Rhyee”/“original separateness” Bob reads into the connubium)
- Quentin Fiore (designer of War and Peace in the Global Village)
- John Wain (English novelist alienated by McLuhan)
- Frank Kermode (critic who “tried to learn from McLuhan”)
- Jonathan Miller (early fan turned critic)
- Robert Fulford (Toronto critic, “the gadfly”)
- Tim Leary (LSD apostle in Bob’s L.A. picture)
- Woody Allen (“the book guy” of Annie Hall)
- Raymond Rosenthal (editor who coined “millennial phatic”)
- Richard Meltzer (rock critic celebrating working-class media)
- Hugh Kenner (author of The Pound Era)
- Andrew McLuhan (grandson who found the seminar tapes)
- David Greenberg (attempted McLuhan’s final TV series)
Closing
A close reading that turns a single obscure page of McLuhan into a whole theory of how a new medium ages and renews — and, at its end, into a theology of the world remarried to itself.
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