At the top of p.101 sits a rare 1973 McLuhan interview from Forces magazine, and its claim that “the media themselves have become the new art forms” sets the whole session’s agenda. Bob reads the avant-garde out of the galleries and into the media themselves, pushing the line forward to the book’s thesis — that Trump is the Tech Body — while Cameron keeps turning each equation back into a question, asking how the little word “is” actually functions . The reading circles from Culture Is Our Business through scandal, the caveman ground of tactility, and Rumsfeld’s “unknown unknowns” to a closing account of how McLuhan quietly overwrote Jung.
Key Topics
- The Forces interview draws McLuhan’s sharpest form-versus-content distinction: hear “the media” and you think of the programs — Columbo, 60 Minutes — but “not in the programs,” it is the form of the media that “alters society like people thought art would do.”
- Cameron reads Culture Is Our Business against its commercial surface: the real “business” is not commodification but the standing task of figuring out what culture is — a transpersonal force that shapes how people see and feel while we propagate it unconsciously.
- Bob ranks Trump “the greatest artist of the last 34 years,” taking an artist as “someone who makes a big impact” and “accomplishes a major change in direction” where the celebrity-culture artists never did.
- Reading Counterblast (“all technologies are collective unconscious”), Bob relocates the unconscious out of the skull: the environment you live in unnoticed is the unconscious, the media “what you’re not conscious of.”
- Bob reads McLuhan as a writer of “cartoons” — bounding generalities — who merged his own prose seamlessly into Finnegans Wake, and recovers a 1977 line that “the media are characters in Finnegans Wake.”
- The session closes on the archetype: Bob argues McLuhan “took on the Jung meme” and made technologies themselves the archetypes, a move Cameron dates to a 1940s debt that made cliché and archetype — figure and ground — reversible.
Notable Quotes
"The media themselves have become the new art forms."Marshall McLuhan, read by Bob Dobbs, The Resonant Interval, Dialogue 51 (23 Jun 2022), 0:42
"I would say he was the greatest artist of the last 34 years."Bob Dobbs, on Donald Trump, The Resonant Interval, Dialogue 51 (23 Jun 2022), 21:36
"The media are characters in Finnegans Wake."Marshall McLuhan, quoted by Bob Dobbs, The Resonant Interval, Dialogue 51 (23 Jun 2022), 49:06
Outline
- 0:00:01 — The Forces 1973 quote: the media as the new art form
- 0:01:20 — Meltzer, wrestling, and Canada as anti-environment
- 0:07:20 — Questions, not statements: the Android Meme as method
- 0:13:26 — Culture Is Our Business: the multiple readings
- 0:17:26 — Scandal as the sense-making engine
- 0:20:06 — Trump the artist and the Tech Body
- 0:24:22 — The word “is,” verbum, and the caveman ground
- 0:30:53 — Efficiency and loss: Gutenberg, Heidegger, tactility
- 0:37:05 — The Forces interview’s other gems: the moon shot, the Pound letter
- 0:42:56 — McLuhan writes cartoons; the merged Finnegans Wake
- 0:49:06 — The media are characters in Finnegans Wake; Mr. Book
- 0:52:35 — McLuhan as detached producer: “let happen”
- 01:01:54 — Scene-sters, “where it’s at,” and iON’s vindication
- 01:09:17 — Deliteralization and the Counterblast unconscious
- 01:18:54 — Trump’s grammar and Rumsfeld’s “unknown unknowns”
- 01:33:19 — Global Theater vs. Global Membrane: the chart’s numerology
- 01:39:49 — Voices of Literature; numerology as radar
- 01:45:52 — McLuhan one-upped Jung: technologies as archetypes
Mentioned Resources
Works by McLuhan
- Culture Is Our Business (1970) — its title read three ways; the phrase traced back to a 1950s essay
- Counterblast (1969) — p.31, “all technologies are collective unconscious,” read as the session’s second keynote
- From Cliché to Archetype — behind the closing discussion of cliché, archetype, and reversible figure/ground
- Gutenberg Galaxy — cited for the half of the book that “isn’t his writing,” the blurred line between text and quotation
- The Mechanical Bride — described by McLuhan as “a new kind of science fiction” whose characters are the ads and comics
- Take Today — source of Barrington Nevitt’s play on “intangibles”
- Explorations — the essay in which the last paragraph merges a quotation of 7 lines from James Joyce’s Finnegans Wake (1939) into McLuhan’s last sentence of the essay, “Radio and TV vs. The ABCED-Minded”, Explorations, Volume Five, June 1955, p.18, line 7 (”… now I am amp amp amplify…. The young brain-trust, representative of 20th Century science and broadcasting,…”) without proper quotation marks to indicate where the quotation ends and McLuhan’s own words begin — “amp amplify…. The young brain-trust,…”
- Interview in Forces magazine (issue 22, 1973, Hydro-Québec) — the p.101 quote on media as the new art form
- Voices of Literature — McLuhan’s high-school anthology, the elusive Volume 3 (“Roles, Sounds, and Masks”)
Other Works
- James Joyce, Finnegans Wake — the book Bob calls “the closest to presenting the Android Meme in book form”
- Richard Meltzer, The Aesthetics of Rock (1970) — the rock critic who left journalism for wrestling
- Frank Zingrone and Eric McLuhan, eds., Essential McLuhan — its Part Four, “Culture and Art, Figure and Ground”
Documents
- Donald Rumsfeld’s February 12, 2002 briefing — the “known knowns / unknown unknowns” passage
- McLuhan’s letter to Ezra Pound — “To hell with our top soil. We can grow potatoes on the moon tomorrow.”, Letters of Marshall McLuhan, January, 1951, p.219
People
- Marshall McLuhan (media theorist at the center of the dialogue)
- Donald Trump (the subject of Bob’s book, read as the Tech Body)
- Carl Jung (the psychologist whose “archetype” McLuhan is said to overwrite)
- Richard Meltzer (rock critic who turned from journalism to wrestling)
- Frank Zingrone (co-editor of Essential McLuhan, credited with noticing the move past Jung)
- William Irwin Thompson (his “all-at-onceness” list that leaves McLuhan out)
- Barrington Nevitt (co-author of Take Today, source of “intangibles”)
- Martin Heidegger (invoked on the pre-Socratics and the losses efficiency brings)
- Ezra Pound, Frank Zappa, Andy Warhol, Donald Rumsfeld, Andrew McLuhan (figures invoked across the session)
Closing
Held against Bob’s ever-larger cosmology, the session’s quiet claim is Cameron’s: that McLuhan’s real bequest was not a set of answers but the discipline of hearing, in “is” there is a question we otherwise live inside and never ask.
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