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."
"I would say he was the greatest artist of the last 34 years."
"The media are characters in Finnegans Wake."
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 whose ending merges into Finnegans Wake
- Interview in Forces magazine (issue 22, 1973, Hydro-Québec) — the page-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 — “we’ll just go and grow everything on the moon”
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,” a question we otherwise live inside and never ask.
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