Resuming their line-by-line reading of Bob’s Trump/Tech Body book at p.109, the dialogue arrives at a single dense coinage: the holeopathic cliché-probe, Bob’s name for a meme he says he had “right there in 1987” . Fusing homeopathy’s ever-diluted-but-potent substance with the hologram, it lets Bob and Cameron McEwen trace how the satellite-era anti-environment shrinks the whole world into every individual at once — a coenaesthetic center that turns out to be “nowhere” — and how McLuhan’s late word for all of it, “structure,” bottoms out in the “grunt” that “makes the market” .
Key Topics
- Bob reads McLuhan’s Take Today line (p.148, co-written with Barrington Nevitt), “At electric-information speeds art and science and nature converge through understanding media” as an anticipation of the Android Meme, an artist/scientist/new nature.
- The holeopathic-cliché probe defined: an old cliché retrieved and “slashed around” as a shrinking probe is a meme, diluted but retaining “the memory of the substance.”
- Donald Theall’s pair — “synaesthesia” and “coenaesthetic” — seats each digital user as “the director of the movie” — at a center that is also nowhere.
- Bob reads Howard Gossage’s four phases (last word → cliché → art form → archetype), see Gerald Stearn (ed.), McLuhan: Hot and Cool — Howard Gossage’s four-phase essay, “You Can See Why The Mighty Would Be Curious”, pp.13-14; Cameron corrects them toward McLuhan’s reversible archetype “like a ground.”
- Cameron on “structure” as McLuhan’s last word — the figure-and-ground turn that became “the dominant theme of his work” from 1964.
- Bob traces “phatic communion” from anthropologist Bronislaw Malinowski and the Trobriand Islanders to James Joyce and Marcel Jousse and gesture as “the ground of all communication.”
Notable Quotes
"At electric information speeds, art and science and nature converge through understanding media."Marshall McLuhan, read by Bob Dobbs, The Resonant Interval, Dialogue 54 (4 Aug 2022), 1:07
"The world is not one thing. 'Being' — big B 'being' — is itself plural."Cameron McEwen, The Resonant Interval, Dialogue 54 (4 Aug 2022), 22:57
Outline
- 0:00:06 — The Global Membrane and the Android Meme’s prediction
- 0:03:59 — “Mythic stages” and the simultaneity of time
- 0:12:18 — Heidegger’s framing and the sack of forgetfulness
- 0:21:34 — Holeopathic worlds: synaesthesia to coenaesthetic
- 0:29:18 — Holeopathic cliché-probes and the four phases of cliché (see Gerald Stearn (ed.), McLuhan: Hot and Cool — Howard Gossage’s four-phase essay, “You Can See Why The Mighty Would Be Curious”, pp.13-14)
- 0:35:53 — Cliché and archetype: reversibility and intercommunication
- 0:40:17 — Finitude, “quadrophrenia”, and the two dramas of cognition
- 0:51:05 — The long quotation and holeopathic battles
- 01:14:48 — Structure, the verbum, and the grunt that makes the market
- 01:33:05 — Making culture conscious: pain as the probe
- 01:38:38 — Journalism, phatic communion, and gesture
- 01:50:58 — Close: absurdity and laughter
Mentioned Resources
Works by McLuhan
- McLuhan’s Take Today line (p.148, co-written with Barrington Nevitt), “At electric-information speeds art and science and nature converge through understanding media”
- Counterblast (1969) — “The content of film is a collection of media within media. The ‘message’ is all of them at once.”, p.23
- From Cliché to Archetype (1970) — the archetype/cliché reversibility read as literate vs tribal
- City as Classroom — “a cliché and an archetype are interchangeable”
- War and Peace in the Global Village — pain as “the new probe of the 20th Century”; “macroscopic gesticulation”
- Explorations — the printing press making nature “a robot, a content”
Other Works
- Ogden & Richards, The Meaning of Meaning — Bronislaw Malinowski’s appendix introducing and naming “phatic communion”
- Roland McHugh, Annotations of Finnegans Wake — the clown juggling the slipping ball
- Gerald Stearn (ed.), McLuhan: Hot and Cool — Howard Gossage’s four-phase essay, “You Can See Why The Mighty Would Be Curious”, pp.13-14
- Tom Wolfe, The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test — Leary and Kesey never “completing the epiphany”
People
- Marshall McLuhan (media theorist at the center of the reading)
- Donald Theall (McLuhan student who coined a new application for synaesthesia/coenaesthetic)
- Martin Heidegger (framing and “language uses us”)
- Howard Gossage (adman whose four phases Bob reads from) — see Gerald Stearn (ed.), McLuhan: Hot and Cool — Howard Gossage’s four-phase essay, “You Can See Why The Mighty Would Be Curious”, pp.13-14
- Henry Wright (McLuhan’s Manitoba philosophy professor, “intercommunication”)
- Bronislaw Malinowski (anthropologist who named “phatic communion”)
- Marcel Jousse (Jesuit whose theory of gesture influenced Joyce)
- Lewis Lapham (editor whose O. J. Simpson’s “pagan-reality” epiphany vindicated McLuhan in 1994)
Closing
This session turns Bob’s most opaque coinage — the holeopathic-cliché probe — into a working account of how the Digital Age miniaturizes the whole world and its media into every person at once, and why becoming conscious of it is “extremely painful.”
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