One word runs the length of this session, and it enters almost by accident. Reading his own sentence about “anchoring our icon of this complexity in the after image of the bureaucratic chemical body,” Bob Dobbs is stopped by Cameron McEwen’s first question of the night: does anchoring mean only limiting, or something more like emphasis? Bob calls it a fetish, an identity crisis, a wish to “get solid somewheres.” Two hours later the same word comes back as a verdict on the whole human project — the anthropomorphic is reachable only by throwing out an anchor, and “no anchor has legitimacy.”
Key Topics
- Picking up the Arthur Kroker quotes left unfinished in session 59, Bob works “surplus flesh” against McLuhan’s obsolescence: “when something’s obsolete, you get more of it. So we get more and more chemical bodies, and that’s called overpopulation.”
- Cameron turns Bob’s complaint about lazy categorization into something harder — everyone already knows the categories are prisons, so “the whole world is involved in the business of getting used to our prisons.”
- Bob sets McLuhan’s December 1964 Nation essay on Burroughs, and its phrase Global Membrane, against his own coinage the Android Meme, arguing the better phrase was the one the reception passed over.
- The Android Meme’s second phase gets its terminology challenged on arrival: Cameron asks “Why do you call it the parachemical body instead of some other body, like the astral body or TV body or something?”, and Bob has to state the term’s whole content in one answer.
- From a November 1968 Explorations piece, the line that the laser beam will use “human dreams and the audience of the intellect” — which both men read as the scrubbing of the last private reserve of awareness.
- With the electric ESP withdrawn, Bob’s voluntary ESP is a matching nobody feels anymore; Cameron answers with making, and art theory’s discovery that art is never a merging.
Notable Quotes
"And so the whole world is involved in the business of getting used to our prisons."
"Such is the law of electric media, which stretch the nerves to form a Global Membrane of enclosure."
"You don't get to the subject or to the anthropomorphic except by... throwing out some kind of anchor. But no anchor has legitimacy."
Outline
- 0:00:02 — Surplus flesh and the afterimage of the chemical body
- 0:07:31 — Lazy categories and the business of getting used to our prisons
- 0:15:32 — The Global Membrane and the Android Meme
- 0:19:55 — Archetypes of collective postures
- 0:29:55 — The new science
- 0:32:31 — Notice of cancellation of subscription to a world
- 0:38:30 — The theology of discarnate man
- 0:46:28 — Android Meme phase two: the parachemical body
- 0:53:27 — The anchor gadget
- 0:58:46 — The audience of the intellect
- 01:08:11 — The multiplicity of media
- 01:13:58 — The anthropomorphic
- 01:25:11 — Hearts failing
- 01:28:16 — October 1962
- 01:33:37 — Voluntary ESP: matching and making
- 01:40:30 — The hologram
- 01:46:37 — Puny Canada, and CBGB
- 01:56:29 — The private individual man
Mentioned Resources
Works by Marshall McLuhan
- “Notes on Burroughs” (The Nation, December 1964) — source of the Global Membrane passage read at length here
- Counterblast (1969) — cited twice by page, for the earth as “an old nose cone” and the archetypes of the social unconscious
- Prospect (1962) — the “sheer multiplicity of media” passage, dated here to the week of the Cuban Missile Crisis
- Explorations (University of Toronto Varsity Graduate, November 1968) — the laser beam and the audience of the intellect
- The Gutenberg Galaxy — invoked for Pope’s private postures of mind, and for “we’re like the book”
- Culture Is Our Business — its last line, “There is no finish line”
- War and Peace in the Global Village — pain as the new exploratory leading edge
- Laws of Media — tactile space, pushed to an extreme, flipping into kinetic space
- The Review of Books and Religion, Vol. 3 No. 9 (mid-June 1974) — the interview on the theology of discarnate man
Other Works
- Arthur Kroker, Body Drift — cited as independent arrival at Bob’s overlay of multiple bodies
- Arthur Kroker, The Will to Technology and the Culture of Nihilism (2004) — the quotes carried over from session 59
- Eric McLuhan, Media and Formal Cause — its inventory of the last fifty years of fads
- Sigfried Giedion, Mechanization Takes Command — the route to McLuhan on advertising as good news
People
- Bob Dobbs (co-host; author of the Trump / Tech Body book being read)
- Cameron McEwen (co-host; McLuhan scholar and editor)
- Marshall McLuhan (Canadian media theorist, the dialogues’ central figure)
- Arthur Kroker (Canadian political theorist of technology and the body)
- Eric McLuhan (Marshall McLuhan’s son and collaborator)
- William Burroughs (novelist, subject of McLuhan’s 1964 Nation essay)
- Alexander Pope (poet of the Dunciad, McLuhan’s archetypes of private posture)
- Donald Theall (McLuhan’s student, read here as calling him the new seer)
- Barrington Nevitt (McLuhan’s collaborator and close friend)
- Nelson Thall (Bob’s collaborator on the 1979 McLuhan interview)
- Marilouise Kroker (Arthur Kroker’s collaborator and wife)
- Robertson Davies, Robert Fulford, Kildare Dobbs (Canadian writers, Bob’s candidates for the Prospect readership)
- Derrick de Kerckhove and Robert Logan (Toronto McLuhan scholars)
- Walter Cronkite (CBS anchor, the hologram’s nightly frame)
- Sigfried Giedion (architectural historian)
- James Joyce (whose Finnegans Wake, Bob says, was built to have no ground)
Closing
This is the session where the chart’s own ground gives way: after fifty-nine dialogues mapping the Anthropomorphic Physical, Bob concedes there is no anthropomorphic left to find, and Cameron closes the last exit by ruling that nothing could legitimately anchor it anyway.
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