One sentence, emailed between sessions, takes over the whole evening: the very components that make for a divided consciousness can, “with a certain encouragement,” become the means of an inclusive one . Neither man lets the vague phrase stand. Cameron McEwen eventually answers that the encouragement is faith, then immediately knots it — faith cannot come through works, because it must already be there in order to do the work . Bob Dobbs answers earlier and from the other end, out of a remark he says he overheard after a Monday night seminar and has been testing ever since: that certainty collapses on a monthly cycle, and recognizing the pattern is itself the encouragement . Bob’s book, the pair’s nominal subject, is never opened.
Key Topics
- Cameron sets the constraint the session runs under — an inclusive pair must stay two, which is why the yin-yang fails and why Bacon’s achievement was keeping the two pages distinct rather than reconciling them .
- He asks four times where the Tech Body actually is and never gets a location he can use; Bob’s answers arrive as images — the mortar between the stones of a wall, still binding but grown invisible, so people feel most autonomous where they are most propped up — until Cameron folds the whole thing into language instead .
- Bob identifies the Kroker quadrant of his 1995 Tiny Note Chart as “tactility squared,” a diagram drawn before he had the term Tech Body at all ; Cameron objects that tactility put to use is falsified, and Bob answers that being able to obsolesce tactility is what is new about the present .
- Cameron reconstructs the 1958–59 NAEB correspondence in which McLuhan insisted you cannot know what a new medium is unless you know what a medium is , lost that argument to the grant application, and — trying to work around the compromise — had his first big stroke .
- The New Science is deferred by its own foundation: it was to rest on configurations of the senses, but “sense” only becomes usable after the revolution the New Science was supposed to be .
- Cameron matches Bob’s chart of five-part “quadrants” to Eliot’s Four Quartets, each of them in five sections , which makes the structure a retrieval rather than an invention.
Notable Quotes
"at least so far, all of his work has come to nothing."Cameron McEwen, on McLuhan's project, The Resonant Interval, Dialogue 64 (2 Feb 2023), 3:26
"Every time there's a full moon, it all falls apart."Marshall McLuhan, quoted by Bob Dobbs, The Resonant Interval, Dialogue 64 (2 Feb 2023), 20:16
"It's been obsolesced. How could you obsolesce tactility? That's the newness of our situation."Bob Dobbs, The Resonant Interval, Dialogue 64 (2 Feb 2023), 1:15:44
Outline
- 0:01:10 — The Bacon quote: two pages, one gaze
- 0:03:43 — Hendiadys: two preserved as two
- 0:08:18 — Stubbornness and the citadel
- 0:13:49 — The algorithm as the new spectre
- 0:20:16 — Every full moon it all falls apart
- 0:28:01 — 1970: the year something fell apart
- 0:38:05 — Collective psychotherapy on the air
- 0:44:11 — The end of nature
- 0:49:15 — Grace, faith, and the somersault
- 01:06:30 — Where is the Tech Body?
- 01:14:17 — The Kroker quadrant and the 1995 chart
- 01:33:23 — Skornia, the NAEB, and new media singular
- 01:38:20 — The wobbling pivot and the fifth ball
- 01:54:41 — Configurations of the senses
- 01:57:12 — The chart: one, four, and the fifth quadrant
Mentioned Resources
Works by McLuhan
- Understanding Me — the Stephanie McLuhan and David Staines collection the session’s opening quote comes from
- “Towards an Inclusive Consciousness” (1970) — University of Toronto lecture supplying the Bacon passage
- From Cliché to Archetype (1970) — source of the p.131 passage on the formative process of consciousness
- The Gutenberg Galaxy — defended by Cameron as not only negative; supplies the definition of imagination
- War and Peace in the Global Village — the book Bob remembers the “incommensurable” sentence from
- The Global Village (1989) — searched live for that sentence; the incommensurable-yet-complementary passages
- Take Today — read for its closing “recently achieved forms of consciousness”
- Counterblast — its spectre of communism transposed onto “the algorithm”
- “Notes on Burroughs” (1964) — the Pharaoh who programs the whole world
- Review of Hugh Kenner’s book on Wyndham Lewis (1955) — the attempt to establish a One
Other Works
- T. S. Eliot, Four Quartets — each quartet in five sections
- James Joyce, Finnegans Wake — and “Finneganese” as the only adequate complexity
- W. B. Yeats, “The Second Coming” — the rough beast
People
- Marshall McLuhan (the media theorist whose 1970 lecture and unanswered question drive the session)
- Francis Bacon (Elizabethan philosopher who read the Book of Nature and the Book of Scripture together)
- Harry Skornia (head of the NAEB, McLuhan’s 1958–59 correspondent over the new-media grant)
- Wilfred Watson (McLuhan’s collaborator on From Cliché to Archetype)
- Hugh Kenner (critic whose book on Wyndham Lewis occasioned McLuhan’s account of nihilism)
- Donald Theall (McLuhan student; source of the History of the Illuminati story (“they” end up in Toronto at the Coach House in the sixties) and of synaesthesia/coenaesthesia)
- Arthur Kroker (theorist whose name Bob gives to a quadrant of his 1995 chart)
- Sigmund Freud (the analogy Cameron uses for Bob’s work on the air)
- Ezra Pound (supplies the wobbling pivot)
- Jean Baudrillard (supplies “after the orgy” for 1970)
- Bruce Powers (McLuhan’s co-author on The Global Village)
- Barrington Nevitt (source of “prepare very carefully and then do the opposite”)
- Stephanie McLuhan and David Staines (editors of Understanding Me)
Closing
The session is the clearest statement yet of why the New Science has not arrived: it needs the understanding it was meant to produce, and everyone involved — McLuhan included — has to work anyway.
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