A word carried unexamined through sixty dialogues finally gets taken apart. Reading aloud from his own Memo to Prince Charles (June 4, 1987), Bob stops at “holeopathic” and derives it — homeopathy plus hologram — which commits the session to defending a strange proposition: that the satellite’s global hologram, like a diluted remedy, grows more potent as it shrinks toward pure memory . Most of the night is spent looking for a warrant for that. What turns up instead is the same movement running the other way — the more a thing has to mean everything, the smaller it has to become before anyone can handle it .
Key Topics
- The session opens on unfinished business — Bob’s page-by-page directions for locating a quote in an unpaginated section of Project 69 , before returning to the Kroker passage left hanging at the end of dialogue 70 .
- Hauntology’s provenance gets questioned: Bob credits it to Derrida , Cameron doubts it because McLuhan was writing about haunted media in the 1950s and twice returns Bob’s “spectre of communism” to Marx , then concedes he cannot confirm McLuhan ever used the noun .
- Kroker’s prose is worked clause by clause rather than admired whole, and Bob’s verdict is generous and fatal at once — the reaching is itself the problem — sharpened from Cameron’s gentler reading of the passage as a man working something out in public .
- The coinage is defined and then needs a warrant, which sends the session into Jacques Benveniste’s 1988 Nature paper on high dilutions . Bob reads the refutation aloud against his own interest , keeping the citation while the record contradicts it.
- Cameron relocates disappearance a century earlier, to a Nietzsche who says not that things vanished but that there is no more apparent world — and names what the Gutenberg Galaxy could not see, that the gap is transitive and is what holds things together .
- Cameron’s rule against every theory of everything is that it must be a theory of everything’s plural , which Bob translates into the multipolar and reads back off his own chart, where each quadrant is paired with a subatomic particle and advertising is named for the gluon precisely so the cohesion can be called fake .
Notable Quotes
"The more huge things you have, the smaller the huge things have to be."Cameron McEwen, on the flip between the inflated and the tiny, The Resonant Interval, Dialogue 71 (15 Jun 2023), 1:20:55
"You don't realize that the smaller something is, the more powerful it is."Bob Dobbs, The Resonant Interval, Dialogue 71 (15 Jun 2023), 1:36:56
"And so the saving is the danger. The danger is the saving."Cameron McEwen, on the two faces of media availability, The Resonant Interval, Dialogue 71 (15 Jun 2023), 1:49:17
Outline
- 0:00:13 — Opening: finding the tactile eye in Project 69
- 0:03:17 — Kroker, hauntology, and whether Derrida got it from McLuhan
- 0:08:50 — The Body Drift passage and the Five Bodies
- 0:13:19 — Kroker reaching: the metaphor exceeds his grasp
- 0:18:14 — Nobody knew they were fragmented
- 0:32:09 — Holeopathic: homeopathy plus hologram
- 0:38:02 — Etherealization and the dilution of everything
- 0:39:22 — Benveniste, Nature, and the skeptics
- 0:44:23 — Carolyn’s turn to magnesium
- 0:51:36 — McLuhan’s acupuncturist and the D-cell
- 01:03:05 — Reading the 1987 passage back
- 01:05:13 — Nietzsche, disappearance, and the gap
- 01:10:32 — Effects precede causes
- 01:15:43 — Inflation and the archetypal
- 01:26:04 — A theory of everything is plural
- 01:35:16 — The cliché-probe, shrunk
- 01:38:01 — The extension of the non-physical
- 01:41:09 — The Tech Body and iON
- 01:46:37 — Panoptical: the saving is the danger
- 01:50:22 — Janus-faced: Lewis, Theall, and the men of 1914
- 01:53:11 — Gluons, the PTA, and “Big Brother”
- 01:56:04 — The Tiny Note Chart’s quadrants
- 02:01:39 — Closing: the prince has become the king
Mentioned Resources
Works by Bob Dobbs
- Memo to Prince Charles (1987) — read from throughout; the document where “holeopathic cliché probes” first appears, written, Bob says, to guide its addressee in McLuhan
- “Cloning ESP” (1999) — cited as the article presenting the Android Meme’s first phase, 1960–1985
- The Tiny Note Chart — the five-quadrant diagram whose columns are paired with subatomic particles
Works by McLuhan
- From Cliché to Archetype (1970) — source of the cliché-probe, the term Bob extends into the holeopathic cliché-probe
- Take Today — quoted on man bridging art and nature, and on the recently achieved forms of consciousness
- “A Media Approach to Inflation” (1974) — anything can be invested in, anything insured
- “The Gap Is Where the Action Is” — the column written for the Ontario Dentist
- Understanding Media — invoked for Cameron’s rule that understanding media means understanding media plural
Other Works
- Arthur Kroker, Body Drift (2012) — the passage on the body as an object of viral invasion
- Arthur Kroker, The Possessed Individual — his book on six postmodern thinkers
- James Joyce, Finnegans Wake — proposed as the theory of everything, acted out rather than stated
- Francisco Goya, El Coloso — Cameron’s image for what Marx meant by a spectre
Documents
- Project 69 — the unpaginated “General Introduction to the Languages and Grammars of the Media”
- Nature, 1988 — Benveniste’s paper on high dilutions of anti-IgE antibody
People
- Arthur Kroker (Canadian political theorist whose vocabulary of bodies Bob works against)
- Jacques Derrida (French philosopher, credited with coining “hauntology”)
- Karl Marx (source of the “spectre of communism” Cameron traces the phrase to)
- Friedrich Nietzsche (Cameron’s guru of disappearance, who removed the apparent world)
- Jacques Benveniste (French immunologist whose 1988 dilution paper is a footnote to Bob’s Memo to Prince Charles [June 4, 1987])
- Jean Baudrillard (French theorist who had reached Benveniste first and used the homeopathic metaphor)
- Marshall McLuhan (the figure the whole series reads, here as gap-theorist and acupuncture patient)
- Donald Theall (McLuhan biographer, who reads him as a Wyndham Lewisian)
- Wyndham Lewis (the Janus-faced Menippean satirist Bob has been reading criticism on)
- Ted Carpenter (McLuhan collaborator, who read him as Poundian)
- Eric McLuhan (who reads his father as a Joycean)
- Frank Zappa (whose “Big Note” gives the Tiny Note its name by inversion)
- Michel Foucault (named as the source for the panopticon)
- Shoshana Zuboff (named for surveillance capitalism)
- Jean-François Lyotard (cited for the “postmodern condition” and the age of disappearance)
- Frank Zingrone (McLuhan’s neighbour on Wells Hill, who worked with Eric McLuhan)
- Michael Blake Read (medium who channeled the “Evergreens” from 1974 until 2004)
Closing
This is the dialogue where a private coinage is finally made to account for itself in public — and where the accounting turns up a better idea than the word it was defending.
← The Tactile Chain: Hildebrand to Carpenter, and the Super Angel · The Trap Door to the Wake: Scapes, the Five Bodies, and Module as Meme →