One word stops the reading. Bob is a paragraph into p.150 of the Trump book when Cameron picks out scapes and says only “that’s a good word” — and the rest of the session is what that remark asks for. The old media environments did not vanish when digital shrank them; they were bureaucratized into archives, museums, and McLuhan’s mini-states , a collective wealth heavy enough that nothing proportionate is left to topple. Then, asked what the three panels of the triptych at the end of Finnegans Wake are, Bob cannot remember the third, goes looking, and reads Book IV aloud for the better part of an hour. Cameron names what has happened: the book has opened a trap door over to the Wake . It is, by Bob’s own description, a solo.
Key Topics
- Scapes: displaced media become bureaucracies that must still be fed and housed, so the young spend a decade catching up with a past that nobody has scheduled .
- The Berkeley–Patrick debate at 611 read line by line, down to the “thud” that Donald Theall counted as an eleventh thunder past the canonical ten .
- The Five Bodies given their full reading — chemical, astral, TV, chip, and the mystery body the Android meme is the “resultant” of — and offered as more comprehensive than Samuel Huntington’s clash of civilizations .
- Why the fifth points past itself to a sixth: the 1995 chart traced to Carolyn Dean’s suppressed MIHR device, which regular science could not account for .
- The session’s find — hunting for a word that would make “holeopathic cliché probe” mean what “meme” means, Bob discovers McLuhan already had it .
- Quadrophrenia derived rather than named: the Android meme simulates our schizophrenia, “so there’s two schizophrenias” that merge .
Notable Quotes
"module is McLuhan's term for meme."
"Philosophy and management alike have yet to come to terms with the mini-module or the new structure of the electric age."
"What you have done is you've opened a kind of trap door that leads out of your pamphlet over to the wake."
Outline
- 0:00:04 — Opening: p.150 and the servomechanism paragraph
- 0:01:10 — Scapes: the bureaucratized media past
- 0:11:31 — The language that no longer applies
- 0:19:12 — McLuhan as the last writer
- 0:31:18 — Where the book stands: Android Meme Phase 2
- 0:44:22 — That’s our modern hospital
- 0:54:44 — The triptych at the end of Finnegans Wake
- 01:00:48 — Reading Book IV: Berkeley and Patrick
- 01:11:36 — The vicociclometer paragraph
- 01:24:38 — The trap door and the porters
- 01:28:13 — The Five Bodies
- 01:36:48 — The hexadic and the Tiny Note Chart
- 01:42:47 — Huntington, first and second nature
- 01:46:22 — Module: McLuhan’s term for meme
- 02:01:24 — Quadrophrenia and the drama of cognition
- 02:08:30 — The outer trip, the inner trip, and the Auden panel
- 02:21:57 — Closing: an impossible anti-environment
Mentioned Resources
Works by McLuhan
- From Cliché to Archetype (1970) — p.152 and p.155 supply the module quotations and the outer/inner trip division; the dust jacket supplies “old archetype is new cliché”
- Take Today — p.11 on man as both figure and ground, and the closing question about “recently achieved forms of consciousness”
- Understanding Media — the “tinkling symbol” Bob cross-references mid-Wake
- The Gutenberg Galaxy — invoked to place Berkeley twice over
- DEW-Line Newsletter — the issue titled “Strike the Set,” matched against the day’s Hollywood strike headline
Works by Joyce
- Finnegans Wake (1939) — Book IV read at length: the Muta and Juva replay, the Berkeley–Patrick debate at 611–612, p.614’s vicociclometer paragraph, and ALP’s closing monologue
- Ulysses — Molly’s monologue, which Bob hears ALP redoing
Other Works
- Bob Dobbs, Memo to Prince Charles (1987) — where “holeopathic cliché probes” was written before the internet
- Bob Dobbs, the Tiny Note Chart and the Formula Chart — the Five Bodies and the Wake family read off both
- Samuel Huntington, “The Clash of Civilizations” — the paradigm the Five Bodies are pitched against
- Derrick de Kerckhove, “Three Looming Figures of the Digital Transformation” — credited for the fusion aspect, bounded to a small portion of Phase 2
People
- Marshall McLuhan (the Toronto media theorist whose work the series reads)
- James Joyce (author of Finnegans Wake, the ground of Bob’s charts)
- Donald Theall (McLuhan’s student and Joyce scholar; the thunder count and co-anesthesia)
- Arthur Kroker (theorist of the screenal economy and of organs without bodies)
- Wyndham Lewis (painter and writer who called himself a performer)
- Barrington Nevitt (McLuhan’s collaborator; answered that the Wake is the recently achieved form of consciousness)
- Frank Zingrone (told Bob that Western alchemy has four levels and Asian alchemy five)
- Carolyn Dean (developer of the MIHR device that occasioned the 1995 chart)
- Samuel Huntington (political scientist; the establishment’s academic)
- W.H. Auden (poet; McLuhan’s opponent on the February 1971 Toronto panel)
- Buckminster Fuller (also on that panel)
- Stéphane Mallarmé (source of “the world will end in a book”; master of the verbal module)
- Jack Nicholson (actor whose cliché epiphany Bob reads as cliché probing)
- Tom Wolfe (stunned into “there you have it” at the 1999 Canadian consulate lecture)
- Bronisław Malinowski (subject of the last project proposed to McLuhan)
- Marge Stewart (McLuhan’s secretary, who got a pizza in hospital)
Closing
This is the session where the media argument and the Joyce reading stop being two subjects: the pamphlet turns out to have a door in it, and what is on the other side is the book Bob has been charting from all along.
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