Two texts hold each other open for the whole session. Cameron arrives with McLuhan’s New York Times op-ed, September 21, 1974, in which the interval itself becomes “a new kind of object to be exploited” ; Bob has reached the last page of Take Today, where the program for the period ahead is “programming the unconscious with the recently achieved forms of consciousness” . The op-ed says the ground of the twentieth century has been put up for sale. The book says somebody now has to make it conscious. What sits between them is a single adjective — complementary — that Cameron refuses to let pass as ordinary English , and a one-word answer Bob once got by asking the surviving co-author what the sentence actually meant.
Key Topics
- Bob’s reading of what the 1974 essay records: tactility, the ground of the century “via the extended electricity,” has flipped and “now becomes a figure and exploited” .
- Cameron’s correction of a word nobody stops on — “make” in McLuhan is a technical term, set against merging and matching, so making yields a truth “admittedly and avowedly limited” while matching is the attempt to take truth over .
- The Wikipedia entry on the atom read aloud end to end, Dalton through Bohr, until Bob calls it “a tactile teamwork exploration of the tactile object” and Cameron answers with “It’s public interest investigating public interest” .
- The question Bob put to Barrington Nevitt directly, and the answer from Barry — “Finnegans Wake” .
- Arthur Kroker’s word for what a generation that never watched television is nonetheless watching: the “screenal” — folding TV, instant replay, the digital, the Android Meme, and the Global Theater into one condition .
- Cameron’s proposal that the Android Meme’s two phases are not two periods but two states of noticing — phase one “unconscious”, phase two “conscious” .
Notable Quotes
"In the pulsating world of the intervals in electronic information, there are innumerable opportunities to seize and abstract the interval itself as a new kind of object to be exploited."Marshall McLuhan, read by Cameron McEwen, The Resonant Interval, Dialogue 74 (17 Aug 2023), 1:58
"So I asked Barry Nevitt, what does that refer to? And he says, Finnegans Wake."Bob Dobbs, The Resonant Interval, Dialogue 74 (17 Aug 2023), 50:47
"The 'screenal' is the passive massager compared to the Tech Body."Bob Dobbs, The Resonant Interval, Dialogue 74 (17 Aug 2023), 1:18:32
Outline
- 0:00:01 — Opening: p.158 and the 1974 New York Times op-ed
- 0:01:40 — Seizing the interval
- 0:03:57 — Public interest
- 0:08:14 — The privatization of public asset
- 0:12:53 — The civil war of the media
- 0:17:27 — The death of God and the anthropomorphic
- 0:20:03 — Making, merging, matching
- 0:23:02 — The tribal unconscious: anthropology and the Paris Commune
- 0:26:35 — Complementarity: Bohr and the structure of the atom
- 0:30:54 — Tactile teamwork: reading the atom aloud
- 0:40:49 — The revelation of ground and the unified field theory
- 0:46:05 — Second nature and the new natural
- 0:50:35 — Finnegans Wake as the answer
- 0:53:14 — The procedure: “tetradomational” (p.614 in Finnegans Wake) and “Domitian” (p.47 in The Interior Landscape)
- 0:59:22 — A new form of consciousness: the chemistry model
- 01:04:57 — The saving process and its exploitation
- 01:09:48 — The last paragraph of Take Today
- 01:13:28 — TV, Global Theater, instant replay
- 01:18:08 — The “screenal”
- 01:20:59 — The unsaid and the common language
- 01:25:57 — Arrogant superiority: the octopus and the pyramids
- 01:33:09 — John Cage and sitting at McLuhan’s feet
- 01:36:55 — Electronics as ESP
- 01:43:41 — The McLuhan marriage on the run
- 01:48:45 — P.159: the digital, the Android Meme, and the AP
- 01:57:09 — Android Meme: phase one and phase two
- 02:01:22 — “Organs without bodies”
- 02:07:53 — The loop: art, life, and the cloud
Mentioned Resources
Works by McLuhan
- Take Today: The Executive as Dropout (1972, with Barrington Nevitt) — p.297, the closing paragraph the session reads; p.11 on man as both figure and ground
- “A Media Approach to Inflation”, New York Times (September 21, 1974) — the McLuhan op-ed Cameron brings, on seizing and abstracting the interval
- Laws of Media — the source of “second nature,” Cameron’s name for the new natural
- Understanding Media — quoted in the Hot and Cool interview on the road to media effects
- War and Peace in the Global Village — its last pages offered as an overlay on the Take Today ending
- The Interior Landscape — the McLuhan essay where McLuhan quotes James Joyce punning on “Domitian”, “it is dormition” (p.47 in The Interior Landscape)
- Culture Is Our Business — Bob’s source for “there’s no finish line” (last sentence on the last page)
- “The Alchemy of Media” (1955) — the title Bob offers for the science not yet defined
- The Playboy interview (1969) and the McLuhan: Hot & Cool interview (1967) — the two octopus passages read back to back
Other Works
- James Joyce, Finnegans Wake — pp. 614–615 for “tetradomational,” and the Wake’s own “Array! Surrection!” closing Take Today
- Arthur Kroker — the “screenal”, and “organs without bodies”
- Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari — “the body without organs” Kroker inverts
- William Irwin Thompson — on biology displacing physics as the organizer of public interest
- The Realist — Paul Krassner’s underground paper, where Eric Norden published in 1966
People
- Marshall McLuhan (the media theorist whose late work the series reads line by line)
- Barrington Nevitt — the engineer and Take Today co-author who answered Bob’s question about the recently achieved forms of consciousness
- Niels Bohr — the Danish physicist whose complementarity supplies the session’s technical reading of a single adjective
- Werner Heisenberg — named with Bohr as the formulators of quantum mechanics in the mid-1920s
- J. J. Thomson, Ernest Rutherford, Frederick Soddy, Irving Langmuir — the chain of atomic physicists Bob reads aloud from Wikipedia
- Edward Burnett Tylor and James Frazer — the anthropologists Cameron dates to the birth of the discipline
- Norman Mailer — quoted from a 1973 interview on technology making God and Satan nervous
- Domitian — the Roman emperor McLuhan names in his Joyce essay
- John Cage — the composer Cameron credits with recognizing what McLuhan was doing
- Eric Norden — the journalist who interviewed McLuhan for Playboy and, in Bob’s account, did not understand him
- Paul Krassner and Mae Brussell — the 1972 interview through which Bob found the Norden article
- George Carlin — the comedian Cameron names as working the audience’s unspoken perception
- Bernard Muller-Thym — best man at the McLuhan wedding, godfather to Eric and Mary, and the link Cameron traces to Carlin’s schoolyard
- Corinne McLuhan — whose last-minute reversal in St. Louis made the August 1939 wedding happen
- Norbert Wiener — placed at the East Coast end of Bob’s Atlantis–Lemuria mapping
Closing
This is the session in which the series finally reaches the sentence it has been circling for seventy-odd dialogues — and finds that Take Today does not end with a summary but with an assignment.
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