Forty years ago Bob put the obvious question to Barrington Nevitt: what were the recently achieved forms of consciousness that the last page of Take Today says the period ahead must program the unconscious with? The answer came back in two words — Finnegans Wake . This session is what four decades of turning that over have produced, and Cameron opens by calling the answer both right and wrong . What follows is a pun taken seriously. The woke period is the arrival McLuhan predicted in 1970 and did not live to see; a wake is a vigil held over someone who has not actually died. And by the time the two reach p.160 and the Anthropomorphic Physical itself, the quadrant Bob has defended for seventy sessions, is being asked, for the first time, whether it is a thing worth wanting .
Key Topics
- Cameron’s split verdict on Nevitt’s two words: wrong, because McLuhan almost certainly meant symbolist poetry, anthropology and analytic psychology as well — right, because Finnegans Wake is “a kind of synopsis of these developments” .
- The analogy that carries the whole middle of the session: alchemy worked with materials that were everywhere without knowing what it was doing, and chemistry, born around 1800, did not change the stuff — it specified “everything that had always been going on forever” .
- Bob’s coinage set one turn past Walter Ong’s — “secondary tactility” rather than “secondary orality”, located on the Tiny Note Chart as the squaring of the tactile environment in the Kroker quadrant .
- Cameron’s answer to what a medium actually is: not a newspaper but “the tactility in between the ear and the eye,” with ear and eye standing in for all possible interrelationships .
- Bob’s account of the hidden ground of the last fifty years — the news-making was only the figure, and what went unnoticed was “the super-angelization, the super-humanization of every citizen who got a cell phone” .
- The 1977 scene Bob keeps: Barbara Frum appointed to introduce Tom Wolfe at the University of Toronto, stranded on the podium while McLuhan, off in the bleachers, could not stop smirking .
- Bob’s closing architecture for the Five Bodies — Chemical and Astral as first nature, TV and Chip as second, the Chip redoing the Astral and the TV redoing the Chemical .
Notable Quotes
"Programming the unconscious with the recently achieved forms of consciousness."Marshall McLuhan, read by Bob Dobbs, The Resonant Interval, Dialogue 75 (28 Sep 2023), 1:19
"Finnegans Wake is a wake that is not awake because the person they're waking is dead, is supposedly dead, but he's not dead."Cameron McEwen, The Resonant Interval, Dialogue 75 (28 Sep 2023), 42:59
"It's not a newspaper. It's the tactility in between the ear and the eye."Cameron McEwen, on what the medium in "the medium is the message" refers to, The Resonant Interval, Dialogue 75 (28 Sep 2023), 1:07:32
Outline
- 0:00:12 — p. 297 and Nevitt’s answer
- 0:04:46 — Finnegans Wake becomes accessible
- 0:15:15 — Alchemy and chemistry
- 0:21:00 — Esoteric sources
- 0:27:17 — Minerva’s owl
- 0:29:38 — Ginsberg, Burroughs, and a private warning
- 0:36:52 — Wake, awake, woke
- 0:44:55 — Making the world
- 0:53:07 — Barbara Frum, Tom Wolfe, and the bleachers
- 0:57:25 — Bob’s first time on the media
- 0:59:31 — Secondary tactility
- 01:09:46 — Cyborg theocracy
- 01:16:18 — The Five Bodies and the Chemical Body
- 01:21:35 — Mailer versus McLuhan
- 01:30:14 — Language eats all that
- 01:33:47 — An image for the woke period
- 01:36:50 — The Anthropomorphic Physical (AP)
- 01:41:38 — Is the AP good or bad?
- 01:43:48 — MIHR and the making of the Tiny Note Chart
- 01:48:11 — The ten names on the chart
- 01:55:02 — The “Jackass movement” and the Extropians
- 01:58:42 — William Irwin Thompson
- 02:03:35 — The sixth level
- 02:06:22 — First nature, second nature, and the Mystery Body
- 02:10:30 — Close
Mentioned Resources
Works by McLuhan
- Take Today: The Executive as Dropout (1972, with Barrington Nevitt) — p. 297, the closing paragraph read whole and treated as the session’s instruction
- The Medium is the Massage (1967) — the wake/awake passage, and the image of the crowd walking into the sculpture of a huge womb
- Understanding Media — the environments Bob argues are no longer there to be described
- Through the Vanishing Point — the art-criticism book McLuhanite art professors are said to have skipped
- From Cliché to Archetype — where McLuhan quotes Norman Mailer’s The Armies of the Night (1968)
- Explorations — the 1950s source of the body-image argument
Other Works
- James Joyce, Finnegans Wake — the answer Nevitt gave, and the figure Bob says McLuhan kept as insurance
- James Joyce, Ulysses — the “day book” to the Wake’s “night book,” and its dateline
- Donald Theall, The Medium Is the Rear View Mirror (1971) — the book on McLuhan whose reading of the artist Bob rejects
- Ivan Illich, Deschooling Society — the book behind the McLuhan-Illich argument about the schools
- William Irwin Thompson, At the Edge of History (1971) and Coming into Being (1996)
- Norman Mailer, The Armies of the Night (1968)
- Bob Dylan, Highway 61 Revisited (1965) — the sleeve photograph of Dylan among his magazines
- October — the art journal Rosalind Krauss edits
- Wired (1993) — the magazine that made McLuhan its “patron saint”
People
- Marshall McLuhan (media theorist; the figure the whole series reads)
- Barrington Nevitt (McLuhan’s co-author on Take Today; the source of the two-word answer)
- James Joyce (author of Finnegans Wake, “the recently achieved forms of consciousness”)
- T.S. Eliot (whose “auditory imagination” McLuhan said had become normal awareness by 1970)
- Sigfried Giedion (art historian whose 1943 postcard sent McLuhan to Apollinaire)
- Stéphane Mallarmé (the symbolist McLuhan read daily by the late 1940s)
- Harold Innis (whose “Minerva’s Owl” lecture supplies the image of high culture during decline of the civilization)
- Étienne Gilson (medievalist at St. Michael’s; the research on intellectual migration)
- Allen Ginsberg (poet whose photograph hung in McLuhan’s Coach House)
- William Burroughs (subject of McLuhan’s December 1964 piece in the Nation)
- Barbara Frum (CBC broadcaster; the news archetype of the session)
- Tom Wolfe (whose 1977 Toronto lecture Frum was appointed to introduce)
- Donald Theall (McLuhan’s student and biographer; source of the “Joyce-as-Varronian satirist” — not Menippean satirist — reading)
- Walter Ong (whose “secondary orality” Bob’s “secondary tactility” is set against)
- Arthur Kroker (whose quadrant on Bob’s Tiny Note Chart squares the tactile environment)
- Norman Mailer (the metaphysical opponent of McLuhan Bob put on his early charts)
- Bob Dylan (the pop-culture parallel to McLuhan’s rise)
- Frances Haugen (the Facebook whistleblower Bob calls the new Ralph Nader)
- Ray Kurzweil (the Chip Body’s advocate)
- William Irwin Thompson (once proposed as McLuhan’s replacement; asked Bob only for the Tetrad)
- Frank Zingrone (McLuhan scholar; source of the Richard Needham (Toronto columnist) story (1971) that William Irwin Thompson “is the new McLuhan”)
- Rosalind Krauss and Friedrich Kittler (the pair Bob reads as replaying Greenberg versus McLuhan)
- Clement Greenberg (the art critic on the other side of that argument)
- Sjoukje van der Meulen (whose PhD on Greenberg versus McLuhan Bob recommends)
- Ivan Illich (priest and critic of institutions, met McLuhan in 1975)
- Moholy-Nagy (probable author of the eye-and-ear drawing of Joyce)
Closing
This is the session where the series’ own vocabulary turns on itself: the Anthropomorphic Physical, mapped for seventy sessions as the chart’s ground, is finally put on the sleeping side of the Wake it was built to explain.
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