The Kroker quote on p.162 is where they left off and where they never arrive. What takes its place is a single problem Cameron states in the first ninety seconds and then holds every later topic against: any talk about human awareness is itself human awareness, and since Plato “no one has figured out how to get out of that magic circle” . Extension does not open the circle — it tightens it. An hour in, pressed by Cameron for a “practical application,” Bob sets the only terms on which anything could count as a way out: “ideas don’t do it. Nothing, no communication does it… It has to be something physical” . Against that standard the session tests three candidates and finds one. A dead colleague’s late prose turns out to be the circle straining against itself ; Bob’s chart claims to have named what nobody else could name ; and in the closing half hour a single word lifted out of a 1929 Lewis book finally offers a door .
Key Topics
- The opening frame, taken from Take Today p.11 — “it is man who has become both figure and ground by the electrotechnical extension of his awareness” — and Augustine’s third term offered, then dismissed, as the standard failed solution .
- Bob’s eyewitness rebuttal of McLuhan-as-TV-optimist: after a NASA documentary in an afternoon class, McLuhan spoke first and said only “we’re doomed” .
- F. Scott Taylor, who died in January, 2023, and his 1980s diagnosis of “social autism” — which Cameron immediately converts into the session’s own vocabulary as the clinical name for the circle .
- Bob’s criterion for any real exit, given in answer to Cameron’s offer of a “practical application” as a way “of getting out of this circle”: “ideas don’t do it… no communication does it” — it “has to be something physical,” “a new hardware breakthrough to get out of the software delusion we’re in” .
- Bob’s 1987 memo to Prince Charles, its prediction of a “battle of mythic stages” , and the holeopathic retrievals he says broke out of it once social media gave everyone a nano-community .
- The Five Bodies giving out onto a Sixth, the Hexadic Body , and Cameron’s structural argument for why it would have to exist — and why it would be as dangerous as fission .
- Rumpelstiltskin as the Tiny Note Chart’s operating principle, naming as control , and Cameron’s harder counter-question: not why a journalist reached the same word, but what made Bob write it down rather than a billion others .
Notable Quotes
"We're doomed."Marshall McLuhan, quoted by Bob Dobbs, The Resonant Interval, Dialogue 77 (9 Nov 2023), 27:21
"Yeah, ideas don't do it. Nothing, no communication does it. You have to make a new technology, a new environment… It has to be something physical. We could say a new hardware breakthrough to get out of the software delusion we're in. The software rabbit hole, just endless software creation. And that's not going to work. That's not going to get us out of it."Bob Dobbs, on why no exit can be made of ideas, The Resonant Interval, Dialogue 77 (9 Nov 2023), 1:02:59
"He realizes that arrest is a break in time. It's not the expression of time. It's the break in time. It's what is happening at every moment of perception."Cameron McEwen, on what McLuhan took from Lewis, The Resonant Interval, Dialogue 77 (9 Nov 2023), 2:34:10
"Somebody says a word and that awakens what is already there."Cameron McEwen, on communication running backward, The Resonant Interval, Dialogue 77 (9 Nov 2023), 2:38:18
Outline
- 0:00:09 — P.162, and the magic circle
- 0:08:35 — Liberation and its failures
- 0:26:33 — Cynicism, prophecy, and “we’re doomed”
- 0:31:20 — McLuhan and Lewis, 1943 to 1950
- 0:35:13 — F. Scott Taylor and social autism
- 01:04:16 — Ressentiment and the groping for valuation
- 01:11:08 — Mythic stages and the holeopathic retrievals
- 01:45:39 — The Sixth Body
- 01:50:58 — iON and McLuhan
- 02:06:15 — Rumpelstiltskin and the naming
- 02:20:51 — The holy offices
- 02:21:13 — Xenochrony, the cut-up, and Symbolism as environment
- 02:32:14 — Paleface and arrest
- 02:38:43 — Cybernetics, Giedion, and the close
Mentioned Resources
Works by McLuhan
- Take Today — p.11, the figure-and-ground epigraph the session opens on
- The Interior Landscape — p.32, the Joyce essay where Bob locates the arrest theme
- The Gutenberg Galaxy and Understanding Media — offered as McLuhan’s own attempt to perform an arrest
- War and Peace in the Global Village — the feedback/feed-forward interplay, and the section on Symbolism as environment
Other Works
- Wyndham Lewis, Paleface (1929) — the source of the concept of arrest, raised in the passage on Spengler
- Bruno Bettelheim, The Empty Fortress (1967) — cited in Taylor’s note on autistic rage
- Sigfried Giedion, Space, Time and Architecture (1941) — the 1939 Harvard lectures
- Norbert Wiener, Cybernetics (1948) — read by McLuhan in 1950
- Matt Taibbi, Griftopia (2010) — the book under discussion when the Rumpelstiltskin line lands
Documents
- Memo to Prince Charles (1987) — where Bob says he predicted the battle of “mythic stages”
- The Tiny Note Chart (1995) — the naming project Rumpelstiltskin anchors
People
- Marshall McLuhan (Canadian media theorist, the archive’s central figure)
- Wyndham Lewis (painter, novelist, and polemicist of “the Men of 1914”)
- F. Scott Taylor (Toronto theatre figure and McLuhan student, died January, 2023)
- Arthur Kroker (Canadian political theorist, author of the passage they never reach)
- Donald Theall (McLuhan’s student and later critic, source of the “coenaesthetic”)
- Sigfried Giedion (architectural historian who introduced McLuhan to Joyce)
- I.A. Richards (McLuhan’s Cambridge teacher, on feed forward at the Macy seminars)
- Frank Zappa (musician, source of the Tiny Note Chart’s “xenochrony” and “Rumpelstiltskin decor”)
- Matt Taibbi (journalist whose “Rumpelstiltskin” remark Bob takes as confirmation)
- Jordan Peterson (psychologist, read here as a hero-metaphysics that cannot ground itself)
- Brion Gysin (Canadian artist who devised “the cut-up method” with Burroughs)
- Peter Beter (alternative broadcaster, paired with Arthur Kroker on the Tiny Note Chart)
- Friedrich Nietzsche (source of “ressentiment” and “the genealogy of morals”)
Closing
This is the session where the series’ oldest question — whether awareness can ever get outside itself — stops being rhetorical and gets an answer, borrowed from a word Lewis meant as an insult.
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