Seventy-eight sessions in, the book finally arrives somewhere: at the two-hour mark Bob stops mid-reading to announce that everything before was preparation for this one leap . Getting there costs an hour of resistance first, because Cameron will not accept the dating the chapter runs on. Bob’s periodization has analog media knocking the walls down and digital media rebuilding them; Cameron’s counter, raised inside the first two minutes, is that the digital was never a period at all — it has been running under everything since the telegraph, and only recently became conscious of itself. What that argument produces is his real term, the gap: the analog works by closing it, the digital by living in it . By the time they return to Kroker’s page, the two vocabularies have converged enough that the passage does the book’s remaining work.
Key Topics
- Cameron dates the digital to Faraday and the telegraph rather than to postwar MIT, on the grounds that electricity and magnetism are polar — and therefore digital — in themselves .
- The Macy Conferences supply the working distinction, analog as continuous and digital as discrete, which Cameron immediately turns on itself: seeing the two as poles is already a digital perception .
- Bob maps his own 1999 pair of “blocking” and “merging” onto it, and Cameron generalizes the result to all human expression as a modulation of that single split .
- Plato’s Sophist supplies the frame — the battle of gods and giants, and the philosopher as the child who begs for both — with Cameron’s verdict that 2,500 years have taught us to apply the insight technically but not wisely .
- Bob reads out Eliot’s definition of the auditory imagination in full, then argues it has been overtaken: the machines now perform the descent and return themselves .
- Kroker’s gene astronauts, read once as written and then a second time with “memes” substituted throughout, deliver the passage from Android Meme to Tech Body .
Notable Quotes
"we have learned how to apply that insight in technology, but we haven't learned how to apply it to wisdom."Cameron McEwen, on the 2,500 years since Plato, The Resonant Interval, Dialogue 78 (16 Nov 2023), 41:26
"And why shouldn't genes go cybernetic?"Arthur Kroker, read by Bob Dobbs, The Resonant Interval, Dialogue 78 (16 Nov 2023), 1:53:43
"Language gives birth to memes, but memes then kill language."Cameron McEwen, on what accelerating memes cost, The Resonant Interval, Dialogue 78 (16 Nov 2023), 2:08:45
Outline
- 0:00:12 — P.160 and the Anthropomorphic Physical chapter
- 0:01:45 — The dating quarrel: is the electric environment analog?
- 0:21:41 — The Macy Conferences and the gap
- 0:26:17 — Blocking and merging, making and matching
- 0:39:51 — Plato’s Sophist and the awareness of digitality
- 0:49:21 — Eliot’s “auditory imagination”
- 0:55:30 — The gigantomachia and the two manifolds
- 01:01:31 — The prankquean and the Porters piece
- 01:17:36 — “Mind your media, men” and the rebuilt walls
- 01:34:45 — Aping, not shaping
- 01:40:30 — Project, extension, and the double projection
- 01:46:32 — The Kroker quote from Spasm
- 01:57:21 — Genes, memes, and the form that escapes
- 02:09:15 — Xenochrony and “pinhead consciousness”
- 02:16:53 — Identity as violence
- 02:23:48 — The Civil War of Thought and the ersatz anti-environment
Mentioned Resources
Works by McLuhan
- Take Today — p.137 (bottom paragraph) on “process pattern recognition”, and the line on “the maintenance of social power”
- The Gutenberg Galaxy — the Leibniz quotation Bob reads as implying the binary
- Understanding Media — the photograph as “the brothel without walls”
- The Mechanical Bride — Biology’s late-19th-Century attempt to unify knowledge
- Counterblast (1969) — p.23, “non-verbal mental gesture” as the definition of ESP; p.31, “ersatz anti-environments”
- From Cliché to Archetype — Joseph Frank on Dostoevsky and the literate man as “armored”
- “Mind your media, men, or you’ll catch a cold environment” (Playboy, December 1968)
- “Project” (Arts Canada, 1962) — McLuhan on having our nerves outside us
- Explorations, “The Media Fit the Battle of Jericho”, Volume 6, July 1956
Other Works
- Arthur Kroker, Spasm: Virtual Reality, Android Music and Electric Flesh (1993) — the gene-astronaut passage read on p.164
- James Joyce, Finnegans Wake — p.21’s “prankquean”, p.27’s “chalking”, p.614’s “egg”, and p.353’s “the abnihilisation of the etym”
- Joseph Campbell, A Skeleton Key to Finnegans Wake (1944) — the copy carrying McLuhan’s dissenting marginal note
- Tom Robbins, Even Cowgirls Get the Blues (1976) — the amoeba riding evolution
- Derrick de Kerckhove, Connected Intelligence (1997) — the 1990s phrase Bob inverts
- T. S. Eliot, “The Use of Poetry and the Use of Criticism” (1933) — “the auditory imagination”
People
- Marshall McLuhan (Canadian media theorist, the series’ central figure)
- Arthur Kroker (Canadian political theorist of the digital, the chapter’s quoted source)
- James Joyce (Irish novelist whose Finnegans Wake structures the chapter)
- Plato (Greek philosopher; the Sophist’s gigantomachia frames the session)
- T. S. Eliot (poet and critic; his “auditory imagination” is read out in full)
- Wyndham Lewis (writer and painter, cited alongside Eliot as insufficiently focused on the “gap”)
- Frank Zappa (composer; The Grand Wazoo (album, 1972), “xenochrony”, and the Tiny Note Chart come from him)
- Barrington Nevitt (McLuhan’s Take Today co-author, “Barry,” on “process pattern recognition”)
- Derrick de Kerckhove (McLuhan associate; his “connected intelligence” is the phrase Bob reverses)
- Harold Innis (Canadian economic historian; Cameron finds the double projection already in him)
- Friedrich Nietzsche (philosopher; the crisis of making dates from him and “the Men of 1914”)
- Joseph Campbell (mythographer and Skeleton Key co-author, faulted on the “prankquean”)
- Heraclitus (pre-Socratic philosopher; human reality as a child playing)
- Thomas Aquinas (theologian; “the doctrine of analogical proportionality”)
- Norbert Wiener (mathematician; the Macy Conferences)
- Michael Faraday (physicist whose magnetic research Cameron dates the digital from)
- Tom Robbins (novelist; Even Cowgirls Get the Blues (1976))
- Ezra Pound (poet; “the unwobbling pivot”)
Closing
This is the session where the series’ two vocabularies stop competing and start doing the same job — and where the book Bob has been reading aloud for 150 hours finally states what it was for.
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