A quarrel about original sin sets the terms for everything after it: Bob has McLuhan saying it was the refusal to be aware , and Cameron corrects him — for McLuhan it was the deception of being aware, since the capacity never comes to an end . From there the session cannot treat awareness as something you either have or lack, which is exactly what the rest of the reading needs. Bob’s own move is to take a term from Frank Zappa’s recording studio and make it structural , and by the closing minutes the chart it titles has stopped being a map of the media environment and become an inventory of the listener .
Key Topics
- Bob credits McLuhan with a “50% better definition” of the unconscious — our extended environment, technology — that goes past Freud, Jung and Bateson , while Cameron holds out for the unconscious as a myriad of possibilities selected from unawares .
- Zappa’s xenochrony gets its origin story: dissonance manufactured in the studio that kept resonating anyway , and Bob’s own version, which he says was pointed out to him rather than sought .
- The Tiny Note Chart’s full title is read off the page for the first time, subtitle included .
- Bob names the Fourth of his Six Schools of Media Ecology — the Diasporic School — and diagnoses it as electric perception held alongside undiminished Gutenberg loyalty .
- Cameron blocks any tidy periodizing of the synchronic and diachronic: “It’s always both” .
- McLuhan’s May 10, 1974 op-ed supplies the session’s second half — private ethics weakening as public standards are ratcheted up — which Bob rewrites by substituting bodies for media .
- Frank Zingrone’s The Media Simplex (2001) is read at length, and its author given a portrait: the neighbour who came to McLuhan late, argued for thirty years, and recanted in print .
Notable Quotes
"I think McLuhan regarded original sin as the deception of being aware."Cameron McEwen, on what awareness cannot settle, The Resonant Interval, Dialogue 79 (7 Dec 2023), 10:24
"cross the data desert of the internet in one-person caravans."Frank Zingrone, read by Bob Dobbs, The Resonant Interval, Dialogue 79 (7 Dec 2023), 2:01:07
"Establishing an identity is an act of violence. Becoming literate is a violent act."Bob Dobbs, The Resonant Interval, Dialogue 79 (7 Dec 2023), 1:12:32
Outline
- 0:00:08 — P.164 and the Anthropomorphic Physical
- 0:04:54 — What the unconscious is, and original sin
- 0:14:03 — Cloned ESP and the more extreme case
- 0:16:11 — Zappa in the studio: xenochrony
- 0:35:06 — The Tiny Note Chart, read off the page
- 0:36:53 — “Pinhead consciousness” and “connected tactile intelligence”
- 0:40:39 — The Six Schools and the Diasporic School
- 0:53:31 — Every extreme reverses itself
- 0:55:41 — Lewis in 1922 and the passivity thesis
- 01:02:53 — Synchronic and diachronic: always both
- 01:07:03 — The knot of activity and passivity
- 01:12:32 — Identity as violence
- 01:25:23 — McLuhan’s New York Times op-ed, May 10, 1974, on the new hypocrisy
- 01:40:31 — Culture Is Our Business and the flip in values
- 01:56:45 — The Android Meme apes us
- 02:00:01 — The Media Simplex (2001) and the one-person caravans
- 02:12:09 — Frank Zingrone: from Wells Hill Avenue to the University of St. Michael’s College
- 02:28:50 — Finnegans Wake in the Zappa world
- 02:39:29 — The top ten individuals
Mentioned Resources
Works by McLuhan
- From Cliché to Archetype — the Joseph Frank passage on Dostoevsky’s The House of the Dead (from 1860 to 1862), and the “intermediate process”
- Take Today — p.297, “endless replays of the tribal unconscious”; the Barrington Nevitt term “electric process”
- Culture Is Our Business (1970) — the flip into neo-visual values
- Understanding Media — putting virtues on one’s sleeve
- The Mechanical Bride — the freedom to listen, not the freedom to choose
- “Mind Your Media, Men, or You’ll Catch a Cold Environment” (1968) — the coming reversal
- New York Times op-ed, May 10, 1974 — the new hypocrisy, read in full
- Atlantic Monthly, December 1969 — the essay on Lewis and the “tactile eye”
Other Works
- Frank Zingrone, The Media Simplex: At the Edge of Meaning in the Age of Chaos (2001) — the book read at length
- Wyndham Lewis, The Art of Being Ruled (1926), Time and Western Man (1927), and Paleface (1929) — the late-1920s nonfiction Cameron says sets out the present
- James Joyce, Finnegans Wake (1939) and Ulysses (1922) — the key to McLuhan, and the source of “living as if every moment were your next”
- Eric McLuhan, The Role of Thunder in Finnegans Wake (1997)
- Who Was Marshall McLuhan? (ed. Barrington Nevitt and Maurice McLuhan, 1995) — Zingrone’s and Easterbrook’s essays of regret
- The Legacy of McLuhan — the 1998 Fordham conference volume
- Stewart Brand, The Media Lab (1987) — the book that gave Theall a new role
- Robert Logan, The Fifth Language (1995) — reading’s return, celebrated
People
- Bob Dobbs (media theorist and broadcaster, author of the Tech Body book being read)
- Cameron McEwen (McLuhan scholar and Bob’s interlocutor across the series)
- Marshall McLuhan (the 20th Century’s central media theorist, the archive’s constant subject)
- Frank Zappa (composer whose studio term, “xenochrony”, the session takes over)
- Frank Zingrone (McLuhan’s neighbor, student, and critic; author of The Media Simplex (2001))
- Donald Theall (McLuhan scholar and The McLuhan Institute’s “éminence grise”)
- Wyndham Lewis (painter and writer, the man of 1914 Bob reads as the first theorist of passivity)
- Neil Postman, Lance Strate, B.W. Powe, William Irwin Thompson, Derrick de Kerckhove (the Diasporic School roster)
- Arthur Kroker (the theorist Bob says reaches the Five-Body account Frank Zingrone does not)
- Nelson Thall (Bob’s radio partner and co-founder of The McLuhan Institute)
- Harold Innis and W.T. Easterbrook (the Toronto political economists whose late returns Cameron parallels)
- T.S. Eliot and Ezra Pound (“the Men of 1914” placed on either side of Joyce’s passivity)
- Lester Bangs (the Rock critic who named the 1970s the “Bland Out”)
- Ben Watson (Zappa biographer, Bob’s London radio interlocutor)
Closing
The session’s real subject is what happens to a chart when its maker stops using it to describe the environment and starts handing it to the listener as a description of themselves.
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