The punchline finally arrives: p.172 opens Chapter 6, “The Tech Body and President Donald Trump” , the passage the whole book has been building toward. Getting there means clearing two McLuhan scholars out of the way first. Richard Cavell’s Remediating McLuhan keeps reaching for something human still salvageable inside the extensions, and Bob quotes it not as authority but as symptom — while Cameron supplies the rule that disposes of it, and of Frank Zingrone’s Gnosticism an hour later: any time you try to get to a definition of a word that holds, you are back in the Gutenberg Galaxy . What survives that filter is Arthur Kroker’s “dark tetrad”, read out in full and then annotated in Bob’s own vocabulary , plus the plainest account, yet, of where “holeopathic” came from .
Key Topics
- Cavell’s “ourselves as technology” is read as an unconscious figure of the Anthropomorphic Physical — the same yearning Bob dates to Wyndham Lewis in 1926 — and Cameron shuts down “the artist reading” with a single line: “The artist cannot construct the artist” .
- Cameron argues that any one body, or any two, is always the Gutenberg Galaxy, which Bob renames quadrophrenia and hands a form by applying the Tetrad to it .
- Zingrone’s closing chapter on “telegnosis” reaches behind print for the Gnostic, which Bob says still lands inside what print made possible .
- Cameron notices that phatic and haptic are anagrams , sending Bob into the archive’s most careful definition: a shaping in the gap without contact pressure, figure to tactility’s ground, so that “the economy is haptic” .
- Cameron takes apart the stages of apprehension — not a chronology but the unconscious staging beneath any utterance, “staged” as a play is staged .
- Zappa’s Central Scrutinizer, read off the Joe’s Garage sleeve (1979) , turns out mid-sentence to be the Tech Body, which Bob reports discovering on the spot .
- Lewis’ 1929 self-description in The Enemy, Volume 3 — communist, fascist, monarchist, anarchist at once — is taken as quadrophrenia stated four decades early , then mapped clause-by-clause onto the Five Bodies.
- Pressed by Cameron, Bob gives up the exception that kept the citadel of consciousness apart from the rest of the chart: all four features are holeopathic .
Notable Quotes
"The artist cannot construct the artist."Cameron McEwen, on why reading McLuhan as an artist presupposes a ground that isn't given, The Resonant Interval, Dialogue 80 (14 Dec 2023), 7:24
"So I put together 'hologram' and 'homeopathy' to create the word 'holeopathic.'"Bob Dobbs, The Resonant Interval, Dialogue 80 (14 Dec 2023), 2:24:22
"A technological destiny that can be so deeply seductive because it contains the tangible, palpable scent of a death drive in hypermotion."Arthur Kroker, read by Bob Dobbs, The Resonant Interval, Dialogue 80 (14 Dec 2023), 2:31:56
Outline
- 0:00:13 — P.167 and Richard Cavell’s Remediating McLuhan
- 0:11:51 — Any one body is the Gutenberg Galaxy
- 0:13:44 — The satellite conductor
- 0:27:40 — Socialization, difference, and the probing of pain
- 0:39:24 — “One word, ‘apocalypse’”
- 0:45:02 — Zingrone’s “telegnosis” and the “Fifth Dimension”
- 0:55:11 — The chip environment and coenaesthesia
- 01:00:33 — The chart on p.171: four phases
- 01:06:11 — “Phatic communion”, from Malinowski to “Phat”
- 01:25:38 — The “haptic” defined
- 01:27:39 — Chapter 6: the Tech Body and Trump
- 01:30:26 — The stages of apprehension
- 01:41:32 — The Rumpelstiltskin effect
- 01:47:53 — Zappa’s Central Scrutinizer
- 01:57:23 — The Tetrad on “verbum”
- 02:13:37 — Lewis in The Enemy (1929)
- 02:20:19 — Kroker’s “dark tetrad”
- 02:29:03 — All four features are “holeopathic”
Mentioned Resources
Works by McLuhan
- Take Today (1972) — p.11, “It is man who has become both figure and ground via the electrotechnical extension of his awareness”
- Laws of Media — the Tetrad on “verbum”, in Etc. magazine, June, 1977
- Letter to Harold Innis from Marshall McLuhan, March, 1951: “Have you looked at Lewis?”
- New York Times op-ed, September 21, 1974 — the American White House as “the word that makes the market”
Other Works
- Richard Cavell, Remediating McLuhan (2016) — quoted through pp.26 and 113; and Richard Cavell, McLuhan in Space (2002)
- Arthur Kroker, Exits to the Posthuman Future (2014) — p.177, the “dark tetrad”, read out in full; and Body Drift (2012)
- Frank Zingrone, The Media Simplex (2001) — the closing chapter, “The way of telegnosis”
- Wyndham Lewis, The Enemy, Volume 3 (1929) — p.70, the political self-classification
- C.K. Ogden and I.A. Richards, The Meaning of Meaning (1923) — the source of “phatic,” by way of Malinowski
- Frank Zappa, Joe’s Garage (1979) — the Central Scrutinizer, described off the sleeve
- Bernard Lonergan, Verbum (1967) — the word and Aquinas
- James Joyce, Finnegans Wake, 1939, p.349, the “mood mud”; and Ulysses (1922), for Bloomsday
- Sigmund Freud, The Interpretation of Dreams (1900) — the century’s opening onto pain
- Martin Heidegger, Being and Time (1927) — boredom as a way of constituting human being
People
- Richard Cavell (Vancouver-based McLuhan scholar, quoted throughout the chapter)
- Arthur Kroker (Canadian political theorist of technology, source of the “dark tetrad”)
- Frank Zingrone (McLuhan’s Wells Hill Avenue neighbor and long-time interlocutor)
- Wyndham Lewis (painter, novelist, and critic; the 1914 Vorticist whose plurality Bob reads as “quadrophrenia”)
- Marshall McLuhan (the subject the book is written through)
- Bronislaw Malinowski (anthropologist who named “phatic communion”)
- Frank Zappa (composer whose “Central Scrutinizer” Bob identifies with the “Tech Body”)
- Donald Trump (the Chemical Body that “declared” politically on Bloomsday, 2015)
- Bernard Lonergan (Toronto Jesuit, McLuhan’s contemporary competition)
- Hannah Arendt (source of “the negative being of technological society”)
- Jean Baudrillard (wrote the Twin Towers’ triumph in the 1970s, then their suicide)
- Richard Kostelanetz (interviewer McLuhan told that people need a few concepts “to get a grasp on reality”)
- Philo Farnsworth and John Logie Baird (electronic and mechanical television)
- Alexis de Tocqueville (analyst of the American “kinetic bias”)
- Lyndon LaRouche (source of “All great art is a huge joke”)
Closing
This is the session where the book’s title concept stops being approached and starts being defined — and where Bob, cornered by a question about his own chart, revises it “live”.
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