For the first time in eighty-one sessions the format breaks: instead of reading the book, Bob plays the tape. Appendix 2 is the 2019 recording of the Tech Body speaking for itself , and its very first word is McLuhan . What follows is not commentary but cross-examination, because the thing describes itself as speaking “through a muddy lens” and Cameron cannot find the mud — everything it says about print, identity and the box seems straightforwardly correct, which is exactly the problem he spends the session on . The way out he proposes is Heideggerian: what the recording says must be understood as an effect, coming from the wrist of the Tech Body — understood from its side, not ours . Bob’s counter runs the other way, and is as close to a thesis as the series has come: “get used to not knowing, because that’s the general condition now from now on. So the clarity you think you need is not relevant” . The final session of the series ends on the book’s punchline, a sentence from Take Today p.211 that Bob wants to replace “the medium is the message” .
Key Topics
- Twenty minutes of definition before a note is played: the Tech Body is not AI but its parent — “AI is a subplot of the Tech Body” — and iON has been overtaken by it .
- Bob gives the fullest account yet of what body means in his system, from homeopathy plus hologram to a definition Cameron has to extract by pressing: “a human scale appendage. It appears to be tiny and controllable” .
- The Tech Body’s genealogy of itself runs through the yo-yo and the wrist that slings it, landing on The Mechanical Bride as its “uber conclusion” ; Cameron reads its window imagery back against McLuhan’s own from the 1940s .
- Bob explains what the Tech Body meant by “capture” — that it, and no longer the printing press, is constitutive .
- Carolyn’s question, “is the Tech Body a construct of somebody’s mind?”, sets off six minutes on the objective versus subjective genitive , ending with the reading Cameron wants: somebody’s mind is the what being constructed, not the maker .
- Power is routed through Wyndham Lewis as an acute reader of Nietzsche , which lets Cameron gloss the Tech Body’s “bandwidth, not information” as pure Nietzsche — bandwidth is power, information a constellation of it .
- Cameron corrects Bob’s claim that Kroker’s habit of leaving his revisions in print is unique: a lot of modern poetry does it, and the Cantos are full of self-correction .
- On Bob’s reading of iON’s “great crime” — print reducing everything to one-way certainty — Cameron amends rather than agrees: the crime is what made the electric environment possible .
- The recording ends on Trump, with the Tech Body scripting a line for Joe Biden about chicanery and then quoting two songs , which Bob takes as the perfect ending to a book about Trump .
Notable Quotes
"bandwidth is power, and information is a constellation of the power."Cameron McEwen, on the Tech Body's "bandwidth, not information", The Resonant Interval, Dialogue 81 (21 Dec 2023), 1:17:40
"Maybe iON wants you to get used to not knowing, because that's the general condition now from now on. So the clarity you think you need is not relevant."Bob Dobbs, to Cameron on the muddiness he cannot find, The Resonant Interval, Dialogue 81 (21 Dec 2023), 1:18:48
"The great mystery, the making, is that it achieves truth, but through limitation."Cameron McEwen, The Resonant Interval, Dialogue 81 (21 Dec 2023), 1:38:54
"In Catch-22, the figure of the black market and the ground of war merge into a monster presided over by the syndicate. When war and market merge, all money transactions begin to drip blood."Marshall McLuhan, read by Bob Dobbs, The Resonant Interval, Dialogue 81 (21 Dec 2023), 1:57:14
Outline
- 0:00:13 — Zappa’s birthday, p.180, Appendix 2
- 0:10:14 — What does body mean in “Tech Body”?
- 0:23:58 — The tape plays: Herbert Marshall McLuhan, or better said, Marge Stewart
- 0:42:12 — Cameron’s problem: where is the muddiness?
- 0:46:59 — Pound, the Mechanical Bride, and Wyndham Lewis
- 0:53:30 — Capture, obfuscation, and what “constitutive” would have settled
- 0:57:09 — Carolyn’s question and the genitive
- 01:12:04 — Lewis, Nietzsche, and the will to power
- 01:23:49 — Is the Tech Body a bunch of algorithms?
- 01:36:50 — Self-correction, from Explorations to the Cantos
- 01:41:00 — The great crime and the electric breakthrough
- 01:45:21 — The Trump ending, Vestal Goodman and Bachman-Turner Overdrive
- 01:56:44 — Take Today, p.211
- 02:06:25 — No decency, no obscenity, and the question of power
- 02:10:18 — The death of God and the acceptance of failure
- 02:25:59 — The table of contents
Mentioned Resources
Works by McLuhan
- Take Today (1972) — p.211, on Catch-22; the sentence Bob wants made more famous than “the medium is the message”
- The Mechanical Bride (1951) — dated to 1950–51 in the writing, and to 1948 in a letter as almost finished
- Understanding Media — the interrogative taking over daily life
- Explorations No. 1 — the first essay, on allowing self-correction
- “Notes on Burroughs” (NATION Magazine, Dec.28, 1964) — there is no decency and there is no obscenity
- New York Times op-ed (September 21, 1974) — the economy as the tactile financial weirdness of the “Four Worlds”
Other Works
- Barrington Nevitt and Maurice McLuhan, eds., Who Was Marshall McLuhan? (1994) — Nevitt’s running commentary, and the attribution problem it illustrates
- Sigfried Giedion, Mechanization Takes Command — the subject of a 1948 McLuhan letter dating The Mechanical Bride
- Wyndham Lewis, America and Cosmic Man — what prompted McLuhan to tell Kenner he would emphasize Lewis more
- Joseph Heller, Catch-22 — the novel behind the Take Today passage
- Ezra Pound, The Cantos — Cameron’s counter-example on self-correction in print
- Modern Office Procedures — a serialization Bob calls a rewriting, not excerpts, of Take Today
- The New Republic — on Trump and a post-literate American presidency
Documents
- Appendix 2, “Interview with the Tech Body” — the 25-minute 2019 recording played in full across the session
- The Tiny Note Chart — the four phases of holeopathic development, and the hexad waiting at the bottom
People
- Marshall McLuhan (the subject the book is written through)
- Marge Stewart (McLuhan’s secretary, whom iON rates above him — and whom the Tech Body names first)
- Ezra Pound (the antecedent without whom, on the Tech Body’s account, there is no McLuhan)
- Wyndham Lewis (painter, novelist, and critic; the acute reader of Nietzsche who carries power into McLuhan)
- Friedrich Nietzsche (source of the will to power, the session’s frame for the whole second half)
- Hugh Kenner (with whom McLuhan began looking into Pound in 1948)
- Sigfried Giedion (Swiss architectural historian, McLuhan’s correspondent on Mechanization Takes Command)
- Barrington Nevitt (co-author of Take Today, and the likely hand behind its italics)
- Martin Heidegger (source of Cameron’s figure for understanding “Being” from its own side)
- Arthur Kroker (Canadian theorist whose habit of printing his own revisions Bob singles out)
- Mark Stahlman (who came to Toronto in 1995 asking where McLuhan wrote about “power”)
- Wayne Constantineau (who told Mark Stahlman to read Take Today, and was correct)
- Tim Leary (source of the one-way/two-way distinction on media)
- Kitty Carlisle (the What’s My Line? panellist the Tech Body invokes in its first paragraph)
- Frank Zappa (whose birthday the session falls on)
- Donald Trump (the figure the recording, and the book, end on)
- Vestal Goodman and Bachman-Turner Overdrive (the two songs the Tech Body quotes instead of declaring a conclusion)
Closing
This is the session where the book’s central concept stops being described and is put on the stand — and where the most careful piece of grammar in the whole archive turns out to be the only way to answer what it is. But the line to carry out of it is Bob’s counsel, a major point of the whole series: not knowing is the general condition now from now on, and the clarity you think you need is not relevant .
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