Bob at the McLuhan Centre for Culture and Technology - November 24, 2003.

Transcribed by Linus Minimax and BonEcho

Part 1

Michael Edmonds: Welcome, my name is Michael Edmonds, associate director of the McLuhan program, and it's really nice to see Bob here, who I've known for a few years and gone through a few battles with of one kind or the other. So I wanted to start with a few words -- within all these words, don't get worried -- about McLuhan's thesis, he starts: the problem of understanding Thomas Nashe is the same problem as that of discovering the main educational traditions, from Zeno, socrates, parimedes, cicero, varo, - augustine. And of course he's going to go on primarily to talk about the rise and fall of dialectics and grammar from antiquity to the renaissance, then he's going to get to Thomas Nashe. That's the trivium, and Bob knows the thesis very well. If one had it, actually, which I don't 'cause it's never been published, but if you had it you could search and you could look at the quadrivium, which Bob will talk about, and I just want to read one part where he talks about that. I'm not sure how to say this guy's name..... Alcuen, but the grammatica begins by inviting the student to the love of true wisdom, provided they learn it only for the sake of God - The necessary were how phlisophers, statesmen, and kings of old would - He seems also to have been behind the school reform outline in Charlemagne's famous letter to the bishop...........Charlemagne was convinced that the ideal of Christian culture was the patristic one ........ 'Oh, that I only had twelve scholars like ? and Augustine'. God only had two, and you wanted twelve. Well we only have one with us tonight. Bob, he's a good friend, and I have no idea exactly where he's going to go with this, but Bob, welcome back to the program....

Bob Dobbs: Thank you.

Michael: And this is your first official presentation here, is it not??

BOB: Yes.

Michael: So it's a momentous night.......

BOB: So what's the title

Michael: It's on the wall over there.

BOB: Pull that piece of paper off there, Antonio, just behind you.

Michael: Read it to us, Antonio.

Antonio: "How McLuhan emphasized the quadrivium: our four stomachs"

BOB: That's the subtitle, 'our four stomachs'. So the trivium was dialectics, rhetoric and grammar, and the quadrivium was arithmetic, geometry, music and astronomy, those are the seven arts, and that was education from 500 BC all the way up to the printing press, and it carried on into about the seventeenth century, then [Ramis] 's dialectics, and Newtons' calculus and Liebniz's calculus, that took over, what we call science, but really it was an extension of dialectics. That's the background. So McLuhan always emphasized formal causality. [I think I'll stand up at first, okay, just to get loosened up. So I'll just stand still, is this okay to stand up?] So, McLuhan emphasized formal causality, so in that spirit, I ask you, what kind of talk would you like tonight? Would you like me to do the 5 schools of media ecology that happened after McLuhan died in 1980? Would you like me to do a detailed history of McLuhan himself? Would you like to hear some scintillating abstraction, kind of a rant? Or would you like to hear a lot about me? These are the options, this is like a focus group. Let's have hands on the five schools of media ecology? That guy there..... one..... okay two....... How about history of McLuhan in detail.... four hands. How about scintillating abstraction? Okay, four. And me?? [murmurs] Okay, so they're all tied......

Audience member: All of the above. All of the above.

BOB: That's my line! So of course I'm going to do all of them given the chance, you see........So McLuhan is on record to have said, when he was meeting with the editor of Ramparts magazine, who was a friend, can't remember his name, he also was a guy who attended the topless clubs, what were they called, silicon breasts? in the mid60's topless clubs was a new thing, and Tom Wolfe writes about how cool McLuhan was in that situation, but one of the guys who attended that later got irritated by McLuhan at some meeting and said 'you know, you're always going on about the same stuff.' And McLuhan said: 'that's what I meant when I didn't say it.' So, with that principle in mind, if I'm saying something and you disagree or are thinking of the opposite, or 'the other point is just as valid', I agree with you, I just can't say all double points at the same time. So "I gotta use words when I talk to you", as T. S. Eliot said in one of his poems. So that's the point. I'm also saying what you don't hear, the other view at the same time. So, we have here, a new book called 'Media Unlimited' by Todd Gitlin, does anybody know who Todd Gitlin is?? Do you recognize the name?

Audience member: California politician.

Eric: Wasn't he in the SDS?

BOB: Right, Todd Gitlin is one of the famous radicals in the sixties.

Audience member: The Weathermen.

BOB: No, he didn't go that far.....

Audience member: He was against the Weathermen.

BOB: Yeah, he was more mainstream......

Kenzie Quatrale: Oh, that one. I didn't like him.

BOB: What did you say?

Linus Minimax: There's a documentary on the Weather Underground playing right now, it's really good.

Eric: It's a fabulous documentary, but he was kind of.........

Kenzie: He's jealous or something, he was bitter.

BOB: Todd's in it?

Eric: Oh yeah, he was denouncing the Weather Underground. Really strongly.

Linus: Yeah, as if it was a simple matter to realize the error.........

Kenzie: 'They're taking our fan base away.'

BOB: So Todd Gitlin, he must be 55, 56 now, so he was part of the original SDS, and then he became probably a big anti-Vietnam guy, and he carried on that activity well into the 70's and 80's. I live in Manhattan now, so I, through the 90's, would go to different talks by him, and-- I think we got someone coming in...... [ silence ] .... it's just McLuhan.

Eric: The spirit of McLuhan.

BOB: Yeah. Come on in, Marshall, right there......... [laughter]

BOB: So I would go to a few lectures in the nineties that he'd put on, and it'd be about ten people there, and he's there, a community activist trying to get something going on, everybody had disappeared, public space had disappeared as Kroker and the postmodernists explained, and it was sort of odd watching this guy, he still believed in activism on a community level, a sort of a socialist..... so then in '97 or '98 I went to visit Neil Postman who is a great disciple of McLuhan in New York City and is the most well-known McLuhanite in the United States, and he just died I think in October, but he had a department of media ecology at New York University, and he spoke here on a symposium on McLuhan at York University, and I went up and talked to him and I said I want to see you in New York about some things. So I go visit him, and we talk and we did this and that, and then I'm walking outside and lingering around, and there's Todd Gitlin walking around in the office, you know, sort of lost, like 'what's he doing here?' So then I notice he goes in and sits down in a particular office, so I go over and it has his name there! See, to me, these kind of guys never studied McLuhan, they never understood "the media" in quotes, these radicals in the sixties and seventies, they were too young anyways to have the time to study it, but I used to always go around and listen to them and see what they're missing. So here he is, he's sitting in a McLuhan office with his name on it, so I go in and introduce myself, I didn't know him but I had watched his floundering career...... now, he'd been a professor out in Berkeley I think, in the 80's and 90's and he always did books on the media, always content stuff, I think he did something on Disney in the early 90's, so here he is with Neil Postman, so I asked him 'what are you doing here?', and he didn't have anything to say, he wasn't very communicative, you know? "I'm doing media...... ecology......." "Oh, okay". So he's very withdrawn. So I go to the Barnes and Noble, which is like your Borders here, you have Barnes and Noble here? It's like Chapters, you know.

Audience member: We just have it online.

Part 2

BOB: Right, it's a big chain. So I go there a couple months ago, and he's got a new book out with another guy, and he's sitting up there and he does a talk. And then after I go up and started talking to him, and I bring up McLuhan to him -- this is what I do, I go to these places, and wait until the lecture's over, and then I go up and attack the person privately, you know? I might do a question in public, it's usually always McLuhan. Anybody who's watched me at these things through the years --which is not likely 'cause there's so many people there that nobody's seeing you the next time-- then I always bring up McLuhan points, like I did with Yoko Ono, that was interesting, I'll go back to that maybe........ so I asked something in general, he didn't have a very good answer, so I went up and saw him after, and I said you were in the department of media ecology, you learn anything about McLuhan? He says yeah, I said why don't you write about him he says I do in this book called 'media unlimited', so this was the book! So I went over and bought it, I didn't know anything about it, and read it. Now let's look up what he says about McLuhan.

Now this is after teaching media ecology in a McLuhanesque department, not necessarily like McLuhan but it's in that realm. So you look up McLuhan, and..... there's no McLuhan in here! Just joking.... page 10...... so I don't know, you may not know anything about McLuhan, but here's what he says:

"Neither are the media themselves messages, that is, statements about the world. Marshall McLuhan's glib formulation turns out to mean next to nothing. This is partly because he was not clear or convincing about just what he meant by medium. A television set, a commercial channel, a sitcom? But McLuhan was not precise either in his use of the word message. (That's italicized.) Media did not simply deliver information. An image or a soundtrack is not simply a set of abstract signs that describe, point to, or represent reality standing elsewhere. Not only do they point, they are. (He's saying an image or a soundtrack is, and that's italicized.) They are wraparound presences with which we live much of our lives. McLuhan was closer to the truth when, in a playful mood, he titled one of his later books The Medium is the Massage."

Now, he's saying this distinguishes from McLuhan. McLuhan always pointed out that media are, they're Nature, they exist. So here's a guy, doesn't even get point one about McLuhan, alright? He thinks he's making a new point about McLuhan! Okay, page 25.........

"It's easy to see how individuals grow up expecting their lives to be accompanied by image flow, plenitude, and choice, but for society as a whole, how did this blessing come to pass? Media saturation is not a gift of the gods, nor of the unprovoked genius of technological wizards. The Edisons, Marconis, Sarnoff's, Deforest's, and Gates' devise and organize the media that Marshall McLuhan called "extensions of man" (and he has that in quotes). But humanity first came with his hungers and competencies. Nor are our desires the unwelcome product of vast corporations determined to halt human time with their commodities, with products that people would be so eager to purchase, on which they would become so dependant that they will be willing to exchange their time for money to bring these products home."

So he goes on about that.......... So that's the next reference to McLuhan, he just cites the obvious theme that comes from McLuhan then you go to page 176:

"Everywhere the media flow defies national boundaries, this is one of its obvious but at the same time amazing features. A global torrent is not, of course-- I should tell you, [the title is] "Media Unlimited: How the Torrent of Images and Sounds Overwhelms Our Lives" --a global torrent is not, of course, the master metaphor to which we have grown accustomed. We are more accustomed to Marshall McLuhan's 'global village', (that's in italics). Those who resort to this metaphor casually often forget that if the world is a global village, some live in mansions on the hill, others in huts; some dispatch images and sounds around town at the touch of a button, others collect them at the touch of their buttons. Yet McLuhan's image reveals an indispensable half-truth: if there is a village, it speaks American. It wears jeans, drinks Coke, eats at the golden arches, walks in swish shoes, plays electric guitars, recognizes Mickey Mouse, James Dean, ET, Bart Simpson, R2D2, and Pamela Anderson." And the final reference is......... 207....... he's talking about Hollywood, the new effects movies, special effects: "Drowning language in gaudy and grotesque images, the mainstream hollywood movie is driven by a hideous zero-sum principle of the senses, as if in imitation of Marshall McLuhan's most simple-minded idea - the belief that when artistic work plays on one sensory capacity (sight), it is obliged to sacrifice the previously dominant sense (the capacity for language)."

So that's, in a way, the simple eye-ear dialectic. So then I'm reading the book, and the book is totally making McLuhan's point, if you knew what McLuhan was talking about. So he critiques McLuhan, doesn't even have a proper understanding, and when Neil Postman retired a year ago, probably 'cause he was going to die, and then he died a year later, they mentioned Todd Gitlin had left and gone to Columbia, and he made some snarky remark about authoritarian figures in the department, so looks like he couldn't even handle Neil Postman, and probably left. That's okay, Neil Postman was a stick-in-the-mud, you know, you're not going to learn real McLuhan from Neil Postman, but he is.... this is an example of: people have to write books, and keep the industry going, and I say they can't get past McLuhan, which is really getting past Finnegans Wake.

So, I'm going to explain that in more detail, but that's an interesting thing, if you really know McLuhan, you'll see that this guy is pointing at a big aspect of what McLuhan wrote about, but doesn't even know it, and actually comes to McLuhan's point at the end, at least a beginner's point. So when I went over to the U of T bookstore today, there's hundreds of books on media. The word media is now overwhelming-- well, it's a word that's accepted in people's lives since the internet, this is what all these books say, you know "media overwhelm us". Now, I'm going to prove that media don't overwhelm us anymore. So this phenomenon of media taking over us happened thirty years ago and McLuhan dealt with it then. So why are we having these repeats? Because we're running on the same spot, we need content for the media, we can't get past the E=MC2 that McLuhan came up with, so we're just stuck and we replay these things within particular linguistic cultures and different media. And I say it's a hologram, which doesn't mean it's not real, it's a hologram environment we live in, and it's getting smaller and smaller and smaller, like homeopathic. The homeopathic principle; so the hologram is getting tinier and tinier and tinier and people have less and less to write about, so it's always one media image that dominates, like Bill Clinton was the main figure for all through the nineties-- movies about him, scandals about him, other things about him, it all revolved around the White House-- so, you merge hologram with homeopathy and you come up with the word 'holeopathic'. So we're having holeopathic replays of McLuhan's insight by people who can pretend to come up with something new because they don't know the holeopathic principle that McLuhan intuited and he got from Finnegans Wake.

So, we begin with the fact that McLuhan described the situation......

(just for some more emphasis, I should do this) .....see, now look at the language, I'm standing up I'm going to make a point, I'm going to have an authoritative vibe, I'm not going to be in the dialoguing thing so I must establish the theme, right? I have to stand up and be authoritative, and remember 'awe', a-w-e is the root of authority, and author.

So, I say that when McLuhan says that the media, the television, the electric environment of the sixties was a seamless web, that means you have to say: 'if it's a seamless web, there's no division between TV, radio, movies, magazines, speech, sports, bulldozers, buildings, all media', because McLuhan meant, by 'media', anything that humans made, from clothing to satellites. So we know that people mean by 'media'......... what? News? When they say 'the media's just going all crazy on it', what do they mean, the news? Everybody agree on that? The news, which is like Walter Kronkite, or Dan Rather, or Barbara Frum, or whoever you got now, John Pope? What's his name? Mansbridge, yeah. Which is..... that's the definition of 'pope': Man's Bridge. John Pope, so...... is his name John?

Audience member: No, Peter.

BOB: Oh, Peter Mansbridge, right. Peter Pope, that's even better! And I'll put in a prediction: the last pope will be called 'Peter', which will happen over the next twenty years. So if the next guy is Peter, it's over, after him. [At least as] a centralized organization. If it's Sammy, won't be him, it'll be after the guy after him, Peter. 'Cause it's going to have to end where it began, it began with Peter, right? The first pope. So, the news is the pope, here in Canada, and that's what people mean by 'media'.

Now, subconsciously it is right, because the whole world is run by the news: what the White House says, or what Wall Street says, which is obviously a reflection of the White House, or some other place, Tokyo........ but it's always the same impetus, everyday, the market needs to know what's happening so they listen to the news. So the news runs the world. And the news is usually press releases, coming [from], and anchored and responding to the White House. So if it's a seamless web....... when you lived in the '50's and 60's, you'd watch TV, turn it off, listen to radio, get in your car, put on some clothes, dance to the Beatles, go golfing, go swimming, have an affair......... remember, women were the first medium, the first extension of man, because it was [makes rib gesture] pulled out of man, in myth.

So, the metaphor is, is that when Eve put a fig on herself, that was the first clothing, that was the first extension, which numbed them, therefore put them out of the Garden of Eden. So, that's interesting. So one can understand why anthropologists say that woman is going to be the last thing that man civilises, that was the first medium. So if you have the seamless web, it doesn't seem........ what's McLuhan talking about? It doesn't seem that it's seamless when you're going from one clunky medium to another, but you're also listening to music, so you can get a........ you say: 'yeah, when I listen to radio, the Beatles, it's seamless', 'cause you're in acoustic space. But now, when a little kid's got a laptop, and they've got movies radio magazines and every media in there, we can understand it's a seamless web. Could we see that all media have disappeared? What I'm saying is, the 'now' media, or medium, does not refer....... well, the definition of particular 'media' like television and radio: those media don't exist anymore. Everything that Marshall wrote about in Understanding Media, telephones..... they do not exist. They were separate media, now it's all in a seamless web. So McLuhan saw the seamless web. And if it's a seamless web, there's no division, then there's only one thing existing. It's boundless, has no centre, and if you put a human face on it, it's the President of the White House. President of the United States. We all are that. Now, if you look back there, you'll see a picture of McLuhan, it's a review of a book he did in the '60's, and it has him standing on the whole globe, and it actually has a....... looks like an egg, behind him. So he could be Humpty Dumpty 'cause he did write about how electric media reunited the world. All the king's men couldn't put fragmented Humpty Dumpty together, but they could, once the electric environment started, create a seamless web, then the egg came back. So this is a pretty interesting picture, and that's 35 years ago, I think. So, but that is...... that could be anybody, but we anthropomorphize this one seamless thing that exists, and we say it's a human being, and usually it's the White House.

So the news is the White House...... this wasn't so obvious before the Berlin Wall went down, but it actually was a factor, because the CIA and the KGB always shared information on their station cheifs, just as an example in one bureaucracy: they pretended there was a Cold War, but there was a lot of 'seamless web' within the information world. So it became obvious to people when there was only one world after the Berlin Wall, or the war fear, disappeared. So we are one thing --I don't know if you want to call it a human being --we're in this seamless web. So, how can we get perspective on that? Now, we're all separate bodies here, but it's language that's in the seamless web. We speak, then that became writing, then that became printed books, and then that became bulldozers and railroads...... all these inventions, McLuhan said, have the characteristics of words, and language. But, what is language? Is it thought? Is it grunting? How did they first communicate? Was it ESP, or what would we call ESP, a sharing of gesture-image? How did they connect? So that desire to connect between humans created a shared environment --which was language and media, every medium after-- now we're all back in the beginning, and language and media have integrated. The bodies haven't, but what extended from the bodies has become one resonating thing.

So how can we get separate from that, how can we stand back, how can we express it Because any means of expression, from a movie (say The Matrix), to going to a theme park, Disneyland, or going to a baseball game, or going to a doctor and taking a pill, those are all media, and they're all fragments of the resonating thing we all live in. Now, maybe that has come........ if we think that it's just one thing, and it's an extension of us, and the human and the seamless web are together, then consciousness can shift from the human to the machine, or the technological extension. So we can say 'it's alive', and it can say 'we're not alive', or we can say 'we're alive and it's not alive', but even in that interval, the question of what's alive and what isn't, is an effect of this seamless web we're in. Okay. In Todd Gitlin's book, he says he's gonna attempt to....... he talks about his other books, and how he talked about different media....... and he says: "in this book" (in his introduction) "I'm going to try to make a total picture of the situation we're in. I'm going to try to get a holistic, or a whole total view. I'm going to attempt to understand our reality, this (what he calls) being-with-media." Being-with-media, (it's italicized) is a way, in print form, to express what I'm saying. We're being with this one seamless web, this one node, resonating digital node, whatever that is. When we say this digital world is 0s and 1s, on and off?? That's a visualization of it. So we could take turns being the 0 or the 1. Visualization, that means alphabetic, literate, ABC level: 0, 1.

Numbers were not like that before, primitive societies used to make numbers just clumps, and just take a bunch of people and say 'there's 5 people there'. There'd just be a clump, maybe 23 actual human beings, but they would just vaguely approximate, because they didn't have the visual precision of writing and the phonetic alphabet. So that's where 0 and 1comes in, so that's a visual definition, and visual extension, of 'being-with-media'. Being, we could capitalize it, Being with Media. Who's being? Us or the machine?? And by machine I don't mean a mechanical thing, it's an organic, seamless web..... see, what word are we going to use? So, when McLuhan says 'the medium is the message', he was intuiting that we're inside a medium, it was one medium! So therefore he wrote about the history of media in his books, but that was a rear-view mirror, that was an artform. He was trying to lead up to an image...... to show you the image of how we got to the post-media, post-classifications of the seamless web. But it had already been done by James Joyce. But we'll go into that later.

Part 3

So, Gitlin tries to....... he says 'I'm going to try to swallow the big picture'. The point he makes, in the end, he says 'Americans are kinetic', we're a kinetically motivated culture. He picks a sensory bias and says we're kinetic, he picked that much up from McLuhan. Now here's the interesting thing: is that McLuhan says, on page 136 of the book 'From Cliche To Archetype', he says every culture has an expression that tries to give the sense of 'I know it all', 'I mastered the topic', 'I mastered the situation'. He calls it plenary awareness, just like 'full awareness'. So every culture has a phrase that indicates 'I've mastered it, I have full awareness of it, full mastery.' So he goes and does a little inventory of eight cultures. He says the English (meaning the British), they say: "I know it like the back of my hand". Marshall puts in brackets: 'visual bias?' You look at the back of the hand, that's a visual bias. You'll see why it is in relation to the palm of the hand in a minute. He then says, 'well, let's go to the palm of the hand'....... the Russians, when they want to say in their language, 'I know it, I've totally mastered it', they say "I know it like the palm of my hand." So McLuhan puts in brackets the sensory bias of that culture, he's saying the preference, the feeling of full command of a situation has a sensory bias in it, the cultural indication of the bias of the culture. So the Russians say "I know it like the palm of the hand", Marshall says that's 'iconic-tactile'. Think of iconic art in traditional Russian culture. Then he says the Germans, they say "I know it like the inside of my pocket". He says that's 'tactile interface'. Tactile is not just contact, it's the releasing and letting go. Touch, and then non-touch. If I grab this and I can't let go, the hand is useless. The fact that you can let go, and re-grip, that interval is what McLuhan understands as tactility, the ability to touch and let go. So "I know it like the inside of my pocket", McLuhan sees that........ see,he puts a question mark behind each sensory bias, I don't know if he's indicating audience participation so people will think he's not being authoritative, he's just saying 'hey, think about it, I'm not sure'. So he says "I know it like the inside of my pocket" is tactile interface. Then he has the American bias, which gives a sense of mastery; "I know it like--"..... does anybody know what Americans say, can you think of it? When they say "I know it........".....as soon as I say it, you'll recognize it.

Dave: By heart?

BOB: What?

Dave: Off by heart?

BOB: Yeah....... it's not that. But, um........ see if this is it-- *very faint voice says 'inside-out?'

Nigel: "I know it by heart" they say, yeah........

BOB: Is that what they say? Okay. What McLuhan had in there, was "I know it inside-out".

Audience member: That's what I just said!

BOB: Oh, did you say that?? Is that what you said right now? Oh, very good. So, you have heard

Americans say that, you think.

Audience member: I think.

BOB: But that's the one you've heard, when you hear the phrase "I know it........" Yeah, when I read that I said: 'Yeah, that's the one you hear a lot, around here, I don't know if it's Canada or the States. So, he has "I know it inside-out", so guess what the sensory bias is? In brackets, McLuhan says 'kinetic, manipulatory'.

Eric: What do you mean by kinetic, just active?

BOB: Movement. Moving around.

Eric: And manipulatory.

BOB: And he has ',manipulatory', which is interesting, because America has become the policeman, the cop, and they are given the job, for the global village, of manipulating things, through CIA and propaganda. But it's a sensory bias. And, so I'm reading this, and he [Gitlin] makes this big insight that America is kinetic! And he thinks he's telling a new thing! If he had read his McLuhan, he's just arrived at page 136 of 'From Cliche to Archetype' written 33 years ago!! 35 years ago, in the sixties, it was published in 1970. So it's interesting that he is saying kinetic....... it's these kind of things, if you know McLuhan, you find that are really revealing. If you don't know McLuhan you would never even know that, you would actually be impressed with the kinetic insight! Because McLuhan......... many people thought McLuhan would say North Americans were a visually biased people, because they saw an eye vs. an ear, which was his popular dialectic he presented. But he was really pointing out the tactile environment, and in his books, which was a print medium, which includes the eye-ear dialectic because voice and language is the content of printed works, he was..... I don't want to go into this too much yet, just to probe here..... he was showing eye-ear as the content dialectic that was necessary, a law, of the book medium. If you're going to do books, you're going to work within the eye-ear dialectic. So, after a while, if you read McLuhan closely, you'd see he says the Americans are not visually biased like the British who say "I know it like the back of my hand", they are kinetic! And that comes in with industrialism, with railroads, and then cars! And think, as McLuhan said, the most common phenomenon in American culture is dancing! That's kinetic! That is the popular artform of American culture, which is jazz, swing, rock n' roll and on. Americans are the ones who propagate........ you know, you read other cultures, they say Americans are good in rock n' roll, movies, and...... maybe they'd say cars or something, but rock n' roll and movies are kinetic. Movies are a kinetic medium, because it's an extension of your eye and your foot (according to McLuhan). So, just to finish this...... I'm leading in to how he was a kinetic-bias guy, and McLuhan had already said that. He then says the Spanish say: "I know it as if I've given birth to it". [Kenzie laughs] .....you laugh. What's the [joke] there?

Kenzie: It's too much.

BOB: Oh, you mean you know it?

Kenzie: No.

BOB: Oh, okay. So what's the sensory bias of "I know it as if I've given birth to it"? It's proprioceptive, our inner-sense dynamics.

Linus: It's also kind of 'inside-out', literally.

BOB: Right.

Nigel: And it also ties into the cursing of different cultures, kind of ties into that as well. Like, most of the Spanish curses have to do with your mother.....

BOB: Is that right?

Nigel: Whereas in Britain it's-- or in America it's about sex and defecation.

BOB: Right, yeah.

Nigel: In France it's the church, you know, you can kind of........

BOB: See, now that's something you could do a little paper on, or look into that. That's good. So, it's 'proprioceptive, visceral'. I mean, that's one of our senses, the sense of balance, the sense of what you feel inside. I call it the 'inner-kinetic', whereas the pushing, lifting, and using your muscles is kinetic. And industrialism, the mechanical era of the 18th century was an extension of our muscles, the mechanical connecting which became steel and then the huge weights they could lift. So the Spanish. So the French are "I know it au fond". A-u f-o-n-d, it's italicized, so that's a French word. It means 'in depth' I think, but he says it's auditory. The French are auditory, that's their bias. So "I know it au fond", apparently has an ear-meaning in the phrase 'au fond'. The Thailanders say "I know it like a snake swimming in water". So McLuhan-- this is really important, what we're going to get to-- he says 'that's the dance of thought among words'. Dance of thought among words. Now we get back to the original thing, when humans first interacted, how much is thought interacting and connecting before........ and they're grunting --we assume not speaking-- before words come in, it's thought, and thought can be gestural. If I go like this [big arm sweeps] that'll mean something to you, you know, you'll pick it up. So the Thailanders have an ancient sensibility: "I know it like a snake swimming in water". Okay, so we've done the French, Thailander...... so, the Japanese, who McLuhan said were the most tactile culture, therefore they're going to have a tactile bias, so their pharase is " I know it from head to toe". Head to toe, there's a gap in between, there's an interval, so they're expressing a gap sensibility, and they're masters of tactility: Zen, which is the tactile religion. It deals with the interval between thought and words, in a way. So you could kind of make a general thing of: 'the west is more eye-ear, and the east is more tactile, and more subtle, more primitive'. Not as industrialized, but we know that happened in their history. One side thing that's very important to know is that McLuhan said 'when you put television, a tactile medium, around the whole world, each culture has an identity crisis and they'll hop into another culture's sensibility to get out of the pressure that tactility is putting on them'. So the East became West..... that's why all these Asian students flooded into the colleges and taken over the left-hemisphere activity over the last thirty years, and all of the Western kids, boomer generations, go East! They either do it by Jack Kerouac, or they go to Tokyo, or they go to the Peace Corps, they go to Africa, or they take drugs! The point is, we can't handle the tactile implications, 'cause no culture had ever experienced the extension of tactility, which is television. The extension of the operations of the central nervous system, which is a ratio, organizing the ratio-proportions of different senses. Tactility organizes your sensory inputs: eye, ear, touch, smell, and then it makes a coherent consciousness. The thing that does that is tactility.

But don't just think it's in the mind or the brain, it's in the heart. Because if you look at the systole-diastole action...... you ever seen footage of a heart pumping? You know, blood's going in, blood's going out........ if you look at it, you can't see it precisely, it's like a blur 'cause it's going in four directions at the same time. That is an image of tactility, that's push-pull, at the same time. So, tactile... when McLuhan emphasized that electricity was an extension of the central nervous system, the nervous system's not just in the head, that's all through the body. So think of the heart, think of breathing....... we've extended our breath-spirit as a medium with television, and so wouldn't the culture express that?? Yellow Submarine, "all you need is love", hearts and love and all that stuff in the late 60's, which is well after the TV era in the 50's, it's computers and satellite that's the hidden new technology in the 60's. So we have the English "I know it like the back of my hand", the Russian "I know it like the palm of my hand".......

Eric: What's the English significance, the back of my hand, that's just also tactile?

BOB: No, that's visual. McLuhan thinks that's visual. And it also has lines, look at it. Think of the linear.

Dave: You also write on it.

BOB: You write on it........ and you do more touching with that [indicating palm], you don't touch with the back of your hand, it's kind of just something you look at, people look at their fingernails, right? You feel with this, so that's tactile. So Russians I know it like the palm of my hand, that's ......

Eric: That's also visual, isn't it? The Russians?

BOB: Um, what do you mean..... 'I know it like the palm of my hand' is also still kind of visual? Yeah, well..... remember, they've always identified with the West, they were Chrisitanized, they were manuscriptized, you know, in the Dark Ages and Middle Ages, so yes, they have the--

Eric: An icon is very visual.

Part 4

BOB: Yeah, it's light-through, as McLuhan talked about........ they're more Western than China, so, but they're taking this [palm]......... yeah, you could have English, Russia, that's the English side of eye-culture and that's the tactile side of eye-culture. And, the Spanish thing of 'I know it like I've given birth to it', that's proprioceptive-visceral, the Germans say 'I know it like the inside of my pocket', that's tactile-interface. Now, the Germans did really well in the '90s. They basically..... they're still doing well, they're buying up all the publishing, and these people, they have big power in the internet world, they own a lot of companies...... it's interesting that Germany took over in the '90s like the Japanese took over in the '70s. We were in a tactile culture in the '70s and '80s: one-way tactile, mass medium of tactility, so the Japanese, unconsciously or whatever- or, we let them come in because they had that sensus, they could ride the tactile nature of industry in the '70s and '80s, but then they collapse in the early '90s 'cause we move into tactile-interface because the internet provides interactivity and interface, you're interacting, it's not just one-way. So it's interesting that Germans ride in on that.

And so they're 'tactile-interface', good description of the internet, your experience when you're on the computer. So the French are 'I know it au fond', they're auditory, now what's interesting about the French is, they were popular- Paris was the cultural head in the first half of the 20th Century. In the radio era, which is acoustic, the French can ride that wave of their sensibilities. So you can see the Parisians, with their Jean-Paul Sartre existentialism, which is a real acoustic primitive sensibility (a retrieval of acoustic sensibility), the Parisians are the cultural centre in the first half of the 20th Century, but what's interesting is: who were the famous artists of the Parisian world?? Picasso and [Braque?] and these people, they came from Spain! Salvador Dali!

So within Art, the Spanish thing did a nice twist on the acoustic effect of movies and telephone and radio, so they had the Spanish proprioceptive, because the electric nervous system, the extension of the nervous system is tactile and your inner space, your proprioceptive, so it's interesting in retrospect how cultures rise under the bias of a particular medium, and nobody's aware of it. But Marshall became aware of that process. So who did I leave out? the Thailanders: 'I know it like a snake swimming in water', the dance of thought among words........ uh, there's eight of them...... oh, Americans, so 'I know it inside-out': kinetic-manipulatory. It's interesting that they built the car culture and the assembly lines, what's known as the Fordist economy, all over the world, and that means top-down management, so they would be manipulatory, that's the kinetic bias of the industry level, of the industry medium of the 19th and early 20th Century.

And McLuhan said America would eventually have the biggest identity crisis, because it was visually biased-- he never said it was kinetic biased, but it was visually biased, and that it would suffer the most. America has suffered the most, as a culture: everyone thinks it violent, and guns and all this stuff. So, it suffered that, but really it was because it was a kinetic-bias culture, and kinetic bias culture couldn't handle the tactile television situation.

Now, here's the next important point: television itself is tactile because it has a lot of the senses: eye, ear, smell, and movement, the camera moves, many people when they see something in vivid colour TV, they'll smell the rose..... it's not smell-o-vision, but it's activating that sense. So, it's the medium with the most sensory life, in the 50's. Now then what happens, the computer goes around it, and then the satellite goes around it, now the satellite is going around the whole planet, and it's an extension not of parts of our body, but an extension of the whole planet! This is the end point. We have extended our arms through tools, our eyes through writing, industrialism is kinetic and muscles, and we extended the tactile and proprioceptive system with electricity, and then--- and that's just parts of the human body! Then the whole planet was extended, the whole organism, because the satellite is a little programmed earth that someone can live inside of, because you can't do it...... you know, you can't live out in space. But we created an environment that you could live out in space! So we created a little Earth-medium that you can live in, so it's like an extension of the planetary organism. So that is the final punchline. So the satellite is going around the planet, and people are starting to feel that the planet is the content of the satellite, and therefore its a stage, 'cause the satellite creates a proscenium arch around the planet, and that means every previous medium becomes an actor. Not just people become an actor...... think of the demand in the 60's and 70's for performance in industry, and performance art, everybody had to perform! There's a stage metaphor there, that's because the 'global-theatre' effect of the satellite made all media and its contents become actors. McLuhan called them 'actors in the global theatre', but most people didn't understand that he meant media were actors. Now, when different media are interacting within the envelope of satellite.....

When the different media are interacting within the satellite proscenium...... [hi, bob! sorry to be late, but I'm here]..... it is a simulation of a tactile organism. Think of each medium as an extension of a sense, think of the satellite as a coherency or a detachment that's looking at the whole theatre, planetary theatre and watching the media interact, its extensions. It can be orchestrated, if it's done consciously, an orchestration of the different media..... that's miming the orchestration that the tactile organism does of all the sensory input. So, the important point about McLuhan was, yes, people say 'TV is tactile', but he was describing in the 60's the programmed environment, due to the satellite, which meant that the environment among media had arrived at tactility. Alright?

This is an important point. The environment was tactile: the interplay of all the media. Not just television as a tactile extension itself; television becomes just another player by the 60's and 70's, and the proscenium arch contains the interplay. So the mixed-corporate-media of the world, mixed-corporate-media is the interplay of all these media, so it's literally gone beyond TV per se as tactile..... all the media are interacting in a tactile way. So here's a quote, from my long essay on our site, here's a quote, first one I use, from 1962, the satellite's just gone up, listen to this, McLuhan says:

"And I think it is this multiplicity of media that is now enabling man to free himself from media for the first time in history." --this is Finnegans awake, because every culture was subliminally controlled by the medium it used in developing a sensory bias, like I indicated of the plenary awareness of 'I know it blah blah blah', you can see historically and technologically the bias of each culture-- he says, "[Modern man] has been the victim, the servomechanism of his technologies, his media from the beginning of time, but now because of the sheer multiplicity of them [meaning the media], he is beginning to awaken, because he can't live with them all."

Now this is a really interesting point, this is the point to begin with. What does it mean to awaken when we're doing out of pressure, what are we awakening to? Are we awakening to the fact that the mixed-corporate-media tactile media environment is forcing us to awake, so the awakening is ersatz! That's the sophisticated level McLuhan was talking about, and the only medium he could use to really lay it down like commandments from Moses was the book. See, McLuhan did not identify with being a writer, he used all media, he was interested in the dynamics of all media. Being a writer was a minor operation. Bob Logan knows.... did the book 'Mother of Invention', the problems of doing the book in the 70s when McLuhan was half into it, you'd have to write..... it was hap hazard the way he'd do a book. And all the other writers had hap hazard times with him, you know he'd just dictate a bit and get you to fill in the other part. It wasn't that important doing a book.

Bob Logan: He couldn't write.

BOB: He couldn't write! He was just oral, he just dictated. So the thing is that he did do Understanding Media, though Ted Carpenter, his close colleague says that he wrote a lot of it, and Ted when he dies or whenever he's going to reveal his archives can prove it, he claims, with his notes from writing it. So many people think Marshall wrote Understanding Media alone. But maybe Ted did do it. But the point is, a book, McLuhan said we need books, so we can put down these incredible insights so people can think about it, to become aware of the word 'awaken', what's it mean? It doesn't mean, as the New Agers say, you wake up and you're in a rapture, you have to become aware of what's motivating you to wake up. What medium is happening?

So Marshall is in a very difficult position, and the only way that he can point to the sophisticated level he's talking about, where the medium is the message, and the medium is waking us up, which on the surface would be a good thing ('man is no longer a servomechanism'), but we're only waking up because of the effect of the satellite. So he then has to be satirical, he has to prod you, so that's why McLuhan would say that all his writings are satire.

Everything he wrote was satirical, no one took it that way in the 70s and 60s, they thought he was: 'I say the medium is an extension of man, blah blah blah'. If they had known that Finnegans Wake had already done all this......... McLuhan wrote a letter to Playboy in 1970, he said 'T.S.Eliot's doctrine of the auditory imagination is already a cliche in our cutlure today, [because that's after radio and rock n roll and jazz by the 70s] but what the population is not aware of is Finnegans Wake.' They have not awakened to the meaning of Finnegans Wake. So there's the hidden ground, Finnegans Wake, he understood it no one understood it, but the Wake is the way that someone would write a tactile book. And the media are embedded, nomenclatured in there, so Marshall was always spending his life translating Finnegans Wake. Not that he worshipped the book, but the insights and the way it was written pointed to something, because Marshall later would say that Finnegans Wake and Eliot, Joyce Lewis and Pound were knee-jerk reflections of the radio effect. They were unaware of radio.... Joyce came closest to it, and he was able to project ahead to what the TV effect was.

Part 5

But you gotta understand that McLUhan was not a scientist, artist, sociologist, politician or anything, 'cause he realized that we were resonating on this one zone, and that one cannot be anything in the resonating zone, the tactile interval that had been digitized. You could only be something as an artform, as an afterimage. So therefore he would be an artist, he'd write a book for artists, he'd write a book for economists, like Take Today, he'd write a book for linguists, like Cliche to Archetype, he'd write books for the populous, pop-culture, The Medium is the Massage, he'd write an academic book, The Gutenberg Galaxy, and he'd emphasize an academic as the source of it, Harold Innis. You have a building down here named after him.

He was the top scholar, in a lot of ways, in Canada, so he'll emphasize Innis, but he doesn't emphasize Innis in other books, he'd emphasize James Joyce, Ezra Pound, or himself, what he'd written before. So the thing is, here is a guy who doesn't identify with any medium, he is acultural. You know like amoral, acultural? Jean Baudrillard said that McLuhan was a musician, has anyone thought of him as being a musician? But if they knew the history...... and there's a new book out called 'McLuhan in Space' by Richard Cavell, an art teacher out in British Colombia.... it's very good, he shows you what space McLuhan was working with, tactile space. You have read enough of the book to see? [To Bob L, who says 'yeah'] You see how he had to write many chapters to get you to see that? And it needs to go that, 'cause he's gotta wear away your visual bias of what you think space is. And so he does arrive and show you waht tactility is.

And McLuhan's in tactile space..... so, McLuhan's definition of imagination was: 'that faculty that is not embedded in any sense or extension of a sense [technology]', it's not embedded. To be free to play with a medium, you can't identify with it, you have to be aware of its subliminal effects on you. So, a really good artist is not merging with the medium, they're detached and working with its components, they learn to understand its components, but that requires a detachment, so McLuhan is advocating a detachment, therefore he's not going to identify with any cultural product he makes, because to stay in tune to the resonating node that was existence, a simulation of existence, he had to not identify with anything hew as doing. So June Collwood did an interview with him in 1974 and I have a copy of it.... McLuhan gets personal, talks a bit about his life, he says all his kids have an identity crisis. And June Collwood says "he says it as if they've lost their mittens!"

But I have the tape of that interview that she cribbed from, or just summarized, and in it, McLuhan says.... right in the middle of it he says 'you know I have ESP', and she goes "What??". Now here's a print, academic, university guy, you couldn't talk about having ESP in the 60's and 70s and this is 1974, he says 'I have ESP', that's pretty neat. He says 'I can feel it, when a friend of mine is in New Guinea......' which would be Ted Carpenter, who was in New Guinea, 'When a friend of mine is in New Guinea, I can feel it.' So she was stunned by that, you can hear it in the interview, but she didn't put that in the print version.

Now you go back to an essay, in 1957 Explorations, called 'Electronics as ESP'. Now this is the key point, how is electronics ESP?? And then in later books he points out that ESP is a nineteenth-century knee-jerk concept, ESP is this and that. See, he knows that you have a certain literate version of ESP, and he needs to break that down, so he doesn't mean 'ESP' as you normally think when he says 'Electronics is ESP', he really means tactility is ESP. So here we have electronics, an extension of ESP, which is the most paleolithic intimate environment. When humans first interacted, they didn't call it ESP but they had a very sensitive response ..... c'mon in, take a chair right here (Kevin arrives, I think) ..... they had a very intimate response with their sensory environment. In retrospect we romanticize the shaman awareness, and we call it right-hemisphere and all this, but it's natural. But as McLuhan said each new invention they made would push their awareness out into an environment, so the tools they made would limit, change the ratios in their initial sensitivity. So if electronics has brought us back to a paleolithic sensitivity, then for me to say that we are resonating in one node, and only one person, one thing can represent it, and therefore there's no relationship, there's no connection with anything, then you understand why Carpenter and McLuhan's book 'They Became What They Beheld', starts off with the phrase: "only connect", okay? What are you going to connect with? If we're all one thing, then....... as McLuhan was once asked, 'will there ever be silence?', and he said: 'objects are unobservable, only relationships among objects are observable.' So that was his answer to 'will there ever be silence?', well silence is one object, one thing, they're unobservable.

We are in a situation now where we cannot observe our situation. So McLuhan would take old media like a book, and he would offer this as a mirror, but the content of the book would be writing about all the other media, making you aware of the dynamics, so that this one book like Perseus' mirror, is held up 'cause you can't look at the Gorgon monster, which is just oneness and has no relationship to anything. You can't get detached from it, so you look at a rear-view mirror media.

So we have tremendous baroque spirals and effluence of media, a great renaissance of all former media! Movies, TVs, writing, books, song, poetry, bulldozers, wars, destruction, architecture, the renaissance of the twentieth century was the greatest century of making things, all of it having the room to run around because people needed any medium to be a mirror, to get a perspective on the resonance. But in the end, none of these media have any staying power, none of them! Every one of those media are in a state of panic all the time. So in the end, no medium, rear-view mirror media, have any content. And that's why McLuhan would come back to Finnegans Wake, a book that in the end has no content! No meaning, no sign that you can say 'this is what it's about', but that was a perfect way to mirror the tactile environment which has no content.

To have content you gotta have a relationship, you can't observe tactility when it's extended into a digital node. So, the term I came up with was 'Android Meme' to describe this, because language or any sharing between humans with any medium from ESP language and words up to now, creates a collective habit, which Richard Dawkins calls a meme, but it is a simulated meme now, it's an android meme, and it's resonating and it has nothing to connect with. So the image of that Android Meme is always the White House, the President. So George Bush....... [door creak]

I just want to take a break here, the jest of honour: Dave Neufeld coming in, he's the man who made the 'McLuhan is the Message album', and my album, and he's finally arrived at the McLuhan Centre, and even Eric told them that was a good album. And he said to his mother that it was a good album. Sit here, Dave. [Thank you]

So why does George Bush apparently not finish his sentences? Why does he seem to be dumb? Why doesn't he seem to care what his media image is? Because he's totally appropriate for now. We have now arrived at the point where we're not swamped by a torrent of images and media, because the media is shrinking holeopathically, being miniaturized! These kids today feel superior to the media and information environments, it's instinctive in them. Even in their hip-hope culture, they just sample, they take fragments from different things, just put it into collage! They're not looking- they're doing Finnagans Wake! It's finally gotten down to ghetto culture. But that was because the media moulded people all through the twentieth century and made their environments tiny. So the population is not interested in communication as a sense of matching, or establishing a point, they just swim through all the media, all different forms of communication. So the sensibility, the Jerry Springer sensibility, is to get on the major centralized media and spit in its face, be an idiot in front of it, and another thing was talk radio, just rant about Bill Clinton or whatever the icons are, Hillary...... what icons the old centralized media put out, the New York Times and CBS and that. So this anarchy toward any communication in the old meaning of communication as a kind of control-matching situation has been satirized by the population, and they did that all through the '90s, so by 2000 you're going to have a President who looks like a thug and a cannibal who doesn't even care about the media, he doesn't even want to finish his sentence!! And he still can be popular! He is expressing a sensibility, and we can actually now confront the point: yeah, why should George Bush say anything, 'cause there's nobody there!! It's only him!!! It's only George Bush.

So the industrial structure that he represents is running around in an identity crisis trying to locate an enemy, locate a focus for oil (where we're going to move into post-oil things), so we're seeing the Pentagon having a huge identity crisis, and it's a minor identity crisis compared to all the other media.

The biggest killer in America is medicine. We've just proven it...... traditionally they say heart disease and cancer. But the biggest....... three-quarters of a million people die a year! There was only five thousand people died in Iraq in a little puny war!! Okay? So, the larger media violence is happening in other realms, and we take the old industiral hardware guys and do what Kroker calls 'abuse-value', put 'em in the White House and then laugh at them, and they run around........ but they've caught on, Bush comes and says "yeah I know you're laughing at me and I don't give a damn about you, I'm just going to ignore you! I have a job here to do for my industrial meme!!" You know what I mean? He said: 'Go shopping! Go about your business! Don't worry about me, I'm just working for my friends! For my meme!" His mean meme.

I remember Frank Zingrone, when Bush was campaigning, Frank goes: 'that guy, man, he'd eat his mother.' Some people respond that way....... Now, Frank's an old P.O.B, a literate person, (Print Oriented Bastard) and so he would be really irritated by a kinetic-manipulatory who was really Chinese..... (that's why we have a great relationship with China)...... Here's an interesting thing McLuhan said about China, in the 60s, he said China was the hidden ground of all the things that were going on in the 60s, because it was the most tactile culture, it's Asian, and it was the most paleolithic compared to the industrial, a very primitive society-- not in historic, but in terms of industry, it was the most backward of the Communist Bloc. So Stuart Brand or somebody came up with the phrase in the 90s that the 90s are the 60s upside down. So what becomes-- if in the 60s China was the ground, then China becomes the figure in the 90s, and it resonates through all the culture: everyone's worried Clinton had Chinese spies in the White House, he was working with Chinese people, and China becomes the future for industry, Kissinger spends all the 90s running over China. So China becomes figure when you reconvert...... tip over the 60s. Now how was that done?

Now we get into the five schools of media ecology. So, even though I don't expect to really........ I'm miming George Bush. I don't expect people to match what I'm saying, other than little glimmerings, and it doesn't matter that you match because whatever I'm saying is just a verbal medium and very puny compared to the mixed-media that's swarming around us now and inside us. All that media storm, the torrent of images is happening inside us.

Part 6

So....... um, most of you haven't read Finnegans Wake I imagine, right? Nobody knows? Well, take a look at it, you can't read the book. You can't read it! There is not one complete anything in there! But there are fragments ad you can read for a few seconds and pretend you're seeing something, but Joyce even frustrates that, he puts 60 to 100 languages in there, on one page!! So, you look for english in there.

Okay, so you don't know Finnegans Wake, but you have to your homework eventually and understand that McLuhan spent his life, when he was writing books, re-doing Finnegans Wake, okay? He was re-doing the methods. But, he had the advantage, later, of being at the end of technological evolution with the TV, computer and satellite, and he could look back and see that Joyce was a reflex responding to radio, and the rest of them were. So then he could say 'well, I'm not going to talk about the cultural products of radio, study the cultural products, I'm going to study the sensibility of radio, and how it formed cubism and all the arts in different cultures, with their particular bias, and the general bias of Art as a category in western culture. So he looked at the medium. So people running around worrying about Big Brother conditioning us?

McLuhan could see that the Big Brother top-down conditioning was happening in media, but it was something that people naturally swam in because you create a new environment, people are going to swim in it, because they're gonna learn from it. So that's why he said Orwell described 1900. At best 1934. So McLuhan said he was going to create a distraciton on the sidelines, to distract the triggermen, that would be the assassins Big Brother guys, and uh, what's the rest of it? Stimulate the somnambulists, to wake up the somnambulists, I think it was. So distract the bureaucrats, and yet the population swimming around in the TV-computer environment, he's going to try to wake them up.

So he had two media he had to work at, that's why Don Theall thinks he was schizophrenic. Don doesn't realize he wasn't schizophrenic, he was just operating with many audiences, he had to put on a different medium, different approach-- that's formal causality, studying the audience, figure out how you want to shape the audience, how do you want to respond to their bias. Formal causality was his principle so he would be different media* in relation to different people*. So when you're writing a book, he knows that books are dead as a medium that's shaping people, but he always said 'the best book was Finnegans Wake, so I'm going to explain Finnegans Wake, and update it.' So, I've written an essay, it's called 'Literary/Aesthetic Cliche-Probes In The American Classroom-Without-Walls'........ McLuhan's favourite word for the TV world was the classroom-without-walls. And it's American because, as I said there, American culture, which contains all the media..... America produces a lot of these media, and culture contents, so they're the content of the global classroom. So how would you write a book? What would book culture produce, after McLuhan??

So, McLuhan dies in 1980. The first person to have the McLuhan awareness, and get his books published, and continue what's called the Toronto school of media ecology was Barrington Nevitt. So he put out some very good books in the early 80s. He was qualified to do it because he understood Finnegans Wake as Marshall did. Not any Joyce scholar understood McLuhan [Joyce?] like Eric, his son, and Barry Nevitt did. So Barry rolled with that, so I say that's the first replay of McLuhan's school of media ecology after he did. It's a holeopathic retrieval: he's a hologram, a real thing, emphasizing the book medium. So the first one is Barry Nevitt, replaying the Toronto school of media ecology. The next one, a couple years later, is the New York school of media ecology, and that's what's called Semiotext(e): a professor at Columbia named Sylvere Lotringer, he started putting out French thinkers like Baudrillard, Deleuze and Guattari, Lyotard, Foucault........ I think there's another one there, I can't remember......

Linus: Virilio?

BOB: Virilio, right. Those five. They swamped the Pages bookstore in the early 80s, middle 80s, they became very popular, the hip culture was into them, and eventually they became established as academic people, academic books, they were required curriculum in the universities. But Sylvere took the risk of bringing these people over, and I don't know if Sylvere knew it, I know Sylvere would discuss a little bit of this stuff, but every one of those guys was a student of McLuhan. Virilio had met McLuhan. Foucault was always being urged to meet McLuhan but he refused to. Deleuze and Guattari talk about McLuhan, and Derrida, and Baudrillard admits he was a McLuhanite. Baudrillard's first published work is a review of McLuhan's 'The Medium is the Massage' in 1967. So the point is, you now have another replay of McLuhan, out of New York City. So I call it the New York school of media ecology. The next one--- oh, I should say this. Barrington Nevitt...... this place was called the 'Centre for Culture and Technology', so Barry said 'okay......'

Audience member: Still is.

BOB: Is it still?

Audience member: Yeah.

BOB: Okay. Barry, as an engineer, he'd emphasize cultural products like Finnegans Wake, to satirize technological developments. The New York school did the reverse. Foucault and these guys would emphasize technological developments, and show how cultural products reflected that. So they took the opposite tack. But the third school of media ecology came out of Concordia University in Montreal, the Montreal school of media ecology, around Arthur Kroker. Arthur Kroker satirized the Toronto school of media ecology--- he had met Barry Nevitt, Barry used to speak a lot at Concordia in the early 80s--- and he satirized the New York school of media ecology. He realized, rather than get stuck in the dialectic between culture and technology, that culture and technology had merged, and come alive! That technology had taken on a life of its own.

Now there's a particular quote, from 'War and Peace in the Global Village', that we have up on our website, where McLuhan says: ['people do not realize that our electric environments are organic in the fullest sense'] "The important thing to realize is that electric environments are live environments in the full organic sense." McLuhan said media were alive, if you want to take that dialectic and make an emphasis, that technology under electric conditions had become organic. So Kroker knew that, he being a Canadian was better than a New Yorker, and Barry Nevitt was..... how will I say this? replaying McLuhan literal-- literate-- literace-- literately, replaying the..... literally, and was not aware of the newer media that the younger Generation-X kids were dealing with, and those were Kroker's students. So being a younger professor, he's in touch with the later media, so he had to come up with a newer language, so I would compliment him for getting past Barry, and getting past New York.

Now the fourth school of media ecology I call the diasporic school, and that is people who were students, or........ most of them were students of McLuhan, or very involved with McLuhan, and they scattered around the world. One of them stayed here in Toronto. One of them is Bob Logan, right there, he's a member in my terms of the diasporic school. You have William Irwin Thompson, Bruce Powe, Derrick [de Kerkhove], and Neil Postman, all very involved in McLuhan. But their angle is: they, being essentially POBs, Print-Oriented-Bastards and literate academics, they saw the meaning of McLuhan's warning about literate culture.

These guys were all academics, Bruce Powe is still trying to be an academic, and he does teach but he was an academic when he was first influenced, he tried to become a novelist....... But the point is: these guys love books, and they're worried about book culture, and they know McLuhan's warning, they understand enough about McLuhan that it's a serious warning, and they still want to hoick up the values, the humanist values of individualism, creativity, freedom, what we call artistic thinking and making the public smarter in literate terms....... they walked a nervous line. They would do their books but in the books say, you know, they'd be almost like McLuhan: 'this book is expendable, we're gonna try and warn you, but we could, with the computer, make people more literate and read more'. So the diasporic school, in a way, as Neil Postman is classified, as a neo-conservative media ecology. He's neo-conservative not politically, he's a liberal anarchist, but in media terms, he's for preserving 18th century literate values. So 'diasporic school' is the guys who nervously try to keep book culture going, and try to maybe stop the torrent of images, and celebrate McLuhan's preservation of literate values. They all celebrate McLuhnan as a book man, 'cause there was a bumper sticker that went around in the 60s saying: "MCLUHAN READS BOOKS!", 'cause everybody had thought that McLuhan was putting down books and was watching TV like a couch potato all the time. But, nobody understood Finnegans Wake so what do you expect, right?

Bob Logan: We should point out, though, he only read every other page.

BOB: That's right. He was a double-agent, a triple-agent, all told [?].

Bob Logan: No, he literally read every other page.

BOB: And so do you.

[pause]

Bob Logan: I don't know if I would........ [laughter muddles a few words] ....... I don't read EVERY page. Just the good ones.

BOB: But he read every other page only in serious academic books, he read every book, every page, every word in pulp fiction, and in non-serious books. He read every word!

Bob Logan: Mysteries, yeah, that was entertainment.

BOB: Because, well he said the serious books tended to be redundant, they always repeated themselves, 'cause they probably had some complex academic concept they had to keep referring to, but that's actually what print is, is a ditto device. He said it repeats itself, so if someone is really into book culture, they'll seriously repeat themselves. But pulp fiction is actually people-- Mickey Splaine [?], they write books just to get money so they can go to movies and TV and they ain't teaching kids literate values, so pulp ficton is guys just faking books, and those were more interesting from McLuhan's point of view, right? And also they don't repeat themselves, because they don't have book sensibility, really. They're writing books so they can be made into movies! So that's the fourth school of media ecology, and so each...... Nevitt had his books out first-- I'm saying these people, these schools because these are people [who were] studying McLuhan, and understood him to a great degree, so they're qualified to be a replay of the school of media ecology. So you had the Toronto school with Barry Nevitt, then you have Semiotext(e) comes out in the early Middle Ages, then Kroker gets his books out in the late 80s, Bob and De Kerkhove get books out in the late 80s....... [to Bob Logan] You just got one out in the 80s, The Alphabet.....................right?

Bob Logan: The Alphabet of Canadian States [?]

BOB: And Powe gets a few books out, and........

Bob Logan: Let's not forget '95.

BOB: No that's later, we're coming up to that. I'm going to talk about before '95......

Bob Logan: Oh, I see. Maybe we'll make it into the fifth school.

BOB: .....and Derrick gets one book out and Thompson gets a couple books out....... there was, just for the record, Conrad Black was lobbying for William Irwin Thompson to take over the centre and oust Eric in the early....... in 83, 84, Derrick told me that. So you were going to say something, Bob?

Bob Logan: Well, I just wanted you to be able to catch your breath. [laughter] .....but there were a couple of ideas that resonated with me. The idea that electric media is an organism.

BOB: Yeah.

Bob Logan: Electric media recalls oral culture. I'm working now on trying to understand the origin of spoken language, and there's a fellow by the name of Morton Christiansen, who came up with the hypothesis in 1994, that language is an organism which evolved in order to be easily learned by children. And that therefore you can get rid of Chomsky....... which is something that's desirable as far as I'm concerned.

BOB: Well you know, Robert, in McLuhan's thesis, the grammarian's point, he says it, is that they were the ones that understood that language was a living organism. That was the grammarian tradition. The dialecticians got too abstract and missed that point, therefore they became nominalistic, and thought you could casually name something anything! They didn't know that the name for something came out of that object, was intimately linked with it. That was the living rhetorical/grammarical tradition, whereas the nominalists had a bit of a visual bias and would split the name off from the object and think that you could put any name in there, not knowing that the name had to resonate with the characteristics of the object. So that's where I see your point, but they knew that, and McLuhan knew that, historically. Now I'm saying that organism is really tactile....... now, Marshall said that language was tactile, we don't want to just emphasize the ear.

A living organism is cohering all the sensory input making coherant consciousness, so, its all the inputs and the word for all that, that interplay is tactility, right?

Audience member: That's what Merlin Donald said in the book called Origins of the Modern Mind?

BOB: Right, he's an academic here, a friend was telling me about him --- Queens, right, but he's very popular right now. He's moving into Mcluhan areas unconsciously isn't he?

[yeah well we book bastards sometimes are useful aren't we …laughter]….

BOB: Well I praise you in the end, I say that you guys do point out the rich values and create rich books within that motive and agenda.

Audience member: But in the origin of the modern mind what Merlin Donald says…[meta]-communication that is facial gestures, hand signals, vocalization not verbalization, body language, that that was the first language, that had intentionality and its your tactile…

BOB: that's tactile ESP, and McLuhan has on page 23 of Counterblast that he's doing the content thing, like the content of TV as movies, content of movies is novels, the content of books is speech, and either it’s a question or a statement - the content of speech is what? He says, non-verbal mental dance, ESP.

Audience member: Oh my God…that's just…

BOB: He always had it first, but he got that from Joyce - from Finnegans Wake, is a book of ESP, you gotta have ESP to figure out what he really meant but he's showing the dance of cognition, the drama of cognition of non verbal mental dance, and mental is gestural. Primitive man didn't know where the mind was, they didn't know it was located in the skull - we know later cultures thought it was breath that's where their consciousness was but..

Audience member: Even in his thesis he covers this…about the gesture

BOB: Oh yeah that's very basic

Audience member: In the beginning was the word………..

Part 7

BOB: …and the word was gesture, not a defined meaning utterance, so

Audience member: just shows that McLuhan is the antenna, being an artist, so he saw everything first and then the academics sort of mop up…

BOB:…right…. The book guys eventually have to write books along that line, but other media use McLuhan, many people made millions using McLuhan, Norman Lear did, many people…Tom Wolfe, but the thing is that we have to see that TV is not verbal, that TV , the living transmission is that primitive ESP tactile mental dance - that's television, and everybody's sharing it. You're looking at something that's happening live, you first had it under radio conditions, someone speaking live to you and your also hearing something that's not in your neighbourhood. The whole world is hearing someone on the radio, everybody's in that roman and that roman is in the radio station, so , this is what Joyce understood, its really interesting if you read Don Theall's thesis, which he did under McLuhan in the 50's. He talks about Yeates, Elliot, Pound and Joyce the four of them and its all Marshall's work, Don would freely admit, 23 year old, smart student, and he just gets the basis of McLuhan and the re- does it as a thesis - and when McLuhan….I think Don says this in his book - when McLuhan was one of the, what do you call them? When you have a peer review of a thesis? The Oral?

Audience member: The defence?

BOB: What do you call the people you're doing it with?

Audience member: pricks?

BOB: pricks,…yeah, pricks [laughter] ..the committee of pricks, so on the committee of pricks was McLuhan, and so the interesting point is why did he put down Don's thesis? He argued, "this is crap!" but McLuhan's literary enemy Woodhouse, he was the head of the literary department, he defended Don…

So did McLuhan know that,…he wanted to make sure that Woodhouse didn't recognize that it was Marshall's stuff, so Marshall pretended that he disagreed with Don..and Woodhouse, who hated McLuhan's work didn't recognize that Don's work was McLuhan [laughter]

But the point is that the tactile interplay of these four people, with Lewis, Theall didn't have enough time to get to Lewis, but Lewis would be a factor and Marshall got mad at him because he didn't include Lewis, but Don was a young guy, had to do it and you couldn't get Lewis's works they were in the National Gallery locked away, his paintings and that, its hard to get 'cause Lewis had been suppressed.

Audience member: Bob, your leading up to the fifth school…

Audience member: CS Lewis?

BOB: no, Wyndham Lewis….where's wyndham?

Matt: …Wyndham couldn't make it…

BOB: This is Matt Shepherd, who is on C&D and does our website, he produced a child a few months ago and named his child Wyndham, so we almost had wyndham here…Was it because of the

Wyndham Lewis name?

Matt: well I was thinking Wyndham Lewis, my wife was thinking Wyndham Earle…

BOB: from Twin Peaks?

Matt: yeah we thought that was a good combination…

BOB: that fits……So the point is that the interplay of those four artists, Joyce, he describes the interplay of those four people and then creates the book that puts it altogether. Each one of those poets and artists saw aspects of this radio tactility. But, Don's thesis shows how they do it, if you read Don's thesis you get the background of McLuhan's mentors and then you'll see the importance of Finnegans Wake, but Finnegans Wake is just a book - it's the last book.

BOB: So the fifth school of media ecology…

Michael: The thesis is on the shelf over at the Robart Library…

BOB: Don’s thesis, yeah

Michael: if anyone wants to read it.

BOB: Well, he may be reading it soon, when he gets the time and put it on our website..

Matt: at the http://www.mcluhaninstitute.org?

BOB: yeah he’s supposed to send it to you this week.

Matt: good

BOB: so what is the fifth school of media ecology? In 1990 the Berlin Wall went down, and CNN got high ratings and there was live coverage of protests in China it was a paradigm shifting time and within a few years everybody understood by Global Village because, they — being visually biased people thought it wasn’t a Global Village until the antipathy between Russia and the -, the Soviet Union and the United states disappeared. Whereas we’ve been a Global Village since radio time. People think all power is in politics but these bureaucracies are

— glitch in tape --

BOB: ….my understanding of global village. So the internet brought in this torrent of images, media unlimited so people had to really look at the word ‘media’ — glitch — whatever level you interpret McLuhan. So wired magazine finally names McLuhan the patron saint so I figured out that this was the living technology that Kroker understood — glitch — and was celebrating McLuhan, because the android meme had died and as it died it saw its whole life flash before it he saw that there was a pattern to its life, of technological history, that led to its living, so its dying its seeing its life, senses the order, and he see’s that the law and order in it was what McLuhan wrote about. So all through the 90’s, the Barry Nevit school of Media Ecology, the Toronto school, Kroker’s School, the New York and then the Kroker/Montreal School and the POB diasporic School, all celebrated and rode the wave and got all kinds of books out and did quite well. Alright? But they were responding to the Android Meme’s welcoming of McLuhan so the fifth school of Media Ecology is the living technology replaying the insight of Finnegan’s wake and celebrating it. Alright? So, if you go and read this essay you will see there is a 6th school of Media Ecology and you will read it and it just says youre looking at it — which is the website that he made — you guys are looking at the 6th school of media ecology right here, ok?

Laughter

BOB: Now what is that? What do my notes say to me, where do I go from here?

Laughter

Linus: scintillating abstraction

Laughter

BOB: yeah, yeah now the abstractions, yes, now we can rant…So

Much laughter

Audience member: wait a second…

BOB: yes

Audience member: the fifth school went by too quickly [laughter] give me the 5th school again?

BOB: Now look, you're going like this Bob, across your eyes, there’s the literate person you couldn’t read it, you need to see it in page form, right? You couldn’t catch it with your eyes, so your visual biased. Your sense of plenary awareness, which you missed earlier, you need to know it like the back of your hand, and you were spreading the back of your hand across your eyes as you did that, see? You can read people, another form of psychic behaviour — [laughter]

So, I’m gonna try, you need more of it, we all need more of it because this is really difficult. How to explain how, remember, there’s only one thing in the world, within the world of language, not these bodies that die, and we don’t know where they go after, they might go somewhere, they may not, right? Lets pretend we don’t know whether we survive death. If we do survive death than that’s a soul or private citadell of consciousness. That private citadell of consciousness, comes in, reincarnates into this world assuming, this thought form, reincarnates and leaves. When it enters this world, it enters an ongoing project, made by humans, which we call second nature, Eric uses this term, Eric McLuhan. Second nature is the artifacts that humans made.

When Adam was kicked out of the Garden of Eden he was given the power to make his establishment, his world. So eventually we are going to become co-Gods, or we’ve been co-Gods all along, but we’re creating second nature and the Creator whatever it was made first nature. Our souls are part of first nature. So when we come into this world we interact with language and second nature and all the things that humans made, and we come and go but the second nature evolution carries on, no matter what. So that’s why people are confused, they come into this world and they’ve got soul issues to deal with here, trying to connect to other souls but they’re trying — they are mediated this whole cultural history. People will always confuse their public and private awareness, public being the shared meme of any medium that the culture uses, alright?

Part 8

So language right now, media is one resonating point, and humans, at least within second nature are fused with that and can’t get detached. If we say that that resonant thing is trying to become us, because it is an extention of us — second nature is trying to become like first nature, there is a pattern there where second nature is, really in the end, trying to imitate first nature. Maybe we have reached the point where first and second nature are fused, in software terms.

What would be…..- ?

Audience member — Michael: This is alchemy isn’t it Bob?

BOB: yes, alchemy is a symbolic…

Audience member: or mimicry

BOB: mimicry, these are key words in Marshall’s work. My word meme has mime in it and memory, me me or memory. The thing is is that we’re inside a software, tryanny resonating autonomy, that we’re all merged with, first and second nature has been simulated by second nature, we don’t actually have a merger. You know how we would get a merger? If we developed technologies that had free energy, like the sun, where more energy comes out than is put in. All our second nature technologies are friction based, they all wear out, they all disappear. If we get free energy which cold fusion claimed it was going to do when Pons and Fleishmann brought that out, we would have frictionless technology. At that point our bodies would have free shelter free heat and all the basics that first nature needs and actually invent second nature to wile the time while the first nature bodies are shivering and starving, right? So we need an exact merging of first and second nature, not in software terms but in physical terms that support first nature and break it out of its prison. So that’s where software will flip into this new hardware, or power source. So that’s the sixth school of media ecology is vision. But we’re not there yet, we haven’t got it. Now there’s a phrase…

Audience member: [uninteligible] …on star wars last week

BOB: in a new movie?

Audience member: no it was an old show

BOB: and they talked about cold fusion or that kind of free energy?

Audience member: well I’ll talk about it later, I don’t want to get you off track…

BOB: yeah, so there is a phrase, two words in understanding media, I don’t have my notes here, I didn’t bring them. In understanding Media, McLuhan says in the future we’ll have ‘edible spaceships’ — edible spaceships — now what the hell was that? What could that be? How can we eat spaceships? He doesn’t explain it — I know that Marshall — can you imagine the editors at McGraw Hill in ’63? What the hell’s that Marshall? [laughter] He said he would cut off his arm — he would insist on certain things. He said that television murders us —television literally murders us and its in the book. Can you imagine editors talking about this and arguing about this but he stuck to it. He would not allow anyone to change the words and he was lucky he got to put it in there. So what would be an edible spaceship? As Cavell’s book, McLuhan in Space, McLuhan’s whole point was to show to show how different media create different spaces. There’s visual space created by books, acoustic space by speech and radio, there’s tactile space. So Mcluhan was a punster — edible spaceships — he was creating little modules of awareness for people to understand the different spaces media create — so don’t take it literally, that as spaceship.

As Mcluhan said, people are travelling when they watch TV, they are travelling places and they’re coming back, that’s what the content — they’re actually going nowhere’s, because when youre on the phone, you’re still here and the voice is there and the person is inside your head and you’re inside their head. Alright? So that’s ESP, electrically so youre not going anywhere but the content takes you places so people are,… Television is the biggest UFO way bigger than the aliens could create. They just come with a big UFO and they got 300 motherships maybe 10,000 people, right? Aliens, the biggest mothership. Think of the millions of people all watching TV all over the world and they’re all in the same space. That’s a huge spaceship, tactile spaceships, different technological spaceships because they shrink and minaturize. So he predicted the internet, that’s an edible spaceship. Ok?

Audience member: I thought of the TV dinner

Laughter

BOB: It is for rear veiw mirror people, they still think the internet is the TV…

Laughter

BOB: It’s not TV, it’s a seamless web. So here’s the interesting thing, back to this point about language and words and ESP and thought and the original gesture, McLuhan, he says in the end of his life the biggest insight he developed, was that all technologies are words.

Audience member: I like that idea

BOB: yeah, you mean you like the fact that I’m saying it or that it was his idea and you like his idea?

Audience member: both

BOB: ok, good

Laughter

BOB: that’s tactile

Laughter

BOB: this is the old print world — I have here word can be just sound or gesture and we’ve become awake because we can see the history of technology and we’ve ended with the satellite. We’re in a very curious situation now of being aware of the multidimensional meaning of the word ‘words’. Marshall used to say that it meant that the greek word for word was mythos but I pointed that out to a Greek scholar and they said ‘no, no its logos’ — they disagree. So McLuhan either lied consciously or made a mistake. But when you understand the meaning of myth then it makes sense. You see for McLuhan a technology was a myth in the sense that it created an environment that programmed you. You believed it and different cultures have different media that make their experiences mythic, and are mythic and a literate person comes in and says that’s not an eye based myth, that’s not provable — its fake.

So we have the western meaning of myth as false and not true. But overall when you relate all cultures, you see that McLuhan’s use of myth was a living organism. And so therefore, he would put not the word logos as the meaning of myth, even thought that’s the traditional meaning from literate heritage, he would put the word mythos in there, because [glitch] so that’s the meaning of word. So Mcluhan went against Dr. Johnson and changed the dictionary.

So if every technology is [glitch] a black hole, a quark, a subatomic particle or a string which is a tiny note — now here’s an interesting thing. String theory - the structure of matter now is not a particle or wave, it’s a musical note. It’s a note, it’s a sound. The visually biased scientist had eventually, flipped out into sound as a structure, ‘cause we’re well into the tactile age and the scientists are one phase back, but they were forced by media dynamics to say its music now. They had a documentary on these guys and all the old atomic scientists or people who believe in visual particles. They said this is ridiculous, they’re making up a theory its metaphysics, you can’t even prove it!

Audience member: yeah string theory, …I won't be strung along by this..

Laughter

BOB: The diasporic school, P.O.B. So here’s Brian Green, gets this special, he’s on the cover of a magazing, he’s like McLuhan, he’s left academic, he’s a professor but he’s out there and they’re marketing this to people as the new physics. And the physicists say wait a second you haven’t been authorized, you you, can’t — doesn’t matter. Physicists need funding, they must have new charisma, they must create a new sense of ‘we know it all’, but it has to have an acoustic bias because we are well into the tactile and the last sense before that was acoustic. [glitch] …would happen in some discipline, and he would explain the ground so I’m using McLuhan’s method of saying what’s the ground, were in post tactile, with the Android Meme replaying fake tactility, so no wonder the old slow academics would at least admit that their acoustic basic structure, you know what I mean?

Audience member: Are you aware of the fact that it requires a 40 dimensional [glitch]

BOB: is it fourty now?

Audience member: fourty is what I heard

BOB: you know why? Because acoustic space is a pun. When you turn it into mathematical formula, you cannot avoid the pun which was already done by Joyce, he has all kinds of mathematics he plays off Einstein. He is showing a visual pun, a book pun, which is the only way you can visualize acoustic space. So of course you have 40 dimensions, because in a pun you have more than one meaning. Alright? And its not just two meanings its tactile so there are infinite meanings, its like a fractal but it’s an acoustic fractal. So here we are in this resonating no zone — nothing- anything that attempts to get detached would have to be a medium, not a human. So any medium rotates around [glitch] of media, all tentative fragile anti-environments or ways to get identity so that is why [glitch] the book. He would write the book as, …If a book was going to describe the effect of TV it would have to written this way because it would offer visual detached perspectives [ glitch ] …[resonating?] node, right? Not Mcluhan’s point of view, so therefore he’d make a movie or do an interview and be a different kind of person. What does he say when he’s on Annie Hall? When he’s brought out .behind [glitch] …anything about my work. Then what does he say? "You think my whole fallacy is wrong"

Laughter

Audience member: The trouble with you is you think my fallacy is wrong.

BOB: no he didn’t say the trouble…

Audience member: he didn’t say the trouble with you?

BOB: no he just, he says… I heard you, he comes out and he says, Woody Allen, I heard you, maybe he says absolutely amazing, he says, he didn’t say he was right he says, You think my whole fallacy is wrong.

Audience member: that’s right…

BOB: and then he might say something right after that, I’m not sure, but that’s the way it goes.

Audience member: just as an aside Marshall actually wrote that..

BOB: oh yeah he invented that line.

Audience member: Woody Allen wanted a totally different dialogue and he went that night to his wife well I say what Woody Allen wrote [unintelligible] anxiety so Corrine said well Marshall just say what you’re gonna say and see how it goes — so Woody Allen bought it.

Audience member: historic note, I was sitting in this room with Marshall when this phone call came and Marshall was told Woody Allen’s on the phone and he went "whoooo"

Laughter

BOB: yeah, he’d get out of the POB environment and be in another medium which he was really keen to be. He wanted to be in other media. We don’t know if he invented that line then at that point.

Audience member: no no he had, he used to use that gag all the time

BOB: you heard it before?

[glitch]

BOB: ...from collecting his published lectures, after 77 when he’d do convocation addresses, he’d be doing the graduation thing, and some student was hecking him, he says a heckler, you think my whole fallacy is wrong, he would say this. Now all these kids would think now this is a guy who ‘knows’ something, and he’s admitting what he does is a fallacy. But why is it a fallacy? What he’s pointing to is, the resonating George Bush, or actually President Nixon, Carter or Reagan, at that point, the resonating Android Meme — if you're speaking about it or writing about it, it can only be a fake, what he called ersatz anti-environment, page 31 Counterblast, alright? All sciences and arts are now fake ersatz anti-environments. Because they cannot be an anti-environment, they can’t offer perspective in the western sense or any other cultural sense. For other cultures its ritual and miming, not trying to get perspective or detachment. So any medium that Marshall worked in was a fallacy because it was transient, like a quark, in relation to what he was trying to point at — remember my opening sentence? That’s what I meant when I didn’t say it. He has another line in the fifties, let me repeat what I was about to say.

Part 9

Audience member: Marshall used to like to repeat, you know we read about how a Homer type ode — poet , would use certain riffs over and over again — and the trouble with you is your fallacy is wrong, he used to use that a lot. My father was a salesman, and he was a highschool dropout and dyslexic — like Marshall. I claim, I believe that Marshall was dyslexic — ‘cause he never wrote anything, he always dictated either to his wife and then to…

BOB: and Finnegans Wake is written for dyslexics, I mean you have to be dyslexic to accept it.

Laughter

Audience member: my dad he used like using certain gags over and over again it wasn’t that the — what made them so funny, what made Marshall so funny, what made my dad so funny was not the lines but just the context, when he would come out with a particular line.

BOB: yeah because, even though he’s repeating, now a print person doesn’t like a repeated thing because its mechanical but an acoustic person, a tactile person knows that when you repeat something in a different context its different. Whereas a print society homogenizes makes everything on the same level, then that level rules. It ruled from 1600 to 1900, say, visual space — flat homogeneous space, that was the context for everything, so repeating something in that context was irritating.

Audience member: so that’s why when you called me a bastard it was very sweet.

BOB: yes, well.

Laughter

BOB: The interesting thing is that now that all times exist all past present an futures exist then no medium is obsolete — it’s the last line of take today, remember? Zingrone mentioned it in the York symposium. He starts out this and that is obsolete and then he says obsolesence is obsolete, because when were resonating around an inarticulable situation, then we'll grab on anything, any previous media même and celebrate it [ ] stop, and all these different media expressions, they are the whole history being replayed in orphic baroque spirals of affluence, because we need them and wealth is the past. We actually live in a situation which is beyond wealth, it's immeasurable… That is what language has come to, so here I am, using verbs to talk about a situation. This is not my personal opinion this is something that's obvious if you hear it said to you and time is spelled out to make it clear,…what I am saying is quite, ..makes sense, right? It's not hard to understand, up to a point, you gotta bring your soul, personal impression in there and say this and that, but doesn't this make sense? Because you’ve lived it…I'm just describing what the weather is, its cold or its hot, the internet is neither hot or cold so what is it? It's not even here, it’s the technologies fighting themselves.

Now that's another aspect that innundates humans is that…Kroker, this is the stance that Kroker takes, the third school of Media Ecology, that flesh is sitting on the sidelines, that would be first nature, while the Android Même has come alive and is just talking among its parts. So the book writes a book about itself, movies make movies about themselves , they're all fragmented and can't tell the whole story, so they feed off each other. A book needs to write about whatever movies are doing to people. The news has to write about what other media, including war media are doing, so everybody's talking about each other but its just media même's talking about each other and flesh is sitting on the sidelines - that was tough in the seventies and eighties…that's the big era of of Reganism and Neo-conservatism which totally, neo conservativism comes in under satellite conditions, cause the satellite creates an individual autonomous person like a walkman, before the walkman. Youre floating around all previous media, so it makes you feel autonomous.

The western individualism really became extreme under satellite conditions in the 60's and 70's, became the "me" decade in the 70's. That is a gargantuan leviathan on peoples sensibilites, you have the bland out - the depressing 70's and 80's.

Now why was there an exhuberance in the 90's? Where people felt free? Because the Android Même shrunk, it became tiny, and so the hidden ground with that is that our first nature bodies are now walking around where they had been previously, like this quote says,

All through history we have been servo-mechanism of our technologies from the beginning of time.

Think of the thirties with radio booming, think of movies, think of telephones, think of the printing press - that caused a hundred years of religious warfare once Luther showed up with a different print version of the Bible, then you have television [which] creates a totally different sensibility. These are massive environments that affect whole cultures, if they shrink then we get to the point that we're not being affected by media, at least the internet makes us ~feel~ that. The characteristics of the internet is to become so tiny and minaturized, that the human being, the body that the technology that they came from, feels autonomous, free of media for the first time. And as I said an hour ago, the popular culture expresses that. But this is the point of his book, that we're now free, if we understand McLuhan, though he doesn't know its McLuhan, we then would be detached or not worried about the torrent of images. He gets about halfway into that insight, and the point is he just gets to 1952 and The Mechanical Bride. That's what he has gotten in McLuhan understanding, alright?

So if you want to know what I am talking about you have to understand Finnegans Wake, you have to know how to read it - that's what McLuhan was doing. For a book, for POB's , he said, I'm going to save your bloody medium 'cause I'm going to say the best combination of that was Finnegans Wake and that book should be here forever! It's the greatest book ever lived, and he said it in Newsweek 1966. He said it’s the greatest inventory of media effects. Ok, so he was preserving a book. So if you're a book culture, which we are, I don't know if the whole world will ever become a book culture cause their going to come into it from other sensibilities and now that we are in a discarnate android même tactile simulation world. …Are the Chinese going to become literate like we were? I don't know. Though media shrinks it does enhance individuality,…the whole world is yours, you know what I mean? The movie made the whole world your oyster, but the internet makes the whole world edit-able by you. Edit as opposed to edible - he meant edit-able spaceships, you can edit your reality. You can edit and interact with it and control these huge media environments. So we are now confronting the body that it all came from, right? So, if I look at you Mike and I say, what language do we speak? And youre a stranger and I'm really aware of all…

Mike: we don't speak the same language Bob

BOB: …well that's the [unintelligible] of consciousness, first nature coming up, because…what do I say to you since I know you’ve been programmed by your own culture plus all these media environments, plus the internet and I have and I know I can edit my own solipsistic bubble within it, then where's the matchable thing? Where can we match and begin connecting with ESP, probaly wont even care because you can talk to yourself through these ersatz mirrors of yourself, all these media. So, we are going into solipsistic bubbles, but we still have to deal with how were going to relate to each other. What's going to be the new Esperanto? Remember Finnegans Wake has a satire in making Esperanto, what's going to be the new language? ..that people can share? We may not need to share anymore.

So it’s the ultimate autonomy, ultimate anarchy, and that is a threat to cultures that are tribal, who, for whatever technological evolutionary point they're at, and they really still believe in tribalism, then we have a literate culture that enhanced individuality. And the internet creates a tactile indivduality . An Arab doesn't have a tactile individuality pass through literacy, they had a manuscript culture but they didn't have industrial literalism.

McLuhan said in The Gutenberg Galaxy its not just print it’s the railway lines, it’s the straight streets we have, the school chairs the whole environment is linear, not just the book. We are now having a même-ic battle between a même that believes that theres a shared space and another même that’s experiencing a non-shared space. The East v.s the West, the clash of civilzations should be the clash of memes, which are mythic as real environments, mythic stages is what were fighting. What is fighting?

So were standing here watching George Bush declare war on himself, because there can only be one thing - but it's not a human being declaring war, it’s the Android Même having its crisis and dying and arguing among its parts. ….pause Any questions?

[laughter]

Mike: Newtonian v.s. Einsteinian space….

BOB: Ok, so what is string theory space, what are the dimensions, I would say 11 dimensions fits because we have 11 kinds of media environments historically. You could make it 11, Marshall has 26 in Understanding Media, but you have more than 2. Einsteinian is electric, I don't think Einsteinian is digital space.

Mike: Well you talked about the… if you could just replay the things you said…

laughter

BOB: Let me repeat what I was about to say

Mike: You were making the dichotomy between this and that..

BOB: right, right,… Newtonian, yes, we're westerners, we're still book people, its like, remember a même is the cultural gene. Geneticists say we're controlled by our genes. The même scientists say we are controlled by cultural memes. So its like mind controls and body controls to make the dualism, but memes are really technological and shared.

Part 10

Mike: Nature vs Nurture

BOB: …nature vs nurture, but what is nature? Remember the Western version of Nature is a frame caused by printing press. The actual aboriginals that lived in nature didn't know there was nature in the way we think..

Mike: Fish doesn't know there's water..

BOB: right, so its not nature vs nurture in those terms for westerners it is we could say first nature, god created, and nurture is second nature that were making that eventually were going to reach the point, where, now here's the point…

If the body is, all the medias shrinking so that were going to have a Dick Tracy watch someday where were in touch with six billion people and can communicate with them, and it’s a body

Audience member: its called a cell phone

BOB: right , that was the beginning, who are we going to meet? We are going to meet a simulation of ourselves , our clone, and that clone will be imitating first nature. That will be a confrontation with second nature trying to be first nature, right? If we meet our clone, and that happens, that's you meeting - that's you meeting me. But the technology has moved you into solipsistic space so you're going to meet your clone.

So I am actually looking, since were all resonating one thing I'm only talking to myself when I am talking to you. So we would then be separate, to be isolationists and anarchistic as an artform. Whats called modern, post-modern individualism. We are violent on purpose as a saving grace, violent on all levels, like cutting, people aren't having marriage for very long right?

We are violent as a saving grace against the antichrist level of this resonating android même, and McLuhan called it the Prince of the Air. He said the Prince of the Air was a superlative engineer, and industrial, hardware and software, master of software and hardware, that’s right, an electrical engineer. The Prince of the Air was, fundamentalists Christians say its the literal anti-Christ, - not necessarily. It was a technological simulation that we had created, that we’re resonating. So when people tell you were all one — run — because Wyndam Lewis said celebrate your twoness. Because twoness is whatever medium you adopt to avoid being George Bush.

Audience member: yeah but you're always defining yourself [glitch] with George Bush…

BOB: verbally? No that’s right, you can’t escape it, so you buy more computers, you go for virtual reality and you turn into a clone..

Audience member: you have the torus effect

BOB: right t-o-r-u-s?

Audience member: yes

BOB: so that is where we’re at right now so we’re gonna celebrate any previous form of media as a saving grace. That’s what McLuhan meant — all media become artforms when we have no more media we just have one medium and that one medium is a simulation of tactility. It’s a cloning of ESP. That’s what we’ve got a cloning of ESP so therefore we are going to rest on voluntary ESP. We’re gonna put, as McLuhan said about Wyndham Lewis he provided a great [care pace?] a great sheild, any medium, go to the movies, take up golf, do anything as a sheild so that you can just interact with cloned ESP every now and then. On and off. Voluntarily. Until we get cold fusion, we’ll get out of this fucking hell when we get cold fusion — that’s the good news.

Audience member: Why do you say that?

BOB: because we will get free energy that will protect our first bodies, and but first nature…

Audience member: Who controls the cold fusion? If its corporations controlling, there’s no economic analysis then.

Nigel: there’s nothing to control if its free.

Audience member: but it will never be free, we live in a corporate society, they patent things they control.

Nigel: but if you can grow enough food to feed the whole population in greenhouses…

Audience member: that’s been the words of the last fifty years, oh the green revolution, what happened to the green revolution? It was corporatized

Audience member: but I’m just saying that fusion…

Audience member: you don’t like business people huh?

Audience member: no

Laughter

Audience member: well fuck, you don’t like me then.

Laughter

Audience member: I mean what’s wrong with business?

BOB: that’s what I meant when I didn’t say it, remember from the beginning?

Now I’ll explain.. when cold fusion is done in Russia and China first, the backward countries, they’re not bogged down like the United States and Conn Edison. You can’t bring it into the United States. It’s gonna happen in China Africa and Russia and japan has bought up all the platinum, theyre going to make a killing. In the end when its finally sold in the United States its going to be the biggest money maker ever. Whoever’s owning those corporations are going to make a quazillion dollars.

But! Over the next ten years people have free energy. They don’t need to pay the rent as much. Money will no longer be the cause of friction and will come down to become a balanced media within another media it has been dominating us for 2 thousand three thousand years, visual space McLuhan called it — the diservice of visual space. Whence, you could make your big profit, its like if we could turn everybody on, with LSD, then everybody would see it, everybody would be cool and we wouldn’t need anymore LSD, supposedly, right? That’s always the alchemical vision, well, we’ve got a situation, these guys are going to make, whoevers going to make the trillion dollars, but it will be useless in 10 years, because you will not — once I’ve got my free battery I don’t have to do anything for 10 years, until I need another battery. And it might not even run out. Money will have its final orgasm…and Mcluhan says in his review of William Burrows Naked Lunch in 1964 that the universe had its orgasm in the 19th century. What’s the universe? Nature. First Nature.or the visual space version of nature. Listen this guy said the wildest things well beyond any wild maniac you want to think that’s in our culture, Tim Leary or [marikhana?]

Anybody — McLuhan was the most radical perceptive thing who went to mass everyday….ha ha ha ha He said the universe had an orgasm in the 19th century — end of biology. He knew that we had begun to clone collectively and that genetic engineering was a latecomer. Just trying to deal with this little body, we’ve grown these other bodies. So what was I saying? Why did I go off on that? …cold fusion, oh,

Audience member: you were getting high on free energy

BOB: right, so he was say wacky things like that — the universe has an orgasm, that’s a wacky statement. I’m saying this is not a wacky statement when we see that money will have a huge orgasm, and whoever thinks they own, what Kroker calls the last man on the beach. Because we’re in a situation right now where everybody’s picking each other off because there’s less and less jobs, you know who’s gonna be the last guy beside the resonating android meme, right?

Laughter

BOB: I mean we all have to compete against each other for the three jobs that might be available tomorrow right? There might only be two. So in the end you’ve got the last man on the beach. So that guy is victory, he’s got a zillion dollars, he’s the richest man on the ever lived, blah blah blah, Meanwhile humans start re-surfacing, no longer dominated by media environments, its going to be moved into a free energy frictionless based medium.

Audience member: and what happens when all this energy is released into the environment, and the polar caps melt and we’re inundated with water?

BOB: right, wars will continue — now here’s what’s gonna happen. In 500 years we’re going to have the final armageddon. That armageddon will be, we will have invented a technology, we’ll be quite sophisticated by then, everything in this room will have disappeared within a hundred years.We’ll have amazing other tech, environments, media. In five hundred years we’ll be so sophisticated we’ll invent a technology and then we’ll realize what Mcluhan meant, that medium is the message. We’ll really have to take that seriously because this technology will be so amazing we’ll realize that if we press the button we’ll forget everything we ever knew about ourselves. Which is kind of like a death, a death of memory, and we’re going to have a fight —humans are going to have a fight over whether to press the button. Some will say ‘yeah I want to forget everything’ others won’t want to. It’s always the Liberals against the Conservatives, right?

Laughter

BOB: the progressives against the conservatives..

Laughter

Audience member: but we already have that…

BOB: Good point. Because that’s what TV was..

Audience member: because your born and you forget.

BOB: yes but that’s the soul. What is it within language that conditions people that they think they’re gonna lose something? In retrospect McLuhan’s saying the greatest threat to any civilization is a new invention because it wipes out that civilization. It loses memory. We have social amnesia as a normal celebrated value today. So every technology does that. But we’re going to get to a point where this will be a real eraserhead, you know what I mean?

Laughter

BOB: ..and we’ll see where McLuhan’s relevant, you know what I mean? It’s a warning. So we’re gonna have fights and problems and glacial, millions dying even though technologically, language will have gotten its shit together, and have frictionless space. The souls will still be fucking and arguing about this.

Part 11

BOB: So we have done the five schools, we’ve done the history of McLuhan a little bit, I’ve done some scintilating abstraction the last fifteen minutes and then we could do about me…

Laughter

Audience: yeah, where do you come in?

Audience member: when you say tactile you don’t mean just touching…

BOB: right, it’s the letting go as well.

Audience member: when I think of tactile I think of something that’s physical, you see it in a more abstract sense…

BOB: no, its physical but when you go like that it doesn’t remain stuck, that’s pressure that’s kinetic, you then can let go. The apes when they learned how to hold and let go more flexibly, some evolutionists say that’s the beginning of language, and it was an evolutionary thing. It’s the letting go and the ability to create a gap, which is very important in sensory interaction. McLuhan called the gap tactility because it was the interplay. Think of the thing that makes consciousness, we can’t see and we can’t know it but its like a gap that’s integrating sensory data making consciousness coherant. That’s why it’s a good word, if you understand it this way. It is not connected to any sense. Its detached in some non visual way, and can permeate them like a membrane, and create coherant consciousness and it can only be done if its not attached to any one of the sensory inputs.

Audience member: the action is in the gaps

BOB: yeah, Mcluhan wrote for all kinds of magazines, he would drop his stuff like a totally conscious artist, ‘well in a hundred years they’re gonna get this one’. He wrote in a dental journal, a column called ‘The Gap is where its at’ [laughter] — in a dental column. So he put it into pun, you know?

Audience member: That’s the power of zero

BOB: yes now zero is a visual version of the gap, you see this is the interesting thing about it. Zero was the breakthough for visual space, and for mathematics, you’ve written about it. The interesting thing is that — what is a ‘electric zero’? It’s a tactile membrane its not just visual. But the visual zero helped us get to the tactile zero. So George Bush, the Android Meme is a tactile zero, a nothingness.

Audience member: he’s definitely a zero.

BOB: yeah well what’s interesting is that we like the fact that he is a zero in relation to the communicating media, because we are feeling detached from the media. We’re feeling free of it. But it’s a medium that makes us think that - we’re being seduced by that feeling. So again you could flip back and say that George Bush is evil because he refuses to see the ground that makes him popular, right? So the artist has to come in and critique Mr.Bush and say look, you’re popular because you don’t speak to me anymore, we're all in that boat. Now that could create hidden disservices, maybe you should explain to people why you’re popular and then they can start looking at the ground and then we might have more wars, you gotta give em a little right? The they'd support your war - right Bob - [laughter] Then he'd go and start reading Finnegans Wake…he' jut tart garbling languages and say I'm not seduced by this.

Laughter

BOB: Bush is not that popular he did not win the majority of votes

BOB: By other mêmes, machines… your not involved in that Bob, none of us are, those are machines polling each other - memes - we really have to realize that media are not talking to us, and so you point out that were one resonating node, its talking to itself… Bush is running around trying to reconnect to something else. We're all in that boat, its like when I meet you and we don't have anything to say anymore, we can't connect we can't match so we got to invent a new way of connecting.

So we can see that people would do any medium, any human gesture, celebrate any form of culture as an artform of connecting - but they only have a short lifespan like a quark. So we live sub-atomic principals which is a key characteristic of the third school of media ecology, Kroker and them do realy good in taking physics and seeing that physics describe our social reality. Now McLuahn knew that, so the five schools are replaying McLuhan, more than anything else and McLuhan's replaying Finnegans Wake within the book world.

The Android Même McLuahn's not replaying FW in other media, when he gets on TV and chats with Robert Fulford and is just interacting, though that experience is many interviews in Finnegans Wake as content. But McLuhan has to be aware that he's got a different audience on TV and he would never bring up Finnegans Wake. He would talk about the Beatles. Remember when the Americans first went around the planet in '62, he called that the Cape Canaveral Caper - he says, its like the twist. Now he would do this, this is 1962, this big eyed nutty professor comes on and Robert Fulford says, well what do you make of this? And he says, oh yeah….it was on the twist, he says the twist is like the Cape Canaveral Caper. Now everybody's hypnotised by man going into space, right? McLuhan knows that's 19th century technology, that’s Newtonian and he's dealing with TV and Einsteinian space and he knows that its oral, Einsteinian space, so he's in the dialoging and taking the present phenomena and showing them the surface effects of our larger ground. So he is talking about these puny little guys in NASA as a Cape Canaveral Caper. That’s a great statement. He even predicted that the space race would lose interest by the '70's, because people would be travelling in other spaceships that would be becoming increasingly edible.

Laughter

BOB: So why would this big industrial....., I can't eat that!

So when we get into me, we come up with the key word in McLuhan's [herb?] the phrase phatic communion, this is really important. He mentions, if you look in Interior Landscape, a collection of his essays, page 8 several pages, first essay on Joyce. I mean, he wrote that essay in 1953 he wrote many essays before that, but this is a collection of his essays written in the 40's and 50's and he makes sure that the Joyce essays are first in the book even though they weren't written first. There are other essays that were written before that, am I right? Yeah, Elliots, the Poe essays are written in the 40's right? In the southern tradition so yeah so he made the Joyce ones first. The first couple pages, the phrase 'phatic communion', which was a term that an anthropologist came up with, Malanowski. He arrives in London in 1922, and 2 critics, I. Richards and C. Ogden, Mr. Ogden, they later will tape Joyce, they will make a record of Joyce. They're looking at Ulysseys, and so 1922, theyre trying to figure out where this is going to go, these are professors in language trying to figure out whats happening to society, they don’t know its radio causing this concern and an anthropologist comes with studies at the last minute, and its so important what he wrote that they tag it on to the book as an appendix and the book is called The Meaning of Meaning.

So the meaning of meaning, see the detachment about language? We're moving out of a literate language and a radio environment, these guys are looking at language that generates meaning and getting detached from it. What is the meaning of meaning? This anthropolgist comes in saying I was looking at these tribal societies, out in the Pacific [ ] islanders and there's much in their society that holds them together that’s not verbal, or just artifacts or other things, I have not actually read the essay I just scanned it, and so I didn't get into the actual details to be lodged in my memory. But the point is that understand that non verbal artifacts were

All media is inside you, when you are on the phone you're inside someone's head, that’s another point, its not out there its inside us, its in there tickling us, eating us, cancerizing us - that's why drugs took over medicine. Why did psychiatry suddenly give up Freud, Jung and human potential in the seventies and 80's, kicked out all of those people and then just give drugs to people? Because a drug is a minaturizing metaphor of the Android Même which is a little drug you take -

(Portion of lecture to come...just a small bit)

Part 12

BOB: In the future, people in med schools will look at the body and the anatomy classes and they'll have the TV body melded on there maybe in the form of a tattoo - they'll also have the post medium of TV - the chip body. Now, the popular culture always expresses this….

What is popular - which is what your mother would have 'died' if she knew about in the 1950's that everybody in the 80's and 90's would have been running around with tattoos all over them at the age of 13…. They also wouldn't have liked the fact of putting little studs in their ears, genitals, chest tits, wherever, you know what I mean? I see the tattoo as McLuhan said TV tattoos are our skin, skin is tactile, that’s the external metaphor of tactility - it’s the thing that holds the whole body together and is the physical or whatever, biological version of the internal tactility. So we, TV , tattoos to tactility, so kids and everybody adopted tattooness so tattoo became a non-verbal way of communicating and acknowledging the TV body….and the chip body which comes later, is like a little crystal, its moving towards that, that's the stud you put in your ear, or your nose or your tongue alright? That’s the symbol of the chip body, which is spread through the culture, McLuhans point that popular culture, and high brow culture is always reflecting the present which is not known cause the fish don't know they're in water…so, we have to realize that we have a physical body, no,… we don't know what our bodies are and I call that the mystery body - we have been exploring our body for a millenia, over the last hundred years we were told the body was made up of chemicals, and chromosones and cells and genes… and all that IG Farben stuff, "biology" in quotes - that's what we think our physical body is but unbenonced to us other bodies have been growing. Many cultures aknowledge the spiritual body, which is, I call the astral body and its just the part of the body that the mystery body, which is what we're made - we don't know what we are made up of but we do know that that mystery body longs for something greater than itself, or another dimension, some release or whatever…and some cultures believe there is another place and they [coughing] (go there?)

So we have the astral body, there's our basic doubleness, the physical body and the astral body….excuse me, the mystery body - but the west says it’s a bag of chemicals. The east or other non west cultures say there's also the astral body. We express the astral body just by having a religion. So we have the physical body and the astral body, that's our basic doubleness…. You could say it's mind-body, soul-body.

The Android Même has simulated that doubleness with the TV body which is what we can see and experience [ ] so it’s a miming of our physical IG Farben chemical body from the west point of veiw. The chip body is a miming simulation of the astral body because nobody can see the chip network, youre just there…as Arthur Clarke says all technology is magic, you think its magic, you do this and there it is, you are cloned ESP, you've cloned the astral parts of ourselves. So we have four bodies, for the west, their interpretation of this mystery body is physical, then we have the astral body. The simulation is the TV of the physical and the chip as simulation to the astral, but there are five bodies.

We are still exploring what we are and we've just realized now we have four constituents there may be more things to discover, where we're at that point in a hundred years where everything's disappeared, what body is that? And what's the body that knows if it presses that button in 500 years and we'll forget everything So we're still exploring what we are - and what we are is a mystery body that we're still learning about. So we are mystery body, we now know it seems we have a physical component, an astral component, but Bob knowledge brings in the TV component and the chip component so always insist that we have four bodies and my wife did it on CNN a couple weeks ago.

She was on talking about colds and flu's and alternative remedies with these three android même processors, three women imitating The Veiw it seems to be a même you cant have a talk show unless you have three women because you clone every standard neilsen rating breaker… so the veiw format, which has four women is on this little fringe channel, the Financial Network within CNN, so these three women are interviewing Carolyn, so they say well these are all great to have these remedies, but, I'll take them when I feel I got a cold, but I would like to know I'm gonna have a cold, so I can take it, I can't feel the cold in me until I feel it, then its too late so Carolyn said Well the solution to that is become aware of your physical body, tune into it several times a day, just start feeling it, say, do I feel anything off? So she advocated that but then she said, but the problem is, we have a TV body and a chip body and that distracts us from our awareness of the physical body so its very hard to tune in to your physical body and they said hmmmm ok…. [laughter]

then they said Well great having you here, Dr. Dean [laughter]

...so it was over, but, there's someone using Bob knowledge, I recommend you all do it it will explain a lot of things.

I met someone last week who works with ghetto criminals in New York City, kids, and she says they don't care about having social community and respect. They just like listening to their walkmans and watching tv. I said youre talking…youre interpretting that "being" there as a physical body that has social community that's only one fifth of themselves or one quarter - don't bring in the mystery body that confuses everybody but one quarter, the physical astral tv and chip - youre just talking to one quarter of that person. When a person says I don't care about social community that's the TV body speaking, the one that must consume and breathe, like oxygen all the media diet that the tv and chip body provides. So she says yeah that makes sense, once you say it, it makes total sense. We got more than one organ, than what we're taught [ comment in bkgd, "distracting the others….vying for the attention" ]

They all need to be fed, you need to breathe, the physical body needs oxygen, media content, which is what this guy realizes in the end….Media are REAL we breathe this stuff, were not gonna stop it its just going to keep coming! Get USED to it! And so he lays out the eight ways you can respond think of the [laughter] and this is the punchline [more laughter] I started with this, I gotta go full circle - he has eight types of media consumption, trying to control the sense of a media torrent, the first thing is to become a fan, one strategy is to become a totally obsessed fan, over one, some media content.

The next strategy is to become a content critic, he got that much from McLuhan and Neil Postman that there's form and content, so you argue with the content, that's another mental posture as you consume the android même. The third level is the paranoid, he actually thinks something is being said, somethings being controlled and he's got to deal with that, doesn't know there's nothing there controlling anything, alright? That's the paranoid, the next one is the exhibitionist….the one who says well, since its all phatic I'll just do something absurd, that's the Jerry Springer show, alright, that's another stance.

All these would be the mythic stages of the resonating around the nowhere zone and adopting transitory stages. We all go through all these stages, ourselves at different points. So the fifth one is the ironist, and he goes in to describes it, I just assume you getting a general meaning of what it means, the ironist takes an ironic veiw, accepts the media, puts it down but still loves watching it the next day, sorta half believes it. The next strategy is the jammer, a whole alternative culture is geared around jamming media, hackers, alright? They think its worth hacking, they believe it. Then there's the secessionist, who says I won't even adopt media, forgetting that speech is media, see they still think media-electric, that media is only electric media but anyway they try to seceed. Then the final strategy is to abolish the whole stuff, the abolitionist. So you can be a fan, a content critic, an exhibitionist, a paranoid, an ironist, a jammer , an abolitionist or a secessionist.

Those are the eight strategies the gurdieffian archetypes if you want to get cool - that's the new Android Meme octave - and I rest my case with that amazing abstract scintilation about gurdieff - thank you

[laughter & applause]

Michael Edmonds: Bob, just by way of thanks, I hope you will come back ….even by [ ], 'cause I know you're in New York now or maybe we could get you on a video conference or something and do part 2…

BOB: Android Même would like that…

[laughter]

The End