Andy Warhol's Art by Telephone

Excerpt from What Is an Andy Warhol:

What Is an Andy Warhol?

By Richard Dorment | The New York Review of Books

Andy Warhol

by Arthur C. Danto

Yale University Press, 162 pp., $24.00

Pop: The Genius of Andy Warhol

by Tony Scherman and David Dalton

Harper, 528 pp., $40.00 (to be published November 1)

I Sold Andy Warhol (Too Soon)

by Richard Polsky

Other Press, 268 pp., $23.95

TV Head

The eye was a broadcaster...

Trading Time in InterZone

Marshall McLuhan on the "social media expert"

Image via danielweir.esq

Inverted Commas: Marshall McLuhan

The Future of the Future is the Present

Shrugged

Watch money. Money is the barometer of a society's virtue. When you see that trading is done, not by consent but by compulsion, when you see that in order to produce, you need to obtain permission from men who produce nothing, when you see that money is flowing to those who deal not in goods but in favors, when you see that men get richer by graft and by pull than by work and your laws don't protect you against them, but protect them against you, when you see corruption being rewarded and honesty becoming a self-sacrifice, you may know that your society is doomed.

Excerpt from Atlas Shrugged, by Ayn Rand, 1957.

Of Other Spaces, Heterotopias

There might be a sort of mixed, joint experience, which would be the mirror. The mirror is, after all, a utopia, since it is a placeless place. In the mirror, I see myself there where I am not, in an unreal, virtual space that opens up behind the surface; I am over there, there where I am not, a sort of shadow that gives my own visibility to myself, that enables me to see myself there where I am absent: such is the utopia of the mirror.

The great obsession of the nineteenth century was, as we know, history: with its themes of development and of suspension, of crisis, and cycle, themes of the ever-accumulating past, with its great preponderance of dead men and the menacing glaciation of the world. The nineteenth century found its essential mythological resources in the second principle of thermaldynamics- The present epoch will perhaps be above all the epoch of space. We are in the epoch of simultaneity: we are in the epoch of juxtaposition, the epoch of the near and far, of the side-by-side, of the dispersed. We are at a moment. I believe, when our experience of the world is less that of a long life developing through time than that of a network that connects points and intersects with its own skein. One could perhaps say that certain ideological conflicts animating present-day polemics oppose the pious descendents of time and the determined inhabitants of space. Structuralism, or at least which is grouped under this slightly too general name, is the effort to establish, between elements that could have been connected on a temporal axis, an ensemble of relations that makes them appear as juxtaposed, set off against one another, implicated by each other-that makes them appear, in short, as a sort of configuration. Actually, structuralism does not entail denial of time; it does involve a certain manner of dealing with what we call time and what we call history. Yet it is necessary to notice that the space which today appears to form the horizon of our concerns, our theory, our systems, is not an innovation; space itself has a history in Western experience, and it is not possible to disregard the fatal intersection of time with space. One could say, by way of retracing this history of space very roughly, that in the Middle Ages there was a hierarchic ensemble of places: sacred places and profane plates: protected places and open, exposed places: urban places and rural places (all these concern the real life of men). In cosmological theory, there were the supercelestial places as opposed to the celestial, and the celestial place was in its turn opposed to the terrestrial place. There were places where things had been put because they had been violently displaced, and then on the contrary places where things found their natural ground and stability. It was this complete hierarchy, this opposition, this intersection of places that constituted what could very roughly be called medieval space: the space of emplacement. This space of emplacement was opened up by Galileo. For the real scandal of Galileo's work lay not so much in his discovery, or rediscovery, that the earth revolved around the sun, but in his constitution of an infinite, and infinitely open space. In such a space the place of the Middle Ages turned out to be dissolved. as it were; a thing's place was no longer anything but a point in its movement, just as the stability of a thing was only its movement indefinitely slowed down. In other words, starting with Galileo and the seventeenth century, extension was substituted for localization. Today the site has been substituted for extension which itself had replaced emplacement. The site is defined by relations of proximity between points or elements; formally, we can describe these relations as series, trees, or grids. Moreover, the importance of the site as a problem in contemporary technical work is well known: the storage of data or of the intermediate results of a calculation in the memory of a machine, the circulation of discrete elements with a random output (automobile traffic is a simple case, or indeed the sounds on a telephone line); the identification of marked or coded elements inside a set that may be randomly distributed, or may be arranged according to single or to multiple classifications. In a still more concrete manner, the problem of siting or placement arises for mankind in terms of demography. This problem of the human site or living space is not simply that of knowing whether there will be enough space for men in the world -a problem that is certainly quite important - but also that of knowing what relations of propinquity, what type of storage, circulation, marking, and classification of human elements should be adopted in a given situation in order to achieve a given end. Our epoch is one in which space takes for us the form of relations among sites. In any case I believe that the anxiety of our era has to do fundamentally with space, no doubt a great deal more than with time. Time probably appears to us only as one of the various distributive operations that are possible for the elements that are spread out in space. Now, despite all the techniques for appropriating space, despite the whole network of knowledge that enables us to delimit or to formalize it, contemporary space is perhaps still not entirely desanctified (apparently unlike time, it would seem, which was detached from the sacred in the nineteenth century). To be sure a certain theoretical desanctification of space (the one signaled by Galileo's work) has occurred, but we may still not have reached the point of a practical desanctification of space. And perhaps our life is still governed by a certain number of oppositions that remain inviolable, that our institutions and practices have not yet dared to break down. These are oppositions that we regard as simple givens: for example between private space and public space, between family space and social space, between cultural space and useful space, between the space of leisure and that of work. All these are still nurtured by the hidden presence of the sacred. Bachelard's monumental work and the descriptions of phenomenologists have taught us that we do not live in a homogeneous and empty space, but on the contrary in a space thoroughly imbued with quantities and perhaps thoroughly fantasmatic as well. The space of our primary perception, the space of our dreams and that of our passions hold within themselves qualities that seem intrinsic: there is a light, ethereal, transparent space, or again a dark, rough, encumbered space; a space from above, of summits, or on the contrary a space from below of mud; or again a space that can be flowing like sparkling water, or space that is fixed, congealed, like stone or crystal. Yet these analyses, while fundamental for reflection in our time, primarily concern internal space. I should like to speak now of external space. The space in which we live, which draws us out of ourselves, in which the erosion of our lives, our time and our history occurs, the space that claws and gnaws at us, is also, in itself, a heterogeneous space. In other words, we do not live in a kind of void, inside of which we could place individuals and things. We do not live inside a void that could be colored with diverse shades of light, we live inside a set of relations that delineates sites which are irreducible to one another and absolutely not superimposable on one another. Of course one might attempt to describe these different sites by looking for the set of relations by which a given site can be defined. For example, describing the set of relations that define the sites of transportation, streets, trains (a train is an extraordinary bundle of relations because it is something through which one goes, it is also something by means of which one can go from one point to another, and then it is also something that goes by). One could describe, via the cluster of relations that allows them to be defined, the sites of temporary relaxation -cafes, cinemas, beaches. Likewise one could describe, via its network of relations, the closed or semi-closed sites of rest - the house, the bedroom, the bed, el cetera. But among all these sites, I am interested in certain ones that have the curious property of being in relation with all the other sites, but in such a way as to suspect, neutralize, or invent the set of relations that they happen to designate, mirror, or reflect. These spaces, as it were, which are linked with all the others, which however contradict all the other sites, are of two main types. » HETEROTOPIAS « First there are the utopias. Utopias are sites with no real place. They are sites that have a general relation of direct or inverted analogy with the real space of Society. They present society itself in a perfected form, or else society turned upside down, but in any case these utopias are fundamentally unreal spaces. There are also, probably in every culture, in every civilization, real places - places that do exist and that are formed in the very founding of society - which are something like counter-sites, a kind of effectively enacted utopia in which the real sites, all the other real sites that can be found within the culture, are simultaneously represented, contested, and inverted. Places of this kind are outside of all places, even though it may be possible to indicate their location in reality. Because these places are absolutely different from all the sites that they reflect and speak about, I shall call them, by way of contrast to utopias, heterotopias. I believe that between utopias and these quite other sites, these heterotopias, there might be a sort of mixed, joint experience, which would be the mirror. The mirror is, after all, a utopia, since it is a placeless place. In the mirror, I see myself there where I am not, in an unreal, virtual space that opens up behind the surface; I am over there, there where I am not, a sort of shadow that gives my own visibility to myself, that enables me to see myself there where I am absent: such is the utopia of the mirror. But it is also a heterotopia in so far as the mirror does exist in reality, where it exerts a sort of counteraction on the position that I occupy. From the standpoint of the mirror I discover my absence from the place where I am since I see myself over there. Starting from this gaze that is, as it were, directed toward me, from the ground of this virtual space that is on the other side of the glass, I come back toward myself; I begin again to direct my eyes toward myself and to reconstitute myself there where I am. The mirror functions as a heterotopia in this respect: it makes this place that I occupy at the moment when I look at myself in the glass at once absolutely real, connected with all the space that surrounds it, and absolutely unreal, since in order to be perceived it has to pass through this virtual point which is over there. As for the heterotopias as such, how can they be described? What meaning do they have? We might imagine a sort of systematic description - I do not say a science because the term is too galvanized now -that would, in a given society, take as its object the study, analysis, description, and 'reading' (as some like to say nowadays) of these different spaces, of these other places. As a sort of simultaneously mythic and real contestation of the space in which we live, this description could be called heterotopology. Its first principle is that there is probably not a single culture in the world that fails to constitute heterotopias. That is a constant of every human group. But the heterotopias obviously take quite varied forms, and perhaps no one absolutely universal form of heterotopia would be found. We can however class them in two main categories. In the so-called primitive societies, there is a certain form of heterotopia that I would call crisis heterotopias, i.e., there are privileged or sacred or forbidden places, reserved for individuals who are, in relation to society and to the human environment in which they live, in a state of crisis: adolescents, menstruating women, pregnant women. the elderly, etc. In out society, these crisis heterotopias are persistently disappearing, though a few remnants can still be found. For example, the boarding school, in its nineteenth-century form, or military service for young men, have certainly played such a role, as the first manifestations of sexual virility were in fact supposed to take place "elsewhere" than at home. For girls, there was, until the middle of the twentieth century, a tradition called the "honeymoon trip" which was an ancestral theme. The young woman's deflowering could take place "nowhere" and, at the moment of its occurrence the train or honeymoon hotel was indeed the place of this nowhere, this heterotopia without geographical markers. But these heterotopias of crisis are disappearing today and are being replaced, I believe, by what we might call heterotopias of deviation: those in which individuals whose behavior is deviant in relation to the required mean or norm are placed. Cases of this are rest homes and psychiatric hospitals, and of course prisons, and one should perhaps add retirement homes that are, as it were, on the borderline between the heterotopia of crisis and the heterotopia of deviation since, after all, old age is a crisis, but is also a deviation since in our society where leisure is the rule, idleness is a sort of deviation. The second principle of this description of heterotopias is that a society, as its history unfolds, can make an existing heterotopia function in a very different fashion; for each heterotopia has a precise and determined function within a society and the same heterotopia can, according to the synchrony of the culture in which it occurs, have one function or another. As an example I shall take the strange heterotopia of the cemetery. The cemetery is certainly a place unlike ordinary cultural spaces. It is a space that is however connected with all the sites of the city, state or society or village, etc., since each individual, each family has relatives in the cemetery. In western culture the cemetery has practically always existed. But it has undergone important changes. Until the end of the eighteenth century, the cemetery was placed at the heart of the city, next to the church. In it there was a hierarchy of possible tombs. There was the charnel house in which bodies lost the last traces of individuality, there were a few individual tombs and then there were the tombs inside the church. These latter tombs were themselves of two types, either simply tombstones with an inscription, or mausoleums with statues. This cemetery housed inside the sacred space of the church has taken on a quite different cast in modern civilizations, and curiously, it is in a time when civilization has become 'atheistic,' as one says very crudely, that western culture has established what is termed the cult of the dead. Basically it was quite natural that, in a time of real belief in the resurrection of bodies and the immortality of the soul, overriding importance was not accorded to the body's remains. On the contrary, from the moment when people are no longer sure that they have a soul or that the body will regain life, it is perhaps necessary to give much more attention to the dead body, which is ultimately the only trace of our existence in the world and in language. In any case, it is from the beginning of the nineteenth century that everyone has a right to her or his own little box for her or his own little personal decay, but on the other hand, it is only from that start of the nineteenth century that cemeteries began to be located at the outside border of cities. In correlation with the individualization of death and the bourgeois appropriation of the cemetery, there arises an obsession with death as an 'illness.' The dead, it is supposed, bring illnesses to the living, and it is the presence and proximity of the dead right beside the houses, next to the church, almost in the middle of the street, it is this proximity that propagates death itself. This major theme of illness spread by the contagion in the cemeteries persisted until the end of the eighteenth century, until, during the nineteenth century, the shift of cemeteries toward the suburbs was initiated. The cemeteries then came to constitute, no longer the sacred and immortal heart of the city, but the other city, where each family possesses its dark resting place. Third principle. The heterotopia is capable of juxtaposing in a single real place several spaces, several sites that are in themselves incompatible. Thus it is that the theater brings onto the rectangle of the stage, one after the other, a whole series of places that are foreign to one another; thus it is that the cinema is a very odd rectangular room, at the end of which, on a two-dimensional screen, one sees the projection of a three-dimensional space, but perhaps the oldest example of these heterotopias that take the form of contradictory sites is the garden. We must not forget that in the Orient the garden, an astonishing creation that is now a thousand years old, had very deep and seemingly superimposed meanings. The traditional garden of the Persians was a sacred space that was supposed to bring together inside its rectangle four parts representing the four parts of the world, with a space still more sacred than the others that were like an umbilicus, the navel of the world at its center (the basin and water fountain were there); and all the vegetation of the garden was supposed to come together in this space, in this sort of microcosm. As for carpets, they were originally reproductions of gardens (the garden is a rug onto which the whole world comes to enact its symbolic perfection, and the rug is a sort of garden that can move across space). The garden is the smallest parcel of the world and then it is the totality of the world. The garden has been a sort of happy, universalizing heterotopia since the beginnings of antiquity (our modern zoological gardens spring from that source). Fourth principle. Heterotopias are most often linked to slices in time - which is to say that they open onto what might be termed, for the sake of symmetry, heterochronies. The heterotopia begins to function at full capacity when men arrive at a sort of absolute break with their traditional time. This situation shows us that the cemetery is indeed a highly heterotopic place since, for the individual, the cemetery begins with this strange heterochrony, the loss of life, and with this quasi-eternity in which her permanent lot is dissolution and disappearance. From a general standpoint, in a society like ours heterotopias and heterochronies are structured and distributed in a relatively complex fashion. First of all, there are heterotopias of indefinitely accumulating time, for example museums and libraries, Museums and libraries have become heterotopias in which time never stops building up and topping its own summit, whereas in the seventeenth century, even at the end of the century, museums and libraries were the expression of an individual choice. By contrast, the idea of accumulating everything, of establishing a sort of general archive, the will to enclose in one place all times, all epochs, all forms, all tastes, the idea of constituting a place of all times that is itself outside of time and inaccessible to its ravages, the project of organizing in this way a sort of perpetual and indefinite accumulation of time in an immobile place, this whole idea belongs to our modernity. The museum and the library are heterotopias that are proper to western culture of the nineteenth century. Opposite these heterotopias that are linked to the accumulation of time, there are those linked, on the contrary, to time in its most flowing, transitory, precarious aspect, to time in the mode of the festival. These heterotopias are not oriented toward the eternal, they are rather absolutely temporal [chroniques]. Such, for example, are the fairgrounds, these' marvelous empty sites on the outskirts of cities that teem once or twice a year with stands, displays, heteroclite objects, wrestlers, snakewomen, fortune-tellers, and so forth. Quite recently, a new kind of temporal heterotopia has been invented: vacation villages, such as those Polynesian villages that offer a compact three weeks of primitive and eternal nudity to the inhabitants of the cities. You see, moreover, that through the two forms of heterotopias that come together here, the heterotopia of the festival and that of the eternity of accumulating time, the huts of Djerba are in a sense relatives of libraries and museums. for the rediscovery of Polynesian life abolishes time; yet the experience is just as much the,, rediscovery of time, it is as if the entire history of humanity reaching back to its origin were accessible in a sort of immediate knowledge, Fifth principle. Heterotopias always presuppose a system of opening and closing that both isolates them and makes them penetrable. In general, the heterotopic site is not freely accessible like a public place. Either the entry is compulsory, as in the case of entering a barracks or a prison, or else the individual has to submit to rites and purifications. To get in one must have a certain permission and make certain gestures. Moreover, there are even heterotopias that are entirely consecrated to these activities of purification -purification that is partly religious and partly hygienic, such as the hammin of the Moslems, or else purification that appears to be purely hygienic, as in Scandinavian saunas. There are others, on the contrary, that seem to be pure and simple openings, but that generally hide curious exclusions. Everyone can enter into thew heterotopic sites, but in fact that is only an illusion- we think we enter where we are, by the very fact that we enter, excluded. I am thinking for example, of the famous bedrooms that existed on the great farms of Brazil and elsewhere in South America. The entry door did not lead into the central room where the family lived, and every individual or traveler who came by had the right to ope this door, to enter into the bedroom and to sleep there for a night. Now these bedrooms were such that the individual who went into them never had access to the family's quarter the visitor was absolutely the guest in transit, was not really the invited guest. This type of heterotopia, which has practically disappeared from our civilizations, could perhaps be found in the famous American motel rooms where a man goes with his car and his mistress and where illicit sex is both absolutely sheltered and absolutely hidden, kept isolated without however being allowed out in the open. Sixth principle. The last trait of heterotopias is that they have a function in relation to all the space that remains. This function unfolds between two extreme poles. Either their role is to create a space of illusion that exposes every real space, all the sites inside of which human life is partitioned, as still more illusory (perhaps that is the role that was played by those famous brothels of which we are now deprived). Or else, on the contrary, their role is to create a space that is other, another real space, as perfect, as meticulous, as well arranged as ours is messy, ill constructed, and jumbled. This latter type would be the heterotopia, not of illusion, but of compensation, and I wonder if certain colonies have not functioned somewhat in this manner. In certain cases, they have played, on the level of the general organization of terrestrial space, the role of heterotopias. I am thinking, for example, of the first wave of colonization in the seventeenth century, of the Puritan societies that the English had founded in America and that were absolutely perfect other places. I am also thinking of those extraordinary Jesuit colonies that were founded in South America: marvelous, absolutely regulated colonies in which human perfection was effectively achieved. The Jesuits of Paraguay established colonies in which existence was regulated at every turn. The village was laid out according to a rigorous plan around a rectangular place at the foot of which was the church; on one side, there was the school; on the other, the cemetery-, and then, in front of the church, an avenue set out that another crossed at fight angles; each family had its little cabin along these two axes and thus the sign of Christ was exactly reproduced. Christianity marked the space and geography of the American world with its fundamental sign. The daily life of individuals was regulated, not by the whistle, but by the bell. Everyone was awakened at the same time, everyone began work at the same time; meals were at noon and five o'clock-, then came bedtime, and at midnight came what was called the marital wake-up, that is, at the chime of the churchbell, each person carried out her/his duty. Brothels and colonies are two extreme types of heterotopia, and if we think, after all, that the boat is a floating piece of space, a place without a place, that exists by itself, that is closed in on itself and at the same time is given over to the infinity of the sea and that, from port to port, from tack to tack, from brothel to brothel, it goes as far as the colonies in search of the most precious treasures they conceal in their gardens, you will understand why the boat has not only been for our civilization, from the sixteenth century until the present, the great instrument of economic development (I have not been speaking of that today), but has been simultaneously the greatest reserve of the imagination. The ship is the heterotopia par excellence. In civilizations without boats, dreams dry up, espionage takes the place of adventure, and the police take the place of pirates. » Michel Foucault 1967 via marianne

Synchronistic Linguistics in the Matrix

To use the images of the city is not appropriate to our time. The real city today is Magnetic City. Magnetic City is the whole world in a little acoustic imitation of resonating electromagnetic white light. We're all on that little node. It can't be visualized, but the whole world is on that spot all the time, and that's the state of being discarnate. To someone who wants to have visual parameters, that's a very claustrophobic thing to imagine. But we are stuck in that. That's why people are channeling. That's why people are doing all the various things that have been surprising to Americans for the past twenty years. They're trying to erase their body, and the motive for that is the sensory-structural change resulting from electric conditions. Did you know that even speaking, even not being in a trance, is a form of trance under electric conditions? Just walking around is a form of trance today because any bodily activity is inside this little electronic, discarnate node of consciousness called Magnetic City. - Bob Dobbs (Dave Porter Interview 10/16/88)

Synchronistic Linguistics in The Matrix

By Robert Guffey

An interesting parallel to the above view is expressed by a hypnotist named Jack True. In the epilogue to Jon Rappoport's 1998 book The Secret Behind Secret Societies, True makes the incredible statement that he's "stopped doing hypnosis on most people" because most of his clients are already in a hypnotic trance when they walk into his office! "The modern idea that surrounds our society is that by being nice, by being very nice you will fit into the system around you and everyone else will be happy with you. The only thing is, everything around you is hypnotic. I mainly find myself doing reverse-hypnosis these days. I do things to wake people up." (371). As I write this on the night of April 25th, 1999, a film called The Matrix is number one at the box office. Though by no means a perfect science fiction movie, it still manages to pack one hell of a wallop. I'd hardly put it on the same scale as 2001: A Space Odyssey or Brazil, or even Blade Runner, but at the same time I don't believe the flaws in the film represent a weakness on the part of the Wachowski Brothers' writing talents. I believe the film is designed to disseminate a subversive message through the filter of popular culture.

As Marshall McLuhan said, "Anything that's popular is a rear-view image." The Matrix is not about the future, it's about the past: circa 1945, to be exact. The Wachowski Brothers' previous film, Bound, received good reviews but fared poorly at the box office, which proves to me that they're more than capable of non-generic, non-traditional writing. I suspect the overly-long fight scenes and limited characterizations are specifically intended to lull the viewers into a hypnotic state, to drag their brainwaves down into alpha, at which point the filmmakers slam the message home: 'Wake Up, You're Being Controlled.' This is a cliché. Clichés are obsolete. "If it works, it's obsolete." Marshall McLuhan explains this quite well in the first chapter of his 1964 book Understanding Media. I could compare The Matrix to ancient Vedic philosophy, Hassan-i-Sabbah ("Nothing is real, everything is permitted"), the experimental novels of William S. Burroughs (The Reality Studio in Naked Lunch), Philip K. Dick's series of solipsistic novels (Eye in the Sky, Ubik, A Maze of Death, not to mention dozens of others), recent proponents of VR technology (Jaron Lanier), and the best-selling novels of William Gibson. But, this film has almost nothing to do with any of those things. Halfway through, I realized it was all about Bob Dobbs. Not J.R. Bob Dobbs; the real Bob Dobbs.

The real Bob Dobbs has nothing to do with the Church of the SubGenius, was never assassinated in San Francisco, and doesn't even smoke a pipe. He is the guiding intelligence behind two quirky CDs entitled Bob's Media Ecology and Bob's Media Ecology2 (which features the music of Negativland, Coldcut and Steinski), a radio play entitled Who's Forgotten Furry Lint? (a Bob Marshall production), and the author of Phatic Communion With Bob Dobbs. (Perfect Pitch Editions, 1992) Bob Dobbs is an expert on communications theory and was a colleague of Marshall McLuhan at the Center for Culture and Technology in Toronto, Ontario. For several years during the mid-'80s he was the personal advisor to investigative journalist Bob Marshall, who hosted a radio show on CKLN-FM called the International Connection. The show regularly featured the information of groundbreaking conspiracy theorists such as Mae Brussell, Sherman Skolnick, Dr. Peter Beter, and Lyndon LaRouche's Executive Intelligence Review. Adam Vaughan, the manager of the station, fired Marshall early in 1987 for broadcasting Dr. Beter's "antiSemitic rants" against the Rothschilds. The fact that Beter railed against the Rockefellers just as much as the Rothschilds apparently went right over Vaughan's head. Dobbs later replaced Marshall on the air, and has since followed a rather interesting career trajectory. According to him, he's taken over the Earth. Dobbs is a brilliant but eccentric fellow who claims to be the leader of "The Secret Council of Ten," a shadowy cabal that controls the world using complicated techniques known as "synchronistic-linguistics" and "tetrad management." As far as I know, the latter term was first developed by Marshall McLuhan and his son Eric in their 1988 book Laws of Media: The New Science. The tetrad is a four-step process that analyzes the projected evolution of man-made artifacts; you might say it's a means of predicting the future of humanity by predicting the future of its technology. Dobbs claims the NSA and other intelligence organizations utilize the techniques outlined in Laws of Media to manage world affairs. He also claims that he and his colleagues are engaged in the same exact activities. Thus, he refers to himself as "The Tetrad Manager."

Though he looks no older than 35, he claims to have been born on Feb. 2nd, 1922. When asked to explain this incongruity he explains that a unique device known as the D-Cell has enabled him to maintain the veneer of youth even though he's really going on 78 years old. He also claims to be "the only artist alive today." When asked to elaborate he replies that everyone else in the world is really dead, therefore he feels completely at ease with declaring himself "the only artist alive today." According to Dobbs everyone else disappeared in 1945, leaving behind a world of "holeopathic retrievals." "Holeopathic," he explains, is a mixture of "homeopathy" and "hologram." Homeopathy is a form of medical treatment where the physician takes the essence of a substance and dilutes it, the theory being that the tinier the dose the more potent it is. A hologram is an artificial environment indistinguishable from the reality upon which it's based. Dobbs claims it was the implementation of what he calls "the solar government" in 1945 that caused the disappearance of Earth's entire population, who were then replaced with holograms. This means that succeeding generations are mere holograms of holograms of holograms, ad infinitum. The tinier the holograms, the more realistic and engaging the artificial environment becomes, hence the term "holeopathic retrieval." In order to break out of this program, he claims we must become what he calls "menippean satirists."

The word "menippean" is derived from the Greek writer Menippus, who lived around 230 B.C. According to Dobbs, "He mixed prose and poetry and different styles in a rather anarchistic way, and that mixing of styles is traditionally called menippean satire by historians." (Interview 7/24/93) Though it's not quite clear - Dobbs' explanations tend to lean toward the abstract to say the least - by advising us all to become menippean satirists, he's suggesting metaphorically that we need to learn how to flip in and out of various environments at will, just as Menippus flipped in and out of various writing styles. We have to learn to wear our environments like clothing. Dobbs goes on to explain, referring to himself in the third person, "the goddess Circe turned men to swine. Bob's role is to return the swine - or our media extensions as the new animals - to human form again, to get back out of the tiny diluted homeopathic level. I'm here to retrieve our human-scale identity." Dobbs' solution to this is surprising: We as secret discarnate menippean satirists who follow Bob, what do we do?

We know that we don't want to be just discarnate. We want to retrieve the human form. What is the one religion that celebrates the human form in an individualistic sense, not in the Oriental sense of the human gnostic pleasure machine of the body? The Christian concept of the human body - God in flesh, as Christ manifested in his individuation of that process. One individual, not a tribe. We as discarnate menippean ironists, we put on Catholicism in the sense of the true Christian tradition of celebrating the human form over all technological amplifications of it. So we're secretly Catholics." Despite this, Dobbs maintains the Pope is the Anti-Christ. "He's acting out that potential of the Christian mythic tradition," Dobbs explains: The problem is the Pope believes he has a human body in the first nature sense, what I call the anthropomorphic image of oneself. The aristocrats rule with that image by controlling land, like feudalism. They think - and hope - that the planet is still there. They do not want you to realize that Nature dropped out and there's no basis for land, wealth, or gold. So their efforts are to move us back to a gold-based economy based on Prince Charles running the show. This is the strategy of the Anti-Christ: to leap back to first nature, to use the images of first nature and claim that he is the Tetrad Manager. That's why, all around the Earth, they're solving the debt crisis by allowing the Third World countries to cancel the debt if they give over wilderness lands to the central banks, because the oligarchs want to occupy the first nature. I'm an anti-environment to that. Bob hoicks up the values of the discarnate state, the electric environment that keeps Nature in a subordinate role. In other words Bob enhances the discarnate virtual reality image, which can't be bought, sold, or stolen. This is done as an ironic strategy in opposition to Prince Charles, who wants to stay in one fixed position. Secretly, followers of Bob will return to their anthropomorphic bodies, but with full awareness of how they lost them. Anybody can flip out of the body and become discarnate, and like a menippean satirist go back and forth into the first nature [original nature] and second nature [virtual reality]. (Ken Yas Interview 5/4/95)

I first heard Bob Dobbs on May 29th, 1993 early one Saturday morning on KPFK in Los Angeles. I tuned in thinking Mr. Dobbs was in some way connected to the Church of the SubGenius. I expected to hear Rev. Ivan Stang's typically irreverent (irrelevant?), quasi-religious rants about the Illuminati-controlled "pinks" attempting to steal "slack" from SubGenii wealthy enough to mail a dollar bill to Stang's Church. As you've already seen, what I got was something quite different indeed. Particularly delightful was hearing the callers trying to make sense of this confusing and yet oddly sensible melange of heady scholarship and absurd non sequiturs. Chats with Bob induce quite a vertiginous sensation in the average Homo sapien. One second you'll be listening to a postgraduate-level lecture on the effects of mass communications on society, then before you can escape you're being assaulted by a non-stop stream of bizarre theories bordering on the surreal.

For example: in September of 1977 the Rockefellers' secret moonbase was destroyed by the Russians' Particle Beam weapon during the Battle of the Harvest Moon, Henry Kissinger was killed in 1979 and replaced with a Russian Robotoid, three years after which (on Sept. 17, 1982) Dobbs joined forces with Richard Nixon and Dr. Beter to interrupt "the Bolsheviks' attempt to start Nuclear War One with a First Strike against the Soviet Union." (Dobbs 125) This is a mere fraction of the phantasmagoria that comes twirling out of Dobbs' mouth with the grace of a Bolshoi ballerina. One's initial reaction might be that of utter skepticism, but as Marshall McLuhan writes in his 1972 book Take Today: "Only puny secrets need protection. Big discoveries are protected by public incredulity." (92) My own skepticism of Dobbs' omniscience has waned over the years for a variety of reasons. I have a taped interview with Dobbs recorded on October 16th, 1988 in which he accurately predicts the fall of the Berlin Wall almost to the exact day. To suggest such a possibility when the Cold War was at its most frigid seemed like pure science fiction. Today it seems more like supernatural prescience. Further credibility surrounds Dobbs' strange pronouncements. In the last chapter of the meticulously researched book Operation Mind Control (Chp. 41, pg. 15), journalist Walter Bowart writes: When I last saw Bob, between meetings of a Finnegans Wake study group, he was making an in-depth study of Norman Mailer's novel, Harlot's Ghost, and trying to explain how he was actually the central character in the book. Shortly after I visited Bob, I visited Fletcher Prouty [former advisor to President Kennedy and author of The Secret Team]. He had read Harlot's Ghost and had made a list of character's names beside which he wrote the names of real people he thought they might be. He sent the list to Mailer who wrote back telling him he'd gotten all of them right except one.

Tetrad Management Mysterious little synchronicities like these abound and soon become commonplace once you've been exposed to Dobbs. You begin to see hints of Dobbs' Tetrad Management everywhere - on license plates and old television shows, in crop circles and cigarette ads, in pinball machines and star-studded blockbuster movies... like The Matrix. If I didn't know any better, I'd suspect that the Wachowski Bros. worked side by side with Dobbs to slip in signs of his presence throughout the course of the entire film. Keanu Reeves' character Neo (an obvious anagram for "one") is jumpstarted out of his humdrum existence by the use of synchronistic linguistics.

During an interview on KPFK broadcast on September 24th, 1994, the following exchange occurs between Dobbs and an anonymous caller:

Caller: For the individual who called earlier who was wondering what you were talking about, I think you should've at least given him one word: synchronistic-linguistics. Basically that's what you're doing, you're just trying to encourage people to recognize the patterns for themselves - the ever-densifying retrievals of synchronicity.

Dobbs: You're making me feel like Rumplestiltskin. Remember how Rumplestiltskin did not want his name known? You have named me pretty accurately. Synchronistic-linguistics, if you include all technologies as linguistics, is the right term.

Caller: Yeah, exactly. And that's what Finnegans Wake presaged. That's what's so brilliant about it.

Dobbs: That's the electric environment. Dan Rather does synchronistic-linguistics. That's what Tetrad Management is, as it comes out of the DIA and the National Security Agency. That's how they manage the Global Theatre, through synchronistic linguistics which really numbs the population. So I am a mirror of that.

Caller: Well, they strive for control but the true natural phenomenon of synchronicity, as I'm often want to say, is the only thing they - whoever "they" are - can't actually control, not in the ultimate sense of Rupert Sheldrake's conceptions about morphogenesis and synchronistic patterns.

Dobbs: No, they can't control your private citadel of consciousness, and that means they can't control you, but they can control our synthetic crowd behavior. That's what you've got to realize. You've got to realize they are controlling us through synchronistic linguistics. They call it the audience participation mystique. They allow everybody to roam the planet to be what they want to be. In other words, read Marshall McLuhan's essay called "Catholic Humanism in Modern Letters" where he says the world government in 1954 understood that Finnegans Wake was the key to world management. They understood that, that early, and Marshall blew the whistle on them and they really nailed him for it.

Synchronistic-Linguistics: The White Rabbit A cryptic message appears on Neo's computer. The message reads: "Wake up, Neo. The Matrix has you. Follow the White Rabbit. Knock, knock, Neo." At that exact moment he hears two successive knocks at the door. He opens the door and sees a tattoo of a white rabbit on a woman's shoulder. The woman leads him out of his apartment, the little urban cocoon where most of his life is spent plugged into the electric "mood-mud" of the mixed corporate-media environment - what Bob Dobbs calls "Magnetic City." The white rabbit (i.e., synchronistic-linguistics) helps lead the hypnotized Neo to take his first tentative steps from second nature back to first nature. He follows the tattooed woman to a night club where he first meets Trinity, the woman who will later fall in love with him as well as save his life. The Catholic overtones of the name Trinity should be obvious. (Trinity is also the name of the site in New Mexico where the first atom bomb was detonated in 1945, the same year Dobbs claims everything disappeared and was replaced by holeopathic retrievals.) Trinity leads Neo to Morpheus, ostensibly the head of an underground faction of renegade hackers. In Greek mythology, of course, Morpheus was one of the sons of Hypnos, the god of sleep. According to Funk & Wagnalls' Standard Dictionary of Folklore, Mythology, and Legend, "Morpheus either gave shape to dreams or brought dreams of human figures." (749) This is interesting, for when Jack True says he has to "wake people up," he actually means the exact opposite. According to Dobbs, we're under reverse conditions in the electric environment. As can be seen in McLuhan's Laws of Media, every tetrad eventually flips into its opposite function. As Dobbs says, "First technology flips, then information itself flips." (Interview 7/24/93) Under the category of the word "information" you could include human language. The Wachowski Bros. must be aware of this, at least on a subconscious level. Though the initial message sent to Neo reads "Wake up," they purposely give Neo's mentor the name of a mythological figure who puts people to sleep. This paradox represents the tetrad-flip. Under electric conditions the second-nature body is overstimulated to the point of constant awareness. In Magnetic City nobody sleeps. Therefore, it's intriguing that the Wachowski Bros. chose as their mythological template not Icalus or Phantasus, or Hypnos himself, but Morpheus - who specializes in dreams of the human form. Morpheus' goal, like Dobbs, is to retrieve Neo's human-scale identity. Only seconds after typing the last paragraph, purely by accident, I came across the following sentence in one of Dobbs' manifestoes: "This New Batch, the generation born since 1990, are even-tempered, tolerant menippeans (I suggest they are Morphic Spirals - Morpheus having been the son of the god of Sleep) as opposed to the glowing Boomer menippeans and the glum X-er menippeans." ("Silencing the Virtually Solar Theater" 6) Another example of synchronistic-linguistics at work? As Hunter S. Thompson likes to say, "Res Ipsa Loquitor."

Morpheus offers Neo two pills, one red and one blue, an obvious parallel to the "Drink Me" sequence in Alice in Wonderland. After he swallows the red pill Neo begins to, in Jack True's terms, "wake up," (i.e., return to the first nature). The effects of the illusion of visual space slipping away from Neo is presented as an experience akin to an hallucinatory trip on LSD. Neo reaches out for a mirror, which represents visual space. To his surprise the mirror begins to dissolve and his fingers slip through the glass as if it's made of viscous liquid. Though Wonderlawn's lost us for ever. Alis, alas, she broke the glass! (Joyce 270) When Alice went through the vanishing point of the visual world, breaking the hardware of the looking-glass world, she became involved in a series of rapid metamorphoses, not unrelated to her tears. "Who am I, then? Tell me that first, and then, if I like being that person, I'll come up."... Lewis Carroll, a non-Euclidean mathematical professor, was the first to denote the dilemma of a print-oriented world in his fable. (McLuhan Culture Is Our Business 68) The liquified mirror slithers up Neo's arm as if it's a living being. Within seconds it has covered his entire body. He has become subsumed by visual space. But as per the dictates of tetrad management, every environment eventually flips into its opposite form. Thus, the next time we encounter Neo he will have flipped back into the first nature.

But it's important to note that the mirror itself represents more than just a portal out of the second nature. During his 9/24/94 KPFK interview, the following exchange occurs between Dobbs and a caller who refers to himself as, of all things, Prof. Illuminatus:

Prof. Illuminatus: Is any of this close to the 'Crack in the Cosmic Egg,' the actual crack, the area of action that Joseph Chilton Pierce talks about?

Dobbs: No. The problem with the crack is that it's a visual image. It's an extension of the mirror. In my book, on the first page or so, you'll see the phrase The Analogical Mirrors. We have to look at a figure-ground. The Illuminati is a mirror, constantly through all time, but the conditions of the mirror changes. So the Western left hemisphere was a visual mirror - the egg with the crack - but now we're into an acoustic, tactile mirror. How do you mirror something that's essentially non-visual? That was attempted by James Joyce in Finnegans Wake. So the wisdom I offer today is how to be flexible in the modalities of The Analogical Mirrors. You could say that the lamp is the acoustic mirror because it's light-through. Symbolism of the nineteenth century played off the mirror vs. the lamp, the mirror as visual, the lamp as acoustic. The tactile mirror is me as I am today with you. That's a mirror for you, but it's not just a visible mirror. So know that the Crack in the Cosmic Egg is a rearview-mirror nostalgic retrieval. The Mirror is the Illuminati.

The red pill enables Neo first to slip through the Illuminati-Buddhist virtual reality program, just as Alice slipped through the looking-glass, and then return to his anthropomorphic human form. On the other side of the mirror he meets the companions who will help him on his quest. Significantly, upon first meeting Neo each of the characters communes with him silently (i.e., phatically) except for the man named Cipher, who will later betray him. It's as if the filmmakers are using Cipher's verbality as a symbol of his future transgression. Cipher is not a true menippean, thus phatic communion is denied him. Phatic Communion is the title of Bob Dobbs' book. "Phatic Communion" is an obscure phrase first used in the 1920s by the anthropologist Bronislaw Malinowski in the book The Meaning of Meaning (1923) to describe unacknowledged communication networks among tribes, the archetypal clich¹s that are embedded so deeply in the culture that no one even realizes they exist. It can also be described as a form of communication where the verbal content is not intended literally; its true meaning, in fact, is completely different from the content of the message. Here's a good example provided by Dobbs himself: "You approach somebody who's fixing a flat tire on a highway, and you're a stranger to that person, and you come up and say, 'Got a flat tire?' The person doesn't scream at you, 'What's it look like?!' He knows that you know he has a flat tire. The content of what you're saying is not the communication. It's a recognition of the person as a gesture, like waving." (Interview 7/24/93). This is a fascinating concept. If you think about it, most jokes - particularly satire - could be considered phatic.

Take Jonathan Swift's "A Modest Proposal," for instance. The real meaning of the piece differs from the content. Taken literally, it seems to advocate not only mass infanticide but cannibalism as well. Taken phatically, we realize that it's a cry of moral outrage protesting the treatment of Ireland's lower classes. Menippean satire is phatic. When Dobbs encourages us to become menippeans he's really saying that we have to begin thinking of ourselves, the entire society, the Global Theatre itself, as nothing more than a joke. When taken literally this joke can actually seem quite depressing, which is why we somehow have to learn to transcend our collective content, the electric swill of Magnetic City. We have to learn to commune phatically in order to fully understand Dobbs' main message: everything's disappeared. This, itself, is a phatic statement. The meaning of the phrase has nothing to do with the literal content. Dobbs is an artist. Under electric conditions, when nobody is listening to anything anyone is saying, when every being on the planet wishes to be the sole player on the stage of the Global Theatre, you can't communicate directly if you wish to be understood. Like Menippus and Jonathan Swift and James Joyce and Marshall McLuhan and William Burroughs and Philip K. Dick and the Marx Bros. and the Wachowski Bros., you have to make an end-run around the Ivory Tower. The Ivory Tower is now the Control Tower, and the Control Tower is in the mud. Bob Dobbs, 5/4/95 The fifth element is mud. Napolean Bonaparte, c. 1800

Neo's newfound companions reveal to him that the world he's known up till now is, in fact, nothing more than a virtual reality created by an Artificial Intelligence (AI) program grown so far out of control that it's taken over the Earth and now breeds humans on a mass scale in order to use their bodies as a constant source of energy, while imprisoning their minds in a complex virtual reality program they know as the "real world." You might think this is an unrealistic plot until you realize that the AI program represents the Anti-Bob, the faction of the Cryptocracy that wishes us to believe we still have physical bodies in the first-nature sense. The matrix is a form of phatic communion. Neo's companions proceed to show him what a human being is capable of in a virtual reality program once he's no longer burdened by the illusion that he has a body. This was the key scene that clued me in on the fact that the entire film is actually about Bob Dobbs' ascension to the position of Tetrad Manager. A character named Tank sends Neo into the VR program to learn martial arts. The Wachowski Bros. could have had him learn karate, Kung Fu, Tae Kwon Do, the Mao Tse Tung Whirlwind Kick, whatever. They could've chosen anything. But what's the first word that comes out of Neo's mouth as he prepares to enter the training program? "Jujitsu."

This is extremely significant from a Dobbsian perspective. I think you'll see why when you read the following excerpt from his 1/22/94 interview on Dave Porter's "Genesis of a Music":

Caller: Good morning, sir. I've been listening to the radio since seven o'clock this morning. I've been listening to a very interesting program, but I don't really know what it's all about. I turned it on when this Bob fellow said, "I'm going to be doing an interview with Frank Zappa in two years even though he's already dead," then later on I hear him say he's really a black woman. Is he a man, is he a woman? What does holistic music mean? I'm confused... but it's interesting. Thank you. [This isn't the first time Dobbs has claimed to be a black woman; it's a motif that pops up over and over again in his dialogues. In light of this fact, perhaps it would be relevant to note that at a crucial point in the film Neo receives spiritual guidance from a black woman known only as The Oracle.]

Host: And thank you. Final comments?

Dobbs: That's a very perceptive interpretation, a very honest interpretation of the effects of me and tetrad management. Did he say the phrase "holistic music"?

Host: Yeah, I think he mistook "holeopathic retrieval" for "holistic music."

Dobbs: [Laughs] Well, what this show is about is, uh . . . Who's Forgotten Furry Lint? That's what it's about. And it's within the context of Hand Signals For The Blind. But it's about - your ears may not believe it - it's about the person who controls this Global Theatre. And I don't control it in a dictatorial George Bush sense. I control it through jujitsu.  So this caller has been listening for an hour and a half to the most aware, most conscious person in the world. And, of course, if you are aware then you're a chameleon. The menippean tactility of the mixed corporate-media puts people, all of us, through many changes of form and shape and desire. Therefore, I have to manifest this as part of my satire, not that the satire isn't based on a real science. I don't mean to be arbitrary in my satire. It's like McLuhan used to say, "Humor is part of learning." When you're laughing, you're learning. So, I have to mime the environment that I'm describing. During a press conference on shortwave radio, they actually have on tape Ronald Reagan being asked if he was a woman, and him saying "Yes."

The mere mention of the word "jujitsu" in The Matrix, and its role as the covert objective correlative of the plot, clearly draws the subtext of the film into the Dobbsian superstructure. Though the basic framework (i.e., the figure) of the film isn't too dissimilar from other entries in the ever-growing action adventure genre, the use of Bob Dobbs' special brand of menippean satire (i.e., the hidden ground) lifts The Matrix to a much higher realm worthy of deeper critical analysis than there's room for in a single article. I believe the recurrence throughout the film of palindromic numbers such as 101 and 303 represent ternary ciphers pointing toward Dobbs' secret influence on the filmmakers. "Bob," after all, is a palindrome reduced to its smallest possible size, not unlike a holeopathic retrieval. The smaller the palindrome, the more powerful its resonance in the human mind. As Dobbs himself says, "BOB is sort of like the OM concept. It contains all sounds, all words, all artefacts." (Interview 5/4/95)

The conclusion of the film truly underscores Dobbs' influence on the Wachowski Bros. When Neo realizes his full potential and transforms into The One he steps out of the boundaries of not only visual space but acoustic, kinetic, and tactile space as well. He merges into the mixed corporate-media electric environment itself and becomes "one" with it. By regaining his human body in the first-nature sense, he's able to then flip back into the second nature (the virtual reality program) with full awareness of how he lost his body originally, thus enabling him to gain control over the second nature and destroy the evil holeopathic retrievals who have been sent by the AI program to destroy him and his companions. Though this is not stated, Neo probably doesn't even need a programmer to enter the virtual reality world anymore. He can flip in and out of his body at will. He's the ultimate menippean satirist. This is a clear allegory for how Bob Dobbs staged his campaign for chairmanship of the Secret Council of Ten. In February of 1988 the Council held an election during which Dobbs rigged the computers so that he would win. He beat out three of his adversaries: Prince Charles, a Russian named Romanov who was ruling the USSR using Gorbachev as a cover, and Prince Thurn und Taxis. Because he was no longer controlled by the Council, he was able to begin releasing crucial information to the public early in 1988. Unfortunately, he soon discovered that nobody was listening, which is probably why the Cryptocracy hasn't bothered to bump him off.

Dobbs is now attempting to make an end-run around the Cryptocracy. In order to persuade people to listen to his message, he's decided he must first persuade them to turn off the media environment. In the early 90s he developed a program known as Media Ecology, the main purpose of which is to encourage a Media Fast. The following is excerpted from one of Dobbs' flyers distributed by Gerry Fialka's Contemporary Communications Conference: We are polluting Art as fast as we are tidying up Nature. The people of the Earth are encouraged to engage in an experiment of utmost urgency. We must turn off the electric environment for a period of one week to perform a cleansing of mass-man's mind, body and spirit. We must get back to our bodies, lest we forget they are still there! Imagine the freedom to be experienced as the top-down cultural control of civilization is eradicated for even the briefest period! If everyone did participate in the media Fast, how would we know it happened? Stay tuned... The paradoxical nature of the last sentence seems to be intentional. Near the end of his final interview on KPFK Dobbs reveals, "We can't turn off TV. This whole agenda I'm proposing is a vain extension of nothing by nothing. But in software/wetware conditions we just have to think about something collectively and it's done. So if we become aware of what my agenda is and think it, it is done." (Interview 9/24/94)

Dobbs' current predicament is exactly the same as that of Neo in the final scene of The Matrix. We see him standing in a telephone booth on a crowded city street, addressing the AI through a pay phone. "I'm going to show everybody what you don't want them to see," he says. "I'm going to show them a world without you." We see him step out of the phone booth and onto the street, where he is surrounded by hordes of busy pedestrians on their way to a non-existent job in a non-existent world. Somehow he must convince each of them that they're nothing more than holeopathic retrievals. The film ends as his quest begins. According to the ancient Hebrew system of the Kabalah, two words possessing similar numerical ciphers are considered inextricably linked. On a whim, I calculated the Kabalistic numbers of both "Neo and "Bob" The results: Neo equals 46, Bob equals 47. The message seems clear: Bob is Neo, Neo is Bob. But Bob's got the edge... by one digit. In the electric environment, of course, sometimes you only need one digit to have the edge. If the plot of The Matrix is true, and Bob is the real life equivalent of Neo, then I suppose it's appropriate that his message would be limited to publications such as this. The AI wouldn't allow such a dangerous message to be spread on a wider basis, now would it? But that doesn't really matter. As Bob himself says (Interview 5/4/95), "since I'm a holeopathic retrieval, I don't need that many followers." One might extrapolate even further: the fewer followers Bob has, the more powerful he becomes.

Endnotes Bob Dobb's book and CDs are available from: AK Press, PO Box 40682, San Francisco CA 94114. His tape list is available by sending two .37 stamps to: Contemporary Communications Conference, 2427 1/2 Glyndon Ave., Venice CA 90291. Further Bob tapes are available from She Who Remembers at 626-287-8254. Bob's home page is http://www.posi-tone.com/BOB.html. He can be e-mailed at purple@ingress.com. Bob has had a regular column in Flipside magazine since issue #96 (P.O. Box 60790, Pasadena, CA 91116). He is currently presenting selections from his private diaries under the general title "Android Meme's Xenochrony." The selections extend as far back as the early 1930s and feature conversations with such historically important figures as Reinhard Gehlen, Alexander Haig, Mae Brussell, Marshall McLuhan, and many others.

In the March/April 1999 Flipside (#117) you'll find a transcribed dialogue between Dobbs and McLuhan that perfectly sums up the basic plot of The Matrix. McLuhan says to Dobbs: "I once wrote an article, 'The Southern Quality.' back in 1946 or 1947 where I explained why there was no human life on this planet. Since then human beings have been grown inside programmed media-environments that are essentially like test tubes. That's why I say the kids today live mythically." (Dobbs, Flipside 38). What's perhaps most amazing is this: the date of the entry is May 2, 1967. McLuhan prefigured the current trend in popular films (David Croenberg's eXistenZ and Josef Rusnak's The Thirteenth Floor being further extensions of the virtual reality motif) well over thirty years ago, and Dobbs just happened to release the transcribed conversation for an international audience only a few weeks before The Matrix premiered! This is where synchronicity gives way to "xenochrony," an esoteric term best defined simply by reading Bob's on-going column in Flipside. Phatic Communion With Bob Dobbs is an epyllion (a miniepic) that reads like a postmodern version of the Eddaic Verses, the Old Norse mythological poems that conveyed esoteric religious information through breathless dialogues between the gods. The book consists of "verbal duels" between Lyndon LaRouche and Marshall McLuhan, LaRouche and William Irwin Thompson, LaRouche and Bob Dobbs, Arthur Kroker and Dobbs, then concludes with Dobbs' subsumption of the entire narrative. Oddly enough, the Eddaic poems always ended with the death of one of the interlocutors. In Bob's book, however, all of the interlocutors die except for Bob!

Reblogged from Paranoia Magazine I Mage via