The Resonant Interval

A Series of Dialogues between Cameron McEwen & Bob Dobbs

A series of dialogues between Cameron McEwen and Bob Dobbs on the work of Marshall McLuhan — and on the cul-de-sac that Western thought walked into, and the way through that McLuhan found.

81 dialogues · 172 hours · 2,457 claims · 373 entities

Three ways in

  • Read them in order. The dialogues run from October 2020 onward, each one readable in full or listenable from the page. Start at the first.
  • Follow a figure or an idea. Every person, concept, tradition, and text in the conversations has its own page, gathering what was said about it across every dialogue: People, Concepts, Schools of Thought, Works.
  • Search it. Use the box at the top left. Every claim on this site is tied to the moment it was spoken — search a name and you get the passages, not just the pages.

The throughline

Beginning with Nietzsche’s diagnosis, the conversations trace how thought advanced, step by step, into a cul-de-sac — and how McLuhan’s distinction between light through and light on answers a need Nietzsche could name but not meet. Every dialogue returns to this spine.

The interlocutors

Cameron McEwen and Bob Dobbs, reading closely after Marshall McLuhan, Friedrich Nietzsche, James Joyce, and Wyndham Lewis.

One moment

Nothing on this site is paraphrase without a source. Each claim carries the words that were actually spoken and a button that plays them:

I think he probed things in really interesting ways and opened up new ways of understanding the world. But he didn’t figure out how to communicate it.

— Cameron McEwen on Marshall McLuhan asserted

Enter by idea

The concepts the dialogues keep returning to, ranked by how many conversations they run through.

  • Tech Body in 67 dialogues — Bob’s term for the last phase in his sequence of media anti-environments — the point at which the extended machinery folds back into an autonomous body of its own.
  • Android Meme in 60 dialogues — Bob Dobbs’s term for technology “coming alive” — the moment machines achieve a form of interactivity or autonomy, a drama of cognition crossing between humans and machines.
  • Tactility in 53 dialogues — McLuhan’s name for touch not as a fifth sense but as contrast — the interplay of the merging and the abruptly interrupting — which Bob makes the ground term of his whole media…
  • iON in 51 dialogues — Bob’s name for the phenomenon he and Carolyn are “creating” — what the Tiny Note Chart’s 1995 stand-in “MIHR” was, he says, unconsciously anticipating. iON “showed up in 2009”…
  • Global Theater in 50 dialogues — Marshall McLuhan’s late-1960s companion phrase to the global village, and the station Bob’s book reaches at p.87 as it turns into Part Two.
  • Global Village in 42 dialogues — McLuhan’s best-known phrase, taken here not as a slogan but as a dating problem and a temporal claim.
  • Cul-de-Sac in 38 dialogues — Cameron McEwen’s central framework across the series — his name for the dead end Western thought entered when concepts began to be used to certify reality.
  • Global Membrane in 38 dialogues — McLuhan’s phrase for electricity as “an extension of the nervous system,” which Bob promotes into the central ground of the satellite era.

The figures who recur

  • Marshall McLuhan in 81 dialogues — Canadian media theorist and the figure the entire dialogue orbits — nearly every Concept and Work in this archive is, at bottom, a reading of McLuhan.
  • James Joyce in 67 dialogues — Irish novelist whose Finnegans Wake is the central text of Bob and Cameron’s reading of McLuhan.
  • Wyndham Lewis in 66 dialogues — British painter, novelist, and founder of Vorticism — and the subject of McLuhan’s sustained, ambivalent engagement.
  • Donald Trump in 59 dialogues — The subject of Bob’s book What We/You Didn’t Know About Trump (Part two of his Trump work) — the book the series, from Dialogue 13 on, reads line by line.
  • Ezra Pound in 55 dialogues — American poet, a leader of Imagism and Vorticism and one of McLuhan’s “men of 1914” alongside Lewis, Eliot, and Joyce.
  • Arthur Kroker in 52 dialogues — The postmodern theorist Bob cites as his best guide to the vocabulary of the 1980s–90s postmodernists, and the fourth figure of the Tiny Note Chart (with LaRouche, McLuhan, and…
  • TS Eliot in 48 dialogues — The poet and critic whom Bob and Cameron treat, in dialogue 24, as a formative pressure on McLuhan.
  • Barrington Nevitt in 46 dialogues — A late McLuhan collaborator and co-author, “Barry” Nevitt is the source Bob turns to for McLuhan’s own formulas.

The works they read closely

  • Finnegans Wake in 69 dialogues — Joyce’s final novel.
  • Take Today in 57 dialogues — McLuhan’s 1972 book with Barrington Nevitt, subtitled The Executive as Dropout — the late, corporate-facing McLuhan that Bob returns to more than any other single text, treating…
  • The Gutenberg Galaxy in 52 dialogues — McLuhan’s 1962 book, invoked across dialogue 27 less as a text than as the name for a whole perceptual regime: the visual, perspectival stance in which “all other conditions…
  • Understanding Media in 44 dialogues — McLuhan’s 1964 landmark — Understanding Media: The Extensions of Man — the most-invoked book across the series.
  • From Cliché to Archetype in 43 dialogues — Book by Marshall McLuhan and Wilfred Watson, published 1970.
  • Explorations in 40 dialogues — The journal McLuhan and Ted Carpenter edited out of the Ford-funded Toronto seminar from 1953 — nine issues, and the place where most of what became McLuhan’s method was first…

The schools they argue with

The named traditions the dialogues position themselves against — the field that grew up around McLuhan, and the schools it sorted itself into.

  • Media Ecology in 36 dialogues — The academic field that grew up around McLuhan — and, in Bob’s usage, less a discipline than a symptom of one.
  • Catholic Thomism in 10 dialogues — Bob’s name for McLuhan’s intellectual allegiance — the Catholic revival of Thomas Aquinas’s Aristotelian philosophy that Bob makes the ground of McLuhan’s whole method, and one…
  • Catholic Humanism in 6 dialogues — The Catholic literary and intellectual programme McLuhan was addressing, and positioning himself inside, in the mid-1950s.
  • Winnipeg School of Communication in 3 dialogues — Bob and Cameron’s name for the school of McLuhan studies centered on Winnipeg — the city where McLuhan grew up — one of the many “schools of media ecology” that grew out of…
  • Diasporic School in 3 dialogues — Bob’s name for the fourth of the six schools in his long essay on Media Ecology — the post-McLuhan scholars who understood the electric effects perfectly well and went on valuing…
  • Cambridge English School in 3 dialogues — The critical movement McLuhan was trained in — I.

The places that shaped it

  • University of Toronto in 29 dialogues — The campus at the center of the McLuhan story — where McLuhan taught from 1946, where Innis chaired Political Economy, and, in Bob and Cameron’s reading, the anti-environment that…
  • Monday Night Seminars in 12 dialogues — The weekly seminars McLuhan held in Toronto through the 1960s and 1970s, where the guest of honor did the talking and McLuhan listened.
  • World Economic Forum in 9 dialogues — The Davos institution Bob and Cameron treat as the contemporary emblem of managerial ambition over the planet, almost always through its founder Klaus Schwab.
  • Media Ecology Association in 5 dialogues — The New York-based scholarly body founded in 1998, out of the Fordham “Legacy of McLuhan” conference Lance Strate organized — the meeting at which Bob himself spoke.
  • Explorations Group in 3 dialogues — The interdisciplinary seminar and magazine (Explorations) McLuhan and Carpenter ran at Toronto in the 1950s on a Ford grant — the first institutional try at McLuhan’s “dialogue”…
  • Project Paperclip in 3 dialogues — The real postwar U.S. program that recruited German rocket scientists — Wernher von Braun and the Peenemünde team — brought to Huntsville to seed what became NASA.

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