A late McLuhan collaborator and co-author, "Barry" Nevitt is the source Bob turns to for McLuhan's own formulas. His ABC of Prophecy (1980) preserves McLuhan describing the interplay of cliché and archetype as the generator of consciousness — which Bob reads as the Drama of Cognition — and his Tetrad on "news" anticipates the conspiracy logic of the Global Theater.
Across the dialogues
ABC of Prophecy preserves McLuhan's cliché-archetype as the generator of consciousness
Nevitt's ABC of Prophecy records McLuhan's formula — the interplay of cliché and archetype as the generator of consciousness — which Bob equates with the Drama of Cognition.
"I have a quote — Barry Nevitt, must be in ABC of Prophecy, 1980. He talks about the interplay of cliché-archetype as the generator of consciousness. He quotes McLuhan saying that. So the interplay of cliché-archetype, in that case, would be the drama of cognition."
Nevitt's "news" tetrad — the news behind the news, the conspiracy effect of the global theater
Nevitt's Tetrad on "news" shows it flipping into "the news behind the news" — the global-theater effect Bob ties to conspiracy thinking.
"Barry Nevitt did a tetrad on news, and it flips into the news behind the news. That is the result of the global theater."
Named at the flatline's origin — the late-1980s talks Bob dates the "groundless situation" to, and the Decad the Tiny Note Chart drew from ABC of Prophecy
Bob dates the "groundless situation" — the flatline — to late-1980s conversations with Barry Nevitt.
"I remember talking about that with Barry Nevitt in the late 80s. We were in a groundless situation, which is probably what I meant by the flatline."
The Tiny Note Chart's "Decad Dance" draws its Decad from Nevitt's book ABC of Prophecy.
"the Decad is developed by Barry Nevitt in his book, ABC of Prophecy."
Recovered as the source of the archivist theme — Bob credits Nevitt's unpublished papers with first naming the comprehensive archivist that the internet age has made of everyone
Bob credits Nevitt with first naming the archivist — "comprehensive," ahead of media studies — the role the World Wide Web has since forced on everyone.
"Barry Nevitt used to talk about the archivist, and the archivist is comprehensive."
Cast as the one collaborator who could carry the late McLuhan — the balanced engineer who made Take Today possible when Carpenter and Parker could not — against Cameron's "too schematic" verdict on his own books
Bob makes Nevitt the balanced late interlocutor who could actually build Take Today — an engineer "pretty well balanced" without the identity crisis of the others — when Ted Carpenter was uninterested and Harley Parker was drinking.
"and Barry Nevitt was around him for that later phase to be someone who would be a reasonable, someone to bounce the ideas off of."
Cameron enters the reservation — Nevitt's own books (ABC of Prophecy, the "Ted Carpenter program") are "too schematic, too classificatory for McLuhan" — where Bob defends him as the one who "spelled out the later systematic part."
"Barry's too schematic, too classificatory for McLuhan."
His prose read for the first time as argument rather than testimony — the scare quotes traced past the intelligence backstory to Cambridge ambiguity, so Nevitt becomes a thinker with a method instead of a source with a past
Bob's explanation for why Nevitt puts everything in scare quotes — an ex-intelligence man who left because "the secrets weren't secrets anymore" would treat secret as a word that no longer holds, which turns a stylistic tic into the argument itself.
"Marshall always said that Barry was British intelligence."
Cameron supplies the literary genealogy Bob's biographical reading misses — the quotation marks come from Cambridge in the 1930s and Empson's finding that no word in poetry means one thing, so Nevitt is applying ambiguity to human experience rather than signalling insider knowledge.
"he's taking the ambiguity of language, the stuff that McLuhan studied in Cambridge, in the 1930s where it was seen that there's no word in poetry that just means one thing. And when that's applied to human experience, there is nothing that has obvious and set meaning. Everything is a figure to some other ground."
Measured against Bob's own project and found short — the engineer who made McLuhan practical is credited with the consciousness-as-speed-up formulation and faulted for missing the mystery it points at
Nevitt's sentence supplies the mechanism Bob's p.135 is built on — consciousness as a product of speed rather than a precondition of it.
"Marshall McLuhan foresees that consciousness will prove to be an effect of speeding up cliche archetype processes in the brain."
Cameron separates the two projects — distillation of what McLuhan already meant, against Bob's thinking-through to something not said that way in McLuhan.
"Barry is the guy that he tries to sort of just still the essence of McLuhan, you could say."
The engineering temperament named as the limit — application requires a fixed object, which is the one thing the mystery of the subject will not supply.
"Barry was trying to make it practical. He's the engineer"
Connections
A late-stage McLuhan collaborator (co-author of Take Today); his ABC of Prophecy preserves McLuhan's cliché-archetype formula.
Nevitt's ABC of Prophecy quotes McLuhan on the interplay of cliché and archetype as "the generator of consciousness."
Co-edited Who Was Marshall McLuhan? with Barry Nevitt, dedicating it to Finnegans Wake's HCE.