One of the two hosts of the dialogue — the philosopher of the pair. Where Bob does "meteorology," the large-scale weather of media, Cameron does "chemistry": the patient study of the elements of consciousness. A Princeton-trained reader of Nietzsche who studied under Kuhn and Rorty, he comes at McLuhan through the deep problems of philosophy — the cul-de-sac, the plurality of time, the drama of cognition — and is wary of the cliché McLuhan of medium-and-message. Start with the chemistry frame (dialogue 01), then the one question that organized his life's work (dialogue 08).
Life & Work
Cameron McEwen graduated from Princeton in 1966 with an undergraduate thesis on Nietzsche's second untimely meditation, written under Walter Kaufmann; Richard Rorty, then a young faculty member, led his preceptorials on Sartre, Nietzsche, and Wittgenstein. In his junior year he read The Structure of Scientific Revolutions with Thomas Kuhn himself, just after the book appeared. He visited McLuhan's Coach House in Toronto for about a week in the fall of 1968, pressing the case that McLuhan's work could answer the philosophical problems left open since Nietzsche; McLuhan dismissed this as "conceptual thinking," and Cameron went to Germany to pursue Nietzsche instead.
From 1970 he spent some thirty years in and out of Germany, learning to think and dream in German, and over more than a decade became a friend of Hans-Georg Gadamer — a living link to Heidegger — through frequent visits to Gadamer's Heidelberg home. For a living he was a partner and director of publisher relations at InteLex, the digital scholarly-publishing house, securing texts from presses like Oxford University Press and Meiner Verlag; as he puts it, "I always regarded my work as my way of financing my writing." He has since spent decades documenting McLuhan in a deeply searchable text archive — the concordance behind his blog. He first met Bob in 1998, at Mark Stahlman's loft in New York; their renewed exchange two decades later became this series.
Across the dialogues
Chemistry — pattern recognition of pattern recognition, the second-order move McLuhan makes with media
Cameron's signature frame — "chemistry." Just as 1800 chemistry was a pattern recognition of humanity's age-old pattern recognition of matter, McLuhan's "medium is the message" demands a second-order recognition of the drama of cognition itself — and that recognition, he holds, is the condition of survival.
"In 1800, what happened was that there was pattern recognition of the pattern recognition. And that's the elements of chemistry. And when McLuhan says the medium is the message, he's saying that the pattern recognition of the drama of cognition needs to be subject to pattern recognition. And if we can achieve that, then we can achieve survival."
Arrogant superiority — the marking hidden in every perception, and questioning as the real work
Cameron's diagnostic — every perception "marks" or privileges one side of a ground (or centre/margin) pair, and that marking is "always present but a variable." The humanities never reach rigor because they don't see this arrogant superiority at work in their own perceiving.
"The road to understanding media effects begins with arrogant superiority."
For Cameron, a good dialogue's deepest work is questioning — not as a means to an answer but as good in itself — the stance that animates the whole series.
"when people are thinking and when they're conducting a good dialogue, probably the most important thing going on is questioning."
The Kuhn lens — McLuhan as a revolution in the humanities on the scale of the post-1800 sciences
Cameron read Kuhn's Structure of Scientific Revolutions with Kuhn himself at Princeton, and brought that lens to McLuhan: McLuhan, he argues, was after a Kuhnian revolution in the humanities on the scale of the post-1800 sciences.
"I was reading Structure of Scientific Revolutions in very detailed fashion with Kuhn — that would have been 1964–65, just after the book came out."
Light through / light on — how the cul-de-sac closes once reality hangs on subjective certification
André Girard's distinction (McLuhan, 1958) is Cameron's key to the cul-de-sac: once there is no objective marker, reality hangs on subjective certification — and if certification itself depends on reality, "then there is no subjective certification, therefore there is no reality."
"The distinction is light through, as through a stained glass window... light on, which is what we produce, what we certify... Once there is no objective marker, then reality depends upon subjective certification."
Plural time — Al-Ghazali's trap, and the backflip that is always already underway
Quoting the philosopher Al-Ghazali, Cameron names McLuhan's central trap — the thing sought is already present, so seeking it linearly loses it; the cul-de-sac can be escaped only by a different relation to time.
"If you are looking for something that's already there, then it becomes lost and can never be found. That's the situation with McLuhan."
Cameron's resolution — time is plural. McLuhan's love of re-words (retrieval, recognition, replay) points to an "all-at-once" dimension folded into the linear one; coming to terms with that plurality is the clue that lets the cul-de-sac's "backflip" be always already underway.
"This gets into Being and Time, which was Heidegger's great book in 1927. And the idea in being in time is that the coming to terms with the plurality of time is the sort of the essential clue to figuring out what's going on with being."
The one question — is it possible to get out of the cul-de-sac, and if it is, how?
From Nietzsche, Cameron took one driving question and spent roughly 1966–1978 on it alone — whether and how Western thought can escape the cul-de-sac — and only then began visiting the thinkers (McLuhan among them) who might answer it.
"And so I more or less dedicated my life for the next 10 or 15 years to the question of is it possible to get out of this cul-de-sac and if it is how is it?"
Presses whether participating in memes is a cliché probe or only a cliché; reads the chart's chief problem as time and the flatline as clue
Of everything the formula chart tracks, Cameron singles out time as the recurring difficulty — the register it never stops shuffling.
"the formula chart is illustrative of how one of the chief problems that you're shuffling all the time is the question of time."
He names that difficulty as reversed causation — the coming event throwing its shadow ahead of itself, so effect appears before cause.
"there are causes that sort of run before themselves. There's a shadow before the event. And so the effect shows itself before the cause."
The chemistry frame reaches its fullest statement — the exit is not invented but recognized, the way 19th-century chemistry saw "what had always gone on," with the interior landscape's "protein" complexity the field still to be read
The fullest version of Cameron's "chemistry" frame — the "third position" and "all the possibilities of human perception" were always there; we get out "in a way that's something like chemistry," which in the 19th century "began to see what had always gone on," never disclosing a new world.
"My somewhat contrary view is that we get to first where the third position is already there. All of the possibilities of human perception are already there and have always been there."
The exit given a program and a criterion — the chemistry frame turned into a public demand that the scattered memes fuse into "science," and the "alive mind," mobile enough to cross figure and ground, made the test a harnessing culture keeps failing
The chemistry frame turned into a public program — the many self-enclosed meme "bubbles" must be fused into science, which Cameron defines not as a body of results but as radical seriousness: open to question, required to test, "entirely open to all of the possibilities."
"what is necessary is for all of the memes together to become science."
Cameron's criterion of a living mind is mobility — the capacity to traverse figure and ground rather than fixate, the standard by which he prizes Bob's mind and indicts the "bureaucrats of the spirit" whom the economy harnesses to useless or bad ends.
"In order to have a live mind, you need to be able to go up and go down and go from one side to the other side."
The quiet counter-method stated — against Bob's "louder" megalomania, Cameron casts his own work as communication "through less," "as depreciative as possible," not claiming he can do it but "called to attempt it"
Cameron's stance against Bob's "megalomania" — where Bob believes he can communicate the vision, Cameron will only say "I don't say that I could do it. I say that I'm called to attempt it," a communication sought "through less," "as depreciative as possible," the opposite of talking louder.
"I say that I'm called to attempt it"
The reader's method named — his refrain that all McLuhan's key words are "in quotation marks," bells to be sounded rather than defined, threaded through probing, acoustic space, and the comfortable/uncomfortable dualism of all-at-onceness
The governing method Cameron presses all session — McLuhan's central terms are questions with no bottom and no ground, sounded like bells for where they resonate, so "education," "university," and "surface" can never be read as a single-meaning surface.
"but people need to understand that all of the important words in McLuhan are in quotation marks."
The skeptic holds the method line — pressing that McLuhan flips media as a mode of reading, not a claim that the old poets "meant" TV, against Bob's literalizing drift
Cameron's methodological correction held all session — McLuhan flips one medium against another as a way of reading effects, never claiming Eliot, Pound, and Lewis literally "were talking about television," the literalism Bob keeps sliding toward.
"I see McLuhan talking about media as a strategy, as a rubbing one medium against the other as a mode of understanding."
Carries the session's constructive burden — presses the McLuhan reading toward a religious "level that holds," reachable only by going through the maelstrom or the vanishing point, and toward rebuilding McLuhan research as a searchable digital lab
Cameron's foundation argument, the session's constructive counter to the maelstrom — the only exit is a level of reality that "does not fall through itself," and the search for a "false foundation" is what destroys us; at bottom, he holds, that level is "the religious level."
"Unless we can find a level of reality that does not fall through itself... we're going to destroy ourselves looking for some kind of false foundation."
Connubial bliss reframed as peace — "the belonging together of the absolutely different," with the numb exposed as a defense against plurality and the exit lying through absolute difference, not its erasure
Cameron's culminating gloss on the War and Peace connubium — "connubial bliss is peace," and peace is "the belonging together of the absolutely different"; the numb "consolidates into unity" and so is "a defense against plurality," which makes the recognition of absolute difference "the first step towards peace."
"Peace is the belonging together of the absolutely different."
The method sharpened into a warning — the subjective/objective genitive offered as a reading tool from Heidegger and scholastic theology, and the standing price of simplification, whose bought efficiency is paid for in a blindness that maximizes alongside it
Cameron's diagnosis of modernity's bargain — forgetting the "complicated" body of the mystical and phatic tradition for something "more simple" lets a process be maximized, but "in the maximization, you also maximize the blindness that was a part of the simplification that first allowed the efficiency," so peak efficiency and peak blindness arrive together.
"So that's where we're at in the history of the world, is that we have simplified things to enable the greatest possible efficiency, but that's tied to the greatest possible blindness."
Change parted from the eternals — people do change, but the eternals themselves have dissolved, so the laws of media are eternal only as Galileo's are; and the wanderer named the figure posthuman society depends on
Cameron's figure of the wanderer — because "death and sickness and craziness and war" destroy context, "posthuman society is dependent upon wanderers," the un-paid, un-ruled scholars (himself and Bob among them) whose task is to redefine context and "retrieve human solidarity" after each collapse.
"Posthuman society is dependent upon wanderers, people that go beyond defined context to redefine and to retrieve human solidarity in the face of these recurrent collapses."
The reading compressed to its premise — McLuhan opened a field, not a subject, and the chemistry analogy that has recurred for fifty sessions is finally made load-bearing rather than illustrative
Cameron states the claim his whole reading rests on in its most compact form — McLuhan's subject was never media but a field, physical nature plus human nature, and every misreading follows from taking the artifacts as the object rather than as the field's data.
"So we need to understand that the whole key to McLuhan is that there is another discipline, another whole field aside from that of physical nature, and that field is physical nature plus human nature... the physical nature plus human nature is what he calls the interior landscape."
The method to match the field — Cameron's recurring analogy to chemistry after Mendeleev is here made load-bearing, so that pattern recognition is a discipline's operation, and the popular sense of the phrase is what keeps the discipline from existing.
"Pattern recognition is a precise technical term referring to something like what chemists began to see in physical nature around 1800."
The program stated in its shortest form and then, in the same session, its own method ruled out — having spent an hour on explication he concedes talk is not a possibility, and closes by naming the renunciation the whole series has implied: quit being the steersman and think from the dominations instead
The shortest statement of the program Cameron has been drafting for the whole series — survival made contingent on a single methodological extension, which converts McLuhan from a critic of media into the author of an unbuilt science.
"What he sometimes called the possibility of survival depended upon us emerging into a world where not only physical nature, but also psychological nature would be subject to common study."
His standing refusal of the advice-to-power question, given a rule rather than a mood — no content can travel without a shared medium, so the Oval Office scenario is malformed rather than merely unpromising.
"there's no message that can be given to people if they don't understand the medium of the message."
Fifty years of failure entered as evidence rather than complaint — the refusal is general enough to be a property of the material, which is what licenses calling it radioactive rather than calling people lazy.
"Even people of goodwill, even people that have a decent mind, as soon as they're confronted With the possibility of common work on the interior landscape, that is to say human experience, they cannot do it. I've had this experience for at least 50 years."
The concession that reorganizes the session — having spent an hour on explication, Cameron rules explication out, which is what makes Bob's unexplained device the only live candidate in the room.
"But talk is not a possibility. 5,000 years of civilization shows that."
The method stated as a renunciation rather than a technique — mastery is the obstacle, so the discipline is submission, and this is why he has spent the series refusing the guru position his blog could have won him.
"the only possible answer is to quit being the steersman of the process and allow the process to dominate you."
The field he is usually taken to belong to is named as the error itself — media ecology surveys dominations from a vantage that presumes it stands outside them, which is the steersmanship he has just ruled out.
"That's what media ecology amounts to. Media ecology is the steersman, seeing the different forms of..."
The series' most direct statement of where he is going next — Shinto's elemental forces offered not as belief but as a worked example of thinking from dominations, the positive form of the renunciation he has just described.
"I want to learn more about how one thinks from the elements."
The renunciation of the previous session given its positive counterpart — waking redefined as contraction into a particular rather than release from one, and the disconnect between the two men named as the productive condition of the whole form
His sharpest formulation of the contemporary settlement — the categories are not merely inescapable but universally conceded to be so, which turns acclimatization into the age's principal occupation and makes the cul-de-sac a matter of consent rather than of ignorance.
"And so the whole world is involved in the business of getting used to our prisons."
The correction he has been making for fifty-nine sessions applied to the word waking itself — awakening is a contraction into a particular, not an expansion into omniscience, which quietly bars the transcendental reading Bob's sources keep inviting.
"Being awake is inherently to be limited, to be a certain person in a certain place at a certain time and to be a kind of selection of the possibilities that are before you."
His account of what the dialogue form is actually doing, offered from inside it — the gap between the two men is not an obstacle the sessions work to close but the condition that lets them produce anything at all.
"When people talk, as we're talking now, they don't merge their points of view or their personalities. They make... sense by making. And there's an inherent disconnect that's part of the connection."
The ruling that gives the session its shape — every route to a human center runs through an anchoring act, and none of them is legitimate, so the search is not merely unfinished but improperly constituted.
"You don't get to the subject or to the anthropomorphic except by... throwing out some kind of anchor. But no anchor has legitimacy."
Turns the interrogation around on himself — pressed all night on what his own medium is and what bias he is running, he answers with a vocation rather than a programme, and in the same stretch withdraws a reading he had supplied only three weeks earlier, so the session shows the method being applied by its author to his own positions
His answer to Bob's charge of indifference is to accept it and give it a horizon — the encyclopedic work is addressed to readers who do not exist yet, which is what makes present reception irrelevant rather than disappointing.
"I feel like I'm writing for an audience in a thousand years."
Asked what he would say from a podium to billions, he declines the premise entirely — the reply describes a practice and its obligation, not a message, and refuses any claim about effect.
"I feel like I go into a studio of an artist where I have a whole bunch of canvases. Some of them I've started to paint on. Some of them I haven't. And I paint."
The session's method turned on its user — asked to name the bias in his own ecological concern, he neither denies having one nor treats it as a flaw, which is the only consistent answer available on his own account of bias.
"one of them is a bias that regards our situation in the world as a gift and as a responsibility."
The limit of the vocation, stated flatly — the obligation is to the work, not to persuading a neighbour, which is what separates his position from the missionary reading Bob keeps testing him for.
"I don't feel any responsibility about that whatsoever."
The forward commitment the series has been circling — McLuhan's formulations are treated as unfinished rather than sacred, with "the medium is the message" named as the first candidate for redefinition.
"But I think that the time has come for some of the things that McLuhan was talking about to be better defined."
Takes the whole session as an exposition of his own method — the chemistry of 1800 laid out end to end for the first time, and the 1998 failure at Stahlman's finally given the content it was reaching for
The historical principle that governs his whole account of scientific revolution, and the sentence he uses to block Bob's decline narrative — every sharpening of focus buys its inventions by abstracting from something that does not go away.
"But no advance is made without a retreat."
His most unguarded account of what the series cost to begin — he recognized Bob at Stahlman's in 1998 and could not reach him, and had by then been failing to be understood for so long that the failure carried no sting. The equanimity is the biographical fact, not the disappointment.
"but you gave me your book, and I knew from some of the things that you were saying that you had an intuition of some of the things that I had an intuition about. And so it was a little bit disappointing to me that I was unable to sort of reach across and communicate with you. On the other hand, I'd already had at least 30 years of the same experience, so it didn't surprise me or depress me."
The self-cancelling trap he sets for every account of the electric age, his own included — any formulation that puts the electric past the visual has already reverted to visual thinking, which is why the required articulation must be "inclusive" rather than successive.
"If the electric is essentially tactile space in the middle, if the electric is the intuition of the importance of media as middles, then The idea that the electric goes beyond the visual doesn't work, because if the electric is opposed to the visual, that's no longer electric. That's no longer tactile. That's falling back into the visual."
His counter to Bob's making of devices, and the closest the session comes to a statement of his own vocation — what the two of them manufacture is access, not objects, and the environment they are opening is old rather than arriving.
"But aren't we trying to make something? We're trying to make accessible the new environment. The new environment that's perpetually there, that always has been there. The new environment that is the ancient environment."
Sets the constraint the whole session runs under — that a pair held together must stay two — and then applies it to the pair in the room, refusing to let his own agreement with Bob collapse the difference between them
Cameron's governing rule, issued in the fourth minute and never relaxed — inclusiveness that fuses is not inclusiveness, which is why the yin-yang fails and why he keeps declining Bob's equations for the rest of the night.
"But the two needs to be preserved as two."
The governing rule turned inward — what Bob offered as a fact about pairs of people Cameron relocates inside a single person, so the difference that must stay two is not social but constitutive of any self at all.
"the consciousness and unconsciousness, they can never be made commensurable."
Arrives with the synthesis the whole series has been circling — pre-tribal awareness, the art formula and the stem cell named as one thing — and states for the first time that Bob's quotations, not his own reading, are what made it visible
His governing metaphor for the series arrives — a single polymorphous structure that is never met as itself, only in the expressions it makes possible.
"I think that what McLuhan was trying to do was set out what might be called the stem cell of human consciousness, or the stem cell structure of human experience."
He frames the session as the resolution of a decades-old private impasse, not a new reading — which is why he treats Bob's quotations as evidence rather than illustration.
"I've spent many years talking about how difficult and obscure the idea of the subject is in McLuhan."
The plainest statement yet of the asymmetry he keeps refusing — he takes the dialogue as a source of his own thinking, not a venue for expounding it.
"I not only enjoy our conversations, I learn from them."
What changed for him in one session, stated precisely — the same material moves from open question to recognizable pattern without the question being closed off.
"it was a discovery that, for me, it was always a question. And what your different quotation suggested is that it's actually more than a question. It's a pattern."
States his own position as a position for the first time rather than arriving at it by correction — asked directly what divides him from Bob, he names the whole difference as a refusal of historical difference itself, and spends the session applying that refusal to every novelty Bob offers
He names the disagreement at its root rather than at any of its instances — not whether Bob's terms are right but whether the going-beyond they presuppose is available at all.
"The big issue, Bob, is that I think you want to say that there is such a thing as going beyond McLuhan."
His synchronic reading given in one sentence, which is why every historical marker Bob produces in this session can be answered the same way — by relocating it from the sequence to the structure.
"I take the view that McLuhan was talking about something that is always going on with human beings right from the moment they stopped being grunt people up until now."
The most explicit statement of his method in the archive — history is not denied but demoted to replay, which lets him keep every one of Bob's observations while refusing all of Bob's conclusions.
"And so the historic difference doesn't mean anything to me. Historic difference is always only a different play of possibilities, a different replay in the global theater."
Lands the autonomy argument on a single test case — the election of roles is made to explain a biographical fact, and the cul-de-sac question becomes what spectrum autonomy runs across
His account of autonomy reaches its most compact form — freedom is not choosing within a role but electing among roles, which is why a religious commitment can be evidence of autonomy rather than its surrender.
"So it's that freedom that allowed McLuhan to be a Catholic. And it's that freedom which Kroker doesn't see."
Autonomy is defined operationally — not freedom within a role but election among roles, which is the mechanism the whole cul-de-sac exit has been missing a statement of.
"we're never limited to a role. It's always a question of being confronted with roles, plural, and making an election or making an activation of a certain role."
His plural-time argument reaches its most compact form — freedom is not a property of the person but a dimension of time, which is what the double cover-up conceals.
"Synchronic time is the exercise of freedom."
Connections
Co-host of the dialogue; the two met in 1998 and reconvened two decades later for this series.
Spent about a week at the Coach House in the fall of 1968; McLuhan waved off his Nietzsche/Kuhn framing as "conceptual thinking."
Read The Structure of Scientific Revolutions in detail with Kuhn at Princeton, 1964–65, just after it appeared.
His Princeton thesis advisor; Cameron wrote on Nietzsche's second untimely meditation.
Rorty, then a young faculty member, led his Princeton preceptorials on Sartre, Nietzsche, and Wittgenstein.
The Nietzsche-derived question — is it possible to get out of the cul-de-sac, and how? — that organized his life's work.