The Russian chemist whose 1869 periodic table stands, in these dialogues, for the moment a scattered practice becomes a science that different researchers can share. Cameron McEwen uses him as the far end of the chemical revolution that begins with Lavoisier, and Bob uses him as the yardstick for McLuhan's achievement. Dialogue 63 is where the analogy is worked out at length and then turned against itself.
Across the dialogues
Turns from a passing name for scientific tabulation into the archive's working measure of what McLuhan accomplished — and, in the same breath, into a chart that by its own logic can never be drawn
The table is presented as a terminus rather than a discovery — seventy years of laboratory work culminating in a way of seeing, which is what lets Cameron treat 1800–1869 as a single completed revolution available for transposition.
"what happened beginning around 1800 and then coming to fruition with Mendeleev's table in 1869, what happens is that chemistry introduces a new way of looking at the environment."
Bob supplies the transposition the whole session has been building toward, and it is his own — Joyce, Eliot, Pound and Lewis isolated the elements of the new environment; McLuhan was the one who tabulated them. Cameron accepts it as a statement of his own theory.
"They were the Lavoisier level, or times, and Marshall McLuhan was Mendeleev's periodic chart level."
The enumeration that gives the analogy actual content — three positions crossed with two intensities, the combinatorial structure Cameron has been carrying since the failed 1998 conversation at Mark Stahlman's.
"the the visual slash audile can have an emphasis on the visual. It can also have an emphasis on the audile. It can also have an emphasis on the middle. And the emphasis in each one of these cases can be an extreme emphasis or a weak emphasis."
The payoff of the chemistry analogy, and the point where it stops being an analogy — what the visual/audile structure yields is not like a periodic table but is one, with experience rather than matter as its elements.
"And so what you end up with, looking at this structure, is a kind of Mendeleev's table of the elementary ways in which human experience unfolds."
Cameron refuses Bob's identification of Understanding Media with the chart, and the refusal matters — McLuhan published the consequences of a table he never set down, which is why the archive keeps mistaking the effects for the instrument.
"it's a book concerned with what happens when you look at the world in this way. So it's the effects of Mendeleev's chart."
His table becomes the model for the private pole's plurality — the originary faculty is said to be multiple in the way the elements are, which is what stops the stem cell from collapsing into a single principle
The periodic table is used against monism — a structured plurality, not one substance, is what a genesis capable of plural expressions has to look like.
"the field has to be formulated by going back to the original faculty, which is not a singular thing. It's a multiple thing like Mendeleev's table in chemistry."
Connections
The two names mark the two ends of the chemical revolution Cameron uses as his model — isolating the elements, then tabulating them.
Bob's transposition — Joyce and his contemporaries were the Lavoisier level; McLuhan was the periodic-chart level.
Cameron corrects Bob — Understanding Media is not the chart itself but a book about the effects of looking at the world that way.