The American novelist as McLuhan read him — the subject of McLuhan's 1951 essay "Dos Passos: Technique vs. Sensibility." Cameron takes the essay's account of discontinuous juxtaposition as a mirror of Bob's chart, and later places Dos Passos as one of McLuhan's two literary extremes. New to it — start with dialogue 14 for the 1951 essay.
Across the dialogues
Enters through McLuhan's 1951 essay "Dos Passos: Technique vs. Sensibility" — discontinuous juxtaposition as the technique Cameron sees mirrored in the chart
Cameron reads McLuhan's 1951 Dos Passos essay as "exactly what you are miming in your chart" — discontinuous juxtaposition as the technique that first made the whole ambition thinkable.
"until the technique of discontinuous juxtaposition was brought into play, it was not even possible to entertain such an ambition"
Recast as one extreme — Dos Passos knowing the surface but "not what's going on in the surface," the materialist pole against the idealist
Cameron places Dos Passos as one of McLuhan's two extremes — the materialist surface without remove, against the platonic/idealist pole, a "Gilson take" joining Rupert Lodge to Cambridge.
"he has a very good idea of the surface, but he doesn't know what's going on in the surface"
Connections
McLuhan's 1951 essay "Dos Passos: Technique vs. Sensibility" — discontinuous juxtaposition as the enabling technique.