Cambridge critic whom Cameron, in Dialogue 11, names as "a continuing important influence on McLuhan." McLuhan attended Richards's mid-1930s lectures on rhetoric and later took up his notion of "feed forward" — coming back on oneself, the self-correction Bob and Cameron keep circling. But Cameron reads Richards as "a determined materialist" for whom all language was material and limited, so he "never got out of the cul-de-sac" — a friend of Eliot, and a mountaineer in whom Cameron hears the dialectic of sky and earth.
Across the dialogues
Cast as McLuhan's long, ambivalent debt — feed forward without the materialism
McLuhan was "talking about the same thing" as Richards but found him too psychological and materialistic — which is why he would flip to Leavis.
"he saw Richards as being too psychological, too materialistic."Cameron McEwen, The Resonant Interval, Dialogue 11 (21 Jan 2021), 46:17
Richards's 1950s "feed forward" is cast as an early name for the recursive self-correction the dialogue keeps circling — giving McLuhan's loop of the medium turning back on itself a source in Richards.
"later by Richards notion in the 1950s of feed forward which was basically the notion you were just talking about of coming back on oneself"Cameron McEwen, The Resonant Interval, Dialogue 11 (21 Jan 2021), 48:15
Cameron reads the mountaineering Richards as living out the dialectic of reference to the sky and humiliation to the earth.
"he was a mountaineer so both he and his wife they climbed many of the highest mountains on earth"Cameron McEwen, The Resonant Interval, Dialogue 11 (21 Jan 2021), 52:14
Enrolled in the serious "we" — grouped with Eliot, Empson, McLuhan and Leavis as the exacting minority against the crowd's "regular we"
Richards is named in Cameron's serious "we" — the exacting minority (with Eliot, Empson, McLuhan, Leavis) whose "we" is nothing like the crowd's, the party fit to retrieve the Greek world of contemplation.
"There's a very big difference between the we of Eliot, Richards, Empson, and McLuhan."Cameron McEwen, The Resonant Interval, Dialogue 24 (29 Apr 2021), 1:08:55
Connections
A continuing influence — McLuhan took up his "feed forward," even as he found Richards too material to escape the cul-de-sac.
In the 1930s McLuhan was "decidedly Leavis versus Richards"; over forty years he became less Leavis and more Richards.