McLuhan's term for what the televised sports replay does to perception, and the concept Bob puts at the front of his Trump / Tech Body book as its only Tetrad. The pair take it well past the television set: Cameron argues that the replay is not a broadcasting technique but the shape of experience itself, which is why McLuhan could call it "the externalizing of the cognitive principle." New to it — start with dialogue 58, where the reading of The Implications of Cultural Uniformity turns on it.
Across the dialogues
Promoted from one McLuhan coinage among many into the load-bearing term of the whole reading — the sports replay turns out to name what experience is doing vertically at every second, so the series now has a single mechanism under roles, metaphor and pattern recognition alike
The sentence the whole session turns on — read aloud as a question McLuhan leaves open, it makes the replay an externalization rather than a technology.
"Is not the instant replay, the externalizing of the cognitive principle itself?"
Cameron's generalization strips the term of its media referent — because the form of any experience is already there before the experience, replaying is what experiencing is, and the TV replay merely makes it visible.
"So all experience is an instant replay."
Bob's editorial decision is offered as evidence for the reading — of everything he could have tetradized, the instant replay is the book's single Tetrad and its opening symbol.
"and that's why I picked one tetrad."
The replay is identified with metaphor and with tactility, which is why it cannot be grounded in anything further — the point where the concept turns from analysis into what Cameron calls the mystery of creation.
"Because the instant replay is the exercise of metaphor."
Connections
Cameron reads the televised replay as the outward form of the cognitive principle — the stages of apprehension running at every second of experience.
The replay is the exercise of metaphor and of tactility, and so cannot itself be grounded in anything further.
The 1975 essay supplies the sentence the concept is built on — the replay as "the meaning minus the experience."