Both a McLuhan concept and the title of his 1969 essay collection . As a concept it is nothing physiological — it is McLuhan's term for the field of media understood as the complete spectrum of human experience, analogous to chemistry's claim on the entire physical world. In dialogue 10 it also names the source of Bob Dobbs's "formula chart."
Across the dialogues
Defines the interior landscape — the field of media, not a physiological interior
The interior landscape is nothing interior to the body — McLuhan's 1969 essay title signals the plurality of media as a field, not a physiological interior.
"the interior landscape is nothing sort of interior to the body. It's nothing physiologic. It's an attempt to see if there's some way to utilize the plurality of media to get a new sort of orientation."
The field of media includes everything ever thought or experienced — and everything that could have been — as chemistry (c.1800) claimed the entire physical world.
"The field of media includes everything that has ever been thought or experienced, including everything that could have been thought or experienced."
Bob's decades-long touchstone — pp.31–33 of the second Joyce essay: the stages of apprehension, the drama of cognition, the quiddity of the moment, the art form.
"He goes into using the phrase: stages of apprehension, the drama of cognition, the quiddity of the moment, and the art form."
Supplies the name for Bob's formula chart (the Wyndham Lewis essay)
The name of Bob's "formula chart" comes from the Wyndham Lewis essay that opens Interior Landscape — the modern artist, like the scientist, develops a formula.
"He talked about the modern artist, and that's the first half of the 20th century, like the scientist has a formula, develops a formula."
Named as the science that answers pattern recognition — the pattern of pattern recognition, isolating patterns applicable to war and peace
The interior landscape is the science that answers the regress pattern recognition opens — not "having the pattern" (that would be Königsbergian) but the pattern recognition of pattern recognition.
"So the science of pattern recognition is the pattern recognition of pattern recognition."
Cameron's chemistry analogy — as recognizing chemical structure set off the 19th century, McLuhan "recognized the elements of the interior landscape, called them media," igniting an investigation rather than handing over an answer.
"the science of the interior landscape can only take off when there is significant pattern recognition."
Why the field matters — poetry is a way of isolating patterns that carry over to economics, politics, and war and peace; the interior landscape is not a study of poems but a tool for everything human.
"the consideration of poetry is a way of isolating patterns which can then be applied to the economic world or the political world or to the world of war and peace."
Escalates from a definition of the field into a claim about the interior's own density — set at parity with the exterior, and named as the frontier a barely-begun science must learn to examine
Cameron's parity thesis — the interior can be no simpler than the exterior it perceives (the repeated "interior" is a slip for "exterior"); since the body is run by proteins folded in countless ways, mind and perception must be at least as dense, and examining them is a science barely begun.
"One of my central ideas is that the interior landscape cannot be less complicated than the interior landscape."
The collection's Joyce essay surfaces — Bob recalls McLuhan finding Joyce "a lot more fun" than Lewis there, the Varronian/Menippean contrast in embryo, before either had the word
Bob's evidence that Theall's typology only names something already in McLuhan — the offhand preference registers the split between the joyful and the cynical temperament, so the Varronian/Menippean distinction is native to McLuhan's own criticism, "though McLuhan doesn't use that word."
"McLuhan wrote in Interior Landscape, in his essay on Joyce, one of those two, he says that Joyce was a lot more fun."
The volume finally read at the surface — the 1953 Joyce essay's two schools of art become the Trump book's lens, and McLuhan's foreword line about "mowing down the Kennedys" is lifted from the same book
Bob mines the volume's connective tissue as well as its essays — the foreword's line, that hot politics fails on the cool medium of TV, which Bob and Nelson once spun into the on-air joke that McLuhan had "admitted" a hand in the Kennedy assassination.
"must we continue to mow down the Kennedys to show that … hot politics doesn't work on the cool medium of TV?"
Opened to its widest horizon — defined now as the whole space of possible selves and possible worlds the nomad-subject must range across, and set once more beside chemistry's Mendeleev table as the field a barely-started science will spend the rest of history investigating
The interior landscape given its widest definition — not a physiological interior but the total space of every possible self and every possible world, the field the nomad-subject must "skip between" against the Gutenbergian fixity of a known self and a known world.
"The interior landscape is all of the possible ways of being a self and all of the possible ways of experiencing the world."
Made the load-bearing term of the synchronic case — everything Bob reads as a difference in time is referred back here, and the committee of possibilities that defines it is then set against Bob's proposal that a committee could be convened
The term is given priority over chronology itself — history is not what the landscape moves through but what it expresses, so differences in time are properties of something that does not change with them.
"the chronological expression of human beings always depends upon the interior landscape, the Global Village within, that is what gets expressed over time."
The landscape is redescribed as a standing committee of possibilities, which turns Bob's political proposal inside out: there is nothing to convene, only something already convened that selection draws on at every moment.
"The committee is what human beings always come from."
Connections
McLuhan's 1969 essay collection, and his term for the field of media as the whole spectrum of experience.
The drama of cognition and the stages of apprehension are aspects of the interior landscape.
Bob's path of personality set against Cameron's "abrogation of personality" — the science of the interior landscape.
Cameron ties Bohr's superposition — "the middle position of both together" — to McLuhan's tactility and to quantum computing.