The American journalism scholar, at the University of Illinois when Cameron McEwen rereads him, whose 1970 essay is offered in dialogue 62 as the beginning of the misreading the series exists to correct: McLuhan as unreserved champion of the electronic. He is a double figure here. The reading is dismissed hard by both speakers, but the session's most quoted line about him concerns McLuhan's refusal to be annoyed — correspondence and an invitation to smoke rather than a rebuttal — and Cameron uses the whole passage to draw the distinction he says marks thinking from its absence. New to it — read the one-sided-reading exchange first, then Bob's 1998 encounter.
Across the dialogues
Enters as the named origin of a reading the series has been arguing against for sixty sessions without giving it a author — and doubles, in the same stretch, as the occasion for the session's most useful distinction, between disagreeing with a reader and treating his name as an idea
The charge is not that Carey got a detail wrong but that he founded a genre — a reading whose durability, not its content, is what makes it worth naming fifty years on.
"And what Carey does is take McLuhan one-sidedly as being the unreserved champion of the electronic. And that one-sided reading of McLuhan is a continuing sort of shtick of the academic world."
The diagnosis is method rather than conclusion — a critic who never reaches the text because the surrounding names do the arguing for him.
"He was a one-level guy, and, you know, in the essays that I was reading, I mean, it's ridiculous how... He attempts to talk about McLuhan by talking about everybody else."
The session's sharpest general rule, arrived at through a particular grievance — and one both speakers immediately find themselves subject to when the Plato–Aristotle question comes up an hour later.
"You always know when people are not thinking, when they use names as ideas."
The anecdote is doing structural work — it supplies the behaviour the session's account of McLuhan's comedy requires, detachment as technique rather than temperament.
"Carey wrote these ridiculous papers about McLuhan, and McLuhan didn't get angry about it."
The word is the session's own — impercipience is what War and Peace in the Global Village names as the condition of historical man, so McLuhan's indifference reads as consistency, not generosity.
"He didn't care that Carey was impercipient."
Connections
The one-sided reading Cameron says began with Carey in 1970 and is still running in Kroker's recent book.
Bob reports Theall taking the argument with Carey personally and targeting him for years.
McLuhan's response to the papers was correspondence and an invitation, not anger.