A real image-to-sound reading machine — and, for McLuhan, the master figure of his own work. Cameron draws it out of Finnegans Wake's coinage "'Tis the optophone which ontophanes," which he unpacks as opto (eye) plus phone (ear): the ratio of eye and ear "which shines forth our realities." McLuhan reads Joyce's device in his 1954 essay "New Media as Political Forms" (Explorations 3) and calls the "optophone principle" the thing "his whole life was about." The device was also literal — invented by E. E. Fournier d'Albe to let a blind reader hear print as musical tones — which is what lets the episode braid Joyce, McLuhan, and the science of sensory translation into one thread.
Across the dialogues
Introduced as the hinge between Joyce's word and McLuhan's whole project — the eye-ear ratio named in the Wake, and a real reading-machine whose history ties Joyce, McLuhan's mentor, and the science of sensory translation together
Cameron locates the optophone first as Joyce's Wake-word — opto (eye) and phone (ear), so it names the eye-ear ratio through which realities "shine forth."
"'Tis the optophone which ontophanes."
reading McLuhan's 1954 essay, Cameron insists the optophone is also a real instrument — the literal machine that makes Joyce's figure more than metaphor.
"The optophone is an instrument for turning images into sounds."
Cameron elevates the device to a principle — the "optophone principle" McLuhan never developed further yet which, on Cameron's reading, is what "his whole life was about."
"But his optophone principle in art... provides the key for future literary and social education."