The Romantic poet and critic who enters these dialogues chiefly through McLuhan's use of him — the primary/secondary imagination distinction that From Cliché to Archetype invokes on p.200, and, in Bob's reading, an early detection of "the medium is the message." Dialogue 63 is where the distinction stops being a citation and becomes a term the two speakers apply to themselves.
Across the dialogues
Moves from a name inside a McLuhan citation to a working term the two men use on each other — the primary/secondary distinction becomes the vocabulary for what Bob does all day and what Cameron does in the blog
Coleridge is placed structurally rather than as a source — one of the figures who registered what the chemical revolution's sharp focus was abstracting from, and so belongs on the loss side of Cameron's no-advance-without-a-retreat ledger.
"people like Wordsworth and Coleridge were already trying to say, well, wait a minute. Yeah, we've got these cities that are exploding, but there's also nature and we can't forget nature."
The distinction arrives inside a McLuhan quotation Bob reads aloud, which is how it enters the archive at all — as a borrowed instrument in someone else's argument about the creative process repeating the stages of apprehension.
"the expressionist had discovered that the creative process is a kind of repetition of the stages of apprehension, somewhat along the lines that relates that relate Coleridge's primary and secondary imagination."
Bob's own literary-historical claim from his manuscript, offered without support and worth marking as his: McLuhan's formula is given a Romantic precursor, which puts the medium's priority two generations earlier than the phrase.
"But Coleridge was the first to detect, quote, the medium is the message on a very small scale."
The correction that turns the term on the speaker — Bob has just called his own faculty "perpetual imagination," and Cameron supplies the existing name for it, so the closing exchange about how the two men think is conducted in Coleridge's vocabulary rather than Bob's.
"That's what Coleridge calls primary imagination."
Promoted from a source McLuhan cites to the key that unlocks him — primary imagination read as the stem cell faculty, and Coleridge credited with detecting the medium as the message on the scale of a single consciousness
Coleridge's distinction is taken as the working definition of the private pole — not a poet's faculty but the capacity that makes any acquisition of a world possible.
"Primary imagination is the ability of humans to do secondary imagination. It's the stem cell faculty that humans have that allows them to learn language when they're infants, to grow into a certain society, but to maintain an identity through this generalized experience, generalized language."
Bob's page assigns priority for the formula to Coleridge, with "small scale" meaning the individual consciousness rather than a culture.
"Samuel Taylor Coleridge and William Wordsworth had a letter exchange and debate, but Coleridge was the first to detect the medium as the message on a very small scale."
The reason Bob's attribution holds — the faculty is not a thing that has effects but a self-expressing movement, which is exactly the form of the formula.
"the primary imagination is inherently dynamic. So it's like a medium that expresses itself and therefore is the message."
Connections
The page-200 passage on the creative process as a repetition of the stages of apprehension runs "along the lines that relate Coleridge's primary and secondary imagination."
Cameron identifies Bob's "perpetual imagination" as Coleridge's primary imagination.