McLuhan's term for the unconscious staging that precedes any act of perception, and one of the recurring pieces of vocabulary the two speakers use differently. Bob treats the stages as a sequence — the background that has to be laid before the Tech Body can be described. Cameron treats the word "stages" theatrically rather than chronologically. Dialogue 80 is where the difference surfaces and gets resolved.
Across the dialogues
Moves from a phrase Bob uses structurally to a term Cameron takes apart — the disagreement over whether it implies chronology forces the archive's clearest statement of what the stages actually stage
In the pamphlet the stages do structural work — they are the ramp the argument climbs before it can name its subject.
"But all this background, the stages of apprehension, which implies chronology, is the preparation for the far more difficult and strange situation of the Tech Body."Bob Dobbs, The Resonant Interval, Dialogue 80 (14 Dec 2023), 1:30:25
The correction is precise and narrow: Bob may use them chronologically, but he cannot attribute that use to McLuhan.
"When you say the stages of apprehension imply chronology, they don't for McLuhan."Cameron McEwen, The Resonant Interval, Dialogue 80 (14 Dec 2023), 1:30:45
The term is a transposition, not a periodization — what McLuhan borrowed was the layered production of an utterance, moved wholesale onto media.
"What McLuhan does with the stages of apprehension is take the stages of language speaking and apply it to media."Marshall McLuhan, read by Cameron McEwen, The Resonant Interval, Dialogue 80 (14 Dec 2023), 1:31:04
The content of the stages is everything a speaker does not decide — the term names the machinery under a word, not the steps in front of it.
"there's a lot of stages that go into the choice of a word. the intonation of a word and the grammar around a word. There's all sorts of things that are almost entirely unconscious. And that unconscious staging is what McLuhan calls the stages of apprehension."Marshall McLuhan, read by Cameron McEwen, The Resonant Interval, Dialogue 80 (14 Dec 2023), 1:31:25
The pun in the English word is doing the work — "staged" as mounted for performance, which lets the term keep a sequence without committing to a timeline.
"So you could say that in the stages of apprehension, there are not only stages that are chronological, but not in the normal sense of chronology. It's also staged in the sense of a play, of a theater."Cameron McEwen, The Resonant Interval, Dialogue 80 (14 Dec 2023), 1:31:50
Bob takes the second English pun and turns the whole sequence into a mounting dread, which is how the term earns its place in a chapter about the Tech Body.
"because apprehension means not only understanding, I also include the anxiety meaning of apprehension. So we've got progressive horrors until we get to the Tech Body."Bob Dobbs, The Resonant Interval, Dialogue 80 (14 Dec 2023), 1:32:06
Connections
Cameron's account has McLuhan transposing the unconscious staging of speech onto media.
In Bob's pamphlet the stages are the run-up — the background whose completion is the Tech Body.