Wyndham Lewis' 1926 book, one of the five or six that came out of the enormous manuscript he wrote between 1923 and 1925. In this archive it functions less as a book than as an address: p.111, where a single paragraph names the ideologic machine, figures escape from it as a mammal growing wings, and hands McLuhan the sentence about art and science as "the very material" that he will build his 1944 Lewis essay around. Cameron reaches the page by Google Books search mid-session; Bob recognizes the title from the phrase "by which men are governed" before it is found. Enter through episode 76, where the paragraph is read whole and then taken apart word by word.
Across the dialogues
Turns from a cited source into the session's primary text — a single paragraph on a single page is read, re-read and fought over for an hour, and the book becomes the place where the pair's oldest disagreement finally has a fixed wording to argue against
The provenance is established live — an unattributed quotation McLuhan embedded in 1944 is tracked back mid-session to a page number, which converts a floating epigraph into a citable position in Lewis' argument.
"It's from The Art of Being Ruled, page 111."Cameron McEwen, The Resonant Interval, Dialogue 76 (2 Nov 2023), 1:00:06
Bob identifies the book from its title's logic rather than from memory of the text — the phrase "by which men are governed" is the art of being ruled, so the quotation names its own source.
"that's what I kept thinking, The Art of Being Ruled. That's what he was saying in that sentence by which we were governed."Bob Dobbs, The Resonant Interval, Dialogue 76 (2 Nov 2023), 1:00:10
The paragraph's governing condition, and the one Cameron will hold Bob to all session — escape is rare and individual, not a historical development that a whole era can undergo.
"In a very small percentage of cases, better brains and good social opportunities enable a person to extricate himself from this ideologic machine."Wyndham Lewis, read by Cameron McEwen, The Resonant Interval, Dialogue 76 (2 Nov 2023), 1:06:59
Lewis' image for what escape feels like from inside, and the sentence the session treats as the whole book's charge to McLuhan.
"like the mammal growing wings, he exists thenceforth in another and freer element."Wyndham Lewis, read by Cameron McEwen, The Resonant Interval, Dialogue 76 (2 Nov 2023), 1:00:49
The book is recast as an assignment — not a precursor McLuhan happened to read, but the text that set the terms of the problem he would spend forty years failing to complete.
"Here is Lewis saying in The Art of Being Ruled in 1926, he's defining what it is that McLuhan has to think."Cameron McEwen, The Resonant Interval, Dialogue 76 (2 Nov 2023), 1:00:59
The trap closes on the reader — the free element is precisely not where the arts and sciences are, so the people conventionally taken to be free are the ones most thoroughly inside the machine.
"But this free region is not conterminous with the arts and sciences."Wyndham Lewis, read by Cameron McEwen, The Resonant Interval, Dialogue 76 (2 Nov 2023), 1:01:18
The paragraph's sting, and the reason it survives its century — it disqualifies the culture's designated free spirits in the same breath that it grants freedom exists.
"and free spirits do not, as is popularly supposed, inhabit the bodies of men of science or artists."Wyndham Lewis, read by Cameron McEwen, The Resonant Interval, Dialogue 76 (2 Nov 2023), 1:12:45
The paragraph's last clause refuses the exemption every commentator wants — there is no vantage outside the material from which to teach it, which is why Bob returns to the line at the session's close as its verdict on the two of them.
"and the teacher is usually as much a dupe as the learner."Wyndham Lewis, read by Cameron McEwen, The Resonant Interval, Dialogue 76 (2 Nov 2023), 1:13:08
The book's status as one outcropping of a single buried mass — which is why its paragraphs read as denser than their context and why so much of Lewis remains unpublished.
"1,500 pages he was writing, 23, 24, 25, and then, you know, five or six, seven books come out of that from 26 to 30."Bob Dobbs, The Resonant Interval, Dialogue 76 (2 Nov 2023), 1:00:27
The session ends where its middle was spent — the page number becomes the pair's shared coordinate, the thing each will now read separately before the next session.
"Okay, I'll go look that up in my copy of The Art of Being Ruled, page 111."Bob Dobbs, The Resonant Interval, Dialogue 76 (2 Nov 2023), 2:26:20
Connections
Lewis' 1926 book, one of the two he wrote out of the 1,500-page manuscript of 1923–25 that also produced Time and Western Man.
The page-111 paragraph is where the ideologic machine is named, and where extrication from it is figured as a mammal growing wings.
One of the two Lewis books McLuhan quotes on practically every page of his 1944 essay, and the source of the "art and science are the very material" sentence he builds that essay around.