C. K. Ogden and I. A. Richards' 1923 book, and the archive's single most-used piece of connective tissue. It does three jobs here that no other title does at once: it carries Malinowski's appendix on phatic communion, which is where Bob's own vocabulary ultimately comes from; it is the book by the Cambridge professor whose rhetoric course McLuhan took in 1935; and it is the volume Bob puts in the hands of Joyce and Duchamp in early-1920s Paris. The pair consistently date it to 1922, the year of the meeting rather than of publication. Start at dialogue 54 for the story of the held press.
Across the dialogues
Enters sideways, as the container for someone else's appendix rather than as a book with an argument of its own
The book is introduced by what was bolted onto it, which sets the pattern — for this archive its contents matter less than its function as a place where two lineages were bound into one volume.
"So the Meaning of Meaning by Richards has an essay by Malinowski as one of its appendices."Cameron McEwen, The Resonant Interval, Dialogue 5 (10 Dec 2020), 26:59
Acquires a scene — a press held open in 1922 for a returning anthropologist — which turns a citation into an origin story Bob can tell
The anecdote does the work a citation cannot — a press stopped mid-run dramatizes how contingent the term's survival was, which is why Bob tells it rather than simply attributing the word.
"And so they held up the publication of the meaning of meaning so he could put in his essay explaining how these tribal people did Phatic. He named Phatic communication."Bob Dobbs, The Resonant Interval, Dialogue 54 (4 Aug 2022), 1:46:56
Promoted to a hinge in the teaching lineage, the book that puts Richards in the room with McLuhan and with the Paris modernists at once
Two separate lineages are collapsed into one sentence, and the compression is the point — the same book reaches McLuhan through a classroom and the modernists through Paris, which is how the series makes its favourite figures contemporaries.
"I.A. Richards was one of McLuhan's professors at Cambridge. He wrote a book, The Meaning of Meaning, which was an important influence on James Joyce and Marcel Duchamp."Bob Dobbs, The Resonant Interval, Dialogue 57 (29 Sep 2022), 2:06:25
The relation is narrowed to what the record supports — a course roll, not a friendship — which is Cameron's habitual correction to Bob's warmer version of the same connection.
"I.A. Richards, who wrote The Meaning of Meaning in 1922 and was giving a course on rhetoric in 1935, which McLuhan took."Cameron McEwen, The Resonant Interval, Dialogue 57 (29 Sep 2022), 2:08:59
The book becomes a scene rather than a text, its readers placed in one room — the move that lets Bob treat modernism as a conversation someone could have overheard.
"he and Joyce at the same time are reading The Meaning of Meaning in the early 20s and talking to Peggy Guggenheim about it."Bob Dobbs, The Resonant Interval, Dialogue 58 (13 Oct 2022), 54:48
Turned back on Bob himself, cited as the ultimate source of a term he had been using as his own
The citation is turned on Bob, tracing a term he uses as his own back through two authors to a book — and supplying the 1923 date the pair's earlier tellings had lost.
"I would say that the word phatic you got from Malinowski. Yes. Richards' 1923 book, Meaning of Meaning, which is interesting in itself."Cameron McEwen, The Resonant Interval, Dialogue 80 (14 Dec 2023), 1:09:06
Connections
Richards' book with C. K. Ogden — the one the archive always names him through.
Malinowski's essay on phatic communion was added as an appendix, the press held up to fit it in.
The book is where the term enters circulation, and where Bob's own use of it ultimately comes from.
Bob places it in the hands of Joyce and Duchamp in early-1920s Paris.