Through the Vanishing Point (1968), McLuhan's book with Harley Parker on space in poetry and painting, and the phrase the dialogues put to work in two directions. Bob first frames the book as Parker's to carry out , then uses "the vanishing point" as the mark of Gutenbergian, single-perspective thinking ; Cameron flips it into a threshold — words hold meaning only on the far side of it . New to it — start with dialogue 43 for Cameron's reading.
Across the dialogues
Enters by attribution — the project Bob says was left to Parker to carry out
Bob attributes the book to Parker's initiative — with Carpenter out of the picture, the Through the Vanishing Point project falls to Parker, whom Bob rates as "important" to McLuhan's work on perception.
"So that leaves room for Parker to do through the vanishing point."
Turned into a diagnosis — the "analytical conception whose vanishing point is the horizon between reality and meaning," Bob's example of Gutenbergian thinking
Bob makes the vanishing point a symptom — the single-perspective "analytical conception" that fixes a horizon "between reality and meaning" is, for Bob, "really Gutenbergian," the visual bias the phrase names.
"one is dependent on the analytical conception whose vanishing point is the horizon between reality and meaning."
Given its positive sense — Cameron's reading that words hold meaning only on the far side of the vanishing point, a crossing into tactility
Cameron inverts Bob's diagnosis into a method — meaning lives past the vanishing point, so getting at the meaning of words requires crossing it, a move he equates with the passage into tactility or electricity.
"The words do have meaning but they don't have meaning on this side of the vanishing point. They only have meaning on the other side of the vanishing point."
Cameron names the crossing — the vanishing point as one more name for the shift into tactility or the electric, aligning the perceptual threshold with the whole series' acoustic/electric turn.
"and that vanishing point is one way of talking about tactility or electricity."
Turned from a McLuhan title into the condition on every question the session raised — not one topic among others but the passage all of them require, and the thing each of the usual responses is a way of not doing
The book's title is made a precondition rather than a subject — the session's questions cannot even be posed without the passage, which is why the answers on offer everywhere else are answers to something smaller.
"All of these questions, in order to be even addressed as questions, require going Through the Vanishing Point."
Wanting to do something is itself named as the evasion, which puts McLuhan scholarship, foreign policy and legislation on one footing as varieties of the same refusal.
"what people want to do with McLuhan or what people want to do about Ukraine or what people want to do about lawmaking or anything, all of these things are ways of avoiding going Through the Vanishing Point."
Connections
The book McLuhan wrote with Parker; Bob frames it as the project Parker was "left room" to do.
Cameron reads the vanishing point as another name for the crossing into tactility or electricity, where words find their meaning.