Canadian poet and playwright, McLuhan's co-author on From Cliché to Archetype (1970). In dialogue 04 he is the recipient of McLuhan's October 1964 letter — written alongside the "Notes on Burroughs" — that casts the modernists as would-be "world engineers" and pharaohs who "made of the world a perception lab."
Across the dialogues
The October 1964 letter — McLuhan's "world engineers" and the pharaonic "perception lab," twin to the Burroughs notes
McLuhan's October 1964 letter to Watson was written in tandem with the "Notes on Burroughs" — the two converge on the same point.
"It's a letter to Wilfred Watson, from October 1964. So it's written just at the same time that McLuhan must have been writing his notes on Burroughs."
In the Watson letter, McLuhan casts the modernist artists as would-be "world engineers" and pharaohs — a priesthood out to remake perception, "a perception lab."
"I find it a bit staggering to confront Lewis as a man who really wanted to be Pontifex of a magical priesthood. Their priesthood was to create new worlds of perception. They were to be world engineers who shaped the totality. Such were the pharaohs. They made of the world a perception lab."
The addressee of the closing letter — McLuhan October 1964 note on Lewis, Yeats, Joyce, and Pound as "world engineers" becomes the episode frame for the artist power to sign reality
From McLuhan's October 1964 letter to Watson, Cameron reads the Lewis gloss — art as "totally environmental," "the content of nothing whatsoever" — the ambition to "sign reality into being" that Bob ties to the Tech Body.
"art must be totally environmental. It must be the content of nothing whatsoever."
The collaboration is entered into the sequence of failures — it follows the Skornia compromise and precedes the brain surgery, one more attempt that "broke down completely"
Cameron places the collaboration in a pattern rather than treating it as an episode — after the NAEB compromise, the Watson dialogue is the next strategy tried and abandoned, and the illnesses track the attempts.
"Yeah, yeah, but that broke down completely."
Connections
Co-author of From Cliché to Archetype (1970); recipient of McLuhan's October 1964 "world engineers" letter.
Co-wrote From Cliché to Archetype with McLuhan.
The Watson letter and the "Notes on Burroughs" were written together (Oct–Nov 1964), converging on the pharaonic "perception lab."