Bob Dobbs and Cameron McEwen reconvene after a three-to-four-year gap, opening a run of dialogues from a sheaf of questions Cameron had emailed since they last spoke . What begins as a tour of McLuhan’s touchstones — the Drama of Cognition, Finnegans Wake, Wyndham Lewis — tightens by the end into a single consequential reading of what “the medium is the message” really means, and into the “chemistry versus meteorology” distinction that will divide Bob’s and Cameron’s approaches for the rest of the series.
Key Topics
- McLuhan’s “Drama of Cognition” — the whole body making and matching through tactility — serves as the organizing question, with Cameron pressing how an apparently individual process connects to the collective fact of the electric age.
- Cameron argues that the relationship between the Incarnation and the drama of cognition runs in the opposite direction from Bob’s framing: it is the drama of cognition that replays the Incarnation, not the reverse, giving the concept ontological rather than merely psychological grounding.
- McLuhan’s engagement with Finnegans Wake deepened over the decade 1939–1954, from a bar-room first encounter to insisting in class (1951–52) that the Wake was “not a book — it was a radio program.”
- McLuhan credited Wyndham Lewis as the first writer to deal with the media “en bloc” , but came to see Lewis as having merely taken the opposite side from the moderns — for McLuhan, a sign of thoughtlessness rather than insight.
- Cameron’s “chemistry vs. meteorology” metaphor names two modes of reading McLuhan : chemistry as the study of the elements of consciousness, meteorology as mapping the large-scale weather of media epochs.
Notable Quotes
"You have to start with the drama of cognition and then ask, on the basis of that, what is a person, what is a machine."
"It's what my next move is going to be, whether verbal, gestural, or indifferent, that is of interest to the other who just spoke to me. And therein is the drama of cognition."
"When McLuhan says the medium is the message, he's saying that the pattern recognition of the drama of cognition needs to be subject to pattern recognition. And if we can achieve that, then we can achieve survival."
Outline
- 0:00:01 — Opening: a McLuhan quote about dogs and identity
- 0:01:46 — Question 1: Drama of Cognition and the electric age
- 0:05:51 — The Android Meme: technology coming alive
- 0:10:57 — Analogical Mirrors (1943): a mirror in every sense
- 0:14:05 — Finnegans Wake as multi-sensory Esperanto
- 0:15:00 — When McLuhan found the Wake: a biographical reconstruction
- 0:20:25 — McLuhan and Wyndham Lewis: a complex debt
- 0:43:47 — Question 2: How does an age envelop everybody?
- 0:47:01 — Chemistry and meteorology: two approaches to McLuhan
- 0:59:37 — Tower of Babel, Esperanto, and communal willfulness
- 01:10:36 — Whitehead inverted: particulars misplaced as abstractions
- 01:18:01 — Question 3: Acoustic space: “the odd-out”
- 01:26:47 — Undecidability as foundation
- 01:38:04 — Chemistry in 1800: pattern recognition of pattern recognition
Mentioned Resources
Works by McLuhan
- Interior Landscape — Drama of Cognition discussed around p. 32
- “Analogical Mirrors” (1943 essay)
- “James Joyce: Trivial and Quadrivial” (1953) — FW is about “media as art forms”
- “Catholic Humanism and Modern Letters” (1954 lecture)
- “Third Program in the Human Age,” ‘Verbi Voco Visual’ in Explorations #8, 1957 — Lewis dealt with media “en bloc”
- War and Peace in the Global Village (1968)
- Playboy interview (1969)
- From Cliché to Archetype (with Wilfred Watson) — mirror as mind, p. 161
- Laws of Media — wheel-and-axle passage, p. 77
- The Global Village (with Bruce Powers) — resonant interval, p. 4
- McLuhan/Gerald Stearn interview (“Hot and Cool”)
- Tom Snyder interview (TV)
Other Works
- James Joyce, Finnegans Wake — Mutt & Jute dialogue pp. 16–18; “ignorance that implies impression” p. 18
- James Joyce, Stephen Hero — Chinaman and yellow bridges passage
- Barry Nevitt, ABC of Prophecy (1980)
- Alfred North Whitehead, Science and the Modern World — fallacy of misplaced concreteness
- Joseph Campbell, A Skeleton Key to Finnegans Wake (1944)
- Bob Dobbs, “The Cloning of ESP”
- The Social Dilemma (2020 documentary)
People
- Hugh Kenner (literary critic; McLuhan’s interlocutor on Joyce)
- Don Theall (started Finnegans Wake reading group with McLuhan, 1950–51)
- Murray Schafer (in McLuhan’s class 1951–52)
- Barry Nevitt (McLuhan collaborator)
- Richard Cavell (McLuhan scholar; McLuhan in Space, Remediating McLuhan)
- Wyndham Lewis (painter and writer)
Closing
This dialogue earns its place as a first recording precisely because neither speaker lets the other get away with easy formulations — the back-and-forth is itself a demonstration of the drama of cognition they’re trying to describe.