Monthly Archives: April 2024

Dobbs: Hand signals for the blind

Bob:

One Spring Day in 1976 I was walking with McLuhan in Queen’s Park, across the street from his Coach House, on our way to the subway. I mentioned the title of a play I had just written: “THE DIRECTOR OF THE CENTRE FOR CULTURE AND TECHNOLOGY”. He didn’t react.

Then about a year later I was telling Marg Stewart, McLuhan’s secretary, how I had given the play a different title: “HAND SIGNALS FOR THE BLIND”.

At that moment McLuhan barged into Marg’s office – I didn’t know he was nearby – and ordered: “Too long. Make it, “HAND SIGNALS”.

I thought this was rather rude and presumptuous — correcting an author’s work.

Later I changed the play considerably but kept the second title: “HAND SIGNALS FOR THE BLIND”.

Editor’s comment:

Bob’s identification of McLuhan as the “Director of the Centre for Culture and Technology” with “Hand Signals for the Blind” is an exacting insight. But what is the meaning, or meanings, of “Hand Signals for the Blind”?

Whenever McLuhan is read as evoking literalisms — ‘media’ as literal speech or books or television, ‘senses’ as literal sight or hearing or touch — his work is transported back into the Gutenberg galaxy, into the reign of literalisms, the reign of the rear-view mirror. The great question posed by him, indeed by thinkers since the dawn of time, is how to signal — communicate — aside from the already-known literalisms in that mirror? Absent this possibility, there could, of course, be no real teaching nor real learning. Especially there could be no language learning by in-fants in the first place.

“HAND SIGNALS FOR THE BLIND” nicely gestures toward that great question. Although the phrase may be taken literally as indicating the problem at stake — how to signal something new that by definition is unknown — and which is unknowable as long as the media between the interlocutors remain incompatible, like visual signaling to the blind — it may also be read as specifying how such communication does indeed take place.

Read aside from the rear-view mirror, “HAND SIGNALS FOR THE BLIND” concerns no literal ‘hand’, no literal ‘blindness’, no literal ‘signal’. It concerns tactility.

In his 1954 lecture, ‘Catholic Humanism and Modern Letters’,1 McLuhan spoke of “the poetic process which is involved in ordinary cognition”.2 That is, all cognition, specifically including the most “ordinary cognition”, implicates the exercise of creativity (“the poetic process”) in the navigation of the possibilities through which it will come to be as this or that particular instance of experience. Cognition of every sort is always some effect of such a prior process, however unconscious that process may be.

Moment to moment this process of possibility-sifting is entirely free — “poetic” as McLuhan says. Experience comes from it, not it from experience. The upshot is that communication between possibilities, and between the realm of possibilities and “ordinary cognition”, is so little problematic (however mysterious and, indeed, wondrous it is) that human being cannot in any way be without it. It — the “fecund interval” — is always already there.

“HAND SIGNALS”, understood non-literally, may be taken to be that incessant exercise of tactility upon which all expressions of human being originally spring. (For discussion and citations from McLuhan’s work see Tactility.)

On this reading of Bob’s title, “HAND SIGNALS FOR THE BLIND” raises the question of how the “blind” artefactual process, the unknown process in which we yet have a “hand”, can be exposed (“signaled”) for investigation. The possibility of that exposure rests on the prior tactility — the resonant interval — that first of all characterizes the relation of possibilities to each other as well as the perpetual, moment to moment, relation of humans to that deep drama.

Here is the etymology of “signal” > sign from the great Online Etymology  site:

early 13c., signe, “gesture or motion of the hand,” especially one meant to express thought or convey an idea, from Old French signe “sign, mark,” from Latin signum “identifying mark, token, indication, symbol; proof; military standard, ensign; a signal, an omen; sign in the heavens, constellation.”

 

  1. ‘Catholic Humanism and Modern Letters’ has been reprinted in The Medium and the Light, 160ff. ↩
  2. Note the title of McLuhan’s 1951 ‘‘Joyce, Aquinas, and the Poetic Process’. ↩

Dobbs: McLuhan on Nam June Paik

Here’s Bob: 

I met Nam June Paik in New York City in the middle of May, 1975. I told him I would be seeing Marshall McLuhan in Toronto in a couple of days.
He immediately handed me a copy of the May 5 NEW YORKER which featured a long profile of Paik, and asked me to give it to McLuhan as a gift.
When I gave it to McLuhan compliments of Paik, McLuhan said he would read it that evening.
The next day I asked him if he had read the article.
He replied he had.
Then after a pause, he said: “But it’s all just CONTENT.”

Dobbs: McLuhan on copy and original

Bob Dobbs:
McLuhan often quoted a mother showing her new baby to a friend who was expressing the appropriate delight:
“That’s nothing, wait til you see the photograph.”

Some questions from the editor…

We learned in the 1950s that the framed reality on the TV screen was superior to the unframed one outside. But today (2024) everyone is glued to their screens even or especially when they are outside. What did the iPhone do? Put the screen on wheels? Take away the house?

Dobbs: McLuhan on what’s the difference

Another great anecdote from Bob:

McLuhan occasionally would state the wrong date when he was discussing the effects of the Russian/Soviet Sputnik launch in 1957.

He seemed to favor October 17, rather than the correct date, October 4.

I once pointed this out to him.

He replied, “What’s the difference?”

Dobbs: a telling problem

Another memory from Bob Dobbs:

After the end of the formal part of a Monday Night “performance” in 1978, I was eavesdropping on Marshall McLuhan engaging in some intellectual banter with a Professor. 
They were getting into the dialogue deeper and deeper when McLuhan all of a sudden said to his ‘colleague’:
“You’re trying to TELL me something.”
This was the end of their exchange. 

Bio statement from 1944

In 1944 McLuhan began to publish in Sewanee Review1 and Kenyon Review.2 Both were edited by close friends of McLuhan’s close friend, Cleanth Brooks — Andrew Lyttle at Sewanee and John Crowe Ransom at Kenyon — and it is probable that McLuhan gained entry to these journals through Brooks. In fact, Brooks was himself an ‘associate editor’ with Sewanee at this time. 

McLuhan’s second Sewanee piece, ‘Poetic vs Rhetorical Exegesis’, featured the following biographical statement:

H.M. McLuhan teaches at St Louis University,3 worked for three years in Cambridge,4 part of this time with Richards and Leavis.5 He is a former contributor to Sewanee Review.  

The last sentence is rather comical since McLuhan’s ‘former’ contribution to the Sewanee Review had appeared only in the immediately previous number. The importance of this connection with the Sewanee Review for McLuhan lay in the facts that it paid for contributions and added weight to his CV at a time when he was searching for a more lucrative position than he had at SLU. Both reflected McLuhan’s virtually penniless state in 1944 when his wife was pregnant for the second time with what would turn out later that year to be twin girls.6

  1. ‘Edgar Poe’s Tradition’, Sewanee Review, 52:1, 1944; ‘Poetic vs Rhetorical Exegesis’, Sewanee Review, 52:2, 1944; ‘Kipling and Forster’, Sewanee Review, 52:3, 1944. ↩
  2. ‘The Analogical Mirrors’, Kenyon Review, 6:3, 1944. ↩
  3. When this issue of Sewanee Review appeared in the spring of 1944, McLuhan was in the process of leaving SLU for Assumption College in Windsor where he taught from 1944 to 1946. Father Gerald Phelan had set up McLuhan’s job at SLU (as he had done for many Canadians) and was now, it may be supposed, behind the step by step process of bringing McLuhan to Toronto via Windsor. ↩
  4. McLuhan was in Cambridge from 1934 to 1936 as an undergraduate and 1939-1940 as a graduate student. ↩
  5. Describing the time he and McLuhan were working together a few years later, Hugh Kenner wrote in his 1985 ‘Preface’ to the reprinting of The Poetry of Ezra Pound from 1951 that “Marshall, at that time (was) pretty much a New Critic”. ↩
  6. In January 1951 McLuhan wrote to the then editor of the Sewanee Review, John Palmer, complaining that he had to publish elsewhere because his work was not appearing often enough at Sewanee. “Trouble is, he (the other editor) don’t pay, and it’s quite a problem finding hamburger for our five kids these days.” (Between 1944 and 1951 the McLuhans had  two more girls after the twins and their older brother, Eric.) If Palmer didn’t much like McLuhan’s work, despite Brooks’ prompting, perhaps he would be more sympathetic to it in consideration of his hungry children? ↩

Dobbs: McLuhan on how much truth you got

Bob Dobbs has a lot of great memories of McLuhan from the 1970s. The hope is to feature many of them here.

The first is one that Bob says he has subsequently used many times himself.

*

In the Spring of 1979, during one of Marshall McLuhan’s last Monday night “Open House” discussions before his stroke later that year on September 26, somebody said that his statement, “the medium is the message”, was just a half-truth.
 
McLuhan’s response: “Yes, but for most people that’s a lot of truth!”