Visual perspective
The secret is to avoid eye contact
Marshall McLuhan (1964, age 52). Isn’t it obvious?
“The name of a man is a numbing blow from which he never recovers.”
Me (August, 2010, age 58). Really?
What did McLuhan mean by this? Read Douglas Coupland’s recent biography of McLuhan and you will find this quotation separated from its context and put up as meaning that a man’s name has a subliminal effect. If your last name is Rich, for example, people won’t think you’re poor. A somewhat kooky idea that McLuhan adopted in his analysis of the difficulties of Richard Nixon. (See this blog – The Power of Names – in which I must admit I did not see this distinction as clearly as I do now.)
Take a look at what McLuhan is actually trying to say with this line in Understanding Media (p. 49). He starts with the observation that “in a highly visual and highly literate culture” – read Canada, Britain or America – most people can’t quite catch the name of a person they’re being introduced to for the first time. Why? Because McLuhan says you’re so caught up in looking at the person that you don’t hear the name. It’s as if the sound is blocked out or dimmed. To get the name you then ask “How do you spell your name?” (How much more visual can you get?) This wouldn’t happen, he says, in a highly auditory ear culture. In such a culture – to reach the quotation at last – “the sound of a man’s name … is a numbing blow from which he never recovers.”
If you lived in an ear culture rather than an eye culture, McLuhan says, you’d hear the name. But we don’t do we? Even today after half a century of television and now the internet we still seem to be a highly visual culture. We still have trouble hearing names for the first time. What do we do to help people hear names at large business meetings and social events? We ask them to wear name tags. (How much more visual can you get?)
Cordially, Marshall and Me
Reading
Marshall McLuhan, Understanding Media, 1964, pp. 49.
What would Marshall say? (continued)
Me (August, 2010, age 58). McLuhan in conversation (continued)
Yesterday we left Marshall in conversation with journalist Herb Caen at a topless restaurant in San Francisco in August 1965. Readers will recall that McLuhan had called attention to the visual bias of Caen’s language. Let’s take one more look – sorry, I apologize for my visual orientation – at that exchange. Here, to refresh your memory is their conversation from yesterday:
[Caen] Being President of the Leg Men of America, I never felt a primal urge to lunch among the topless ladies, but in such distinguished company who could resist? ‘Strip steak sandwich,’ I said to waitress Marilyn, who was wearing blue sequin pasties and not much else. As she walked away, I commented ‘A good-looking girl.
[McLuhan] Interesting choice of words. Good-LOOKING girl. The remark of a man who is visually oriented, not tactually. And I further noticed that you could not bring yourself to look at her breasts as she took your order. You examined her only after she walked away – another example of the visual: the further she walked away, the more attractive she became.
Question: What do you think Caen said next:
(a) “If you say so Marshall.”
(b) “Fascinating, I never noticed – look I’ve done it again – my visual orientation.”
(c) “What?”
(d) “Actually, I’m rather inhibited.”
Marshall McLuhan (August 1965, age 54) The answer is …
Of course (d) – which, if memory serves me, I followed up with:
Another interesting word. Inhibited is the opposite of exhibited, and what is exhibited causes you to be inhibited.
Cordially, Marshall and Me
Reading
Herb Caen, “Rainy Day Session,” San Francisco Chronicle, August 12, 1965, p. 25.
What would Marshall say?
Me (August, 2010, age 58). McLuhan in conversation.
Forty-five years ago, in August 1965, McLuhan was in San Francisco to take part in the Marshall McLuhan Festival organized by the PR team of Howard Gossage and Gerald Feigen, who had organized the event to build McLuhan as a public figure. One day they took McLuhan for lunch at a topless restaurant along with journalists Tom Wolfe and Herb Caen. In the article Caen wrote about the outing he reports this exchange between himself and McLuhan:
Being President of the Leg Men of America, I never felt a primal urge to lunch among the topless ladies, but in such distinguished company who could resist? ‘Strip steak sandwich,’ I said to waitress Marilyn, who was wearing blue sequin pasties and not much else. As she walked away, I commented ‘A good-looking girl.’
Question: What do you think McLuhan said next?
(a) “She certainly is.”
(b) “I hear you Herb.”
(c) “Excuse me, Marilyn, I’ll have the strip steak too.”
(d) “Interesting choice of words. Good-LOOKING girl. The remark of a man who is visually oriented, not tactually.”
Marshall McLuhan (August 1965, age 54). The answer is …
Of course (d) – I have little in the way of small talk. And, if memory serves me, after I said that I said this:
And I further noticed that you could not bring yourself to look at her breasts as she took your order. You examined her only after she walked away – another example of the visual: the further she walked away, the more attractive she became.
Cordially, Marshall and Me
Reading
Herb Caen, “Rainy Day Session,” San Francisco Chronicle, August 12, 1965, p. 25.
Memories.
Marshall McLuhan (June 16, 1975, age 63). My first memory.
I am in Edmonton. I can’t be much more than two years old. I’m looking out the window of a street car and I see horses on the river bank. I remember thinking they look so small they could fit in my nursery. Such is the magic of visual perspective. To me the horses in the distance not only looked small, they were small. I was a very perceptive lad.
Me (July, 2010, age 57). Too good to be true?
Philip Marchand writes in his biography of McLuhan that “in view of McLuhan’s later obsession with visual perspective as an invention of the print era and his almost visceral rejection of that perspective – in later years, the painter Harley Parker recalls, McLuhan seemed actually to believe that ‘things became smaller as they receded into the distance’ – the memory is almost too pat.”
Who can say? My first memory is from the time I was two or three. I’m in a long hallway. I look around and realize that I’m lost. Given that this blog in a way is an exercise in both discovery and self-discovery, a way of finding my way home, intellectually, perhaps this first memory of mine is also “almost too pat.”
What is your first memory? Does it reveal something significant about you?
Cordially, Marshall and Me
Reading for this post
Philip Marchand. Marshall McLuhan: The Medium and the Messenger, 1989 p. 8-9.
The rear view mirror.
Marshall McLuhan (October 6, 1965, age 54). Is this any way to live?
Unaware of the environment that surrounds them, people do not see the world for what it is. Instead they insist on seeing it as it was. The present which contains the future lies before them, but they do not see it. Instead they see the past. You might say this is like driving with your eyes firmly fixed on the rear view mirror. Fortunately, I don’t drive.
Me (March 2010, age 57). Is there any other way?
If this is the human condition, what can we do about it? The possible courses of action would seem to be: (1) Distrust your senses; (2) Hope there are no bends in the road; (3) Find ways to wake yourself up* and see the present; (4) Hope that McLuhan got this one wrong.
*The standard approaches are: read history, travel, and look for patterns
Cordially, Marshall and Me
Reading for this post
Letters of Marshall McLuhan, 1987, p. 325.
Everything can be checked out
Marshall McLuhan (July 3, 1964, age 52). My statements are not opinions.
People seem to believe that I make things up out of thin air. It simply isn’t true. Everything that I say can be checked out, and if it doesn’t check out – à la Popper – it can be chucked out. If I was simply expressing a personal opinion I wouldn’t bother to say it.
Me (February 2010, age 57). Can we check this out?
Here is one of the statements of Marshall McLuhan: since the advent of TV Americans have become less visual.
(The visual he said perceive the world as “uniform, continuous, and connected” – like a page of printed text. To be visual is to view the world from a distance – to be uninvolved, objective, and rational. To view the world less visually is to perceive it more acoustically – acoustic space is “fluctuating, discontinuous, and disconnected” – the world viewed up close – intimately, emotionally and tactically. The less visual are less objective, less rational. They are involved.)
A case can certainly be made that this is true. Compare “The Dick Cavett Show” to “Oprah”, the “The Twilight Zone” to “Numbers” or “Perry Mason” to “Boston Legal.” America today has a more tactile less visual feel. Granted, it’s not a scientific test, but in a rough and ready way it does provide support for Marshall McLuhan’s statement.
Are we all becoming more or less visual? Is each generation less visual than its predecessor? If so, what difference does it make?
Cordially, Marshall and Me
Reading for this post
Letters of Marshall McLuhan, 1987, p.304
We are not visual creatures any more
Marshall McLuhan (May 1964, age 52). North Americans are biased.
It is odd that North Americans will accept no other way of perceiving the world apart from the visual. The Brits have never gone this far, nor the French. To North Americans there is only one way for rational people to understand the world: in visual space. Visual space is continuous, uniform, and connected. That is the bias the North American brings to his understanding. Here only seeing is believing. There is no other way.
Me (February 2010, age 57). Today feeling is believing.
If Marshall McLuhan was right about the power of new electric media North Americans – especially those who are the second, third and fourth generations of TV kids – are no longer visually biased. The new bias is that of acoustic space, which is discontinuous, non-uniform, and disconnected.
Today seeing is no longer believing – feeling is believing. The good life is tactile: It’s “cool” “sweet” or “juicy.”
How many of the trends and assumptions of the world today fit with this new bias? Shortening attention spans, illiteracy and innumeracy, the failing of teachers rather than students, relative truth, the importance placed on intuition and feelings, emotional intelligence, grade inflation, political correctness?
Cordially, Marshall and Me
Reading for this post
Letters of Marshall McLuhan, 1987, p.300