Marshall McLuhan DEW Line Card Deck

The DEW-Line was a system of radar stations in the far northern Arctic region of Canada, with additional stations along the North Coast and Aleutian Islands of Alaska, in addition to the Faroe Islands, Greenland, and Iceland. It was set up to detect incoming Soviet bombers during the Cold War, and provide early warning of any sea-and-land invasion.

The DEW-Line deck of cards takes as its point of departure Ezra Pound's remark, "Artists are the antennae of the race." Artists are a sort of cultural DEW-Line that warns of changes to arrive shortly. They can do so because they keep their senses (their radar, to ride the metaphor to staggers) well-tuned: that is the main business of any serious artist.

The deck of cards exemplifies the probe technique. Each card is a way to probe a situation of the user's choosing, a way to come at it from unexpected directions, real outside-the-box work. The cards function as a problem-solving device, a bottleneck-breaker.

The cards use techniques of poetics instead of those of rationality and logic. In The Book of Probes, I called the probe "poetics on the warpath." Play is the quickest way out of an uptight situation. To use the deck, shuffle the cards well and focus your mind on the matter you wish to probe. Then deal yourself two or three cards, and relate each one to your subject. 

Take your time: irrationality is an essential ingredient to solution, and there's lots of it here. If you MUST, shuffle the deck well once again and deal yourself another pair of cards... Generally, a solution appears on the first deal. If you find the quips on the cards annoying, so much the better: they are wake-up calls.

It took several weeks to come up with suitable probes (the words on the face of each card). They were not composed at random, though they work when they are used randomly.

It looks somewhat chaotic, but that is the surface. There is a good system under the surface. If you would see the patterns, line the cards up on a table in a column four-wide, with each vertical row a complete suit, King through Ace. Then scan across the lines. Each group of four has a distinct theme.

The  deck was included with the July 1969 issue (vol. 2, no.1) of the McLuhan DEW-Line Newsletter.