Marshall McLuhan Quotes
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Tactility is the space of the interval; acoustic space is spherical and resonant.
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Far more thought and care go into the composition of any prominent ad in a newspaper or magazine than go into the writing of their features and editorials.
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African audiences cannot accept our passive consumer role in the presence of film. (p. 44)
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Interdeterminacy was a figure-ground problem arising from incongruity between the visual bias of classical science and the new acoustic sensibilities.
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The uniformity and repeatability of print created the 'political arithmetic' of the seventeenth century and the 'hedonistic calculus' of the eighteenth. (p. 237)
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The manuscript shaped medieval literary conventions at all levels. (p. 99)
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Until now a culture has been a mechanical fate for societies, the automatic interiorization of their own technologies. (p. 86)
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Primitivism has become the vulgar cliche of much modern art and speculation. (p. 77)
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Newton, and 'proper scientific method' after him, conducted attention to 'continuous description' of experimental phenomena instead of to causes.
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The 'interface' of the Renaissance was the meeting of medieval pluralism and modern homogeneity and mechanism – a formula for blitz and metamorphosis. (p. 161)
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The images of mankind have become the most basic thing about them. And they're all software, and disembodied. (p. 346)
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The world of visual perspective is one of unified and homogeneous space. Such a world is alien to the resonating diversity of spoken words. So language was the last art to accept the visual logic of Gutenberg technology, and the first to rebound in the electric age.
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Cultural dominance by either the left or the right hemisphere is largely dependent upon environmental factors.
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Visual space is the space of detachment. Audile-tactile space is the space of involvement. (p. 194)
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Sentimentality, like pornography, is fragmented emotion; a natural consequence of a high visual gradient in any culture.
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By phonemic transformation into visual terms, the alphabet became a universal, abstract, static container of meaningless sounds.
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Dialectic functions by converting everything it touches into figure but metaphor is a means of perceiving one thing in terms of another. (p. 298)
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When you move into a new area, a new territory and learn a new language, the language is not a new subject, it is an environment, it is total. (p. 105)
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The portability of the book, like that of the easel-painting, added much to the new culture of individualism. (p. 233)
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The Greek 'point of view' in both art and chronology has little in common with ours but was much like that of the Middle Ages. (p. 64)
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The TV generation is postliterate and retribalized. It seeks by violence to scrub the old private image and to merge in a new tribal identity, like any corporate executive. (p. 201)
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In this book we turn to the study of new patterns of energy arising from man’s physical and psychic artifacts and social organizations. The only method for perceiving process and pattern is by inventory of effects obtained by the comparison and contrast of developing situations. (p. 8)
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The pre-atomist multisensory void was an animate, pulsating, and moving vibrant interval, neither container nor contained, acoustic space penetrated by tactility.
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Only a fraction of the history of literacy has been typographic. (p. 84)