Marshall McLuhan Quotes
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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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Left hemisphere industrialism has blinded the Chinese to the effects of our alphabet: pattern recognition is in the right hemisphere.
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The great sixteenth century divorce between art and science came with accelerated calculators. (p. 205)
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It is always the psychic and social grounds, brought into play by each medium or technology, that readjust the balance of the hemispheres and of human sensibilities into equilibrium with those grounds.
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The visual power of the phonetic alphabet is the translate other languages into itself is part of its power to invade right hemisphere (oral) cultures.
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There is absolutely no inevitability, so long as there is a willingness to contemplate what is happening. A chapter sub-heading attributed by McLuhan to Alfred North Whitehead
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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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The audience, as ground, shapes and controls the work of art.
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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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America is 100% 18th Century. The 18th century had chucked out the principle of metaphor and analogy - the basic fact that as A is to B so is C to D. AB:CD. It can see AB relations. But relations in four terms are still verboten. This amounts to deep occultation of nearly all human thought for the USA.
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Youth instinctively understand the present environment – the electric drama. It lives mythically and in depth.
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Art at its most significant is a Distant Early Warning System that can always be relied on to tell the old culture what is beginning to happen to it.
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As Narcissus fell in love with an outering (projection, extension) of himself, man seems invariably to fall in love with the newest gadget or gimmick that is merely an extension of his own body.
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The specialist is one who never makes small mistakes while moving towards the grand fallacy. (p. 154)
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TV is not good at covering single events. It needs a ritual, a rhythm, and a pattern...TV tends to fosters patterns rather than events.
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Violence is the effort to maintain and restore a weakened psyche. (p. 377)
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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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The Greeks encountered the confusion of tongues when numbers invaded Euclidean space. (p. 203)
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Civilization gives the barbarian or tribal man an eye for an ear and is now at odds with the electronic world. (p. 30)
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Only a fraction of the history of literacy has been typographic. (p. 84)
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Phenomenology is dialectic in ear-mode – a massive and decentralized quest for roots, for ground.
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There is no individualism in Eastern or oral cultures.
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The printing press was at first mistaken for an engine of immortality by everybody except Shakespeare.
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To say that a body or its gravitational field 'bends in space' in its vicinity is the discuss visual space in acoustic terms.