Marshall McLuhan Quotes
-
The anguish of the third dimension is given its first verbal manifestation in poetic history in King Lear. (p. 18)
-
The business of art is no longer the communication of thoughts or feelings which are to be conceptually ordered, but a direct participation in an experience. The whole tendency of modern communication...is towards participation in a process, rather than apprehension of concepts.
-
Language alone includes all the senses in interplay at all times. (p. 253)
-
Audile-tactile space is the space of involvement. We lose 'touch' without it. Visual space is the space of detachment.
-
The uniformity and repeatability of print created the 'political arithmetic' of the seventeenth century and the 'hedonistic calculus' of the eighteenth. (p. 237)
-
Typography as the first mechanization of a handicraft is itself the perfect instance not of a new knowledge, but of applied knowledge. (p. 171)
-
Each tetrad gives the etymology of its subject, as an uttering or outering of the body physical or mental, and provides its anatomy in fourfold exegetical manner.
-
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)
-
Print, in turning the vernaculars into mass media, or closed systems, created the uniform, centralizing forces of modern nationalism. (p. 226)
-
At electric speed, all forms are pushed to the limits of their potential.
-
Tactility is the space of the interval; acoustic space is spherical and resonant.
-
You don't like those ideas? I got others!
-
With TV, came the icon, the inclusive image, the inclusive political posture or stance. (p. 191)
-
The young are really the heirs to a generation of incompetence.
-
The comic strip: upholder of Homeric culture. (p.19)
-
The magic of the cave image lies in its being, not in its being seen. The symbolic does not refer. It is. (p. 350)
-
Phenomenology is dialectic in ear-mode – a massive and decentralized quest for roots, for ground.
-
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.
-
Left hemisphere industrialism has blinded the Chinese to the effects of our alphabet: pattern recognition is in the right hemisphere.
-
Visual space is the space of detachment. Audile-tactile space is the space of involvement. (p. 194)
-
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.
-
Youth instinctively understand the present environment – the electric drama. It lives mythically and in depth.
-
The reader is the content of any poem or of the language he employs, and in order to use any of these forms, he must put them on.
-
The audience, as ground, shapes and controls the work of art.