Marshall McLuhan Quotes
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The magic of the cave image lies in its being, not in its being seen. The symbolic does not refer. It is. (p. 350)
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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.
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All words, in every language, are metaphors.
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Every mode of technology is a reflex of our most intimate psychological experience. (p. 171)
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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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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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The audience, as ground, shapes and controls the work of art.
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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.
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The medieval student had to be paleographer, editor, and publisher of the authors he read. (p. 109)
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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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At electric speed, all forms are pushed to the limits of their potential.
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We are no more prepared to encounter radio and TV in our literate milieu than the native of Ghana is able to cope with the literacy that takes him out of his collective tribal world and beaches him in individual isolation. (xx)
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New technological environments are commonly cast in the molds of the preceding technology out of the sheer unawareness of their designers. (p. 47)
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In Chinese, honesty is the figure of a man standing, physically standing, beside his work. That means honesty: a man stands by his work. Two things: figure / ground. (p. 314)
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The press is a group confessional form that provides communal participation. The book is a private confessional form that provides a 'point of view.' (p. 204)
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Tactility is the space of the interval; acoustic space is spherical and resonant.
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Human perception is literally incarnation.
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Audile-tactile space is the space of involvement. We lose 'touch' without it. Visual space is the space of detachment.
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Money is a corporate image depending on society for its institutional status. (p. 133)
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Manuscript culture is conversational if only because the writer and his audience are physically related by the form of publication as performance. (p. 96)
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In an age of multiple and massive innovations, obsolescence becomes the major obsession.
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With TV, came the icon, the inclusive image, the inclusive political posture or stance. (p. 191)
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Print, in turning the vernaculars into mass media, or closed systems, created the uniform, centralizing forces of modern nationalism. (p. 226)
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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.