Marshall McLuhan Quotes
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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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Sentimentality, like pornography, is fragmented emotion; a natural consequence of a high visual gradient in any culture.
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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.
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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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Attention spans get very weak at the speed of light, and that goes along with a very weak identity.
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World War I a railway war of centralization and encirclement. World War II a radio war of decentralization concluded by the Bomb. World War III a TV guerrilla war with no divisions between civil and military fronts. (p. 152)
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Phenomenology is dialectic in ear-mode – a massive and decentralized quest for roots, for ground.
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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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The young are really the heirs to a generation of incompetence.
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Scribal culture could have neither authors nor publics such as were created by typography. (p. 149)
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With Francis Bacon, Vico continuously asserts the claims of grammar as true science precisely because it has not yielded to specialism and method.
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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 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.
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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 Age of Writing has passed. We must invent a new metaphor, restructure our thoughts and feelings. (p. 14)
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The audience, as ground, shapes and controls the work of art.
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In television, images are projected at you. You are the screen. The images wrap around you. You are the vanishing point. (p. 125)
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Speech structures the abyss of mental and acoustic space...it is a cosmic, invisible architecture of the human dark. (p. 13)
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The Greeks encountered the confusion of tongues when numbers invaded Euclidean space. (p. 203)
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Each of our senses makes its own space, but no sense can function in isolation. Only as sight relates the touch, or kinaesthesia, or sound, can the eye see.
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Language always preserves a play or figure/ground relation between experience, and perception and its replay in expression.
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Literacy, in translating man out of the closed world of tribal depth and resonance, gave man an eye for an ear and ushered him into a visual open world of specialized and divided consciousness.
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In antiquity and the Middle Ages reading was necessarily reading aloud. (p. 94)
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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.