Marshall McLuhan Quotes
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Scribal culture and Gothic architecture were both concerned with light through, not light on. (p. 120)
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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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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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In an age of multiple and massive innovations, obsolescence becomes the major obsession.
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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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You don't like those ideas? I got others!
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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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Attention spans get very weak at the speed of light, and that goes along with a very weak identity.
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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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There is no individualism in Eastern or oral cultures.
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Every mode of technology is a reflex of our most intimate psychological experience. (p. 171)
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Dantzig explains why the language of number had to be increased to meet the needs created by the new technology of letters. (p. 200)
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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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Primitivism has become the vulgar cliche of much modern art and speculation. (p. 77)
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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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Language always preserves a play or figure/ground relation between experience, and perception and its replay in expression.
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Prolonged mimesis of the alphabet and its fragmenting properties produced a new dominant mode of perception and then of culture.
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Typography extended its character to the regulation and fixation of languages. (p. 229)
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A theory of cultural change is impossible without knowledge of the changing sense ratios effected by various externalizations of our senses. (p. 49)
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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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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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Sentimentality, like pornography, is fragmented emotion; a natural consequence of a high visual gradient in any culture.
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Advertising is an environmental striptease for a world of abundance.