Marshall McLuhan Quotes
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The comic strip: upholder of Homeric culture. (p.19)
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Good taste is the first refuge of the non-creative. It is the last-ditch stand of the artist.
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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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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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The young are really the heirs to a generation of incompetence.
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The images of mankind have become the most basic thing about them. And they're all software, and disembodied. (p. 346)
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You don't like those ideas? I got others!
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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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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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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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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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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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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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The Greeks encountered the confusion of tongues when numbers invaded Euclidean space. (p. 203)
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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 Age of Writing has passed. We must invent a new metaphor, restructure our thoughts and feelings. (p. 14)
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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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Scribal culture could have neither authors nor publics such as were created by typography. (p. 149)
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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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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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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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Scribal culture and Gothic architecture were both concerned with light through, not light on. (p. 120)