Marshall McLuhan Quotes
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Poetry and the arts can’t exist in America. Mere exposure to the arts does nothing for a mentality which is incorrigibly dialectical. The vital tensions and nutritive action of ideogram remain inaccessible to this state of mind.
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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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The public has yet to see TV as TV. Broadcasters have no awareness of its potential. The movie people are just beginning to get a grasp on film.
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Primitivism has become the vulgar cliche of much modern art and speculation. (p. 77)
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Scribal culture and Gothic architecture were both concerned with light through, not light on. (p. 120)
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Invention is the mother of all necessities.
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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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Sentimentality, like pornography, is fragmented emotion; a natural consequence of a high visual gradient in any culture.
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The reduction of the tactile qualities of life and language constitute the refinement sought in the Renaissance and repudiated now in the electronic age. (p. 272)
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When you move into a new area, a new territory and learn a new language, the language is not a new subject, it is an environment, it is total. (p. 105)
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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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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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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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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 Age of Writing has passed. We must invent a new metaphor, restructure our thoughts and feelings. (p. 14)
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The photograph reverses the purpose of travel, which until now had been to encounter the strange and unfamiliar.
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There is no individualism in Eastern or oral cultures.
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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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Prolonged mimesis of the alphabet and its fragmenting properties produced a new dominant mode of perception and then of culture.
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The automated presidential surrogate is the superlative nobody. (p. 157)
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Non-literate societies cannot see films or photos without much training. (p. 41)
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The newspaper is a corporate symbolist poem, environmental and invisible, as poem.
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A man's reach must exceed his grasp or what's a metaphor? (p.7)
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The field of 'information theory' began by using the old hardware paradigm of transportation of data from point to point.