Marshall McLuhan Quotes
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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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The dyslexic: Everyman as cubist.
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Bacon's Adam is a medieval mystic and Milton's a trade union organizer. (p. 214)
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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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Medieval and ancient sensibility now dominates our time as acoustic and multisensory awareness displaces the merely visual.
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The professional tends to classify and to specialize, to accept uncritically the ground rules of the environment. The ground rules provided by the mass response of his colleagues serves as a pervasive environment of which he is contentedly unaware. (p. 93)
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Appetite is essentially insatiable, and where it operates as a criterion of both action and enjoyment (that is, everywhere in the Western world since the sixteenth century) it will infallibly discover congenial agencies (mechanical and political) of expression.
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The newspaper is a corporate symbolist poem, environmental and invisible, as poem.
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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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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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Money is a corporate image depending on society for its institutional status. (p. 133)
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All of the new media have enriched our perceptions of language and older media. They are to the man-made environment what species are to biology. (p. 84)
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All forms of violence are quests for identity. When you live on the frontier, you have no identity. You're a nobody.
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Any new technology is an evolutionary and biological mutation opening doors of perception and new spheres of action to mankind. (p. 67)
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All media are extensions of some human faculty - psychic or physical.
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The automated presidential surrogate is the superlative nobody. (p. 157)
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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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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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Formal logic and the logical syllogism encapsulate connectedness in reasoning.
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The invention of printing did away with anonymity, fostering ideas of literary fame and the habit of considering intellectual effort as private property. (p. 122)
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The Concept of Dread, by Soren Kierkegaard, appeared in 1844, first year of the commercial telegraph...It mentions the telegraph as a reason for dread and nowness or existenz.
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Logic is figure without a ground. (p. 241)
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The alphabet, when pushed to a high degree of abstract visual intensity, became typography. The printed word with its specialist intensity burst the bonds of medieval corporate guilds and monasteries, created extreme individualist patterns of enterprise and monopoly. (p. 23)