Marshall McLuhan - Culture Quotes

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Another theme of the Wake that helps in the understanding of the paradoxical shift from cliché to archetype is "pastimes are past times". The dominant technologies of one age become the games and pastimes of a later age. In the twentieth century the number of past times that are simultaneously available is so vast as to create cultural anarchy. When all the cultures of the world are simultaneously present, the work of the artist in the elucidation of form takes on new scope and new urgency. Most men are pushed into the artist role. The artist cannot dispense with the principle of doubleness and interplay since this kind of hendiadys-dialogue is essential to the very structure of consciousness, awareness, and autonomy.

Marshall McLuhan
Sentimentality, like pornography, is fragmented emotion; a natural consequence of a high visual gradient in any culture.

Marshall McLuhan
Manuscript culture is conversational if only because the writer and his audience are physically related by the form of publication as performance.

Marshall McLuhan
We are numb in our new electric world as the native involved in our literate and mechanical culture.

Marshall McLuhan
Jacques Ellul observes in Propaganda: When dialogue begins, propaganda ends. His theme, that propaganda is not this or that ideology but rather the action and coexistence of all media at once, explains why propaganda is environmental and invisible. The total life of any culture tends to be "propaganda", for this reason. It blankets perception and supresses awareness, making the counter environments created by the artist indispensable to survival and freedom.

Marshall McLuhan
There is no individualism in Eastern or oral cultures.

Marshall McLuhan
I think of Art, at its most significant, as a DEW line, a Distant Early Warning system, that can always be relied on to tell the old culture what is beginning to happen to it.

Marshall McLuhan
Prolonged mimesis of the alphabet and its fragmenting properties produced a new dominant mode of perception and then of culture.

Marshall McLuhan
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.

Marshall McLuhan
Scribal culture could have neither authors nor publics such as were created by typography.

Marshall McLuhan
We are swiftly moving at present from an era where business was our culture into an era when culture will be our business. Between these poles stand the huge and ambiguous entertainment industries.

Marshall McLuhan
The twentieth century encounter between alphabetic and electronic forces of culture confers on the printed word a crucial role in staying the return to the Africa within.

Marshall McLuhan
The culture-heroes of preliteracy and postliteracy alike are robots.

Marshall McLuhan
The alphabet is an aggressive and militant absorber and transformer of culture, as Harold Innis was the first to show.

Marshall McLuhan
I am not a "culture critic" because I am not in any way interested in classifying cultural forms. I am a metaphysician, interested in the life of the forms and their surprising modalities. That is why I have no interest in the academic world.

Marshall McLuhan
Unlike previous environmental changes, the electric media constitutes a total and near-instanteous transformation of culture, values and attitudes.

Marshall McLuhan
Great ages of innovation are the ages in which entire cultures are junked or scrapped.

Marshall McLuhan
The celebrated earthy tactility of Rabelais is a massive backwash of receding manuscript culture.

Marshall McLuhan
The artists of our culture, 'the antennae of the race,' had tuned in to the new ground and begun exploring discontinuity and simultaneity.

Marshall McLuhan
Scribal culture and Gothic architecture were both concerned with light through, not light on.

Marshall McLuhan
When technology extends one of our senses, a new translation of culture occurs as swiftly as the new technology is interiorized.

Marshall McLuhan
The ways of thinking implanted by electronic culture are very different from those fostered by print culture. Since the Renaissance most methods and procedures have strongly tended towards stress on the visual organization of knowledge.

Marshall McLuhan
Until now a culture has been a mechanical fate for societies, the automatic interiorization of their own technologies.

Marshall McLuhan
At no period of human culture have men understood the psychic mechanism involved in invention and technology.

Marshall McLuhan
The portability of the book, like that of the easel-painting, added much to the new culture of individualism.

Marshall McLuhan
The comic strip: upholder of Homeric culture.

Marshall McLuhan
Rabelais offers a vision of the future of print culture as a consumer's paradise of applied knowledge.

Marshall McLuhan
The hot radio medium used in cool or nonliterate cultures has a violent effect, quite unlike its effect, say in England or America, where radio is felt as entertainment.

Marshall McLuhan
The content or time-clothing of any medium or culture is the preceding medium or culture.

Marshall McLuhan
The tribalizing power of the new electronic media, the way in which they return to us to the unified fields of the old oral cultures, to tribal cohesion and pre-individualist patterns of thought, is little understood. Tribalism is the sense of the deep bond of family, the closed society as the norm of community.

Marshall McLuhan