Marshall McLuhan - Form Quotes

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Cubism ('multi-locationalism') is one of the painterly forms of acoustic space.

Marshall McLuhan
The village had institutionalized all human functions in forms of low intensity.... Participation was high and organization was low. This is the formula for stability.

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
Every innovation scraps its immediate predecessor and retrieves still older figures – it causes floods of antiques or nostalgic art forms and stimulates the search for museum pieces.

Marshall McLuhan
If the work of the city is the remaking or translating of man into a more suitable form than his nomadic ancestors achieved, then might not our current translation of our entire lives into the spiritual form of information seem to make of the entire.

Marshall McLuhan
The hardware world tends to move into software form at the speed of light.

Marshall McLuhan
Applied knowledge in the Renaissance had to take the form of translation of the auditory into visual terms, of the plastic into retinal form.

Marshall McLuhan
At electric speed, all forms are pushed to the limits of their potential.

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
If a work of art is to explore new environments, it is not to be regarded as a blueprint but rather as a form of action-painting.

Marshall McLuhan
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
In tetrad form, the artefact is seen to be not netural or passive, but an active logos or utterance of the human mind or body that transforms the user and his ground.

Marshall McLuhan
The mosaic form of the TV image demands participation and involvement in depth, of the whole being, as does the sense of touch.

Marshall McLuhan
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.

Marshall McLuhan
It is the medium that shapes and controls the scale and form of human association and action.

Marshall McLuhan
Literate man, civilized man, tends to restrict and to separate functions, whereas tribal man has freely extended the form of his body to include the universe.

Marshall McLuhan
War has become the environment of our time if only because it is an accelerated form of innovation and education.

Marshall McLuhan
While people are engaged in creating a totally different world, they always form vivid images of the preceding world.

Marshall McLuhan
The laws of the media, in tetrad form, bring logos and formal cause up to date to reveal analytically the structure of all human artefacts.

Marshall McLuhan
The press is a group confessional form that provides communal participation. The book is a private confessional form that provides a point of view.

Marshall McLuhan
All forms of violence are quests for identity. When you live on the frontier, you have no identity. You're a nobody.

Marshall McLuhan
The discarnate TV user lives in a world between fantasy and dream, and is in a typically hypnotic state, which is the ultimate form and level of participation.

Marshall McLuhan
Advertising is the greatest art form of the twentieth century.

Marshall McLuhan
Man becomes, as it were, the sex organs of the machine world, as the bee of the plant world, enabling it to fecundate and to evolve ever new forms. The machine world reciprocates man's love by expediting his wishes and desires, namely, in providing him with wealth.

Marshall McLuhan