Marshall McLuhan - Ground Quotes

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Older cliches are retrieved both as inherent principles that inform the new ground and new awareness, and as archetypal nostalgia figures with transformed meaning in relation to the new ground.

Marshall McLuhan
In Catch-22, the figure of the black market and the ground of war merge into a monster presided over by the syndicate. When war and market merge, all money transactions begin to drip blood.

Marshall McLuhan
Marx shared with economists then and since the inability to make his concepts include innovational processes. It is one thing to spot a new product but quite another to observe the invisible new environments generated by the action of the product on a variety of pre-existing social grounds.

Marshall McLuhan
By involving all men in all men, by the electric extension of their own nervous systems, the new technology turns the figure of the primitive society into a universal ground that buries all previous figures.

Marshall McLuhan
The task confronting contemporary man is to live with the hidden ground of his activities as familiarly as our literate predecessors lived with the figure minus ground.

Marshall McLuhan
Hypnotized by their rear-view mirrors, philosophers and scientists alike tried to focus the figure of man in the old ground of nineteenth-century industrial mechanism and congestion. They failed to bridge from the old figure to the new. It is man who has become both figure and ground via the electrotechnical extension of his awareness. With the extension of his nervous system as a total information environment, man bridges art and nature.

Marshall McLuhan
The audience, as ground, shapes and controls the work of art.

Marshall McLuhan
While Poe and the Symbolists were exploring the irrational in literature, Freud had begun to explore the resonant figure/ground double-plot of the conscious and unconscious.

Marshall McLuhan
Professionalism is environmental. Amateurism is anti environmental. Professionalism merges the individual into patterns of total environment. Amateurism seeks the development of the total awareness of the individual and the critical awareness of the ground rules of society. The amateur can afford to loose.

Marshall McLuhan
In Chinese, honesty is the figure of a man standing, physically standing, beside his work. That means honesty: a man stands by his work. Two things: figure / ground.

Marshall McLuhan
Pornography and obscenity... work by specialism and fragmentation. They deal with a figure without a ground — situations in which the human factor is suppressed in favor of sensations and kicks.

Marshall McLuhan
It is always the psychic and social grounds, brought into play by each medium or technology, that readjust the balance of the hemispheres and of human sensibilities into equilibrium with those grounds.

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
Interdeterminacy was a figure-ground problem arising from incongruity between the visual bias of classical science and the new acoustic sensibilities.

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
All words at every level of prose and poetry and all devices of language and speech derive their meaning from figure / ground relation.

Marshall McLuhan
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.

Marshall McLuhan
Phenomenology is dialectic in ear-mode – a massive and decentralized quest for roots, for ground.

Marshall McLuhan
Language always preserves a play or figure/ground relation between experience, and perception and its replay in expression.

Marshall McLuhan