I was recently looking for a few McLuhan quotes for a piece I'm doing and since I haven't read/re-read McLuhan in ages I had forgotten just how much more powerful and relevant he gets as time goes by. So, decided to share what I picked and saved (much more than I initially thought I would) — a lot of insight and food for thought there. Just a reminder, McLuhan was this 20th century media studies guy — actually, the founder of media studies as such, as a form of radical anthropology which investigates the effects of technological media on human cognition, perception and worldview. McLuhan understands "technological media" in the broadest sense, beginning with language and the metaphor, alphabetic arrangements and linear subject-predicate constructions, etc., etc. No, actually, he doesn't, he begins with pre-literate societies and what he calls acoustic space and how these things condition and define entirely different worlds and worldviews with their specific laws and characteristics on how society evolves and forms as such.

Importantly, McLuhan seems himself to be in the lineage of Giambattista Vico, the 17th century Italian rhetorician, political philosopher and historian (who was only paid attention later in the 20th century) who wrote "Scienza Nuova" (the new science). Vico explores the universal human history of how nations naturally evolve through eras and cycles, one following from the other, on the basis of how language and linguistics evolve. He's the first expositor of things such as social science, semiotics, philosophy of history and constructivist epistemology. Verum ipsum factum — "The truth/facts are made", is one of his main principles (and the question remains, how are they made and come to be the way they are, which is what defines that "new science" of his, which was quite anti-Cartesian and thus didn't catch anybody's attention back in the day).

As for McLuhan, he had been a Medieval and Joyce scholar, among other things. And a devouted Catholic (strangely, or not). The reference to Vico (which James Joyce had himself been very influenced by, by the way) can be immediately seen in the titles of works of his like "The Laws of Media: The New Science". Anyway, here goes, enjoy (and if you get caught up, maybe get the books themselves, they're all pleasure to read!):

"Nobody can doubt that the entire range of applied science contributes to the very format of a newspaper. But the headline is a feature which began with the Napoleonic Wars. The headline is a primitive shout of rage, triumph, fear, or warning, and newspapers have thrived on wars ever since."

"The ordinary person senses the greatness of the odds against him even without thought or analysis, and he adapts his attitudes unconsciously. A huge passivity has settled on industrial society. For people carried about in mechanical vehicles, earning their living by waiting on machines, listening much of the waking day to canned music, watching packaged movie entertainment and capsulated news, for such people it would require an exceptional degree of awareness and an especial heroism of effort to be anything but supine consumers of processed goods."

 

"For tribal man, space was the uncontrollable mystery. For technological man it is time that occupies the same role."

— "The Mechanical Bride : Folklore of Industrial Man" (1951)

"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."

 

"The interiorization of the technology of the phonetic alphabet translates man from the magical world of the ear to the neutral visual world. "

 

"Schizophrenia may be a necessary consequence of literacy."

 

"Civilization gives the barbarian or tribal man an eye for an ear and is now at odds with the electronic world."

 

"Non-literate societies cannot see films or photos without much training."

 

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

 

"A theory of cultural change is impossible without knowledge of the changing sense ratios effected by various externalizations of our senses."

 

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

 

"The Greeks invented both their artistic and scientific novelties after the interiorization of the alphabet."

 

"The increase of visual stress among the Greeks alienated them from the primitive art that the electronic age now reinvents after interiorizing the “unified field” of electric all-at-onceness."

 

"A nomadic society cannot experience enclosed space."

 

"In antiquity and the Middle Ages reading was necessarily reading aloud."

 

"The medieval student had to be paleographer, editor, and publisher of the authors he read."

 

"The invention of typography confirmed and extended the new visual stress of applied knowledge, providing the first uniformly repeatable “commodity,” the first assembly-line, and the first mass-production."

 

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

 

"Until more than two centuries after printing nobody discovered how to maintain a single tone or attitude throughout a prose composition."

 

"The “interface” of the Renaissance was the meeting of medieval pluralism and modern homogeneity and mechanism – a formula for blitz and metamorphosis."

 

"With Gutenberg Europe enters the technological phase of progress, when change itself becomes the archetypal norm of social life."

 

"Typography tended to alter language from a means of perception and exploration to a portable commodity."

 

"Typography is not only a technology but is in itself a natural resource or staple, like cotton or timber or radio; and, like any staple, it shapes not only private sense ratios but also patterns of communal interdependence."

 

"Print, in turning the vernaculars into mass media, or closed systems, created the uniform, centralizing forces of modern nationalism."

 

"The uniformity and repeatability of print created the “political arithmetic” of the seventeenth century and the “hedonistic calculus” of the eighteenth."

 

"Philosophy was as naive as science in its unconscious acceptance of the assumptions or dynamic of typography."

 

"Throughout Finnegans Wake Joyce specifies the Tower of Babel as the tower of Sleep, that is, the tower of the witless assumption, or what Bacon calls the reign of the Idols."

— "The Gutenberg Galaxy: The Making of Typographic Man"

"In the electric age, when our central nervous system is technologically extended to involve us in the whole of mankind and to incorporate the whole of mankind in us, we necessarily participate, in depth, in the consequences of our every action. It is no longer possible to adopt the aloof and dissociated role of the literate Westerner."

 

"It is experience, rather than understanding, that influences behaviour."

 

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

 

"War is never anything less than accelerated technological change."

 

"All media exists to invest our lives with artificial perception and arbitrary values."

 

"The press is a group confessional form that provides communal participation. The book is a private confessional form that provides a “point of view.”

 

"The "message" of any medium or technology is the change of scale or pace or pattern that it introduces into human affairs."

 

"Language does for intelligence what the wheel does for the feet and the body. It enables them to move from thing to thing with greater ease and speed and ever less involvement."

 

"In the electric age we wear all mankind as our skin."

 

"The specialist is one who never makes small mistakes while moving towards the grand fallacy."

 

"All meaning alters with acceleration, because all patterns of personal and political interdependence change with any acceleration of information."

 

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

 

"Art is anything you can get away with."

 

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

 

"Once we have surrendered our senses and nervous systems to the private manipulation of those who would try to benefit from taking a lease on our eyes and ears and nerves, we don't really have any rights left. Leasing our eyes and ears and nerves to commercial interests is like handing over the common speech to a private corporation, or like giving the earth's atmosphere to a company as a monopoly."

— "Understanding Media : The Extensions of Man" (1964)

"There is absolutely no inevitability, so long as there is a willingness to contemplate what is happening."

 

"We look at the present through a rear-view mirror. We march backwards into the future."

 

"Youth instinctively understand the present environment – the electric drama. It lives mythically and in depth."

 

"The invention of printing did away with anonymity, fostering ideas of literary fame and the habit of considering intellectual effort as private property."

 

"All media work us over completely. They are so pervasive in their personal, political, economic, aesthetic, psychological, moral, ethical, and social consequences that they leave no part of us untouched, unaffected, unaltered. The medium is the message. Any understanding of social and cultural change is impossible without a knowledge of the way media work as environments. All media are extensions of some human faculty – psychic or physical."

— "The Medium is the Message" (1967)

And the famous scene from Woody Allen's "Annie Hall" where McLuhan himself shows up telling a college teacher who teaches about McLuhan that he "knows nothing of his work".

"I’m flattered to hear my work described as hallucinogenic, but I suspect that some of my academic critics find me a bad trip."

— McLuhan in a Playboy interview, 1969

"The more data banks record about us, the less we exist."

"Mysticism is just tomorrow’s science dreamed today."

"Media are means of extending and enlarging our organic sense lives into our environment."

"When new technologies impose themselves on societies long habituated to older technologies, anxieties of all kinds result."

"New media are new archetypes, at first disguised as degradations of older media."

"There are no passengers on Spaceship Earth. We are all crew."

"The mother tongue is propaganda."

"In television, images are projected at you. You are the screen. The images wrap around you. You are the vanishing point."

"The present is always invisible because its environmental. No environment is perceptible, simply because it saturates the whole field of attention."

"People in new environments always produce the new preceptual modality without any difficulty or awareness of change. It is later that the psychic and social realignments baffle societies."

"Language is a form of organized stutter."

 

"The new media are not bridges between man and nature - they are nature...The new media are not ways of relating us to the old world; they are the real world and they reshape what remains of the old world at will."

"The modern Little Red Riding Hood, reared on singing commercials, has no objection to being eaten by the wolf."

"Historians and archaeologists will one day discover that the ads of our time are the richest and most faithful reflections that any society ever made of its entire range of activities."

"Affluence creates poverty."

"Most of our assumptions have outlived their uselessness."

"Innumerable confusions and a feeling of despair invariably emerge in periods of great technological and cultural transition."

"A point of view can be a dangerous luxury when substituted for insight and understanding."

"Politics will eventually be replaced by imagery. The politician will be only too happy to abdicate in favor of his image, because the image will be much more powerful than he could ever be."

"Television brought the brutality of war into the comfort of the living room. Vietnam was lost in the living rooms of America - not on the battlefields of Vietnam."

"We shape our tools and afterwards our tools shape us."

"The scientist rigorously defends his right to be ignorant of almost everything except his specialty."

"Where the whole man is involved there is no work. Work begins with the division of labor."

"Our Age of Anxiety is, in great part, the result of trying to do today's job with yesterday's tools and yesterday's concepts."

"Societies have always been shaped more by the nature of the media by which men communicate than by the content of the communication."

“In the land of the blind, the one-eyed man is a hallucinating idiot...for he sees what no one else does: things that, to everyone else, are not there.”

“One thing about which fish know exactly nothing is water, since they have no anti-environment which would enable them to perceive the element they live in.”

“Many a good argument is ruined by some fool who knows what he is talking about.”

“The only people who have proof of their sanity are those who have been discharged from mental institutions.”

“I am an intellectual thug who has been slowly accumulating a private arsenal with every intention of using it. In a mindless age every insight takes on the character of a lethal weapon. Every man of good will is the enemy of society.”

“Language is metaphor in the sense that it not only stores but translates experience from one mode into another. Money is metaphor in the sense that it stores skill and labour and also translates one skill into another.”

“The price of eternal vigilance is indifference.”

Note the years these were written. Back in those days McLuhan was a bit weird, incomprehensible and strange to many. Now.... not so much at all (same goes by the way for people like for example Karl Marx - "Das Kapital" was way too difficult and complex a task/read back in the day, even 20-30 years ago, but now, in our current day and age, it reads like the reality of the world we live in...)

Oh, and also, not sure how many of you have even noticed, but Cronenberg's classic "Videodrome" — the character of Prof. Brian O'Blivion there is actually based on Marshall McLuhan himself...