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“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

1970s, The argument: causality in the electric world (1973)

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

Marshall McLuhan

Source: 1960s, The Gutenberg Galaxy (1962), p. 233

“The method of the twentieth century is to use not single but multiple models for experimental exploration – the technique of the suspended judgement.”

Marshall McLuhan

Source: 1960s, The Gutenberg Galaxy (1962), p. 81

“With [Francis] Bacon, Vico continuously asserts the claims of grammar as true science precisely because it has not yielded to specialism and method.”

Marshall McLuhan

Source: 1980s, Laws of Media: The New Science (with Eric McLuhan) (1988), p. 220

“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

Source: 1980s, Laws of Media: The New Science (with Eric McLuhan) (1988), p. 52

“America is 100% 18th Century. The 18th century had chucked out the principle of metaphor and analogy — the basic fact that as A is to B so is C to D. AB:CD. It can see AB relations. But relations in four terms are still verboten. This amounts to deep occultation of nearly all human thought for the USA.”

Marshall McLuhan

Letter to Ezra Pound (21 December 1948)
1940s

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

Marshall McLuhan

Source: 1960s, The Gutenberg Galaxy (1962), p. 30

“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

Tyuonyi, Volumes 1-2, 1985, p. 60
1980s

“Current concern with reading and spelling reform steers away from visual to auditory stress.”

Marshall McLuhan

Source: 1960s, The Gutenberg Galaxy (1962), p. 54

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

Marshall McLuhan

Mademoiselle: the magazine for the smart young woman, Volume 64, 1966, p. 114
1960s

“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.”

Marshall McLuhan

Source: 1960s, Understanding Media (1964), p.73 of the 1966 Signet paperback edition

“When we invent a new technology, we become cannibals. We eat ourselves alive since these technologies are merely extensions of ourselves. The new environment shaped by electric technology is a cannibalistic one that eats people. To survive one must study the habits of cannibals.”

Marshall McLuhan

Source: 1960s, Hot & Cool (1967), p. 261

“Our senses are not receptors so much as reactors and makers of different modalities of space. Perhaps touch is not just skin contact with things, but the very life of things in the mind.”

Marshall McLuhan

Source: 1990s and beyond, The Book of Probes : Marshall McLuhan (2011), p. 256

“Medieval and ancient sensibility now dominates our time as acoustic and multisensory awareness displaces the merely visual.”

Marshall McLuhan

Source: 1980s, Laws of Media: The New Science (with Eric McLuhan) (1988), p. 225

“Logic is figure without a ground. (p. 241)”

Marshall McLuhan

1990s and beyond, The Book of Probes : Marshall McLuhan (2011)

“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.”

Marshall McLuhan

Source: 1960s, Understanding Media (1964), p. 23

“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

Source: 1990s and beyond, The Book of Probes : Marshall McLuhan (2011), p. 314

“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

Source: 1970s, From Cliché to Archetype (1970), p.99

“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.”

Marshall McLuhan

Source: 1960s, Counterblast (1969), p. 84

“The space of early Greek cosmology was structured by logos – resonant utterance or word.”

Marshall McLuhan

Source: 1980s, Laws of Media: The New Science (with Eric McLuhan) (1988), p. 35