Marshall McLuhan: Culture

Marshall McLuhan was Canadian educator, philosopher, and scholar-- a professor of English literature, a literary critic, and a communications theorist. Explore interesting quotes on culture.
Marshall McLuhan: 832 quotes16 likes

“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.”

Marshall McLuhan

Letters of Marshall McLuhan (1987), p. 413
1980s and later
Context: 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.

“Scribal culture and Gothic architecture were both concerned with light through, not light on.”

Marshall McLuhan

Source: 1960s, The Gutenberg Galaxy (1962), p. 120

“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.”

Marshall McLuhan

Source: 1960s, The Medium is the Message (1967), p. 26
Source: The Medium is the Massage

“The city no longer exists except as a cultural ghost for tourists. Any highway eatery with its TV set, newspaper and magazine is as cosmopolitan as New York or Paris.”

Marshall McLuhan

Source: 1960s, Counterblast (1969), p.12

“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

1990s and beyond, "The Agenbite of Outwit" (1998)

“Perhaps the most precious possession of man is his abiding awareness of the Analogy of Proper Proportionality, the key to all metaphysical insight, and perhaps the very condition of consciousness itself. This analogical awareness is constituted of a perpetual play of ratios among ratios. A is to B, what C is to D, which is to say the ratio between A and B, is proportionable to the ratio between C and D, there being a ratio between these ratios, as well, this lively awareness of the most exquisite delicacy depends upon there being no connection whatsoever between the components. If A were linked to B, or C to D, mere logic would take the place of analogical perception, thus one of the penalties paid for literacy and a high visual culture is a strong tendency to encounter all things through a rigorous storyline, as it were. Paradoxically, connected spaces and situations exclude participation, whereas discontinuity affords room for involvement. Visual space is connected and creates detachment or non-involvement. It also tends to exclude the participation of the other senses.”

Marshall McLuhan

Source: 1960s, Through the Vanishing Point (1968), p.240

“Great ages of innovation are the ages in which entire cultures are junked or scrapped.”

Marshall McLuhan

Source: 1990s and beyond, The Book of Probes : Marshall McLuhan (2011), p. 309

“Cultural dominance by either the left or the right hemisphere is largely dependent upon environmental factors.”

Marshall McLuhan

Source: 1980s, Laws of Media: The New Science (with Eric McLuhan) (1988), p. 72

“By surpassing writing, we have regained our wholeness, not on a national or cultural but cosmic plane.”

Marshall McLuhan

1960s, Counterblast (1969)

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

Marshall McLuhan

Source: 1960s, Understanding Media (1964), p. 16

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

Marshall McLuhan

Source: 1960s, The Gutenberg Galaxy (1962), p. 96

“The culture-heroes of preliteracy and postliteracy alike are robots.”

Marshall McLuhan

Source: 1980s, Laws of Media: The New Science (with Eric McLuhan) (1988), p. 79

“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

Source: 1960s, The Gutenberg Galaxy (1962), p. 51

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

Marshall McLuhan

Source: 1960s, The Gutenberg Galaxy (1962), p. 167

“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

Source: 1980s, Laws of Media: The New Science (with Eric McLuhan) (1988), p. 47

“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 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

“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

“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

Source: 1990s and beyond, The Book of Probes : Marshall McLuhan (2011), p. 384

“The celebrated earthy tactility of Rabelais is a massive backwash of receding manuscript culture.”

Marshall McLuhan

Source: 1960s, The Gutenberg Galaxy (1962), p. 170