Marshall McLuhan
413 quotes
Biography
Herbert Marshall McLuhan was a Canadian philosopher whose work is among the cornerstones of the study of media theory. Raised in Winnipeg, McLuhan studied at the University of Manitoba and the University of Cambridge.
"I think of art, at its most significant, as a DEW line, a Distant Early Warning system that can always be relied on to tell the old culture what is beginning to happen to it."
"Great art speaks a language which every intelligent person can understand. The people who call themselves modernists today speak a different language."
"Advertising is the greatest art form of the 20th century."
"Ads are the cave art of the twentieth century."
"Our Age of Anxiety is, in great part, the result of trying to do today’s jobs with yesterday’s tools!"
"A point of view can be a dangerous luxury when substituted for insight andunderstanding."
"With the arrival of electric technology, man has extended, or set outside himself, a live model of the central nervous system itself. To the degree that this is so, it is a development that suggests a desperate suicidal autoamputation, as if the central nervous system could no longer depend on the physical organs to be protective buffers against the slings and arrows of outrageous mechanism."
"Art is whatever you can get away with."
"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."
"Poetry and the arts can’t exist in America. Mere exposure to the arts does nothing for a mentality which is incorrigibly dialectical. The vital tensions and nutritive action of ideogram remain inaccessible to this state of mind."
"There is a real, living unity in our time, as in any other, but it lies submerged under a superficial hubbub of sensation."
"Ads represent the main channel of intellectual and artistic effort in the modern world."
"Human perception is literally incarnation."
"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."
"Even pacifist agitation or the nation-wide fever of big sports competitions acts as a spur to war fever in circumstances like ours. Any kind of excitement or emotion contributes to the possibility of dangerous explosions when the feelings of huge populations are kept inflamed even in peacetime for the sake of the advancement of commerce. Headlines mean street sales. It takes emotion to move merchandise. And wars and rumors of wars are the merchandise and also the emotion of the popular press."
"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."
"Such is the content of the mental life of the Hemingway hero and the good guy in general. Every day he gets beaten into a servile pulp by his own mechanical reflexes, which are constantly busy registering and reacting to the violent stimuli which his big, noisy, kinesthetic environment has provided for his unreflective reception."
"For tribal man, space was the uncontrollable mystery. For technological man it is time that occupies the same role."
"Instead of scurrying into a corner and wailing about what media are doing to us, one should charge straight ahead and kick them in the electrodes."
"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."
"The TV camera has no shutter. It does not deal with aspects or facets of objects in high resolution. It is a means of direct pick-up by the electrical groping over surfaces."
"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."
"The mother tongue is propaganda."