Marshall McLuhan Quotes

Relativity theory forced the abandonment, in principle, of absolute space and absolute time.

The victory over Euclidean space was not achieved by isolated individuals, but by a field of young rebels opposed to all absolutes.

To say that a body or its gravitational field 'bends in space' in its vicinity is the discuss visual space in acoustic terms.

Logos is the formal cause of the kosmos and all things, responsible for their nature and configuration.

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

The pre-atomist multisensory void was an animate, pulsating, and moving vibrant interval, neither container nor contained, acoustic space penetrated by tactility.

Tactility is the space of the interval; acoustic space is spherical and resonant.

Formal logic and the logical syllogism encapsulate connectedness in reasoning.

Prolonged mimesis of the alphabet and its fragmenting properties produced a new dominant mode of perception and then of culture.

By phonemic transformation into visual terms, the alphabet became a universal, abstract, static container of meaningless sounds.

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

For me any of the little gestures I make are all tentative probes. That's why I feel free to make them sound as outrageous or extreme as possible. Until you make it extreme, the probe is not very efficient.

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.

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.

Mass man is a phenomenon of electric speed, not of physical quantity.