Marshall McLuhan
Marshall McLuhan
Herbert Marshall McLuhan, CCwas a Canadian professor, philosopher, and public intellectual. His work is viewed as one of the cornerstones of the study of media theory, as well as having practical applications in the advertising and television industries. He was educated at the University of Manitoba and Cambridge University and began his teaching career as a Professor of English at several universities in the U.S. and Canada, before moving to the University of Toronto where he would remain for the...
NationalityCanadian
ProfessionNovelist
Date of Birth21 July 1911
CityEdmonton, Canada
CountryCanada
Metaphor has traditionally been regarded as the matrix and pattern of the figures of speech.
All media are extensions of some human faculty- psychic or physical.
Cubism ('multi-locationalism') is one of the painterly forms of acoustic space.
Language always preserves a play or figure/ground relation between experience, and perception and its replay in expression.
The victory over Euclidean space was not achieved by isolated individuals, but by a field of young rebels opposed to all absolutes.
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 meaning of experience is typically one generation behind the experience. The content of new situations, both private and corporate, is typically the preceding situation.
Any loss of identity prompts people to seek reassurance and rediscovery of themselves by testing, and even by violence. Today, the electric revolution, the wired planet, and the information environment involve everybody in everybody to the point of individual extinction.
Pornography and obscenity...work by specialism and fragmentation. They deal with a figure without a ground -- situations in which the human factor is suppressed in favor of sensations and kicks.
The reader is the content of any poem or of the language he employs, and in order to use any of these forms, he must put them on.
We don't know who discovered water, but we know it wasn't the fish.
Our permanent address is tommorrow.
All media work us over completely.
All forms of violence are quests for identity. When you live on the frontier, you have no identity. You're a nobody.