Quotes from the lecture

This is the Quotes From The Lecture category.

Quotes from a lecture by Marshall McLuhan, as delivered on May 7, 1966 at The Poetry Center of the 92nd Street YM-YWHA for the Foundation for Contemporary Performance Arts. McLuhan titled his lecture “The Medium Is the Massage”, a play on his famous aphorism, “the medium is the message”.

 

“I have been introduced quite recently as Canada’s revenge on the United States. You know, from the land of the DEW Line, the early-warning system.”

— Marshall McLuhan

“[But, this is one of my themes tonight, as it were,] the artist as early-warning system for new media.”

— Marshall McLuhan

“[Another main theme of course will be that] the medium is the massage and not the message—it really works us over, it really takes hold and massages the population in a savage way.”

— Marshall McLuhan

“Which does recall; from the land of the DEW Line, I can bring you a special kind of world of jokes that you may not have encountered, namely the grievance joke associated with French Canada. It’s not like the Pole joke or the Italian joke, and so on.”

— Marshall McLuhan

“I have a bit of a cold. And it feels very strange—I’m very pleased to be here but it feels very strange to be here while I was out there listening a few nights ago to Arthur Koestler. It’s a very strange change of roles.”

— Marshall McLuhan

“I think it was Steve Allen who said that the funnyman is a man with a grievance. And if you look around at the joke world from that point of view, it’s sometimes rather instructive.”

— Marshall McLuhan

“In Canada we have jokes such as the one about: mouse being pursued by the cat, and finally hiding under the floor, and all is quiet until suddenly there’s a kind of a “bow wow arf arf” sound. And the mouse figures, ah, house dog has come, scared cat away, and up comes the mouse and the cat grabs it. As the cat chews the mouse down, it says, “You know, it pays to be bilingual.””

— Marshall McLuhan

“There are a lot of those jokes around up there, and… I think it is rather amusing to watch the joke as a sign of grievance.”

— Marshall McLuhan

“In the same way slang can be an indicator of subtle change of sensibility, shifting patterns of perception. And if our youngsters were encouraged to pay the utmost attention and respect to slang from this point of view, it might clarify some of the problems they have.”

— Marshall McLuhan

“Isn’t it strange that no matter how complicated slang is, no child ever made a mistake in slang, and that goes even for the word cool.”

— Marshall McLuhan

“I once presented one of my children with a strange object. It was actually a yearbook from Rice University, and it was about six by six inches square, just cards taped together, and it had the little stories and poems of the year. When our thirteen-year-old saw this, he said, “Dad, that’s real cool”. And he was using the term quite correctly.”

— Marshall McLuhan

“But many people have difficulty with that term, especially when I use it. Actually, I merely draw it from the world of slang in which it means involved and detached at the same time like a surgeon operating.”

— Marshall McLuhan

““Cool” means identification with the creative process.”

— Marshall McLuhan, see also “Understanding Media: The Extensions Of Man”, p. 24

“When a person is both involved and detached, he has to identify with the creative process.”

— Marshall McLuhan

“You can read a great deal about the concept of cool in Mr. [T. S.] Eliot’s Four Quartets. It’s a somewhat Oriental concept.”

— Marshall McLuhan

“[And] the Western man tends to be either involved or detached, but not both at once. So this is a new development in our society. It is a complicated idea, and it is a profoundly creative idea.”

— Marshall McLuhan

“Well, I’m going to have a pleasant few minutes here. And I’m going to break at nine o’clock so that some people can be seated. And then we’ll continue and have a few questions—after a bit of chatting.”

— Marshall McLuhan

“One of the strange changes that is taking place in our world—and John Cage gave me a curious example of what it meant to him—is that we’re moving out of the world of the planter, out of the world of the specialist, out of the world of the fragmented person into the world of the hunter, the unified person.”

— Marshall McLuhan

“This is the meaning of James Bond, it’s the meaning of the sleuth, the meaning of the obsession with crime in our world, because the criminal or the criminologist alike are both hunters. They belong to the old paleolithic world and are really a new type of human being in our midst—the person who explores the total human environment the way the old hunter and the food-gatherer used to explore his entire environment as a unified field. Because man the planter, man the basket-weaver, man the pot-maker, and so on, came in after the paleolithic man, and we’ve had thousands of years of the planter.”

— Marshall McLuhan

“When I mentioned this to John Cage, he said, “You know, that’s very interesting. I spend my life hunting mushrooms. I am not the least bit interested in cultivating them.” This is a curious illustration of the difference between the two kinds of man.”

— Marshall McLuhan

“The hunter is not concerned with classification or specialism or the processes of cultivation, only with discovery.”

— Marshall McLuhan

“So there are some rather exciting things afoot.”

— Marshall McLuhan

“[For example, if one wanted to talk about] the future of work in our world, we know that it has very little to do with jobs as they’re presently understood. It has much to do with discovery, much to do with knowing, much to do with involvement in processes so much so that the future of work is plainly knowing.”

— Marshall McLuhan

“There was a time when the job of royalty, of the prince, was not to learn any special skill, but simply to grow up.”

— Marshall McLuhan

“Jacques Ellul, the author of Propaganda, points out that in our twentieth-century world the child is the hardest working child in all human history. Our children in a twentieth-century information environment have to process more data than any human being in any previous culture of the world. Our children from early infancy are engaged in extraordinarily hard work, and that work is mainly just growing, growing up because to grow up in a modern electronic environment is a fantastically complex and difficult job.”

— Marshall McLuhan

“It’s also a job which threatens to deprive people of identity, the personal concept.”

— Marshall McLuhan

“One of the peculiarities of an electronic environment is that people become so profoundly involved in each other that they lose that sense of private identity.”

— Marshall McLuhan

“This is one of the peculiar cruxes of our time that people, precisely because they become profoundly involved in one another in an all-at-once simultaneous field of happenings, then begin to lose their sense of private identity because identity used to be connected with simple classification and fragmentation and non-involvement.”

— Marshall McLuhan

“In a world or profound involvement, identity seems to evaporate.”

— Marshall McLuhan

“Well, the future of work as knowing, the future of identity as involvement, brings one around to the idea of perhaps roles instead of jobs.”

— Marshall McLuhan

“A mother doesn’t have a job; she has sixty jobs, and that’s a role. A top exec doesn’t have a job; he has many jobs simultaneously, and that is a role. I think this is happening to all of us in varying degrees.”

— Marshall McLuhan

“The very speeded-up world we live in guarantees that we can all have a highly integrated existence which really points in the direction of role-playing rather than of job-holding.”

— Marshall McLuhan

“I was talking to a group of managers one time, and I thought I’d try it out on them. It seemed to me plausible to suggest to them that the real future of old age in business is discovery. They were quite struck by this. It seemed to make profound sense—most of them were over forty. But the point about old age as a period of discovery contradicts the merely chronological approach to things. But the older man in business is a man who knows the field, and he’s in a much better position to be a discoverer than some younger man who is merely job-holding. And so there’s hope.”

— Marshall McLuhan

“There’s another basic theme associated with this computer threat to job holding.”

— Marshall McLuhan

“”Come into my parlor,” said the computer to the specialist.”

— Marshall McLuhan

“Anybody who wants to be taken over by a computer should just specialize.”

— Marshall McLuhan

“[But, ] one of the hopeful things about the computer is this: that as a retrieval system, the instantaneous speed of retrieval by computer offers a tremendous future of discovery.”

— Marshall McLuhan

“[B]ecause a retrieval system of very high speed brushes so many facets of knowledge together, so many kinds of layers of experience get brushed together that they reveal structures, they reveal forms, they reveal the life of forms, they reveal knowledge in all sorts of new patterns.”

— Marshall McLuhan

“So it is typical of our time, or any other time, perhaps, that they should tackle this new form of technology and put it on the old job-classified data. What we’re doing with the computer up until now is merely giving it to the librarians and to the card cataloguers.”

— Marshall McLuhan

“But the possibility of retrieval as a form of discovery is something we all know from our own memories. When we recall something, we tend to make discoveries. We certainly tend to make changes in the pattern of the thing we know.”

— Marshall McLuhan

“Finnegans Wake is a book built entirely on this retrieval system: “Casting her perils before swains.” This is a phrase out of Finnegan, and it’s typical of the technique of Finnegan.”

— Marshall McLuhan

“Joyce regarded the human language as the biggest storage system of human knowledge and perception anywhere. And his own use of that vast store of human perception was to retrieve from it in a pattern which made discovery natural: “Though he might have been humble there’s no police like Holmes.” And that’s retrieval.”

— Marshall McLuhan

“The pun as a form of retrieval brushes various layers and contexts together and creates a new discovery pattern.”

— Marshall McLuhan

“So the computer offers many advantages besides just the threat to wipe out jobs and provide leisure.”

— Marshall McLuhan

“Now, “the future of”—under electric conditions—suggests an approach to various other things which I might mention while on that theme, the future of the planet as a work of art.”

— Marshall McLuhan

“Since the planet has as its new environment of satellites and electronic information, it is rapidly becoming an old nose cone, a work of art like the Model T.”

— Marshall McLuhan

“Like old silents on TV, the planet is now becoming the content of our own man-made environment.”

— Marshall McLuhan

“And the future of the planet as Williamsburg, as work of art, as carefully prepared archeological exhibit, is really quite amusing.”

— Marshall McLuhan

“And the future work of mankind will be mainly raking and tidying and clipping the old planet, putting it in shape, reconstructing it pretty much the way it was when the pilgrims landed, and that sort of thing.”

— Marshall McLuhan

“I’m merely using this as an illustration of a basic theme that anything becomes a work of art as soon as it is surrounded by a new environment.”

— Marshall McLuhan

“Give any form at all a new environment and it acquires art status.”

— Marshall McLuhan

“ In other words, it becomes visible because this is the peculiar character of art. It creates attention—it creates perception.”

— Marshall McLuhan

“And the role of the artist as a creator of perceptual models and of perceptual means is perhaps misunderstood by those who think of art as primarily a blood bank of stored human values.”

— Marshall McLuhan

“In our time there are a great many unhappy people who see the great art treasures of the past being polluted by a corrupt new vulgar environment. It never occurs to them perhaps their job is the penetration and exploration of these new environments, and that the mere accumulation of past human experience in blood banks called art does not really contribute very much toward the perception of our current environment.”

— Marshall McLuhan

“We might come back to that theme during questions.”

— Marshall McLuhan

“A great many people are confused and unhappy at the present time because they sense that all the great values of the past are being polluted and corrupted, anemicized, by vulgar entertainment, mass entertainment. So, in that regard let’s pause a moment on the future of the book.”

— Marshall McLuhan

“The printed book created what we call the public. With the coming of electric circuitry, you have what is called the mass.”

— Marshall McLuhan

“It’s a time factor. The book created the public because the book, as a printed form, made possible a very large body of people but not simultaneous. The peculiar dimension of the mass audience is that it’s all-at-once. It’s a happening like telegraph, like the daily paper.”

— Marshall McLuhan

“The daily paper is a good example of a happening because everything that’s in it happens at the same moment.”

— Marshall McLuhan

“The dateline is the only organizing principle in a newspaper.”

— Marshall McLuhan

“There is no connection between the items otherwise than the dateline. And if you take away the dateline from any newspaper whatever, you have a quite handsome surrealist poem. It becomes much more enjoyable if you pull the dateline off.”

— Marshall McLuhan

“The dateline presents a plausible pretext of rationality, meaning, connection, which is not really very deeply related to the newspaper. The sort of constellation of events that is incorporated on any page of a newspaper is a kind of environmental image for which many people find it natural to identify empathetically, and so on. And the paper as a happening is very much in this dimension of the all-at-once.”

— Marshall McLuhan

“The editorial page by contrast represents a point of view, a fixed, arrested position with regard to the happening. The editorial is very closely related to the book as a form.”

— Marshall McLuhan

“The printed book as a form created the public, and Montaigne said upon recognizing the existence of this new entity, this new environment called the public: “I owe la publique a complete portrait of myself.””

— Marshall McLuhan

“It was a matter of immediate response on the part of writers that their task as writers would be from now on the etiolation, the evolving of self-portrait, an image. There was no such impulse or response in the Middle Ages, when they had the scribe-and-manuscript culture, or in the ancient world. It was with the coming of the printed book that people suddenly felt the need to reflect, to bounce their image off this public as a form of self-expression, self-portraiture.”

— Marshall McLuhan

“Self-portraiture was a very special response to the printed word and was never felt as a need or a response for the manuscript form of culture.”

— Marshall McLuhan

“Now Xerox has brought a kind of revolution into the publishing world that is only being felt slowly. It will be felt more and more. Xerox is the application of electric circuitry to a world which had formerly been merely mechanical and fragmented.”

— Marshall McLuhan

“Xerox or xerography enables the reader to become publisher, and this is an important aspect of all electric circuitry. The audience is increasingly involved in the process.”

— Marshall McLuhan

“With the public [print], the audience was detached, observant, but not involved. With circuitry, the reader, the audience becomes involved in itself and in the process of publishing.”

— Marshall McLuhan

“The future of the book is very much in the order of book as information service. Instead of the book as a fixed package of repeatable and uniform character suited to the market with pricing—and so on—the book is increasingly taking on the character of service, an information service, and the book as an information service is tailor-made and custom-built.”

— Marshall McLuhan

“The strange dynamic or pattern of electric information is to involve the audience increasingly as part of the workforce instead of just tossing things to it as consumer or as entertainment. The tendency is to involve the audience as workforce as with electric toasters, electric razors, electric anything. You do the work. And we’re coming to this. I’ll come back to this perhaps apropos the future of television or forms like that in which it will become possible or is now possible to brief audiences in prime-time on top-level problems in physics, science, whatever, and invite their response to these problems by IBM cards sent out in supermarkets or in magazines.”

— Marshall McLuhan

“[Robert Oppenheimer was fond of saying:] There are children playing in the street who could solve some of my top problems in physics, because they have modes of sensory perception that I lost long ago.”

— J. Robert Oppenheimer, quoted by Marshall McLuhan in “Address at Vision 65”, p. 12

“Now Oppenheimer realizes in that remark that most scientific problems are really not concept problems but percept problems, that most scientists are blocked in their perceptions by preconceptions and prepossessions.”

— Marshall McLuhan

“When you’re dealing simultaneously with several million people, it’s obvious that somebody in that audience is going to have a perceptual perforation into the problem without any difficulty whatever.”

— Marshall McLuhan

“Eight scientists working on a problem for fifty years might not get through, but ten million people working on the problem for ten minutes might get through.”

— Marshall McLuhan

“Anyway, audience participation can mean many things. You remember in the old quiz shows the audience was browned off when it discovered that the shows had been rigged, and they had really been left out. There was nothing dishonest about rigging quiz shows any more than there is about rigging a movie and making it look different from what a real-life situation might. But it was a misuse of the medium of TV, which calls for much participation.”

— Marshall McLuhan

“The movie world doesn’t call for any participation. It’s a fantasy world, highly visual with the audience sitting very much back from the show. But TV is not like that.”

— Marshall McLuhan

“TV is a profoundly involving medium with the audience as environment, the audience as vanishing point, the audience as screen.”

— Marshall McLuhan

“In the movie, the audience is the camera; the audience looks out at the environment. With TV, the audience is the environment, is the screen, is the vanishing point. And this creates a completely different relation to programming. It creates a kind of Oriental effect with reverse perspective.”

— Marshall McLuhan

“Audience as vanishing point creates a reverse perspective with a kind of Orientalism involved. It’s not accidental, I think, that our Western world is taking on many profound Oriental traits since television. But it’s not just television. It’s electric circuitry.”

— Marshall McLuhan

“The safety car is another peculiar example of electric circuitry afflicting a mechanical object, that is, the consequences of the car are now being felt by the designers of the car whereas formerly they merely concerned themselves with the projectile. You hurled it out into the public and let the chips fall where they may. But suddenly in the age of circuitry the feedback is coming into the design. Product design now takes on the character of audience participation.”

— Marshall McLuhan

“But perhaps the safety car is more an example of the effect of the space capsule. Bucky Fuller is famous for having pointed out, among many brilliant observations, that the space capsule is the first man-made environment. Totally man-made.”

— Marshall McLuhan

“You know the old saying, “You can’t take it with you.” With the space capsule you’ve gotta take it with you. You have to take the planet with you. So the space capsule is really a kind of complete environment in which all consequences of all maneuvers are anticipated by design, by the built-in design pattern.”

— Marshall McLuhan

“This sense of the space capsule as applied to the motorcar is now creating the motorcar as a padded cell. And what more appropriate form of design for the maniac driver? But the motorcar as a feedback design pattern turns into a padded cell.”

— Marshall McLuhan

“I have a friend who speaks of the motorcar as the “carsophagus.” “Don’t drop the bandwagon” is another of his remarks. The carsophagus is a form of peripatetic vehicle in which the effects of the object on the environment are built back into the object. This is something that is characteristic of electric circuits.”

— Marshall McLuhan

“The circuit as such is a form that feeds back and feeds us into the circuit. All circuits are do-it-yourself objects.”

— Marshall McLuhan

“The book on Xerox becomes somewhat like the safety car. The reader becomes publisher and author.”

— Marshall McLuhan

“In the ancient days of the scribe in manuscript cultures, the scribe was both publisher and author. And we are sort of circling around to that condition again in which with Xerox the reader of the book can excerpt it and relate it to any other excerpts or any other notions or any other soundtracks and publish it as his own creative effort. And this is already happening.”

— Marshall McLuhan

“Teachers are strongly inclined to make their own books for their own classes designed specifically for the needs of a particular class.”

— Marshall McLuhan

“This is another peculiar feature of electric technology; it tends toward decentralized, tailor-made, custom-built servicing.”

— Marshall McLuhan

“It’s typical of our rear-view mirror orientation that we look at all these new technologies as if they were reflexes of the old technology.”

— Marshall McLuhan

“For heaven knows how long, people have encountered each new technology by translating it back into the old familiar one. You know all the types of examples of that.”

— Marshall McLuhan

“The first motorcars were made with buggy whip holders. And the new automation computer devices are being made as if they were card catalogues.”

— Marshall McLuhan

“This strange habit of looking backward when moving forward is one that perhaps won’t quite bear up, isn’t quite consistent with jet speeds and electronic speeds.”

— Marshall McLuhan

“It may be that we are the first human generation to feel the need for a close look at what’s actually happening under our noses instead of that rear-view mirror look.”

— Marshall McLuhan

“The rear-view mirror is a very comforting spot. It gives you a sense of remoteness like Bonanza.”

— Marshall McLuhan

“Suburbia [the suburban world of our time] lives [imaginatively] in Bonanza-land.”

— Marshall McLuhan

“This gives it a comfortable sense of distance and security. It’s a nineteenth-century image.”

— Marshall McLuhan

“When the railway was new in the nineteenth century, people formed an image not of the railway and the new world it was creating, the new cities. They formed an image of an Arcadian retreat, a pastoral, innocent world, a Jeffersonian paradise. That was their image of the railway. As soon as they banged into the railway, they translated themselves back into an agrarian, Arcadian pastoral world.”

— Marshall McLuhan

“And this is a kind of normal human reaction to novelty and innovation. Its inappropriateness as a reaction in no way deters people from this strategy. It’s a kind of déjà vu. Every time you encounter the new, you say, “I’ve been here before, and this isn’t as new as you might think.”, and all that.”

— Marshall McLuhan

“This seems to tie in with the ancient theory of human learning as needfully going from the known to the unknown. I don’t think there’s too much evidence that this is a basic pattern of human learning.”

— Marshall McLuhan

“I think there’s lots of evidence, though, for the fact that the moment you encounter the unknown you translate it back into the known. This means that we never encounter the unknown. We encounter only convenient self-deceptions.”

— Marshall McLuhan

“The world of electric technology and circuitry then, as involving the audience as workforce, has extraordinary implications. You can see while this development is taking place, while the audience is becoming profoundly involved in making a world of entertainment, the gloom voyeurs stand around classifying the program and providing program ratings of the most unhappy kind. While the audience is about to take over this vast creative act, the gloom voyeurs stand around reading off audience ratings.”

— Marshall McLuhan

“For example, 350 million people each week watch Bonanza in sixty-two different countries of the world. What could be a more gloomy image of the human condition? And so on. Actually, Bonanza isn’t that bad a show. There was a little boy in Nairobi a few weeks ago, in Africa, who was found wandering around the city, and on being questioned by the police, he explained he had come from some village, and he was an orphan. And they said, “Yeah, well why are you here?” He said, “I’m looking for Mr. Cartwright. I think he can help me.” And I’m quite sure he could, too.”

— Marshall McLuhan

“For countries like Africa or Indonesia or China, Bonanza must have a very strange aspect. It must look like some distant science-fiction image of some remote world to come, that is, for countries that never had a nineteenth century. And by the way, this also happens to apply to the West Coast.”

— Marshall McLuhan

“California didn’t have a nineteenth century. During the nineteenth century people were making their way out there as best they could. There were no factories, there were no cities, there was no industrial life, etcetera, etcetera. Now, note, the result is that, not having had a nineteenth century, the West Coast leapfrogged out of the eighteenth into the twentieth with great advantage to itself.”

— Marshall McLuhan

“[That is,] if you leapfrog out of one century and leapfrog over a century or two, you can, upon encountering the new conditions, feel completely uncrippled by the older ones. You can behave in a much more spontaneous and much more resourceful way than people who have been through the whole process.”

— Marshall McLuhan

“Those who lived through the nineteenth century lived through the most stupefying and fragmenting and systematizing and categorizing century in human history. Therefore, anybody who leapfrogged over the nineteenth century might retain some imaginative life. And those who went through the nineteenth century were maimed and mutilated very horribly because of this enormous power to fragment and systematize and classify everything that happens.”

— Marshall McLuhan

“So, Canada is in a peculiar position, by the way. Canada never had anything but a nineteenth century, that is, Canada was invented in the nineteenth century.”

— Marshall McLuhan

“The United States was invented in the eighteenth century. Wasn’t it Adlai Stevenson who said, “Columbus went too far”? This business of leapfrogging is not without its significant features.”

— Marshall McLuhan

“In our present time you see there are many countries in the world who are leapfrogging out of 10,000 B.C. into the twentieth century. Many countries that are doing this, leapfrogging out of prehistory into post-history.”

— Marshall McLuhan

“Just psychically, what is the consequence of skipping thousands and thousands of years of Western history? No one knows. It hasn’t been thought about.”

— Marshall McLuhan

“And so to come back a moment to the strange prodigy of the xerographed book, the tendency to involve audience as actor, as publisher, as writer is a characteristic that applies to an enormous amount of electric technology quite apart from this particular instance. It’s a sort of prospect that will increasingly bring us into the need for new instruments of handling our problems.”

— Marshall McLuhan

“One way of putting it is to say, for the first time in human history, there is more information and data outside the classroom or the school situation than inside.”

— Marshall McLuhan

“The sheer amount of levels of information outside in the environment far exceed the amount of data and information inside the classroom. Now, this is not just of very recent origin. It’s occurring more and more rapidly and on a much bigger and bigger scale.”

— Marshall McLuhan

“You know all the statistics one hears, again intended to panic people, that by the year 1980, there will be more scientists than people, and more and more and more. What would seem to be, therefore, the future of education in a world in which the proportions of information have been reversed? In ordinary human past, there’d been more in knowledge and information available inside the classroom conditions than outside. With this spectacular reversal of this condition, it would seem to be possible that the business of the school has also reversed, that the business of the school is no longer instruction but discovery.”

— Marshall McLuhan

“And [that] the business of the teaching establishment is to train perception upon the outer environment instead of merely stenciling information upon the brain pans of children inside the environment.”

— Marshall McLuhan

“We have never had an educational system programmed to train perception of the outer world, and it will create a considerable trauma or shock to switch into that mode of activity. But it’s like the audience in the entertainment world that is ready to go into action on high-level problems.”

— Marshall McLuhan

“The children in our school system at the present time have very high-level information resources both in their own makeup and nervous systems and in the world immediately accessible to them, and they can be given the task, in teams, of researching all sorts of fascinating problems.”

— Marshall McLuhan

“For example, suppose a group of elementary schoolchildren were given the job of trying to find out what was happening to America since color TV. Teams of them could be turned loose in just making inventories of effects observable in clothing, in food, in cars, in designs, in family life, in all sorts of forms. If they merely made inventories, they didn’t have to use any ideas, they didn’t have to reach any conclusions, they merely were invited to observe, to make inventories of effects. Small children love this kind of work, and are just as able researchers as any team of sociologists in the world. And the accumulation of such inventories can be absolutely necessary and indispensable to the highest operations.”

— Marshall McLuhan

“I was hearing a sociologist today suggest that it was quite impossible to make a direct connection between television and any change whatever. This is in a certain sense true. On the other hand […].”

— Marshall McLuhan

“[I]f you make an inventory of all the changes that have taken place in the last twelve, fifteen years since TV, without any preconceptions, without any theories about what television is or what television does, if one merely made an inventory of all the changes in speech, in politics, in habits of human association, habits of reading, habits of dress and food, it might become quite evident that there had been a kind of a pattern of change.”

— Marshall McLuhan

“And this would be a scientific report in the usual way of an induction. No conclusions. Just here are the changes that have taken place in the past fifteen years in all these fields since TV. And you could in turn look at that same curve in relation to some other technology if you chose.”

— Marshall McLuhan

“The way to study the effects, for example, if you wanted to study what the motorcar was, you might find out more from what it did to the environment and the community.”

— Marshall McLuhan

“In other words, if you notice that the motorcar created road systems and vast servicing industries, you would probably have a better idea of the motorcar than you could have from photographic images of cars in catalogues.”

— Marshall McLuhan

“The car is what it does to people and what it does to the environment, and so with any other medium, as far as I know.”

— Marshall McLuhan

“A medium creates an environment. An environment is a process—it’s not a wrapper. It’s an action and it goes to work on our nervous system and our sensory lives, completely altering them.”

— Marshall McLuhan

“The ‘content’ of any medium [/technology] is always [/inevitably] another medium [—the older technology].”

— Marshall McLuhan

“The new environment goes around the old environment, and turns the old one into an art form. This happened to the Greeks, it happened to the Romans, it happened to the Middle Ages, it happened to the Renaissance, and so on. There’s no lack of evidence of this happening. Now, at the present time, I mentioned the strange fate of the planet as art form resulting from the new environment of satellite and electronic information.”

— Marshall McLuhan

“One of the biggest revolutions in Western culture occurred when the world of the arts in the eighteenth century began to deliberately create landscapes and environments as a way of controlling mental life.”

— Marshall McLuhan

“The eighteenth-century artist, whether in painting or in poetry or in landscaping and city building—the eighteenth-century artist created landscapes, what he called the picturesque, making things look as if they already were framed in pictures. And he found that these landscapes or picturesque situations could be used as a means of controlling the mental life of the observer.”

— Marshall McLuhan

“The function of Romantic art or picturesque art was to control moods. It was all oriented toward effect.”

— Marshall McLuhan

“Earlier the arts had been more concerned with simply permitting the audience to enjoy the sense of community and festive involvement. Medieval arts, as we are popularly aware, were festive and communal and participative. They were not intended to give any sense of privileged or elite life.”

— Marshall McLuhan

“[It’s a little bit like] the Balinese have a saying [/who say]: We have no art. We do everything as well as [possible/] we can.”

— Marshall McLuhan, see “Understanding Media: The Extensions Of Man”, p. 73

“[The Balinese] think of art as that which applies to the environment. They program the environment. Art for them means dealing with the environment itself as if it were a work of art. And this, I think, is one of the meanings of pop art.”

— Marshall McLuhan

“Pop art is a recognition that the outer environment is itself capable of being processed like art. And this, I think, is an electronic phenomenon that only in an age of electronic immediacy and totality could we ever dream of tackling the whole human environment as a work of art. This is happening to us. And pop art is merely a report to the nation, as it were, that this event is taking place and that we can prepare ourselves accordingly.”

— Marshall McLuhan

“You know how the elite artists, the blood-bank people, are shocked by pop art because they try to classify the content of pop art. Instead of viewing pop art as a means of perception, they think of it as a means of classification, as merely a means of ratings. The idea that it might have a function just training human perception doesn’t seem to get through easily to these people.”

— Marshall McLuhan

“But let’s go back for a moment to the eighteenth-century landscape picturesque artists. Having devised this landscape as a way of controlling the mental life of populations, there came shortly after, in the middle of the nineteenth century, a sudden break in which the artist said: it is the inner life, not the outer landscape, that counts.”

— Marshall McLuhan

“And the symbolists—the Rimbauds, the Wagners, the Baudelaires—began to examine the inner mental landscape as something that could be programmed as a means of enriching consciousness, of creating an inclusive consciousness.”

— Marshall McLuhan

“Instead of just creating—as the Romantic artists [the symbolists] had done—creating a mood, they began to work on the idea of the total consciousness.”

— Marshall McLuhan

“And eh—we’re gonna have some questions—but…”

— Marshall McLuhan

“There are some lessons to be learned from the artist in regard to our own time in this way. A man like Seurat, the painter, was painting TV in 1880, that is, he had a model, a perception that had all the technical features of TV—rear projection, minute fragmentation of image into these little pointillisms. The TV viewer receives these little spots on himself, they wrap around him, he becomes lord of the flies. They settle on him literally. The TV viewer is covered with these little dots, these little flies. But Seurat knew that, and he painted that back in 1880, but he wanted an effect. ”

— Marshall McLuhan

“[Seurat] was not painting the technology. He was painting the effect he wanted. The effect he wanted from this TV image or this type of pointillism—the effect he wanted was that of total audience participation, involvement of a multi-sensuous kind. Seurat was consciously aiming at not merely visual but total sensuous involvement. He wanted all the senses to be involved in the painting, and that’s why he used this rear projection.”

— Marshall McLuhan

“There’s a pleasant story about Malraux taking General de Gaulle around an art gallery recently and pointing out this and that. And de Gaulle was saying, “Uh, ah, what’s that one over there?” and Malraux said, “That’s a Dufy.” “And what’s that one?” “Oh, that’s a Renoir.” “Ah,” says de Gaulle suddenly, “I know that cartoon over there, that must be a Rouault?” “No, sir, that’s a mirror.” Rouault came to mind because he too was a rear projectionist, that is, the light came through the image to the viewer. This light through or rear projection creates a much higher degree of involvement than otherwise is possible. The painters suddenly wanted to involve the audience deeply in their images with all their senses.”

— Marshall McLuhan

“Electric technology, both radio and TV, for example, have this power of involving us in all our senses.”

— Marshall McLuhan

“Many people don’t seem to recognize very easily that a cartoon, a mere outline, a mere contour is a profoundly involving experience that requires participation of all our senses. Whereas a photograph is more limited to one sense, the visual merely, whereas a cartoon, although it seems much simpler, is actually more profound in involving our senses, our sensuous lives.”

— Marshall McLuhan

“Well, the painters knew this. I learned this from the later-nineteenth-century painters, all this stuff about the media that I talk about I learned from them.”

— Marshall McLuhan

“[And[ in fact, you’ll find the great instructors in all media matters are these painters and poets of the later nineteenth century and people like James Joyce and Eliot and Pound and others. They spent their lives studying our senses as they go out technologically into the environment because they realized this had a profound effect on language and on the medium that they were working with as poets.”

— Marshall McLuhan

“One of the things that puzzles many people about our world of advertising is that there seems to be such a strange disproportion between the effect of the ad and the content.”

— Marshall McLuhan

“Take a Picasso painting such as Man Sitting in Chair. You see no chair. You see no man. But the painting is designed to convey the effect of sitting in a chair, not the appearance. Not what it looks like, but what it feels like. Now, this painting the effect minus the appearances is a means of involvement. And the painters and poets alike sought increasingly the techniques of involvement in our time.”

— Marshall McLuhan

“Hence, the return, for example, of poetic drama, because the dramatists discovered that if you want to really involve the audience in the action of a play you must not use prose, which merely leaves them talking at each other and to each other, the audience, and the actors. You must use poetry which brings the audience right up onto the stage.”

— Marshall McLuhan

“It’s rather paradoxical to say that poetry is a more involving experience than prose when in actual fact most people read prose and very few read poetry. But in terms of effect this is true. And it’s the same with painting.”

— Marshall McLuhan

“So now in modern advertising there’s much the same revolution going forward as has been going forward in painting and poetry and in the world of entertainment with the audience moving more and more into the act.”

— Marshall McLuhan

“Modern advertising is more and more a substitute for the product.”

— Marshall McLuhan

“Because of its rich resources and means of sensuous solicitation, modern advertising can give you the effect of almost anything without your having to bother about having the thing at all.”

— Marshall McLuhan

“Tony Schwartz is in the audience tonight, bless him, and he is an expert in this very department. In terms of auditory magic, the power of giving effect without thing is entirely within his domain.”

— Marshall McLuhan

“But, you see, advertisers have been puzzled for a long time in their surveys to discover that people don’t really read ads until they own the thing. If you own that icebox or that car, then you notice the ads very much because this is how you get your satisfaction. The ad world then becomes an enormous area of information service, part of the service industries, enabling you to substitute the effect for the thing, just like Picasso.”

— Marshall McLuhan

“And this is called non-objective abstract art. Now you see it, now you don’t see it. And so on.”

— Marshall McLuhan

“The artists usually go through these maneuvers fifty or more years before the engineers get around of them. And so the advantage of knowing art is orientation in a complex world. It gives you fifty-year breathing space before the thing hits, and that is a considerable advantage.”

— Marshall McLuhan

“One of the—in these terms and I’m going to pause here for a few questions, after this observation—one of the peculiar results of this profound involvement through circuitry as compared with the old detachment of literacy and visual culture has been the increasing Orientalization of the Western world.”

— Marshall McLuhan

“Even as we pour and lavish our nineteenth-century technology on the East, we are doing to ourselves the exact opposite. We are Orientalizing ourselves by going inward. And it’s very easy to see them going westward, but very difficult to see ourselves going inward because it is so environmental with us that it becomes almost imperceptible. You can, however, if you do inventory, discover the amazing rise of Oriental values in the arts and in all sorts of produce and all sorts of habits. And I’m sure they could by similar inventories find that the West made considerable inroads into their world.”

— Marshall McLuhan

“But this may serve as a last—or break—example for the kind of change that is going on in our own midst—we’re doing this to ourselves, nobody is doing this to us—we are Orientalizing ourselves while Westernizing the East, and seemingly taking much credit to ourselves for the Westernizing and not even noticing what we’re doing to ourselves.”

— Marshall McLuhan

“Many people find it desirable to saddle me with moral judgments and the need for value judgments.

— Marshall McLuhan

“If you notice this Orientalizing of the Western world, it would be impertinent and somewhat fatuous to approve or disapprove of anything that concerned the life of nations and many, many millions of people simultaneously. It would be very much like the position of Margaret Fuller, one of Bucky’s relatives, by the way, who said back, what, in 1850: “I accept the universe.” And Emerson, I think it was, who said, “She’d better!””

— Marshall McLuhan

Questions

“Well now, time for a few questions?”

— Marshall McLuhan

“Thanks”

— Marshall McLuhan

“Well there is a mobile mic down there for people with questions.”

— Marshall McLuhan

“Uh-ah.”

— Marshall McLuhan

“Well, it’s a wedding and most of our media are like that. They tend to hybridize or crossover with other media and, you know, the book and the picture, and the movie and the soundtrack and the motorcar is itself a product of the union of the machine and of the electric or the sparking system.”

— Marshall McLuhan

“Most of our technologies depend upon two or more technologies wedding each other. ”

— Marshall McLuhan

“Yes: the effect however, the effect of TV on movie—or of movie on TV—has been more profound than that. When you’re looking at—just to answer your question—when you’re looking at movie on TV, you’re watching TV, you’re not seeing a movie. However, that is, the translation is into TV, not into movie.”

— Marshall McLuhan

“Now, one of the strange effects that TV has had on the movie has been the deprivament of the story line. In the Fellini world, stripping off story line is a normal result of speed up—electric technology.”

— Marshall McLuhan

“The newspaper lost its story line when it got telegraphic services. The humpy little stories without the unifying one.”

— Marshall McLuhan

“You see, in earlier days the newspaper, each day’s paper, came out as a big paper of editorial that were all unified. Then as the news services improved it became impossible to unify so they broke down the story line. But in the same way, TV has stripped the story line off the novel.”

— Marshall McLuhan

“The thing novel, the Roman shows, has come in along with the Fellini or VanDerBeek movie. The movie without the story line is a movie more subtly responsive to modulations of complex environments and human needs. It’s what many people find very baffling—and you see Dr Zhivago as no story line to speak of, but that’s not because of the influence of TV. It’s simply because Russians never needed a story line, they were always a corporate, collective sense. They sensed the meaning of vast environmental changes, and corporate changes. And so, in War and Peace and in Dr Zhivago you have this sense of MASS, collective energy, reshaping whole populations. And so a narrative, a mere narrative story line from a personal point of view of an author, doesn’t tend to exist.”

— Marshall McLuhan

“But the story line not only disappeared in humor, you know all the vast new group of jokes in many areas that have many effects but no stories [, like:]”

— Marshall McLuhan

“[Or the Polish jokes, like, eh:] “Alexander Graham Kowalski—the first ‘telephone Pole.’”. [The first Polish joke I ever heard. One of the best.”]

— Marshall McLuhan, “Address at Vision 65” , p. 1

“And no story, just an effect. And it’s an effect of a story: everything happening at once—without a connecting story. All the jokes, the elephant jokes and so on, are all in this pattern.”

— Marshall McLuhan

“The disappearance of story line all goes along with the disappearance of clothes lines, hemlines, stag lines, you name it.”

— Marshall McLuhan

“The line as a means of organising human life is disappearing. I don’t say this is a good or a bad thing. I don’t even pretend to know. But it disappears under the impact of an all at once technology.”

— Marshall McLuhan

“TV is not a narrative medium. And attempts to keep it in the narrative mold have been rather unhappy.”

— Marshall McLuhan

“Prior to print the narrative structure was rather obscure and opaque compared to what it became with printing. As a matter of fact you don’t even get fictional narrative until you hit upon the wonderful device of getting the characters all moving along a row. Eighteenth century novel.”

— Marshall McLuhan

“When you get the characters on the row then you begin to get novels with plots. But the fictional form is a very peculiar one. And it’s disappearing very rapidly.”

— Marshall McLuhan

“You know, a thing like In Cold Blood would have been a novel 20, 30 years ago. In Cold Blood is like Dr Zhivago the account of a huge upheaval within our own sensory life. It’s like the safety car: radical change of orientation. It’s a revolution. And it doesn’t depend on a story line so much as on an environmental shaping of energy.”

— Marshall McLuhan

“So a novel, and movie and tv, have this profound kind of relationship that the movie is undergoing, very rapid change along with the novel as a result of contact with TV.”

— Marshall McLuhan

“Yes, sir.”

— Marshall McLuhan

“Well, in terms of our own children’s lives, our children today, small children, anywhere up to the teenage group, they have gone inside themselves in the sense of taking themselves with profound seriousness. They’re not looking for goals. LAT, the old movie world with its camera angles outward, they’re looking for roles, involvement, participation. And again, I’m not proving or disapproving, it’s simply something that happened.”

— Marshall McLuhan

“The young people today are not goal oriented, they’re role oriented.”

— Marshall McLuhan

“It’s like Peace Corps. Peace Corps isn’t a goal activity, it’s role, it’s involvement. And we need Peace Corps activity at home. It’s ridiculous to think of Peace Corps as something that should be going on in remote parts of the world. It should be done on our own campuses.”

— Marshall McLuhan

“Anyway, this kind of inwardness, and this self inspection and inquisition, and profound earnestness and seriousness, lack of playfulness, and so on, is a very much a part of the oriental in our own lives.”

— Marshall McLuhan

“This gentleman has asked if I could merely give some examples of influences of orientalizing in our own lives. A curious example comes to mind in the life of Thomas Mörten, who as you know, became a trappist monk years, quite a few years ago and who has, he merged from that monastery to become a hermit. He finds the corporate life of a monastery all together too vulgar, brash and noisy. For his inward life he has removed himself from that brash community into a silent hut.”

— Marshall McLuhan

“Now this kind of involvement, the yogi like or contemplative like, involvement in depth in ourselves, this quest inwardly for huge significances. This is not exactly a western habit, you know of a cheerful endeavor and applied knowledge, and so on.”

— Marshall McLuhan

“I’m not trying to make any prophecies or any gloomy observations at all, I simply notice these changes.”

— Marshall McLuhan

“And the changes are very much like the changes between the old dance style and the new dance style. In the old dance style you moved around the dance floor, you asked people for dances, you changed partners. Now you move out on the floor and you sculpture. They call it through for suzy whatla. You make images, you can’t ask anybody for a dance on that floor. There’s no way of getting in. It’s a closed world. It’s profound, it has depth, whereas the old Foxtrot world was an exceedingly superficial, although cheerful world and to which I belong.”

— Marshall McLuhan

“You mean weddings between RCA and publishing?”

— Marshall McLuhan

“However, you see, in Canada, to illustrate again, here’s a country that was shaped by the railway. It was unified from its vast frontier spanned by rail.”

— Marshall McLuhan

“Until there was a rail connection East-West there was no Canada. And now with airplane and electronic speeds of information movement that whole country is falling apart. It has fallen apart. That is, French separatism is like school dropout-ism, an inability to make contact with an alien form of organisation.”

— Marshall McLuhan

“That is our children, you see live in a world in which—I’m not saying it is profoundly integrated of say content or programming but in the sense of everything happening at once and everything affecting everything—our children live in a world which they feel isn’t profoundly unified. They go into a schoolroom where all subjects are classified, separate and unrelated to each other and they’re really baffled.”

— Marshall McLuhan

“In the same way the French Canadians in the electric age have an image of themselves as profoundly participating in the life of Canada and they are offered legally and politically participation only by the most fragmentary and partial forms, like nose counting, voting. They want a role, they want to be part of the significant developing life of Canada and they have nothing offered to them that permits liaison. So they’ve just drop out, that’s all. It’s an involuntary gesture.”

— Marshall McLuhan

“I don’t know whether there’s going to be anymore fuzz and feathers about it or not. It has simply happened. It isn’t something that’s going to happen, they dropped out. But they may be persuaded to go to school again.”

— Marshall McLuhan

“But, electric technology doesn’t centralise, it decentralises human energies, because it makes possible anything happening anywhere at the same time.”

— Marshall McLuhan

“You don’t have to be in anyone favorite position in order to enjoy the advantages of the electric light. You can have it under the Polar ice cap and do, you can have it on the top of the Mount Everest and do. It isn’t a kind of service that is limited to any area. And the same is true of all information in our world, it’s available to everybody at the same time and in the same excellent measure.”

— Marshall McLuhan

“Now, I’m merely concerned, as a professor of literature, I’m concerned with what effect does this have on the future of literature, on the future of the work I have undertaken.”

— Marshall McLuhan

“It has been largely irritation with these new forms that has made me consider their properties—not fascination, but irritation.”

— Marshall McLuhan

“But as I have become more attentive to the structure of these forms I have become more fascinated. They have tremendous untapped resources that are far in excess of anything men have ever known. So I don’t think there is too much occasion to despond.”

— Marshall McLuhan

“Thanks very much!”

— Marshall McLuhan