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Quotes from The Gutenberg Galaxy — Marshall McLuhan

1911–1980 Canada

← All quotes by Marshall McLuhan

74 quotes

As Innis got more insight he abandoned any mere point of view in his presentation of knowledge.

The Gutenberg Galaxy (1962)

There is nothing willful or arbitrary about the Innis mode of expression.

The Gutenberg Galaxy (1962)

The new electronic interdependence recreates the world in the image of a global village.

The Gutenberg Galaxy (1962)

Innis sacrificed point of view and prestige to his sense of the urgent need for insight.

The Gutenberg Galaxy (1962)

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 Gutenberg Galaxy (1962)

Literacy, in translating man out of the closed world of tribal depth and resonance, gave man an eye for an ear and ushered him into a visual open world of specialized and divided consciousness.

The Gutenberg Galaxy (1962)

The world of visual perspective is one of unified and homogeneous space. Such a world is alien to the resonating diversity of spoken words. So language was the last art to accept the visual logic of Gutenberg technology, and the first to rebound in the electric age.

The Gutenberg Galaxy (1962)

Typography as the first mechanization of a handicraft is itself the perfect instance not of a new knowledge, but of applied knowledge. (p. 171)

The Gutenberg Galaxy (1962)

Every technology contrived and “outered” by man has the power to numb human awareness during the period of its first interiorization. (p. 174)

The Gutenberg Galaxy (1962)

He is setting up a mosaic configuration or galaxy for insight … Innis makes no effort to "spell out" the interrelations between the components in his galaxy. He offers no consumer packages in his later work, but only do-it-yourself kits...

The Gutenberg Galaxy (1962)

Civilization gives the barbarian or tribal man an eye for an ear and is now at odds with the electronic world. (p. 30)

The Gutenberg Galaxy (1962)

King Lear is a working model of the process of denudation by which men translate themselves from a world of roles to a world of jobs. (p. 16)

The Gutenberg Galaxy (1962)

The interiorization of the technology of the phonetic alphabet translates man from the magical world of the ear to the neutral visual world. (p. 21)

The Gutenberg Galaxy (1962)

Typographic man can express but is helpless to read the configurations of print technology. (p. 245)

The Gutenberg Galaxy (1962)

The typographic lore of school children points to the gap between the scribal and typographic man. (p. 103)

The Gutenberg Galaxy (1962)

Rabelais offers a vision of the future of print culture as a consumer's paradise of applied knowledge. (p. 167)

The Gutenberg Galaxy (1962)

Literacy affects the physiology as well as the psychic life of the African. (p. 38)

The Gutenberg Galaxy (1962)

For the oral man the literal text contains all possible levels of meaning. (p. 126)

The Gutenberg Galaxy (1962)

The print-made split between head and heart is the trauma which affects Europe from Machiavelli till the present. (p. 193)

The Gutenberg Galaxy (1962)

The Homeric hero becomes a split-man as he assumes an individual ego. (p. 58)

The Gutenberg Galaxy (1962)

Attribution

Quotes and notes from Wikiquote: Marshall McLuhan (page history), available under CC BY-SA 4.0.