Five Bodied Bob Archive - Holeopathic Quadrophrenia

McLuhan and Holeopathic Quadrophrenia:
The Mouse-That-Roared Syndrome

An Essay by Bob on McLuhan

"... much of III.3 (Book Three, Chapter Three-ed.) is telephone conversation.... As III.3 opens with a person named Yawn and III.4 displays the ingress of daylight upon the night of Finnegans Wake, the note on VI.B.5.29 is interesting:
Yawn telegraph telephone Dawn wireless thought transference."

Roland McHugh,
The Sigla of Finnegans Wake, p.19, 1976.
"... Orion of the Orgiasts, Meereschal MacMuhun, the Ipse dadden, product of the extremes giving quotidients to our means, as might occur to anyone, your brutest layaman with the princest champion in our archdeaconry, or so yclept from Clio's clippings, which the chroncher of chivalries is sulpicious save he scan, for ancients link with presents as the human chain extends,..."

James Joyce,
Finnegans Wake, p.254, 1939.
(In McLuhan's private library in one of his copies of Finnegans Wake he has pencilled in the words "me" and "moon child" next to Joyce's "Meereschal MacMuhun".-ed.)
"The ordinary desire of everybody to have everybody else think alike with himself has some explosive implications today."

(the first sentence in the first article
McLuhan wrote for Explorations-ed.)
H. M. McLuhan, Culture without Literacy,
Explorations Magazine, Volume1, p.117, December, 1953.
"Entertainment in the future may have quite different patterns and functions. You'll become a yogi, you'll do your self-entertainment in yoga style."

Marshall McLuhan,
Like Yoga, Not Like the Movies,
Forbes Magazine, p.40, March 15, 1967.
"T. S. Eliot's famous account of 'the auditory imagination' has become an ordinary form of awareness; but Finnegans Wake, as a comprehensive study of the psychic and social dynamics of all media, remains to be brought into the waking life of our world."

Marshall McLuhan,
Letter to Playboy Magazine, p.18, March, 1970.
"At electric speeds the hieroglyphs of the page of Nature become readily intelligible and the Book of the World becomes a kind of Orphic hymn of revelation."

Marshall McLuhan, Libraries: Past, Present, Future
(address at Geneseo, New York-ed.), p.1, July 3, 1970.
"The future of government lies in the area of psychic ecology and can no longer be considered on a merely national or international basis."

Marshall McLuhan and Barrington Nevitt,
Take Today: The Executive as Dropout, p.227, 1972.
"And do you know," he (Eric McLuhan-ed.) enthuses, "there are actually (four-ed.) laws governing media communications? At last we can prove to people that we aren't just theorists. This is a real science.... We know there is one more law," says Eric. "And we'll find it. Sooner or later."

Olivia Ward,
Now! Son of Guru!,
Toronto Star, p.D1, March 30, 1980.

Marshall McLuhan made two decisions in 1937: one was the spiritual strategy of becoming a Roman Catholic, and the other was the secular strategy, after intensive study at Cambridge, of translating James Joyce's Work-in-Progress (later given the title of Finnegans Wake in 1939) into an aesthetic anti-environment useful for countering and probing the cultural assumptions of a practicing Catholic. For the next twenty years he refined his understanding of, first, the Thomist concept of analogical proportionality as the expression of the tactile interval, and second, its usefulness in perceiving the cultural effects of the new electric technologies, through an ongoing dialogue, analysis, and sensory meditation on the nature of metaphor and consciousness (including extrasensory perception) as an artifact. Since McLuhan defined "metaphor"(1) as the act of looking at one situation through another, each situation constitutive of figure-ground interplay (a concept borrowed from Gestalt psychology), then a metaphor was an instance of mixed media, or two figure-grounds. And so was consciousness - because of its essential subjective experience as doubleness, which is doubled again as the objective effect of its autonomous interplay with other consciousnesses. Metaphor, for McLuhan, was hylomorphic(2). In retrospect, the equation McLuhan was playing with could be flattened out as:

metaphor=mixed media=doubleness =consciousness=tactile interplay=the Christian Holy Cross =figure/ground=analogical mirror=iconic fact= cliché/archetype=resonant field= hendiadys=menippean irony,

each and all (except for "metaphor") squared. However, after he made personal contact with Wyndham Lewis in 1943, their dialogue enhanced his appreciation of adopting Wyndham Lewis' social probing style as a political anti-environment to McLuhan's own commitment to the poetry of T. S. Eliot, Ezra Pound, W. B. Yeats, and James Joyce. Hence, his own studies simulated the doubleness he was observing technically. For the rest of his career McLuhan juggled the artistic approaches of these five artists in miming the tactile qualities of the analogical drama of proper proportions - the drama of being and perception. For him, language was the drama of cognition and recognition, or consciousness.

"The measure of our (Catholics-ed.) unawareness and irrelevance can be taken from the fact that no Thomist has so far seen fit to expound St. Thomas's theory of communication by way of providing modern insight into our problems."

H. M. McLuhan,
The Heart of Darkness
(unpublished review of Melville's Quarrel with God by Lawrence Thompson, 1952-ed.), p.8, 1952.
"The analogical relation between exterior posture and gesture and the interior movements and dispositions of the mind is the irreducible basis of drama. In the Wake this appears everywhere. So that any attempt to reduce its action, at any point, to terms of univocal statement results in radical distortion.(p.33)... It needs to be understood that only short discontinuous shots of such a work as Joyce's are possible. Linear or continuous perspectives of analogical structures are only the result of radical distortion, and the craving for 'simple explanations' is the yearning for univocity."(p.36-7)

Marshall McLuhan,
James Joyce: Trivial and Quadrivial (1953) in The Interior Landscape, pp.33 and 36-7, 1969.
"For the Catholic the revealed word of God is not the Gutenberg Bible nor the King James' version. But the Protestant cannot but take a different view of the passing of the pre-eminence of the printed book; because Protestantism was born with printing and seems to be passing with it. There again the Catholic alone has nothing to fear from the rapidity of the changes in the media of communication. But national cultures have much to fear."

Marshall McLuhan,
Catholic Humanism and Modern Letters,
Christian Humanism in Letters: The McAuley Lectures,
Series 2, p.78, 1954.
"Wyndham Lewis is perhaps the first creative writer to have taken over the new media en bloc as modes of artistic and social control. (Joyce and Eliot have done so on a smaller scale.)(p.17)... With the help of modern scientific medicine he (Lewis-ed.) re-edits and refurnishes the various levels of Dante's Inferno in a startling way. The Devils appear as film stars perturbed by the ease with which their supernatural dimensions are mimicked by modern publicity devices. It's this power of the new media which fosters a new humanist movement in Hell."(p.18)

Marshall McLuhan,
Third Program in the Human Age,
Explorations Magazine, Volume 8, p.17-8, October, 1957.
"Finnegans Wake is the greatest guidebook to media study ever fashioned by man."

Marshall McLuhan,
Newsweek Magazine, p.56, February 28, 1966.
"The Catholic Church does not depend on human wisdom or human strategies for survival. All the best intentions in the world can't destroy the Catholic Church! It is indestructible, even as a human institution. It may once again undergo a terrible persecution and so on. But that's probably what it needs."

Marshall McLuhan,
Futurechurch: Edward Wakin interviews Marshall McLuhan,
U.S. Catholic Magazine, p.6, January, 1977.

McLuhan also meditated and formulated with the process-pattern that there had been three Copernican Revolutions in the collective consciousness: the first, via Copernicus, had thrown man as an image to the edges of the universe; the second, via Kant, threw man into an inner landscape; and the third, via the twentieth-century revolution of pattern-recognition, threw man inside the machine. His growing understanding of the third revolution in collective perception allowed him to see that the managers of contemporary society operated by means of the principle that the technological unconscious (the "archetypes of the social unconscious")(3) is a massage in all facets of modern life. For example, Keynesian economics was the recognition, in the 1930s, that money would now be a technically-managed medium, or a guaranteed environment. In all areas of decision-making, this principle meant the use of the technique of the suspended judgement in parallel with a multi-levelled application of the anthropological concept of "phatic communion"(4).

"It is on its technical and mechanical side that the front page is linked to the techniques of modern science and art. Discontinuity is in different ways a basic concept both of quantum and relativity physics. It is the way in which a Toynbee looks at civilizations, or a Margaret Mead at human cultures. Notoriously, it is the visual technique of a Picasso, the literary technique of James Joyce."

Herbert Marshall McLuhan,
The Mechanical Bride: Folklore of Industrial Man, p.3, 1951.
"By pretending that the new magic can be contained in the entertainment sphere we assume the old form-content split which is based on the doctrine that the form of communication is neutral. Even Hitler and Goebbels, fortunately, shared this illusion with the Western world. At present we appear to be living by an illusion but with magical media. Of course this may prove to be an enduring formula."

Marshall McLuhan,
Notes on the Media as Art Forms, Explorations Magazine, Volume 2, p.13, April, 1954.
"As gimmick, the machine is useful. As object, as companion, as environment-shaper, it is magical. Marx was right to that extent. He saw that the machine would necessarily transform human feeling and sensibility. It would change habits of association and work. It would re-structure one's idea of the world and of oneself. It was the revolution."

Marshall McLuhan,
Poetry and Society, Poetry Magazine, Volume 84, No.2, p.95, May, 1954.
"A few Europeans like LeCorbusier and Giedion have undertaken to verbalize our technology for us. A few of our artists such as Poe, Henry James, Pound, and Eliot have in reverse order undertaken to technologize the traditional verbal world of the European."

Marshall McLuhan,
Space, Time and Poetry, Explorations Magazine, Volume 4,
p.60, February, 1955.
"Cubism, by seizing on instant total awareness, suddenly announced that the medium is the message.... Specialized segments of attention have shifted to total field, and we can now say, 'The medium is the message', quite naturally. Before the electric speed and total field, it was not obvious that the medium is the message."

Marshall McLuhan,
Understanding Media: The Extensions of Man, p.28, 1964.
"The futurists, the cubists, the Vorticists, and others accepted the mechanical as an art form. Today, Pop art, derived from the old environment of advertising technology, appears as an art form."

Marshall McLuhan,
New Media and the Arts, Arts in Society Magazine, Volume 3, No.2, p.239, September, 1964.
"Like Burroughs, Joyce was sure he had worked out the formula for total cultural understanding and control. The idea of art as total programing for the environment is tribal, mental, Egyptian. It is, also, an idea of art to which electric technology leads quite strongly. We live science fiction."

Marshall McLuhan,
Notes on Burroughs, Nation Magazine,
p.519, December 28, 1964.
"My own interest in symbolist techniques in poetry and painting, and my concern with the poetic processes and the training of perception and awareness, have long taught me to avoid fixed positions and value judgements where techne is concerned."

Marshall McLuhan,
Obiter Dicta, Letter to Atlantic Monthly Magazine,
p.39, October, 1971.

McLuhan, however, revealed an aspect of this principle that included the concept of a collective extrasensory perception as an hylomorphic ("organic")(2), dramatic quality and effect of any electric environment - an anticipation of the recent popular concept of the "meme". Privately, he would refer to one facet of the complex extrasensory characteristics of this third Copernican revolution as the "'Prince of this World',... a great electric engineer, and a great master of the media"(5). McLuhan was anticipating what I would term "tetrad management", the managerial "postures and impostures"(6) resulting from an environment of "participation mystique"(7) (effects merge with causes) and "anticipatory democracy"(8) (effects precede causes).

"Synesthesia, the new sin of the nineteenth century, roused as much misunderstanding as E.S.P. today. Extra sensory perception is normal perception. Today electronics are extra sensory, Gallup polls and motivation research are also. Therefore, people get all steamed up about E.S.P. as something for the future. It is already past and present."

Marshall McLuhan,
Electronics as E.S.P., Explorations Magazine,
Volume 8, Section 3, October, 1957.
"Any artist in any field whatever knows that 'form' and 'content' are a bogus pair. But when such a notion is all we have with which to cope with modern entertainment (and education) we are helpless. When we hear that 'the medium is the message in the long run', we think it is jabberwocky or Finneganese. And so it is. That is, such a formula speaks not of one plane of fact at a time, but is multi-leveled."

H. Marshall McLuhan,
Around the World, Around the Clock
(review of The Image Industries by William Lynch, S.J.-ed.),
Renascence Magazine, Volume12, No.4, p.205, Summer, 1960.
"Wealth is already derived for the most part from the movement of information alone, and will increase in our time as the mere reflex of human chatter. That is why paid learning is long overdue."

Marshall McLuhan,
The Electronic Age - The Age of Implosion,
Mass Media in Canada, p.201, 1962.

By June, 1952, after television had become an environment in the United States, Harold Innis had died, and McLuhan had gotten tenure as a professor, he was ready to present his insights into the tentative maneuverings of tetrad-management in a multi-disciplinary format as an anti-environment to the new technical developments in society. Thus was born the Explorations experiment which ran its course until 1957.

"We can win China and India for the West only by giving them the new media. Russia will not give these to them. Television prevents communism because it is post-Marx just as the book is pre-Marx."

Marshall McLuhan,
Media Log, Explorations Magazine,
Volume 4, p.55, February, 1955.
"Politics have become musical; music has become politics. Government has become entertainment, and vice versa. Commerce has become incantation and magical gesture. fScience and magic have married each other. Technology and the arts meet and mingle."

Marshall McLuhan,
Space, Time and Poetry, Explorations Magazine,
Volume 4, p.59, February, 1955.
"We have to know what we are doing in advance. We have to repeat what we were about to say."

Marshall McLuhan,
The Be-Spoke Tailor, Explorations Magazine,
Volume 8, Section 4, October, 1957.
"A bell is to auditory space what a polished surface is to a visual space - a mirror. ALP is river mirror of HCE the mountain. It is he for whom the belles toil."

Marshall McLuhan,
Television Murders Telephony, Explorations Magazine,
Volume 8, Section 19, October, 1957.
"In his Company Manners Louis Kronenberger describes how 'one very real social phenomenon of our time is that "creative" people constitute America's newest nouveaux riches '. Spectorsky in his Exurbanites refers to them as the symbol-manipulators, meaning those who have mastered the grammar and rhetoric of the new media."

Marshall McLuhan,
The Old New Rich and the New New Rich,
Explorations Magazine, Volume 8, Section 23, October, 1957.
"The effect of TV, as the most recent and spectacular electric extension of our central nervous system, is hard to grasp for various reasons. Since it has affected the totality of our lives, personal and social and political, it would be quite unrealistic to attempt a 'systematic' or visual presentation of such influence. Instead, it is more feasible to 'present' TV as a complex gestalt of data gathered almost at random."

Marshall McLuhan,
Understanding Media: The Extensions of Man, p.317, 1964.
"In a world in which we are all ingesting and digesting one another there can be no obscenity or pornography or decency. Such is the law of electric media which stretch the nerves to form a global membrane of enclosure."

Marshall McLuhan,
Notes on Burroughs, Nation Magazine,
p.518, December 28, 1964.
"In an interview with James R. Dickenson for the National Observer (May 30, 1966) he (McLuhan-ed.) spoke about the pride he takes in understanding media and quoted Coleridge's Ancient Mariner, 'We were the first that ever burst/Into that silent sea'."

Raymond Rosenthal,
Current Biography, McLuhan: Pro&Con, p.22, 1968.

This project was obsolesced by Sputnik on October 4, 1957. During the following twenty years McLuhan studied the consequences of the post-tactile and post-television environments created by the new computer and satellite technologies (with an eye on the new laser inventions, also) which had cracked all the visual, acoustic, and tactile mirrors. The multi-media gestures that McLuhan made in this second twenty-year phase were based on a post-tetradic sensibility of menippean tactility, or menippean phatic communion, i.e., from the perspective of the "pentad-manager"(9) - one who understands that the Present can only be an art form.

"Jet travel and satellite broadcasting will foster the grasp of languages, ancient and modern, in a simultaneous cultural transparency."

Marshall McLuhan,
The Humanities in the Electronic Age, Humanities Association Bulletin (Canada), Volume 34, No.1, p.11, Fall, 1961.
"And I think it is this multiplicity of media that is now enabling man to free himself from media for the first time in history. He has been the victim, the servo-mechanism of his technologies, his media from the beginning of time, but now because of the sheer multiplicity of them he is beginning to awaken. Because he can't live with them all."

Marshall McLuhan,
Prospect, Canadian Art Magazine,
Volume 19, p.365, September/October, 1962.
"Rapidly, we approach the final phase of the extensions of man - the technological simulation of consciousness, when the creative process of knowing will be collectively and corporately extended to the whole of human society, much as we have already extended our senses and our nerves by the various media.(p.19)... For with the telegraph, man had initiated that outering or extension of his central nervous system that is now approaching an extension of consciousness with satellite broadcasting."(p.222)

Marshall McLuhan,
Understanding Media: The Extensions of Man,
pp.19 and 222, 1964.
"TV, as the latest archetypal environment or technology, is very much in this dishevelled phase. The movie remained in such a dishevelled phase for decades. Whether Telstar is already a new archetypal environment that assumes the present TV form as its content will appear fairly soon."

Marshall McLuhan,
New Media and the Arts, Arts in Society Magazine,
Volume 3, No.2, p.242, September, 1964.
"The hullabaloo Madison Avenue creates couldn't condition a mouse."

Marshall McLuhan,
Newsweek Magazine, p.56, February 28, 1966.
"The 70's will see: The end of SOLUTIONS. Pattern recognition via inspection of multiple problems will bring an end to the hidden environments."

Marshall McLuhan,
Profile of the 70'S, The McLuhan DEW-Line,
Volume 2, No.3, a poster, November, 1969.
"For the future of the future is the present."

Marshall McLuhan and Barrington Nevitt,
Take Today: The Executive as Dropout, p.134, 1972.
"At instant speeds, everybody begins to live inside a 360-degree module in which every event echoes every other event back and forth at electric speeds, and all events bounce off each other creating patterns. There is one optimistic feature. The mind moves very much faster than light. Light travels to Mars in minutes. The mind can go and come back from Mars in an instant many times. The mind can actually recognize all these electric patterns as easily as it can alphabetic letters. It's very much faster than the computer."

Marshall McLuhan in McLuhan Dissects the Executive,
Business Week Magazine, p.118, June 24, 1972.

Returning to the first phase (1937-57) we see, from McLuhan's perspective, he had enthusiastically performed as an agent and catalyst for a discriminating plenary awareness under electric conditions of the interplay between private and public awareness as an artifact. Miming the Logos (speech as an archetype)(10) this entailed retrieving the five parts of rhetoric (inventio, dispositio, elocutio, memoria, and pronuntiatio) and the four Aristotelian causes (formal, material, efficient, and final) in parallel with the four traditional levels of exegesis (literal, allegorical, moral, and eschatological) and applying them as a grammarian, rhetorician, dialectician, musician, mathematician, geometer, astronomer, psychologist, sociologist, anthropologist, scientist, psychic, doctor, and politician either simultaneously or separately in their traditional specialized contexts, depending on the medium and audience addressed. This method was McLuhan's conscious strategy of mirroring and testing the conventional "schizophrenic"(11) lives of the ordinary citizen: McLuhan as cyborg and floating, winking tetrad (see the four-level interplay of the SI/SC/HD/LD charts in McLuhan's Report on Project in Understanding New Media, 1960-ed.). In this regard, he explored meditative attention a great deal further and deeper than the popular and influential Menippean religionist, Jiddu Krishnamurti (1895-1986), or any of his imitators or successors. This phase of McLuhan's career inaugurated a new and enduring private and collective yoga inside an immanent "communication ecology"(12).

"This may be said, at least, by way of illustrating the mode in which any poet's prose criticism directs the keenest possible ray on his own poetic practice."

Marshall McLuhan,
Pound's Critical Prose (1950) in The Interior Landscape,
p.80, 1969.
"Industrial man is not unlike the turtle that is quite blind to the beauty of the shell which it has grown on its back. In the same way, the modern newspaper isn't seen by the reporter except from the point of view of its mushy sensual content, its pulsating, romantic glamour. The reporter doesn't even know there's a beautiful shell above him. He grows the shell, unwittingly, subhumanly, biologically. This is not even the voice, but only the feel, of the turtle."

Herbert Marshall McLuhan,
The Mechanical Bride: Folklore of Industrial Man, p.4, 1951.
"Today we get inside the machine. It is inside us. We in it. Fusion. Oblivion. Safety. Now the human machines are geared to smash one another. You can't shout warnings or encouragement to these machines. First there has to be a retracing process. A reduction of the machine to human form. Circe only turned men into swine. Our problem is tougher."

Marshall McLuhan,
Letters of Marshall McLuhan, p.227 (June 22, 1951), 1987.
"Now was the time for the artist to intervene in a new way and to manipulate the new media of communication by a precise and delicate adjustment of the relations of words, things, and events. His task had become not self-expression but the release of the life in things. Un Coup de Dés illustrates the road he (Mallarmé-ed.) took in the exploitation of all things as gestures of the mind, magically adjusted to the secret powers of being. As a vacuum tube is used to shape and control vast reservoirs of electric power, the artist can manipulate the low current of casual words, rhythms, and resonances to evoke the primal harmonies of existence or to recall the dead. But the price he must pay is total self-abnegation."

Marshall McLuhan,
Joyce, Mallarmé, and the Press (1953) in The Interior Landscape,p.11-2, 1969.
"As mime, the artist cannot be the prudent and decorous Ulysses, but appears as a sham. As sham and mime he undertakes not the ethical quest but the quest of the great fool. He must become all things in order to reveal all. And to be all he must empty himself... the artist cannot properly speak with his own voice."

Marshall McLuhan,
James Joyce: Trivial and Quadrivial (1953) in The Interior Landscape, p.31-2, 1969.
"For it was Coleridge as much as anybody who hastened the recognition of the poetic process as linked with the modes of ordinary cognition, and with the methods of the sciences."

Marshall McLuhan,
Coleridge as Artist (1957) in The Interior Landscape,
p.115, 1969.
"Senecan antithesis and 'amble' (as described in Senecan Amble by George Williamson) provided the authentic means of scientific observation and experience of mental process."

Marshall McLuhan,
The Gutenberg Galaxy: The Making of Typographic Man,
p.103, 1962.
"The central theme of Naked Lunch is the strategy of by-passing the new electric environment by becoming an environment oneself. The moment one achieves this environmental state all things and people are submitted to you to be processed. Whether a man takes the road of junk or the road of art, the entire world must submit to his processing. The world becomes his 'content'. He programs the sensory order."

Marshall McLuhan,
Notes on Burroughs, Nation Magazine,
p.517, December 28, 1964.
"You can never perceive the impact of any new technology directly, but it can be done in the manner of Perseus looking in the mirror at Medusa. It has to be done indirectly."

Marshall McLuhan,
Address at Vision '65, The American Scholar,
p.202, Spring, 1966.
"For all their obsolescence he (McLuhan-ed.) himself finds books 'a warm, visceral, tactile medium'...."

Jane Howard,
Oracle of the Electric Age, Life Magazine,
p.96, February 28, 1966.

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McLuhan and Holeopathic Quadrophrenia:The Mouse-That-Roared Syndrome

"... much of III.3 (Book Three, Chapter Three-ed.) is telephone conversation.... As III.3 opens with a person named Yawn and III.4 displays the ingress of daylight upon the night of Finnegans Wake, the note on VI.B.5.29 is interesting:

Yawn telegraph telephone Dawn wireless thought transference."

"The ordinary desire of everybody to have everybody else think alike with himself has some explosive implications today."

"Entertainment in the future may have quite different patterns and functions. You'll become a yogi, you'll do your self-entertainment in yoga style."

"T. S. Eliot's famous account of 'the auditory imagination' has become an ordinary form of awareness; but Finnegans Wake, as a comprehensive study of the psychic and social dynamics of all media, remains to be brought into the waking life of our world."

"At electric speeds the hieroglyphs of the page of Nature become readily intelligible and the Book of the World becomes a kind of Orphic hymn of revelation."

"The future of government lies in the area of psychic ecology and can no longer be considered on a merely national or international basis."

"And do you know," he (Eric McLuhan-ed.) enthuses, "there are actually (four-ed.) laws governing media communications? At last we can prove to people that we aren't just theorists. This is a real science.... We know there is one more law," says Eric. "And we'll find it. Sooner or later."

metaphor=mixed media=doubleness =consciousness=tactile interplay=the Christian Holy Cross =figure/ground=analogical mirror=iconic fact= cliché/archetype=resonant field= hendiadys=menippean irony,

"The measure of our (Catholics-ed.) unawareness and irrelevance can be taken from the fact that no Thomist has so far seen fit to expound St. Thomas's theory of communication by way of providing modern insight into our problems."

"Finnegans Wake is the greatest guidebook to media study ever fashioned by man."

"A few Europeans like LeCorbusier and Giedion have undertaken to verbalize our technology for us. A few of our artists such as Poe, Henry James, Pound, and Eliot have in reverse order undertaken to technologize the traditional verbal world of the European."

"The futurists, the cubists, the Vorticists, and others accepted the mechanical as an art form. Today, Pop art, derived from the old environment of advertising technology, appears as an art form."

"Like Burroughs, Joyce was sure he had worked out the formula for total cultural understanding and control. The idea of art as total programing for the environment is tribal, mental, Egyptian. It is, also, an idea of art to which electric technology leads quite strongly. We live science fiction."

"My own interest in symbolist techniques in poetry and painting, and my concern with the poetic processes and the training of perception and awareness, have long taught me to avoid fixed positions and value judgements where techne is concerned."

"Wealth is already derived for the most part from the movement of information alone, and will increase in our time as the mere reflex of human chatter. That is why paid learning is long overdue."

"We can win China and India for the West only by giving them the new media. Russia will not give these to them. Television prevents communism because it is post-Marx just as the book is pre-Marx."

"Politics have become musical; music has become politics. Government has become entertainment, and vice versa. Commerce has become incantation and magical gesture. fScience and magic have married each other. Technology and the arts meet and mingle."

"We have to know what we are doing in advance. We have to repeat what we were about to say."

"A bell is to auditory space what a polished surface is to a visual space - a mirror. ALP is river mirror of HCE the mountain. It is he for whom the belles toil."

"In a world in which we are all ingesting and digesting one another there can be no obscenity or pornography or decency. Such is the law of electric media which stretch the nerves to form a global membrane of enclosure."

"In an interview with James R. Dickenson for the National Observer (May 30, 1966) he (McLuhan-ed.) spoke about the pride he takes in understanding media and quoted Coleridge's Ancient Mariner, 'We were the first that ever burst/Into that silent sea'."

"Jet travel and satellite broadcasting will foster the grasp of languages, ancient and modern, in a simultaneous cultural transparency."

"TV, as the latest archetypal environment or technology, is very much in this dishevelled phase. The movie remained in such a dishevelled phase for decades. Whether Telstar is already a new archetypal environment that assumes the present TV form as its content will appear fairly soon."

"The hullabaloo Madison Avenue creates couldn't condition a mouse."

"The 70's will see: The end of SOLUTIONS. Pattern recognition via inspection of multiple problems will bring an end to the hidden environments."

"For the future of the future is the present."

"This may be said, at least, by way of illustrating the mode in which any poet's prose criticism directs the keenest possible ray on his own poetic practice."

"For it was Coleridge as much as anybody who hastened the recognition of the poetic process as linked with the modes of ordinary cognition, and with the methods of the sciences."

"Senecan antithesis and 'amble' (as described in Senecan Amble by George Williamson) provided the authentic means of scientific observation and experience of mental process."

"You can never perceive the impact of any new technology directly, but it can be done in the manner of Perseus looking in the mirror at Medusa. It has to be done indirectly."

"For all their obsolescence he (McLuhan-ed.) himself finds books 'a warm, visceral, tactile medium'...."

McLuhan and Holeopathic Quadrophrenia:
The Mouse-That-Roared Syndrome