McLuhan's Three Books

With our accelerating cascade of new media it is borne upon us that each represents not an appendix to but a complete retranslation of the Book of the World, and of the reader. As W.B. Yeats sang, in 'Sailing to Byzantium': 

Once out of nature I shall never take

My bodily form from any natural thing,

But such a form as Grecian goldsmiths make

Of hammered gold and gold enamelling...

Vico simply had not distinguished between first and second nature for separate study: nothing in his experience suggested such a distinction would be of any use. Second nature is nature made and remade by man as man remakes himself with his extensions. Separate them: the first is the province of traditional grammar; the second, that of Bacon, Vico, and Laws of Media.


Eric and Marshall McLuhan
Laws of Media 

 

 

 

Finding Your Way in a Sea of Information

The goal of science and the arts and of education for the next generation must be to decipher not the genetic but the perceptual code. In a global information environment, the old pattern of education in answer-finding is of no avail: one is surrounded by answers, millions of them, moving and mutating at electric speed. Survival and control will depend on the ability to probe and to question in the proper way and place. As the information that constitutes the environment is perpetually in flux, so the need is not for fixed concepts but rather for the ancient skill of reading that book, for navigating through an ever uncharted and unchartable milieu. Else we will have no more control of this technology and environment than we have of the wind and the tides.


Marshall and Eric McLuhan
Laws of Media,
1988

Media as Cliché as Probe

Any extension of man's sensory life such as the dog, or the motor car, imprints numerous clichés on any language, extending its range of probe. All media of communications are clichés serving to enlarge man's scope of action, his patterns of association and awareness. These media create environments that numb our powers of attention by sheer pervasiveness. The limits of our awareness of these forms does not limit their action upon our sensibilities. Just as the rim-spin of the planet arranges the components of high- and low-pressure areas, so the environments created by linguistic and other extensions of our powers are constantly creating new climates of thought and feeling. Since the resulting symbolic systems are numerous, they are in perpetual interplay, creating a kind of sound-light show on an ever-increasing scale.


Marshall McLuhan
From Cliché to Archetype
1970

The Limits of Knowledge

To conclude therefore, let no man upon a weak conceit of sobriety or an ill-applied moderation think or maintain, that a man can search too far, or be too well studied in the book of God's word, or in the book of God's works; divinity or philosophy: but rather let men endeavour an endless progress or proficience in both; only let men beware that they apply both to charity, and not to swelling; to use, and not to ostentation; and again, that they do not unwisely mingle or confound these learnings together.


Francis Bacon, Advancement of Learning, 1605

The Joyce of McLuhan Studies

He [Marshall McLuhan] was never reticent about the debt he owed to Joyce in particular, and frequently uttered and published such statements as this: 'Nobody could pretend serious interest in my work who is not completely familiar with all the works of James Joyce and the French symbolists.' Such statements were intended to be taken quite literally: a full appreciation of McLuhan's work is impossible without the sort of perceptual training that such familiarity instils. ... He once remarked to me, as I know he did to many others, that his work on media and culture was, in the main, 'applied Joyce.'


Eric McLuhan, The Role of Thunder in Finnegans Wake, 1997

The Future of the Book

The future of the book in school or outside of school is a service. You will go to the phone, or use some other means of announcing your interest, and say "The history of Egyptian arithmetic" and that you know a  little Sanskrit and a lot of French and a lot of this and that and, "Please send me the latest." You will receive in an hour or so a package with all the latest studies on Egyptian arithmetic from every journal in the world, and custom-made for your resources and your means. The idea of just having mass-produced books the same for every one, and just going out and buying one, is automatically liquidated by Xerox. Xerox makes the book into a service industry--information service--and entirely tailor-made, custom-built.

--Marshall McLuhan, Education in the Electronic Age, 

in The Best of Times/The Worst of Times: 

Contemporary Issues in Canadian Education, 1970

Grammar and the Laws of Media

The very events of history are a gigantic and complex statement to which the methods of grammatical exegesis are applicable; and this point of view is as helpful for the understanding of Dante as of Milton, not to mention subjects of greater extent.

Marshall McLuhan, The Classical Trivium, 2006

The Business of Art

The doctrine of names is, of course, the doctrine of essence and not a naive notion of oral terminology. The scriptural exegetists will hold, as Francis Bacon held, that Adam possessed metaphysical knowledge in a very high degree. To him the whole of nature was a book which he could read with ease. He lost his ability to read this language of nature as a result of the fall; and Solomon alone of the sons of men has ever recovered the power to read the book of nature. The business of art is, however, to recover the knowledge of that language which once man held by nature.

Marshall McLuhan, The Classical Trivium, 2006

On Two Natures

Aristotle first noted that the Greek invention of Nature was made possible when they had left behind a savage or barbaric state (first nature) by putting on an individualized and civilized one (second nature). And A.T.W. Simeons has discussed at length how disruptive the second nature has been to the first. Made discarnate by our electric information media, the west is furiously at work retrieving its obsolesced organic first nature in a spectrum of new aesthetic modes, from feminism to phenomenology. As our second nature consists entirely in our artifacts and extensions and the grounds and narcoses they impose, their etymologies are all to be found in first nature, the wild body.

Marshall and Eric McLuhan, Laws of Media, 1988

Technological Pollination

It is because our lives are so attached to and involved with the evolution of our machines that we have grown to see and feel everything in revolutionary terms, just as once the natural mood was conservative. We instinctively repose on the future rather than the past, though this may not yet be generally realized. Instead of the static circle of the rotation of the crops, or the infinitely slow process of handiwork, we are in the midst of the frenzied war of machines. This affects our view of everything; our life, its objects and uses, love, health, friendship, politics; even art to a certain extent, but with less conviction.

Wyndham Lewis, The Art of Being Ruled, 1926

Man becomes, as it were, the sex organs of the machine world, as the bee of the plant world, enabling it to fecundate and to evolve ever new forms.

Marshall McLuhan, Understanding Media, 1964