As reprinted in Phatic Communion with Bob Dobbs (Toronto: Perfect Pitch c. 1992)
This externalization of our senses creates what de Chardin calls the "noosphere" or a technological brain for the world. Instead of tending towards a vast Alexandrian library the world has become a computer, an electronic brain, exactly as in an infantile piece of science fiction. And as our senses have gone outside us, Big Brother goes inside. -The Gutenberg Galaxy: The Making of Typographic Man. New York: Mentor Books, 1962.
The owners themselves are concerned more about the media as such, and are not inclined to go beyond "what the public wants" or some vague formula. Owners are aware of the media as power, and they know that this power has little to do with "content" or the media within the media. -Understanding Media: The Extensions of Man. Mentor Books, 1964.
Leasing our eyes and ears and nerves to commercial interests is like handing over the common speech to a private corporation, or like giving the earth's atmosphere to a company as a monopoly. Something like this has already happened with outer space, for the same reasons that we have leased our central nervous systems to various corporations. As long as we adopt the Narcissus attitude of regarding the extensions of our own bodies as really out there and really independent of us, we will meet all technological challenges with the same sort of banana-skin pirouette and collapse. -Understanding Media: The Extensions of Man.
Only puny secrets need protection. Big discoveries are protected by public incredulity. -Take Today: The Executive as Dropout (with Barrington Nevitt). New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1972.
The more you create village conditions, the more discontinuity and division and diversity. The global village absolutely insures maximal disagreement on all points. It never occurred to me that uniformity and tranquillity were the properties of the global village. It has more spite and envy. The spaces and times are pulled out from between people. A world in which people encounter each other in depth all the time. The tribal-global village is far more divisive - full of fighting - than any nationalism ever was. Village is fission, not fusion, in depth. -McLuhan: Hot & Cool - A Critical Symposium. Edited by Gerald Stearn. New York: Dial Press, 1967.
Half the world today is engaged in keeping the other half "under surveillance". This, in fact, is the hang-up of the age of "software" and information. In the preceding "hardware" age the "haves" of the world had kept the "have-nots" under "surveillance". This old beat for flatfoots has now been relegated to the world of popular entertainment. The police state is now a work of art, a bureaucratic ballet of undulating sirens. That is a way of saying that the espionage activities of our multitudinous man hunters and "crediting" agencies are not only archaic, but redundant and irrelevant. -Take Today: The Executive as Dropout
A clichÄ is an act of consciousness: total consciousness is the sum of all the clichÄs of all the media or technologies we probe with. -From ClichÄ to Archetype (with Wilfred Watson). New York: Viking Press, 1970.
For America, the electronic revolution from industrial products and consumerism to information and custom-made services, is a reversal of the entire way of life, with goals and directions suddenly yielding to roles and figures. America has found the paths of industrial uniformity and continuity no longer to its taste. Living in an new environment of instant electric information has shifted American attention from specific goals to the cognitive thrills of pattern recognition, a change that is manifested directly by the TV service of the instant replay. Is not the instant replay the externalizing of the cognitive principle itself? For the replay would seem to offer both cognition and re-cognition; the same pattern of reversal, in he transition from the industrial to the electric age, appears in the role of Sputnik (1957) in placing the planet inside a man-made environment. -"The Implications of Cultural Uniformity" in Superculture: American Popular Culture and Europe. Edited by C.W.E. Bigsby. Bowling Green: Bowling Green University Popular Press, 1975.
For the dominant environment of our age has itself become information or "software". Since at electric speed any figure tends to become ground, and anything, however trivial, can acquire infinite mass, the temptation and the desire to gamble with everything and anything becomes obsessive. One dollar at the speed of light can do as many transactions as a million at pre-electric speeds. Quantitative projections and rational critiques cannot cope here. -"A Media Approach to Inflation" (with Barrington Nevitt). The New York Times, September 21, 1974.
Joyce knew that any technology is at once internalized by men, with a resulting shift in the ratios among their senses. This shift is recorded exactly in the tones and colors and interplay of words. Language is itself the very drama of cognition and recognition. -"Phase Two". Renascence, Vol.14, Summer, 1962.
Language is a technology which extends all of the human senses simultaneously. All the other human artifacts are, by comparison, specialist extensions of our physical and mental faculties. -From ClichÄ to Archetype
The archetype is a retrieved awareness or consciousness. It is consequently a retrieved clichÄ - an old clichÄ retrieved by a new clichÄ. Since a clichÄ is a unit extension of man, an archetype is a quoted extension, medium, technology, or environment. -From ClichÄ to Archetype
All media of communications are clichÄs 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. -From Cliche to Archetype
Another theme of the Wake that helps in the understanding of the paradoxical shift from clichÄ to archetype is "pastimes are past times." The dominant technologies of one age become the games and pastimes of a later age. In the twentieth century the number of past times that are simultaneously available is so vast as to create cultural anarchy. When all the cultures of the world are simultaneously present, the work of the artist in the elucidation of form takes on new scope and new urgency. Most men are pushed into the artist role. The artist cannot dispense with the principle of doubleness and interplay since this kind of hendiadys-dialogue is essential to the very structure of consciousness, awareness, and autonomy. -From ClichÄ to Archetype
Any movement of appetite within the labyrinth of cognition is a "minotaur" which must be slain by the hero artist. Anything which interferes with cognition, whether concupiscence, pride, imprecision, or vagueness is a minotaur ready to devour beauty. So that Joyce not only was the first to reveal the link between the stages of apprehension and the creative process, he was the first to understand how the drama of cognition itself was the key archetype of all human ritual myth and legend. And thus he was able to incorporate at every point in his work the body of the past in immediate relation to the slightest current of perception. -"Joyce, Aquinas, and the Poetic Process". Renascence, Vol. 4, No.1, 1951.
Physically, the young seem to feel that the planet has become their stage. They want to act outside, in the street, on the campus. They have shifted their dramatic quest for new identities away from the expression of private opinions to the enactment of a new kind of group theater. The new program they offer for scrutiny and participation seems to many people to be trash such as has never been seen before - a wild orgy of "law and ordure."
Technologies would seem to be the pushing of the archetypal forms of the unconscious out into social consciousness. May this not help explain why technology as environment is typically unconscious? The interplay between environmental and content factors, between old and new technologies, seems to obtain in all fields whatever. In politics, the new conservatism has as its content the old liberalism. Every new technology requires a war in order to recover an image made by the old environment. -Counterblast (with Harley Parker, via George Thompson). Toronto: McClelland and Stewart, 1969.
When a man-made environment circumvents the entire planet, moon, and galaxy, there is no alternative to total knowledge programming of all human enterprise. Any form of imbalance proves fatal at electric speeds with the superpowers released by the new technological resources representing the full spectrum of the human senses and faculties. Survival now would seem to depend upon the extension of consciousness itself as an environment. This extension of consciousness has already begun with the computer and has been anticipated in our obsession with ESP and occult awareness. -Take Today: The Executive as Dropout
