A dictionary of Marshall McLuhan’s quotations
Compiled by William Kuhns
©2026 Marshall McLuhan Estate
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Viewing chapter Discontinuity (40 quotes)
How does the jazzy, ragtime discontinuity of press items link up with other modern art forms?
Marshall McLuhan
The Mechanical Bride, (1951), p 3
Year: 1951
Chapter:
Discontinuity
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.
The Mechanical Bride (1951), p 3
Year: 1951
The global-village conditions being forged by the electric technology stimulate more discontinuity and diversity and division than the old mechanical, standardized society; in fact, the global village makes maximum disagreement and creative dialog inevitable.
“Playboy Interview: Marshall McLuhan: A Candid Conversation with the High Priest of Popcult and Metaphysician of Media”. By Eric Norden. Playboy Magazine, March (1969), p 70, reprinted in The Essential McLuhan (1995), p 259
Year: 1969
Chapters:
Dialogue | Divided by Media
Mallarme sees this impersonal art of juxtaposition as revolutionary and democratic also in the sense that it enables each reader to be an artist: “Reading becomes a solitary, tacit concert given to itself by the mind which recaptures significances from the least sonorities.” It is the rhyming and orchestrating of things themselves which releases the maximum intelligibility and attunes the ears of men once more to the music of the spheres. We are finished, he says, with the custom of an official literary decorum by which poets sang in chorus, obliterating with their personal forgeries the actual signatures of things. In fact, the new poet will take as much care to avoid a style that is not in things themelves as literary men have in the past sought to achieve and impose one.
“Joyce, Mallarme, and the Press” (1954) in The Interior Landscape (1969), p 16
Year: 1954
Orchestration permits discontinuity and endless variety without the universal imposition of any one social or economic system.
The Mechanical Bride (1951), p 34
Year: 1951
But discontinuity, whether in cultures or physics, unavoidably invokes the ancient notion of harmony. And it is out of the extreme discontinuity of modern existence, with its mingling of many cultures and periods, that there is being born today the vision of a rich and complex harmony.
The Mechanical Bride (1951), p 97
Year: 1951
Chapter:
Harmony
It is the powerful mosaic and iconic thrust in our experience since TV that explains the paradox of the upsurge of TIME and NEWSWEEK and similar magazines. These magazines present the news in a compressed mosaic form that is a real parallel to the ad world.
Understanding Media (1964), MIT/Routledge edition, p 227
Year: 1964
One need go no further than Japanese flower arrangement, which is achieved by means of the spaces between the flowers. In an electronic world where all-at-onceness is inevitable and normal, we have rediscovered an affinity for the discontinuity of
Oriental art and expression which is most enthusiastically felt in the teen-age world today.
Through the Vanishing Point with Harley Parker (1968), p 221
Year: 1968
Drawn to McLuhan #8
The techniques of discontinuous juxtaposition in landscape poetry and painting were transferred to the popular press and the popular novel.
“Media Log”, In Explorations 4, (1955), p 53
Year: 1955
Chapters:
Interval | Living Unity
It is very rugged for a highly literate society, whether in Europe or here, to face the new world of resonant discontinuity. It means chaos in a literate society. That is why literate societies around the globe are having a very rough time. They are switching from visual order to auditory-resonant order and this gives a huge advantage to all tribal societies and all backward societies. That goes for the U.S. Backward people in the U.S. are now highly favoured: the North American Indian is making a very strong comeback in Canada, along with the Eskimo.
“The Hardware-Software Mergers: How Successful Have They Been?”, Speech given at the conference, Reappraisal of the Educational Technology Industry, University of Chicago, November 116-118, 1969, Transcript, p 9
Year: 1969
The comic strip ‘Blondie’ may prove just as revealing as Levi-Struss’s Structural Anthropology, although the two in combination may unveil structures unknown to Levi-Struass.
Quoted by Thomas W. Cooper in “Pioneers in Communication: The Lives and Thought of Harold Innis and Marshall McLuhan”, dissertation, University of Toronto, 1979, p 280
Year: 1979
Remember, as a general rule of thumb, hardware tends toward centralism and connectiveness (left hemisphere) and software tends toward decentralization and discontinuity (right hemisphere). But software will ultimately produce a climate of diversity in the Bell Systems because its final aim is the servicing of the user.
The Global Village with Bruce Powers (1989), p 28
Year: 1989
KERMODE: But how would the arrival of the electric technology modify our views of time, for example? MCLUHAN: I think it is well enough manifested in Lewis Carroll, where both time and space are suddenly subjected to total discontinuity and non-conformities and disconnections.
“The Future of Man in the Electronic Age” (Interview with Frank Kermode on BBC), in Understanding Me (2003), p 65
Year: 2003
So our world beginning as early, in fact, as Rimbaud, our whole environmental world electromagnetically moved into a world of discontinuity and disconnection and unique spaces rather than homogeneous spaces.
“The Future of Man in the Electric Age” (1965), in Understanding Me (2003), p 65
Year: 1965
This is real cool. Jazz as compared with classical music has many of these aspects of discontinuity and very much room for fill in. But where the information or data level is low, the fill-in or participation is high.
“The Future of Man in the Electric Age” (1965), in Understanding Me (2003), pp 70-71
Year: 1965
The world of discontinuity came in most vividly with the telegraph and the newspaper. The stories in the newspaper are completely discontinuous because they are simultaneous. They're all under one dateline, but there's no story line to connect them. TV is like that. It's an X-ray, mosaic screen with the light charging through the screen at the viewer. Joyce called it, "the charge of the light barricade." In fact, FW is the greatest guide to the media ever devised on this planet, and is a tremendous study of the action of all media upon the human psyche and sensorium. It's difficult to read, but it's worth it.
“Open Mind Surgery “lecture at Fordham U (1967), in Understanding Me (2003), p 152
Year: 1967
[A discontinuous format ] …is like the detective story. It involves you more deeply. It arouses curiosity more than any possible connection could do. But the strange fact about the missing link or about a discontinuity is that the audience leaps to fill it in, and this is true in jazz and so on. But at any rate, I think it fair to say that jazz and rock have turned English into a world language because you cannot sing jazz or rock in any other language but English.
“Art as Survival in the Electric Age” (1973), in Understanding Me (2003), p 217
Year: 1973
If the corporate life is to be rendered on paper, the method of discontinuous non-story must be employed.
“Notes on Burroughs” (1964), in Media Research (1997), p 86
Year: 1964
In his new book The Age of Discontinuity (Harper & Row. 1969), my friend Peter Drucker presents a magnificent inventory of problems in current decision-making. He hasn´t a clue as to why these problems have arisen but he cries out for a new theory of organization. He indicates that every organization in the world, whether in the home or the school, the business or the political or the religious, has broken down today regardless of ideology or geography.
Letter to Pierre Elliott Trudeau, January 24, 1969, in Letters of Marshall McLuhan (1987), p 362
Year: 1969
I have made my most exciting discovery while reading Nil by Robert Martin Adams. His inventory of discontinuities and negations in the 19th century revealed to me that the cultures of the world have often been engaged in trying to restrict the continuum of visual space by various strategies of negation, nihilism. discontinuity, etc. Not knowing the properties of visual space, or the spatial properties of any of the other senses, has thus resulted in a huge waste of time and energy.
Letter to Edward T. Hall, November 3, 1969, in Letters of Marshall McLuhan (1987), p 391
Year: 1969
The big breakthrough that came with Planck in quantum mechanics and Freud in The Interpretation of Dreams (both in 1900) was the recognition of discontinuity in matter, and between the conscious and the unconscious.
Letter to Rollo May, July 25, 1974, in Letters of Marshall McLuhan (1987), p 504
Year: 1974
The beatnik reaching out for Zen is only carrying the mandate of the TV mosaic out into the world of words and perception. The paperback itself has become a vast mosaic world in depth, expressive of the changed sense-life of Americans, for whom depth experience in words, as in physics, has become entirely acceptable, and even sought after.
Understanding Media (1964), MIT/Routledge edition, p 325
Year: 1964
Our new stereophonic world is no more continuous or connected than the “solid” patterns of electrons in three-dimensional space. Such is the meaning of “stero” – solid.
"A Garland of Christmases Past and a Glimpse of Christmas Future.”, McCall's 95, Dec (1967), pp. 97, 163
Year: 1967
To the scientist using visual assumptions about phenomena, nature appears as a collection of figures whose variety and discontinuity can be eliminated by means of abstraction.
Laws of Media: The New Science with Eric McLuhan, (1988), p 23
Year: 1988
As the visual sense moves back into interplay with the other senses, it is natural that rigid chronology becomes fuzzy and uncertain. While these developments occurred in science, our artists were articulating discontinuity and simultaneity for their own publics.
Laws of Media: The New Science with Eric McLuhan, (1988), p 45
Year: 1988
However that may be, the cathartic, ethical view of art has led to a doctrinaire hostility to the use of discontinuity in art (the theme of Arnold's preface to Poems, 1853) and indifference to all popular art.
McLuhan Hot and Cool (1967), p 135
Year: 1967
There is more diversity, less conformity under a single roof in any family than there is with the thousands of families in the same city. The more you create village conditions, the more discontinuity and division and diversity. The global village absolutely insures maximal disagreement on all points.
McLuhan Hot and Cool (1967), p 272
Year: 1967
Chapter:
Divided by Media
The West was discovering the power of discontinuity just when the East was taking on the excitement of the novelty of the Western continuum.
From Cliché to Archetype with Wilfred Watson (1970), p 19
Year: 1970
The new age of discontinuity retrieves all the cultures at once. Everyman becomes a missing link? A hairless ape?
From Cliché to Archetype with Wilfred Watson (1970), p 39
Year: 1970
In the same year (1900) that Max Planck announced quantum mechanics and the discontinuity of matter, Sigmund Freud published The Interpretation of Dreams with its announcement of the discontinuity of the private and corporate self.
“Predicting 1983 and the Fourth World,” in Man and the Future of Organizations, Franklin Foundation Lecture Series, Volume 5, 1975, p 7 double check seems low the other quotes from this are higher page #
Year: 1983
The twentieth century opened with Max Planck's theory of quantum mechanics in 1900, stating the discontinuity of the material universe. In the same year Sigmund Freud published his "Interpretation of Dreams" stating the .discontinuities of our conscious and unconscious lives, so far as I am aware, economists have not yet matched physics and psychology with any statement of the discontinuity of the economic bond.
A Media Approach to Inflation 1974, p 29 [Published in NY Times. Cite date etc.]
Year: 1974
The instant and simultaneous have no sequence or connections, but are characterized by resonant intervals and discontinuity. In the new world environment of instant information…
“A Media Approach to Inflation”, in The New York Times, Saturday, September 21, 1974, transcript, p 2
Year: 1974
All experience is segmental and must be processed sequentially. Therefore, rich experience eludes the wretched mesh or sieve of our attention.
The Gutenberg Galaxy: The Making of Typographic Man, (1962), p 249
Year: 1962
And to speak of the stream of consciousness as unlike the rational world is merely to insist upon visual sequence as the rational norm, handing art over to the unconscious quite gratuitously.
The Gutenberg Galaxy: The Making of Typographic Man, (1962), p 278
Year: 1962
Nothing [in our electric culture] could be further from typographic culture with its place for everything and everything in its place.
Understanding Media (1964), MIT/Routledge edition, p 171
Year: 1964
The physical landscape of the earth was changed very quickly by the landscapes of the newspaper, even though the political scene has not yet caught up. The networks of news, trade and transport were one.
"Joyce, Mallarmé and the Press", in The Sewanee Review, Vol.62, No.1, Jan-March (1954), p 43-44, reprinted in The Interior Landscape The Literary Criticism of Marshall McLuhan, (1969), p 10
Year: 1954
Chapters:
Information | News
Expo 67 is a mosaic. There are no connections between any of the parts. It has no story line. Everybody can get into the act. They’re not being given any organized image of anything…. There are a few exceptions in some of the pavilions. Most of the pavilions have no products, no exhibits, no projects, except Russia’s. They’re desperately trying to have a nineteenth century at last, and so they’ve filled their pavilion with products, which is what we used to do in our world’s fairs. It was. A world of produce, not of process. Expo is a world of process, not of products.
The Museum as Large-Room Pinball Machine, Marshall McLuhan, Harley Parker, and Museum Professionals, 1967, full transcript of a seminar at the City Museum of New York, October, 1967, edited by William Buxton, published by U. of Alberta Press, 2026, p 88
Year: 1967
Chapter:
Participation
The visual man is always looking for connection. “I don’t follow you.” This is always the autograph of the visual man.
The Museum as Large-Room Pinball Machine, Marshall McLuhan, Harley Parker, and Museum Professionals, 1967, full transcript of a seminar at the City Museum of New York, October, 1967, edited by William Buxton, published by U. of Alberta Press, 2026, p 90
Year: 1967
We never said that the museum was a failure. The museum is a magnificent illustration of our Western bias towards the whole world of artifacts.
The Museum as Large-Room Pinball Machine, Marshall McLuhan, Harley Parker, and Museum Professionals, 1967, full transcript of a seminar at the City Museum of New York, October 9-10, 1967, edited by William Buxton, published by U. of Alberta Press, 2026, p 90
Year: 1967
Manhattan is an island and is a museum. It probably should be preserved. Like people on other islands, the Manhattan population has taken to living in discontinuous, tribal space. Unlike any other space I know of except England, the space of Manhattan is discontinuous, nuclear, and pocketlike. “You can’t get there from here.” That is true not only outside, but inside most homes. It’s completely unconscious on the part of the dwellers in that area.
The Museum as Large-Room Pinball Machine, Marshall McLuhan, Harley Parker, and Museum Professionals, 1967, full transcript of a seminar at the City Museum of New York, October 9-10, 1967, edited by William Buxton, published by U. of Alberta Press, 2026, p 98
Year: 1967
What we have been saying is “wrong” with the museum (if you can use that kind of value judgment) is that it isn’t tribal enough. It’s too continuous and connected.
The Museum as Large-Room Pinball Machine, Marshall McLuhan, Harley Parker, and Museum Professionals, 1967, full transcript of a seminar at the City Museum of New York, October, 1967, edited by William Buxton, published by U. of Alberta Press, 2026, p 99
Year: 1967