A dictionary of Marshall McLuhan’s quotations
Compiled by William Kuhns
©2026 Marshall McLuhan Estate
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Viewing chapter Giedion, Sigfried (13 quotes)
Sigfried Giedion in Mechanization Takes Command has a section on medieval comfort, in which he explains that a medieval space was furnished even when empty, because of its acoustic properties.
Letter to R. Murray Shafer, Dec. 16, 1974, in Letters (1988), p 507
Year: 1974
No individual can ever be adequate to grappling with the vision of what Sigfried Giedion calls 'anonymous history’. That is to say, the vision of the significance of the multitude of personal acts and artefacts which constitute the total social process which is human communication or participation. For in this kind of awareness 'commerce' or 'technology' are tools of extremely limited usefulness in discussion.
“The Later Innis” (1953), reprinted in On the Nature of Media (2016), p 40
Year: 1953
The patient, watchful analysis of these intricate modes of social experience such as Sigfried Giedion brings to anonymous history was lacking in Innis. For Innis the concept of the media of communication, led him towards a panoramic survey. But it was a survey of great range and value. And it brought him quickly to the awareness of the revolutionary violence latent in the rise of any new mode of communication.
“The Later Innis” (1953), reprinted in On the Nature of Media (2016), p 42
Year: 1953
Chapters:
Living Unity | Dropout
You asked some time ago about Sigfried Giedion. He comes to mind now because of his conscious exploitation of “Space-Time” metaphors in architectural history. It is astonishing how helpful and how crippling a big unconscious metaphor can be in directing the thoughts of whole periods of history. I mean such things as "organism" in Rousseau. Yet how different a concept of organism from that of the sixteenth century when it was hierarchical, or of the 19th when it was animal. I sometimes feel that such a notion of organism got into the surging rhythm of [Tolstoy's] "War and Peace" in such a way as to create the psychological reality of cinema before the mechanical fact. Curiously, the Greeks invented "organic" as a metaphor from "mechanic". Your work shows a constant awareness of the nearness of these supposed opposites, I am fully aware.
Letter to Wyndham Lewis, October 26, 1943, in Letters (1987), pp 135-136
Year: 1943
Chapter:
Organic
Sigfried Giedion devotes much of his Introduction to Space, Time and Architecture to the theme of "anonymous history," just as Hans Selye tackled the "pharmacology of dirt," or the whole environment, in The Stress of Life. Giedion approaches the entire man made environment as architecture. Most of this environment is unintended and unplanned, or simply leftover junk from other periods. This anonymous history tends to be "invisible" much as John Cage's Silence consists of all the unintended noise of the environment, or as most poetry consists of all the "unintended meanings" or ambiguities.
From Cliché to Archetype with Wilfred Watson (1970), p 76
Year: 1970
Of course the trouble with Leavis is that his passion for important work forbids him to look for the sun in the egg-tarnished spoons of the daily table. In other words, his failure to grasp current society in its intellectual modes (say in the style of [Lewis's] Time and Western Man or Giedion's Space Time and Architecture) cuts him off from the relevant pabulum.
Letter to Walter J. Ong, S.J., and Clement J. McNaspy, S.J., Dec. 23, 1944, Letters of Marshall McLuhan (1988), p 166
Year: 1944
Chapter:
Language of Forms
My object is to learn the grammar and general language of 20 major fields in order to help on an orchestra among the arts. cf. S. Giedion's Mechanization Takes Command [1948] as sample of how I should like to set up a school of literary studies. Basic modes of cognition on this continent not linguistic but technological. Artistic experience comes to the young only via that channel. Must work with that at first. Present procedure is to slap an alien culture over the actual one. The real one is killed and the alien one is worn as a party mask. You and Eisenstein have shown me how to make use of Chinese ideogram to elicit the natural modes of American sensibility. But I've just begun. Feeling my way.
Letter to Ezra Pound, January 5, 1951, in Letters (1987), p 218
Year: 1951
Chapter:
McLuhan on McLuhan
Drawn to McLuhan #5
…the advent of satellite broadcasting makes every one of the more than two hundred and fifty cultures of the globe as immediately present to each other as are the telephone subscribers of a single town.
“The Electronic Age – The Age of Implosion” (1962) in Media Research (1997), p 35
Year: 1962
Incidentally, I am not a fan of De Chardin’s. I find the evolutionary stuff very tiresome. The idea that anything is better because it comes later, is surely borrowed from pre-electric technologies. By the way, there is one thing that is enormously faster than light or electricity, and that is thought. That is why pattern recognition is only possible to the human mind.
Letter to Tom Easterbrook, 1972
Year: 1972
Chapters:
Corporate Consciousness | Mastering Technology
The tendency of electric media is to create a kind of organic interdependence among all the institutions of society, emphasizing de Chardin's view that the discovery of electromagnetism is to be regarded as "a prodigious biological event”.
Understanding Media (1964), MIT/Routledge edition, p 247
Year: 1964
The car, in a word, has quite refashioned all of the spaces that unite and separate men, and it will continue to do so for a decade more, by which time the electronic successors to the car will be manifest.
Understanding Media (1964), MIT/Routledge edition, p 225
Year: 1964
Chapter:
Mastering Technology
Liturgy on television affords every opportunity for full participation. It is possible to join one's intention to participate in the fullest extent, just as fully as in any church... Electric man has no ego and depends totally on close involvement with others. Similarly, electric liturgy would have no ego but a collective personality instead... The trouble with Christianity is that it has never had a theory of communication and a confrontation is fast developing between... the mystical body of the church and the electric environment.
"RC Church Should Accept Televised Liturgy as Valid Fulfilment of Sunday Mass: McLuhan," in The St. Catherine's Standard, Saturday, June 2, 1973
Year: 1973
This reminded me of Sigfried Giedion, whose work I have followed since 1939. He was in St. Louis then, giving the lectures that were published as Space, Time and Architecture. I became acquainted with him and have known him ever since. … Giedion’s whole approach to art and technology is environmental. He called the environment non-museum history, because people are always unaware of it. Now the study of environments as a new perception and new teleology is his theme; so the secret of Giedion is indispensable in the context of here and now. His whole approach to the study of changing styles in art and architecture is something I have taken for granted since ’39, when I first met him. It was all new to me then. … So perhaps I have taken too much for granted. This Giedion approach (like Hall’s educational approach, which we mentioned earlier, to the hidden dimensions of experience) is one which seems to me indicated for our time.
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 161
Year: 1967