A dictionary of Marshall McLuhanβs quotations
Compiled by William Kuhns
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Viewing chapter Retribalizing (85 quotes)
The instant involvement that accompanies instant technologies triggers a conservative, stabilizing, gyroscopic function in man, as reflected by the second-grader who, when requested by her teacher to compose a poem after the first Sputnik was launched into orbit, wrote: βThe stars are so big / The earth is so small / Stay as you are.β The little girl who wrote those lines is part of the new tribal society; she lives in a world infinitely more complex, vast and eternal than any scientist has instruments to measure or imagination to describe.
βPlayboy Interview: Marshall McLuhan: A Candid Conversation with the High Priest of Popcult and Metaphysician of Mediaβ. By Eric Norden. Playboy Magazine, March (1969), p 70; reprinted in Essential McLuhan (1995), p 260
Year: 1969
As such, the new society will be one mythic integration, a resonating
world akin to the old tribal echo chamber where magic will live again: a world of ESP.
βPlayboy Interview: Marshall McLuhan: A Candid Conversation with the High Priest of Popcult and Metaphysician of Mediaβ. By Eric Norden. Playboy Magazine, March (1969), p 72, reprinted in Essential McLuhan (1995), p 261
Year: 1969
Chapter:
Occult
... And the sheer intimacy of our new interrelatedness has, as it were, transformed society into a kind of βskin-flick,β in which everybody is inside everybodyβs skin.
βMr. Nixon and the Dropout Strategyβ, in The New York Times, July 29, 1973, Section E, Page 13
Year: 1973
Chapters:
Extending Consciousness | Global Village
Western Electric is typical of the new corporate, tribal and imperial powers that create whole environments.
Culture Is Our Business, (1970), p 56
Year: 1970
MANSARAM - Well sir, you know about this East/West Happening?
MCLUHAN - Oh, yeah! Well, the simple fact of the matter is the whole world is an East/West happening, and while the Western world is going Oriental, the Oriental world is going Western. This has been going on for a century, and so what could be a bigger East/West happening than that? See, all the Western artists have gone Oriental since Baudelaire, and all the painters, all abstract art is Oriental art.
A long- unpublished interview done in1967 by Artist P. Mansaram, much later published in the McLuhan Galaxy Blog (2014) by Alex Kuskis.
Year: 1967
The basic changes of our time lead us towards confronting the environment as artefact. In a non-literate society there is no art In our sense, but the whole environment is experienced as unitary. Neolithic specialism ended that. The Balinese say: βWe have no art. We do everything as well as possibleβ; that is, they program the environment instead of its content.
Counterblast, 1969, p 31
Year: 1969
The world tribe will be essentially conservative, itβs true, like all iconic and inclusive societies; a mythic environment lives beyond time and space and thus generates little radical social change. All technology becomes part of a shared ritual that the tribe desperately strives to keep stabilized and permanent; by its very nature, an oral-tribal society - such as Pharaonic Egypt - is far more stable and enduring than any fragmented visual society. The oral and auditoryΒ tribal society is patterned by acoustic space, a total and simultaneous field of relations alien to the visual world, in which points of view and goals make social change an inevitable and constant byproduct. An electrically imploded tribal society discards the linear forward-motion of βprogress.β We can see in our own time how, as we begin to react in depth to the challenges of the global village
βPlayboy Interview: Marshall McLuhan: A Candid Conversation with the High Priest of Popcult and Metaphysician of Mediaβ. By Eric Norden. Playboy Magazine, March (1969), p 70, reprinted in The Essential McLuhan (1995), p 260
Year: 1969
Drawn to McLuhan #7
Iβm saying that the result, not the current process, of retribalization makes us reactionary in our basic attitudes and values. Once we are enmeshed in the magical resonance of the tribal echo chamber, the debunking of myths and legends is replaced by their religious study. Within the consensual framework of tribal values, there will be unending diversity -- but there will be few if any rebels who challenge the tribe itself.
βPlayboy Interview: Marshall McLuhan: A Candid Conversation with the High Priest of Popcult and Metaphysician of Mediaβ. By Eric Norden. Playboy Magazine, March (1969), p 70, reprinted in The Essential McLuhan (1995), p 260
Year: 1969
The price exacted of the twenty centuries [for reversing the trend of specialism] is a return to involvement in the most primitive modes of human consciousness.
Take Today with Barrington Nevitt (1972), p 204
Year: 1972
We have become irrevocably involved with, and responsible for, each other.
The Medium Is the Massage (1967), p 24
Year: 1967
Chapters:
Extending Consciousness | Global Village
We are back in acoustic space. We begin again to structure the primordial feelings and emotions from which 3000 years of literacy divorced us.
Hands have no tears to flow.
βFive Sovereign Fingers Taxed the Breathβ, in Shenandoah The Washington And Lee University Review, Vol. VII, No. 1, Autumn (1955), p 52, reprinted in Explorations 4, (1955), p 33 , Explorations in communication: an anthology (1960), p 208, Also appears in alternative format as part of Verbi-Voco-visual Explorations, (1967), Counter Blast (1969), p 17, Essential McLuhan
(1995), p 211
Year: 1995
The civilized man imagines that he is going to help the native by stripping off the nativeβs world of myth and legend, ritual and superstition. The paradox is that in the electric age we ourselves are moving into, returning to, the acoustic world of simultaneous involvement and awareness, experiencing the surfacing of the subliminal lifeβ¦. We had imagined that we could simply strip off the acoustic culture of these primitives or these natives in order to civilize them, but the same stripping off of our civilization is taking place at the same time, by means of the new electric technology. We are losing our civilization even faster than we stripped off the institutions of the Indians and the Africans.
βMan and Media,β lecture delivered at York University, Toronto, (1979), in Understanding Me (2003), p 296
Year: 1979
What I wish to show is that today we experience, in reverse, what pre-literate man faced with the advent of writing.
βAn Historical Approach to the Media of Communicationβ (1955), speech given at Columbia University, July 26, 1955, typescript, p 2
Year: 1955
I think the best distinction might be found in the phrase, "with it." You know how today we speak of being with it... meaning we've understood completely, we've got the message as it were....in every way possible. But in the older book or print culture people weren't with it....they were away from it....by themselves with their own private point of view. You have no point of view when you're with it...because you accept a thing totally. And we're with it because these new media of ours....the ones you talked about in the appliance store....have made our world into a single unit....the world is now like a continually sounding tribal drum, where everybody gets the message....all the time. A princess gets married in England and boom boom boom go the drums and we all hear about it; an earthquake in North Africa, a Hollywood star gets drunk....away go the drums again. I use the word tribal...probably the key word.
βThe Teenager and The Mediaβ, Explorations for CBC-TV, May 18th, (1960) Printed as Exhibit 2--Television Script, in NAEB Report on Understanding New Media, June (1960), p xxiii
Year: 1960
With television both sight and sound were out of the wire and our culture stepped free of mechanization for the first time since the invention of writing, 5,000 years ago.
From his 1955 Report to the Ford Foundation, quoted in W. Terrence Gordonβs Marshall McLuhan: Escape into Understanding (1997), p 163
Year: 1955
[Of a Volkswagen ad] By the way, βvolkβ is German for βcloud.β The βfolkβ indicates a corporate tribal dream.
Culture Is Our Business, (1970), p 32
Year: 1970
Chapter:
Advertising
When radio became a twenty-four hour environment, Muzak invented βprogrammingβ β unnoticeable sound adjusted to the hour of the day. Real groovy and tribal.
Culture Is Our Business ,(1970), p 34
Year: 1970
The ways of thinking implanted by electronic culture are very different from those fostered by print culture. Since the Renaissance most methods and procedures have strongly tended towards stress on the visual organization and application of knowledge.
Our electronic world now calls for a unified global field of awareness; the kind of private consciousness appropriate to literate man can be viewed as an unbearable kink in the collective consciousness demanded by electronic information movement.
βThe Agenbite of Outwitβ, In Location Magazine, Vol.1, No.1, (1963), p 123; reprinted in Marshall McLuhan Essays Media Research: Technology Art Communication, (1997), p 125
Year: 1963
The paradox today is that the ground of the latest Western technologies is electronic and simultaneous, and thus structurally right-hemisphere and "Oriental" and oral in its nature and effects. This situation began with the telegraph more than a century ago. Still, the overwhelming pattern of procedures in the Western world remains lineal, sequential, and connected in political and legal institutions, and also in education and commerce, but not in entertainment or art. A formula for complete chaos!Β
Laws of Media with Eric McLuhan (1988), p 80Β
Year: 1988
Chapters:
Goodbye Linearity | Hardware / Software | Hemispheres of the Brain | Todayβs Transition | Warnings
Anthropologist Leach, whose models of ideal order are naturally tribal, greets the decay of the Western family with a cheer. (Runaway World?) Somnambulistically he is with the trend of the electrically regenerated kids of the West. (From six onward they could form little psychedelic communities.)
Culture Is Our Business, (1970), p 236
Year: 1970
β¦the electronic age in which we stand as the primitives of an undeveloped and unknown cultureβ¦
Speech to the Learned Societies Canada Conference in Montreal, June, 1961
Year: 1961
β[McLuhan] praised the singing commercial for reinstating the old tribal institution of memorized wisdom.β
βTalk of the Town,β New Yorker, May 15, 1965, p 44
Year: 1965
[We plunge] β¦into the world of non-Euclidean space once more, lewd, ignorant, tribal, involved totally as in group singing.
Letter to Jacqueline Tyrwhitt, May 11, 1964, in Letters (1988), p 298
Year: 1964
Radio and TV enormously increased the consciousness of the auditory space, and spurred an involvement that extended to the revival of ancient religions among several of the Indian nations of this continent.
Culture Is Our Business, (1970), p 242
Year: 1970
The teenager seems in many ways to be a tribal man.
NAEB Revised Report on Project in Understanding New Media. (1960), p 127
Year: 1960
Chapter:
Youth
[Data processing] will, of necessity, produce a new kind of tribal man in the original corporate, or group, sense; the kind of person who has survived the excesses of left-hemisphere thinking and who will have retained his respect for the group awareness of the right hemisphere.Β But such a mutation will take at least a quarter of a century. He or she will be the psychic precursor of the twenty-first century ethos, which will be largely lived imaginatively on the planetβs surface and in outer space.
The Global Village with Bruce Powers, 1989, p 92
Year: 1989
We actually live in a world environment that has the structure of our own subconscious lives.
βThe New Moralityβ, 1967, p 176
Year: 1967
[We] shall resemble pre-literate and pre-historic societies in the inclusivity of their awareness.
βThe Post-Literate Manβ, 1973, Cycle 7: Essays, Short Stories, Poems for Freshman English, ed. by James Burl Hogins and Robert Earl Yaber, p 230
Year: 1973
Chapters:
Consciousness | Postliteracy
After 2500 years of alphabetic and typographic culture, it is not easy for us to adjust suddenly to the non-visual, inner space of the interval and to the ferment of the "interface".
To make the transition from the "outer trip" of the visually-oriented man to the "inner trip" of the audile-tactile world, is to shift from West to East.
"Backward" and non-literate cultures and individuals take readily to non-visual or electric technology, which is the world of the new quantum mechanics or of the resonating chemical bond.
The DEWLINE Newsletter, Vol 1, # 5 (NOVEMBER 1968)
Year: 1968
Chapters:
Todayβs Transition | West and East
β¦into the world of non-Euclidean space once more, lewd, ignorant,
tribal, involved totally as in group singing.
Letter to Jacqueline Tyrwhitt, May 11, 1964, in Letters (1987), p 298
Year: 1964
This also means that we shall tend as they [pre-literate societies] did towards homogeneity both of experience and organization. Perhaps, therefore, we have in our post-literacy come to the age of the classroom without walls.
βThe Post-Literate Manβ, 1973, Cycle 7: Essays, Short Stories, Poems for Freshman English, ed. by James Burl Hogins and Robert Earl Yaber, p 230
Year: 1973
Chapter:
Education
I have said (and I hope I am wrong) at various times that we ought to expect a steady trend toward irrational tribal behavior in North America, as our youngsters get saturated with the all-at-once auditory experience of our new media. Such tribal experience was still intact and available to the Jap and the German. But for us to retribalize would be quite a different matter. And in the global village created by our electronics there would, of course, be room for only one tribe β the human family itself.
Speech to the NAEB, Sept. 23, 1959. Republished whole by Cameron McEwen in his blog, McLuhanβs New Sciences:
Year: 1959
Chapters:
Heβs Doubtful | Warnings
The difference between factitious and fictitious tends to dissolve.
βInformation Hunt Looms Bigβ (1967), p 5
Year: 1967
The reason we find myths difficult to grasp is just this fact, that they do not exclude any facet of experience as literate cultures do. All the levels of meaning are simultaneous. Thus natives, when asked Freudian questions about the symbolism of their thoughts or dreams, insist that all the meanings are right there in the verbal statement. The work of Jung and Freud is a laborious translation of non-literate awareness into literary terms, and like any translation distorts and omits.
The Gutenberg Galaxy : The Making of Typographic Man , (1962), p 72
Year: 1962
Chapter:
Myth, Mythic
Cybernation seems to be taking us out of the visual world of classified data back into the tribal world of integral patterns and corporate awareness.
βCybernetics and Human Cultureβ (1964), in Understanding Me (2003), p 50
Year: 1964
Chapter:
Computer
The oral man never asks for a blueprint. He never wants an over-all view. His but to feel he is a member of the team. The only possibility in an oral structure is a monarchical apex of control. Where the activities of many are to be orchestrated there can be only one conductor. But the more necessary the conductor the more expendable he becomes. The first job of a top executive today is to see to it that there are several who can succeed him instantly. They often do!
βThe Organization Manβ, Explorations 8, October (1957), unnumbered page βsection 15β; the issue was later reprinted as Verbi-Voco-Visual, (1967), without pagination.
Year: 1957
Chapter:
Management
MCLUHAN: Well. the woman of the future will be highly mobile, nonspecialized -
some Kind of rival to Henry Kissinger: bureaucrat/ academic/ ambassador/ parent/ peacemaker. She'll have multilevel activities. And fashion. of course, is folk art. Fashions are images that update sensory life, that reflect change. If we project from now well, unisex isΒ· the thing now. Femininity has no meaning any longer. We'll have a tribe of Alice Coopers the new man/woman/ beast in a siren suit. Men and women will wear tribal costume as a mark of group identity.
βAn Informal Interview with Marshall McLuhanβ, in Miss Chatelaine, Fall Issue, 1974, p 92
Year: 1974
Chapter:
Predictions
The younger generation's whole orientation is toward a return to the native, as reflected by their costumes, their music, their long hair and their sociosexual behavior.
βPlayboy Interview: Marshall McLuhan: A Candid Conversation with the High Priest of Popcult and Metaphysician of Mediaβ. By Eric Norden. Playboy Magazine, March (1969), p 64, reprinted in Essential McLuhan (1995), p 252
Year: 1969
Sexual freedom is as natural to newly tribalized youth as drugs.
βPlayboy Interview: Marshall McLuhan: A Candid Conversation with the High Priest of Popcult and Metaphysician of Media.β By Eric Norden. Playboy Magazine, March (1969), p 65, reprinted in Essential McLuhan (1995), p 253
Year: 1969
Chapter:
Drugs
It's understandable why the retribalized young take to drugs like a duck to water.Β
βPlayboy Interview: Marshall McLuhan: A Candid Conversation with the High Priest of Popcult and Metaphysician of Media.β By Eric Norden. Playboy Magazine, March (1969), p 66, reprinted in Essential McLuhan (1995), p 254
Year: 1969
Chapter:
Drugs
Have you noticed that the word βescapismβ has almost disappeared from the language? βInvolvementβ has taken its place. Under electric conditions there can be no escape.
Letter to Claude Bissell, March 29, (1967), (LAC)
Year: 1967
Chapters:
Involvement | Todayβs Transition
Electric man is engaged in making new environments for himself much as primitive man was engaged in creating the world by his tribal rituals. Today he tends to be the maker of a cosmos rather than its incidental content. The information environment creates an all-at-once pattern that in effect puts our subconscious experience outside into the environment. Our patterns of living have become mythical, as it were, even though we retain the older patterns of thinking based on visual or rational space. In the electronic age space is no longer uniform, continuous or connected. The approach to the economy and to marketing cannot depend upon any precedents in Western history. An information economy naturally tends to be service-oriented, in international terms, service-orientation means understanding other cultures from within. It means the tailor-made and the custom-built program specially designed for our population. This requires an understanding of the sensory bias of each culture. The human sensorium in terms of systems development permits and tends to demand a programming of the environment itself. The future of the economy in terms of our new technology strongly points towards the need to program environments rather than to make commodities to put into environments. This is tantamount to saying that the future of advertising is to supplant products by providing the satisfactions in every greater depth, with increasing independence from the product. This has been a strong tendency within advertising for decades and yet it may seem a mere fantasy. It is this kind of fantasy that we are living out in the electronic age.
Letter to John Eberhard, November 3, 1966 (LAC)
Year: 1966
β¦on the overall pattern of social life, we are retribalizing, after centuries of detribalizing; and that whereas we achieved detribalization by literacy and segmental analysis of all thought, action and production, we are accomplishing our retribalization by the simultaneous, the electronic, which tends to put us in a kind of auditory world, or field, of simultaneous sound in which the Intuitive Man takes over from the Analytic Man.
Letter to Edward S. Morgan, May 16, 1959, in Letters of Marshall McLuhan (1987), p 255
Year: 1959
Tribal man is βhalf-wittedβ since he lives not by eye, but by ear and touch. (Civilized man is βhalf-wittedβ since the dominance of sight encourages him to subdue all the other senses. Joyce calls it βabcedmindednessβ or βalforabitβ, i.e., alphabet throws everything away and retains a fragement of the experience, the private point of view.)
Letter to Pat OβNeill, August 21, 1969 (LAC)
Year: 1969
Not only does modern physics abandon the specialized visual space of Descartes and Newton, it re-enters the subtle auditory space of the non-literate world. And in the most primitive society, as in the present age, such auditory space is a total field of simultaneous relations in which βChangeβ has as little meaning and appeal as it had for the mind of Shakespeare or the heart of Cervantes. All values apart, we must learn today that our electric technology has consequences for our most ordinary perceptions and habits of action which are quickly recreating in us the mental processes of the most primitive men.
The Gutenberg Galaxy: The Making of Typographic Man, (1962), p 30
Year: 1962
[As weΒ΄re retribalizing...we're getting rid of individualism; we're in the process of making a tribe. For just as books, and their private point of view, are being replaced by the new media, so the concepts which underlie our actions, our social life, are changing. We are no longer so concerned with self-definition, with finding our own individual way. WeΒ΄re more concerned with what the group knows, of feeling as it does, of acting with it, not apart from it.
TV episode, βMarshall McLuhan Describes the Global Village,β Explorations (CBC-TV), May 18, 1960, transcript, p 2
Year: 1960
[We move] into the world of non-Euclidean space once more, lewd, ignorant, tribal, involved totally as in group singing.
Letter to Jacqueline Tyrwhitt, May 11, 1964, Letters (1987), p 298
Year: 1964
It is the Bergsons and the Picassos who have announced the literate plunge into the tribal experience. Non-literate and non-visual societies experience the same plunge as there is encountered with literacy.
U.S. Catholic, March, 1966, p 30
Year: 1966
Electric circuitry is recreating in us the multi-dimensional space orientation of the βprimitiveβ.
The Medium Is the Massage (1967), p 56-57
Year: 1967
Chapter:
Todayβs Transition
Way back in the age of the hunter, as indicated earlier, paleolithic man was firmly convinced that he made his environment. He did it by rituals, dances, and various cosmic communing and behavioral patterns. But primitive men always thought that they made the world, that they wound it up and renewed its energies by their rituals. Are we not moving very much back into that state?
βInformation Hunt Looms Bigβ, in College and University Journal, Vol 6, No. 2, Spring, 1967, p 6
Year: 1967
Time can be defeated, as it were, by reversal of its characteristics if only it be speeded up enough. Experience of this fact awaited the electronic age, which found that instant speeds abolish time and space, and return man to an integral and primitive awareness.
Understanding Media, 1964, MIT/Routledge edition, pp 151-152
Year: 1964
Chapter:
Speedups
Culture is not civilization. Every day we get more cultured and less civilized.
βMedia Message from McLuhanβ (1967)
Year: 1967
Chapter:
McLuhanisms & Zingers
[Cybernetic] organizational changes will produce social mutations of some consequence. It will, of necessity, produce a new kind of tribal man, in the original corporate, or group, sense; the kind of person who has survived the excesses of left-hemisphere thinking and who will have retained his respect for the group awareness of the right hemisphere.
The Global Village with Bruce Powers (1989), p 124
Year: 1989
And the hippies, those brash pioneers of new life patterns, have revertedβboys and girls together, along with a few little childrenβto the communal living of the Middle Ages or the primitive tribe.
βThe Future of Sexβ with George Leonard (1967), in On the Nature of Media (2016), p 138
Year: 1967
The very name βWurlitzerβ with its telescoping of βwaltzβ and βwhirl,β conveys the idea of vertigo. The face of the machine, with its garish cascade of lights, is like the phosphorescent mask of a tribal witch doctor. And the squat massive bulk of the box resembles those figures of African sculpture in which terror has retracted the limbs, leaving only a torso for contemplation. Also, there is real propriety in applying βmagicβ to the ensemble of emotions and activities evoked by the machine, whose voodoo spells are hooked mechanically to the nickel slug.
The Mechanical Bride (1951), p 85
Year: 1951
[James Joyceβs] idea, among many others, [is] that tribal man lived a dream and modern man is βback again Finneganβ into the cycle of tribal involvement, but this time awake.
βTechnology and Environmentβ, 1967, in Arts Canada, No. 105, p 217, reprint of βVision 65 Addressβ of 1965
Year: 1967
This drive towards "spontaneity of consciousness" fostered the child cult, as well as primitivism of many varieties. But it represented a rebellion against merely visual culture, a rebellion that had begun in the eighteenth century with Rousseau and others.
βInside the Five Sense Sensoriumβ (1961), in On the Nature of Media (2016), p 57
Year: 1961
Chapter:
Consciousness
οΏ½οΏ½οΏ½ a mass society is one in which personal diversity is encouraged while at the same time everybody reacts and interacts simultaneously to every stimulus.
βPlayboy Interview: Marshall McLuhan: A Candid Conversation with the High Priest of Popcult and Metaphysician of Mediaβ. By Eric Norden. Playboy Magazine, March (1969), p 72, reprinted in Essential McLuhan, (1995), p 261
Year: 1969
Chapters:
Audience, Public, Mass | Corporate Consciousness | Future | Individual | Todayβs Transition
Tribalization or retribalization means going back into the world of all-at-onceness, of echoland, in which the auditory resonance is dominant; and this is a world totally antithetic to the written literate culture.
βThe Hardware-Software Mergers: How Successful Have They Been?β Speech given at conference, Reappraisal of the Educational Technology Industry, University of Chicago, November 16-118, 1969. Transcript, p 5
Year: 1969
Chapter:
Eye vs Ear
The TV generation is tribal and scrubbed. It has lost its identity, and it is very angry and it is fighting like mad to recover self-image by suffering. The tragic agon is a quest for identity such as when people have had their identity scrapped or scrubbed, they fight. Student activists are not merely aware of themselves as occupants of the global theatre. They are also people struggling for identity in a world that has robbed them by innovation. I donβt suppose so many babies were thrown out with so little bath water in human history; but TV scrapped, by sudden technological change, a whole generation of children.
βThe Hardware-Software Mergers: How Successful Have They Been?β Speech given at conference, Reappraisal of the Educational Technology Industry, University of Chicago, November 16-118, 1969. Transcript, p 5
Year: 1969
...the electronic age in which we stand as the primitives of an undeveloped and unknown culture.
βThe Humanities in the Electronic Ageβ, a speech to the annual meeting of the Humanities Association of Canada, delivered in Montreal, June, 1961, first published in the Humanities Association Bulletin, Volume XXXIV, 1961, p 4, reprinted in McLuhan Unbound (2005), #7, p 7
Year: 1961
The consequences of this [technology as an extension of manβs physical organism] would seem to be that all invention is a form of bodily fission with the ensuing chain reactions in the body and in the environment.
Letter to Melvin Kranzberg, Editor, Journal of Culture and Technology, July 10, 1973
Year: 1973
The mother tongue is propaganda.
βElectronic Man and the End of the Neolithic Ageβ (1965), p 3
Year: 1965
Chapter:
Language
The extremely mobile individual consciousness of the print-oriented man now reverses into the tribal inertia of multi-consciousness.
From ClichΓ© to Archetype, with Wilfred Watson, 1970, p 6
Year: 1970
Chapter:
Consciousness
Tribal man, or family man, is characterized by certain basic outlooks and strategies., of which perhaps the most obvious is a deep sense of togetherness, a strong resistance to change. It certainly sounds paradoxical to say that the Electronic Age, in which change is itself the only constant, will be the age which will be most resistant to change, but the reason for this is perhaps obvious to us in our daily lives now.
Letter to Edward S. Morgan, May 16, 1959, in Letters of Marshall McLuhan, 1987, p 254
Year: 1959
The new electronic man and preliterate man see eye to eye.
βMedia and the Inflation CROWDβ (1973), in MM The Man and His Message (1989), p 59
Year: 1973
With the latest technologies we encounter the most primitive forms of human association, part of our own unconscious life.
βInformation Hunt Looms Bigβ, in College and University Journal, Vol 6, No. 2, Spring, 1967, p 6
Year: 1967
The tribalizing power of the new electronic media, the way in which they return to us to
the unified fields of the old oral cultures, to tribal cohesion and pre-individualist patterns of thought, is little understood. Tribalism is the sense of the deep bond of family, the closed society as the norm of community.
Tyuonyi, Volumes 1-2, 1985, p. 60
Year: 1985
The culture heroes of preliteracy and postliteracy alike are robots.
Laws of Media: The New Science with Eric McLuhan, (1988), p 79
Year: 1988
In tribal societies we are told that it is a familiar reaction, when some hideous event occurs, for some people to say, βHow horrible it must be to feel like that,β instead of blaming somebody for having done something horrible. This feeling is an aspect of the new mass culture we are moving intoβa world of total involvement in which everybody is so profoundly involved with everybody else and in which nobody can really imagine what private guilt can be anymore.
The Medium is the Massage with Quentin Fiore, 1967, p 61
Year: 1967
I think now we're playing it backwards. We're going back into the bicameral mind, which is tribal, collective, without any individual consciousness.
βViolence as a Quest for Identityβ (Mike McManus Interview, TVO), 1977, in Understanding Me (2003), p 264
Year: 1977
They have high-rise cemeteries now. This is what [high-rise apartment and condo buildings] are really intended for. You buy yourself a little box, in the sky, instead of taking up space on the ground. Literally, the new high-rises are all cemeteriesβ¦
Undated Monday Night Seminar recorded and available on YouTube as ββ; time stamp 1:09-1:40.
We are re-entering the old tribal world but this time we are going to go through the tribal doubts and the tribal dreams, wide awake.
Video βThis Is Marshall McLuhan,β 1967, Transcript, 5:25
Year: 1967
Chapter:
Todayβs Transition
Diaper backward spells repaid. Think about it.
From a collection of one-liners kept by Marg Stewart and Barrington Nevitt, circa 1973
Year: 1973
Chapter:
McLuhanisms & Zingers
Having long admired the spontaneity and art of backward men in preliterate and semi-literate societies, we now find ourselves well on the road to retribalization via our new electric media. Having long talked of the plight of the individual in a mass society we can now get ready to write about the plight of mass men in an individualist world. Even the wheel, the basis of Western mechanical enterprise, may in the jet age reamalgamerge with the animal form from which it originally was abstracted.
βPopular/Mass Cultureβ Speech, 1960, in Understanding Me, p 15
Year: 1960
The subliminal depths of radio are charged with the resonating echoes of tribal horns and antique drums. This is inherent in the very nature of this medium, with its power to turn the psyche and society into a single echo chamber.
Understanding Media, 1964, MIT/Routledge edition, p 261
Year: 1964
Chapter:
LOM 1 - Enhance or Amplify
The Golden Bough is a memory theatre of the corporate rather than the private consciousness and marks a major transition toward the retribalizing of the human consciousness.
Letter to William Jovanovich, Dec. 1, 1966, in Letters of Marshall McLuhan, (1987), p 339
Year: 1966
Chapter:
Memory
Even the highbrow arts of the twenties were βJung and easily Freudened,β and moved enthusiastically toward retribalization of society. The famous family of Stein (Gert and Ep and Ein) presents a good cross section of the new tribalism created by the radio environment.
βReversal of the Overheated Imageβ Playboy, December, 1968 , Vol. 15, No. 12, pp. 131-134, 245.
Year: 1968
Chapters:
Freud, Sigmund | Jung, Carl G
The twenties were going corporate and tribal fast enough under the huge speed-up of information movement by radio. But their slang is still visual and square (i.e. Euclidean) compared to the tactile, haptic, proprioceptive, and acoustic spaces and involvement of the slang of the TV age.
Letter to Robert J. Leuver, July 30, 1969, in Letters of Marshall McLuhan (1987), p 385
Year: 1969
Private identity is pushed to its extreme, or breakdown point, with solipsism, and it may well be that solipsism, on a corporate scale, is what we call tribalism.
Laws of Media: The New Science with Eric McLuhan, (1988), p 59
Year: 1988
By involving all men in all men, by the electric extension of their own nervous systems, the new technology turns the figure of the primitive society into a universal ground that buries all previous figures.
Take Today with Barrington Nevitt (1972), p 25
Year: 1972
Chapter:
Fashion
The 19th century lived in the Renaissance. It did not live in the 19th century. We live in the nineteenth century. We do not live in the twentieth. The image that we have of ourselves is from back there.
Diebold meeting (1966), p 8
Year: 1966
Now what is happening at the present time is that changes are occurring at so much more rapid a pace that the rear view mirror doesnβt work any more. At jet speeds, rear view mirrors arenβt very useful, and so many people are beginning to doubt their habit of looking into the rear view mirror.
Diebold meeting (1966), p 10
Year: 1966
The astronauts are still haunted by this obsolete and irrelevant image of space as a continuum that offers goals to man.
βThe concept of space in artβ, August 17, 1970, p 4
Year: 1970
What we have been saying is βwrongβ with the museum (if you can use that kind of value judgment) is that it isnβt tribal enough. Itβs 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