A dictionary of Marshall McLuhan’s quotations

I might mention, apropos communication studies, that I have begun to realize that my peculiar approach to all matters has been to enter via the ground rather than the figure. In any gestalt the ground is taken for granted and the figure receives all the attention. The ground is subliminal, an area of effects rather than of causes. Some day I hope you will do a small book called "Chaucer's Theory of Communication." There should be such a book for Plato, and Virgil, and Dante, and Newton, and Darwin, but no such books exist. Nobody wants to study the sort of changes, or the sort of effects, that any of these people wanted to make in their contemporaries. If you are game for the Chaucer study, tell me because I have a series in view.
To Morton and Caroline Bloomfield, March 26, 1973, in Letters of Marshall McLuhan (1987), p 473-474
Year: 1973
Chapter: Communication
Compiled by William Kuhns
© 2026, The Estate of Marshall McLuhan