Mike Benz, "Music for Regime Change"
“World War 3 is a guerrilla information war with no division between military and civilian participation.
― Marshall McLuhan
“War and the fear of war have always been considered the main incentives to technological extension of our bodies. Indeed, Lewis Mumford, in his The City in History, considers the walled city itself an extension of our skins, as much as housing and clothing. More even than the preparation for war, the aftermath of invasion is a rich technological period; because the subject culture has to adjust all its sense ratios to accommodate the impact of the invading culture.”
― Marshall McLuhan, Understanding Media: The Extensions of Man
“The present is only faced in any generation by the artist.”
― Marshall McLuhan
“Art is anything you can get away with.”
― Marshall McLuhan, Understanding Media: The Extensions of Man
“Poets and artists live on frontiers. They have no feedback, only feedforward. They have no identities.”“The poet dislocates language into meaning. The artist smashes open the doors of perception.”“The poet, the artist, the sleuth - whoever sharpens our perception tends to be antisocial; rarely "well-adjusted", he cannot go along with currents and trends. A strange bond often exists between antisocial types in their power to see environments as they really are. This need to interface, to confront environments with a certain antisocial power is manifest in the famous story "The Emperor's New Clothes".”
― Marshall McLuhan, The Medium is the Massage
“Rationality or consciousness is itself a ratio or proportion among the sensuous components of experience, and is not something added to such sense experience. Subrational beings have no means of achieving such a ratio or proportion in their sense lives but are wired for fixed wave lengths, as it were, having infallibility in their own area of experience. Consciousness, complex and subtle, can be impaired or ended by a mere stepping-up or dimming-down of any one sense intensity, which is the procedure in hypnosis. And the intensification of one sense by a new medium can hypnotize an entire community.
― Marshall McLuhan, Understanding Media: The Extensions of Man
“Anyone who tries to make a distinction between education and entertainment doesn't know the first thing about either.”
― Marshall McLuhan
“We look at the present through a rear view mirror. We march backwards into the future.”
― Marshall McLuhan
“Our technology forces us to live mythically”
― Marshall McLuhan
“Politics offers yesterday's answers to today's questions.”
― Marshall McLuhan, The Medium is the Massage
“In the "Republic," Plato vigorously attacked the oral, poetized form as a vehicle for communicating knowledge. He pleaded for a more precise method of communication and classification ("The Ideas"), one which would favor the investigation of facts, principles of reality, human nature, and conduct. What the Greeks meant by "poetry" was radically different from what we mean by poetry. Their "poetic" expression was a product of a collective psyche and mind. The mimetic form, a technique that exploited rhythm, meter and music, achieved the desired psychological response in the listener. Listeners could memorize with greater ease what was sung than what was said. Plato attacked this method because it discouraged disputation and argument. It was in his opinion the chief obstacle to abstract, speculative reasoning - he called it "a poison, and an enemy of the people.”
― Marshall McLuhan, The Medium is the Massage
“The ear favours no particular “point of view.”
We are enveloped by sound.It forms a seamless web around us.We say, “Music shall fill the air.” We never say, “Music shall fill a particular segment of the air.”We hear sounds from everywhere, without ever having to focus.Sounds come from “above,” from “below,” from in “front” of us, from “behind” us, from our “right,” from our “left.”We can‘t shut out sound automatically.We simply are not equipped with earlids.Where a visual space is an organised continuum of a uniformed connected kind, the ear world is a world of simultaneous relationships.”
― Marshall McLuhan, The Medium is the Massage
“Delegated authority is lineal, visual, hierarchical. The authority of knowledge is nonlineal, nonvisual, and inclusive.”
― Marshall McLuhan, Understanding Media: The Extensions of Man
“Once we have surrendered our senses and nervous systems to the private manipulation of those who would try to benefit from taking a lease on our eyes and ears and nerves, we don't really have any rights left.”
― Marshall McLuhan, Understanding Media: The Extensions of Man
