McLuhan, Marshall. The Gutenberg Galaxy. Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1962/1992.

King Lear is a working model of the process of denudation by which men translated themselves from a world of roles to a world of jobs. (14)

The anguish of the third dimension is given its first verbal manifestation in poetic history in King Lear. (15)

The interiorization of the technology of the phonetic alphabet translates man from the magical world of the ear to the neutral visual world. (18).

Schizophrenia may be a necessary consequence of literacy. (22)

>The division of faculties which results from the technological dilation or externalization of one or another sense is so pervasive a feature of the past century that today we have become conscious, for the first time in history, how these mutations of culture are initiated. Those who experience the first onset of a new technology, whether it be alphabet or radio, respond most emphatically because the new sense ratios are set up at once by the technological dilation of eye or ear, present men with a surprising new world, which evokes a vigorous new “closure,” or novel pattern of interplay, among all of the senses together. But the initial shock gradually dissipates as the entire community absorbs the new habit of perception into all of its areas of work and association. But the real revolution is in this later and prolonged phase of “adjustment” of all personal and social life to the new model of perception set up by the new technology. (22-23)

Does the interiorization of media such as letters alter the ratio among our senses and change mental processes? (24)

> If a technology is introduced either from within or from without a culture, and if it gives new stress or ascendancy to one or another of our senses, the ratio among all of our senses is altered. We no longer feel the same, nor do our eyes and ears and other senses remain the same. The interplay among our senses is perpetual save in conditions of anesthesia. But any sense when stepped up to high intensity can act as an anesthetic for other senses…The result is a break in the ratio among the senses, a kind of loss of identity. Tribal, non-literate man, living under the intense stress on auditory organization of all experience, is, as it were, entranced. (24)

> But it was only in recent years that the work of Harold Innis opened up the Cadmus myth fully. The myth, like the aphorism and maxim, is characteristic of oral culture. For, until literacy deprives language of his multi-dimensional resonance, every word is a poetic world unto itself, a “momentary deity,” as it seemed to non-literate men. (24)

>Towards the end of the nineteenth century numerous students of non-literate societies had begun to have doubts about the a priori character of logical categories. (25)

Civilization gives the barbarian or tribal man an eye for an ear and is now at odds with the electronic world. (26).

> Only the phonetic alphabet makes a break between eye and ear, between semantic meaning and visual code; and thus only phonetic writing has the power to translate man from the tribal to the civilized sphere, to give him an eye for an ear. (27)

> In place of cool visual detachment the manuscript world puts empathy and participation of all the senses. But nonliterate cultures experience such an overwhelming tyranny of the ear over the eye that any balanced interplay among the senses became extremely difficult after print stepped up the visual component in Western experience to extrme intensity. (28)

The modern physicist is at home with oriental field theory. (28)

> We can now live, not just amphibiously in divided and distinguished worlds, but pluralistically in many worlds and cultures simultaneously. We are no more committed to one culture – to a single ratio among the human senses – any more than to one book or to one language or to one technology. (31)

The new electronic interdependence recreates the world in the image of a global village. (31)

Literacy affects the physiology as well as the psychic life of the African. (33)

Why non-literate societies cannot see films or photos without much training. (36)

> Literacy gives people the power to focus a little way in front of an image so that we wake in the whole image or picture at a glance. Non-literate people have no such acquired habit and do not look at objects in our way. Rather they scan objects and images as we do the printed page, segment by segment. (37)

African audiences cannot accept our passive consumer role in the presence of film. (38)

When technology extends one of our senses, a new translation of culture occurs as swiftly as the new technology is interiorized. (40)

A theory of cultural change is impossible without knowledge of the changing sense ratios effected by various externalization of our senses. (42)

The twentieth century encounter between alphabetic and electronic faces of culture confers on the printed word a crucial role in staying the return to the Africa within. (45)

> The invention of the alphabet, like the invention of the wheel, was the translation or reduction of a complex, organic interplay of spaces into a single space. The phonetic alphabet reduced the use of all the senses at once, which is oral speech, to a merely visual code. Today, such translation can be effected back and forth through a variety of spatial forms which we call the “media of communication.” But each of these spaces has unique properties and impinges upon our other senses or spaces in unique ways. (45)

> It is the purpose of the present book to study primarily the print phases of alphabetic culture. The print phase, however, has encountered today the new organic and biological modes of the electronic world. (46)

Current concern with reading and spelling reform steers away from visual to auditory stress. (47)

The alphabet is an aggressive and militant absorber and transformer of cultures, as Harold Innis was the first to show. (48)

> By the meaningless sign linked to the meaningless sound we have built the shape and meaning of Western man. (50)

> Mimesis to Plato had appeared, quite understandably, as varieties of representation, especially visual. (52)

The world of the Greeks illustrates why visual appearances cannot interest a people before the interiorization of alphabetic technology. (54)

> It would seem that the extension of one or another of our senses by mechanical means, such as the phonetic script, can act as a sort of twist for the kaleidoscope of the entire sensorium. A new combination or ratio of the existing components occurs, and a new mosaic of possible forms presents itself. That such switch of sense ratios should occur with every instance of external technology is easy to see today. Why has it been unnoticed before? Perhaps because the shifts have in the past occurred somewhat gradually. Now we experience such a series of new technologies even in our own world and, besides, have means of observing so many other cultures that only great inattention could now conceal the role of new media of information in altering the posture and relations of our senses. (55)

The Greek point of view in both art and chronology has little in common with ours but was much like that of the Middle Ages. (56)

> The visual makes for the explicit, the uniform, and the sequential in painting, in poetry, in logic, history. (57)

The Greeks invented both their artistic and scientific novelties after the interiorization of the alphabet. (58)

> Homogeneity, uniformity, repeatability, these are basic component notes of a visual world newly emergent from an audile-tactile matrix. (58)

The continuity of Greek and medieval art was assured by the bond between caelatura or engraving and illumination. (61)

The increase of visual stress among the Greeks alienated them from the primitive art that the electronic age now reinvents after interiorizing the unified field of electric all-at-onceness. (63)

A nomadic society cannot experience enclosed space. (64)

Primitivism has become the vulgar cliché of much modern art and speculation. (67)

The Gutenberg Galaxy is concerned to show why alphabetic man was disposed to desacralize his mode of being. (69)

The method of the twentieth century is to use not single but multiple models for experimental exploration – the technique of the suspended judgment. (71)

> Any phonetic alphabet culture can easily slip into the habit of putting one thing under or in another; since there is constant pressure from the subliminal fact that the written code carries for the reader the experience of the “content” which is speech. But there is nothing subliminal in non-literate cultures. 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. (72)

> We become extremely conscious of cultural models and bias when moving from one dominant form of awareness to another, as between Greek and Latin or English and French. (73)

Only a fraction of the history of literacy has been typographic. (74)

> From the fifth century B.C. to the fifteenth century A.D. the book was a scribal product. Only one third of the history of the book in the Western world has been typographic. (74)

Until now a culture has been a mechanical fate for societies, the automatic interiorization of their own technologies. (76)

The techniques of uniformity and repeatability were introduced by the Romans in the Middle Ages. (77)

The word modern was a term of reproach used by the patristic humanists against the medieval schoolmen who developed the new logic and physics. (80)

> As we shall see, with regard to the sixteenth century, number and visuality, or tactility and retinal experience, split quite asunder and went their divergent ways to set up the rival empires of Art and Science. (81)

In antiquity and the Middle Ages reading was necessarily reading aloud. (82)

> In the absence of visual aids the reader will find himself doing exactly what the ancient and medieval readers did, namely reading aloud. Readers continued to read aloud after the beginning of word separation in the later Middle Ages, and even after the coming of print in the Renaissance. But all these developments fostered speed and visual stress. Today, scholars using manuscripts read them silently for the most part, and the study of reading habits in the ancient and medieval world remains to be done. (84)

Manuscript culture is conversational if only because the writer and his audience are physically related by the form of publication as performance. (84)

> Just as music written for a small group of instruments has a different tone and tempo from music designed for large halls, so with books. Printing has enlarged the “hall” for the author’s performance until all aspects of style have been altered. (85)

The manuscript shaped medieval literary conventions at all levels. (86)

> The alternating modes or ratios between the mental processes of the medieval and the modern reader. (88)

> Not only did this oral aspect of manuscript culture deeply affect the manner of composing and writing, but it meant that writing, reading, and oratory remained inseparable until well after printing. (90)

The traditional lore of school children points to the gap between the scribal and typographic man. (90)

The medieval monks’ reading carrel was indeed a singing booth. (92)

In the chantry schools grammar served, above all, to establish oral fidelity. (93)

The medieval student had to be paleographer, editor, and publisher of the authors he read. (95)

Aquinas explains why Socrates, Christ, and Pythagoras avoided the publication of their teachings. (97)

The rise of the schoolmen or moderni in the twelfth century made a sharp break with the ancients of traditional Christian scholarship. (100)

Scholasticism, like Senecanism, was directly related to the oral traditions of aphoristic learning. (102)

> The implication of this visual approach for oral aphorism, and for the compendia of sentences, adages, and maxims which had been the medieval staple of learning, was recession. (104)

Scribal culture and Gothic architecture were both concerned with light through, not light on. (105)

> The scholastic deviation from the monastic literary humanism was soon to be confronted by the flood of ancient texts from the printing presses. (105)

Medieval illumination, gloss, and sculpture alike were aspects of the art of memory, central to scribal culture. (108)

For the oral man the literal text contains all possible levels of meaning. (110)

The sheer increase in the quantity of information movement favoured the visual organization of knowledge and the rise of perspective even before typography. (111)

The same clash between written and oral structure of knowledge occurs in medieval social life. (114)

The medieval world ended in a frenzy of applied knowledge-new medieval knowledge applied to the recreation of antiquity. (117)

Renaissance Italy became a kind of Hollywood collection of sets of antiquity, and the new visual antiquarianism of the Renaissance provided an avenue to power for men of any class. (119)

The invention of typography confirmed and extended the new visual stress of applied knowledge, providing the first uniformly repeatable commodity, the first assembly-line, and the first mass-production. (124)

> The mechanization of the scribal art was probably the first reduction of any handicraft to mechanical terms. That is, it was the first translation of movement into a series of static shots or frames. Typography bears much resemblance to cinema, just as the reading of print puts the reader in the role of the movie projector. The reader moves the series of imprinted letters before him at a speed consistent with apprehending the motions of the author’s mind. The reader of print, that is, stands in an utterly different relation to the writer from the reader of manuscript. Print gradually made reading aloud pointless, and accelerated the act of reading till the reader could feel “in the hands of” his author. (124-125)

A fixed point of view becomes possible with print and ends the image as a plastic organism. (126)

The interface of the Renaissance was the meeting of medieval pluralism and modern homogeneity and mechanism – a formula for blitz and metamorphosis. (141)

> An age in rapid transition is one which exists on the frontier between two cultures and between conflicting technologies. Every moment of its consciousness is an act of translation of each of these cultures into the other. Today we live on the frontier between five centuries of mechanism and the new electronics, between the homogeneous and the simultaneous. It is painful but fruitful. (141)

Peter Ramus and John Dewey were the two educational surfers or wave-riders of antithetic periods, the Gutenberg and the Marconi or electronic. (144)

Rabelais offers a vision of the future of print culture as a consumer’s paradise of applied knowledge. (146)

Typography as the first mechanization of a handicraft is itself the perfect instance not of a new knowledge, but of applied knowledge. (151)

Every technology contrived and outered by man has the power to numb human awareness during the period of its first interiorization. (153)

At any rate, with the Gutenberg technology we move into the age of the take-off of the machine. The principle of segmentation of actions and functions and roles became systematically applicable wherever desired. (155)

With Gutenberg Europe enters the technological phase of progress, when change itself becomes the archetypal norm of social life. (155)

> Print is the extreme phase of alphabet culture that detribalizes or decollectivizes man in the first instance. Print raises the visual features of alphabet to highest intensity of definition. Thus print carries the individuating power of the phonetic alphabet much further than manuscript culture could ever do. Print is the technology of individualism. If men decided to modify this visual technology by an electric technology, individualism will also be modified. (158)

Typography tended to alter language from a means of perception and exploration to a portable commodity. (161)

Typography is not only a technology but is in itself a natural resource or staple, like cotton or timber or radio; and, like any staple, it shapes not only private sense ratios but also patterns of communal interdependence. (164)

Lewis Mumford writes in Sticks and Stones (41-42):

Victor Hugo said in Notre Dame that the printing –press destroyed architecture, which had hitherto been the stone record of mankind. The real misdemeanor of the printing-press, however, was not that it took literary values away from architecture, but that it caused architecture to derive its value from literature. With the Renaissance the great modern distinction between the literate and the illiterate extends even to building; the master mason who knew his stone and his workmen and his tools and the tradition of his art gave way to the architect who knew his Palladio and his Vignola and his Vitruvius. Architecture, instead of striving to leave the imprint of a happy spirit on the superficies of a building, became a mere matter of grammatical accuracy and pronunciation; and the seventeenth century architects who revolted from this regime and created the baroque were at home only in the pleasure gardens and theaters of princes…

In his youth a student of the Scottish biologist Patrick Geddes, Mumford has always given us a civilized example of how unnecessary and unrewarding are the ways of the specialist who sees nothing in relation to anything else. (164)

Number, that is to say, is itself an audile-tactile code which is meaningless without a highly developed phonetic-literate culture to complement it. (178)

The great sixteenth century divorce between art and science came with accelerated calculators. (181)

> Print assured the victory of numbers or visual position early in the sixteenth century. (181)

Print, in turning the vernaculars into mass media, or closed systems, created the uniform, centralizing forces of modern nationalism. (199)

> Closely, interrelated, then, by the operation and effects of typography are the outering or uttering of private inner experience and the massing of collective national awareness, as the vernacular is rendered visible, central, and unified by the new technology. (199)

The divorce of poetry and music was first reflected by the printed page. (200)

> Song is the slowing down of speech in order to savour nuance. (200)

The portability of the book, like that of the easel-painting, added much to the new cult of individualism. (206)

> Very arbitrarily we shall move on to a physical aspect of the printed book that contributed a great deal to individualism. I mean its portability. As easel painting deinstitutionalized pictures, so printing broke library monopoly. (206-207)

> This very natural inclination towards accessibility and portability went hand in hand with greatly increased reading speeds which were possible with uniform and repeatable type, but not at all with manuscript. The same drive towards accessibility and portability created ever larger publics and markets which were indispensable to the wole Gutenberg undertaking. (207)

The uniformity and repeatability of print created the political arithmetic of the seventeenth century and the hedonistic calculus of the eighteenth. (208)

The typographic logic created the outsider, the alienated man, as the type of integral, that is, intuitive and irrational, man. (212)

Cervantes confronted typographic man in the figure of Don Quixote. (213)

Typographic man can express but is helpless to read the configurations of print technology. (216)

> It may well be that print and nationalism are axiological or co-ordinate, simply because by print people sees itself for the first time. The vernacular in appearing in high visual definition affords a glimpse of social unity co-extensive with vernacular boundaries. (217)

Print had the effect of purifying Latin out of existence. (228)

Typography extended its character to the regulation and fixation of languages. (229)

Print altered not only the spelling and grammar but the accentuation and inflection of languages, and made bad grammar possible. (231)

> In out time it is extremely evident that man is language, though he now recognizes many non-verbal languages as well as the language of forms. (231)

Print created national uniformity and government centralism, but also individualism and opposition to government as such. (235)

Nobody ever made a grammatical error in a non-literate society. (238)

The Gutenberg galaxy was theoretically dissolved in 1905 with the discovery of curved space, but in practice it had been invaded by the telegraph two generations before that. (253)

> With this recognition of curved space in 1905 the Gutenberg galaxy was officially dissolved. With the end of lineal specialisms and fixed point of view, compartmentalized knowledge became as unacceptable as it had always been irrelevant. But the effect of such a segregated way of thinking has been to make science a departmental affair, having no influence on eye and thought except indirectly through its applications. (253-254)