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Friday, November 23, 2018

Marshall McLuhan Predicts the Phenomenon of iON—When the Environment of the Gulf (“Heaven”) Merges with the Physical (“Earth”)

“When people don’t have bodies, they are like people in a dream who just move in and out of each other like fantasy… At the speed of light, the people on the planet, minus their bodies and minus their identities, move back and forth through each other in forms we have come to call ‘newscasts.’ ”
Marshall McLuhan, Address at the "Alliance for Life Festival", May 6/77 [manuscript], National Archives of Canada

“The present electric ESP age of multiple interfaces finds no problem in metamorphosis or transubstantiation such as baffled abcede-minded culture of the sixteenth century and after.”
Marshall McLuhan, CULTURE IS OUR BUSINESS, 1970, p.82

“Some feel that Christianity’s existence must always stand in the tension between being in the world and standing outside it. Kierkegaard was keenly aware of this, as were St. Paul and, later, Martin Luther. But the tension between inner and outer is a merely visual guideline, and in the age of the X-ray, inner and outer are simultaneous events.”
Marshall McLuhan and Harley Parker, THROUGH THE VANISHING POINT: Space in Poetry and Painting, 1969, p.254

“The flipout of the visual literate world after 2500 years would seem to call into question the whole Graeco-Roman basis of a Christian bureaucracy and emotions. The Church, mystically considered, is tribal, and now the secular world is becoming tribal - the separation of Church and world becomes more and more difficult.”
Marshall McLuhan, Letter to Larry Henderson, Oct.20/75, National Archives of Canada

“My immediate feeling and impression is one of total futility as regarding the kind of participation possible between here and Rome. I am sure that telephone conference calls would be an enormous improvement on the type of bureaucratic prose and comment that are currently in use.”
Marshall McLuhan, Letter to Rev. R. Drake Will, 1974, National Archives of Canada

“The invisible and total environment of information, electrically established, presents an ethereal world that is a ‘reasonable facsimile’ of the mystical body. This ethereal-mundane form demands a total submission and involvement that challenges the claims of the church itself.”
Marshall McLuhan, “The Papal Interview” [manuscript], no date, National Archives of Canada

“The Gutenberg revolution was visual hardware. The electric revolution is acoustics. Hardware congealed and legalized Catholic doctrine. Software blurs it into a kind of echo chamber of all religions at once.”
Marshall McLuhan, 1968

“For, if the private person is an artifact, then it becomes criminal to perpetuate him technologically in the electric age.”
Marshall McLuhan, Letter to Alexis de Beauregard, May 11/72, National Archives of Canada

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