since the Second World War, it is the highways of the mind that have been found inadequate. (Understanding Media, 102)

Poe’s sailor says that when locked in by the whirling walls [of the maelstrom] and the numerous objects which floated in that environment: “I must have been delirious, for I even sought amusement in speculating upon the relative velocities of their several descents toward the foam below.” It was this amusement born of his rational detachment as a spectator of his own situation that gave him the thread which led him out of the Labyrinth. (The Mechanical Bride, v)

The technique of insight itself is a natural phase to succeed the nineteenth-century discovery of the technique of invention, because it is the means of abstracting oneself from the bias and consequence of one’s own culture. (…) Innis’ concern in the Bias of Communication is with the technique of the suspended judgement. That means, not the willingness to admit other points of view, but the technique of how not to have a point of view. This is identical with the problem facing physicists in correcting the bias of the instruments of research, and it draws attention to the fact that the historian, the poet, the critic, and the philosopher, now as always, face exactly the same situations as the scientist. (The Humanities in the Electronic Age, 1961)

Today our science and method strive not towards a point of view but to discover how not to have a point of view, the method not of closure and perspective but of the open “field” and the suspended judgment. Such is now the only viable method under electric conditions of simultaneous information movement and total human interdependence. (Gutenberg Galaxy, 276)

Paradoxically, it was not through the book but through the development of the mass press, especially the telegraph press, that poets found the artistic keys to the world of simultaneity, or of modern myth. It was in the format of the daily press that Rimbaud and Mallarme discovered the means of rendering the interplay of all the functions of what Coleridge called the “esemplastic” imagination. For the popular press offers no single vision, no point of view, but a mosaic of the postures of the collective consciousness, as Mallarme proclaimed. Yet these modes of collective or tribal consciousness proliferating in the telegraphic (simultaneous) press, remain uncongenial and opaque to the bookmen locked in “single vision and Newton’s sleep”.¹ (Gutenberg Galaxy, 267-268)

Joyce (…) accepted the grotesque as a mode of broken or syncopated manipulation to permit inclusive or simultaneous perception of a total and diversified field. Such, indeed, is symbolism by definition — a collocation, a parataxis of components representing insight by carefully established ratios, but without a point of view or lineal connection or sequential order. (Gutenberg Galaxy, 267)

This is the Age of Anxiety for the reason of the electric implosion that compels commitment and participation, quite regardless of any “point of view.” The partial and specialized character of the viewpoint, however noble, will not serve at all in the electric age. At the information level the same upset has occurred with the substitution of the inclusive image for the mere viewpoint. If the nineteenth century was the age of the editorial chair, ours is the century of the psychiatrist’s couch. (…) The psychiatrist employs the couch, since it removes the temptation to express private points of view and obviates the need to rationalize events. (Understanding Media, 5)

cubism substitutes all facets of an object simultaneously for the “point of view” (…) Instead of the specialized illusion of the third dimension on canvas, cubism sets up an interplay of planes and contradiction or dramatic conflict (…) by giving the inside and outside, the top, bottom, back, and front and the rest, in two dimensions (…) Cubism, by seizing on instant total awareness, suddenly announced that the medium is the message. Is it not evident that the moment that sequence yields to the simultaneous, one is in the world of the structure and of configuration? Is that not what has happened in physics as in painting, poetry, and in communication? Specialized segments of attention have shifted to total field, and we can now say, “The medium is the message” quite naturally. Before the electric speed and total field, it was not obvious that the medium is the message. (Understanding Media, 12)

Film is eye plus foot. TV is eye plus hand. No shutter. Multi-aspects simultaneously. Direct pick-up. No footage. No segments. No point of view. Just groping over contours. (McLuhan to Carpenter, undated 1964?) 

The hand has no point of view. The ear has no point of view. (Stearn Interview, 1967)