Academic literature on the topic 'McLuhan, Marshall, 1911-1980 Criticism and interpretation'

Herbert Marshall McLuhan (1911-1980) was a Canadian philosopher, philologist, literary scholar and media expert. Andy Warhol famously said that in the future everyone will be famous for fifteen minutes. As for McLuhan’s fame, it stretched over decades. His ideas that technology can influence and shape society have been widely discussed up to this day. McLuhan’s work is regarded as an important conceptual contribution to media theory, and his term ‘global village’ is widely used by students and scholars, practitioners and theorists in the field of communication. The authors of this article attempt to analyze the contribution of McLuhan, as a communication expert and influential technodeterminist, to understanding the media of the 21st century. It is concluded that, despite the abundant criticism regarding the naivety and “unscientific” nature of his approach, the lack of empirical evidence for the theory he put forward, his passion for technology, as well as his belief in the decisive role of the media in the development of culture and society, McLuhan’s ideas still inspire researchers. The concept of ‘global village’ in the modern information world has not only retained its relevance - it describes the laws of the functioning of the digital society in the best possible way. The Internet and social networks have confirmed Marshall’s postulate that communication technologies enable people to become increasingly involved in one another’s lives.

Canadian intellectual Marshall McLuhan (1911--1980) left a controversial legacy. This dissertation addresses the four chief paradoxes that his work poses for contemporary commentators: the core meaning of his texts; the tradition in which his contribution now seems most intelligible; the divergent response to his work; and the enduring yet fragmentary impact of his contribution to popular and academic life. Taking a rhetoric of inquiry approach, modified by Gerald Holton's writing in the history of science, this reappraisal argues for McLuhan's significance as a theorist of communications as techno-cultural transformation or "mediamorphosis"; for his seminal role within the Toronto School of Communications; and for his inspiring relevance within the interdiscipline of communications, despite the forging of a negative academic consensus against his work in the early 1970s. McLuhan united the ancient arts of grammar and rhetoric into a techno-cultural hermeneutics that constitutes an unexhausted approach to the study of the impacts of media and technologies on sensibilities, literacies and culture.

The proof set forward in this thesis is that the method of Marshall McLuhan (1911-1980), which he came in the 1970’s to describe as ‘structuralist’, ‘phenomenological’ and even ‘metaphysical’, owes a heretofore unacknowledged debt to Sigmund Freud (1856-1939). Critics have thus far neglected the influence of nineteenth and twentieth century psychology in McLuhan’s work, although a wealth of biographical material supports the argument that McLuhan’s ‘metaphysical’ method is derived as much from psychoanalysis and analytical psychology (C.G. Jung) as from any of McLuhan’s acknowledged predecessors. Returning to the texts from which McLuhan gained his knowledge of psychology, I trace the influence of Freud, Jung and their disciples upon McLuhan, establishing McLuhan’s use of Freudian concepts and terminology in his first book The Mechanical Bride (1951), and his use of the psychoanalytic concepts of the ‘unconscious’, ‘trauma’ and ‘repression’ in the books that came after it. What McLuhan calls the ‘unconscious’ is more often named by him as Logos, ‘acoustic space’ or the ‘media environment’, and I trace the debts that these concepts owe not only to Freud and Jung but to Aristotle, St. Thomas Aquinas, gestalt theory, art theory, Henri Bergson, Pierre Teilhard de Chardin, Wyndham Lewis, Siegfried Giedion, Harold Innis, the French symbolist poets of the late nineteenth century and the British modernists of the early twentieth. Despite his rejection of the Freudian argument, McLuhan, like Freud, conceptualizes pain or trauma as the ‘cause’ of transformations (i.e. processes) in the unconscious; but while for McLuhan, invoking St. Thomas Aquinas and Aristotle, technologies are ‘formal causes’ simultaneous with (or ‘preceded’ by) their effects, for Freud and his modern interpreter Jacques Lacan, trauma is ‘paradoxical’ in structure, presenting as both its own ‘cause’ and ‘effect’. Situating McLuhan in relation to French structuralism, I contrast McLuhan’s concepts of ‘figure’ (as cause) and ‘ground’ (as effects), elaborated in his last book Laws of Media (1988), to the concepts of the ‘signifier’ and the ‘signified’ in Ferdinand de Saussure’s Course in General Linguistics (1916), and critique McLuhan’s ‘tetrad’, the ideograph with which he illustrates media ‘effects’, in relation to the psychoanalytic concept of the signifier elaborated by Lacan. In reply to McLuhan’s maxim that ‘the medium is the message’, I conclude that technologies, insofar as they function as ‘formal causes’, are doubly ‘hidden’: firstly, because, as McLuhan says, they can only be grasped through their effects; and secondly because, as Lacan says, their effects can only be articulated when they manifest as ‘disturbances’ in the symbolic order, i.e., as fantasies of the Other’s jouissance (enjoyment). There are numerous stories about how McLuhan would frustrate his critics by refusing to take a ‘point-of-view’, and in fact his (psychoanalytic) technique of ‘putting on’ the audience as a mask, and his (deconstructivist) manner of changing perspectives as often as necessary, sit oddly with his championing of Logos. A comparison with Freud and Lacan finds McLuhan at a ‘paradoxical’ moment in the history of Western thought, poised between modernism and postmodernism, between structuralism and deconstructivism, and between metaphysics and psychoanalysis.
Thesis (Ph.D.) - University of Adelaide, School of History and Politics, 2008

The proof set forward in this thesis is that the method of Marshall McLuhan (1911-1980), which he came in the 1970’s to describe as ‘structuralist’, ‘phenomenological’ and even ‘metaphysical’, owes a heretofore unacknowledged debt to Sigmund Freud (1856-1939). Critics have thus far neglected the influence of nineteenth and twentieth century psychology in McLuhan’s work, although a wealth of biographical material supports the argument that McLuhan’s ‘metaphysical’ method is derived as much from psychoanalysis and analytical psychology (C.G. Jung) as from any of McLuhan’s acknowledged predecessors. Returning to the texts from which McLuhan gained his knowledge of psychology, I trace the influence of Freud, Jung and their disciples upon McLuhan, establishing McLuhan’s use of Freudian concepts and terminology in his first book The Mechanical Bride (1951), and his use of the psychoanalytic concepts of the ‘unconscious’, ‘trauma’ and ‘repression’ in the books that came after it. What McLuhan calls the ‘unconscious’ is more often named by him as Logos, ‘acoustic space’ or the ‘media environment’, and I trace the debts that these concepts owe not only to Freud and Jung but to Aristotle, St. Thomas Aquinas, gestalt theory, art theory, Henri Bergson, Pierre Teilhard de Chardin, Wyndham Lewis, Siegfried Giedion, Harold Innis, the French symbolist poets of the late nineteenth century and the British modernists of the early twentieth. Despite his rejection of the Freudian argument, McLuhan, like Freud, conceptualizes pain or trauma as the ‘cause’ of transformations (i.e. processes) in the unconscious; but while for McLuhan, invoking St. Thomas Aquinas and Aristotle, technologies are ‘formal causes’ simultaneous with (or ‘preceded’ by) their effects, for Freud and his modern interpreter Jacques Lacan, trauma is ‘paradoxical’ in structure, presenting as both its own ‘cause’ and ‘effect’. Situating McLuhan in relation to French structuralism, I contrast McLuhan’s concepts of ‘figure’ (as cause) and ‘ground’ (as effects), elaborated in his last book Laws of Media (1988), to the concepts of the ‘signifier’ and the ‘signified’ in Ferdinand de Saussure’s Course in General Linguistics (1916), and critique McLuhan’s ‘tetrad’, the ideograph with which he illustrates media ‘effects’, in relation to the psychoanalytic concept of the signifier elaborated by Lacan. In reply to McLuhan’s maxim that ‘the medium is the message’, I conclude that technologies, insofar as they function as ‘formal causes’, are doubly ‘hidden’: firstly, because, as McLuhan says, they can only be grasped through their effects; and secondly because, as Lacan says, their effects can only be articulated when they manifest as ‘disturbances’ in the symbolic order, i.e., as fantasies of the Other’s jouissance (enjoyment). There are numerous stories about how McLuhan would frustrate his critics by refusing to take a ‘point-of-view’, and in fact his (psychoanalytic) technique of ‘putting on’ the audience as a mask, and his (deconstructivist) manner of changing perspectives as often as necessary, sit oddly with his championing of Logos. A comparison with Freud and Lacan finds McLuhan at a ‘paradoxical’ moment in the history of Western thought, poised between modernism and postmodernism, between structuralism and deconstructivism, and between metaphysics and psychoanalysis.
Thesis (Ph.D.) - University of Adelaide, School of History and Politics, 2008