The new American vortex : explorations of McLuhan : a dissertation presented in partial fulfilment of the requirements for the degree of Ph.D. in Media Studies at Massey University, Palmerston North, Aotearoa/New Zealand (2024)

To encounter and digest the oeuvre of H. Marshall McLuhan on his own terms, this study deploys a strategy not dissimilar to that of Poe’s sailor who survived his descent into the maelstrom by studying the action of the vortex and catching hold of a recurring form. Here, McLuhan’s career-spanning concern with “communication” may be seen as just such a recurrence — his concern with communication is evident at every turn of his effort to update the Great English Vortex of 1914 and develop a second vortex in mid-century America. Having taken hold of this central concern, this study uses the procedure he developed to expose the “theory of communication” of any figure in the arts and sciences, and applies it to McLuhan himself.In this process of folding McLuhan in on himself, five loosely chronological chapters are used to reveal the four historical “phases” of his career, and to show that McLuhan cannot properly be understood apart from:1. The great tradition of Ciceronian humanism and the Ciceronian ideal —the doctus orator — a figure in whom eloquence and wisdom coalesce.2. The programme of the figures frequently referred to as the Men of 1914: James Joyce, Ezra Pound, T. S. Eliot, and Wyndham Lewis.In the final analysis, McLuhan is shown as having updated and transformed both — the Ciceronian ideal and the programme of the Men of 1914 — to become something of a singularity in the midst of what he saw as an Electric Renaissance: a paramodern (neither modernist nor post-modernist) doctus orator.

Canadian Journal of Communication

Background Marshall McLuhan claimed his work was a footnote to Harold A. Innis. His claims have been used to argue that McLuhan and Innis offer a coherent system of thought, with a systematic methodology and common set of basic assumptions and presuppositions. This article questions that species of argument and looks to deepen our understanding of the McLuhan-Innis relationship. Analysis McLuhan is read as an analogist, and his footnotes (plural) are interpreted as deliberate violations of normative patterns of academic use in the satiric tradition of Thomas Nashe and the Scriblerus Club. Conclusion and implications McLuhan is repositioned apropos of Innis, figures conventionally associated with the Toronto School of Communication Theory and historians who address themselves to the theme of orality and literacy. This article also invites a reconsideration of McLuhan in relation to the digital era, his contributions to epistemology and understanding media.

Commentary on Marshall McLuhan’s oeuvre has shifted from debating whether he was right or wrong to a deeper consideration of his rhetorical praxis. In Mondo Canuck: A Canadian Pop Cultural Odyssey, for example, Pevere and Dymond declare:"And if McLuhan wasn't right? Well frankly, who cares? For the fact is, no North American intellectual of his era held the world's ear quite as intensely and obsessively as this incessantly talkative, grammatically impeccable, six-foot-two professor of English literature from Toronto, and none mainlined the peculiar zeitgeist of the era with such voracious, surgical precision." (132–133)Elena Lamberti, whose work is, in some senses, also indicative of the shift, makes a persuasive case that to retrieve and make good use of McLuhan we need to understand how he wrote. We need, Lamberti argues, to “move, in fact, from the literal (what McLuhan said) to the structural (how he said what he said) and try to carry out a different exegesis that, in time, may recompose the cosmogony and reassemble the fragments” (63).This essay makes a contribution to this theme. Here I explore how McLuhan, in a bid to create a new way of writing history and a new art that would enable his readers to relate to the present, set about “invading the old arts”—the rag and bone shop—and ravaging them for materials for “stylistic innovation” (McLuhan “Strike the Set” 7). I reveal the contours and lineaments of McLuhan’s study of a form known as the epyllion, anglicized as “little epic,” and how McLuhan retrieved the epyllion to inform and serve as the structural ordering principle of The Gutenberg Galaxy: The Making of Typographic Man and Understanding Media: The Extensions of Man. Hopefully, I also go some ways towards showing that two of McLuhan’s major written works are not merely a heap of splendid fragments. Rather, they are deeply informed by a unity of underlying pattern.

Reality, 2020

The provocative nature of both the form and content, “medium” and “message,” of Marshall McLuhan’s scholarship on technological culture has attracted a wide array of McLuhan interpreters of diverse intentions. It is well known, however, that McLuhan considered himself a follower of the thirteenth century scholastic Thomas Aquinas; as he wrote to his friend Fr. John Mole, “I am a Thomist for whom the sensory order resonates with the divine Logos.” While McLuhan’s intellectual corpus provides enough evidence to justify taking him at his word, it is also clear that McLuhan was a very unusual Thomist, and intentionally so. As early as 1947, at the time of McLuhan’s strategic shift from literary scholar to media exegete, McLuhan was confident enough in his knowledge of the medieval trivium to contend that the “true Thomist” was not the person who “contemplates” Aquinas’ “already achieved intellectual synthesis,” but rather the person who “sustained by that synthesis, plunges into the heart of the chaos” of contemporary “mechanistic society.” This article will explore the ramifications of that belief for McLuhan’s thought as a whole.

This paper offers a retrospective of the images McLuhan used after the global village to characterize and illuminate the evolution of late-twentieth century media landscapes.

Media theorist Marshall McLuhan is examined as an esoteric figure, primarily with regard to the role played by imagination in his thought in relation to the intersensory mediating function of the sensus communis. The influence of modernist literary figures such as Pound, Joyce, and Lewis in McLuhan's media ecology is examined, as are the dynamics of McLuhan's imaginal, symbolized by the processes of cliché obsolescence and archetypal retrieval, as well as enhancement and reversal. Additionally, certain key archetypal figures of McLuhan's imaginal are explored: the discarnate condition, the global theatre, and the place of identity. McLuhan's place as an esoteric figure is justified in terms of the criteria for esotericism developed by Faivre, Stuckrad and Versluis, with regard to his oeuvre and to his continuing influence on esoteric practitioners.

New Explorations, 2020

To examine computers as a medium in the style of Marshall McLuhan, we must understand the origins of his own perceptions on the nature of media and his deep-seated religious impetus for their development. First we will uncover McLuhan's reasoning in his description of the artist and the occult origins of his categories of hot and cool media. This will prepare us to recognize these categories when they are reformulated by cyberneticist Norbert Wiener and ethnographer Sherry Turkle. Then, as we consider the roles "black boxes" play in contemporary art and theory, many ways of bringing McLuhan's insights on space perception and the role of the artist up to date for the work of defining and explaining cyberspace will be demonstrated. Through this work the paradoxical morality of McLuhan's decision to not make moral value judgments will have been made clear.

Textual Practice, 2021

Sixty years after Understanding Media, Marshall McLuhan remains one of the best known and most influential intellectuals of the twentieth century. Far beyond academia, readers (and non-readers) recognize his coinages, such as ‘the Gutenberg era’, the ‘global village’, and ‘the medium is the message’. A literary scholar by profession, McLuhan was one of the first academics to recognize the new opportunities offered by radio and television to reach audiences beyond the readerships of scholarly journals. His talks and appearances ushered in public intellectual debate concerning the ‘electronic age’. Although his reputation waned in the 1970s, the recent making available to the public of his extraordinary personal library of some six thousand books enables new kinds of analyses of McLuhan as a reader, thinker, and cultural force. The essays here focus not so much on his media theory per se as on the habits and practices that animated his reading, and on the larger questions of what reading and not reading mean. We don’t need to agree with everything McLuhan says to make valuable use of his work. New resources offer us an unprecedented opportunity to revisit one fallible human reader whose texts and ideas are good to think with (and against).KEYWORDS reading; libraries; McLuhan; media; annotation; diaries; public intellectual; communications technologies