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DOI 12.33234/SSR.12.4
Dr. Geoffrey Sykes, UNSW, Editor Southern Semiotic Review
Abstract
I wish to structure this paper around several penultimate, and critical, comments about the ideas and career of Marshall McLuhan. One sense in which these three points are penultimate is in terms of my own peripatetic familiarity, over many years, with his ideas of media “grammar”, and more recently his background in literary modernism and Catholic theology. Any current critical sense responds to a personal, if scholarly, sense of disappointment, that McLuhan has not sustained or satisfied the inquiry about language, media, identity and reality, that he seems to encourage. In terms of readings in post structural semiotics and communication theory, it becomes increasingly possible and necessary to mount a case against McLuhan, against his grammar, his theological and social conservatism, his reactionary politics, and finally his personal rhetorical style. Of course it is to be hoped that the following comments resonate with the experience and perceptions of others, regarding this ubiquitous figure: if not positively, then even as a means for useful contention, within general interdisciplinary directions that McLuhan can still represent in media studies.
Keywords: Marshall McLuhan, media is the message, hot and cool media, media grammar, theology of media