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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.

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"Thèse présentée à l'Université Laval comme exigence partielle du Doctorat en Théologie offert à l'Université de Sherbrooke en vertu d'un protocole d'entente avec l'Université Laval pour l'obtention du grade de Philosophae Doctor (Ph. D.)." / Thèse en cotutelle : Université Laval et Université de Sherbrooke. / Comme le suggère son titre, cette thèse entend démontrer que la pensée de McLuhan permet d’articuler un passage de la médianomie à l’autonomie, celle-ci étant comprise tant dans ses dimensions éthiques que dans ses références christologiques. Nous entendons faire l’analyse de la perspective éthique à partir de la pensée globale de l’auteur, et non pas analysée selon une grille de lecture extérieure ou d’un courant éthique établi et reconnu. Il s’agit ainsi d’une lecture a posteriori de l’ensemble d’une oeuvre à la fois terminée et laissée en chantier, pour y débusquer des clés éthiques qui se laissent découvrir au fil du parcours et qui ne paraissent pas à prime abord. Notre appropriation de cette pensée éthique implicite est animée par la responsabilité consciente, autonome et donc explicite que suscite le mouvement global du discours mcluhanien et elle nous amène à en proposer une nouvelle lecture, par la re-création d’une mosaïque initiale de laquelle nous sélectionnons certaines pièces. Une méthodologie qui pourrait être qualifiée de causalité diachronique, c’est-à-dire qu’elle implique une interprétation des éléments explorés en y présentant, par cet appui, quelque chose de neuf, un regard christologique. En fin de parcours nous en arrivons à conclure que la pensée de Marshall McLuhan est construite de telle sorte que s’y retrouvent à la fois la dénonciation de l’emprise médiatique et les voies à suivre pour en arriver à un certain niveau d’autonomie, démarche qui ne se fait pas s’en un éveil de la conscience qui responsabilise et engage à un agir libérateur.

Tese (doutorado)—Universidade de Brasília, Faculdade de Comunicação, Programa de Pós-Graduação em Comunicação, 2014. / Submitted by Albânia Cézar de Melo (albania@bce.unb.br) on 2014-05-07T14:02:41Z No. of bitstreams: 1 2014_RodrigoMirandaBarbosa.pdf: 2835738 bytes, checksum: 8f9bd3fc053b753e9726f79c2e73c082 (MD5) / Approved for entry into archive by Guimaraes Jacqueline(jacqueline.guimaraes@bce.unb.br) on 2014-05-13T14:07:50Z (GMT) No. of bitstreams: 1 2014_RodrigoMirandaBarbosa.pdf: 2835738 bytes, checksum: 8f9bd3fc053b753e9726f79c2e73c082 (MD5) / Made available in DSpace on 2014-05-13T14:07:50Z (GMT). No. of bitstreams: 1 2014_RodrigoMirandaBarbosa.pdf: 2835738 bytes, checksum: 8f9bd3fc053b753e9726f79c2e73c082 (MD5) / Na história do campo comunicacional percebemos uma dificuldade em encontrar critérios que estabeleçam o que é preciso para que uma teoria seja considerada como pertencente ao campo comunicacional. Tal fato repercute também no uso de denominações frouxas (escola, tradição, corrente, etc.) sem que haja um engajamento epistemológico a fim de dar rigor às denominações. A presente tese propõe a elaboração de um programa de pesquisa comunicacional tendo como guia a proposta do epistemólogo Imre Lakatos a partir do trabalho dos canadenses Harold Adams Innis e Marshall McLuhan. Autores, estes últimos, que se dedicaram a análise dos meios de comunicação enquanto tecnologias como elementos centrais para compreender a sociedade. Para estabelecer um programa de pesquisa comunicacional sistematizamos as principais teses dos dois autores, assim como as críticas a estas teses e os pontos de contato epistemológico que existem entre ambos os autores. Procuramos então, estabelecer um núcleo duro capaz de sustentar um programa de pesquisa assim como as hipóteses auxiliares que compõe o círculo protetor do mesmo. ______________________________________________________________________________ ABSTRACT / In the history of communication field we perceive a difficulty to find criteria that establish what is needed for a theory to be considered as belonging to the communication field. This fact also affects the use of loose designations (school, tradition, current, etc..) without an epistemological commitment to give rigor denominations. This thesis proposes the development of a communication research program under the guidance of the proposal by the espistemologist Imre Lakatos from the work of the Canadians Harold Adams Innis and Marshall McLuhan. These authors who dedicated themselves to the analysis of media as technologies as central elements to understand society. To establish a communication research program we systematized the main theses of the two authors, as well as the criticisms against their thesis and the epistemological points of contact between them. Thus, we try to establish a core capable of sustaining a research program as well as the auxiliary hypotheses that composes the protective circle around the core.

“McLuhan’s Bulbs” argues that the 1960s movement of “light art” is the primary site of negotiation between the discourses of “medium” and “media” in postwar art. In dialogue with the contemporaneous work of Marshall McLuhan, who privileged electric light as the ur-example of media theory, light art eschewed the traditional symbolism of light in Western art, deploying it instead as a cipher for electronic media. By embracing both these new forms of electronic media and also McLuhan’s media theory, light art ultimately becomes a limit term of the Greenbergian notion of medium-specificity, heralding the transformation of “medium” into “media” on both a technological and a theoretical level. This leads to a new understanding of the concept of media as not peripheral, but rather, central to the history and theory of contemporary art. Drawing on extensive archival research to offer the first major history of light art, the project focuses in particular on the work of leading light artist Otto Piene, whose sculptural “light ballets,” “intermedia” environments, and early video projects responded to the increasing technological blurring of media formats by bringing together sound and image, only to insist on the separation between the two. Piene’s position would be superseded by the work of light artists who used electronic transducers to technologically translate between light and other phenomena, particularly sounds. These artists are represented here by Piene’s close friend and colleague, Wen-Ying Tsai. In the spirit of earlier examples of “computer art,” Tsai’s “cybernetic sculptures” used light to announce that art would no longer be defined by its material substrates, anticipating the fluid condition of media that we associate with new media art, and digital technology more broadly, today.

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

O presente trabalho investiga a marca anglo-canadense na obra do cineasta David Cronenberg a partir do diálogo que instaura com as tradições culturais e teóricas do país que dizem respeito, ao tecnicismo, centrado nos meios de comunicação, propagado pelos teóricos da comunicação da Escola de Toronto e, especialmente, por Marshall Mcluhan e levando em consideração a tendência dos protagonistas canadenses a serem não-heróis, apontada por Margaret Atwood. E com o objetivo de contextualizar sua produção artística, mercadológica e culturalmente, no interior do sistema cinematográfico do Canadá, apresenta uma breve historiografia do cinema do país. Em relação à notória recorrência na obra do cineasta em questionar os limites do corpo humano, este trabalho analisa sua confluência com tradições teóricas e artísticas, que centramse nessa questão. E destaca as considerações referentes à abjeção e ao disgust, sentimentos diretamente associados ao temor frente ao rompimento dos limites corporais. O objetivo central deste trabalho é então desvelar como essas heranças da tradição cultural canadense estão relacionadas às obsessões cronenberguianas, principalmente em relação ao corpo, e à forma como esses elementos se amalgamam na configuração de sua obra extrema e única. / This dissertation investigates the Anglo-Canadian trademark in the work of cinematographer David Cronenberg through his dialogue with the cultural and theoretical traditions of the country which concern technicism, centred on the means of communication, disseminated by the theoreticians of communication from the School of Toronto, and specially by Marshall McLuhan and taking into consideration the tendency on the part of the Canadian protagonists to be non-heroes, pointed out by Margaret Atwood. Also aiming to contextualize his artistic production, commercially and culturally, in the Canadian cinematographic system, it presents a brief historiography of cinema in Canada. As to the notorious recurrence of on investigation concerning the limits of the body, this dissertation analyses its confluence with theoretical and artistic traditions focused on this theme. It points out the consideration concerning abjection and disgust, feelings which are directly associated with the fear which the exceeding of the corporeal limits provokes. The central aim of this dissertation is therefore to reveal how these heirlooms of the Canadian cultural tradition are related to Cronenberg's obsessions, notably these related to the human body, and to the way that such elements amalgamate to produce his extreme and unique work.

O presente trabalho investiga a marca anglo-canadense na obra do cineasta David Cronenberg a partir do diálogo que instaura com as tradições culturais e teóricas do país que dizem respeito, ao tecnicismo, centrado nos meios de comunicação, propagado pelos teóricos da comunicação da Escola de Toronto e, especialmente, por Marshall Mcluhan e levando em consideração a tendência dos protagonistas canadenses a serem não-heróis, apontada por Margaret Atwood. E com o objetivo de contextualizar sua produção artística, mercadológica e culturalmente, no interior do sistema cinematográfico do Canadá, apresenta uma breve historiografia do cinema do país. Em relação à notória recorrência na obra do cineasta em questionar os limites do corpo humano, este trabalho analisa sua confluência com tradições teóricas e artísticas, que centramse nessa questão. E destaca as considerações referentes à abjeção e ao disgust, sentimentos diretamente associados ao temor frente ao rompimento dos limites corporais. O objetivo central deste trabalho é então desvelar como essas heranças da tradição cultural canadense estão relacionadas às obsessões cronenberguianas, principalmente em relação ao corpo, e à forma como esses elementos se amalgamam na configuração de sua obra extrema e única. / This dissertation investigates the Anglo-Canadian trademark in the work of cinematographer David Cronenberg through his dialogue with the cultural and theoretical traditions of the country which concern technicism, centred on the means of communication, disseminated by the theoreticians of communication from the School of Toronto, and specially by Marshall McLuhan and taking into consideration the tendency on the part of the Canadian protagonists to be non-heroes, pointed out by Margaret Atwood. Also aiming to contextualize his artistic production, commercially and culturally, in the Canadian cinematographic system, it presents a brief historiography of cinema in Canada. As to the notorious recurrence of on investigation concerning the limits of the body, this dissertation analyses its confluence with theoretical and artistic traditions focused on this theme. It points out the consideration concerning abjection and disgust, feelings which are directly associated with the fear which the exceeding of the corporeal limits provokes. The central aim of this dissertation is therefore to reveal how these heirlooms of the Canadian cultural tradition are related to Cronenberg's obsessions, notably these related to the human body, and to the way that such elements amalgamate to produce his extreme and unique work.

O presente trabalho investiga a marca anglo-canadense na obra do cineasta David Cronenberg a partir do diálogo que instaura com as tradições culturais e teóricas do país que dizem respeito, ao tecnicismo, centrado nos meios de comunicação, propagado pelos teóricos da comunicação da Escola de Toronto e, especialmente, por Marshall Mcluhan e levando em consideração a tendência dos protagonistas canadenses a serem não-heróis, apontada por Margaret Atwood. E com o objetivo de contextualizar sua produção artística, mercadológica e culturalmente, no interior do sistema cinematográfico do Canadá, apresenta uma breve historiografia do cinema do país. Em relação à notória recorrência na obra do cineasta em questionar os limites do corpo humano, este trabalho analisa sua confluência com tradições teóricas e artísticas, que centramse nessa questão. E destaca as considerações referentes à abjeção e ao disgust, sentimentos diretamente associados ao temor frente ao rompimento dos limites corporais. O objetivo central deste trabalho é então desvelar como essas heranças da tradição cultural canadense estão relacionadas às obsessões cronenberguianas, principalmente em relação ao corpo, e à forma como esses elementos se amalgamam na configuração de sua obra extrema e única. / This dissertation investigates the Anglo-Canadian trademark in the work of cinematographer David Cronenberg through his dialogue with the cultural and theoretical traditions of the country which concern technicism, centred on the means of communication, disseminated by the theoreticians of communication from the School of Toronto, and specially by Marshall McLuhan and taking into consideration the tendency on the part of the Canadian protagonists to be non-heroes, pointed out by Margaret Atwood. Also aiming to contextualize his artistic production, commercially and culturally, in the Canadian cinematographic system, it presents a brief historiography of cinema in Canada. As to the notorious recurrence of on investigation concerning the limits of the body, this dissertation analyses its confluence with theoretical and artistic traditions focused on this theme. It points out the consideration concerning abjection and disgust, feelings which are directly associated with the fear which the exceeding of the corporeal limits provokes. The central aim of this dissertation is therefore to reveal how these heirlooms of the Canadian cultural tradition are related to Cronenberg's obsessions, notably these related to the human body, and to the way that such elements amalgamate to produce his extreme and unique work.