Thesis (Ph. D.)--West Virginia University, 2003. / Title from document title page. Document formatted into pages; contains v, 151 p. + HTML document (ill. (some col.), video). Includes an HTML document version of the thesis with video clips from the promotional films: Wheels of progress (1927), New horizons (1940) and Design for dreaming (1956). Vita. Includes abstract. Includes bibliographical references (p. 139-145).

The work of Marshall McLuhan has often been reduced to the form of catchphrases and "McLuhanisms," such as the "global village" and "the medium is the message" in the field of communication. Though these phrases capture an aspect of his thought, the scholarly understanding of McLuhan's vision remains incomplete, even within the specialized area of Media Ecology, of which McLuhan is recognized as the intellectual father. Throughout his corpus, McLuhan makes reference to the classical and medieval trivium, which was the basis for education throughout Western history until the Renaissance. Indeed, he developed a history of the trivium up to the Renaissance in order to understand the works of Thomas Nashe. At the end of his life, he worked to synthesize his views on technology, media, and communication, and the arts of the trivium-- grammar, logic, and rhetoric--which were essential to these works. Consequently, this project details the connection between the classical and medieval trivium and McLuhan's tetrad, which was the heuristic tool that advanced as New Science for the twentieth and twenty first centuries. By detailing this connection, the tetrad is a tool that advances a neo-Medieval theory of communication. In its essence, the neo-Medieval communication theory is attentive to the linguistic essence of the cosmos, is attentive to the transformative nature of understanding, and unifies the human person within a perceptual and poetic understanding of the world. / McAnulty College and Graduate School of Liberal Arts / Communication and Rhetorical Studies / PhD / Dissertation

"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.

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

<p>Abstract</p><p>The name of this essay is: A content analyze of the expanded conception of text – in the School curriculum’s for the subjects Swedish, Arts, Philosophy, and Religion by Maria Tollstedt (spring semester 2008), supervisor is Heike Graf.</p><p>This essay is about the expanded conception of text. The theory for this work is the professor in literature Marshall McLuhans theories about Media being extensions of our bodies from the book Understanding Media (1964). The essay also discus and gives examples of definitions of what a text can be. This work examines and analyzes in what way the expanded conception of text implicitly and explicitly is being used in different Swedish governing school documents. More precisely the School curriculum’s concerning the four subjects: Swedish, Arts, Philosophy, and Religion.</p><p>The essay analyzes if the use of the expanded conception of text differs depending on which subjects the documents are addressing and if they are aimed and written for primary school or high school.</p><p>The conclusion of this work is that the expanded conception of text is not often explicitly used in the examined documents, and whether it is often implicitly used is a matter of interpretation.</p>

Abstract The name of this essay is: A content analyze of the expanded conception of text – in the School curriculum’s for the subjects Swedish, Arts, Philosophy, and Religion by Maria Tollstedt (spring semester 2008), supervisor is Heike Graf. This essay is about the expanded conception of text. The theory for this work is the professor in literature Marshall McLuhans theories about Media being extensions of our bodies from the book Understanding Media (1964). The essay also discus and gives examples of definitions of what a text can be. This work examines and analyzes in what way the expanded conception of text implicitly and explicitly is being used in different Swedish governing school documents. More precisely the School curriculum’s concerning the four subjects: Swedish, Arts, Philosophy, and Religion. The essay analyzes if the use of the expanded conception of text differs depending on which subjects the documents are addressing and if they are aimed and written for primary school or high school. The conclusion of this work is that the expanded conception of text is not often explicitly used in the examined documents, and whether it is often implicitly used is a matter of interpretation.

The Canadian artist IAIN BAXTER&, known before 2005 as Iain Baxter, created an innovative Conceptual Art practice in the mid-60s that continues to make important contributions even today. He has maintained a strong collaborative element in his art, as witnessed by his role in the short-lived group IT (1965) and N.E. THING CO. (1966-1978)--an actual incorporated company consisting of BAXTER& and his first wife, Ingrid Baxter as chief officers--and by the addition of an ampersand to his legal name in 2005 to signify the open-ended quality of his work that relies on viewers‘ contributions to help determine its meaning. This dissertation introduces the term "Pop-inflected Conceptual Art" to describe how BAXTER& merges his use of information technologies, modern and ubiquitous materials, and pedestrian activities with a desire to question the received role and purpose of art through an epistemological approach. By presenting BAXTER&‘s key influences—Zen Buddhism, as described by D.T. Suzuki and Alan Watts, and the communications theory of Marshall McLuhan—this study describes five underlying principles that inform BAXTER&‘s work individually and in unison. These principles are: his preference for foregrounding the banal; creation of the "infoscape" that merges the natural world and the constant stream of information within North American culture; proclivity for experimenting with such unlikely media as plastics and telecommunication media; understanding of art‘s kinship with language; and usage of pseudonyms. This study describes the core terms of McLuhan‘s theory in order to analyze this thinker‘s significance for BAXTER&‘s work; moreover, it presents how the above five principles are evident throughout the three main divisions in BAXTER&‘s artistic career: before, during, and after his tenure with N.E. THING CO. Through an analysis of key examples of many of this artist‘s works, this study also determines affinities to both established Pop artists and his Conceptual Art peers, while distinguishing how his Zen and McLuhanesque hybrid approach, which includes a consistent reliance on humor to communicate definitively his ideas, sets him apart from these groups of artists and foregrounds his role as the precursor to such younger Vancouver photoconceptual artists as Ian Wallace, Jeff Wall, Rodney Graham, and Stan Douglas.

This thesis is designed as a comprehensive analysis of the advertising discourse within some pre-set constrains. Specifically, the main area of interest is the realm of American print advertising after 1945. Within these limits, advertising is understood as a mode of language, the chief semantic unit of which is a form of Barthesian myth, a superstructure divorced from reality that supersedes de Saussure's semiotics of the sign. The bulk of this thesis is then a diachronic analysis of the development of these myths and their role as both mirrors and catalysts of a whole range of stereotypes, value hierarchies or fixed ideas firmly embedded within American collective consciousness. The primary materials for this analysis are then various specimen of the advertisements themselves, carefully selected because of their representativeness, influence or significance within the advertising realm. The main theoretical framework rests on Marx's understanding of the commodity as a certain type of fetish, Barthes's description of the structure and social function of the myth, Baudrillard's and Debord's theories on such notions as the society of spectacle, the reign of simulacra and hyperreality, Benjamin's understanding of the uniqueness of representation and its aura and finally McLuhan's detailed accounts of...

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.

<p>This study examinates technology's traumatic impact on the male subject in The Atrocity Exhibition by J.G. Ballard. In my analysis I show how the protagonist uses a fetischistic strategy in order to make sense of the trauma that technology embeds. Paradoxically it proves to be the agent of his trauma, but also functions as his shield. The machine is thus in a position of the hinge, the point in a structural system that both enables and deconstruct the system. In the same position we find the woman. She is the very epicentre of the novel and the violence directed towards her is part of a complex problem that I adress. The woman is divided into pieces and fetischized by the male gaze to serve as a solution for his trauma.</p><p>Hal Foster's notion ”the double logic of prosthesis” constitutes a theoretical base. The model shows how a fetischistic strategy is applied by avant-garde artists to solve the technological trauma that they experience. Both content and composition of The Atrocity Exhibition are inspired by avant-garde practices, I have therefore compared the text with Foster's theory on how the avant-garde problematized the interaction between man and machine. Marshall McLuhan's belief that the human body and technology are inseparable in the era of electronics further helps me to study technology's effect on perception.</p>