Marshall McLuhan and French Structuralism

Both Marshall McLuhan and the French Structuralists have attracted wide popular attention, and hostile critics have used this fact as a pretext to dismiss them as mere fads. But no one has mentioned the similarities in method, perhaps because the men involved have such different intellectual backgrounds. While the Structuralists owe their intellectual allegiance to Marx and/or Saussure, McLuhan's synthesizing capacities bear no label, for he has picked up a little something from most of the major names in twentieth-century thought. In this essay, I wish to deal with McLuhan primarily in relation to two Structuralists, Lucien Goldmann and Roland Barthes. Goldmann's Marxism and Barthes' use of Saussurean linguistics make them ideal representatives of the two major tendencies of Structuralist thought; furthermore, they work in literary criticism, McLuhan's original discipline. As McLuhan says in the preface to The Interior Landscape, an anthology of his literary criticism, his thought derives ultimately from the training which he received at Cambridge from I.A. Richards and F.R. Leavis. Thus, his intellectual origins lie in New Criticism, and to compare him with the Structuralists necessitates some understanding of the historical relationship between New Criticism and Structuralism

Epistemology · Sociology · Structuralism (philosophy of science · Anthropology · Media, Communication, and Education · Philosophy

• The paradoxical effects ofmacluhanisme

  Gary Genosko•Economy and Society•1994

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