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Method Is the Message: ethinking McLuhan through Critical Theory. By Paul Grosswiler Montreal: Black Rose Books, 1998. 244 pp.
McLuhan, or Modernism in Reverse. By Glenn Willmott. Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1996. 262 pp.
Raymond Williams' (1967, 1974) critique of Marshall McLuhan's technological determinism has greatly influenced the way McLuhan has been received in communication and cultural studies. For instance, Williams was one of the first to suggest that McLuhan was a technological determinist because his formalist analysis of the media was lacking in its ability to account for the workings of power, political economy, institutional organization, and everyday life. Williams' critique was timely in its call for an explicit discussion of ideology overlooked in the apolitical stance of modernists like McLuhan. As many recent books about McLuhan argue, however, in the long term Williams' orientation has led to a disregard for relevant aspects of McLuhan's media theory.
Recently Paul Grosswiler and Glenn Willmott have contributed to this longstanding debate. They retrieve McLuhan for their respective disciplines of critical communication studies and postmodern literary criticism. McLuhan's interpretive methods are of use, they argue, for navigating the shifting terrains of culture, society, and technology. To counter his dismissal as a formalist and determinist, Grosswiler and Willmott suggest that McLuhan's media theories are intersubjective. Media, therefore, shape the dimensions of human communication and as such they are communicative, expressive, and interactive. Media are not merely machine objects that determine human behaviour. McLuhan's use of dialectical reasoning, Grosswiler argues, is at the root of his intersubjective approach. For Willmott, McLuhan is orientated by modernist and postmodernist theories. Furthermore, both Willmott and Grosswiler agree, following Arthur Kroker (1984), that McLuhan is a technological humanist. According to Kroker, McLuhan aimed to discover the ways in which technology could contribute to human well-being.
In Method is the Message: Rethinking McLuhan through Critical Theory, Grosswiler analyzes a wide range of scholarly and theoretical literature in the fashion of a historical materialist. He synthesizes McLuhan's eclectic approach to the media with seemingly incompatible orientations such as Marxism, critical theory, and cultural and communication studies. One of McLuhan's goals in studying the media, Grosswiler suggests, was to locate opportunities for human agency in the context of technological change. Grosswiler reviews an array of...