Disdaining the Tribe: The Anti-Humanist Basis of Marshall McLuhan’s ‘The Medium is the Message

In the panel’s first paper, “Disdaining the Tribe: The Anti-Humanist Basis of Marshall McLuhan’s ‘The Medium is the Message,’” Guy Stevenson takes the theorist’s friendship with Ezra Pound as a starting point for exploring the Poundian basis of McLuhan’s ideas about language, society and the media. Stevenson’s argument draws our attention to the dialectic of humanist and anti-humanist, of radically inclusionary and retrogressively elitist impulses at the heart of McLuhan’s career defining slogan “the medium is the message.” By pointing to a similar paradox in Pound’s work (particularly in his literary and economic essays of the 1930s), born of the desire for an aesthetics that delineates difference and a politics that abhors it, Stevenson offers a new way of thinking about McLuhan and the ostensibly progressive period he came to represent.