The Philosophical Topicality of Marshall McLuhan

Despite the flourishing literature on these matters in the past century, McLuhan’s work stands out as one of the most pioneering and original attempts to understand media: not just because he considered media with an unprecedented and ‘omni-inclusive’ level of breadth, but rather because he brought to light their inherently productive, performative, and ‘poietic’ character. McLuhan’s theory of media, which emerged from the great ferment characterizing the Toronto School, influences and inspires the philosophical reflection on the transformations in the most diverse areas. The present paper identifies the particularly interesting and fruitful connection between McLuhan’s perspective and the research on technology and its formative and transformative effects on the human being. It’s not a matter of thinking exclusively of issues pertaining to the post-human, the cyborg, and alike, but rather of the philosophical, anthropological and sociological scholarship on anthropogenesis that came to prominence in the past decades. This kind of study emphasizes the ‘technical life’ of humans or, to put it in more significant terms, the technical genesis of homination and the role of material culture for humanization. The McLuhanisttheory of media is then explored from an eminently philosophico-genealogical perspective, in order to reveal the way in which human experience can receive a new significance by the action of technological prostheses.