McLuhan’s Grammatical Theology

Abstract

This article offers one more assessment of the work of Marshall McLuhan, using his recently published dissertation on the trivium as a window for reading his later, more media-focused works. Seeing McLuhan as a grammatical theologian casts fresh light on several well-known themes in his thought: his encyclopedic method with its surrealist juxtapositions, his insistence on medium specificity, his trouble with mathematics, his love of conceptual incommensurabilities, and, above all, his suppression of dialectic as a mode of thought and argument. In terms of the trivium, McLuhan was a grammarian in his intellectual commitments and a rhetorician in his practical performances, but he was never a dialectician.