Arthur KROKER, Technology and the Canadian Mind : Innis/McLuhan/Grant

Abstract

This 145-page book devotes chapters to three Canadian intellectuals – Henry Grant, Marshall McLuhan, and Harold A. Innis – who represented different perspectives on technology. The chapter on Grant is entitled “Technological Dependency” and the author calls Grant “the Nietzsche of the New World.” Grant’s Christianity and his classical Canadian nationalism provided “critical insights into the nihilism of technological society.” Chapter 3, “Technological Humanism: The Processed World of Marshall McLuhan,” considers McLuhan’s effort “to break the spell cast upon the human mind by electronic technologies.” Finally, Kroker treats Innis’s work on communications and empire within the context of “technological realism.” The author, who was the founding editor of the Canadian Journal of Political and Social Theory and Cultural Texts, specializes in cultural theory and North American intellectual history. He maintains that “Canada’s principal contribution to North American thought consists of a highly original, comprehensive, and eloquent discourse of technology.” Kroker believes that because of historical circumstances and by accident of geography Canada is fated “to be forever marginal to the ‘present-mindedness’ of American culture.” Recalling the insights of these Canadian thinkers is “a way of seeking to recover a voice by which to articulate a different historical possibility against the present closure of the technological order,” Kroker writes.