The detribalization of Marshall McLuhan

The legacy of Marshall McLuhan in media theory cannot be overstated, but the strategies adopted by McLuhan’s followers for extending his theories are limited to the application of his coinages and concepts to newer domains. This article proposes a different approach to understanding and extending McLuhan: by taking his ex-tribal standpoint seriously as the generative point of his conceptual framework. McLuhan’s Gaelic-tribal surname must have been more than a relic in his life, as he actively adopted Catholic Christianity and detribalized himself in an attempt to distance himself from the primitivity that came as ancestral baggage to him. McLuhan’s theory, it is argued, is thoroughly autobiographical – he is driven by his own example as an emancipated tribal and seems to have wished for a similar emancipation for all of humanity. Taken together with some of the theoretical currents that were contemporaneous, this identity of McLuhan can help explain the unity of his theoretical framework. It is from this vantage that he diagnosed the rise of fascism as a re-tribalization of man, a resurgent atavism that was undoing the benefits of civilization.