Towards a Society of Innovation. Mcluhan and the Medial Symbolism

This proposal has a theoretical and hermeneutic perspective: it aims at investigating the role that symbolism gains in McLuhan’s sociological research, pointing out how the study of medial innovation and the examination of the literary tradition is fundamental to understand, specifically,  the developments of communication and of cultural studies in their complexity.

The study revolves around the function of innovation as interpretative key of future in the study of symbolism carried out by McLuhan, since it’s exactly in this artistic movement that the sociologist finds the opportunity to delete the representative practices (irrational and linear) of the modern man, shaped by the reticular sensory of metropolis. Consequently, it will be possible to suppose, by exploiting McLuhan, an interpretative model of the society of communicative innovation.

Exploiting the paradigms of McLuhan’s social symbolism and thanks to the recent scientific studies dedicated to the Canadian sociologist, the analysis of McLuhan’s interpretation of symbolist writers will show a penetration inside the fractures of communicative models, underlining that the linear connection of events is swept away from daily life, declined according to the communicative instances of the interactive society.

In particular, it will be possible to analyze some of the myths and symbols of the information society, whose social impact is tied to the popular capacities of electric media. This aspect is fundamental to understand the role of communicative innovation in McLuhan, inherited by the study of Ezra Pound and T.S. Eliot. Today, as well as for the past, writers are asked to interpret medial fluctuations of modernity, according to an endless exegetic responsibility, based on the projective capability of expressive innovation.