Walter Benjamin, Marshall McLuhan, and the Emergence of Visual Society

The linkage of Walter Benjamin and Marshall McLuhan in the same sentence, let alone the same essay, is surely an outrage. No two thinkers could be further apart in their politics, tone of voice, and intellectual heritage. Yet the very little they share is enough for me to use Benjamin as a device for rekindling interest in Marshall McLuhan. McLuhan is not read much anymore, at least in the original. My purpose is not so much to resurrect McLuhan or to restore a tarnished reputation but rather to redirect attention to a problem that was central to McLuhan's work: to focus the problem of media around the central metaphor of a “visual society.” I chose Walter Benjamin as a wedge to reopen the subject because, curiously enough, Benjamin is currently the subject of extensive interest and extended analysis. Thus, my aim: to use Benjamin to highlight a concern he shared with McLuhan, and to use both to refocus the analysis of modern media of communication.