The Study Of Mcluhan’s Media Theory From The Perspective Of Post-structuralism

Marshall McLuhan was born in Canada,accepted a good English literature education.If he walked along this road, he may be a famous literary critic. But he opened a new media research road,called Media ecology.It was a new communication research paradigm. Mcluhan’s media theories were so generally welcomed because of the non traditional style.In the Nineteen ninties,along with the development of the electronic medium, Mcluhan’s media theory aroused people’s attention again.Thus McLuhan is the subject of my paper.But this is not a isolated research of McLuhan,the post-structuralism is the theoretical perspectives of it. This paper established on the basis of previous studies,but it was different from the previous.The similar past researches put McLuhan under the perspective of modernism.Howere, by reading the literature of pos-tmodernism and post-structuralism,Ifind the post-modernism is a so broad current of thought and the poststucturalism is its theoretical basis.So I choose the poststucturalism as the perspective of McLuhan.This paper expects to provide a philosophy perspective of McLuhan theory and find his impact of communication.He took the thought similar to poststructuralism into the communication,broke the situation of communication which was controled by Criticism school and Experience school, a speculative mode and the another is empirical mode. Mcluhan brought the third paradigm. At the same time, he also has important significance to the history of Western thought. This paper is composed by the following aspects.Firstly,I make a definition about the post-structuralism,through the grasp of history of thought.In my paper,the post-structuralism is not only means the schools of thought which is called French post-sructuralism,but also represents the spirit that opposed to the tradition.The next part is the core of my paper,in this part I analysis McLuhan’s thought by interpret ing his theories and tracing his thought origin.Then I find there are some poststructuralism spirit in his mind. At the same time,in this part,I special emphasis that I won’t call McLuhan the "post-structuralist",because of the residual of ationalism in his thought.The last part is about the effect of McLuhan in the field of communication.Since there is some post-structuralism spirit in McLuhan’s thought,his influence on communicati-on on inevitably associated with this. His thought brought a new paradigm for communication-Media analysis.