After decades of relative neglect, McLuhan is back. While his ideas on media form are receiving a long-overdue assessment, it is also worth recalling McLuhan's challenge to the form of scholarship as media. McLuhan's ‘probes' were designed to produce, in the long run, precisely the kind of stimulus they are now, finally, provoking. However, McLuhan's writing is not that easily assimilable to mainstream humanities and social sciences scholarship. The paradox of McLuhan is that his Catholic faith enabled him to put in question the sacred cows of humanism, such as the faith in the ‘social’ and in ‘culture’ that limits sociology and cultural studies in their attempts to grapple with media.
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