McLuhan e Debray: un dialogo (perlopiù) possibile

Intheprogressivedefinitionofhisideaof mediology, Régis Debray (inventor of the term) compares himself several times with the lesson of Marshall McLuhan. It is a respectful but also polemical comparison. In his Introduction à la médiologie, Debray devotes an entire chapter to deconstructing the well-known formula “The medium is the message”, highlighting its over-simplification on the one hand, and its semantic strength and complexity on the other. This article sets out to retrace the points of contact and divergence between the two great scholars, attempting to highlight how the French thinker has re-read and taken up the assumptions of Understanding media and other McLuhan works, starting from the very concept of medium. Indeed, Debray has his peculiar idea of the medium, which only partly overlaps with McLuhan’s. If for McLuhan it is - as an extension - traceable in every artefact, be it tangible or intangible, and is therefore given, for Debray, the medium does not exist per se but is given from time to time, depending on the object of study. In the Introduction, he tends to separate the two interpretations systematically, sometimes forcing his hand even from a lexical point of view and accentuating a difference that, on closer inspection, is not so wide. Debray’s enucleation of the concepts of milieu and mediation is also interesting. The former represents, for the French scholar, the safe conduct for the accusations of determinism, which have often affected the Mcluhanian theoretical framework. The milieu is what filters - culturally, politically, socially, technologically - every new technical introduction, allowing (or preventing) it to become part of the material and symbolic universe of the human being. Mediation, on the other hand, is the cornerstone of Debrayan reflection: it is to it, much more than to the medium, that the prefix medium- of the word mediology refers. Richard Grusin, who owes much to McLuhan, spoke a few years ago of “radical mediation”, underlining the importance of mediation for the very definition of the individual’s identity. How is the idea of mediation dealt with in McLuhan’s thought? The article also attempts to question this aspect.