The memory is the message. McLuhan: symbolism as parataxis

This paper aims at investigating the role that symbolism gains in McLuhan’s sociological research, pointing out how the study of memory 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 memory 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. The analysis of McLuhan’s interpretation of T.S. Eliot’s poem, The four quartets, shows 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.