Taking Up McLuhan's Cause by Corey Anton Robert Logan Lance Strate

Author:Corey Anton, Robert Logan, Lance Strate [Corey Anton, Robert Logan, Lance Strate]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781783206940
Goodreads: 29362105
Publisher: Intellect Ltd
Published: 2017-04-15T00:00:00+00:00

Chapter Seven

Formal Cause: McLuhan’s ‘Objective Turn’?

Yoni Van Den Eede

Introduction: Back to Metaphysics

Marshall McLuhan’s account of formal cause has a tendency to keep interpreters sufficiently mystified. The notion is like an autostereogram, requiring a skewed sense of focus from viewers, in order for an image to appear. Defying as it does syllogistic logic, McLuhan’s formal cause concept seems to demand a fair amount of benevolence from more analytically oriented readers, and some flexibility with regard to the established definition of ‘decent’ media research. All of this may account for the fact that the debate about its significance, in McLuhan’s work and as such, has only quite recently begun in earnest. Yes, beneath the confusion may truly lie some potentially great insight—and this possibility is extensively surveyed by the present volume. In what follows, I endeavour to add to the recently (re)opened space for discussion a slightly subversive and experimental point of view.

My approach will at first sight complicate things a little bit, by taking a sharp detour through ‘hard-core’ metaphysics. But eventually, this manoeuver should help to unravel the mystery of formal cause. Building further on Graham Harman’s reading of McLuhan and the former’s own ‘object-oriented philosophy’, I suggest that McLuhan’s later work—circling around terms such as metaphor, tetrad, formal cause, …—not just inaugurates a ‘linguistic turn’, as W. Terrence Gordon proposes, but also or even rather an ‘objective turn’. This is surprising since the cornerstone of McLuhan’s thought, i.e., the idea that media in their formal aspects make for environments—epitomized in the phrase ‘the medium is the message’—seems to be grounded in the concepts of mediation and relation, and certainly not of ‘substance’. Yet I will show, starting from Harman’s framework, that this unexpected interpretation is possible, and even suggested by certain passages in McLuhan’s work. Nonetheless, it entails a reformulation and broadening of the latter’s media definition, more precisely in two senses: ‘horizontal’ (all entities or things are ‘media’) and ‘vertical’ (media, as things, harbour a ‘substantive core’). I will, in that order, outline the central terms in McLuhan’s later work, quickly situate the discussion within the general history of philosophy, sketch Harman’s theory, review the latter’s reading of McLuhan and analysis of the tetrad and finally point out the consequences for McLuhan’s concept of media and mediation, in order to then further radicalize Harman’s suggestions by way of a closer scrutiny of some seminal fragments in McLuhan’s texts.

McLuhan’s ‘Linguistic Turn’: Tetrad, Metaphor, Formal Cause

During the last decade of his life, McLuhan starts to rephrase the whole of his thought in terms of the ‘laws of media’ or ‘tetrad’. With these notions he believed he had found the ultimate probing tool for media effects, behaviour and evolution. The whole of his media theory is summarized and compressed into them. Nevertheless, he needs several steps—not necessarily diachronically arrangeable—to arrive at the eventual formulation of these four laws, and it is worthwhile to try to reconstruct them. While fine-tuning his media analysis at the beginning of the 1970s, McLuhan is heavily

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