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Abstract
By re-examining the thought of Marshall McLuhan, showing how his work relies upon the notion of formal cause, this paper offers a heuristic framework for understanding the nature and future of technological mediation. It not only helps to disclose a great deal of coherence and order (a systematic method) to McLuhan's thought but also provides a useful multidisciplinary orientation for future research into the various impacts of technology upon thought, action, and life more broadly.
Notes
1. I wish to thank Valerie V. Peterson, Eric McLuhan, Lance Strate, and Yoni Van Den Eede for assistance in the production of this manuscript. For proofing in the final stages I wish to thank Valerie V. Peterson, Adam Burl, Cherilyn Denomme, and Seth Galligan.
2. Simply subscribe to CRTNET (the Communication Research and Theory Network listserve), and you can watch the continued debate between those who understand communication as a humanistic tradition akin to an art and those who think of communication as a social scientific discipline.
3. Beyond the scope of the present essay, future work might explore the likelihood that hot media are much more powerful in concretizing patterns of associations while cool media are more likely to have greater dispersion in their residual forms (cf. Anton, Citation2011b).
4. In his comment to McLuhan and Nevitt, Frederick D. Wilhelmsen writes, “We live causality as an act performed when we reason and when we will … The rearview mirror, the after-the-fact once set up by the mind's activity, is the moment of determinism within the total structure of invention” (Wilhelmsen, Citation2011, p. 64).
5. This is not to say that all causes bear upon all entities; rather that all four causes will need to be included if we are to talk about the whole of reality.
6. At the very least, the ability to recognize a painting as of a human being just as equally employs formal cause as does recognizing a particular, already-known person “in” the painting.
7. We must be very cautious not to align “final cause” with some kind of end produced by efficient causality. Final cause is a kind of cause, and it remains operative from the very beginning. As Kenneth Burke (1961, p. 246) nicely puts it: “Actually, ‘final causes’ are not futural at all but continually present (a kind of nunc stans) until attained or abandoned,” or, as phrased by Eric McLuhan (2011, p. 127), “Final cause is present in toto from the outset, even before the sequence of making gets underway.”
8. Interested readers should consider Heidegger's (Citation1997) work on the “as-structure,” both hermeneutic and apophantic, as explications of logos and formal cause.
9. A dissertation could and should be written to explore the ways that both Burke and McLuhan have salvaged the notions of final cause and formal cause, respectively.
10. See Thayer's (Citation1997) essays: “How Does Information Inform” and “Deconstructing Information.”
11. Eric McLuhan does not outright equate human intellect, cosmos, and formal cause, but he, at minimum, suggests that “… formal cause is uniquely and particularly human. That is, and I believe this to be crucial, absent human agency or intellect there is no formal cause at all …‘logos is the formal cause of cosmos’” (McLuhan, 2011, p. 123).
12. Said quite otherwise, the expressions, “Material cause,” “efficient cause,” “formal cause,” and “final cause” are the actual words that they are partly by the formal cause of readers and hearers (also see Lingis, Citation1994).
13. See McLuhan and Watson's (Citation1970) Cliché to Archetype.
14. Some traditions suggest the importance of right naming, and getting correct designations, accurately identifying essences in order to diagnose ills or deal with problems present at hand. Point well taken, but Burke would recommend that we do not underestimate the value of comic misnomer in some situations.
15. Consider the IBM computer “Watson,” that successfully competed with and defeated two all-time Jeopardy champions. This computer, popularly talked about as if it were using “natural language,” was, in fact, wholly without auditory or visual input (i.e., naturally “deaf and blind”), and so had a sense of form that came entirely from text and chirographically controlled language—despite the fact that this very text is phonetic and alphabetic.
16. For another example of this, consider how modern science has been able to break the sound barrier, land a person on the moon, crack the genome, develop nanotechnology, etc., but even today, the most sophisticated computers struggle to disambiguate the particular words out from the syllabic flow of sounds of different individuals.
17. In some very important respects, formal cause was the proper predecessor to the contemporary notion of “meme,” though memes seem more reductive and turns attention slightly to the wrong aspects of causality. Meme highlight replicability without agency but basically amount to being a metaphor. Form has the advantage of relating to the other kinds of causes whereas meme is a kind of “tack-on,” one that conveniently rhymes with “genes.” We're practically waiting for someone with a white lab coat.
18. We might consider the Diagram itself in terms of formal cause. Venn diagrams in general could be said to be a formal cause of this one in particular, that is, the actual form that this is taking has been made possible by a precast intelligibility.
19. Lance Strate suggests that formal cause is not limited to the human realm. In his Foreword to the collection, Media and Formal Cause, Strate writes, “… formal cause corresponds to the systems view of Gregory Bateson, to the dissipative structures of physicist Ilya Prigogine, to the fractal geometry of Benoit Mandelbrot, and the metapatterns of Tyler Volk, to the autopoietic systems of biologist Humberto Maturana and Francisco Varela, and in general to the systems concept of emergence” (Strate, Citation2011, p. ix). He thus suggests that formal cause, rather than being reducible to the eidetic or human realm, regards patterns of nature, per se. This is highly instructive yet remains questionable. Not all patterns, per se, are formal cause, even if formal cause deals exclusively in patterns. Patterns, at the least, can be found throughout nature but the question remains: to what extent are patterns, per se, formal cause? For Aristotle, at least, not all patterns are part of formal cause. His example of the eclipse of the moon is one illustration. Placing Eric McLuhan's position on one end (i.e., “absent human agency or intellect there is no formal cause at all,”) and Lance Strate's position on the other (i.e., “formal cause corresponds … to the systems concept of emergence”), I suggest looking for something in between and I would offer mathematics as the exemplar. We begin by underscoring that we are of the fabric we investigate. This means that the orderliness of the universe, with patterns that make mathematics relevant, useful, and powerful, is the same orderliness that produces those minds that encounter and use those patterns, regardless of whether the patterns are invented or discovered. As McLuhan and Nevitt (Citation2011, p. 43) write, “‘Causality’ is a process pattern, exposed by discovery or imposed by invention.” For interesting considerations that lend some support to Strate's claims please see Campbell (Citation1982, pp. 266–273) and Wilden (Citation1987, pp. 303–321).
20. Sir James George Frazer's The Golden Bough (Citation1909) documents the role of sympathetic magic, both magic of contagion and magic of similarity, where the latter is most tightly aligned with formal cause. He abundantly reviews certain homeopathic practices, and, often comically, illustrates the kinds of “irrational processes,” the modes of thinking, that modern science wished to extricate. For example, during childbirth, people might open all doors, open all drawers, untie any visible knots, reasoning that forms of similarity will ease the passage for the infant. Laugh as we may, we remain in many ways just as ruled by our reliance upon formal cause. Not only does it still operate everywhere we can find no thirteenth floor in buildings, but also the pervasive idea that we can accumulate numbers of things, give outward images of successes, and all of this will amount to personal happiness, satisfaction, or achievement is just as superstitious and delusional.
21. See Canetti's (Citation1962) Crowds and Power.
22. One further way to illustrate how formal cause is not reducible to either material or efficient cause is to consider basic numbers and the key differences between alphabetic words representing numbers and written numerals themselves. For example, “One,” “Two,” “Three” are sets of instructions for making sounds in English, and here, the material, efficient and formal causes are easily conflated, for “three” rhymes with “tree.” Written numerals such as 1, 2, 3 are interlingual ideograms which can vary greatly in pronunciation from language to language despite conveying the same concept (Ong, Citation1982). Hence, these written signs can be pronounced: “One,” “Two,” “Three” or equally read as “Uno,” “Dos,” “Tres,” or “Un,” “Duex,” “Trois,” etc. For McLuhan, such literate numbering systems, (“1, 2, 3”) are part of the formal cause of the de-poetizing of language. Said most simply, the spoken word “two” rhymes with “new,” “through,” and “shoe,” but the written number “2” does not rhyme with anything. Interlingual ideograms, more than merely more efficient for mathematical calculations, were vital to discoveries of mathematical concepts, per se; they formally train people to entertain concepts and ideas independent of their sounds. They also invite translation and collaboration across languages.
23. A considerable range of classic scholarship on symbolic form runs throughout the works of thinkers such as Cassirer, Langer, Burke, and Dewey. At their root, symbolic forms, both presentational and discursive, have a “tendency to see reality symbolically” (Langer, Citation1942). Burke (Citation1957) defines form within the arts: “the creating of appetite and the adequate satisfying of that appetite.”