Taking Up McLuhan's Cause: Perspectives on Media and Formal Causality

By Robert K. Logan, Corey Anton and Lance Strate

This book brings together a number of prominent scholars to explore a relatively under-studied area of Marshall McLuhan’s thought: his idea of formal cause and the role that formal cause plays in the emergence of new technologies and in structuring societal relations. Aiming to open a new way of understanding McLuhan’s thought in this area, and to provide methodological grounding for future media ecology research, the book runs the gamut, from contributions that directly support McLuhan’s arguments to those that see in them the germs of future developments in emergent dynamics and complexity theory.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Intellect Books
• Release date: Apr 4, 2017
• ISBN: 9781783206964

Book preview

Chapter One

The Form of Things to Come: A Review of Media and Formal Cause

Corey Anton

Few works will more thoroughly reinvigorate interest in the ideas of Marshall McLuhan and potentially reorient the way that people think about the whole of his thought than the wonderful little book, Media and Formal Cause. This slim collection of four previously published essays—two by Marshall, one co-authored by Marshall and Barrington Nevitt with responses by Joseph Owens and Frederick D. Wilhelmsen, and an integrative summary piece by Marshall’s collaborator, co-author and son, Eric McLuhan (as well as a foreword by Lance Strate)—should be required study materials for anyone who wants to gain a handle on the nature of humanity and technological mediation.

What makes this text so insightful and pertinent is that it helps to articulate Marshall McLuhan’s classical as well as his more systems-like orientations. Too many people seem to imagine that technologies appear suddenly and wholly out of nowhere, and then, from some kind of zero-point, begin to introduce a range of effects upon both individuals and societies. This thought-provoking collection cuts directly against such orientation and provides a highly useful re-entrance into McLuhan’s thinking as a whole. In some ways it helps us to reinterpret his well-known expression, ‘the medium is the message’, to read: ‘the medium is the formal announcement’. That is, by the time any given medium comes to fruition, it has been prepared for—has had room cleared for it—by various forms of media and media effects that preceded it. As McLuhan writes, ‘When the time is ripe in any process, the effects as ground have preceded the cause as figures. Causality is a process pattern, exposed by discovery or imposed by invention’ (2011: 43). Hence, ‘the medium is the message’ insofar as any medium, as a kind of precipitate, is the official birth announcement of changes that already have been under way and now are about to be intensified, accelerated and extended.

If the Laws of Media (1988), co-authored by Marshall McLuhan and Eric McLuhan, has yet to gain the sustained follow-up that it deserves, this is perhaps because many people still fail to grasp McLuhan’s underlying logic and/or forward trajectory. Although McLuhan suggests in many of his writings that the content of any medium is another medium—signifying the way that mediation ties into ongoing historical developments and contexts—many people still fail to grasp how his work relies upon a notion of formal cause. People generally seem to understand material and efficient cause well enough but formal cause remains largely mysterious. Fortunately, this stimulating collection offers additional clarity and impresses upon readers a key meta-logic for studying media as environments: causes and effects emerge as whorled vortexes of relations rather than as linear progressions of effects directly following from particular technologies. In fact, the linearity and sequentiality of literacy and the printed word were (and still are) the formal cause of such modern prejudices regarding notions of ‘unidirectional causality’. Undeniably, it still somewhat befuddles the highly literate mind to suggest that effects can come ‘before’ causes. As a consequence, many people have relegated formal cause to the history books, now regarding it as an antiquated notion no longer relevant or useful.

But as more and more people spend greater amounts of time within electric environments and personally experience the rapidly changing technologies all around them, they may increasingly recognize the diversity of media forms per se, and, accordingly, become more sensitive to the character and/or nature of formal cause. So, then, what exactly is formal cause and why is the study of it so important? For brevity and clarity, I quickly review Aristotle’s four causes and then illustrate the relevance and centrality of formal cause within media ecology today. I conclude by briefly exploring some connections with Alfred Korzybski and general semantics.

Aristotle identifies four kinds of causes: material, efficient, formal and final. For purposes of illustration, consider a simple example: a sculpture of some person. First, the sculpture must consist of some material. It could be wood or clay or stone, etc. In addition to such sheer materiality, it needs to be made by means of particular methods, including hand or tool techniques and manual procedures as well as other specific actions involved in its production. These two causes, material and efficient, can then be distinguished from the formal and final cause of the sculpture. The final cause refers to the ends served by the sculpture: it might be aesthetic appreciation or simply the enjoyment and satisfaction of it; the final cause of an item is its end, or the ‘for-the-sake-of-which’ it comes into being. But we must be very careful not to imagine final causes as ‘eventual’ or as a ‘not-yet-future’; final causes are not futural at all but a kind of continued presence. Last but certainly not least, we have formal cause that, basically, exists in the mind of the artist and of audience members: Formal cause refers to ideas or expectations and sensibilities that need to be satisfied in order for the viewers to recognize in the material what the sculpture is of. In this case, we might say it is ‘a human’, or maybe even identify the particular person. Clarifying the nature of formal cause, Eric McLuhan writes, ‘The formal cause of a painting or a poem or an advertisement is the audience for which it was made and on which it is to operate’ (2011: 117).

As another example, consider a spoon. For the material cause of the spoon, it must be made of something: steel, or wood, or ivory, or bone, or plastic, etc. In addition, the material must be efficiently arranged; it will need to be worked upon and shaped in a temporal unfolding. The formal cause and final cause remain a little trickier to address. Whereas the final cause of the spoon might be reduced to something like ‘a certain kind of eating’, the formal cause emerges with and from the expectations and/or mind of the creator and audience. That is, the spoon must sufficiently resemble, have the rough shape and form of, a spoon: the creators of the spoon must know when its construction has been completed and the audience must be able to recognize the spoon as a spoon. In these senses, the form of the spoon, which comes from anticipated expectations, is a cause of the spoon. Hence, formal cause is a condition of intelligibility for the three other kinds of causality and it remains a ground, a causality that is simultaneous rather than linear. Eric McLuhan nicely summarizes these insights and shows how formal cause continues to play out in the human realm:

The audience is always the hidden ground rather than the figure…Formal causality is not something that can be abstracted, since it is always a dynamic relation between the user and the ever-changing situation […] Formal cause is the ground for the material, efficient, and final causes; in that sense, it ‘contains all the other causes.’

(2011: 76–91, original emphasis)

With this latest collection of essays as our guide, we now can see with increasing clarity that Marshall McLuhan’s work largely deals with formal cause. As Eric McLuhan writes, ‘Marshall McLuhan’s idea of a medium as an invisible, ever-present vortex of services and disservices is exactly that of formal cause’ (2011: 129). Formal cause is, in many ways, what Marshall McLuhan’s classic Understanding Media is all about. When McLuhan suggests that he is interested in the social and psychological impacts of various media—the changes in pace and interaction brought about by technological forms—his concerned attention provides us, by-and-large, with a rangy and thorough study of formal cause.

The study of formal cause attends mainly to side effects, those which guide certain kinds of future developments as much as they hinder other kinds of developments. Such study also understands mind and ‘reason’ as partly socio-historical phenomena that move within horizons outlined by symbolic forms and communication technologies. For example, it would not take too much to show that literacy is the formal cause of intelligence quotients (IQs), or that money is the formal cause of bribery, or to show that credit is the formal cause of debt, or that calendars are the formal cause of legal adulthood. Seriously, think for a moment of how we accept the somewhat arbitrary imposition of regularity upon a highly irregular world. We assume that if someone is 18 years old, to the day or even the hour, then they are legally responsible for themselves (and/or others!). We assume that the sheer number of years has meaning in itself and we succumb to the order imposed; in today’s world, we apparently need not look at actual individuals, need not talk with them or judge their development or capabilities or demonstrated responsibility, we simply and only need know a person’s date of birth and today’s date.

Here, then, we find an interesting point of contact between McLuhan and Korzybski. So, much of Korzybski’s work attempts to bring people beyond various forms of identification, beyond those forms of magical thinking based on similarity that pre-date—and were obstacles to—scientific thought. In some important ways Korzybski’s work offers various kinds of parallel analyses to McLuhan’s writings on formal cause. For example, not only does formal cause lurk in the shadow of Korzybski’s thought (his insistence on a mathematically rigorous language or his notion of knowledge as structure) but so much of his system of sanity combats ‘rear-view-mirror’ styles of thinking, and ‘rear-view-mirror thinking’ is a main symptom of formal cause! By becoming more explicitly aware of formal cause, people can help themselves challenge their intensional habits and become more extensional in orientation. As Korzybski would say, ‘the word is not the thing; the map is not the territory’. For a McLuhanesque harmony, we can add that etymology, map-making, blueprints and the realm of mathematics, all of these fall within the purview of formal cause. Whereas Korzybski grew increasingly aware of linguistic and non-verbal identifications and sought to free people from overly relying upon such ‘irrational’ associations, McLuhan’s work on formal cause reveals the ‘irrational side effects’ of communication and communication technologies.

This excellent little book, Media and Formal Cause, should be required reading not only for those who seek a better understanding of McLuhan’s work or those who wish to find points of relevant contact to Korzybski and general semantics, but also for those who would grasp the many radical changes currently under way in the culture. My only criticism of the book regards its meagre length. Given the centrality of the phenomenon and the degree to which the notion of formal cause has heuristic value, it would have been nice to find a richer and more extensive consideration of some of the newer media. I am confident, though, given the rich applicability of these ideas, we can anticipate a great deal of useful follow-up work on formal cause, media and general semantics.

Anyone seriously interested in the future of humanity should recognize that all four of Aristotle’s causes can be found exerting their subtle power and influence, especially in the areas of communication technologies. As more and more people spend more time in mostly human-created environments, the dubious separation between art and science as well as between ‘the human’ and ‘the natural’ increasingly breaks down. As people learn to recognize the effects of formal cause, they become better suited to face the many changes ushered in by new