Media and Formal Cause by Marshall McLuhan and Eric McLuhan
One of the 10 best books of 2011 - Artforum Magazine
Marshall McLuhan (1911 – 1980) attended the University of Manitoba and there earned a
B.A. and
M.A. in English (1934). He then attended Cambridge University and
received the B.A., M.A., and Ph.D. in English (1944).
He taught at the University of Wisconsin, the Saint Louis University,
Assumption University (Windsor, 1944) and St. Michael’s College (Toronto,1946-1980),
where he headed the interdisciplinary Centre for Culture and Technology.
Besides many hundreds of articles in a broad variety of magazines and journals,
he has written over twenty books. These include The Mechanical Bride: The Folklore of Industrial Man; Alfred Lord Tennyson: Selected Poetry; The Gutenberg Galaxy: The Making of Typographic Man; Understanding Media: The Extensions of Man; The Classical Trivium: The Place of Thomas Nashe in the
Learning of his Time; Voices
of Literature (three volumes; with Richard Schoeck);
Verbi-Voco-Visual Explorations; The Medium is the Massage; War and Peace in the Global Village; Through the Vanishing Point: Space in Poetry and Painting
(with Harley Parker); The Interior Landscape: The Literary Criticism of Marshall McLuhan,
1943-1962; Counterblast (designed by Harley Parker); Mutations
1990; Culture is Our Business; From Cliché to Archetype (with Wilfred Watson); Take
Today: The Executive as Drop Out (with Barry
Nevitt); City as Classroom: Understanding Language and Media (with Kathryn Hutchon and Eric McLuhan); D’oeil a Oreille, Autre
homme autre chretien a l’age electronique (with
Pierre Babin).
Posthumous publications include the following: Letters of Marshall McLuhan; Laws of Media: The New Science (with Eric
McLuhan); The Global Village: Transformations in World Life and
Media in the 21st Century (with Bruce
Powers); Marshall McLuhan: The Man and His Message; Essential McLuhan; Forward Through the Rear View Mirror: Reflections on and by Marshall
McLuhan; The Medium and the Light: Reflections
on Religion and Media; The
Book of Probes; Understanding
Me: Lectures and Interviews; McLuhan
Unbound; Theories of Communication (with Eric McLuhan); and the present volume, Media and Formal Cause (with Eric
McLuhan).
Marshall McLuhan is recognized as the inventor of the field of media
study. In Laws of Media, he showed the seamless
relation between literary criticism and understanding new media and artifacts,
and he demonstrated that the new tools for media study had dissolved the
long-held division between the arts and
the sciences. This book concerns one of the principal such tools.
Eric McLuhan received his B. Sc. in Communication from Wisconsin State University in
1972. He got the M. A. and Ph. D. in English Literature from the University of
Dallas in 1980 and 1982. An internationally-known lecturer on communication and
media, he has over forty years’ teaching experience in subjects ranging from
highspeed reading techniques to English literature, media, and communication
theory, and has taught at many colleges and universities in both the United
States and Canada.
He has published articles in magazines and professional journals since
1964 on media, perception, and literature, and assisted Marshall McLuhan with the
research and writing of The Medium is the Massage, War
and Peace in the Global Village, Culture is Our Business, From Cliché to
Archetype, and TakeToday: The Executive as Drop-Out. He is
co-author: with Marshall McLuhan and Kathryn Hutchon, of City as Classroom (Irwin, 1977); with Marshall McLuhan, of
Laws of Media: The New Science (University of Toronto Press, 1988); and with Wayne Constantineau, of The Human Equation (Toronto: BPS Books, 2010).
Eric McLuhan is the author of The Role
of Thunder in Finnegans Wake (University of Toronto
Press, 1997); Electric Language:
Understanding the Present (Stoddart, 1998); and Theories of Communication (New York: Peter
Lang, 2010). He is the co-editor of: Essential
McLuhan (Stoddart, 1995), and Who WasMarshall McLuhan? (1994; Stoddart, 1995), and the editor
of: The Medium and the Light (Stoddart, 1999); the academic journal, McLuhan Studies; and editor, for Gingko Press, of: Understanding Media, Critical Edition (2003); McLuhan Unbound (2004); and The Book of Probes (2004), and was consulting editor for Voyager/Southam’s
“McLuhan Project,” which produced Understanding
McLuhan (1997), a CD on Marshall McLuhan and his work.
Media and Formal Cause by Marshall McLuhan and Eric McLuhan
A sage and
perceptive quartet of essays which capture and extend a still quintessentially
unique way of thinking about media, via patterns and connections that harken to
the ancient world and redound to our present and future. - Paul Levinson,
Professor of Communication and Media Studies, Fordham University; author of Digital McLuhan, and of New New Media
ISBN 978-0-9832747-0-4 188 pages $18.95 5.5”x8.5” perfect bound, paper
On behalf of
NeoPoiesis Press, I would like to express our great pleasure at being able to
publish this important little book. It
is indeed quite fitting that our first venture outside of the realm of poetry
and creative writing is a work that concerns itself with poetics and aesthetics,
with the creative process, with poiesis both new and old. Moreover, many have commented on the poetic
nature of Marshall McLuhan’s probes and commentary, and this work, co-authored
by Eric McLuhan, is no exception. . . .
as Buber indicates, there is a spiritual dimension to formal causality,
as there is to all acts of creation. But
for those who prefer a more scientific outlook, let me simply note that 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
biologists Humberto Maturana and Francisco Varela, and in general to the
systems concept of emergence.
McLuhan, along with other media ecology
scholars, has been accused of being a technological determinist. And while technological determinism has
largely been used as a straw man argument to dismiss McLuhan and others without
due consideration, the deterministic language of cause-and-effect is easy
enough to slip into, by force of habit, and for wont of easily accessible
alternatives. Thus, we may end up with statements like, the stirrup caused
feudalism as a shorthand, in the same way that we might say that evolution caused
us to walk erect. For media ecologists
and biologists alike, we understand that that kind of language is a form of
shorthand, and a kind of poetry, used to represent much more complex processes. That complexity can be better represented by
the concept of formal cause, rather than cause-and-effect (otherwise known as
efficient cause); formal cause is the causality of emergent properties, the
causality that media ecologists often have in mind when we consider the impact
of technological change on individuals and societies, on communication,
consciousness, and culture.
- Lance Strate, Fordham University, author of Echoes and Reflections: On Media Ecology as a
Field of Study
Reviews
No one understood causality, whether Aristotelian or
electric, like Marshall McLuhan. Now, in
Media and Formal Cause, no
one reveals understanding of formal
cause in the digital environment better than McLuhan’s protégé son, Eric. In the foreword, Lance Strate writes that M.
McLuhan’s Understanding Media
was one of the most important books of the 20th century. For anyone who wishes to understand how
things truly work, Media and Formal
Cause is one of the most important books of the 21st. Arguably formal cause has been the least
understood but and the most intellectually important of all of Aristotle’s four
agents or processes of causation. This small volume proffers a large understanding of this formative,
previously mysterious level of invisible creation. Three essays by Marshall (one with co-author
Barry Nevitt) and a powerful new essay by Eric give new meaning to ye olde cliché, “like father, like
son”. While reading writing that is
engaging, encyclopedic, and electric, we discover that formal cause is not what
you think... but it is vital to how you
think.
- Thomas Cooper, Professor of Visual and Media Arts, Emerson
College; author of Fast Media/Media Fast
In Media and Formal
Cause Eric McLuhan updates an important part of his father’s work that is
often overlooked, the quixotic role of causality in making sense of how new
media change the way we construct our environment and our communication. How does novelty cause antiquity? When do effects precede causes? Read on, and you shall find out.
- David Rothenberg, Professor of Philosophy and Music, New Jersey Institute
of Technology; author of Why Birds
Sing and Thousand Mile Song
Like his mentor, Gilbert Keith Chesterton, Marshall
McLuhan was often accused of indulging in mere paradox. But Media and Formal Cause demonstrates the
profound understanding that underlies the work of both Chesterton and McLuhan,
the understanding that we live in a paradoxical world. Both McLuhan and
Chesterton attempted to jar readers loose from what Cardinal Newman called
"paper logic" into a recognition of the total situation in which we
find ourselves. This very readable and accessible volume should greatly assist
new readers of McLuhan and remind long time students of just how challenging
and exhilarating his explorations were.
- Philip Marchand, author, Marshall McLuhan: The Medium and
the Messenger
This insightful book entices
the reader to engage the legacy of McLuhan.
The paradox of formal cause resonates with our post-literate
environment. The reader who truly wishes
to understand media will recognize the value of these essays.
- Catherine
Waite Phelan, Chair and Professor of Communication, Hamilton College; author of
Mediation and the Communication Matrix
This well-chosen
collection of essays is essential reading for anyone who wants to think
critically about how to understand the pervasive role of media in our
world. A provocative and highly
innovative perspective on modernity is provided by the use of the notion of
formal causation, while new light is also shed on the Aristotelian tradition in
which the notion was first developed.
This neglected conception of causality remains of profound importance
today. - Paul
Franks, Senator Jerahmiel S. and Carole S. Grafstein Chair in Jewish
Philosophy, University of Toronto
Questions about the nature of causality have puzzled
philosophers for a very long time. In
this collection of papers by and about Marshall McLuhan, we see how these
issues can gain new and wider relevance in today's media-focused age. The book illustrates and elucidates McLuhan's
thoughts on formal cause, a concept that he believed could help us to grasp the
complex relations between media and their effects. In addition to three of McLuhan's own
characteristically challenging papers, the associated commentary from Eric
McLuhan and Lance Strate help to clarify and contextualize these vital ideas
for scholars, artists, and anyone else interested in the fundamental issues of
human communication.
- Gerald
Erion, Professor of Philosophy, Medaille College
