Few works will more thoroughly reinvigorate interest in the ideas
of Marshall MeLuhau and potentially reorient the way that people think
about the whole of his thought than the wonderful little book. Media and
Formed Cause. This slim collection of four previously published essays,
two by Marshall, one coauthored by Marshall and Barrington Nevitt with
responses by Joseph Owens and Frederick D. Wilhelmsen, and an
integrative summary piece by Marshall's collaborator, coauthor 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 an 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
and Nevitt write. "'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. p. 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 underway
and now are about to be intensified, accelerated, and extended.
If the Laws of Media (1988), coauthored by Marshall McLuhan and
Eric McLuhan, has yet to gain the sustained follow-up that it deserves,
this is perhaps because many people do not recognize 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 on-going historical
developments and contexts--many people still fail to grasp how his work
relies upon a notion of formal cause. Indeed, 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
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 a 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 an 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 which, basically, exists in the mind of the artist and of
audience members: Formal cause refers to ideas or expectations and
sensibilities which 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. p. 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
4wa 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 he 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 other three 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:
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. p. 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 a study also understands mind and
"reason" as partly sociohistorical 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 people are
eighteen 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; calendars indeed have become the formal cause of legal
adulthood. 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 dale 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 predate--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
nonverbal 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 for those who would grasp the
many radical changes currently underway in the culture. My only
criticism of the book regards its meager 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 and 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 media.
References
McLuhan. M. (1964). Understanding Media: Extensions of Man.
Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press.
McLuhan. M., & McLuhan. E. (1988). Laws of Media: The New
Science. Toronto: University of Toronto Press.
McLuhan. M., & McLuhan. E. (2011). Media and Formal Cause.
Houston. TX: NeoPoiesis Press.
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. pp. 75-91).