a bit more on the tetrad

Earlier this afternoon I was reading a draft article by Ian Bogost that uses the McLuhan “tetrad” to analyze Facebook. It reminded me (though I seldom need reminding about this point) of just how interesting, useful, important, and fun the tetrad is. I’m not sure why I haven’t used it as a classroom teaching technique, because it is so well-suited, pedagogically, to get students thinking about the unseen dimensions of any medium or any intellectual breakthrough.

I went back to Eric McLuhan’s preface to Laws of Media, written impishly on “8.8.88”. The story behind the book has never left my memory banks since I first read the book in 1993, but it’s always a pleasure to reread.

The project was begun shortly before Marshall McLuhan’s stroke, followed by his death a year or so later. Initially, he was supposed to be preparing a new edition of Understanding Media, the 1960’s classic that made him a pop culture icon. His leading idea was to make the study of media into a “science,” and while pondering how to do so he reflected on Popper’s familiar principle that scientific statements must be falsifiable statements.

“What sorts of statements,” Marshall and Eric asked themselves, “can be made or falsified about any medium?” And by this they meant any human-produced artifact at all. They expected to find a dozen or more such statements.

Enhancement and obsolescence were the two that came immediately to mind. Any medium is an extension of some existing medium, and to enhance something always means “closure” or obsolescence for anything else. (Only a few years ago, when writing the first of my two articles on the tetrad, did I fully realize that to enhance something paradoxically means to make it less visible, and to obsolesce something makes it more visible. I had instinctively assumed the opposite on my first readings of the book, without ever stating it as a proposition.)

“A few hours later,” said Eric, they added “reversal” or “flip” to the list. Any medium, when overheated by excessive information, will eventually flip into its opposite.

He then says it took about three weeks for the fourth media law to appear: retrieval. Any medium contains a former medium as its content. We pay attention to that content, ignorant of the effects of the deeper medium that is actually shaping our perception. For instance, criticizing or enjoying the content of a television program overlooks the revolutionary effects of the television medium itself. “The medium is the message.” The resonance with Heidegger here should be obvious.

After that, Eric says, they found no others. They were unable to find a fifth media law, and were eventually convinced that it had to be only these four. This led to a very elegant schematic representation of these four, with beautiful equal ratios between each of the four zones.

They found further that tetrads came in several groupings. Some were synchronic chains, where media would successively reverse into new ones ad infinitum. Others were clusters, with one central tetrad reversing into or retrieving multiple others, all of them dependent on the central one. Still others were loops, where a small handful of tetrads would reverse into each other in a circle, leading eventually back to the original starting point. This “topological” aspect of the book is mentioned only in a few brief passages, and neither I (nor others, as far as I know) have made enough of this idea.

Another aspect to Eric’s preface is his extremely bold claim that the tetrad “is the most important intellectual discovery of at least the last few centuries.” It remains extremely bold even if we exclude the natural sciences and pit McLuhan only against the likes of Kant and Freud, and for many people Marx, not to mention other names that are slipping my mind at the moment.

However, I have a different reaction to these sorts of statements than many people do. For instance, when Badiou made his infamous claim in the foreword to the English version of Being and Event that he knew it was a great work of philosophy that would be studied throughout the centuries, many people found this to be in very bad taste.

My reaction to it was different. The usual assumption is that boasting is bad, and a certain degree of genteel modesty in intellectual work is more pleasant and tolerable. But while I would agree with this as a general everyday rule, I think the rule should be suspended for people who have something to lose by saying it.

In other words, boasts are very common in locker rooms and among fishermen. But they are surprisingly rare among the top thinkers of any era. It’s not uncommon to meet cranks who have a weird system that supposedly explains the entire universe, but these are generally marginal people not taken seriously by anyone. Moving away from wild cranks toward competent academic professionals, boasts to have made world-historic discoveries are of course highly rare, since they would amount to career and social suicide due to their immediate appearance of ridiculousness. If you apply for a job with a cover letter saying “I am surely the greatest philosopher of the past fifty years,” you will have exactly zero chance of getting the job, and will also guarantee being mocked behind your back for years to come. No one would do such a thing even if they were secretly that arrogant.

But the case is a bit different, I think, when we’re talking about someone like Badiou. He’s reached a level where he is guaranteed at least a minor place in the history of 20th century philosophy. He has international fame and respect, and though he may have enemies and detractors, so does everyone of that stature. The safe option would be for Badiou simply to refrain from ranking himself among the greats, and hope that history will view him as kindly as he wishes. But for someone of his prominence to say “this book belongs among the great works of all ages” is extremely risky. I see it less as a moment of bad taste than as pedagogical moment: “the principles in this book are so important that I invite you to read the book, take what I am saying very seriously, and see if you don’t agree that I’ve laid down a new path for the near future of philosophy.” And I see that as taking courage– for someone of Badiou’s already prominent international stature. Obviously it would be quite annoying coming form a third-year undergraduate, because then it would just sound like youthful cockiness and a failure to study past models with sufficient seriousness.

In other words… Badiou doesn’t need to claim to have written a great book of philosophy in order to gain international attention. He already has that attention. And if 100 years from now he looks like a less major figure than he hopes to be, historians are going to have a field day ridiculing that passage from his preface. That’s why I admire his gamble rather than finding it offensive. He’s put a lot of pressure on himself now, and on his reputation later.

But I find that it focuses the mind of the reader very nicely. When Badiou claims to have written a great work of philosophy, it invites me as a reader to try one of my “hyperbolic” thought experiments… Imagine that Being and Event really is one of the greatest works of philosophy ever written. What would have to change about our conception of the history of philosophy? And how would we still feel limited or even imprisoned by his way of thinking? Can we submit the book to such a test without bursting into laughter? Yes, I think. You might laugh if a crank on the web claims to have written a world-historic masterpiece, but Badiou has enough stature that you probably won’t laugh out loud, even if you disagree. (And I must say, I do disagree. But I’ve never laughed at that passage. It’s worth taking seriously.)

That was a long detour through Badiou to get to Eric McLuhan’s statement. He’s the co-author of the book, and the guardian of his father’s legacy, and to that extent it is pretty risky for him to claim to be the co-discoverer of the most important idea of “at least the past couple of centuries.” And many readers will disagree. But the important thing is that it focuses your mind as a reader very nicely… Is it really possible that the tetradic structure of media is as important as that? If so, then what intellectual revolutions still lie ahead?

It also raises questions such as: assuming that the McLuhan tetrad really is such a precious jewel as Eric claims, then why is it barely on anyone’s radar at the moment? Is there some distinctive blindness of the age that prevents the tetrad from becoming one of the major philosophemes of our time?

Of course, you could always conclude that he’s just blowing smoke, like a drunken fisherman down at the wharf, telling tales of a non-existent gigantic swordfish that he almost caught. But I think there’s a lot more to it than that; I think the swordfish might really be there.