reminder: McLuhan is not a “technological determinist”

Just this morning I was writing an abstract for an article on the role of boredom in Heidegger and clichés in McLuhan (a key ontological role in both cases). And I was reminded that it’s time to repeat my explanation of why McLuhan is not a technological determinist.

It’s easy to see why people say he is. After all, McLuhan’s key principle is that background medium is everything, conscious content is nothing. And this does seem to imply that all our thoughts and actions are the marionettes of some invisible deeper medium.

But there are two problems with this reading of McLuhan.

1. It is by no means impossible to understand the medium in which one is currently working, it’s simply difficult.

2. Even more importantly, it can’t be determinism given that the future course of events is completely indeterminate for McLuhan. To be a true technological determinist, in other words, McLuhan would have to hold that one medium leads to the next and that leads to the next and that leads to the next, by an inner logic of the media that lies beyond human control.

But to claim to find such a notion in McLuhan would be absurd. It’s not there. Rather, McLuhan thinks that the new medium will emerge from a reversal of the current one, usually through “overheating” (the process by which a medium begins to accumulate too much detail than can be processed).

And it must be remembered that the current medium is always multifaceted. There are several possible ways in which it can be reversed. What will the medium called “neoliberalism” reverse into, for instance? For McLuhan there would be several possible options, depending on which of its several qualities is the primary one to be reversed. It is not Being Itself that makes this decision, but human activity.

Keep in mind that McLuhan grants a pivotal role to artists as shapers of society. They are the ones who are able to turn the litter of dead clichés into new and living media (and they sometimes fail, of course).

What you could legitimately say about McLuhan’s conception of history are things like this:

1. History is not incremental, but made up of sudden reversals.

2. The surface content of human actions and utterances is less decisive than the background medium in which these occur.

Heidegger could certainly sign up for #2, and possibly for #1 (though I don’t really think so; I think of Heidegger as an incrementalist: Being is forgotten more and more as the history of philosophy moves forward).

But it is certainly Heidegger who is the more determinist of the two. There is a lot of passive waiting for the sending of Being in Heidegger, but none of that in McLuhan.