Harman on McLuhan and “technological determinism”

I have always thought of Marshall McLuhan as a quintessential assemblage thinker. Reading McLuhan started me thinking of technology and media as something 'weird', almost alien - as something that abducts our biology and hooks it up to the non-human. Of course, this thought leads to thinking about humans as primal technologies in our own right, or as extended mediums hooked to cellular communities that can't 'perceive' the effects we have on their capacities, just as we humans fail to perceive the effects our technologic assemblages have on our community until the technology has already become obsolete. McLuhan brings that and more into the mix.

Below is Graham Harman riffing on the mistaken view that McLuhan was a "technological determinist". He wasn't. I'm excited to see/read what Harman and company do later this year, and next, with McLuhan's work. No doubt something strange this way comes.

"McLuhan’s chief idea is the overwhelming power of background conditions over any conscious surface content. The content of television shows is no more important than graffiti on an atomic bomb, and so forth. We see this idea not only in the signature phrase “the medium is the message,” but also his praise of rhetoric and grammar in the old Trivium over dialectic, as well as his greater interest in formal than in efficient causation.

However, unlike Heidegger (another thinker obsessed with the greater importance of the background than the surface), McLuhan is in no way an advocate of passive awaiting. While it is true that the background medium is all-important for McLuhan, he also thinks it is well within our power to change the background medium. For McLuhan unlike Heidegger, it’s not Being itself that sends epochs. It’s primarily artists, but ultimately anyone else who generates new media."

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