Over at Bogost’s place, Ian posts on Eric McLuhan’s response to Harman. Ian writes:
Harman points to Figure-Ground Communication’s interview with Eric McLuhan. It includes a question from Harman about Laws of Media, namely “why did they they [sic., restrict?] the tetrad to human artifacts?” Of course, this is also the question Levi and I will pose in our planned book on McLuhan.
McLuhan doesn’t really answer the question, from the very beginning seeming not to take it at face value (“Graham, you are putting the cart somewhat before the horse, in order to be provocative–as I know you are aware.”) But of course Graham’s question is completely earnest and straightforward.
I got the sense that Eric took Graham’s question as critical, striving to debunk the tetrad. In reality, Graham was doing precisely the opposite: he was trying to expand the tetrad beyond the realm of the human. This, of course, is precisely what Ian and I will argue for in The Pentad: McLuhan and Object-Oriented Ontology. What Eric and Marshall McLuhan propose under the title of media is not restricted to how artifacts extend humans, but is a general ontology that targets how any object extends another object. In this connection, I see no reason to restrict the Mcluhan’s concept of media to the linguistic, despite the fact that Eric appears to do so at the beginning of Laws of Media. If anything, they completely explode the boundaries of the linguistic, opening all objects to being treated as genuine actors and not mere vehicles of signifiers. This is not to suggest that we should reject the linguistic. Language is a medium as well. Yet it is one medium among an infinity of others.
August 7, 2010 at 4:05 pm
“I got the sense that Eric took Graham’s question as critical, striving to debunk the tetrad. In reality, Graham was doing precisely the opposite: he was trying to expand the tetrad beyond the realm of the human.”
It does sort of look like that out of context. But I’ve discussed this with Eric before, and he knows full well I’m an admirer of the tetrad. We’ve even loosely discussed creating a book of new tetrads together, but we’re both too busy.
What made Eric cringe, I think, is that I turned his own words against him (though I did it playfully). He comes right out and says the tetrad is one of the most important discoveries in many centuries. I retort: if so, then why not make it even *more* important by extending it to cover non-humans? But he’s heard me say this before. It wouldn’t have been a surprise (though perhaps he wasn’t aware than Laureano Ralon had invited me to post a guest question.)
August 7, 2010 at 4:42 pm
I can’t speak for Eric McLuhan, of course, but more generally: there’s something strangely confusing to people when they realize that folks like us are serious about our interest in non-human things. Saying “what about non-humans?” in philosophical conversation strikes many interlocutors in just the same way as would saying “I’m wearing frilly pink pony underpants.” Tim Morton’s got it right in comparing talk about new realism with “coming out” … it’s a strange and seemingly shameful position to many, which I suppose makes it one that is likely to change.
August 7, 2010 at 5:25 pm
I also think Tim Morton’s got it spot on with regards to “coming out” as a realist. Although coming from someone who is an arts practitioner and writes about artists and artworks; I find myself in the slightly odd position of noticing, what is taken to be as a retroactive step in suggesting the autonomy of non-human objects. I’m constantly told by other artist friends, that we have no need to look at artworks as independent things, since the last 40 or so years, artists create work to offer commentary on other things rather than be considered insular.
After all, what is the difference (if any) between an OOO object and an artwork? Art criticism (a la Greenberg / Fried), before the early 1960s, suggested that artworks were autonomous objects, (interestingly, they were heavily indebted to phenomenology) before conceptual relational systems came into play. This really was a specific time in mainstream art criticism, when an artwork was allowed to be an object, rather than a system, image or idea.
August 7, 2010 at 5:57 pm
[…] Bryant y Bogost escriben al […]