The McLuhans and metaphysics

Graham Harman

pp. 100-122

in: Jan K. Berg Olsen, Evan Selinger, Søren Riis (eds), New waves in philosophy of technology, Berlin, Springer, 2009

Abstract

In his 1988 preface to Laws of Media, Eric McLuhan calls the tetrad "the single biggest intellectual discovery not only of our time, but of at least the last couple of centuries' (pp. ix–x). He has not backed away from these claims in recent years, avowing that he "[does] not retract one iota of that statement about the importance of our laws'.¹ Yet there is an obvious disjunction between his devotion to the tetrads and the lack of intensity with which others have pursued them. His father's theories of technology reached their popular zenith during the 1960s, with a later resurgence during the Internet boom of the early 1990s. But in neither case did Marshall McLuhan attain a status in the intellectual canon befitting "the single biggest intellectual discovery of… at least the last couple of centuries'. Even McLuhan's fans rarely devote much energy to the tetrad, despite his son's gripping narrative of how the tetrad was meant to summarize his father's work as a whole.