1 Mediated Objectivity: Marshall McLuhan as Philosopher of Fiction Abstract: This paper explores what ontological repercussions can be brought to bear on McLuhan’s long-evolving media concept in light of some contemporary continental theories concerning the reality-fiction divide. While McLuhan’s message has resonated with many since the publication of Understanding Media (1964), some recent criticism has challenged this tradition by suggesting that McLuhan’s concept of ‘media as metaphor’ rests on a pluralistic ontology of media forms. In my view, the creative interplay between figure and ground that marks mediums as sites of causal events blurs without effacing the distinction between actuality and possibility, and suggests that the constant extension and remediation of media forms that emerge from consciousness plays an active role in perceptual awareness of objective reality. I argue that this alternative approach to media ontology rehabilitates Aristotle’s formal cause by extending the concept to include a form of poiesis, understood as the calling forth into being of something that did not exist before. Unlike seventeenth and eighteenth century notions of medium as connecting milieu or middle space through which sense perceptions find footing in the ‘out there’ of objective reality, McLuhan’s media redraw these lines by signaling that media forms achieve a fictional status through an inexhaustible process of mediation as interpretation. It is in this sense that I read McLuhan as a thinker of the new and a philosopher of fiction. Here, I follow one of the more exciting and under-explored consequences of McLuhan’s grounding of media as metaphor — the (not so) sudden compatibility of media ecology with the claim that fictional objects are real. Canadian philosopher and cornerstone of media theory, Marshall McLuhan preaches that mediums are diverse environments that translate knowledge into new forms, and that all media are active metaphors in this sense (Understanding Media 64). Sometimes difficult to separate the jocular from the explicit, explosive claims like these from McLuhan’s 1964 watershed book Understanding Media: The Extensions of Man have become the subject of innumerable pages of interpretation. McLuhan’s idiosyncratic style of writing no doubt helps his claims to resist the tendency of once pliant ideas from becoming ossified in critical traditions, but despite the continuing resonance of McLuhan’s media message, it is curious that what I take as his most explosive claim, i.e. media as metaphor, has seemingly failed to ignite the level of intensity in others as it did for both himself and his later collaborator and son, Eric McLuhan. In the preface to Laws of Media (1988), Eric McLuhan refers to his father’s “discovery” of the metaphoric nature of media atop the greatest intellectual feats in recent centuries, an idea which has been 2 slow to gain traction in the three decades since (ix). While I am not ready to follow Eric McLuhan to such high peaks, my purpose here is to give him a fair shake. It seems foolish to dismiss apparently immodest comments on the grounds of an offended sensibility, and all the more exciting to question why and what apparently taken-for-granted assumptions they might ruffle in the first place. Eric McLuahn’s claims urge us to acknowledge the potentially radical ontological repercussions of McLuhan’s media theory, and to take up an inquiry into what power these metaphors garner their translating powers. This task will be guided by a philosophical tradition to which the McLuhans only allude, but one that suggests that the formal structure of media bear the marks of a pluralistic ontology. To be clear, I will not argue that McLuhan’s theories erase all distinctions between fiction and reality. Differences here will still be made, but by bringing to light the fictionality, i.e. the interpretation-dependence of McLuhan’s media concept, I make the case that McLuhan deserves consideration by those who aim to “turn the mainstream of contemporary philosophy of art on its head (Gabriel 28, 8).” It is on this point that I wish to breathe some life into Eric McLuhan’s lofty claim, and I will hereafter strive to interpret Marshall McLuhan as a thinker of the new and a philosopher of fiction. It is easier to see the grounds for this project after contextualizing Marshall McLuhan within a tradition of philosophies of causation. While it is not uncommon for McLuhan to be read as an Aristotlean or Christian medievalist, fewer have attempted to link McLuhan’s theories of causation with the relatively recent philosophical world of the nineteenth century. Though the McLuhans disparagingly refer to it as the century of the dialections, I will begin there, antichronologically, and then work backwards in an effort to read McLuhan’s relationship to Aristotle’s formal cause in light of some insights developed in that tradition. This current in McLuhan’s opus has been revived in recent years, as thinkers in a variety of fields have found 3 significance, one way or another, in the creative interplay between figure and ground that formal cause evokes. Setting out to explore the mechanisms in media that account for their plasticity, I claim that formal cause, understood as the shadow cast before the coming event, introduces a fictive element to media forms by way of a latent interpretation-dependence at the center of media ontology, a condition constitutive to the nature of media and realized through mediation. Such a reading presents additional tasks. For one, we are encouraged to reconsider the role that media as metaphor plays in how we understand the world, and what repercussions can be brought to bear on our notion of objective reality if we come to experience it primarily through ceaseless remediation of fictions. On this point, I will briefly turn to how Nietzsche depicts this activity as primarily poetic to claim that McLuhan’s media — elastic and supremely adapted to accommodate change — overcome the dangers of Nietzsche’s perspectivism by depicting that the creative interplay between figure and ground that McLuhan describes marks mediums as sites of causal events that blur without effacing the distinction between actuality and possibility. When considered alongside McLuhan’s central claim that ‘media is consciousness extended,’ this consortium of ideas presents new questions for a wide range of disciplines. Following recent writings on the role that formal cause plays on structuring our relation to reality, an additional question I will be concerned with is that if a medium can be thought of as a location of a causal event, how can we understand the role played by poiesis, understood as the calling forth into being of something that did not exist before, within the workshop of creation that is formal cause. Though it may seem sacrilege at first to pair the ‘Godless’ with the devote, Nietzsche figures as an invisible ground throughout McLuhan’s writing. It is possible that readers tuned-in to McLuhan’s philosophical lineage be may be able to pick up his influence in the many 4 comments concerning the metaphoric nature of media, but even Eric McLuhan dismisses any serious compatibility between Nietzsche and his father (Formal Cause, Poiesis, Rhetoric 453). His distancing of Nietzsche is all the more puzzling given that Eric McLuhan is largely responsible for reinvigorating interest in formal cause throughout their collaborative work. However, despite significant differences elsewhere, when Eric claims that the cosmic universe is a “verbal structure,” both he and his father find a partner in Nietzsche (Media and Formal Cause 109). One needn't go further for comparisons than the brief but astonishing paper, “On Truth and Lies in a Nonmoral Sense,” in which Nietzsche lays out his case for the universal relevance of philology. Forging bonds between the verbal structure of consciousness and the structure of reality itself, there he describes how differentiated perceptions arise from the chaos of sensation as “a moveable host of metaphors… which have been poetically and rhetorically intensified, transferred (Nietzsche 84).” In my view Nietzsche’s perceptual processes involves the senses receiving and translating “stimuli and, as it were, engaging in a groping game on the backs of things” to create formally resonate representations that reunite with reality in creative and unpredictable ways. His cosmic universe is therefore an aesthetic phenomenon realized in human thought and therefore not utterly incompatible with the forms in which it is realized, though it remains a skill of the artistically in-formed to sense the metal beneath the shine of the coin (84). Nietzsche’s cognitive metaphors mediate our experiences of that universe and operate within reality as McLuhan’s action within the gap of input and output — “the output of any process, biological or psychic, always differs qualitatively from the input (Media and Formal Cause 41).” For McLuhan, this lacuna functions so that we “‘keep[] in touch’ with ‘where the action is.’ When the ‘play’ between the wheel and the axle ends, so does the wheel. (42).” 5 My purposes in laying this brief outline of Nietzsche’s early essay is to assert a connection between his and McLuhan’s idea of a rhetorical relation between thought and reality, and in this way I follow Peter Zhang in dubbing Nietzsche a McLuhanist, anachronisms aside (Formal Cause, Poiesis, Rhetoric 453). It is remarkable how reading McLuhan captures the Nietzschean drive to endow metaphor with creative powers that, in the former’s words, “transform meaning by translating one form of being into another (Media and Formal Cause 48).” Elsewhere McLuhan echoes this drive toward metaphor creation by writing that the “discontinuous and resonate” rhetorical form of metaphor plays off an “apposition of double figure and ground,” and can only be felt by the side-effects it generates (Laws of Media 223).” While McLuhan sees these patterns of perception “metamorphose” to serve as “guides to insight and comprehension through re-cognition of the dynamic structures that occur in all process,” Nietzsche understands that “the artistic process of metaphor formation with which every sensation begins in us already presupposes these forms and thus occurs within them (Media and Formal Cause 57, Nietzsche 88).” As if in harmony, these quotes describe how for both what we perceive is able to hover over the reality presented to us on the backs of the very forms through which perception translates that reality. For McLuhan, then, as for Nietzsche, truth is form, and the form is the message. Media ecologist Lance Strate has recently argued for a parallel between the process of perception and a new understanding of formal cause “insofar as [in perception] we impose order on an otherwise chaotic environment (48).” He follows McLuhan toward a view of formal cause as representing “information… the active principle behind form (49).” For Strate, the tendency of phenomena to “drift” into a process of pattern recognition should direct our attention to the “structural coupling between the sensory organs of the nervous system and external reality (48).” 6 Like Nietzsche, his analysis draws focus to the structural similarity of the forms that appear within the mental structures that constitute thought and the extended media that bear their mark, drawing on Marshall McLuhan’s idea of formal cause as an “anti-environment” of “unperceived and pervasive pattern (Media and Formal Cause 11).” Elsewhere, Graham Harman, who has created an object-oriented philosophy in part from McLuhan’s media theory, has called pattern recognition “the natural response to information overload,” and describes its role as that of a “background chord” of a complex score (Heidegger, McLuhan and Schumacher on Form and Its Aliens 7). Harman relentlessly champions form, and follows McLuhan’s idea of the interplay between figure and ground in media’s reversal and retrieval toward an objective turn in formal causation (6). Despite their different projects, both Strate and Harman rally McLuhan’s ideas to unite the formal connections between thought and reality, and I take it that both their points of entry into McLuhanism are mediated by a pervasive ‘anti-environmental’ grounding in Nietzsche (Media and Formal Cause 11). Both pattern recognition and metaphor formation rely on an already operative level of iconicity within thought processes as they carry across structures between domains (Nietzsche 83). And as Corey Anton remind us, formal cause is the undergarment of all metaphor (Taking Up McLuhan 48). Interestingly, Nietzsche is not the only nineteenth century German thinker who exhibits strong similarities to Marshall McLuhan’s concept of media. A close contemporary of Nietzsche, Hans Vaihinger’s philosophy follows this aesthetic turn in epistemology toward a reading of metaphor as an “indispensable fiction” constitutive of all mediums in which sense perceptions find their footing in the ‘out there’ of reality (Vaihinger 29). Vaihinger is not read widely in American universities today, but he continues to figure as a figure in contemporary continental philosophers of such fields as speculative realism, new materialism, and new realism. His 7 panfictionalist approach prefigures postmodern and deconstructive approaches to phenomena, and for those concerned with the rampant spread of relativism across the humanities and beyond, Vaihinger may at first seem like an old enemy reanimated in an even older guise. This is not my concern here. Rather, I am most interested in the areas of overlap between Vaihinger’s approach to causation and Marshall McLuhan’s primacy of form. In The Philosophy of ‘As if’ (1911) Vaihiner calls for recognition of the fundamentally fictive elements of perceptual processes that produce the “whole world... as effect (75).” Though he refrains from differentiating between Aristotle’s tetrad when speaking of causality, it follows from his account of the relationship between thought, analogy, and reality that his ideas here are purely formal. He writes that “causality is a cognitive metaphor,” and, thusly situated in the “imaginative faculty” of thought, it sets out to create order from the mass of sensation that bombard it from all sides (344). Vaihinger describes this cause as “mythical,” similar to how many McLuhan commentators have come to describe the way in which formal cause operates “as a prior effect in myth (Taking Up McLuhan 74).” Even the metaphor he uses to describe his theory of pattern recognition is apt. Using the image of a shell to describe the formal features of a container, he calls to mind the presence of an aural diaphony of subaquatic sound within the golden ratio of a spiral that keeps it in perpetual motion (Vaihinger 37). I’m not aware if Marshall Mcluhan ever read Vaihinger, but it seems fair to assume that he would have admired his stylistic choice here to depict how the form of thought “preserves and holds together the essential content” so as to “repeat the essential facts elsewhere” in analogical likeness (ibid). Further, when he writes that “all cognition is the apperception of one thing through another,” Vaihinger draws attention to the medium through which we experience the world, and in what can read like a definition of McLuhan's media as consciousness extended, he even imagines that 8 “thought creates an object to which it attaches its own sensation as attributes (29, 169).” If nothing else, Vaihinger presents additional evidence that McLuhanism drinks from what has long been considered in media ecology a foreign well. Thus far I have tried to show how Marshall McLuhan privileges metaphor as the primary form of media. Now I wish to go a step further and suggest that when McLuhan locates the sites of formal change within mediums themselves he signals toward the autonomous power of creativity at work within media formation (Gabriel 8, 20). I take seriously the idea that, like with Nietzsche, McLuhan’s reverence to the artist derives from his appreciation for how artworks can achieve a malleability over figure and ground, form and content, and following Markus Gabriel’s forthcoming work on art’s “radical autonomy,” taking their ideas together helps us to move closer to a definition of media that captures the fictive nature of formal cause that is manifested in mediation. Said another way, if we are committed to unraveling the mysteries of formal cause, McLuhan consistently points us toward what Lance Strate has called “the act and art of creation (Taking Up McLuhan 48).” It is therefore reasonable to suggest that Nietzsche and McLuhan inhabit the same philosophical universe since they both equate terms like truth, reality, and objectivity to a rotating pattern of forms that become hardened in perceptual processes wherein “‘new things’ come to be regarded as ‘facts (Media and Formal Cause 50).’” Despite the parody already established, there is perhaps no more striking point of overlap between this philosophical odd-couple than their use of the term ‘perspective.’ While McLuhan often uses the term when referring to the warping affect the typographic medium has inflicted on perspectival perception, he never loses touch with the objects of thought, and reminds us that a perspective must be on something for the grammar of the term to work. In other words, perspectives cannot be perspectives on, well, perspectives! In a brilliant two-segment study of 9 philosophies of perspectives, James Conant of the University of Chicago has described the danger of reducing objective reality to a perspective on itself as fourth-stage perspectivism, i.e. a view of reality such that the only truths available about the world are “never really independent, but consist in nothing more than our possible perspectives themselves and nothing beyond these (Dialectics of Perspectivism I 33).” From such a standpoint, any notion of objectivity will fall flat, at best becoming a barely thinkable X beyond the horizon. At its worst, the relation between reality and perspective breaks down completely. In McLuhanese, perspective used in this way becomes a concept divorced from its ground; a free floating figure moored to nothing. Were he alive, the historically minded McLuhan would applaud Conant’s attention to detail in his account of how the concept of a perspective evolved throughout the Renaissance and into the seventeenth century. He begins his study by following the same historical tracks as McLuhan does in Understanding Media, writing that the term began as an affect generated by painters who were able to manipulate their ground into achieving visual depth on a flat surface, thus creating the illusion of an individualized line of sight that recedes into a vanishing point or unreachable plane (13). McLuhan portrays this extension of the visual faculty as one of the preceding effects of the yet-to-be-realized medium of print that “intensified perspectives and the fixed point of view,” implying that the effect of the Renaissance extension of perspective functions as the formal cause of the “linearity, precision, and uniformity of the arrangement of moveable type (Understanding Media 157).” But Conant’s analysis explains that the term gradually grew to include more features outside of this original context (Dialectics of Perspectivism I 13). One such extension came to describe the visual difference of viewing objects, say a coin, as a straight line from one ‘perspective’ and round from another. He describes this shift in meaning as a jump “from using the term as the name of 10 the technique of pictorial representation, to using it as a term for that which such a technique seeks to represent (14).” The difference can be demonstrated by the gap between the affect of depth created by a painter on a flat surface and the varied lines of sight of a particular object presented on that medium afforded by that depth. What is lost in fourth-stage perspectivism is this idea of there being “a same thing, underlying and underwriting transitions between perspectives (34).” Once this happens, the term “struggles to retain this following logical feature of the original concept: perspectives are perspectives on something, so that the same thing can appear differently depending on the perspective (32).” What is most relevant here is that when McLuhan writes that “scientific objectivity… is an optical illusion of truth,” he does so in the hopes of overcoming what he calls the “illusion of perspective,” here perspective being used in Conant’s extended sense (Media and Formal Cause 54, Understanding Media 157). While it is true that McLuhan seeks to overcome this constraint and heralds the multimodal and multisensory ‘return’ to electric / aural depth and sensory immediacy, it is this remediated ‘return’ to the electric — “the future of the future is the present” — that demonstrates the creative role of formal cause by embracing the dormant pluralism inherent to both Conant’s extended definition of perspective, and the internal structures of media which they describe (Media and Formal Cause 56). The formal relation of perception is precisely what characterizes the formal structure of McLuhan’s media, and captures the formal mechanisms of (re)mediation as interpretation. Eric McLuhan has called formal cause the coming shadow of a new ground retrieved from the past, as, for example, the remediation of print to electronic forms of media retrieves the sense-orientation made possible by an older medium (orality) to forecast events in the future (Media and Formal Cause 87). McLuhan’s media are therefore able to escape Conant’s bind of 11 fourth-stage perspectivism by accounting for the essential interpretability coded into media ontology. Media are always perspectives on something because, as McLuhan preeches, “the content of any medium is always another medium (Understanding Media 23).” It is on this point that the fictional elements of media begin to come into view, for while to shift between grounds is to play a catachrestic game of grabbing hold and letting go, one must remain tethered to a form that introduces and accommodates change in order for the game to unfold. Media are fictional in such that they allow us to hover over our various and discontinuous intuitions by providing us with indefinitely many perspectives or interpretations of our own perceptions and indefinitely many grounds in which to find footing (Gabriel 18). In this way, media exhibit an openness which is not exhausted until the last analysis, or, better to say, until the last interpretation of any particular media form (21). McLuhan’s media shows us that the boundary between our mental lives and the ‘out there’ reality is a false one. Reminding ourselves of McLuhan’s claim that media are the senses extended, media open themselves up to inevitable remediation by interpretation in a creative interplay between form and content, figure and ground, audience and poet, working backwards from a rhetorical viewpoint of effect as cause. Peter Zhang, for instance, describes this process as “the medium [being] ‘put on’ by its users in order that they may experience some alteration and extensions of their own perceptions and powers (Formal Cause, Poiesis, Rhetoric 448).” We can be in touch with these media just as easily as we can be in touch with (or out of touch with) ourselves, and contrary to Graham Harman’s withdrawn and impenetrable media ‘objects’ whose “true inwardness….[lies] beyond all description,” McLuhan’s media are both brutally open and, significantly, interpretable, due to the prism like qualities of media, again following Zhang, “puts on the reader’s sensibility (Object Oriented Ontology 70, Formal Cause, Poiesis, Rhetoric 448, Gabriel 12). Media are therefore ‘really 12 existing fictions,’ to borrow the form of a dead catchphrase, and this is why McLuhan warns against errently presupposing a possible reality represented in thought that remains unknowable in actuality. Conant has convincingly argued that Nietzsche is also able to escape the bind of fourthstage perspectivism by a sort of McLuhanesque mediation between subjective and objective experience. He writes that Nietzsche's perspectivism refuses to take for granted “that what is subjective in the sense of involving operations of subjectivity is not objective, and thus that objective knowledge… must be couched solely in terms of properties whose nature in no way depends on how they affect the subject (Subjective Thought 250).” Reality comes into view via an “encounter whose very possibility depends upon human forms of subjectivity (Dialectics of Perspectivism II 38).” In this way, Conant explains “objectivity is no longer identified with the wholesale transcendence of all that is perspectival in our view of reality,” and by grafting the subjective standpoint from which humans gather information about the world onto his account of reality as such, it can be argued that Nietzsche’s metaphors engage in a similar tactic as does McLuhan’s mediation (Subjective Thought 252). Conant’s diligent study surveys the entirety of Nietzsche’s oeuvre and traces this development in his thinking from his youthful “On Truth and Lie in a Nonmoral Sense” to The Genealogy of Morals (1887) published a decade later. In that work, Nietzsche defines objectivity as “the ability to know how to employ a variety of perspectives and affective interpretations in the service of knowledge (Nietzsche qtd. in Subjective Thought 251, italics mine).” He continues, writing that “the more eyes, different eyes, we can use to observe one thing, the more complete will our ‘concept’ of this thing, our ‘objectivity’ be (Nietzsche qtd. in Dialectics of Perspectivism II 48).” Like with McLuhan, we can only break free from a false presumption of an objectivity to which we are denied a role in 13 shaping by becoming aware that the constant remediation of figure and ground is a causal change that dictates how we respond to media and even that we can respond at all. As McLuhan drly puts it, “the ‘subjectivist’ puts on the world as his own clothes, the ‘objectivist’ supposes that he can stand naked ‘out of this world’ (Media and Formal Cause 40).” The views developed regarding how media attain their fictional status might be called mediated-objectivity because media as the senses extended function as intermediaries between ourselves and the objects we perceive. It turns on a conception of subjectivity that invites its metaphorical identification with perspective in a way that does not preclude this feature of our experience from being simultaneously subjective and objective. Media are fictions, that is, they are interpretation-dependent, because they constitute the impossibly many forms of perceptions we can experience within them; “they stand in need of an interpretation to exist (Gabriel 28, 21).” Understanding media in this way enables us to describe media as supreme second-orderrelations, perceptual relations to perceptual relations (18). Media are interpretable because they repeatedly actualize the potentiality of a particular form through the involuntary mediation that unfolds in the moment of its interpretation, a process which unceasingly enfolds in the experience of its self-manifested reality (39). This artistic process might function as the formal cause of, at least, McLuhan’s media because when figure and ground constantly meld into each other in this way, they speak to a plasticity at the center of media ontology capable of nurturing the inexorable bond between the essence of a form and the inexhaustible amount of interpretations as remediations that form affords. The McLuhans’ tetrad theory of media’s enhancement, obsolescence, retrieval, and reversal explains their process of remediation, but ironically misses a significant point (Laws of Media 224). When Eric McLuhan writes that “the audience, as ground, shapes and controls the 14 work of art,” the aesthetic artefact in question should not be limited to the artist’s score or text, or even the medium in which it is realized. Though he elevates his findings to rare intellectual air, Eric McLuhan fails to consider that the ‘work of art’ is not realized until the totality of readings, interpretations, and remediations of a medium and the media forms it carries and translates are realized (Gabriel 20). The remediation of form, say, from a printed page of Emma to a coded digitized interface of that same page on ProjectGutenberg already invites a complex process of interpretation (of font choice size and color, text layout and design) that allow us to “perceive our perception” of Emma and experience it in unpredictable ways (Gabriel 18). It is in this way that remediation and interpretation are always already active elements of media’s formal structure. Like the scores, paintings, and texts they accommodate, media open themselves up to interpretation as remediation. The fiction-games begin well before the first chapters do. Understood this way, the artistic process of creation behind a single fictional artefact is either infinite, or destined to be extinguished in the memory of the final audience (31). The ontology of ‘the book’ is therefore no less exhaustible than the hermeneutics of Madame Bovary because each new remediation (ebooks of Madame Bovary, audiobooks of Madame Bovary, comic books of Madame Bovary, etc.) constitutes new interpretations that present new ways of thinking about media forms as metaphors that each introduce inevitable degrees of divergence from each other in the fictional ecosystem of Madame Bovary. When John Durham Peters speaks of media as “containers of possibilities” that are “both natural and cultural,” he comes close to capturing the idea I have in mind here of media as elements in the fictional environments for which they often serve as vessels (Peters 2, 3). Whereas he correlates “the background to all possible meanings” with an idea of the anti-environmental effects of nature in the digitized present, I draw the line from the ground of all possible meanings to the anti-environmental effects of interpretability, or 15 what I see as meaning’s formal cause — its potential to be translated ad infinitum into new forms of itself, or, put another way, its potential to become fictionalized (2). This process does not produce mere representation of things as copies because mimesis is unable to accommodate for the creation of the other within media, the change inherent to mediation. It is also difficult to definitely pair this process with a form’s logos, understood as Eric McLuhan does as media’s defining structure, because the persistent possibility of remediation seems to defer the formal moment of completion and instead highlights the formal moments of change and movement that constitute their structure (Media and Formal Cause 95113). The circle is never closed, per say, but adopts a more concentric form. It is my hope that we can now understand Lance Strate’s ‘act and art of creation’ to which formal cause perpetually leans as a comment on formal causes’ stickiness to poiesis, the artistic activity of creation that can be understood as the very substratum of formal cause. Though I may read more of an artistic element to formal cause than Eric McLuhan, I follow him closely when he says formal cause is “coercive, not passive. It makes the thing. It, as it were, shoves it into being, and makes it be thus (113). Argentinian philosopher Laureano Ralón has recently argued that Marshall McLuhan possessed “enough imagination to invent a certain future: not as a determinable dimension, a logically objective space, but as an open horizon of potentialities to be called into being (303).” Though not developed explicitly, his view speaks to the elements of fictionality that I have argued are present in McLuhan’s theories by calling back to a more fundamental claim from Aristotle’s Poetics that poiesis should command philosophical attention (1451b). When Ralón writes that McLuhan sees the coming of the future as a process that involves “mobilizing a contingent set of components, both material and expressive,” he distances McLuhan from a 16 future of “empty possibility” that remains beyond the horizon of human actuality, and instead reads him as building a general orientation “towards the new guided by formal concepts (304).” He takes this to mean that McLuhan’s future can be read as a set of “predelineated virtualities waiting to be actualized (ibid).” I highlight his reading in my closing comments because they help clarify the potentially radical consequences of the McLuhans’ media theory that Eric McLuhan heralds in the preface to Laws of Media. Ralón and others part of contemporary philosophy of art have worked to bridge the gap between the sciences and the humanities by using a similar idea to Conant’s subjective mediation of objectivity, and his essay works to highlight some areas of overlap between these views and the later McLuhan’s media concept. Ralón, like Harman, recognizes the relevance of Marshall McLuhan’s ideas to such projects, and has attempted to translate his ideas into “a disposition founded on the real [that] amounts to a comportment towards things that is fueled by the creative advance of contingent responses to the challenges of the environment and its affordances (306).” His idea of affordance bears some similarities to the kind of fictional, interpretation-dependence developed here and elsewhere, but his goal ultimately exceeds the boundaries of this paper. He writes in the hopes of expressing McLuhan’s paradigmatic transition from a global village into a global theatre because he believes “the move suggests a much more radical turn form a philosophy of identity to a philosophy of multiplicities founded upon a nonheirhcical ontology (From Cliche to Archetype 12, Ralón 307).” I might follow Ralón in suggesting that McLuhan’s performative turn in From Cliche to Archetype is indicative of the performative nature of their fictional composition — “interpretations are in each case instances of performances, as such as the stagings of a play (Gabriel 21).” 17 Though not what I suspect Eric McLuhan had in mind when attesting to Marshall McLuhan’s relevance to intellectual history, projects like Ralón’s might give a larger credence to the McLuhans’ ‘discovery’ of the metaphoric nature of media. Whether or not it reaches the peaks of the greatest intellectual discovery in recent centuries is not a serious concern here, but it is my hope that media as metaphor, i.e. media as interpretation-dependent, can be taken together with other projects across both the sciences and the humanities that seek to entrenched Marshall McLuhan’s relevance to a wide range of contemporary continental thought. The fictive elements of media ontology are but another way of demonstrating the extreme malleability of McLuhan’s media. 18 Works Cited Anton, Corey, et al., editors. Taking Up McLuhan: Perspectives on Media and Formal Causality. The University of Chicago Press, 2017. Aristotle. Poetics. Translated by Malcolm Heath, Penguin Classics, 1997. Conant, James. “The Dialectics of Perspectivism, I.” SATS - Nordic Journal of Philosophy, vol. 6, no. 2, 2005, pp. 5-50. Conant, James. “The Dialectics of Perspectivism, II” SATS - Nordic Journal of Philosophy, vol. 7, no. 1, 2006, pp. 6-57. Conant, James. "Subjective Thought," Cahiers Parisiens. Parisian Notebooks, vol. 3, 2007, pp. 234–58. Gabriel, Markus. The Power of Art. Forthcoming. Harman, Graham. “Heidegger, McLuhan and Schumacher on Form and Its Aliens.” Theory, Culture and Society, vol. 33. no. 6, 2016, pp. 99-105. Harman, Graham. Object Oriented Ontology: A New Theory of Everything. Pelican Books, 2018. Harman, Graham. “The Mcluhans and Metaphysics.” New Waves in Philosophy of Technology, edited by Jan Kyree Berg Olsen, Evan Selinger and Soren Riis, Palgrave Macmillan, 2009, pp. 100-122. McLuhan, Eric, and Marshall McLuhan. Laws of Media: The New Science. Toronto, University of Toronto Press, 1988. McLuhan, Eric, and Marshall McLuhan. Media and Formal Cause. Houston, NeoPoiesis Press, 2011. McLuhan, Eric, and Peter Zhang. "Formal Cause, Poiesis, Rhetoric: A Dialogue: A review of general semantics." Et Cetera, vol. 69, no. 4, 2012, pp. 441-458. 19 McLuhan, Marshall. Understanding Media: The Extension of Man. New York, The New American Library, Inc, 1964. McLuhan, Marshall, and Wilfred Watson. From Cliche to Archetype. New York, The Viking Press, 1970. Nietzsche, Friedrich. Philosophy and Truth: Selections from Nietzsche’s Notebooks of the early 1870’s. Edited and translated by Daniel Breazeale, Humanities Press, 1990. Ralón, Laureano. “From Global Village to Global Theatre: The Late McLuhan as a Philosopher of Difference, Sense, and Multiplicities.” Review of Communication, vol. 17, no. 4, 2017, pp. 303-319. Peters, John Durham. The Marvelous Clouds: Toward a Philosophy of Elemental Media. The University of Chicago Press, 2015. Sainsbury, R.M. Fiction and Fictionalism. Routledge. 2010. Vaihinger, Hans. The Philosophy of ‘As if’ A system of the Theoretical, Practical and Religious Fictions of Mankind. 1911. Translated by C.K. Ogden, New York, Martino Fine Books, 2009.