EME 15 (2) pp.

113–128 Intellect Limited 2016

Explorations in Media Ecology

Volume 15 Number 2
© 2016 Intellect Ltd Article. English language. doi: 10.1386/eme.15.2.113_1

LAUREANO RALÓN
Independent Scholar

The Media Ecology–

Philosophy of Technology
disconnect: A matter of
perception?

ABSTRACT KEYWORDS
This article conducts a discourse analysis of a selection of in-depth interviews with Media Ecology
philosophers of technology housed within Figure/Ground (www.figureground.org), Philosophy of
an open-source, para-academic, interdisciplinary collaboration supporting one of Technology
the largest repositories of scholarly interviews on the web. By analysing various Marshall McLuhan
answers to a set of recurrent questions, the article provides a general sense of how
Marshall McLuhan – often identified as one of the forefathers of Media Ecology – is
perceived by the neighbouring field of Philosophy of Technology. The underlining
hypothesis is that, despite significant cross-disciplinary affinities made evident by
a recent philosophical turn in McLuhan studies, the lack of collaborative engage-
ment between both camps, particularly among senior scholars, remains quite
significant. As the interviews show, this gap can be attributed, in part, to a matter
of (mis)perception on behalf of the philosophers: their reservations stem primar-
ily from McLuhan’s controversial public statements, public persona and idiosyn-
cratic use of language, as well as an outdated (deterministic/substantivist) approach
to his oeuvre. Nevertheless, the interviews do not strictly reflect any substantial
differences – whether theoretical or methodological – that would justify an ongoing
disconnect between both fields.

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Laureano Ralón

What it means to be human is thus decided in large part in the shape

of our tools.
(Feenberg 2002:19)

A. SURVEYING THE FIELD(S)

Ever since I wrote and defended my M.A. thesis at Simon Fraser University
(Ralón 2009a), my scholarly research has revolved primarily around the inter-
play between Marshall McLuhan’s ‘general media theory’ (Striegel 1978) –
grounded on embodiment, mediation and the senses – and Martin Heidegger’s
existential/hermeneutic phenomenology – grounded on existence, meaning
and lived experience (Ralón 2008, 2009b; Ralón and Vieta 2012; Vieta and
Ralón 2013). Although McLuhan’s affinity with phenomenology in general
had been signalled in passing by authors such as James F. Striegel (1978), Jude
Kornelsen (1991), Glen Willmott (1996) and Roman Onufrijchuk (1998), the
possibility of a full-blown phenomenological/existential reading of his work
was concealed under the veil of technological determinism (Williams 1974;
Carey 1969: 270–308, 1987: 29–38, 1989: 142–72, 113–41; see also Levinson
1979) and instrumentalism (Shachtman 2002; Federman 2003). These
categories – a dualism whose common underlining assumption is the sepa-
ration between means and ends and a limited conception of technology as
a neutral ‘dumb brute which is to be the mere instrument, tool or slave of
science’ (Ihde 1979: xix) – were forced upon McLuhan from the late 1960s to
the early 1990s. However, they proved too narrow in the end to make sense of
his multifaceted oeuvre, which is ‘beyond categorization’ (Ralón 2009a).
With the decline of the neo-liberal utopia of the 1990s, the instrumentalist/
determinist dichotomy slowly gave way to a more complex view of technol-
ogy: one consistent with the principle that technological development trans-
forms what it means to be human; that how we do things determines who
and what we are. Interestingly, interpretations of McLuhan adjusted to this
change of atmosphere: with the upsurge of prolonged economic recessions
and the War on Terror at the turn of the century, he began to be read as a
dialectical critical theorist (Grosswiler 1998; Babe 2000; Angus 2000), even as
a pessimistic substantivist (Feenberg 2003, par. 9). Yet, despite a certain affin-
ity with these wider rubrics, his work continued to defy categorization on a
number of important levels (Ralón 2008, 2009a). Briefly, the main shortcom-
ing of these ‘alternative’ readings is that they invariably engaged McLuhan
from a perspective that tended to overemphasize his probe-based approach,
aphoristic style, and pun-filled prose. Moreover, they prioritized the applica-
bility of his toolbox kit (Federman 2003), but in a way that separated his meth-
odology from the unifying matrix of his overall media theory (Striegel 1978).
The result was a fragmentary approach that yielded a versatile but ultimately
superficial McLuhan.
On the other hand, more sympathetic reappraisals of his work remained
caught within the theoretical framework of medium theory, Media Ecology
and Canadian communication studies, fuelled in turn by general semantics,
systems theory, symbolic interactionism, and North American pragmatism.
These predominantly social- and symbolically-oriented subfields tended
to overlook other pillars of world and self, such as embodiment or tempo-
rality (Anton 2001), which are very much present in background areas
of the McLuhan canon. Even a dialectical take on McLuhan (Babe 2000;
Grosswiler 1998; Grosswiler 2010), with its tendency to highlight the

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importance of tools and methods within a historical (predominantly Marxist)

horizon, equally neglected his existential/phenomenological concerns. The
result was that entire areas of the McLuhan canon, and valuable statements
such as the following, were left unaccounted for:

• ‘Heidegger surfboards along on the electronic wave as triumphantly as

Descartes rode on the mechanical wave’ (McLuhan 1962: 248).
• ‘Existentialism offers a philosophy of structures, rather than categories,
and of total social involvement instead of the bourgeois spirit of individual
separateness or points of view’ (McLuhan 1964: 57).
• ‘[P]henomenology [is] that which I have been presenting for many years
in non-technical terms’ (McLuhan, in Letter to Roger Poole, 24 July 1978,
quoted in Gordon 2010: 134).

As shown elsewhere (Ralón and Vieta 2012; Vieta and Ralón 2013), these
statements are more than the nonsensical commentary of an eclectic genius.
In spite of the above-mentioned tendencies to approach McLuhan, in
social and symbolic terms, there is undeniable philosophical flair in much of
his writings, which can be accounted for by the so-called ‘perceptual model’
of his ‘general media theory’ – concerned as it is with embodiment, percep-
tion and the senses. Here the work of James Finley Striegel remains of criti-
cal importance. In his sadly neglected Ph.D. dissertation, ‘Marshall McLuhan
on media’, Striegel (1978) convincingly shows that, despite his repeated early
claims of having no theories and no point of view about media and technology,
there is a coherent ‘general media theory’ behind McLuhan’s pun-filled prose.
‘The substance of this study is the author’s interpretation and construction of
this body of work as a coherent and significant general theory’, writes Striegel
in his introduction. ‘The objectives are to accurately present and describe what
McLuhan, himself, has written in terms of three models of experience, and to
suggest linkages wherever appropriate between this unique body of inquiry
and a variety of other fields of study’ (1978: 4). Throughout the remainder
of his dissertation, Striegel demonstrates that there is a consistent tripartite
programme behind McLuhan’s most famous aphorism – ‘The medium is the
message: The content is the user’ – a programme amounting to a perceptual
model (pertaining to lived-through, existential relations), an analogical model
(pertaining to hermeneutic relations) and a historical model. Recently, this
notion of a threefold McLuhan has been further developed by Yoni Van Den
Eede (2012), whose Amor Technologiae approach to the study of human–media
relations is based on a similar (albeit, much more elaborate) tripartite model –
one comprising existential, structural and historical levels of analysis. As we
shall see, engaging McLuhan in this manner can yield a more coherent, robust
and systematic interpretation of his work.
More broadly, our call for a threefold scheme must be situated in the context
of a recent philosophically oriented reappraisal, which has attempted a radical
transformation of the McLuhan corpus: rather than centring on a fragmentary
approach that places his work under pre-existing categories (instrumentalism,
determinism, substantivism, critical theory), the aim became to provide a
new background for future interpretations. Fuelled in part by the so-called
‘empirical turn’ in continental philosophy, i.e., a concern with technolo-
gies rather than technology (Achterhuis 1992; Verbeek 2005), and the post-
humous publication of Formal Cause (M. McLuhan and E. McLuhan, 2011),
interpretations of McLuhan seem to have finally transcended the frontiers of

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the socially constructed and linguistically constituted reality to which his

oeuvre had been confined. In this latest wave of rediscovery, McLuhan
became more obsolescent and environmental, just as Joshua Meyrowitz (2001)
envisioned some fifteen years ago: someone to think from, through and with as
opposed to a thematic object of ‘worship’ from which a series of probe-like,
ready-made commandments are to be derived: ‘the medium is the message’,
‘global village’, ‘hot and cool’ and so forth.
As concerns these clichés, it is important to bear in mind that McLuhan’s
idiosyncratic language and probe-based approach were designed to make
sense of the electronic environment of his time (particularly the TV medium),
but without reducing its complexity to mere logical structures. ‘Any approach
to environmental problems must be sufficiently flexible and adaptable to
encompass the entire environmental matrix, which is in constant flux’, stated
McLuhan in his interview with Playboy Magazine (1969). Now, since his death
in 1980, media ecologists have applied his insights to shed light upon new
media and even ‘new new media’ phenomena (Levinson 1999, 2009; Logan
2010), but without always questioning the basic presuppositions of his general
theory and methodology. Naturally, certain key terms have grown stale over
time (Anton 2014: 20), sedimenting his work along an avenue of common-
places. Conversely, moving away from a fragmentary approach centred
on isolated clichés as the basic units of analysis enabled the exploration of
deeper resonances, lateral affinities and lines of flight across disciplines and
in background areas of the McLuhan canon. What emerged at the end of the
tunnel was no longer an eccentric thinker who merely scratched the surface
of phenomena (Theall 1971: 85–89), but a philosopher of media in his own
right with strong ties to metaphysics (Harman 2009), transcendental, exis-
tential and hermeneutic phenomenologies (Harman 2007; Ralón 2008, 2009a,
2009b; Ralón and Vieta 2012; Van Den Eede 2012; Garrett 2013; Gilchrist
2013; Wachs 2013; Vieta and Ralón 2013; Anton 2012, 2014), speculative real-
ism (Shaviro 2014), object-oriented ontology (Harman 2009) and process
philosophy (Zhang 2012; Iliadis 2013). These are but some of the fields within
philosophy where McLuhan has found a home in the company of younger
generations of academics who are rediscovering anew the importance of his
long-standing legacy.
Within media ecology, Corey Anton was among the first scholars to
advance a philosophical reappraisal of the field. Working at the intersection
of continental philosophy, media and communication studies, Anton explored
how representational accounts of language are symptoms of literacy (2005),
how the transitions from speech to writing to print impacted the experience
of evaluation (2010), how clocks and their synchronization altered sensibili-
ties of time (2011a) and how chemical and pharmacological mediation have
tightened the sense of normalcy (2011b). More recently, he has focused on
McLuhan as a launching pad to addressing how the scholastic notion of
‘quiddity’ provides an avenue for traversing between the phenomenological
notion of ‘essence’ and the notion of ‘formal cause’ (2012). In his interview
with Figure/Ground (Ralón 2010), Anton made explicit the overall approach
that had informed most of his writings: one that combined Media Ecology and
phenomenology to radicalize both media and social constructionism. ‘I have
argued that phenomenology and Media Ecology give the rigorous histori-
cal and embodied ground for how social construction is possible’, he stated.
‘Taken together, they could be called, “social constructionism with teeth”’.
During the same interview, he also expressed his frustration with a number

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of postmodern abuses (e.g., ‘the death of the author’, ‘the end of history’),
calling for a phenomenological framework to reinforce (but also restrict) the
excesses of constructivism and deconstruction in media and social theory.
Interestingly, Anton’s position seems quite congruous with that of another
scholar who also explored the McLuhan-phenomenology interplay with
interesting results (Harman 2007, 2009), and who is equally dissatisfied with
constructionist and deconstructionist approaches to contemporary philoso-
phy. In his introduction to Guerrilla Metaphysics (2005), Graham Harman tells
us that, for more than a decade, he has been disappointed by the direction
of recent continental philosophy, which in his view is preoccupied almost
entirely with written texts and minor modifications to historical narratives
already posited by others. I believe the discursive affinity between Anton and
Harman is not a minor coincidence. The connection will not be explored in
this article, but together, their views signal a philosophical realignment within
Media Ecology that is well in line with realist and empirical, theoretical devel-
opments in continental philosophy. It is also an indication that Media Ecology
is becoming more porous to true cross-disciplinary interplay.
Central to this reshuffling trend has been the ongoing dialogue, carried
out by increasing numbers of young scholars, between McLuhan and
Heidegger. The numerous resonating intervals between these two thinkers
have amounted to a sort of Heideggerian McLuhanism, that is, a connecting
thread running beneath many attempts at engaging McLuhan philosophically.
As regards this specific connection, it is interesting to note that both think-
ers have undergone a process of continuous transformation over time. For
instance, in one of his interviews in 1994, Richard Rorty made the following
observation about Heidegger:

Borradori: In Italy today, some philosophers, like Gianni Vattimo, tend

to unite the two phases of Heideggerian thought into a single curve,
thereby incorporating the existential Heidegger into a new postmeta-
physical perspective. What do you think?

Rorty: I agree. I prefer to think that Heidegger struggled all his life to
reach one objective: self-overcoming. The Letter on Humanism repudi-
ates Being and Time in the same way that What Is Thinking? repudiates
the Letter on Humanism. This is significant for the ‘Heidegger case’ and
his relationship to Nazism.
(Borradori 1994: 38–39)

Indeed, what makes both McLuhan and Heidegger such rich thinkers is
their ability to self-transcend. Over the last fifteen years, new explorations of
the McLuhan canon have unleashed new possibilities for interdisciplinary
dialogue, successfully overcoming simplistic (instrumentalist/determinist)
interpretations.
Although often critical of both thinkers, Harman identifies Heidegger’s
Geviert and McLuhan’s Tetrad as prototypes of his ‘quadruple object’, the
basic unit of his object-oriented ontology (2011: 79). Interestingly, Heidegger
and McLuhan are very much present in his object-oriented philosophy,
but in a way which is non-obtrusive or celebratory. More importantly, his
reading of both thinkers exceeds both utopian and dystopian accounts of
technology, as well as a number of problematic dichotomies (content vs form,
technology-as-thing vs technology-as-system), which had blocked theoretical

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advancements in media and technology studies. Similarly, the work of Yoni

Van Den Eede (2012) has proven extremely effective in advancing McLuhan,
bringing his work into meaningful cross-disciplinary conversation with a vast
range of traditions: from cybernetics and Philosophy of Technology to post-
phenomenology and actor-network theory to speculative realism and object-
oriented ontology. By combining the ideas of an impressive range of authors
from various fields, Van Den Eede has managed to construe a Grand Unified
Theory of human–technology interaction that equally supersedes both utopian
and dystopian accounts of technology. In so doing, he has managed to show
that McLuhan’s eclectic thought is sufficiently malleable to constitute a shared
foundation and a common thread for diverse schools of thought and philo-
sophical movements concerned with the study of objects, media and tech-
nology. His own unique approach – ‘Amor Technologiae’ – combines both
relational and substantive ontologies with threefold and fourfold structures of
thought to account for our ambivalent, often contradictory relationship with
technology, without recurring to instrumentalist, determinist or substantivist
accounts.
To be clear, overcoming dualism does not necessarily mean a relapse
into a kind of organic holism where parts (specific technologies) lose their
distinct identity in favour of an overarching essence, as in the pragma-
tist reading of Heidegger that buries Dasein and its tools under a totality of
references via skillful/mindless coping (Dreyfus 1991; see also Stewart 1996),
Ellul’s oppressive Technological System (1980), or even Postman’s dystopian
Technopoly (1993). Instead, moving into threefold structures of thought has
given McLuhan compelling phenomenological and critical theorist flair – two
subfields which, incidentally, have also informed the works of first-generation,
North American philosophers of technology (e.g., Andrew Feenberg, Albert
Borgmann, Don Ihde and Michael Heim). Yet, despite significant theoretical
affinities between both camps, the lack of direct, interdisciplinary engagement
between Media Ecology and Philosophy of Technology remains substantial.
To date, only second-generation philosophers of technology influenced by a
new empirical ethos have ventured to take McLuhan seriously, engaging his
thought with compelling results (Harman 2009; Van Den Eede 2012; see also
Kiran and Verbeek 2010). On the other hand, only a relatively small number
of media ecologists have attempted to push McLuhan beyond the presup-
positions of the Media Ecology framework (Anton 2012b; Grosswiler 1998;
Grosswiler 2010; Zhang 2012). Undoubtedly, every field and discipline has
its major figures and canon, and all disciplines naturally exhibit a level of
conservatism. In fact, if there is one point that the majority of academics inter-
viewed by Figure/Ground tend to agree on – despite McLuhan’s claim that
‘departmental sovereignties have melted away as rapidly as national sover-
eignties under conditions of electric speed’ (McLuhan 1969) – is that discipli-
nary boundaries remain more or less intact today. That said, structural barriers
are not the only impediment to interdisciplinarity; matters of perception do
play a decisive role at times, as in the case of the Media Ecology–Philosophy
of Technology disconnect, to be described in the next section.

B. DISCOURSE ANALYSIS
In light of the philosophical turn in McLuhan studies described above
and the numerous affinities between McLuhan studies and Philosophy
of Technology which have been systematically exhibited elsewhere

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(Van Den Eede 2012; Vieta and Ralón 2013), the lack of collaborative engage-
ment between both fields seems rather puzzling. As part of an effort to bridge
this gap, what follows is a discourse analysis of a selection of questions and
answers extracted from Figure/Ground (www.figureground.org), one of the
largest online repositories of free scholarly interviews on the web. The aim is
to analyse a series of answers to a set of McLuhan-related questions in order
to provide a general sense of how his work is perceived by the neighbour-
ing field of Philosophy of Technology. The underlining hypothesis is that the
relative lack of scholarly collaboration between both camps can be attribut-
able, in part, to a matter of (mis)perception on behalf of the philosophers.
As the interviews show, their reservations stem primarily from McLuhan’s
controversial statements, idiosyncratic use of language, and outdated (i.e.,
deterministic) readings of his oeuvre. That said, the interviews do not reflect
any substantial differences – whether theoretical or methodological – that
would justify a disconnect.
Given the scope of this article, I will focus primarily on specific responses
by three interviewees (Andrew Feenberg, Don Ihde and Albert Borgmann),
who are arguably the biggest names in North American Philosophy of
Technology. Specifically, my questions were aimed at determining what they
thought of McLuhan and why his work was largely ignored by philosophers
of technology. What follows is a reproduction of key passages from their
responses:

Borgmann: I’ve read some of his work. Like Haraway, he’s provoca-
tive and at times even thought-provoking. But there’s a lot of gravel
you have to sort through to get to the nuggets, much as is the case with
Derrida’s writings. I’d rather read authors like Ihde and Feenberg who
have taken the trouble to think things through.
(Ralón 2010b)

Feenberg: McLuhan had the unfortunate good luck of being too popu-
lar for a moment in time and falling off the edge of the world afterwards.
Something similar seems to have happened to Marcuse. I will admit
that I could use a refresher course on McLuhan who I read with great
sympathy in the 1960s. But there is a theoretical problem. The thesis
that technologies extend the body and the senses is associated histori-
cally with the deterministic views of Gehlen and other early thinkers.
For us the question is not just how technology extends the body and
senses but how technologies shape and are shaped by cultural and
political contexts. I don’t think this was McLuhan’s question.
(Ralón 2010c)

Ihde: On McLuhan, I would echo both Borgmann and Feenberg in your

interviews – interesting, popular, but ultimately somewhat superficial.
His ‘hot’ and ‘cold’ media notions I consider foolish – he needed to do a
much more rigorous phenomenology.
(Ralón 2010d)

To begin, something which becomes immediately apparent is that none of

the interviewees contemplate McLuhan as a philosopher, not even as a seri-
ous ‘scholar’ in the strict sense of the term. In fact, their opinions seem quite
univocal in expressing their resistance to consider McLuhan as a precursor

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to their work. One reason behind this general attitude may be attributable
to a certain cultural and historical baggage. As Yoni Van Den Eede observed
during his Figure/Ground interview:

The old sentiment that McLuhan is outdated or just plain nonsense

seems to have survived more strongly in North America than in Europe,
to my feeling. The reason for this may be that there’s never been a real
McLuhan hype in Europe like in North America during the 1960s –
except maybe a bit in France – and so also no correspondent ‘counter-
revolution’ has taken place. If they approach McLuhan’s work, European
scholars seem to feel less burdened by the historically grown – and, yes,
sometimes justified – presuppositions about him.
(Ralón 2013)

Surprisingly, Van Den Eede’s observation is consistent with the follow-

ing remarks by Andrew Feenberg regarding McLuhan’s status as a 1960s’
cultural icon: ‘McLuhan had the unfortunate good luck of being too popu-
lar for a moment in time and falling off the edge of the world afterwards.
Something similar seems to have happened to Marcuse’ (Ralón 2010c).
Feenberg’s claim here seems to suggest that McLuhan’s decline in media
popularity from 1968 onwards is tantamount to a decline in scholarly
importance, two distinct variables which are not necessarily connected.
Furthermore, unlike Marcuse, whose critical work was more closely tied to
the social and political movements of the 1960s, McLuhan has since the
mid-1990s made an important comeback following the Internet revolution.
Decades after his death, scholars from different generations the world over
continue to extract valuable insights from his books, lectures and interviews,
disclosing ideas that somehow did not appear to be there in its original
context.
An indication of McLuhan’s renewed importance is the fact that a number
of critical theorists have softened their position over the past fifteen years.
Philosopher Douglas Kellner, for example, while traditionally quite criti-
cal of McLuhan, acknowledged during his Figure/Ground interview that he
‘remains one of the most important and stimulating writers of our time’ and
‘continues to be extremely important for my work and certainly one of the
first to be aware of the momentous consequences of new technologies, dram-
atizing the effects of television on culture, politics, education, and everyday
life, and anticipating the effects of the computer’ (Ralón and Dowdall 2012).
Kellner did criticize McLuhan, however, for failing to ‘anchor his important
insights in political economy and critical social theory’, but even this recur-
rent critique has been reconsidered by other critical theorists in recent years
(Grosswiler 2010). More importantly, the position held by Feenberg, Ihde
and Borgmann does not appear to have passed down to younger genera-
tions of philosophers of technology and objects. Darin Barney, for instance,
asserted during his Figure/Ground interview that ‘Innis and McLuhan are
arguably more relevant than ever, partly because of their recuperation in
recent German media theory’ (Ralón 2011). And for Graham Harman,
‘McLuhan was one of the most significant figures in the humanities in the
entire twentieth century. We’ve barely begun to catch up with him’ (Ralón
2010a). In sum, the Figure/Ground interviews reveal that – when it comes to
McLuhan – there is a considerable gap between first- and second-generation
philosophers of technology.

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Speculating about the reasons for this inner discrepancy exceeds the
scope of this article. However, it is not unreasonable to suggest that, in
the case of senior scholars, their perception of McLuhan is informed by a
rather outdated determinist reading, which does not take into considera-
tion recent philosophical reappraisals. Borgmann’s regarding of McLuhan in
terms of ‘obscurity’ (his comparison with Derrida’s mostly textual/symbolic
approach to philosophy) also reveals a partial interpretation that over-
stresses his analogical model – with its emphasis on fragmentary probes,
puns and aphorism – and underplays his perceptual model – rooted in
issues of embodiment, mediation and the senses. The perceptual McLuhan
can in fact be situated within the contexture of the ‘philosophies of praxis’
that Don Ihde identifies as relevant subfields to traditional Philosophy of
Technology:

Praxis philosophies, broadly defined, are those which in some way

make a theory of action primary. Theory of action precedes or grounds a
theory of knowledge. And it will be noted that praxis philosophies as a
family have relations in widely located places within the contemporary
scene.
(1979: xv–xvi)

He adds:

A first, low level survey of the field of philosophies would reveal that
there are a number of bloodlines […] A usual grouping of these fami-
lies would probably identify (a) an Anglo-American family under
the identification of analytic philosophy. The godfather of this family
group is Logical Positivism, but its relations include a second genera-
tion which spans a spectrum which includes formalistic and construc-
tionistic philosophies and reaches to Ordinary Language philosophy.
(b) A second large grouping usually identified as Continental, includes a
mixture of existentialism, phenomenology, and an assortment of dialec-
tical philosophies in the Hegel-Marx traditions. And although I shall not
deal as thoroughly with them, the (c) Neo-Thomist and (d) American
Pragmatist families ought to be mentioned as identifiable…
(1979: xvi)

McLuhan’s affinity with group (b), and particularly with groups (c) and (d),
has been identified for some time now by Media Ecology and Canadian
communication studies scholars. His connection with Marxism, phenom-
enology and existential philosophy began to be explored at the turn of the
century. More recently, Harman’s critique of the theory-praxis dualism
advocated by neo-pragmatism brought McLuhan into conversation with
non-correlationist philosophies such as speculative realism and object-
oriented ontology. And Van Den Eede’s Amor Technologiae (2012) showed us
the possibility of a transcendental McLuhan, capable of unifying a number
of different but compatible fields of enquiry concerned with the study of
media, technology and objects. As I have been arguing throughout this
article, this kind of horizontal broadening of McLuhan studies is not being
considered by first-generation philosophers of technology – only by second-
generation philosophers and a few media ecologists exploring resonances
outside the traditional canon.

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A less obvious but peculiar trend is that, while the interviewees clearly
display a homogeneous position, their individual perceptions of McLuhan
exhibit a number of differences. For example, Ihde’s main charge (McLuhan’s
‘superficiality’) suggests shallowness or lack of depth, whereas Borgmann’s
claim (McLuhan’s ‘obscurity’) suggests excessive depth. On the other hand,
Michael Heim, another first-generation philosopher of technology, uses the
term ‘oracle’ as a euphemism to soften the claim that McLuhan was not a
rigorous thinker:

What he saw was so important for us to notice and he used oracular,

pithy phrases to prick our awareness. The oracular slogan can launch
the research project but goes no further. Another kind of work is needed
for unfolding the implications and extending the insight. McLuhan was
the oracle that prompted the journey. It’s for others to embark on the
long odyssey.
(Ralón 2012)

Once again, these opinions overlook recent philosophical developments

in McLuhan studies. In fact, Feenberg acknowledges so indirectly when he
expresses in his answer above that his overall reading of McLuhan is rather
outdated. Indeed, the respondents’ perception of McLuhan continues to be
informed by technological determinism, a category whose applicability to
McLuhan has been debunked by a number of scholars from various fields.
As Harman notes during his Figure/Ground interview, the real question is
not whether technology extends our selves, but how one medium replaces
another for McLuhan. He argues that this does not occur by a mechanical,
deterministic process or some impersonal law of history to which we are
enslaved:

Certainly, for McLuhan the previous medium overheats and reverses

into its opposite. But it is not the case that there is only one possible
reversal in any situation. McLuhan spends much time praising artists as
the ones who are able to take the clichés from the rag-and-bone-shop
of history and turn them into new media. But this takes work, some-
times fails, and in any case it always allows for multiple options. Which
of the many dead clichés in our environment will we transform into a
new, living medium? No impersonal, mechanical law of history will tell
us what to do here. In McLuhanite terms, there was no a priori reason
why the worldwide web needed to appear when it did, or needed to
appear at all.
(Ralón 2010a)

In short, for Harman, if some determinism can be found in McLuhan through

the dominant action of background media on visible figures, freedom can also
be found at the point where clichés are turned into archetypes, which often
take ‘good, old-fashioned individual work’ (Ralón 2010a).
Another inconsistency that the interviews reveal concerns the notion
of technology as extension of the human self, which in his answer above
Feenberg dates back to Gehlen in order to dismiss McLuhan as a techno-
logical determinist. However, the notion of extension has a considerably
long and wide history that predates determinism. As Van Den Eede points
out, this classical notion can be said to go back as far as Aristotle, probably

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one of the first philosophers to introduce the idea that instruments and
tools extend the human body and soul, just as the body is the instrument
of the soul (2012: 140). Historically, the extension idea was carried forward
by Ralph Waldo Emerson, Ernest Kapp and Henri Bergson, and in present
times it has been adopted by none other than Don Ihde (2002) and further
developed into a theory of the extended self by philosophers such as Andy
Clark and David Chalmers (1998). More recently, Van Den Eede (2012) has
adopted the notion of extension to develop his own approach to the study
of human–media relations (‘Amor Technologiae’). Briefly, his position is
that, while not often expressly acknowledged in contemporary Philosophy
of Technology, the most common and at the same time most challenging
way of dealing with human–technology relations is the concept of extension
(2012: 138). But the question is whether embodied technological extension
chez McLuhan (and Ihde) precludes human freedom. I believe the answer
is no. In McLuhan’s general media theory, the concept of retrieval grants
the notion of extension enough room for agency to avoid determinism, as
Harman and others have noted (Grosswiler 1998; see also Babe 2000).
Ihde’s response contains two additional criticisms that deserve further
scrutiny. First, there is the recurrent charge that McLuhan was a superficial
thinker who merely scratched the surface of phenomena or was outright inco-
herent. Specifically, Ihde states that ‘McLuhan was good with the bon mot
and the widest generalities, but he was short on in-depth step by step analysis,
what Hegelians call “conceptual labor”’. To be sure, McLuhan thought of
himself as a generalist, not a specialist; and there is undoubtedly something
in his probe-based approach – his preference of percepts over concepts –
that makes its methodology fragmentary. Second, there is the notion of hot
and cool, which Ihde considers ‘foolish’. Here again, it is problematic to take
McLuhan’s probes as ready-made formulas. On the other hand, his probes
can take on a new meaning when regarded against the background of larger
interpretative horizons. A perfect example of this is ‘Media, hot and cold –
Temperature is a media problem’, a new special section by the International
Journal of Communication guest-edited by Jonathan Sterne and Dylan Mulvin.
Though inspired by McLuhan, the contributors of that section have managed
to move beyond basic medium theory and Media Ecology assumptions and
into true cross-disciplinary interpretations that tackle concrete questions of
temperature in media studies. In their ‘Introduction: Temperature is a media
problem’, Sterne and Mulvin write:

This is the ethos of ‘Media, Hot and Cold,’ this special selection of
papers in the IJoC, which grapples with the questions implicated by
the ever-radiating temperature of bodies, spaces, and things. Beginning
with a pun on Marshall McLuhan’s famous formulation of hot and cold
(and sometimes cool) media, these papers look at the intersections of
temperature and media studies, a full 50 years after the publication of
Understanding Media (1964). We took McLuhan’s metaphors perhaps
more literally than they were intended in order to argue that the intersec-
tion of media and temperature is a significant – if significantly ignored –
research avenue in the 21st century.
(2014: 2497, emphasis added)

Such efforts demonstrate that there is no superficial McLuhan, but rather

superficial readings of his work and thought based on outdated theoretical

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frameworks. They also show that taking McLuhan seriously does not mean
sticking to a literal (sedimented) reading of his work, but going beyond what
is immediately given into the more than literal realm, exploring the possibilities
in reserve at the core of his multifaceted oeuvre.

C. FINAL REMARKS
The Figure/Ground interviews with philosophers of technology confirmed
my suspicion that the best way to advance McLuhan is explore hidden possi-
bilities in marginal areas of his general media theory. Contrary to what is
commonly believed, the core of his thought is not to be found in a number
of recurrent and superficial clichés, probes and aphorisms, but in back-
ground areas of his thought, where lateral interdisciplinary connections can
be made. Likewise, the Media Ecology field will not really be enriched by
importing more thinkers to its already vast canon. Recent attempts at ‘prob-
ing the boundaries of the media ecology’ have focused on identifying figures
‘outside the canon but whose work resonates with, enhances, updates, or
extends media ecological understanding’ (MacDougall and Zhang 2013; see
also Zhang 2014). Grosswiler (2001) and Meyrowitz (2001) introduced this
strategy more than a decade ago with interesting results. However, their
synthesizing approach remains fundamentally a foreground method that
focuses on visible figures and their interplay. On the other hand, our
approach proposes to revisit the basic tenets of the field in order to unleash
new interpretative possibilities from the ground up. To truly enhance,
update, or extend McLuhan, Innis, Ong or any other thinker, there needs
to be a concomitant enhancement, update or extension of the theoretical
framework – the background assumptions – against which their respective
works are interpreted.

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SUGGESTED CITATION
Ralón, L. (2016), ‘The Media Ecology–Philosophy of Technology disconnect:
A matter of perception?’, Explorations in Media Ecology, 15: 2, pp. 113–128,
doi: 10.1386/eme.15.2.113_1

CONTRIBUTOR DETAILS
Laureano Ralon is an independent scholar, writer and translator. He is an M.A.
graduate from Simon Fraser University School of Communication, where he
was employed as a teaching and research assistant by the Center for Distance
Education, the New Media Innovation Center and the Center for Policy-
Research on Science and Technology. He directed the Canadian Observatory
at the Argentinean Center for International Studies and is the founder and
editor-in-chief of Figure/Ground Communication (www.figureground.org),
an open-source, para-academic, interdisciplinary collaboration housing one of
the largest collections of scholarly interviews on the web.
E-mail: ralonlaureano@gmail.com

Laureano Ralón has asserted his right under the Copyright, Designs and
Patents Act, 1988, to be identified as the author of this work in the format that
was submitted to Intellect Ltd.

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