Taking McLuhan Seriously

The media theorist Marshall McLuhan is often dismissed as a trendy television pundit of the 1960s, even if one who occasionally resurfaces with each new media revolution: the internet, smartphones, the cloud. My view is that McLuhan is actually one of the most important figures in the 20th century humanities, one whose basic teachings are still far from exhausted or even understood. In this lecture I will focus on the important features of McLuhan’s “tetrad” theory, according to which all media (that is, all human products) have a fourfold structure of enhancement, obsolescence, retrieval, and reversal. This theory will be examined, and its strengths and weaknesses addressed.

Date: Wednesday, 18 December 2013, from 17.30 to 19.30 in the FF-B06.

Presenter: Dr. Graham Harman is a Distinguished University Professor at the American University in Cairo. He is a philosopher of metaphysics, and one of the founding members of the Speculative Realism movement. Harman is the editor of the Speculative Realism book series at Edinburgh University Press, and (with Bruno Latour) co-editor of the New Metaphysics book series at Open Humanities Press. He is the author of ten books, most recently Bells and Whistles: More Speculative Realism (2013) and The Quadruple Object (2011).