1.29 Formal Cause Part 1: Technological Determinism, Aristotle, Environments and Atmospheres, The Syrian Civil War, and T.S. Eliot

“Without an understanding of formal causality, there can be no theory of communication. What passes as information theory today is not communication at all, but merely transportation.

Mass media in all their forms are necessarily environmental and therefore have all the character of formal causality. In that sense all myth is the report of the operation of formal causality. In that sense all myth is the report of the operation of formal causality. Since environments change constantly, the formal causes of all the arts and sciences change too.”

-Marshall McLuhan

"Formal cause is still, in our time, hugely mysterious: The literate mind finds it is too paradoxical and irrational. It deals with environmental processes and it works outside of time. The effects - those long shadows - arrive first; the causes take a little while longer. Most of the effects of any medium or innovation occur before the arrival of the innovation itself. A vortex of these effects tends, in time, to become the innovation…David Hockney’s recent study, Secret Knowledge, details how Flemish and other artists of the early 15th century literally paved the way for the Gutenberg press a decade or so later with their optical experiments. Their lenses and mirrors enabled them to explore in depth as never before precision of point of view, perspective, and chiaroscuro, greatly intensifying the visual stress they could bring to bear in their paintings, and paving the way for the press. First come the effects.”

-Eric McLuhan, 2011

"History always constitutes the relation between a present and its past." 

-John Berger, 1972

“What kind of logic is there to the illogic of creativity?”

-Douglas Hofstadter, 1997

"Injustice anywhere is a threat to justice everywhere. We are caught in an inescapable network of mutuality, tied in a single garment of destiny. Whatever affects one directly, affects all indirectly."

–Martin Luther King Jr., 1963 

“The people / want / to topple the regime!”

-Teenage boys, Dara’a, Syria, 2011

"Time present and time past

Are both perhaps present in time future,

And time future contained in time past.

If all time is eternally present

All time is unredeemable.

What might have been is an abstraction

Remaining a perpetual possibility

Only in a world of speculation.

What might have been and what has been

Point to one end, which is always present."

-T.S. Eliot, 1941

Sources and place to discuss: https://old.reddit.com/r/DilettanteryPodcast/comments/rxdp4e/129_formal_cause_part_1_technological_determinism/?