The Revenge of the Surface: without appealing to physical causation.
Yet according to Heidegger,
Heidegger, McLuhan, Greenberg
Graham Harman
In the introduction to his major work Understanding
Media, Marshall McLuhan reports the following anecdote. One of the
editors of his book complained that "seventy-five percent of your
material is new. A successful book cannot venture to be more than ten
percent new.1 In view of this advice, my aim in this lecture is to offer
no more than ten percent new material. Yet I will still risk something,
since the remaining ninety percent will attempt to depict familiar
authors in a new light. Above all it is a question of McLuhan, the
celebrated media theorist, and Martin Heidegger, a philosopher as
famous as he is controversial. The imaginary encounter between
them becomes more interesting if we add the American art
critic Clement Greenberg to the discussion. For Greenberg, no less than
Heidegger and McLuhan, is a thinker who privileges depth, as opposed
to those admirers of the surface who take too seriously the content of
experience. Lets begin with a brief overview of the theme. Why is
"content" viewed with such scorn by all three thinkers?
With Heidegger it is a question of his (mostly friendly) criticism of
phenomenology. The theoretical breakthrough of Edmund Husserl
around 1900 consisted in renouncing all hidden causes and concealed
entities. Instead of giving scientific explanations, we limit ourselves to
the exact description of our lived experiences. A headache, for instance,
should not be reduced to its bodily sources. Instead, it is the task of the
philosopher to investigate all such experiences in their smallest details,
this phenomenology is ultimately impossible, or at least somewhat
deceptive. The practice of phenomenology entails a misunderstanding
of the world as a mere surface. The Seinsfrage, Heideggers famous
question of the meaning of being, means that we do not take the pre-
sence-at-hand of the world too seriously, since the being of beings hides
in the depths
In the works of McLuhan we repeatedly hear that "the medium is
the message." What does this mean? The core program of McLuhans
media theory is found in the assertion that the content of any medium is
of no importance in comparison with its deep and invisible background.
As McLuhan puts it, in his typically lively interview in Playboy, the
content of any medium is no more important than the graffiti on the
casing of the atomic bomb.2 The much-debated difference between good
and bad television shows is actually pointless. Of much greater
significance is the fact that we watch television rather than listening to
radio. The struture of any given medium shape our consciousness,
unnoticed.
In Greenbergs case it seems to be otherwise, since he looks at first
like the champion of the "flat canvas." This could give the impression
that Greenberg is entirely uninterested in the depth of the world, but
only in the two-dimensional surface to which paint is applied. This
seems to be all the more the case, the more he praises cubism as the
flattest painting since Byzantine times. But in fact Greenberg is the
enternal foe of "literary content" in painting. We can freely admit
that the canvas is normally quite flat. Nonetheless, the canvas is
a medium, and that always means: a creature of the
background. According to Greenberg, it is only academic art that
concerns itself with the so-called literary content of a painting.
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True artists (Picasso being a suitably safe example) do the
exact opposite, and build up a tension between two poles: a
colored surface of content emptied of all literary anecdote, and a canvas
medium that always remains deep and invisible despite its two-
dimensional character.
We will proceed in four steps. First, we will consider Heideggers
critique of phenomenology in the name of the dark obscurity of being
itself. Second, we will ask in more precise detail what McLuhan means
with his famous slogan "the medium is the message." Third, we will ask
why Greenberg has such a low estimate of dadaism and surrealism. But
fourth and finally, we will reach the ironic conclusion that the assault of
these three thinkers against surface content does not succeed. Content
takes its revenge, and becomes the unexpected center of gravity of a
thinking still to come.
1. Heidegger vs. Content
As we have already seen, Heidegger was initially viewed as the
crown prince of the phenomenological movement. The basic thesis of
phenomenology consists in the claim that, in principle, everything can
be directly given in some way to consciousness. There is no concealed
thing-in-itself, as we find in the philosophy of Immanuel Kant, and no
independent substance that only occasionally and accidentally
observed. Reality consists fundamentally of its accessibility to
human consciousness. If something is currently not present to anyones
mind, then at least it could become present someday. Obviously enough,
phenomenology is not a noumenology: the philosopher is no longer
interested in anything unknowable, and is only barely interesed in the
objects of the natural sciences except insofar as they are directly given
to us. Yet in any event, phenomenology is partly object-oriented, since
(unlike the British Empiricists) it is less interested in the various
properties or qualities of an apple than in the apple itself as a durable
core beneath all swirling and changing apple-appearances. Even so,
phenomenology remains a sort of idealism, since for phenomenology
"being" means nothing more than representability for a mind.
Heidegger eventually renounced this fundamental idealism of
phenomenology completely; or more accurately, he reversed it.
Beginning in his earliest Freiburg Lecture Course in 1919,3 Heidegger
developed his famous tool-analysis, which was first published eight
years later in his major work Being and Time.4 The basic insight of this
analysis is found in Heideggers remark that, for the most part, the
things of the world are not represented by our minds at any given
moment. Mostly we fail to notice that the ground beneath our feet is
stable, that our heart-beats continue without interruption, that
atmosphe -ric oxygen enables the continuation of our lives, and that
the absence of political uproar in the streets makes possible our calm
contemplation of phenomenological ontology. Usually the life of things
is not accessible to us, but hidden, concealed, or withdrawn.
As Heidegger remarks, in his well known example of a hammer:
"Equipment can genuinely show itself only in dealings cut to its own
measure (hammering with a hammer, for example); but in such dealings
an entity of this kind is not grasped thematically as an occuring Thing,
nor is the equipment-structure known as such even in the
using.5 Naturally, this invisibility is not the special property of
hammers, screwdrivers, or keys. Although Heidegger reports that
"in our dealings we come across equipment for writing,
sewing, working, transportation, measurement,"6 it is not a matter of a
list (however long it may be) of familiar everyday
hardware. Instead, every thing, every being, is fundamentally
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inclined towards absence. Only rarely, most often in cases of
disturbance or total breakdown, do the things become explicitly present
in consciousness. In this way, Heidegger attempts to outflank the basic
doctrine of phenomenology.
This deep, dark unrepresentability of the "tool" (in a broad sense
that ultimately includes all things) gives rise to the assumption that
Heideggerian philosophy is a kind of "pragmatism." In view of the lost
priority of explicit representation and theoretical knowledge as priviled
models of human comportment, it is asserted that Heidegger proclaims
the priority of practical over theoretical reason. In this way, the
strangeness of the tool-analysis is altogether lost, as the analysis
is transformed into a pure banality. What is so disturbing in
the Heideggerian tool is the fact that practical activity fails to do
justice to the things no less than theoretical observation does. Our
theoretical remarks, our scientific discoveries concerning a coniferous
tree or a poisonous snake, are in Heideggers view necessarily flat and
impoverished, since the richness of being is concealed deep beneath the
theoretical surface. Yet praxis is also a kind of surface. The "use" of
coniferous trees or poisonous snakes (no matter what those uses might
be) is just as superficial as the theoretical articulation of them. Praxis is
not a centimeter closer to the world than theory is, since neither
exhausts the objects they encounter. Praxis no less than theory must
always translate, caricature, or outright falsify. Correct representation
is forbidden to the handyman no less than to the thinker.
But a further step is still necessary. The reality of trees and snakes
is not only deeper than all human compor-tent, whether theoretical or
practical. The problem is not only that we humans are so tragic in our
traumatic finitude. "Oh, poor human race, that cannot exhaust
hammers-in-themsel-ves and trees-in-themselves!", as if the inanimate
matter of physics had the ability to make direct relation with other
pieces of matter. Not at all. As several medieval Islamic theologians
already saw early on, there is the same problem in the relation
between two stones as there is between human and stone, dolphin and
stone, monkey and stone, or moss and stone. It is the greatness of
Immanuel Kant to have grasped the withdrawal of the thing-in-itself.
Yet he should not have limited this problem of withdrawal to the
finitude of humans. Instead, the imperfect translatability of things is a
problem that lies in the heart of relations between objects in
general. Instead of German Idealism, which annihilated the Kantian
thing-in-it-self all too quickly, there could have been a German Realism
movement (perhaps under the influence of Leibniz) that would preserve
the thing-in-itself without Kantian limitation to the poignant finitude of
humans in particular. Such a "realism without borders" remains
possible today, in Germany and elsewhere.
In Heidegger there is also a second and fateful problem. Namely,
Heidegger is always inclined to take the world for a holistic totality.
That is already clear at the beginning of his tool-analysis. As he writes:
"Taken strictly, there is no such thing as an equipment. To the Being of
any equipment, there always belongs a totality of equipment, in which it
can be this equipment that it is. Equipment is essentially something in-
order-to...
A totality of equipment is constituted by various ways of the in-
order-to, such as serviceability, conduciveness, usability,
manipulability.7 What interests me here is not the
technical terminology, but the quietly fanatical assertion that there is
no such thing as "an" equipment. In keeping with this rigorous
metaphysical holism, the world in itself is an inarticulate lump, just like
the apeiron of the pre-Socratic philosophers. The multitude of
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things appears to be only a derivative illusion. We are apparently
deceived; being itself is only one. And here we encounter the seldom-
note d ambiguity of Heideggers concept of the "ontological
difference": the difference, so important for his philosophy, between
being and beings. On the one hand, the ontologcial difference means the
difference between present and absent, veiled and unveiled, concealed
and unconcealed, tool and broken tool, and so forth. This difference is
philosophically powerful and, in my opinion, describes reality truly. But
on the other hand, Heidegger is inclined (even if in taciturn fashion) to
interpret the ontological difference as that between one and many. And
here is "bad" Heidegger, the Heidegger who despises all specific things as
somehow sub-philosophical. This is the Heidegger who uses the word
"ontic" as a terrifying insult. But what if being were actually only One?
In that case there would be no reason for the emergence of
the multitude of objects, and therefore such an emergence would
presumably never take place. The simple fact that tools are inclined
towards malfunction entails that the tool (and that means everything) is
never reducible to its current position in the tool-system. The tool is not
holistic; rather, the tool is more like a reservoir or a surplus deeper than
all holistic relations.
We have seen that there is a sense in which Heidegger is a rather
resolute enemy of the surface content of experience. Nonetheless, the
question arises as to whether Heideggers Being can exercise its
apparent functions with the labor of the surface. We will return to this
question later.
2. McLuhan vs. Content
Although to my knowledge Heidegger never wrote anything about
Marshall McLuhan, McLuhan by contrast did make occasional remarks
about Heidegger, and with the appropriate precision. In an important
respect the two can be considered as brothers: namely, in their critique
of the superficiality of phenomenal content. As we have already seen,
McLuhans favorite saying is doubtless "the medium is the message."
Obviously, McLuhan holds that only the background structure of
any medium is of any importance; whatever lies in the foreground is for
that very reason a pointless distraction. The good and the bad, the
puritanical and the morally dissolute might equally well take place in
Berlin, yet the difference between these different cases is not so
important in comparison with the barely visible role of Berlin itself.
According to McLuhan the same holds for all media, whether ancient or
modern. For this reason McLuhan is too often accused of being a
technological deter-minist, especially in Great Britain in my experience
(perhaps due to the strong influence of cultural Marxism in
that country). In any case, McLuhans clear lack of interest in the
foreground of experience, which is evidently the realm of all conscious
decision, might give the impression that we humans are only
the puppets of background forces. We will soon see to what extent this
accusation against McLuhan simply misses the point.
An important impulse for the development of McLuhans media
theory came from the pressure of his publisher, who requested a new
edition of McLuhans breakthrough work Understanding Media. In answer
to this request, McLuhan and his son and collaborator Eric invented a
beautiful geometrical structure for their theory: the Tetrad.8 This
fourfold figure, so characteristic of the late McLuhan, consists (like
almost all fourfold structures in intellectual history) of two differing
axes. It is a question of the two
pairs enhancement/ obsolescence and retrieval/reversal.
What do we learn here about the imaginary encounter between
4-10
Heidegger und McLuhan? First, we see an obvious similarity that quickly
links Heidegger and McLuhan. For all practical purposes there is no
difference between the first McLuhanian axis (en-
hanvement/obsolescence) and Heideggers fundamental opposition
between the presence-at-hand of relations and the readiness-to-hand
that withdraws from all relations. Let us only note that, curiously
enough, the McLuhans terms are explained backwards. They tell us, for
example, that enhancement means to push something in the
foreground, so as to make it more explicit. And contrariwise,
obsolescence (according to the McLuhans) should refer to that which is
superannuated, and therefore falls backwards into darkness and
oblivion. Yet precisely the opposite holds true, even according to the
logic of the McLuhans themselves. We must not forget that in the
intellectual world of Marshall McLuhan, force belongs always to the
invisible, dark, and occasionally forgotten medium, and not to the
obtrusive content of our consciousness. Therefore, to "enhance"
something cannot mean to place it in the clear light of day. Quite the
contrary. The more a medium functions without obstacles, all the more
unobtrusive does it become. Obviously, it is obsolesced things that
push themselves ever further into the foreground. Yet aside from this
terminological inversion, the encounter between Heidegger and
McLuhan is much more than imaginary, as concerns this axis of light
and shadow. On this point they teach more or less the same lesson:
the superficiality of content and the profundity of the background.
Although Heidegger developed his own fourfold structure in the
1940s a poetical and perhaps over-poetical play of earth and sky, gods
and mortalsHeideggers Geviert does not have the same structure as
the tetrad of McLuhan. According to McLuhan, the
enhancement/obsolescence pair can be described as "morphology,"
since the form of any thing includes both foreground and background
elements. Even the most ancient medium, enduring for millennia
without significant change, shows the same dual nature as the most
recent and fleeting inventions of our time. Yet it is somewhat
different with the second axis of the McLuhans. The opposition between
retrieval and reversal has nothing to do with any static moment. It is
not a morphology, since the two terms pertain instead
to "metamorphosis." And here we find perhaps the key concept of this
article. A medium itself -whether it be radio, newspaper, television, or
railroad- cannot change. According to McLuhan a medium simply dwells
in the depths, like the monster-god Cthulhu in the tales of the writer
H.P. Lovecraft: a monster who dominates the world while sleeping.9 The
medium is not just the message; beyond this, it always sends the same
message and remains always the same medium. All change takes place
only on the surface. The car, for example, exercises various powers
in the invisible background, and drives various things into the daylight.
How does it happen that the situation of a car qua medium can be
transformed? According to McLuhan there are only two possibilities: the
reversal of the car through overheating, or the retrieval of the car
(following its recent obsolescence), thanks especially to the work of
artists. Lets briefly consider both possibilities.
How does the car as a medium come to be overheated? Initially,
the car is an instrument of speed and convenience. But one day (and in
Cairo this has already happened) we humans will reach the point of an
automotive Hell, with our lives nearly destroyed by air pollution, traffic
jams, the burden of insurance, and so forth. The auto is no longer
an instrument of increasing freedom, but is now the chief prison of our
lives. The auto has reversed, precisely through the overheating of its
most accidental qualities: its heavy, metallic body, and its dependence
on fossil fuels. The age of the car is transformed into something new:
not thanks to something that is essentially contained in the car qua
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medium, but rather through the purely accidental properties that the
auto itself exploits and normally leaves unnoticed.
The same holds for the second form of metamorphosis: retrieval.
Here, the mechanism is no longer the accidental overheating of the
superficial properties of a medium. Instead, it is a question of the
deliberate labor of the artist. All obsolescent things enter initially into a
Hell that does not lie in the center of the earth, but rather directly atop
the earths crust. The newly deceased medium is condemned to life as
a dead cliche. And it remains a cliche until, one day, it is reborn thanks
to the ingenious labors of art. No longer a surface, the former cliche now
stands in productive tension with its concealed background medium.
For this reason, McLuhan is the exact opposite of a technological
determinist. Indeed, McLuhan perhaps grants too much power to
individuals, who thanks to art are sometimes able to transfigure the
world. In any case, McLuhan notices more clearly than Heidegger and
Greenberg that the despite surface of the world is not nothing, though
certainly not everything either (since the philosophical argument in
favor of the depth still holds). Yet the surface is the essential trigger
for all relations with the hidden world. But how does it stand
with Greenberg, who is so often despised among contemporary artists
and art critics?
3. Greenberg vs. Content
Clement Greenberg is internationally known as the discoverer and
promoter of Jackson Pollock. In this way he is one of the godfathers (the
German-born artist and teacher Hans Hofmann would be another) of the
transplantation of advanced or avant-garde art from Paris to New York in
the late 1940s. Nonetheless, Greenberg has long since fallen out of
fashion, and in some artistic circles he remains an object of
hatred. Indeed, Greenberg was the only name that was met by
hisses during my February 2012 lecture at the Transmediale festival in
Berlin.10 Although Greenbergs most famous essay (written in 1939) was
entitled "Avant-Garde and Kitsch," he was less occupied with Kitsch
than with his arch-enemy: academic art.11 In an important late lecture
that took place in Sydney in 1979, Greenberg attempted the following
definition of "academic":
Academicization isnt a matter of academies- there were
academies long before academicization and before the nineteenth
century. Academicism consists in the tendency to take the medium of an art
too much for granted. It results in blurring: words become imprecise, color
gets muffled, the physical sources of sound become too much
dissembled.12
Marshall McLuhan, who unfortunately suffered a stroke in the
same year and died the following year, would have rejoiced over this
passage, especially over Greenbergs claim that "academicism consists in
the tendency to take the medium of an art too much for granted."
McLuhan always utters his slogan "the medium is the message" in
almost celebratory tones, and Greenberg could well have done the same.
The task of painting, according to Greenberg, is not the depiction of that
which he mocks as "literary content." Instead, the content of art is used
only as a vanishing index of the deep background medium that shows all
content to be superficial-almost exactly as, for Heidegger, presence-at-
hand has the sole function of collapsing before the might of invisible
being. According to Greenberg it is cubism that finally understands this
subordinate role of content in art. The goal of painting in modernity is
less to represent this or that, then to take up the formal possibilities of
the flat canvas.
6-10
 The failure to take this task seriously leads the artist immediately
back into academicism, no matter whether the artist to be something
entirely other than academic. A good example is surrealism, for which
Greenberg has so little interest. Despite Dalis soft watches and long-
legged elephants, Greenberg holds him to be a purely academic painter.
Even if the surprising content of surrealism deviates so much from the
norm, he still remains a textbook example of the three-dimensional,
illusionistic art that no less than the boring salon art of the nineteenth
century tries to reach accurate representations of the spatial position
of things.
A harsh judgment against surrealism! But an understandable
judgment, even if we are not in agreement with it. Yet it is not so clear
why Marcel Duchamp is also described as an "academic artist," in view
of the fact that perhaps no one less took his mediumfor granted to a
lesser degree than Duchamp. In fact, Duchamps entire career can easily
be viewed (and usually is) as the constant questioning of the genuine
medium of art. And here we encounter Greenbergs unfortunate
tendency to use "academic art" sometimes as a pejorative term of great
precision and sometimes just as a global insult for anything that
Greenberg happens not to like. On the whole, Greenberg makes six or
seven charges against Duchamp: for example, that he only wishes to
shock, and even to shock only in the social context of the gallery world
without any genuine aesthetic shock; that Duchamp overintellectualizes
art; that he overestimates his own independence from art history; and
so forth. Yet the accusation of academicism against Duchamp is
immediately weakened as soon as we reflect on what dadaism and
surrealism do not have in common. In fact, these two movements
(despite overlapping membership and a similar irreverent sense of
humor) can be interpreted as opposite experiments. While surrealism
uses a predictable technology of three-dimensional representation, all
the better to enable the wildest variations in pictorial content,
Duchamp in a certain respect makes the opposite maneuver. Namely, he
utilizes the greatest possible banality of content (urinal, bottle rack,
bicycle wheel, and so forth), all the better to raise the most promising
questions concerning the medium of art itself. It would merely be
confusing to use both strategies simultaneously: if for example Duchamp
created a ready-made not from an everyday urinal, from a very
complicated piece of machinery. For the same reason it would be
nonsensical to make surrealistic painting with the pictorial methods of
the cubist avant garde: as if Dali had painted "The Persistence of
Memory" not using recognizable watches, but rather with the broken
surfaces and lines of high analytic cubism. In the natural sciences, one
must always investigate one variable after another, not both
simultaneously. It works the same way in art, and this is roughly what
McLuhans editor meant with his otherwise boring remark that a
successful book should not risk presenting more than ten percent new
material.
Elsewhere, in a rather merciless obituary notice for Wassily
Kandinsky, Greenberg invented a new and even interesting term for his
critical arsenal. Namely, there can also be provincial artists, and not only
in backwater towns. A provincial artist can also be someone who takes
part in avant-garde movements without having clearly understood
them. According to Greenberg, Kandinsky is an example of such a
provincial. Kandinsky is said to have misunderstood cubism as
abstraction, instead of as an ingenious response to the inherent
limitation of the flat canvas as a material medium. As a
result, Kandinsky enters into the traditional world of academic art, since
his mystical circles and triangles hover in an atmosphere of the most
banal three-dimensional illusionistic space.
From all this we can conclude that for Greenberg, as for Heidegger
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and Mc-Luhan, the task of the content or surface of the world consists
almost entirely in the effort to collapse in favor of an invisible
background. In Greenberg, this surprisingly rich (if limited) concept
of art has at least two dangerous consequences. The first is the relative
lack in Greenberg of any detailed remarks on artworks created earlier
than Edouard Manet. His theory of art as hinting towards the flat canvas
obviously leaves us with little to say about the achievements of Raphael
in comparison with those of Perugino or Piero della Francesca. But
Greenberg has perhaps an even bigger problem with respect to the
future of art than with respect to its past. Namely, modern arts
signalling towards the flat canvas background can only be extended up
to a certain point. It is nearly unavoidable (so McLuhan has taught us)
that eventually the flatte-ning-out of painting will attain a maximal
point. And what then? One cannot make the blue sky even bluer, and
by the same token it may not be possible for Jackson Pollock and a few
younger brothers to be flattened even further. Ultimately one needs a
new and wider principle of innovation in philosophy no less than in art
criticism, following Heidegger and Greenbergs total flattening of all
beings im comparison with the dark unity of being or, mutatis mutandis,
of the flat canvas.
4. The Revenge of the Surface
So far we have discussed three thinkers who are not often treated
together, despite their common opposition to the priority of the surface
against the presumption that the message is the message, that
presence-at-hand is the message, or that the so-called literary content
of a painting is the message. Rather, for all three authors the medium
itself is the message, just as McLuhan formulated it. But now the
surface will take its revenge, in a twofold sense.
In the first place we have the problem that depth can do nothing
without that which is not deep. For McLuhan, media change not due to
some inner transformative power, but rather due to the unexpected
consequences of the accidental properties of any medium. The
overheating of a medium occurs outside of its inner life: reversal is
what happens to a medium when its making other plans. The same
holds for the retrieval of a dead medum that was once reduced to a
cliche, most often through the fantasies of visionary artists.
In Greenbergs case we find the similar problem that the literary
content of art cannot be quite as worthless as he often asserted. The role
of art consists not only in giving signs of the superficiality of its own
images. Even if one takes surrealism to be a catastrophic failure, it is not
so plausible to view it as the same sort of failure as bourgeois salon art.
Not every recourse to the old methods of post-Renaissance painting can
be condemned as academic in precisely the same way. It is
equally unhelpful to rate the success of various masterpieces of high
analytic cubism by means of the same criterion of flatness. Aesthetic
criteria lie not only in the rift in which the tension between foreground
and background plays out. Rather, such criteria must themselves be
embodied in the surface itself.
In Heidegger as well we find two problems that are closely
connected with these. In the first place, everyone knows as well as
Heidegger that hidden Being cannot do anything without the surface.
Being hints, sleeps, dominates us, and someday perhaps destroys us, yet
Being cannot change itself, since it lacks the needed internal manifold
to do so. Being remains always only Being, and this is why Heidegger
reports that Being needs human Dasein in order to appear. Therefore,
whatever happens can only happen on the surface of the world. And in
the second place, we have already seen that since all beings are
withdrawn from one another, every form of direct influence between
8-10
entities is entirely impossible. If two entities are both in the depths, the
first can influence the second (or vice versa) only through the mediation
of the phenomenal world. I have written about this topic elsewhere
under the name of "vicarious causation,"13 and will not pursue the topic
further here.
contemporary alternatives to depth-philosophy have learned too little
from Heideggers critique of presence-at-hand, it is now urgent that we
repair the remaining weaknesses in this critique. Today this is very
much possible, thanks in no small part to Marshall McLuhan.

The first revenge of the surface consists in the fact that, however
important being, the medium, or the flat canvas may be, they need the
help of a visible plane in order to achieve anything. But there is also a
second revenge. Namely, Heidegger and Greenberg have the additional
problem (not shared with McLuhan) that they mistake the background
for a unity. And here the surface has yet another important lesson for
the depths: that of the manifoldness of the world. The strength of
McLuhan consists inlarge part of the fact that he is fully conscious of the
manifoldness that we have just stipulated. Despite his flashes of a typical
"hippie holism" of the 1960s, nowhere to my knowledge does McLuhan
say that the entire world is a single, unified medium.

It is entirely different with Heidegger and Greenberg, for whom

manifoldness resides only in the surface. Heidegger often speaks as if
any interest in specific entities were itself highly un-philosophical. And
in Greenberg, the flat canvas apparently has no sectors or regions
either. Depth belongs only to unity, and manifoldness belongs only to
surface content. It is most important that we change this situation. In
philosophy that is perhaps already happening, first in the actor-
network-theory of Bruno Latour (whose theory takes seriously such
individual entities as trains, bridges, beer bottles, and canaries) and
later in the so-called object-oriented philosophies like those of
Tristan Garica, Levi Bryant, and myself.14 In art criticism I do not know
exactly to what extent the things of the surface are now permitted to
have their own concrete depth. But since (at least in philosophy) the

9-10
 11 Clement Greenberg, Avant-Garde and Kitsch, in Art and Culture:
Critical Essays. (Boston: Beacon Press, 1989.)

1 Marshall McLuhan, Understanding Media: The Extensions of 12 Clement Greenberg, Late Writings. (Minneapolis: University of

Man. (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1994.) Page 4. Minnesota Press, 2007.) Seite28. Emphasis added.

2 McLuhan, M. (1969). The Playboy Interview: Marshall 13 See Graham Harman, On Vicarious Causation, Collapse II (2007).

McLuhan, Playboy, March 1969, pp. 26-27.45.55-56.61.63.
3 Martin Heidegger, Towards the Definition of Philosophy, trans. T. Sadler.
(London: Continuum, 2008.)
4 Martin Heidegger, Being and Time, trans. J. Mac-quarrie& E. Robinson.
(New York: Harper, 1962.)
14 See Bruno Latour, Reassembling the Social: An Introduction to Actor-
Network Theory. (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2007); Tristan
Garcia, Formeetobjet: Un traite des choses. (Paris: Presses universitaires de
France, 2011.); Levi R. Bryant, The Democracy of Objects. (Ann Arbor,
MI: Open Humanities Press, 2011.); Graham Harman, The Quadruple
Object. (Winchester, UK: Zero Books, 2011.)

5 Heidegger, Being and Time, p. 98.

6 Heidegger, Being and Time, p. 97.

7 Heidegger, Being and Time, p. 97.

s The concept of the tetrad is developed in the still underread Marshall

& Eric McLuhan, Laws of Media: The New Science. (Toronto: Univ.
of Toronto Press, 1992.)

9 See Graham Harman, Weird Realism: Lovecraft and

Philosophy. (Winchester, UK: Zero Books, 2012.)

10 See Everything is Not Connected in Graham Harman, Bells and

Whistles: More Speculative Realism. (Winchester, UK: Zero Books,
forthcoming 2013.)

10-10