Till A' the Seas Gang Dry

Messrs. Lovecraft and Burns

 

I.

 

My love is like a red, red rose ... 

 

For many people - indeed, we can almost certainly say most people - this will be the line written by the 18th-century Scottish poet and lyricist Robert Burns with which they are most familiar [1].

But for fans of the 20th-century American author H. P. Lovecraft, whose fiction can best be described as a form of weird realism [2] founded upon a philosophy known as cosmicism [3], it's a later line from the same poem that most resonates: Till a' the seas gang dry.

For this line inspired (and provided a title for) one of Lovecraft's best short stories, written in collaboration with his (then teenage) friend R. H. Barlow in 1935 [4].   

 

 

II. 

 

The story consists of two parts:

 

The first describes events that took place on Earth from a few millennia to a few million years after the present day. As the global climate becomes increasingly warm, oceans and bodies of fresh water are slowly disappearing and groups of semi-barbarous people, faced with extinction, are retreating towards the poles in order to try and survive. 

 

The second part starts in a small village in the desert. There is only one man left in the village; the old woman who had been his only companion, having recently passed away. The young man, named Ull, journeys in search of other people using his knowledge of old legends. 

 

After a few days, exhausted and dehydrated, he finds a small settlement. 

 

Ull enters one of the houses, but finds nothing but a dusty old skeleton. Despondent, he starts searching for water and comes across a well that, miraculously, hasn't completely dried up. Trying to reach the rope so as to pull up the bucket, he falls into the well and dies. 

 

After his death - and it transpires that he was, in fact, the last man on Earth - all record of human presence is completely erased. Two of the final passages of the story encapsulate Lovecraft's cosmicism and are worth reproducing in full here:

 

"And now at last the Earth was dead. The final, pitiful survivor had perished. All the teeming billions; the slow aeons; the empires and civilizations of mankind were summed up in this poor twisted form - and how titanically meaningless it all had been! Now indeed had come an end and climax to all the efforts of humanity - how monstrous and incredible a climax in the eyes of those poor complacent fools of the prosperous days! Not ever again would the planet know the thunderous tramping of human millions - or even the crawling of lizards and the buzz of insects, for they, too, had gone. Now was come the reign of sapless branches and endless fields of tough grasses. Earth, like its cold, imperturbable moon, was given over to silence and blackness forever. 

      The stars whirred on; the whole careless plan would continue for infinities unknown. This trivial end of a negligible episode mattered not to distant nebulae or to suns new-born, flourishing, and dying. The race of man, too puny and momentary to have a real function or purpose, was as if it had never existed. To such a conclusion the aeons of its farcically toilsome evolution had led."

As a reader of Nietzsche, I obviously love this and it reminds me, of course, of the famous fable in which the latter "perfectly distils nihilism's most disquieting suggestion: that from the original emergence of organic sentience to the ultimate extinction of human sapience 'nothing will have happened'" [5]. 

 

Man is a clever beast - no doubt about it - but our cleverness won't save us and human knowledge remains just a passing phenomenon when considered cosmically. As Lovecraft is repeatedly at pains to stress, the vast empty universe is entirely indifferent to our existence and we are entirely at the mercy of forces that are beyond our control and full understanding.     

 

 

Notes

 

[1] Robert Burns, 'A Red, Red Rose' (1794). Originally a song based on traditional sources, it is often referred to as 'My Love is Like a Red, Red Rose' and published as a poem. Click here to read on the Poetry Foundation website.

 

[2] The term weird fiction refers to a sub-genre of speculative literature originating in the late-19th and early-20th centuries, which either rejects or radically reinterprets the traditional elements of supernatural horror writing in an attempt to inspire more than merely fear. Lovecraft is closely associated with this sub-genre. 

      The object-oriented philosopher Graham Harman used the term Weird Realism for the title of his study on Lovecraft and philosophy (Zero Books, 2012). 

 

[3] Cosmicism - about which I shall say more later in the post - is a philosophy developed by Lovecraft in his fiction. In brief, it is both an antitheism and an antihumanism, promoting the idea that there is no loving divine presence in the universe and that mankind's temporary existence upon the Earth has zero significance. 

 

[4] H. P. Lovecraft and R. H. Barlow, 'Till A' the Seas', in The Californian (1935). The story can be read online at the H. P. Lovecraft Archive: click here. 

[5] Ray Brassier, Nihil Unbound: Enlightenment and Extinction, (Palgrave Macmillan, 2007), p. 205.          

      Brassier, like me, refers to Nietzsche's fable in the essay 'On Truth and Lies in a Nonmoral Sense', which can be found in Philosophy and Truth: Selections from Nietzsche’s Notebooks of the Early 1870s, ed. and trans. Daniel Breazeale, (Humanities Press, 1979), p. 79.

Reflections on The Transparency Society by Byung-Chul Han (Part 1: From The Society of Positivity to The Society of Evidence)

Stanford University Press (2015)

 

 

I. 

 

I might not share Byung-Chul Han's political views, but I certainly share many of his influences and points of reference; Nietzsche, Barthes, and Baudrillard, for example, all of whom feature in this essay on an ideal that has become central to public discourse in the 21st-century and which functions as one of the most pernicious of our contemporary mythologies. 

 

As Han notes in his preface, today the term transparency "is haunting all spheres of life" [a]. People operating in the social sector, science, business, politics, and the media, all pride themselves on their openness and insist they have nothing to hide; that they are fully accountable.    

But Han sees through this neoliberal (and porno-utopian) fantasy of the Transparenzgesellschaft and indicates the dangers of losing mystery, shadow, and privacy. According to Han - and as we will discuss below - the dictates of transparency enforce a totalitarian system of openness at the expense of other (older) social values such as shame, secrecy, and trust. 

 

Ultimately, more information does not mean more freedom, it means greater control, and as "total communication and total networking run their course, it proves harder than ever to be an outsider, to hold a different opinion" [vii]; consensus and conformity are two key terms within this new order of transparency. When everything and everyone is coordinated on Facebook then, as Jello Biafra predicted long ago, it's California über alles ... [b]

 

 

II.

 

The Society of Positivity

 

Although totalised transparency will ultimately result in terror, the society of transparency ironically manifests itself "first and foremost as a society of positivity" [1]. 

 

We used to think that the smiling face of the politician or salesman was just a mask, behind which lay the ugly reality. But now we know that the smiling face is the truth - just as we have come to understand that the phrase have a nice day is a moral imperative. For fascism not only compels speech, as Barthes pointed out [c], it demands active participatation 24/7. 

 

Whoever optimistically thinks woke liberalism will lead in all its positivity to a better world, has failed to understand the significance of the sign above the gates to Hell which reads: Built in the name of Love [d]. 

 

Similarly, as Han writes:

 

"Whoever connects transparency only with corruption and the freedom of information has failed to recognize its scope. Transparency is a systemic compulsion gripping all social processes and subjecting them to deep-reaching change. [...] This systemic compulsion makes the society of transparency a calibrated society. Herein lies its totalitarian trait: 'New word for Gleichschaltung: Transparency.'" [2]

Han is quoting the German writer Ulrich Schacht here [e]. Later, he quotes Baudrillard in order to provide the following memorable definition: "The society of positivity is dominated by the 'transparency and obscenity of information in a universe emptied of event'." [2] [f]  

 

A universe emptied of event - i.e., one in which there is no possibility of a new world erupting within the known world - is also a universe devoid of Otherness and singularity; what Han - again borrowing from Baudrillard - calls the hell of the Same. 

 

Now, clearly, sometimes the human soul needs sameness (stability, predicability, etc.), "where it can be at home without the gaze of the Other" [3] and not swept up in perpetual chaos. But this is not an argument for the elimination of all difference and becoming. 

 

Similarly, whilst a cerain amount of openness and transparency is healthy, the idea of "completely surrendering the private sphere" [3] is naive and misaken. Ultimately, "human existence is not transparent, even to itself" [3]. To put this in psychoanalytic terms, the id remains largely hidden to the ego:

 

"Therefore, a rift runs through the human psyche and prevents the ego from agreeing even with itself. This fundamental rift renders self-transparency impossible. A rift also gapes between people. For this reason interpersonal transparency proves impossible to achieve. [...] The other's very lack of transparency is what keeps the relationship alive." [3]

 

Compulsive transparency in the name of ideological positivity and a will to knowledge, lacks a sensitivity to the import of secrecy and for what Nietzsche termed the pathos of distance. The attempt to illuminate (and expose) everything and everyone under the same bright searchlight, "only makes the world more shameless and more naked" [4].  

In sum: we require a little negativity, a little shadow, even a little corruption in all spheres; negative thoughts and feelings - somewhat paradoxicaly - make happy and keep sane. An excess of positivity ends in exhaustion and depression. Click the like button if you agree ...

 

The Society of Exhibition

How do you know a sacred object when you see one? It's always hidden from view; the holy is not transparent. It's value depends upon its actual existence rather than its exhibition; the fact that it is what it is, even if it is withdrawn and separated off.

 

Within the society of positivity, however, seeing is believing; "things become commodities, they must be displayed in order to be; cult value disappears in favour of exhibition value" [9]. But this compulsion for display "that hands everything over to visibility" [9] results in objects losing their aura, defined by Walter Benjamin as a thing's unique existence within time and space [g]. 

 

This holds true for people too - and the human countenance ... 

 

If the last trace of aura can be found in a beautiful old photograph, digital technology assures "that the 'human countenance' has become a mere face that equals only its exhibition value" [10] on social media. All imperfections and blemishes and signs of aging are removed [h], even though it's these things that make us unique; the negativity of time, for example, playing a constitutive role. 

 

Transparency desires perfection, but it doesn't allow for transcendence. And digital photography is transparent photography: "without birth or death, without destiny or event" [11], says Han. However, whilst I understand the argument he's making (borrowed from Heidegger, Benjamin, and Barthes), I'm not sure I agree with it. 

 

Or rather, even if it's true, I'm not sure I care, as I like the pictures taken with my i-Phone; even if - or perhaps precisely because - they lack "semantic and temporal density" [11]. Not every image needs to be meaningful or mournful; nostalgic or romantic. 

 

And just because images are digitally reworked and circulated on social media, that doesn't necessarily mean they are obscene [i], or that the objects made visible have had their inherent nature compromised. I tend to agree with Graham Harman, objects cannot be exhausted by their relations with other objects - including a human being with a camera - meaning that they retain an excessive reality that is always unseen, unknown, withdrawn.  

 

And whilst the exhibiting and exploiting of bare life is pornography to one man, it's the laughter of genius to another [j] ...

 

 

The Society of Evidence  

This opening paragraph could have come from my Illicit Lover's Discourse (2010): 

"The society of transparency is hostile to pleasure. Within the economy of human desire, pleasure and transparency do not fit to gether. Transparency is foreign to libidinal economy. Precisely the negativity of the secret, the veil, and concealment incite desire and make pleasure more intense. That is why the seducer plays with masks, illusion, and appearances." [15]

In some ways, I still agree with this and feel sympathetic; I like Baudrillard's suggestion that after the orgy comes the masked ball. And Han is right, I think, to insist that transparency spells the end of erotic fantasy and results in the pornification of society.

 

On the other hand, however, all that talk of desire and libidinal economy, etc. makes me feel a bit weary and as if I've travelled back in time. One of the reasons I decided to read Byun-Chul Han's work was because I wanted to see what a celebrated 21st-century philosopher had to say and I have to admit that I'm a little disappointed - despite its brilliance - to basically find a reworking of all the usual suspects (authors one read twenty or thirty years ago).      

 

Still, just like the famous Icelander Magnus Magnusson, having started this examination of Han's text, I'll finish it and readers may join me in part two of this post by clicking here (or, if they wish, leap ahead straight to part three by clicking here). 

 

 

Notes

 

[a] Byung-Chul Han, The Transparency Society, trans. Erik Butler, (Stanford University Press, 2015), p. vii. Future page references will be given directly in the post. Note also that the chapter titles given in bold are taken from the essay itself and are not of my invention. 

      The book was originally published in Germany as Transparenzgesellschaft, (Matthes & Seitz Verlag, 2012).  

 

[b] Jello Biafra was lead vocalist with the American punk band the Dead Kennedy's. 'California Über Alles' was their debut single (released June 1979). It was re-recorded for the album Fresh Fruit for Rotting Vegetables (Cherry Red / Alternative Tentacles, 1980): click here for this later (faster) version. It describes the triumph of soft fascism which, arguably, the transparency society is in the process of realising.  

 

[c] See Roland Barthes, 'Inaugural Lecture, Collège de France', (January 7, 1977), trans. Richard Howard, in A Roland Barthes Reader, ed. Susan Sontag, (Vintage, 1993), pp. 457-78.   

 

[d] See Dante's Inferno, III, 5-6. 

      Note that Nietzsche famously describes this as a naive error on Dante's part, however, and says that it would have been more telling if he'd placed a sign above the Christian Paradise reading: 'Eternal hate created me as well'. See On the Genealogy of Morality, I. 15.

 

[e] See Ulrich Schacht, Über Schnee und Geschichte, (Matthes & Seitz, 2012), journal entry for June 23, 2011.  

[f] Jean Baudrillard, Fatal Strategies, trans. Phil Beitchman and W.G.J. Niesluchowski, (Semiotext[e], 2008), p. 45. 

[g] See Benjamin's crucial essay 'The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction' (1936). It can be found in Illuminations: Essays and Reflections, ed. Hannah Arendt, trans. Harry Zohn, (Schocken Books, 2007), pp. 217-251.  

[h] Han writes: "Exhibition value above all depends on beautiful looks." [12] 

      Again, maybe that's true, but is that the worst thing in the world? The ancient Greeks also valued good looks, believing such to not only show that they were blessed by the gods, but possessed of a beautiful soul. They even had a phrase for someone who was both attractive and virtuous: kalos kagathos [καλὸς κἀγαθός]. I'm always a bit suspicious of those who seem to sneer at physical beauty, though I assume that Han is here talking about a fixed ideal of beauty based on stereotypical attributes and lacking any complexity or mystery.  

 

[i] Byung-Chul Han is borrowing the term obscene from Baudrillard, who defines it in Fatal Strategies as the "more visible than visible" [p. 30]. I don't disagree that hypervisibility, in as much as it lacks and challenges the negativity of what is hidden and kept secret, is obscene, but I don't think that obscenity ever truly prevents the object from dwelling in peace. For as I go on to say in the post, objects always find a way to elude us and retain their darkness.   

 

[j] I'm paraphrasing D. H. Lawrence in 'Pornography and Obscenity', see Late Essays and Articles, ed. James T. Boulton, (Cambridge University Press, 2004), p. 236. My italics. I'll return to Han's thoughts on porn when I discuss chapter 4 of his book. See also the post on The Agony of Eros (2017): click here. 

Ian Bogost: Play Anything (2016) - A Review (Part 3: Chapters 5-7)

Dr. Ian Bogost: bogost.com 

I have to admit, four chapters and 120 pages in, I'm a bit bored with this book by Bogost. The assertiveness and the repetitiveness I can deal with, but I have real trouble with the folksy Americanism of the writing style and the overly-familiar - overly-familial - character of the book. It's certainly not philosophy as I conceive of it. However, as Magnus Magnusson used to say, I've started so I'll finish ... 

Ch. 5: From Restraint to Constraint

Is abstaining from a material modern lifestyle really the answer to the paradox of choice?

It's an interesting question. But as much as I approve of a certain degree of asceticism, I don't think the answer is yes. And neither does Bogost, for whom restraint is a type of fashionable narcissism that only leads to irony - and irony, as we have seen, is Bogost's great bugbear.

Further, as a strategy for living better, restraint also connects to the Judeo-Christian moral tradition and the values that lie at the foundations of the global economy (Bogost seems to take it as a given that both these things are highly suspect). Ultimately, he says, the feeling of any restraint results in "a terrible sensation" [130] and can even prove fatal (don't tell that to my friends in the BDSM community for whom orgasm denial is so delightful). 

What then? The answer, says Bogost, is to accept the world's constraints, rather than attempt to impose your own restraint upon it. Embracing constraint doesn't mean embracing asceticism (which is an expression of anxiety): "Rather, it means inventing or adopting a given situation as a playground in which further exploration is possible." [143]

In other words, for Bogost, there's a very real and important connection between constraint and creativity. He writes:

"Artists and designers have long known that creativity does not arise from pure, unfettered freedom. Little is more paralyzing than the blank canvas or the blank page. At the same time, the creative process is not driven by restraint either; one does not paint a painting or write a novel or form a sculpture or code an app by resisting the temptation to do something else. Rather, one does so by embracing the particularity of a form and working within its boundaries, within its constraints." [146]

But it's important to realise that Bogost is using the term creativity in a rather special (philosophical) sense derived from Whitehead. For Whitehead, creativity refers to a process (inherent to the universe) of generating novelty or newness; i.e. it's a fundamental feature of existence and not something unfolding exclusively within the sphere of human subjectivity and experience.

To mistakenly think man is central to the process of creativity, rather than peripheral, is what Bogost calls the fallacy of creativity. In the end, we don't speak, write, or sing the world - it speaks, writes, and sings us. Art emerges from a negotiation between the artist and a set of material conditions that impose certain limits. Graham Harman regards this as the culminating insight of Bogost's book and he might well be right; though, to be fair, it's found in Whitehead - as Bogost acknowledges - and we also find it in Heidegger, who famously declared Die Sprache spricht and that man is the poem of being (not the author).

The artist's job, then, is not to express his own desires, ideas, or fantasies. It is rather to allow the gods and demons to enter from behind and below; Not I, not I, but the wind that blows through me!, as Lawrence puts it.

Ch. 6: The Pleasure of Limits

Bogost picks up on this idea of inspiration in the context of ancient Greek poetry and the Muses. For the Greeks, of course, poetry was a worldly rather than a personal activity; one that was tied to a long cultural tradition, to myth, and to the divine. What he really wants to stress, however, is how structured it was - almost unimaginably so, for those raised into the idea of free verse in which almost any text "with unusual white space and line breaks" [158] qualifies as poetry. Bogost notes:

"A sonnet is not a poem even though it has to spill language across fourteen lines of iambic pentameter, but because it does. It takes the surplus of language and offers a rationale for structuring a portion of it in a particular way." [161]

I suppose that's true. But I'd still rather read one of the great modernist poets than Shakespeare. And besides, free verse - if it's any good - isn't really free in the way implied by Bogost. Other than idealists who believe in an individual's right to total freedom of expression and the dissolution of all form, all structure, all rule, etc. no one in their right mind thinks art is anything other than a discipline.

There might be pleasure in transgressing limits - be they aesthetic, moral, or physical in nature - but this is still, of course, a pleasure reliant upon limits. This isn't to say we should therefore fetishise limitations and constraints or regard rules as written in stone (though some do), it's simply to acknowledge that they're necessary.

Indeed, they're not only necessary, but ontologically crucial. For as Bogost points out: "A thing is not only what it appears to be, but it is also the conditions and situations [i.e. the constraints] that make it possible for it to be what it is." [174]

Or, put another way: "Limits aren't limitations, not absolute ones. They're just the stuff out of which stuff is made." [203]     


Ch. 7: The Opposite of Happiness

"Fun is the opposite of happiness" [216], says Bogost. For fun "doesn't produce joy as its emotional output, but tenderness instead" [217].

And so we arrive at a quasi-Lawrentian conclusion; playful encounters with another being - whether it's human, animal, vegetable, or artificial in nature - result in affection and warmth and sympathy. The German's have a word for this: Mitleid.

Thus, OOO - as an ethic or art of living - rests on the presumption that the essence of morality can be defined in terms of purely selfless actions that ask for and expect nothing in return. Nietzsche, of course, was highly critical of this; he'd regard it as laughably naïve, lacking as it does any appreciation of man's ethical complexity and the fact that there are multiple forces at work within every urge and every action.

Ultimately, if Bogost wishes to save his work from falling into warm soft fuzziness, then he needs to spend a little less time watching babies sleep and either subject it himself to a little coldness and cruelty, or find an editor who will read it with steely intelligence and a sharp pencil.   

Notes

Ian Bogost, Play Anything, (Basic Books, 2016). All page numbers given in square brackets refer to this hardback edition. 

D. H. Lawrence, 'Song of a Man Who Has Come Through', The Poems, ed. Christopher Pollnitz, (Cambridge University Press, 2013). 

To read Part 1 of this review - Notes on a Preface - click here.

To read Part 2 of this review - Chapters 1-4 - click here. 

Ian Bogost: Play Anything (2016) - A Review (Part 2: Chapters 1-4)

Basic Books (2016)

Ch. 1: Everywhere, Playgrounds

For someone keen to live in the world and not inside his own head - an admirable goal, that every post-Lawrentian must surely approve of - Bogost thinks and writes a lot about himself, his young daughter, and his lawn. He justifies this, however, by crediting his child with showing him how to transform the boredom and misery of everyday life into fun and the grass with teaching him to work with the world on its own terms.

Not that fun is Bogost's ultimate goal; that would be meaning. For whilst he wants to find novelty in familiar situations - his definition of fun - mostly he longs for meaningful experience. And that, he suggests, involves an immersive realism that counters the pervasive irony of today. Once we discover not only what things do and how they work, but what they "obviously and truly are" [9], then we'll be better able to thrive and flourish in an ultimately indifferent universe.       

I have to say, I like this idea of not retreating further and further into the self and of replacing mindfulness with worldfulness. But, on the other hand, I have problems with his definition of irony as a method for keeping reality at bay that is born of a fear of the world and the world's "incompatibility with our own desires" [10].

That's certainly not how I understand irony. It allows perspective on the world by creating a certain pathos of distance, that's true. But irony is born of sophisticated critical intelligence, not fear, and it's irony that allows us not only to gain perspective but, ultimately, make distinctions and give value to things within - to use another Nietzschean phrase - an order of rank.

I know that the OOO authors like their notion of a flat (democratic) ontology in which all things are equally things. But that doesn't mean that all things are equal. Or - come to that - that we can play anything.

For contrary to what Bogost asserts, I believe there are things "impervious to manipulation" [12] by human beings. He wants to meet the world, "more than halfway" [20], but it's still simply so he can make it ready-to-hand as Heidegger would say: "Living playfully isn't about you, it turns out. It's about everything else, and what you manage to do with it." [26]     

Ch. 2: Ironoia, the Mistrust of Things

Bogost develops his critique of irony, which he describes as a "prevailing aesthetic in popular culture" [33], as well as an affliction and the "great error of our age" [34]. He doesn't like it, 'cos he can't quite read it's meaning; it's like receiving a wink from a sexbot "you think you know what it means, until you realize the signal you took for meaning emanates from a source for which meaning is meaningless" [36].

That's a nice line; but it fails to convince me to reject irony and embrace sincerity. I have no problem with the seductive deception of the sexbot. Nor does her wink instill in me a general mistrust of things - or ironoia, as Bogost calls it. I don't use irony as a kind onto-prophylactic to make me feel safe. And if, as Bogost claims, irony ultimately fails to protect us from the reality of the world and becomes a "death march into nihilism" [42] and nostalgia - well, isn't that ironic?    

And what does Bogost propose in place of irony? It seems to be something very much like the myth and the metaphysics of presence! He wants to know (and to touch) the world directly. Derrida must be spinning in his grave at this new demand for immediate access to meaning and an end to all indeterminacy and différance.

Even Graham Harman, who, by his own admission, has never been a great fan of Derrida and thinks the French philosopher's attempt to deconstruct presence follows a profoundly mistaken path, agrees with Heidegger that being is not presence and that the latter has, therefore, to be countered as an idea within any school of philosophical realism worthy of the name, including object-oriented ontology.

In as much as things are always withdrawn at some level and vacuum-sealed, we can only ever really know the world in translation, as it were. Or metaphorically. Or ... ironically.


Ch. 3: Fun Isn't Pleasure, It's Novelty

Fun isn't pleasure, says Bogost, it's novelty. I'm not sure, but I think Freud said something very similar; that whereas children are perfectly happy to repeat things over and over, adult enjoyment requires novelty as its precondition.

But what Roland Barthes taught us is not to mistake the mere stereotype of novelty for newness. It's only the latter, newness, in its absolute and often most shocking form, that results in bliss.

But what is bliss? For Barthes, it's more fatal than fun; it imposes a loss of some kind and brings the subject to a point of crisis. For Bogost, on the other hand, it means "giving yourself over to the structure of a situation" [83]. Somehow, that doesn't quite sound as sexy to me. 

Nor does the claim that in order to find the secret novelty hidden in the heart of the everyday object or experience (and thus produce the fun), one must give things one's solemn attention and not treat them in a disrespectful and superficial manner. Fun requires persistence and seriousness and dignity. Bogost writes:

"So long as we are unwilling or unable to consider a set of actions as serious and intentional, even when those actions are mustered in the service of a seemingly absurd, foolish activity or end, then we will never be able to experience fun." [88]

And that's unfortunate, because fun is the antidote to irony:

"If irony represents the crack in the universe through which distrust and anxiety about living in a world full of surplus arises, then fun offers a glue with which we can seal those cracks and restore dignity to all the things we encounter - including ourselves." [89]

Here then is one more difference between Nietzsche and Bogost; whilst the former offers us a vision of the Übermensch, the latter fantasises about some kind of moral Sekundenkleber in a desperate and laughable attempt to put poor Humpty Dumpty together again. Has he not heard that all life is a process of breaking down ...?


Ch. 4: Play Is in things, Not in You

In play, then, for Bogost, we draw ever closer to things until we ultimately "meld with them" [92] in a big sticky unified mess. I suppose that's a goal for those who want it. But I don't want glued-together wholeness; I prefer cracks and fragmentation and if I believe in anything, then I believe in the ruins.

And so, whether play is an experience had with things, or, as Bogost claims, a property of things themselves, the more I hear him mention the idea, the more set against it I feel. It may well be impossible "to fully separate ourselves from the things that surround us" [101], but we can surely try not to be overly-intimate.

Just to be clear: I'm not saying I want to keep things at arm's length - which would make me an ironoiac according to Bogost - but I don't want to be forced to embrace everything and experience the world in obscene close-up. This isn't due to some kind of pathological phobia; discretion and reserve are signs of sovereignty as far as I'm concerned.         

The strange thing is that Bogost himself promotes an ethic of respectful letting-be, that I would quite happily endorse. Rather than attempting to subsume objects, events, and other people into our own sphere of being and influence - or our system of values - we should, he writes, let them play in their own manner.

Only "by addressing each thing for what it is, while all the while acknowledging that [nothing is] ... ours to address in the first place" [119], can they (or we) find freedom and fulfilment; or pleasure and meaning as Bogost insists on calling these things. 

Notes

Ian Bogost, Play Anything, (Basic Books, 2016). All page numbers given in square brackets refer to this hardback edition.

Roland Barthes, The Pleasure of the Text, trans. Richard Miller, (Hill and Wang, 1998), pp. 40, 14.

Graham Harman, Object-Oriented Ontology: A New Theory of Everything, (Pelican Books, 2018). For a discussion of Derrida (in relation to OOO), see pp. 198-209. For a discussion of Bogost - with particular focus on Play Anything - see pp. 222-227.

To read the third and final part of this review - covering Chapters 5-7 - click here.

To read the first part of this review - notes on a Preface - click here.

Isn't it Grand! Isn't it Fine! Graham Harman's New Theory of Everything

(Penguin, 2018)

According to Graham Harman, Object-Oriented Ontology (OOO) is first and foremost a form of realism. It is thus a counter-idealism. But it's not a materialism; more a weird and intangible metaphysics in which "reality is always radically different from our formulation of it, and is never something we encounter directly in the flesh" [7]. The fact that things withdraw from direct access into ontological darkness is the central principle of OOO. 

Harman acknowledges the obvious objection that arises: that when you posit an unknowable reality, there's really nothing you can say about it; for any propositions advanced are ultimately unverifiable. But he doesn't let this objection worry him too much. For hey, philosophy isn't a natural science or an accumulated body of knowledge; it's a love of wisdom, man, and OOO is an attempt to share the love and pass the word along. 

As an openly erotic form of aesthetics, OOO is thus heavily reliant upon metaphor to make its case. Or, more accurately, to make itself as alluring as the objects it describes in order to seduce those open to its often provocative - if implausible - ideas. Harman particularly prides himself on the fact that his new theory of everything has emerged as a major influence on individuals in the arts and humanities, "eclipsing the previous influence ... of the prominent French postmodernist thinkers Jacques Derrida and Gilles Deleuze" [8]. 

And, as if that weren't enough, the charisma of OOO has even "captured the notice of celebrities" [8]. So it's obviously very important. Or fashionable. You won't read about Harman's flat ontology or the quadruple character of existence in Nature anytime soon, but you're quite likely to see him on the cover of Art Review and, who knows, maybe you'll one day come across a spread on him in Hello! (perhaps in the private London residence where he once entertained Benedict Cumberbatch).

Never one for false modesty, Harman compares his writing style in this new OOO for beginners book from Penguin, to that of Sigmund Freud. For whatever one thinks of Freud's psychological theories, "he is an undisputed master of the literary presentation of difficult ideas, and is well worth emulating in at least that respect" [14].

That's true. But it's also much easier said than done. And, sadly, Harman doesn't quite pull it off. He hopes that reading his book will be as "pleasant an experience as possible" [17], but this is frustrated by the fact that it is often extremely tedious. Even passionate objectophiles with a good deal of sympathy for Harman's project, will, I fear, struggle to enjoy this text.

Which is a shame. For whilst I'm not convinced that his post-Heideggerean philosophy offers the best hope of a theory whose range of applicability is limitless, Harman and his fellow-travellers do at least offer an opportunity to reimagine a mind-independent reality - even if we can never accurately describe such in the language of literal propositions and must, therefore, either resort to poetic speculation or be reduced to silence, as Wittgenstein famously acknowledged.   

Graham Harman: The Third Table (Synopsis and Critique)

Picasso: La Table (1919)

I. Synopsis

The Third Table (2012) is a fascinating short piece by the object-oriented philosopher Graham Harman. Whilst providing a convenient summary of the four principles of OOO, the author primarily wishes to offer us his reading of A. S. Eddington's well-known parable of the two tables; the first of which is the familiar table of everyday life; the second of which is the quantum table as understood by physicists.

For Eddington, the latter table is more real than the former, which, although visible and tangible, is essentially a 'strange compound of external nature, mental imagery and inherited prejudice'. You might be able to eat your supper off this first table, but that proves nothing to those who subscribe to the remorseless logic of modern science.    

For Harman, however, both humanists who insist on the everday thing and physicists who care only for quantum reality, are equally mistaken - and for precisely the same reason. For both are engaged in reductionism, even though they reduce the object in opposite directions: 

"The scientist reduces the table downward to tiny particles invisible to the eye; the humanist reduces it upward to a series of effects on people and other things. To put it bluntly, both of Eddington's tables are utter shams that confuse the table with its internal and external environments, respectively. The real table is in fact a third table lying between these two others."

Interestingly, it's not traditional philosophers who are best placed to understand this, in Harman's view, but artists: for artists aren't obsessed with reducing tables "either to quarks and electrons or to table-effects on humans". They are concerned, rather, with tables and other objects - sunflowers, nude women, pickled sharks, etc. - as things in themselves with their own autonomous and inexhaustible reality. And they know that the real table "is a genuine [substantial] reality deeper than any theoretical or practical encounter with it". 

That is to say, the third table "emerges as something distinct from its own components and also withdraws behind all its external effects". If this sounds vaguely Aristotelian, that's because it is; although Harman assures us that it's Aristotle with knobs on (i.e., given a "properly weird interpretation" - weird being one of the privileged terms within Harman's vocabulary).       

The problem that some will immediately identify, is that by locating der dritte Tisch in a space between the first and second types of table, Harman posits an object that lies forever outside the scope of human access; "a table that can be verified in no way at all", as he cheerfully concedes. Indeed, Harman suggests that practitioners of OOO should pride themselves on this fact:

"Any philosophy is unworthy of the name if it attempts to convert objects into the conditions by which they can be known or verified. The term philosophia ... famously means not 'wisdom' but 'love of wisdom'. The real is something that cannot be known, only loved."

Object-oriented philosophers - inasmuch as they remain lovers, not knowers - are thus old school philosophers. In a lovely passage, Harman continues:

"This does not mean that access to the table is impossible, only that it must be indirect. Just as erotic speech works when composed of hint, allusion, and innuendo rather than of declarative statements and clearly articulated propositions ... thinking is not thinking unless it realizes that its approach to objects can only be oblique."

Weird (or speculative) realists cannot be downward scientific reducers, nor upward humanistic reducers - they can only be hunters, forever chasing "ghostly objects withdrawing from all human and inhuman access, accessible only by allusion and seducing us by means of allure".

As suggested earlier, it may be artists who best fit this description:

"For on the one hand art does not function by dissolving ... [things] into their subatomic underpinnings. Quite obviously, artists do not provide a theory of physical reality, and Eddington's second table is the last thing they seek. But on the other hand they also do not seek the first table, as if the arts merely replicated the objects of everyday life or sought to create effects on us."

Art does something else, something more; it both establishes the existence of objects as things in themselves and alludes to objects that can never be made fully present. And philosophy, concludes Harman, would be wise if it gave up its pretensions of being a rigorous science and transformed itself into a uniquely vigorous art, thereby regaining its original character as a form of Eros:

"In some ways this erotic model is the basic aspiration of object-oriented philosophy: the only way, in the present philosophical climate, to do justice to the love of wisdom that makes no claim to be an actual wisdom."

Despite the obvious criticisms that can be made, I have to admit to finding Harman's thought very enticing and would happily pull up a chair at his third table in order to share a bottle of wine or eat some figs. Having said that, I do have a couple of concerns ...


II. Critique

Firstly, Harman rather overdoes the praise of artists - though he's by no means the first philosopher to do so and his flattery has earned him recognition as one of the hundred most influential figures on the international art scene; something he seems inordinately proud of, compensating as it does perhaps for the fact that many philosophers choose to ignore or dismiss his work entirely.

Still more problematic is the star-struck nature of Harman's boast in the introduction to his latest book that object-oriented ontology has attracted not only the interest of artists and architects, but also entertainers and actors. The charismatic nature of OOO, he claims, "has even captured the notice of celebrities ... with the popular musician Björk having engaged in correspondence with OOO author Timothy Morton, and the actor Benedict Cumberbatch having listened attentively to one of my lectures at a private residence in London".        

This could possibly be the most embarrassing (and shameful) line ever written by a philosopher.  For as Nick Land once said: Nothing is more absurd than a philosopher seeking to be liked. I would therefore encourage Professor Harman to worry less about sucking-up to a pretentious singer-songwriter and a big posh sod with plums in his mouth, and concentrate instead on persuading colleagues within the world of philosophy to take his writing more seriously.

Secondly, whilst I agree that philosophy should always be conceived in terms of Eros, I see it as a far more perverse and transgressive form of love than Harman; one born of disease and the madness of unconditional desire, or what Land terms libidinal materialism. 

Thus, whereas he thinks of objects as rather shy and retiring - almost coy - and insists we must talk about them with poetic metaphors and maybe a dash of saucy innuendo (OOO-er missus), I think of objects as promiscuous and obscene; things that don't just seek to seduce us from the shadows, but which indecently expose themselves and seek to ravish us in broad daylight if given the opportunity.

However, as I'm not one of the top hundred thinkers on anybody's list and have never had Sherlock listening attentively to one of my lectures, there's really no reason why readers should favour my (equally unverifiable) view over Harman's - unless, of course, it pleases them to do so ...    

Notes
  
A. S. Eddington, The Nature of the Physical World, (MacMillan, 1929).

Graham Harman, The Third Table / Der Dritte Tisch, Number 085 in the dOCUMENTA (13) series '100 Notes - 100 Thoughts / 100 Notizen - 100 Gedanken', (Hatje Cantz, 2012). Lines quoted are from pp. 6-15.

Graham Harman, Object-Oriented Ontology: A New Theory of Everything, (Pelican Books, 2018), p. 8. 

Nick Land, The Thirst for Annihilation: Georges Bataille and Virulent Nihilism, (Routledge, 1992).

Reflections on the Vacuum-Sealed Nature of Objects 2: Ethico-Political Considerations

Hiromi and Lisa by Photographer Hal

# 24 from the series Zatsuran (2013)

I illustrated in part one of this post how D. H. Lawrence's little read (and undervalued) 1922 novel Aaron's Rod anticipates the work of philosopher Graham Harman on the vacuum-sealed nature of objects. Here, I'd like to critically examine the latter's controversial and challenging notion in more detail ...

In a nutshell, Harman wants us to acknowledge something very obvious but not so easy to explain; namely, the fact that discernible, individual objects exist and that being isn't some shapeless, unified totality. Further, whilst these objects have relations with other objects, they aren't defined, determined, or exhausted by such. They always keep something of themselves withdrawn and in reserve; something hidden and untouchable, as Harman says, in the basement of being.

Ultimately, then, what gives to things their absolute distinctness is the fact that they are vacuum-sealed in perfect isolation and only ever have indirect (metaphorical) contact with one another; i.e., they only ever relate by translating one another (and in so doing generate difference).

This - if true - has interesting if not, indeed, crucially important ethical and political consequences; not least of all for any Lawrentians still hoping to establish a democracy of touch based on the interpenetration of bodies, the glad recognition of souls, and the re-establishment of the vital relations between objects which, according to Lawrence, were destroyed by the grand idealists.

Having said that, there is a positive aspect to Harman's thesis of withdrawal and isolation; namely, it allows objects to retain their volcanic integrity and thus to resist all attempts by external forces to control, coordinate, and exploit them. In other words, at some level, despite increasingly extended networks of power and surveillance, objects are essentially autonomous and ontological Gleichschaltung is an impossibility.

As Levi Bryant notes, nothing, for Harman, "is ever so defined, reduced, or dominated that it can't break free and be otherwise ... People, animals, minerals, technologies, and microbes are always threatening to erupt ..." In other words, all objects carry the potential for surprise, which is, of course, a revolutionary potential.

It's also a reason why we should treat them with caution and respect and attempt to see things from their perspective (Ian Bogost refers to this as alien phenomenology). This is more than simply a  question of exercising our human curiosity; it's about acknowledging that the world exists - and doesn't simply exist for us. Again, to quote Bryant here: "We live in a universe teaming with actants where we are actants among actants, not sovereigns organizing all the rest as the old Biblical narrative from Genesis would have it."

In conclusion: some commentators, I know, have little time for Harman and his object-oriented ontology; they aren't seduced by the speculative nature of his realism, nor charmed by the weirdness of his arguments. But, like Bryant, I still think that, at it's best, his work is original and engaging and does what all good philosophical writing should - i.e., encourage us to think outside the gate, even at the risk of losing our way or, perhaps, ending up on yet another foolish quest for that mysterious thing called the soul ...

See:

Levi Bryant, 'Harman, Withdrawal, and Vacuum Packed Objects: My Gratitude', posted on Larval Subjects (May 30, 2012): click here. 

Graham Harman, Tool-Being: Heidegger and the Metaphysics of Objects (Open Court Publishing Company, 2002).

To read part one of this post - Egoism a Deux - click here. 

Reflections on the Vacuum-Sealed Nature of Objects 1: Egoism a Deux

Rem and Marina by Photographer Hal 

# 07 from the series Flesh Love

Japanese photographer Haruhiko Kawaguchi (aka Photographer Hal) has been vacuum-packing lubed-up couples since 2009. The idea, he says, is to bring two people as physically close as possible and then hermetically seal them in their own world; united in love, united in life, united in death. 

I know exactly how D. H. Lawrence would describe this - egoism a deux; two people self-consciously contained in their own idealism and obscene personal intimacy to the point they can no longer move freely or even breathe.*

For like Rawdon Lilly, his fictional mouthpiece in Aaron's Rod (1922), Lawrence hates couples who pose as one and stick together like two jujube lozenges. Ultimately, they must recognise the intrinsically singular nature of being and be able to stand apart; to know that, at the core, one is alone and the heart beats alone in its own silence:

"'In so far as I am I, and only I am I, and I am only I ... I am inevitably and eternally alone, and it is my last blessedness to know it, and to accept it, and to live with this as the core of my self- knowledge.'" 

And so, whilst there's a time to love and to seek out others, so too is there a time to leave off loving altogether and recognise that two of the greatest things in life are fresh air and solitude. 

Now, as far as I remember, at this point in the novel someone tells Lilly that he's getting too metaphysical for anyone to understand. And, it's true, he is venturing onto philosophical ground - indeed, one might even argue that he's anticipating Graham Harman's object-oriented ontology, which I shall discuss in more detail in part two of this post.

For one of the key - and most challenging - ideas of the latter is that all objects, including human beings, are essentially self-sealed or vacuum-packed, never to be known, never to be violated. That is to say, objects always keep some aspect of their being withdrawn in darkness and can never be fully defined or exhausted by their relations; they can never be touched, as Lawrence would say, on the quick.

I'm not sure that Harman would term this hidden element of the thing in itself, as Lilly does, the Holy Ghost or Godhead, but he's certainly not adverse to spooky language and I suspect he'd agree that it's the innermost, integral and unique element. Or, to put it another way, the object's singular destiny; that volcanic core of the self that can never be lost or surrendered - not even in the name of Love ...


See: D. H. Lawrence, Aaron's Rod, ed. Mara Kalnins, (Cambridge University Press, 1988). Lawrence uses the phrase egoism a deux in ch. 9.  The lines quoted from Rawdon Lilly are taken from ch. 18. and the words italicised in the last paragraph are taken from the final chapter, 21.

*Note: Social psychologist and theorist Erich Fromm famously discusses the concept of egoism a deux in The Art of Loving (1956). According to Fromm, it's a mistaken attempt to find refuge on the part of alienated individuals from an otherwise unbearable sense of aloneness, masquerading as true love - something which, according to Fromm, requires learning to care for all mankind. Obviously, this is anathema to Lawrence, who loathes the universal love ideal even more than he does a vain attempt at complete intimacy formed between two individuals.   

To read part two of this post on the ethics and politics of object-oriented ontology, click here.

Blood, Sex, and the Inviolable Nature of Objects

Still from the video for the song Animals by Maroon 5 

Featuring Adam Levine and his wife Behati Prinsloo 

Dir. Samuel Bayer, (2014)

The amorous subject of John Donne's metaphysically conceited poem The Flea, cleverly attempts to persuade his beloved into consenting to a premarital sexual relationship by drawing her attention to a parasitic insect that has suck'd and sampled them both. His argument is that since their separate bloodstreams are united within the body of the flea, then they have, essentially, already been joined as man and wife and so may as well fuck without any further hesitation, embarrassment, or feeling of shame.  

It's a witty and imaginative argument, that rests on the religious idea that sex is a form of blood covenant or physical union consummated between two people. But, like most religious arguments, it's a fallacy; one that even D. H. Lawrence, for whom coition is a vital experience providing a crucial clue to existence, has to concede at last ...  

In Fantasia of the Unconscious (1922), Lawrence describes how the blood of a man "acutely surcharged with intense vital electricity ... rises to a culmination, in a tremendous magnetic urge" towards the polarized blood of a woman. Thus, the desire on the part of both parties to engage in genital intercourse. And, in the act of coition, says Lawrence, "the two seas of blood ... rocking and surging towards contact ... clash into a oneness", resulting in a great flash of interchange, before the two individuals fall separate once more, reinvigorated and tingling with newness in their blood and being.

Writing in A Propos of 'Lady Chatterley's Lover' (1930), however, Lawrence subtly qualifies his position; now, rather than talking about two seas of blood surging towards contact and clashing together into a oneness, he writes about marriage as a correspondence of blood and insists "the blood of man and the blood of woman are two eternally different streams, that can never be mingled ..." [my emphasis].

Thus, whilst the phallus may indeed be a column of blood that enters the valley of blood of woman, no matter how deeply the former penetrates the latter, neither breaks its bounds. In other words, there's a degree of communion, but there's no actual merging - and, if there were, it would be deadly to both parties; a horrible nullification of identity and singular being.

Ultimately, it's not only a fallacy but also a fatal form of idealism to posit the idea of two-becoming-one (even within the body of a flea). Whether we accept it or not, man, like all other objects, is limited, isolate and alone and all the penetrative sex in the world - be it oral, anal, or vaginal in character - doesn't change this. We are, if you like, unfuckable at last; that is to say, we never encounter or touch one another in our deepest being, which is forever withdrawn and vacuum-sealed.

See:

John Donne, The Flea, click here to read online at the Poetry Foundation and click here to read my analysis of this verse on Torpedo the Ark.

D. H. Lawrence, Fantasia of the Unconscious, ed. Bruce Steele, (Cambridge University Press, 2004).

D. H. Lawrence, A Propos of 'Lady Chatterley's Lover' and Other Essays, (Penguin Books, 1961).

Note: I am indebted to Graham Harman for the idea of vacuum-sealed objects existing in subterranean cellars of being beyond all relations - an idea that presents a serious challenge to the Lawrentian notion of touch as advanced in Lady Chatterley's Lover and elsewhere. 

See: Graham Harman, Tool-Being: Heidegger and the Metaphysics of Objects (Open Court Publishing Company, 2002).

Notes on Object Imperative and Pantheistic Sensuality

17thC print depicting a happy dendrophile

Lawrence loves trees and although he concedes they're mindless, he excitedly writes of sap-consciousness and root-lust and assigns them a unique soul. They are, he says, powerful, inhuman beings reaching up to the sky and reaching down into the dark earth. And reaching also into us.

Speaking of an American pine, Lawrence writes:

"Our two lives meet and cross one another, unknowingly: the tree's life penetrates my life, and my life, the tree's. We cannot live near one another, as we do, without affecting one another.”

Confronting the forceful reality of the tree, Lawrence speculates what might be thought of as a form of object imperative which, to paraphrase Graham Harman, radiates over him like a black sun, holding him in its orbit, demanding his attention and insisting that he reorganise his life along it axes:

"Something fierce and bristling is communicated. The piney sweetness is rousing and defiant ... the noise of the needles is keen with aeons of sharpness. ... I am conscious that it helps to change me, vitally. I am even conscious that shivers of energy cross my living plasm, from the tree, and I become a degree more like unto the tree ... And the tree gets a certain shade and alertness of my life, within itself. ...

      Of course, if I like to cut myself off, and say it is all bunk, a tree is merely so much lumber not yet sawn, then in a great measure I shall be cut off. So much depends on one’s attitude. One can shut many, many doors of receptivity in one’s self: or one can open many doors that are shut.
      I prefer to open my doors to the coming of the tree. Its raw earth-power and its raw sky-power, its resinous erectness and resistance, its sharpness of hissing needles and relentlessness of roots ...”

Lawrence describes this as a form of pantheistic sensuality, thereby indicating how his dendrophilia has a religious aspect and is not merely an erotic fascination.

Trees, we might say, give him a sense of god as present in all things and not merely wood. Thus Lawrence wants to venerate them as well as rub up against them (enjoying the feel of their bark and depositing his seed, like Birkin, in the folds of the delicious fresh growing leaves).

See: D. H. Lawrence, 'Pan in America', Mornings in Mexico and Other Essays, ed. Virginia Crosswhite Hyde (Cambridge University Press, 2009). Lines quoted are from pp. 158-59. 

For a related post on Lawrence's dendrophilia, click here.

Black Noise (On the Poetry of Francis Ponge)

Kazimir Malevich, Black Square (1915) 

Tretyakov Gallery, Moscow

I'm not sure I fully understand what physicists and audio engineers mean by the term black noise - I think it refers to a noise whose frequency is located close to zero (or what is commonly known as silence) on a spectrum of sound - but I like how philosopher Graham Harman uses the same term within his work to describe the background hum of mysteriously muffled objects hovering at the fringes of human intelligibility.  

Perhaps it's this gentle and virtually-inaudible sound of things that the French prose-poet Francis Ponge was able to attune his ear to ...

Known as the poet of things, Ponge explored the fascinating universe of actual entities - from pebbles to cigarettes, and flowers to bars of soap - in the (admittedly anthropocentric) belief that all objects, whilst remaining fundamentally withdrawn, nevertheless yearn to express themselves and await the coming of a speaking-subject who might hear them and find some way to articulate their near-silence, thereby revealing something of their hidden depths and weird, inhuman otherness.

What I love about Ponge - apart from his object-oriented ontology - is the fact that he avoided all the tired conventions of poetry; such as empty symbolism and allegory, self-indulgent lyricism, or obvious appeals to emotion. He declared himself an enemy of both the drabness of the dictionary and the transcendent posturing of poetry and sought to combine description and definition with the power and purity of elementary language.

His principle aim, therefore, was to defeat the Stereotype and to do so with a form of speculative realism and something extremely rare amongst artists - intellectual integrity.  

Notes

Graham Harman, Guerrilla Metaphysics, (Open Court Publishing Company, 2005).

Francis Ponge, Le parti pris des choses (1942). This collection of 32 short to medium length prose poems is available in several English translations, including, most notably, those by Lee Fahnestock, Robert Bly, and Beth Archer Brombert. 

Film Kills (2): On Images, Objects and Speculative Realism

In a digital age, the making, distribution, and consumption of images is perhaps our most fundamental activity. It deserves, therefore, to be carefully thought about from a philosophical perspective and, for me, Jean Baudrillard does a better job than most at this. 

For Baudrillard, iconography is not innocent. In fact, it plays a complicit role in what he terms the perfect crime and by which he refers to the extermination of singular being via technological and social processes bent on replacing real things and real people with a series of images and empty signs.

Ironically, in this world of simulacra and simulation the image can no longer even imagine the real, because it has itself become the real: "It is as though things had swallowed their own mirrors and had become transparent to themselves ... full in the light and in real time ... forced to register on thousands of screens" [1] in high definition.

When this happens, we pass beyond representation towards obscenity; a state wherein everything and everyone is "uselessly, needlessly visible, without desire and without effect" [2]. People who indecently expose themselves in this game of cyber-exhibitionism are left without secrets, without shadows, without charm. They become, if you like, ghosts in the machine, forced to confront the possibility that life can no longer be experienced except within the emotional parameters of Facebook. 

But maybe, when everything has finally been put on view, we'll realise that there was nothing to be seen after all. Maybe, those who live by the image will die by the image. And maybe we'll find a way to overcome our own narcissistic and voyeuristic image-fetishism; to smash a great hole in the Universal Screen and experience the wild chaos that lies beyond in the world of objects and actual entities.

Doubtless, this will require a certain innocence on our part and the development of what has been termed speculative realism. That is to say, a philosophy that insists there is more to the world than a play of appearances and that objects have a mind-independent reality; i.e. they exist regardless of whether we are thinking or observing them.

Iconographers and idealists believe there is a permanent correlation between reality and its representation. They become sceptical about anything outside the world of their own making - it is unthinkable, they say, that the unfilmable might exist! And yet, things-in-themselves do exist and there's a mysterious, partly invisible or withdrawn world of such things that constitute a reality that is completely indifferent to our existence and vain attempts to conceptualize it.

Why vain? Because the attempt to visualise and transcendentally guarantee the world in a manner entirely for our own convenience, is fundamentally an attempt to deny reality in all its inhuman and malevolent reality. An image is thus always a kind of anthropocentric conceit, or caricature. That's why a photograph of a horse, for example, is not the same as an actual horse that we might feed sugar lumps to, or be kicked in the head by: "the camera can neither feel the heat of the horse ... nor smell his horsiness", it merely captures "one dreary bit of ... his static external form" [3].

Even at its best, cinema never really encounters the world; it just puts a filmy-imaginative veneer over reality, or what might be described as a "luminous but impoverished plane of explicit awareness" [4].

The good thing is that herein lies hope: for what we learn from this is that the world is inexhaustible and objects virtually indestructible, because essentially unknowable. The image kills - but only partly; it deadens, but does not make dead. And so for all the attempts to dissolve the world and rid it of substance, objects (including human beings) stubbornly refuse to be abstracted away or transmuted into pure light and colour. 

Ultimately, matter returns in all its solidity and menace and the object extracts its revenge.

Notes:

[1] Jean Baudrillard, The Perfect Crime, trans. Chris Turner, (Verso, 1996), p. 4.

[2] Jean Baudrillard, The Intelligence of Evil or the Lucidity Pact, trans. Chris Turner, (Berg, 2005), p. 94.

[3] D. H. Lawrence, Sketches of Etruscan Places and Other Italian Essays, (CUP, 1992), pp. 127, 128.

[4] Graham Harman, Towards Speculative Realism, (Zero Books, 2010), p. 112.

Heidegger and the Thing

To his credit, Heidegger went out of his way to develop a highly singular understanding of the thing in contradistinction to the modern concept which invariably places the latter-as-object in a subordinate relationship vis-à-vis a human subject who represents and determines its nature.

I like it, for example, when he tells us that there is something solid in a work of architecture, coloured in a painting, or sonorous in a musical composition. Such statements may seem trite, or pseudo-profound, but it's important to be reminded of the self-evidently (but nonetheless frequently overlooked) thingly element in art works.

However, I don't like it when Heidegger begins to discriminate between things and mere things; with the latter described somewhat pejoratively as the lifeless beings of nature. He might mean to simply suggest that clods of earth and pieces of rotten wood are things in their purest state, but you can sense the contempt (just as when he tells us the stone is without world).

And when he hesitates to call God a thing, or to consider man as a thing, it profoundly disappoints.

Ultimately, Heidegger is a correlationist. And so, whilst not anthropocentric in the traditional sense, he continues to assign Dasein a special role and insist that it be taken as the final standard of reference. Thus, for all his talk of hammers, jugs, bridges, and shoes etc, Heidegger fails to provide the thingly-oriented ontology that he teases us with.

Whether his somewhat unorthodox disciple Graham Harman will succeed in this - or whether he'll become entangled in his own fourfold project and polypsychism - remains to be seen.