Showing posts with label nature (journal). Show all posts
Showing posts with label nature (journal). Show all posts

24 Mar 2018

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.