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.   

Object-Oriented Ontology and the Joy of Washing Up (With Reference to the Work of D. H. Lawrence)

Einai gar kei entautha theous

One of the reasons that D. H. Lawrence continues to fascinate is because his work is an attempt to construct a queer form of philosophical realism that is very much object-oriented. Even when, as a novelist, he writes of human subjects, he clearly cares more about their impersonal and, indeed, inhuman elements and how they interact within an ontological network made up of all kinds of other things; be they dead or alive, actual or virtual. For Lawrence, art is primarily an attempt to help us understand how all things – including ourselves – exist within this dynamic network of relations.

Human being, we might say, has its belonging in this network and although Lawrence often suggests that the most important of all relations is that between man and woman, there is of course no such hierarchy in reality. All things may not be equal, but they are all equally things and all relations are established, developed and dissolved on a flat ontological playing field. For a man to be rich in world requires more than the love of a good woman. He has to have also a quick relationship to "snow, bed-bugs, sunshine, the phallus, trains, silk-hats, cats, sorrow, people, food, diphtheria, fuchsias, stars, ideas, God, tooth-paste, lightning, and toilet-paper" [SoTH 183].

Thus it is that so many of Lawrence’s characters only really blossom when they enter into strange and startling new relationships with nonhuman objects; objects which, for Lawrence, even if composed of inert matter as opposed to living tissue, nevertheless exist "in some subtle and complicated tension of vibration which makes them sensitive to external influence and causes them to have an influence on other external objects" [SCAL 77].

This is true irrespective of actual physical contact, although Lawrence encourages his readers to establish joyful small contacts with objects, even offering a philosophical justification for doing the washing up:

"If I wash the dishes I learn a quick, light touch of china and earthenware, the feel of it, the weight and roll and poise of it, the peculiar hotness, the quickness or slowness of its surface. I am at the middle of an infinite complexity of motions and adjustments and quick, apprehensive contacts ... the primal consciousness is alert in me ... which is a pure satisfaction." [RDP 151]

When Lawrence advocates climbing down Pisgah, this is an important aspect of what he means; discovering the sacred in daily life. It's not a new idea, obviously. Even Heraclitus standing before his kitchen stove was keen to impress upon visitors that the gods were present everywhere and in all activities. But it remains an important idea that counters all forms of ascetic idealism that advocate separation from the world of things and devotion to a spiritual life of prayer and meditation.   

Critics have often accused Lawrence of contemptuously dismissing modern life as inauthentic. However, in order to make this charge stick they have to glide over passages such as the above which demonstrate that he was eager to relate his ontological vision to everyday existence and those things that lie closest to hand (such as a bowl of soapy water). 

For Lawrence, no chore was too humble that it didn't warrant being done well and he happily absorbed himself in cooking, cleaning, chopping wood, and milking the cow, whilst his wife lay in bed smoking cigarettes. Indeed, far from washing the dishes, Frieda was prone to breaking them over Lawrence's head - though I suppose this too is a way of demonstrating that matter actually exists and that violence can also give pleasure ...      

Notes:

D. H. Lawrence, 'The Novel', in Study of Thomas Hardy and Other Essays, ed. Bruce Steele, (Cambridge University Press, 1985). 

In the first version of ‘Morality and the Novel’, Lawrence offers a different – no less surprising – list of things with which it is crucial to have relations. This includes "children, creatures, cities, skies, trees, flowers, mud, microbes, motor-cars, guns, [and] sewers". See Appendix III of the above text, p. 242.

D. H. Lawrence, 'Edgar Allen Poe' (Final Version, 1923), in Studies in Classic American Literature, ed. Ezra Greenspan, Lindeth Vasey and John Worthen, (Cambridge University Press, 2003). 

D. H. Lawrence, 'Education of the People', in Reflections on the Death of a Porcupine and Other Essays, ed. Michael Herbert, (Cambridge University Press, 1988). 

D. H. Lawrence and Susan, the Black-Eyed Cow

Alexandra Klimas: Susan the Cow (2016)

Oil on canvas (70 x 120 cm)
plusonegallery.com 

As David Brock reminds us in his most recent column in the Eastwood and Kimberley Advertiser, whilst living on his ranch in New Mexico, Lawrence acquired a cow which he named Susan.

He happily milked her twice a day and was able to produce a couple of pounds of butter each week. But he was also obliged to spend a good deal of time chasing after her on horseback, as Susan was prone to wandering off into the surrounding hills; something he was less pleased about.
 
For the American James Joyce scholar, William York Tindall, Susan is best thought of as a symbol rather than as an actual cow. For it is as a symbol that she provides the critic with a key to Lawrence's philosophy and art. Indeed, symbolic Susan might even help us, says Tindall, come to a better understanding of some of the wider problems within literature and society. Thus it is that in his 1939 study of Lawrence and Susan, Tindall has very little to say about the latter.

This is disappointing - and also, I think, mistaken. For Lawrence himself makes it very clear in his own writings on Susan that she is not to be thought of as a symbol, or metaphor, or a piece of livestock whose function is simply to produce milk like a machine, but as a living creature with her own non-human reality.

For Lawrence, the fact that birds, beasts and flowers - indeed, all things - exist independently of man is the essential point to make. And the great challenge, this being the case, is to find a way to come into touch with things without compromising their integrity or falling into anthropomorphism and projecting one's own characteristics and values onto them.

Thus it is that Lawrence is desperate to discover how, as a man, he can equilibrate himself with black-eyed Susan in all her cowy mystery. It isn't easy. For although there's a sort of relation between them, neither can ever really know the other (certainly not in full). But still they can sense one another and she can swing her tail in his face when he sits behind her, making him mad.

And this physical relationship hinges, like all relationships, on a form of desire:

"She knows my touch and she goes very still and peaceful, being milked. I, too, I know her smell and her warmth and her feel. And I share some of her cowy silence, when I milk her. [...] And this relation is part of the mystery of love: the individuality on each side, mine and Susan's, suspended in the relationship."

Tindall refers to these lines from '... Love Was Once a Little Boy' in the preface to his study, but seems more than a little embarrassed by them; explaining that whilst "it cannot be denied that [Lawrence] sounds foolish", he was a genius and genius "is not always reasonable".  

Well, I don't think Lawrence sounds foolish here; in fact, I think he's being perfectly reasonable and that the lines quoted are not only very beautiful, but also philosophically of great interest. It's Tindall, I'm afraid, who is being crass and displaying a remarkable non-affinity with his subject.  


See:

David Brock, 'D. H. Lawrence and his well-loved pet cow named Susan', Eastwood and Kimberley Advertiser, (1 Dec 2017). 

D. H. Lawrence, '...... Love Was Once a Little Boy', Reflections on the Death of a Porcupine and Other Essays, ed. Michael Herbert, (Cambridge University Press, 1988), pp. 329-46.

William York Tindall, D. H. Lawrence and Susan His Cow, (Columbia University Press, 1939).

For a related post to this one, click here.

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.

The Moon at the End of My Street

According to Lawrence, who insists on an essential and dynamic correspondence between man and the heavenly bodies, the moon is a strange, white, soft-seeming world; a great cosmic nerve centre from which we quiver forever. 

Now, as readers of this blog may know, I'm philosophically hostile to such naive vitalism and what Quentin Meillassoux terms correlationism. However, la luna continues to attract my interest and affection and I agree with Lawrence that it's a far lovelier thing than merely a dead lump of rock in the night sky. 

And so it is that - just the other evening - I took the above photo of the moon at the end of my street, which, coincidentally, happens to be the title of a new collection of poems by Isabel del Rio, who, kindly, has given me permission to reproduce the following lines from a verse entitled 'If you and I did not have the moon':

    

If we did not have the Moon,
we would not know what to call
the night, perhaps only
darkness, we would describe it
only by its colour, black,
by its lack of purpose, pointless.


Other lunar-inspired verses in Ms del Rio's new book include 'wondering moon', 'this Moon is but a quaver on the sky', and 'Moon Haiku Number 1':


Like you, the Moon is
not in the universe, but
is the universe


Obviously, as a poet, there are moments when Ms del Rio falls into the same anthropocentric idealism and affectation as Lawrence. It's not so much that either author wilfully privileges the human over other objects, but each seems unable to help thinking the latter unless they conform to the mind of a knowing subject and in this way become products of human cognition and aesthetic fancy.

Still, it's been said that I often do the same, despite my best efforts to adhere to a strict form of speculative realism and object-oriented ontology (i.e. to know that the moon and stars exist independently of Man and are not ontologically exhausted by their relation to us), so who am I to criticise ... 

Note: Isabel del Rio is a writer and linguist, born in Madrid and living in London. She writes in English and Spanish and has published fiction and poetry. Her new book is published by Friends of Alice Publishing (2016).  

Federico Campagna: A Man of Faith and Folly

Federico Campagna identifies himself as a Sicilian philosopher based in London. Unfortunately, I'm not sure this is entirely true. He is Italian and he does work and live in London, but is he a philosopher or is he not merely a moral and political idealist who uses philosophy whenever it's convenient to do so simply to underpin his metaphysical and, indeed, quasi-mystical search for what he describes as a fundamental architecture of emancipation?

At any rate, his current work revolves around the question of contemporary nihilism, viewing the latter as something that we need to move beyond in order that we might reconstruct reality - and not merely reality as understood by science, but an enchanted or magical reality that is more originary and which supports the ontological primacy of Dasein or mankind's manifest self-understanding. 

Thus, Campagna's dreary, dated, and clichéd characterization of nihilism as a deep crisis of truth that paralyses all human action and imagination is one which I would decisively reject. If we must talk about a topic that has been so overly-discussed, then it seems to me the starting point has to be with Ray Brassier and not Ernesto de Martino, the anthropologist and historian of religions whom Campagna refers us to.     

For unlike Campagna, I don't think nihilism is something to be overcome and I certainly don't think we should attempt to do so in the name of values which, he says, reside in some kind of ethical core and stretch from the gates of Being into our everyday lives, constituting one of the mysteries of existence of which he is so fond. Rather, like Brassier, I think nihilism is a speculative opportunity, not an existential dilemma or disease; a chance to think (even if it turns out thinking has interests that do not coincide with human welfare or happiness). 

Ultimately, Campagna, by his own admission, is a man of faith. In an article published earlier this year, he explicitly tells us that faith is what we need today to accompany an ontological awakening. Faith in what? Faith in life and the intrinsic value of life, which cannot be objectively determined by science, only subjectively affirmed by the faithful individual. Only faith in life transforms Dionysian chaos into Apollonian harmony; noise into music. He writes:

"It is only the interplay of the forces of Being and faith that empower and ... will realize our new architecture of values ... And [result in] the establishment of ... an oasis of limit and freedom, where the chorus faithfully sings for its own glory and Apollo benignly looks on from beyond."  

To which we can only shout hallelujah and not know whether to laugh or cry ...


Notes: 

Federico Campagna was speaking at the 6/20 Club on Sunday the 20th of September, 2015. His paper was entitled On Magic and the Reconstruction of Reality After Nihilism. A version of this paper was given to the Art/Work Association earlier in the year and details of this presentation can be found by clicking here. 

The other paper by Campagna  to which I refer and from which I quote, is entitled After Nihilism, After Technic: Sketches for a New Philosophical Architecture. It was published in the online journal e-flux and can be read by clicking here. 

For Ray Brassier's brilliant discussion of nihilism in terms of enlightenment and extinction, see Nihil Unbound (Palgrave Macmillan, 2007).

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.

Revenge of the Flowers

  The triumph of vegetation is total

The revenge of the flowers is an idea that has long fascinated me. I like the thought that plant life continuously conspires to challenge the supposed superiority of animals and defeat attempts on behalf of humanity to create a full idealized and mechanized world; that one day, the weed will conquer.

It is certainly worth remembering that not only do plants have ancestral reality, but we remain absolutely dependent upon them to provide the air we breathe and the food we eat. Man might dream of one day paving over the entire world with concrete and tarmac, but it's grass - that most unassuming of all plants - that provides the foundation for our continued survival and success.

Indeed, once we abandon our anthropocentric conceit, it becomes arguable that not only is our life dependent upon plants, but is in a very real sense determined by them. Like the birds and the bees and other insects, we exist - as far as the plants are concerned - to disseminate their DNA. At best, we have entered into a mutually beneficial co-evolutionary relationship with flora which renders conventional and convenient distinctions between subject and object meaningless: we shape their unfolding and they shape ours.

If you're a humanist, this is a little disconcerting and hard to admit. For it means acknowledging the fact that plants are just as complex, just as cruel, and just as exploitative as us and that in comparison to the daisy, the greatest monuments of mankind are transitory and insignificant. Plants have been evolving for millions of years and have in that time been endlessly inventing new strategies for survival and perfecting their designs. Thus, to say that we are a more advanced form of life is more than a little presumptuous. We can walk and talk and think, but, in the absence of chlorophyll, we can't photosynthesize nutrients directly from water, soil, and sunlight.

All this being said, it's surely important not to simply fall back into one of the three traditional narratives about man and nature with which we are all too familiar: (i) the heroic narrative, in which humanity is depicted as struggling against nature; (ii) the romantic narrative, in which paradise is regained and man emerges into some kind of spiritual unity with nature; (iii) the eco-apocalyptic narrative, characterized by Michael Pollan as an "environmental morality tale, in which Nature pays man back for his transgressions".

Contrary to these tired mythological storylines, I propose a speculative and realist narrative in which all forms of flora and fauna are regarded primarily as objects - not necessarily equal objects, but equally objects nevertheless, caught up in the same orgy of sex, violence, and random mutation that we like to call life.