Haemostasis

For Lawrence, who subscribes to a libidinal materialism in which 'touch' is of crucial importance, the physical handling of an object brings us much closer to a true understanding of it than any abstract theory of the thing. Via frequent contact and usage, we gain what he terms 'blood-knowledge' and by which he means an intuitive, sensual, and pre-cognitive way of relating to the material world.

Although he often claims that he is not an opponent of mind and doesn't advocate an acephalic humanity, Lawrence clearly privileges some form of primal consciousness that he locates in the lower-body and which delights in doing the washing-up. One of the reasons he dislikes Kant is because the latter only thought coldly and critically with his head and never darkly and desirously with his blood: and he never did the dishes!

Real thought, says Lawrence, is an experience and requires the establishment of a 'peculiar alien sympathy' with the otherness of things that lie external to our selves and exist mind-independently. Idealism marks the death of all this: it is a negation of the real and of the great affective centres within the body wherein the pristine unconscious is located. If we are to be happy and vital creatures, then we must, says Lawrence, get back into vivid relationship with the cosmos; i.e. get back into touch and know once more not in terms of apartness (which is rational and scientific), but in terms of togetherness (which is religious and poetic).

What are we to make of all this? At one time, I would have subscribed to this vision and affirmed Lawrence's libidinal materialism without hesitation. And, in fact, I still think there is much to be said for the latter and believe it may hold a fundamental key to the development of an object-oriented ontology. Ultimately, Lawrence plays for me much the same role that Heidegger plays for Graham Harman and he remains a major influence on my thinking.

However, I now have some reservations and find much of what Lawrence writes here, as elsewhere, problematic. Thus, the idea that the physical handling of a mundane object such as a tea-pot, or the frequent use of a tool such as a hammer, somehow brings us closer to it than we might ever be to those things of which we have only a theoretical understanding - such as molecules, black holes, or electromagnetic waves - seems dubious.

In fact, it seems to be based on an entirely false (although common) distinction made between theoretical and non-theoretical forms of knowledge, in which the former are presented as artificial, speculative, and parasitic upon the latter which is the warm-blooded body of true human  understanding. As Paul Churchland points out: "That these specious contrasts are wholesale nonsense has not prevented them finding expression and approval" in the writings not only of artists and poets like Lawrence, but also in the work of many philosophers. Churchland continues:

"Upon close inspection the various contrasts thought to fund the distinction are seen to disappear. If viewed warily, the network of principles and assumptions constitutive of our common-sense conceptual framework can be seen to be as speculative and as artificial  as any overtly theoretical system. ... Comprehensive theories, on the other hand, prove not to be essentially parasitic, but to be potentially autonomous frameworks in their own right. In short, it appears that all knowledge ... is theoretical; that there is no such thing as non-theoretical understanding. Our common-sense conceptual framework stands unmasked as being itself a theory, or a battery of theories. And where before we saw a dichotomy between the theoretical and non-theoretical, we are left with little more than a distinction between freshly minted theory and thoroughly thumb-worn theory whose cultural assimilation is complete."

- Scientific Realism and the Plasticity of Mind (CUP, 1979), pp. 1-2.

In other words, Lawrence's blood-knowledge is simply another term for doxa - or that which can be passed off as true without question simply because it has already been widely accepted as such in advance. Thus Lawrence, the arch-opponent of the cliche and stereotype, is here exposed as trading in such; just as he panders to prejudice and reinforces reactionary ignorance with his lazy and disappointing dismissal of modern science.