View this link:

http://kvond.wordpress.com/2009/11/15/harmans-commodification-of-paper-writing/#comment-3552

Or, the Age of the Object-Oriented World-Picture

Over in the comments section of Kvond’s recent post on Harman, commenter Eli has written a lengthy and formidable remark that sums up and extends the critiques that have thus far been made, revealing the absent center, the constitutive lack, which appears to structure object-oriented philosophy as both a movement and a theory. While the comment itself surely deserves the status of its own complete post, for the time being a few excerpts will have to suffice in order to simply draw attention to his response:

Harman’s attitude toward just about everything is an “aesthetic” one, and he even says that we should regard aesthetics as “first philosophy”. But note that he means nothing remotely sophisticated by “aesthetics” here. Philosophy for him is about liking and disliking things – quite literally – and he views it as a purely aesthetic pursuit – not because he has some theory about how aesthetics judgement supplants all others or what have you; there’s no judgment, no cognitive dimension whatsoever involved: it’s literally as primitive as “x feels good”, “I like x”: hence his love of travelogue, catalogues, lists, photographs with pretty colours: the world is a vast aesthetic sensorium featuring the pleasing and the displeasing and philosophy is the catalogue and guide.

…What puzzles me most when he gives papers saying how philosophy should forget about epistemology and should instead concern itself directly with fire and cotton, monkeys, tornadoes and quarks, is why no-one just asks him straight out: “Could you give me an example of what a philosopher might have to say about monkeys or comets or neutrinos that’s not covered by the sciences?” What would he have to say? “Errm, well … when a monkey eats a banana, there is actually no interaction between the monkey and the banana, because monkeys and bananas are vacuum-sealed objects which forever infinitely withdraw from one another. No-one has ever seen a monkey or a banana in the purity of their individual essences, and they can only interact on the inside of an intention, and all objects relate to each other by means of intentions”. Why don’t people just start howling with laughter and derision when he says such things?

I strongly urge our readers to read Eli’s damning commentary in its entirety, and hopefully within a few days I’ll be able to muster up the time to sketch out some further thoughts of my own (namely, where I agree with what has thus far been said, and also where I disagree).