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December 6, 2018 On reading (as little as possible) about Graham Harman's book "Object-Oriented Ontology: A New Theory of Everything". https://www.lrb.co.uk/v40/n18/stephen-mulhall/how-complex-is-a-lemon There's a review of this book in a recent LRB, where the reviewer (Stephen Mulhall) Though early on, Mulhall makes maintains a much more level temper than I it clear he's Very Serious: would, but continually comments with phrases like Harman-never-explains and "... for OOO objects include it's-hard-to-see-how and so on. One gets ... fictional entities such the sense of an intelligent person as Sherlock Holmes or the bending over backwards to be fair: conspiracy to assasinate Mulhall tries to find some there-there President Kennedy ..." but fails. HEAD_WOUND But even I am not lazy enough to write a summary of someone else's review and call it done, so I went off in search of more direct access to that object named Graham Harman. So first off, let's check the material up at google books from this book -- (though I note that Mulhall's explanations of Harman's ideas often make more sense than Harman's): https://books.google.com/books?id=P6szDwAAQBAJ I think I get Harman's drift. See, post-Trump we're all antsey about being post-truth, and now everybody wants to be all evidence-based and shit. Harman wants to tell us that deploying knowledge against the no-nothings is no good because we don't know nothing and can't. Essentially, Harman leaps from the point that knowledge is difficult (which is well-known) to the presumption that it's impossible (which is self-contradictory). But trying to figure out how we can know stuff better, and how to use what we know to do stuff better, that's all pointless. Because Objects! Or Object-orientation! And Ontology. Or something. Working through some material from his introduction: "To say that we now live in a society dominated by the production Well yes, a lot of us worry of knowledge means that the success about the embrace of of the natural sciences and their propanda-fueled delusions on technical application is the the right, many of them in ultimate benchmark for what counts pretty obvious contradiction as truth, and hence is the possible of anything like "the facts". key to opposing Donald Trump ... On this view, a demagogue can only be But as you might expect, if you're silenced by knowledge, as in the familar the likes of Harman, it is old Leftist adage of 'speaking the terribly naive of us to think that the truth to power'. ... " antidote for lies might be truth. What do those scientific bozos know anyway? Most of them have never even read any Heidegger. "In other words, if only we could apply the scientific method to Do I need to point out that this is a politics than we would finally be rather strange abrupt leap, concealed rid of irrational human conflict, by this phrase "in other words"? and could perhaps make as much progress in politics as we have in Nevertheless, it's an interesting our understanding of physical thought that there might be some nature ... " sort of political science that really is a science, some sort of method of designing a political process to arrive at wise and just decisions. 'Tis true that we don't have it as of yet, but the idea that there's no way to improve what we do have would seem to be a bit pessimistic. And in any case, what people are actually trying to do is get politicians elected who care about the truth (ala the upswing in politicians with scientific backgrounds of late). This would seem to be fairly straightforward-- it's not some sort of impossible dream or "miracle cure". Pragmatic attempts at ameliorating an evil might not be terribly exciting, but neither are they anything to be sneered at. ... truth and knowledge are proposed as the antidote to a relativism .. that invents Actually, lies and misconceptions whatever 'alternative facts' are not synonymous with "relativism". it pleases ... Liars can easily claim to be in touch with absolute knowledge, and often do. "Yet somehow it is not always clear where we are supposed to find the truth and knowledge that are And since it's not *always* recommended as our miracle cure." clear, obviously it *can't be done*! Aha! Disprove that! (If you've a few spare seconds.) "This is especially evident in fields such as the arts and architecture, which are governed by shifting currents of taste " Yeah okay. And that's relevant to, say, "climate change", how? " ... a difference that has mostly served to devalue these fields in Yup, you can't get in the door at the public eye in comparison with the science lectures any more, now those that seem to produce actual that the Lady Gaga fans have knowledge, such as science, abandoned the devalued fields of engineering or medicine." art and culture. " It is also unclear who possesses political knowledge ... " Well, I'm not sure what he's getting at, but lets grant that there are perennial disputes like inside-the-system/outside- the system and pragmatic compromise vs. uncompromising idealism and so on. "Nor is it always clear even where scientific knowledge can be found. Scientific theories are regularly Yup, regularly, like clockwork. overthrown and replaced during Every morning we wake up to the periods of intellectual upheaval ..." screams of anguished scientists tearing out their paradigms by the roots. "Reputable engineering firms make errors of calculation that plunge hundreds of Well yes, mistakes have been made. victims to death in the sea." And yet by and large the engineering profession is pretty reliable, and I doubt Harman would turn down a speaking engagement for fear of riding in an airplane. You're probably getting the idea by now... He then goes off on how relgion isn't any good because religious fanatics sometimes kill each other, then it's Stalin and Pol Pot to discredit lefty politics, and he thinks it's highly significant that not even *Socrates* claimed to actually know There's something funny anything-- though you know, we're free to about treating Socrates claim we've advanced a bit beyond Plato, as the ultimate oracle... should we feel so inclined. right after a gish-galosh dismissing religious fanatics. Harman brings to mind the phrase "fractally wrong". He gets worse the closer you look. He goes on talking about how Object-Oriented Ontology is ".. a relatively new school of philosophy ..." (You will note the sub-title of this book does not hedge with words like 'relatively'). He quite nicely refers to a critic of OoOnt with a name I would ascify as Zizek (though But I gather that he and its supposed to have caron marks over the Zizek play up their duel "z"s) who attacks OOO "for allowing no in public, like rival place in its model for the human subject". rapstars. OOONT "OOO has even been ranked by *ArtReview* among the 100 most influential forces in Right, it's all over the the international art world." Korean dramas I've been watching. But maybe those don't qualify as Art. Or International. "But perhaps its greates impact so far has been in architecture, a discipline that is a famous early adopter of new And is reviled by everyone philosophical trends." who has to deal with the buildings they crank out... BUILDINGS_LEARN "No one is actually in possession of knowledge or truth, which therefore cannot be our protection against the degeneration of politics or of anything else." "As OOO sees it, the true danger to thought is not relativism but *idealism* ..." "As OOO sees it": a funny first person pronoun, that. And you know that how? (You can play this game all day with someone who insists that he knows that none of us know anything...) "... and hence the best remedy for what ails us is not the truth/knowledge pair (which we will consider in greater detail in Chapter 4), but *reality*." Groovy: we need reality, though we can't know anything about it. "Reality is the rock against which our various ships always founder, and as such it must be acknowledged and revered, however elusive it may be." But truth is right out, it's way too elusive. "Just as military commanders say that no battle plan survives the first contact with the enemy, philosophers ought not to legislate foolproof procedures for surmounting emotion and belief, but should This guy *can't even fucking recall instead that no theory survives is write*. I could cut the first contact with reality." word count on this passage in half, easy. Anyway, once again: you don't need to be "foolproof" to be useful. But being prepared to revise ideas upon arrival of new evidence is a very nice message, and it's a good thing we have this "New Philosophy" to make it. "Furthermore, since reality is always radically different from our formulation of it, and is never It's always *radically something we encounter directly in the flesh, different* it's never we must approach it *indirectly*." just somewhat and our formulations are of course never near "good And as I mentioned, I keep enough" as a first cut, wondering if we don't know jack, or anything like that. how is it exactly we know that we don't know jack? "This *withdrawal* or *withholding* of things from direct access is the central principle of OOO." Which I would not touch with a ten foot pole, myself. "The usual objection to this principle ..." Oooh. Let me guess: it doesn't make any sense, you don't know what you're talking about, and common sense seems to indicate there are many cases where it's exactly wrong, e.g. we know a lot about how steel bends and corrodes; and how water boils; and how philosophers gibber incoherently and pass it off as wisdom. "... is the complaint that it leaves us with nothing but useless negative statements about an unknowable reality." Ah, so close! The actual trouble is it claims there are no positive statements that can be made, and yet we do know otherwise. It's reducto ad stupido not reductio ad I-find-that-depressing. "Yet the objection assumes that there are only two alternatives ..." Oh great, now it's your *critics* who are doing the oversimplifying. The fiends, how dare they. "... clear prose statements of truth on one side and vague poetic gesticulations on the other." No jack-- that's the assumption *you* started with, you can't hand it off to us. You keep going on about how we don't have perfection so we've got nothing. "I will argue instead that most cognition takes neither of these two forms ... " And myself I wouldn't want to bet on how the stats work out on these different wonky categories of cognition... The point is that there is at least a *possibility* that someone can do better than nothing and it is established by the *reality* that some people do indeed do better. E.g like Science. You know, you've heard of it, right? Those guys across campus who bring in all the funding because they actually know some stuff? -------- [NEXT - INTO_THE_OOONT]