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MULHALL_ON_HARMAN

                                                  December 12, 2018

                                        https://www.lrb.co.uk/v40/n18/stephen-mulhall/how-complex-is-a-lemon

Quoting much of Stephen Mulhall on Graham Harman
(it took some discipline not to quote even more):

So far so good...

  "Harman's second proposal concerns aesthetics,
  which he presents as the root of all philosophy,
  and as driven by insights he derived from the
  Spanish philosopher Ortega y Gasset."                    I guess it's a
                                                           useful marketing
But Harman apparently includes all sensory experience      ploy to claim that
under aesthetics-- there's a "real" object which we        "aesthetics is all"
can't know, but what we actually percieve are "sensual"    if you're marketing
(i.e. "sensory") objects, that act as an intermediary.     to the Ahrt and
                                                           Ahrchitecture crowd.
You might be able to do something with that, but
Harman is full of complications that don't seem to
make any sense-- he insists on the perfect                 But again, perhaps
unknowability of the "real" (rather than the more          this is marketing?
common sense acknowledgement of imperfect knowledge        Dissing the science
of the real), he insists on not "privleging" any           and engineering
type of object (cause we all know, "privlege" is           crowd plays up to
baaad); he argues that "real" objects are just as          the inferiority
inaccessible to each other as they our to our              complex of the
understanding (cause otherwise real-real                   design-school.
interactions might seem better, and the other kids
in the schoolyard might feel jealous)....

Mulhall traces the arc of Harman going off the rails:

  "On this account, metaphor is the heart of art; and the
  heart of metaphor is a complex transaction between
  subject, real object and sensual object. Suppose a poet
  says: ‘The cypress is the ghost of a dead flame.’
  ... since Harman (unlike Ortega) thinks the real
  cypress is necessarily inaccessible, he believes that we
  can only make sense of this by positing some other real
  object that is always present in any aesthetic experience:
  the subject of that experience, the reader. It is we who
  stand in for the absent cypress and support its
  freshly-anointed flame-qualities; we are method actors
  playing a cypress playing a flame. Harman concludes that
  metaphor is inherently theatrical ..."

And I gather that "theatrical" is more Harman-english:
he's claiming there's some pretense underlying our
normal grasp of "metaphor", there's a let's pretend game
that we're not aware of (which makes it awkward to call
this some sort of "acting").

  "... It’s also quite striking that a supposedly realist
  philosophy, which rejects from the outset any form of idealism
  (which typically claims that objective reality must be
  understood in relation to subjectivity), finds itself making
  the human subject the primary object and actor in art ..."

  "Harman’s polypsychism rests on a refusal to privilege
  subject-object relations over object-object relations ...
  Identifying essential differences between kinds of relation
  doesn’t discredit either kind; and if the ontological
  possibilities are more numerous and richer in one case, then
  acknowledging that fact does not in itself amount to
  privileging that kind of relation."

But even if it did, why would we care?
The "real" is not planning to litigate against
the "sensual" for violating it's civil rights.

 "But why should the accessibility of objects threaten their
  reality? After all, we ordinarily acknowledge a variety of
  limitations in our modes of access to the real world. We think
  that the apple on my desk continues to exist when I’m not
  perceiving it; that I may misperceive some of its attributes
  under certain conditions, and that others may or may not be in
  a position to correct me; that no matter how much knowledge of
  it we acquire, there may be more to discover ..."

  "These ideas add up to what looks like a pretty robust
  acknowledgment of the autonomy and independence of real
  objects; but they also allow for the possibility that we can
  sometimes grasp their real properties and nature.  ... with a
  fair wind, great care and a huge amount of collective
  theoretical and practical labour-- we can come to know a great
  deal about it."

  "Harman never explains why this kind of sober acknowledgment
  of our finitude as knowers should not satisfy our realist
  impulse; why allowing even the possibility of genuine
  knowledge of a real object, however qualified and conditioned
  and subject to revision it may be, is a threat to its
  independent reality."



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