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EVERY_OOONT
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?
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