Who Made Who? Stephen King's 'Maximum Overdrive' (1986)

Graham Harman in Interview and a Digression on Rhetoric

In accounting for the recent 'turn towards things' in contemporary though, Harman relates J. G. Ballard's statement in an interview with RE/search that the role of the imaginative writer has flipped. Formerly, the job of an author was to create fictions, but that now we are so surrounded by fictions, the job of an author is "to create realities, or to discover realities perhaps." [10:46-11:10]

Harman also has some beautifully contentious things to say about writing philosophy, specifically about how to write:

"Freud is one of my heroes, for a couple of reasons. (I don't agree with everything he says, of course.) One of the reasons he's one of my heroes is he's a fabulous writer, and that is of [under-rated?] importance when we're talking about intellectuals. I think, 'When in doubt, write well,' is what I would say, because what you do when you're writing is you are struggling to grasp things that are not easily formulable as... uh, explicit propositions. There's this kind of lazy approach to intellectualism where you think the important thing is to be clear, and fuzzy people are bad and vague people are bad, and you're trying to keep everything as clear as possible.

"Analytic philosophy has tried to teach us this: Continentals are all so fuzzy and we need to make clear propositions in advance like the sciences do. This is completely false, as I see it. Clarity does not get us Truth; clarity gets us a kind of superficial crust that looks like a truth, because reality itself is not an explicit proposition. Reality itself is something deeper than what we say about it, so therefore the only way to get at reality is to be able to allude, to hint, to suggest, and this is ridiculed by the scientistic crowd, but who cares?

They're simply following this dogmatic robotic method of the natural sciences, which is not applicable to philosophy. We're not trying to make clear catalogues of all the known properties of things in philosophy, the way the try to do in the natural sciences. I don't even think the sciences only do that, but that's a... stickier topic. What you're trying to do in philosophy is find what's lying beneath the crust of the world: you love wisdom, you don't have it. Philo sophia; it's not sophia. You're trying to get at what's hiding beneath opinion, what's hiding beneath appearance. And the only way to do that is by approaching it obliquely.The way Socrates did, the way Heidegger does in his Doctrine of Truth.

I said all this because Freud is a great writer, and what to me a great writer is, is someone who knows that reality is something a bit deeper than explicit propositions. And so they're able to use a certain suggestive power, they're able to use metaphors, they're able to use inspiring rhetoric, while also building up a solid case for what they're talking about. It's very rare that there's someone who is a truly good writer who has garbage theories. I think if someone's writing well it's a sign that they're on to something, and you have to take that seriously." [16:00-18:02]

During the Autumn 2013 Fine Art Research Programme (FARP, unfortunately) sessions at the Royal College of Art (RCA), several research presentations have been critiqued with variations on the following: 'I seem to have been moved somehow by the rhetoric used, and I'm uncomfortable with that, I feel like I'm being manipulated.' I may, here, be misrepresenting the comments, because my response to what I take to be their content is so splutteringly flabbergasted and dismissive:

How is it possible, in an early 21st Century research seminar drowning in critical theory no less, not to at least acknowledge the possibility that every possible approach – particularly the most 'neutral' seeming – is equally rhetorical and manipulative? Or that your own seeming lack of manipulation at the hands of a particular orator is not because what they say is intrinsically "legitimate" or "straightforward", but rather evidence of their successful rhetorical appeal to your Ethos?

To continue in the terminology of classical rhetoric, perhaps the 'rhetorical effect' being impugned here is rather an emotional one, the appeal to pathos. Such criticisms often come following moments of drama, rather than rhetoric (if one can make a clear distinction). Tone, rhythm, passion, spectacle: these are suspect. But! It is only through a willful ignorance of almost a century of neuroscience – not to mention much philosophy and the pressing evidence of introspection – that it is possible not to acknowledge that emotion and cognition are impossible to separate, that thinking and feeling are impossible to separate cleanly, and that a 'lack of affect' (a flattening of emotional response) damages the ability to detect falsehood, make ethical judgements, or view information contextually.

Latour at CRASSH : A Conceptual Autobiography

Bruno Latour here gives an introduction to the progression of his thought, from early work on Biblical hermeneutics to Actor-Network Theory and his current activities. He describes the process which led him to 'Symmetric Anthropology', using anthropological methods to study the "rational" aspects of Western society, particularly science.

Hoarding and New Materialism: Jane Bennet at the Vera List Center

Jane Bennett. Powers of the Hoard: Artistry and Agency in a World of Vibrant Matter from Vera List Center on Vimeo.

Jane Bennet, author of Vibrant Matter: A Political Ecology of Things, is part of what she calls a New Materialist movement. This New Materialism would presumably include Latour's Actor-Network Theory, writers on Material Agency like Knappett & Malafouris, and the Speculative Realism blogosphere.

In some sense at least, this work seems linked to anthropologist Alfred Gell's 1998 work Art and Agency on the 'secondary agency' of objects, which he sees as partaking of the social agency of their users or owners. Gell uses the notion of a distributed or partible self, with objects being key aspects of the individual, very much like prosthetic body parts. (Of course using the word 'individual' here becomes rather oxymoronic, as this thesis results from the proposition that people are divisible.)

Jane Bennett expresses this point very vividly in her discussion of the hoarder's bodily relationship with their hoard, such that they form a 'working whole':

"The hoarded object is like one's arm; not a 'tool' but an organ, a vital member. When a therapist has to leave the kitchen of another hoarder named Karen because the smell was too strong, too revolting, Karen becomes upset and insulted. When the therapist explains, 'This is not a personal refection of you,' Karen is adamant in a way that is both ashamed and proud, 'Of course it is.' And the therapist soothingly replies, 'Oh, no, but this isn't you,' and Karen repeats with annoyance, 'Of course it is.' 

"Now I speculated above with reference to Bergson's model of perception as subtraction, that the hoarder might have a relatively non-action-selective perceptual style compared to the non-hoarder, which might allow hoarders to take pleasure in what non-hoarders see as filthy junk. Now this same distinctive sensibility might also account for why hoarders experience the bodies of their junk and their own biological bodies as fused, as sort of forming a working whole.

"A therapeutic discourse might say that hoarders have lost the ability to distinguish between person and thing, but a vibrant or aleatory materialist might say something like this: 'Hoarders have an exceptional awareness of the extent to which all bodies can intertwine, infuse, ally, undermine, or compete with those in its vicinity.'"

First Post

Following Nayan Kulkarni's excellent suggestion that I keep a record of the web research that I am doing as part of my study at the RCA, I've started this blog.