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.