Object-Oriented Ontology by Graham Harman

Author:Graham Harman
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9780241269176
Publisher: Penguin Books Ltd
Published: 2017-12-11T16:00:00+00:00

Having paused to discuss the implications of OOO for social and political theory, we return once more to the aesthetic discussions of Chapter 2. There I claimed that aesthetic phenomena result whenever a wedge is driven between an object and its qualities. To be more specific, it was a matter of real objects – withheld, inaccessible, concealed – vanishing from the scene while their qualities remained visible, accessible, and always revealed. As a result, the aesthetic beholder was required to step in to replace the missing real object, giving rise to a theatrical model of aesthetics: the reader of Homer’s metaphor ‘wine-dark sea’ behaves in the manner of a method actor who replaces the withdrawn sea in its absence and takes on all its various purported wine-dark qualities. In this way, aesthetics gives us a rift between real objects and what we have called their sensual qualities, a rift never made explicit in the normal course of everyday experience. Yet we also noted the existence of sensual objects and real qualities as well. Taken together in all their possible combination, the two kinds of objects and two kinds of qualities yield four separate types of rift between objects and their qualities. This quadruplicity of objects and things is one of the two main themes of the present chapter. The other is the question of how objects can touch at all. Since real objects exceed the grasp not only of all human theory, perception and practical action, but of every sort of direct relation, then I wonder how it is possible for one entity to influence another in any way. Obviously, I do not question the existence of such influence, but only wonder about the mechanism behind it. Given that real objects are by definition incapable of touching each other, we need to find a way in which they touch without touching, through some sort of indirect contact. This concept is known in OOO as ‘vicarious causation’. It owes much to a medieval Islamic and early modern European current of thought called ‘occasionalism’, according to which no two created objects are able to make contact unless they pass through the mediation of God.1 But ultimately OOO cannot accept the findings of occasionalism: not because we wish to mock religious currents in the history of philosophy, but because no entity at all – whether God, the human mind or anything else – should be permitted arbitrarily to make direct contact with other objects when this is forbidden in principle to everything else. Let’s discuss these two themes in turn, beginning with the fourfold structure of objects.

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