Architecture and Objects by Graham Harman

Author:Graham Harman [Harman, Graham]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: ARC001000 ARCHITECTURE / Criticism, PHI026000 PHILOSOPHY / Criticism
Publisher: University of Minnesota Press
Published: 2022-07-26T00:00:00+00:00

The Root Problem of Literalism

We have just mentioned Leibniz’s underrated problem: if reality is made up of enclosed and disconnected cells, then what is the mechanism by which these cells form links with each other? It is here that the fundamental role of aesthetics comes into play. Among the numerous defects of modern philosophy is an excessive commitment to literalism. The literalist position holds that whether or not the world exists beyond human access, we can adequately deal with it by properly ascribing qualities to objects. And indeed, it is entirely possible to make more or less accurate literal propositions about objects, which we all do on a regular basis: this is what we call knowledge, and modernity is nothing if not obsessed with knowledge. Science rules the age, with the arts and humanities treated as soft and secondary—though the social sciences try hard to be as exact as the natural ones, and philosophy in its analytic branch bases its entire claim to legitimacy on a mimicry of scientific culture. The problems with this approach have not gone unnoticed, and there have been numerous worthy efforts to account for nonliteral forms of cognition. Kant tried this early on with his “regulative ideas” in ontology about such entities as God and the universe, which cannot be known directly but still serve to guide us in life. He tried it again in his ethics, in which we must assume our human freedom even though our actions are presumably subject to the same causal laws as inanimate matter. Yet Kant’s best such effort was surely his conception of “taste” in the Third Critique, which refers to aesthetic cognition that cannot be paraphrased in conceptual language. Heidegger’s forays into poetic language make much the same effort, even if they are widely mocked in rationalist circles as an effort to let “bad poetry” dethrone the admirable rigors of knowledge.34 But even in the philosophy of science there have been impressive challenges to the literalist model, whether in the fallibilism of Popper and Lakatos or in the paradigm-based model of revolution in Thomas Kuhn.35

Rationalism is above all a literalist enterprise, and this means a business devoted to accurate propositional content. Even in Continental philosophy rationalism now rules the age, as seen in the popularity of Meillassoux and Brassier in certain circles.36 Yet there is good reason to question the literalist conception. If Heidegger is not to one’s liking, there are more venerable sources, such as Aristotle’s Rhetoric, focused as it is on the crucial role of the “enthymeme” that eludes explicit formulation. There is also McLuhan’s career-long argument that the background effects of any medium are of greater significance than their consciously noticed contents.37 In the arts there is Greenberg, undeservedly out of fashion for fifty years, who argues that modernist painting must come to terms with the flat canvas background rather than the pictorial content of painting. All these thinkers draw our attention to what lies behind any explicit content. But we can also escape

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