Posts Tagged ‘Graham Harman’

Sinister humour by Graham Harman talking about how to deal with thinking about the world as a carnival of objects:

The problem of philosophy now resembles a jigsaw puzzle. We have detected the pieces as carefully as possible, and none seem to be blatantly missing. We also have a picture of what the ultimate solution should look like: the world as we know it, with ist various objects and interactions…Like five year olds faced with a massive thousand-piece puzzle, our greatest danger lies in becoming discouraged. But whereas frustrated children angrily throw their pieces to the floor and change activities, we remain trapped in our puzzle from the start, since it ist he very enigma of our world. Philosophers can escape it only through insanity, or with the aid of rope or a revolver. (‘On Vicarious Causation’, 202)

So, reading and really excited by Prince of Networks. One interesting point I found from an initial reading of the first chapter is Latour’s difference with Bergson/Deleuze when it comes to the isolation and relation between individual things:

On one side are figures like Bergson and Deleuze, for whom a generalized becoming precedes any crystallization into specific entities. On the other side we find authors such as Whitehead and Latour,for whom entities are so highly definite that they vanish instantly with the slightest change in their properties.

I think (Harman’s description of) Latour’s take on object’s as events gives a beautiful feel of a pulsating that in each new moment, brings everything into being:

For Latour an actant [object] is always an event, and events are always completely specific: „everything happens only once and at one place“…all features of an object belong to it; everything happens only once, at one time, in one place. But this means that Latour rejects another well-known feature of traditional substance: its durability. We generally speak of the same dog as dog existing on different days over many years, but for Latour this would ultimately be no more than a figure of speech. It would entail that we abstract an enduring dog-substance o dog-essence from an entire network of relations or trials of strength in which the dog is involved at each moment of its life. ultimately the unified ‘dog’ is a sequence of closely related heirs, not an enduring unit encrusted with shifting accidents over time.