Scruton attempts a phenomenological analysis of pop music, comparing Crystal Castles with Elvis, claiming that “the difference here is not material; it is phenomenological—a difference in how repetitions are heard.” And this is true, although not perhaps in quite the way in which Scruton thinks: the problem is that Scruton cannot hear what is happening in the music he condemns. This illustrates something interesting about aesthetics, and indeed phenomenology; we might think that aesthetic responses are due simply to unmediated sensory impressions, but what Scruton illustrates is that, in the absence of an ability to cognize the input of our senses, we have no aesthetic response to them: Scruton cannot hear pop music because he doesn’t understand it.

I’m not sure Scruton himself realizes this; his claim that the pop music he dislikes “works like tickling” suggests he does indeed think an unmediated aesthetic response is possible, and his unreflective, didactic assertions about the music he does like imply a belief in the naturalness, even obviousness, of his own responses, even if they can then give rise to more detailed elaboration. I disagreed with Ian in his comments over his description of Scruton as an “emotivist,” but he’s likely right; even if Scruton represents a sophisticated form of emotivism, he is at bottom engaged in the cognization of a fundamentally unmediated aesthetic response.

For someone who actually can write about pop music, see jane dark on Jordin Sparks.

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We have all reason to rejoice that the things which environ us are appearances and not steadfast and independent existences; since in that case we should soon perish of hunger, both bodily and mental. (Hegel)

If aesthetics is first philosophy, perhaps we should replace the question “why is there something rather than nothing?” with “why does what is, appear?” This is the question that underlies my concerns with Harman’s withdrawn objects. Harman does think that objects do appear despite their withdrawal, and the relationship (tension?) between real objects and the sensuous objects, in which they appear and through which they interact, is central to his philosophy. Harman (or, I should say, Guerilla Metaphysics; doubtless he’s written more on this since) doesn’t address the question of how these sensuous objects appear, and I have difficulty seeing how his philosophy could explain that. If the object is wholly withdrawn, how could anything of the object appear? Indeed, in what way would the appearance of a wholly withdrawn object be the appearance of that object, rather than some other object? In this way, it seems to me that Harman’s theory actually risks destroying the objects it is supposed to be celebrating: if there is no way of understanding the connection between the table and the appearance of a table, in what sense is the thing genuinely a table, or a horse, or The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire? So we need some account of how appearance and essence are connected; and this is where I feel inclined to turn to Hegel, who does address this question, with a theory that makes the existence of essence bound up with its manifestation:

The essence is, in the first place, the sum total of the showing itself, shining in itself (inwardly); but, far from abiding in this inwardness, it comes as a ground forward into existence; and this existence being grounded not in itself, but on something else, is just appearance. In our imagination we ordinarily combine with the term appearance or phenomenon the conception of an indefinite congeries of things existing, the being of which is purely relative, and which consequently do not rest on a foundation of their own, but are esteemed only as passing stages. But in this conception it is no less implied that essence does not linger behind or beyond appearance. Rather it is, we may say, the infinite kindness which lets its own show freely issue into immediacy, and graciously allows it the joy of existence. (Shorter Logic, § 131)

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Harman, I think, believes a theory must contain all these elements to genuinely count as a realism about objects; the reason I think it’s interesting to disentangle them is that I’m not immediately grabbed by the object-oriented part of object oriented philosophy. What I find exciting in Harman is his anti-reductionism, his carnal phenomenology, and his assertion of the metaphysical importance of aesthetics; I’m trying to figure out in what ways these things depend on the reality of objects, and as part of that I’ve been wondering if they depend equally on all these four aspects of the reality of objects. In particular, I wonder about the fourth element, which seems to put Harman in the position criticized by Hegel in the quote I’ve used as the title of this post. If objects must be totally outside of all relations in order to be real, is this “realism” limited to saying merely that objects have being? I wonder how Harman would respond to Hegel here: is he doing something other than merely saying that objects have being? Would he say that it does do good to the things to say merely that they have being? Or would he reject the idea that philosophy needs to be concerned with whether it does good to the things (after all, if objects really are real, presumably they can afford to be quite indifferent to what philosophers may or may not think about them)?

Aside from this concern, I’m not sure I understand the argument for this fourth step; why does it not establish the reality of objects to say that they are never fully accessible in any given interaction? What is gained by the further step of insisting that objects are inaccessible to any possible interaction? One idea I’ve been toying with is seeing Harman’s philosophy as a particularly innovative response to Berkeley’s idealism. Berkeley argues that mind-independent reality is unimaginable, because, in anything we can imagine is, precisely because we are imagining it, dependent on our mind; this argument is interesting because everyone in the history of philosophy thinks it’s wrong, but it’s frustratingly difficult to argue against. Many have attempted to argue that in fact we can imagine a mind-independent reality; but perhaps we could see Harman as accepting the structure of Berkeley’s argument but drawing different conclusions from it. Berkeley’s premise is that any reality must be conceivable, so he concludes that, because mind-independent reality is inconceivable, there must be no mind-independent reality. But, if one starts with the premise that there is a mind-independent reality, one could equally use Berkeley’s argument to prove that, because any mind-independent reality is inconceivable, the mind-independent reality that exists must be inconceivable. Extend this argument to cover any kind of relation, not just mental representation, and, I think, you have something like Harman’s argument for the absolute withdrawal of objects.

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In fact, however, the concept of politics is essentially problematic, and there is no aspect of it that can be protected from this difficulty. If politics as a practice is good, that depends in part on an ability to distinguish political practice from non-political practice, which is to already invoke an incipient reification of the political; if the political as an ontological condition is good, we need to explain how it can give rise to the bad institutions of politics. No. Better to recognize that politics or the political, whichever term we choose, is a fundamentally ambivalent category: a practical illusion, as Marx puts it, and we need to wrestle with  the practical need to engage with politics, as we try and overcome the illusions that are cast by it.

As an illustration of what this vacuous distinction covers over, consider Rancière’s theory of politicization as the appearance, or making-appear, of the excluded part of the people. What this misses is the dialectical ambiguity of appearance, which is always both the specific appearance of a thing, and an appearance in contrast to the reality of the thing. The appearance of something new on the political scene is never the full presence of that thing, but rather the production of a gap between the thing and its political appearance.

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I’ve complained on many occasions about people who take class to be a positive identity. The point is that class is not an empirical category, but a structuring abstraction. This is especially true of the proletariat (the most real of the real abstractions that are class, and so also the most abstract). The “propertylessness” of the proletariat is not just a lack of possessions, but a lack of positive qualities: that is what makes the proletariat abstract labor. As abstract labor is a subtraction of distinguishing qualities, so “proletarian” names an absence, the absence around which the whole capitalist system is structured.

The idea of a generic absence structuring a social system sounds a bit like Laclau’s idea of the universal as an empty signifier. The problem with Laclau, though, is that this idea of the empty universal is based purely on an abstract philosophical argument about the nature of meaning, but there’s nothing to tie this argument to actually existing class structures. What Laclau loses is Marx’s historical argument for the development of a particular form of absent universalism in the capitalist system in particular; we’re left with a formless mass of particulars. Ironically, given Laclau’s stress on the importance of the political (as opposed to the supposed “positivity of the social”), this is actually a de-politicizing move. Rejecting the Marxist account of class as an abstract structure underlying empirical social groupings leaves us with no way of evaluating the alignments and movements of these shifting empirical identities (this depoliticization is visible, I think, in Laclau’s theory of populism).

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a question of the opposition of the universal as ‘form’, in the form of universality, and the universal as ‘content’.

In science, for example, an individual can fully perform public affairs, and it is always individuals who do so. But public affairs become actually public only when they arc no longer the affair of an individual but of society. This changes not only the form but also the content (Critique of Hegel’s Doctrine of the State).

Equality would be the universality of form, universality in the sense of a potential accessible to all. But the problem with this kind of formal universality is that it has no content: Rancière’s hypothesis of equality tells us nothing about how collective participation in the universal might be realized. Rancière’s understanding of equality is both individualist and idealist, that is to say, the conception of equality characteristic of capitalism. For all it’s abstraction, it seems to me that Badiou’s notion of the generic is much more materialist, and more useful here, because it forces us to consider the process of construction, that is to say, the process of collective change, required for any achievement of universality

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In addition to being charmed by objects, we ourselves want to emulate them, and wish to charm the world. It is simply not the case that our fundamental wish is to be viewed as dignified free subjects with a chance to speak at the microphone of the universal assembly…. The kind of recognition we would prefer is always far more specific, since we often feel ourselves to be so painfully mutable that any specific role will do…. The one book that all of us would approach with greatest interest, that no human in history would be able to resist opening, would be a book of anecdotes about ourselves as told by other people. The appeal of such a book would not lie in some sort of grotesque human vanity, but in our wish to be something definite, a desire at least as great as our desire to be free. There is a profound need to escape the apparently infinite flexible subjectivity within, which feels far more amorphous to us than to anyone else.

Contrary to the usual view, what we really want is to be objects.

I do like Harman’s description of the “painful mutability” of subjectivity. This pain is compounded by the illusion that we are the only people to experience this mutability: so often everyone else seems to be exactly themselves, with the terrifying and tedious depths confined to ourselves alone. Would it be wrong to see this as one of the ways in which we experience the existence of inaccessible depths in objects?

Experiencing the existence of an object’s inaccessible depths (not, of course, experiencing the depths themselves, otherwise they wouldn’t be inaccessible) is part of  the main problem that animates Guerilla Metaphysics, of reconciling the inaccessibility of objects with their evident interactions with one another. Now, when I see an apparent contradiction like this, my first thought is always “it’s dialectical, innit,”  though I imagine dialectics seems like a nonstarter for Harman, for at least two reasons. The standard thesis/antithesis/synthesis dialectic is what Harman calls an “overmining” position, in that it would reduce any object that appears in it to a mere moment of the final synthesis. Worse, this synthesis occours preeminently between subject and object,  or, rather, between subject and itself mediated by objects; that is, dialectics privileges the human/object relation to such an extent that objects disappear entirely (the opposite of object-oriented philosophy).

However, I don’t think these are necessary features of dialectics, and I wonder what would happen if one attempted to do for Hegel what Harman does for Heidegger, expanding his notion of the relationship between subject and object to encompass the relations of objects to objects. I think you might get something like Marx. This might seem to go against the early Marx’s purported humanism, but his humanism is of a very particular sort in any case, not being about the deification of man, but the integration of humans and nature, which is not so far from an object-oriented idea of humanity existing alongside (rather than ontologically separate from) non-human objects. This appears in the young Marx’s discussion of private property, which he claims is problematic not just because it opposes the humanity of humans, but also because it fails to respect the thingness of things:

Private property has made us so stupid and one-sided that an object is only ours when we have it – when it exists for us as capital, or when it is directly possessed, eaten, drunk, worn, inhabited, etc., – in short, when it is used by us….

The abolition of private property is therefore the complete emancipation of all human senses and qualities, but it is this emancipation precisely because these senses and attributes have become, subjectively and objectively, human. The eye has become a human eye, just as its object has become a social, human object…. They relate themselves to the thing for the sake of the thing, but the thing itself is an objective human relation to itself and to man. (“Private Property and Communism,” Economic and Philosophical Manuscripts)

Now, this idea of objects being objects for human beings looks like it privileges humanity; however, Marx extends this idea to all objects, in that an object is an object when it is an object for another object:

To be objective, natural and sensuous, and at the same time to have object, nature and sense outside oneself, or oneself to be object, nature and sense for a third party, is one and the same thing.Hunger is a natural need; it therefore needs a nature outside itself, an object outside itself, in order to satisfy itself, to be stilled. Hunger is an acknowledged need of my body for an object existing outside it, indispensable to its integration and to the expression of its essential being. The sun is the object of the plant – an indispensable object to it, confirming its life – just as the plant is an object of the sun, being an expression of the life-awakening power of the sun, of the sun’s objective essential power. (“Critique of Hegel’s Philosophy in General,” Economic and Philosophical Manuscripts)

Here we have a picture of aleatory objects, with a shimmering and contingent existence as they become objects for further objects. I think Harman would probably find such a position too relational; nonetheless, it does seem to me to be a position that neither subsumes objects into something else, nor subordinates them to humans, too key features of object-oriented philosophy. It’s also interesting to discover that Marx shared Harman’s dislike of subject-centered critique:

“Criticism” is transformed into a transcendental being. These Berliners do not regard themselves as men who criticise, but as critics who, incidentally, have the misfortune of being men…. This criticism therefore lapses into a sad and supercilious intellectualism. Consciousness or self-consciousness is regarded as the only human quality. Love, for example, is rejected, because the loved one is only an “object”. Down with the object. This criticism thus regards itself as the only active element in history. It is confronted by the whole of humanity as a mass, an inert mass, which has value only as the antithesis of intellect. It is therefore regarded as the greatest crime if the critic displays feeling or passion, he must be an ironical ice-cold sophos. (Marx to Ludwig Feuerbach, August 11, 1844)

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One of the strange things about Badiou is the curious retrospective temporality of his literally post-modernist philosophy – this is what it was to be a militant, this is what it was to fall in love… well, yes, but, now what? What’s rousing about The Meaning Of Sarkozy is precisely the call to start again from nothing.

The apparent oddity of this paragraph—that k-punk criticizes Badiou for something for which Badiou himself is held up as the alternative—actually demonstrates something interesting about Badiou. One of Badiou’s most important ideas is his insistence on separating politics and philosophy, a position which evidences a certain modesty about philosophy; despite his avowed Platonism, Badiou would agree with Hegel’s criticism:

To bring to order the endlessly varied relations, which constitute the outer appearance of the rational essence is not the task of philosophy. Such material is not suitable for it, and it can well abstain from giving good advice about these things. Plato could refrain from recommending to the nurses not to stand still with children, but always to dandle them in their arms. (The Philosophy of Right, Preface)

Badiou’s circumscription of philosophy rules out philosophy giving practical recommendations or specific prescriptions. So the lack of reference to contemporary politics in Badiou’s philosophy might be expected; the references to previous political events aren’t intended as discussions of politics as such, but merely as illustrations of philosophical concepts, and why not use older, better known and better understood, examples?

But Badiou can’t actually get off the hook so easily. The basis of the restricted role he gives philosophy is the idea the philosophy is conditioned, it is subordinate to the domains that produce truths (science, art, love and politics). Philosophy involves thinking out certain consequences of events in these spheres. Philosophy on Badiou’s terms does have a responsibility to respond to contemporary political events even as it makes no claim to direct them. It’s here that I think k-punk is right that Badiou’s choice of political subject matter is a weakness, which points to a larger weakness, if not in his philosophy, then in his presentation of it. While philosophy is supposed to have four conditions, Being and Event is particularly conditioned by events in science, specifically mathematics. It’s maybe interesting that the mathematical event that is at the center of Being and Event dates, like his political commitments, from the 60s; Paul Cohen’s 1962 proof of the independence of the continuum hypothesis. Perhaps the 60s was the appropriate time to condition a work written in 1988, as Being and Event was, but it would clearly be remiss of us, a further 20 years later, to take these conditions of our own.

Approaching philosophy in a Badiouian manner from our own starting point is made more difficult, however,  by the fact that we lack from Badiou an example of how philosophy would be conditioned by politics, and this may stem from a more surprising lack: I’m not sure Badiou actually has a conception of politics. Badiou’s rejection of political economy makes his political vocabulary strangely thin, leaving it hard to conceptualize in anything but the most formal way what being a political subject involves: Badiou tells us that politics takes place in a situation, but is indifferent to the means we might use to grasp that situation, locate ourselves and our political activity within it. This political problem must then also be understood as a philosophical problem, because if we lack the concepts to enage with politics,  our philosophy cannot be conditioned by it.

Likewise, I wonder what it looks like when philosophy is conditioned by a truth in the domain of love; and, can any philosophy which claims to be so conditioned ignore the changes in forms of relationships and sexualities that have occured since the 60s?

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The principle of family life is dependence on the soil, on land, terra firma. Similarly, the natural element for industry, animating its outward movement, is the sea. Since the passion for gain involves risk, industry though bent on gain yet lifts itself above it; instead of remaining rooted to the soil and the limited circle of civil life with its pleasures and desires, it embraces the element of flux, danger, and destruction. Further, the sea is the greatest means of communication, and trade by sea creates commercial connections between distant countries and so relations involving contractual rights. At the same time, commerce of this kind is the most potent instrument of culture, and through it trade acquires its significance in the history of the world. (The Philosophy of Right)

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I’ve been trying to pin down more precisely the logic of this position, because it strikes me as an extremely powerful form of materialism. I’m reminded of Damasio’s attempt to understand the mind as a physical reflection of the state of the body. The advantage of Marxism, though, is that the physical instantiations of the mental are no longer arbitrarily limited to the individual human brain. Here Marxism is also light-years ahead of eliminative materialism, as eliminative materialism is cartesianism in scientistic drag, still looking for mental phenomena somewhere inside the pineal gland. But thought doesn’t happen in brains, it happens in hands and throats, and pots of curry and flywheels.

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