reader mail

A brief comment on this, just received:

“Re. the bad review of yourself you excerpted:

‘(I doubt he believes much of it himself, although that is hardly the point).’

You wrote:

‘Actually, I think it *is* the point. Before being right or wrong, people are either serious or full of sh*t. That is a basic distinction of human types, and (I will claim in a publication at some point) the basic fact of ethics.’

I am both bemused and shocked at how often I see this critique of Graham Harman online. You seem to be the only OO thinker who people assume can’t possibly believe a word of this. Levi Bryant you have snowed, and Tim Morton has jumped on because his ego can smell a
trend, and for some reason these detractors never even mention Ian Bogost, but Graham Harman must ‘know he’s selling snake oil’ (I quote, more or less). I read this as ‘Harman is clearly very smart, but we don’t understand how he can be arguing this, so he must be a con artist.’ You are right to see it as an ethical smear.”

Ian’s always more understated in his enthusiasms, so the trolls probably find it harder to ridicule him, whereas Levi and Tim are heart-on-their sleeves types (as I am myself; that’s an OOO stylistic trait in some ways).

As for the charges mentioned above, some of them are just insincere nonsense, people looking to score a point where one might score a point, and that’s not worth any concern.

As for those who honestly wonder how I can believe what I’m saying, well, I do give arguments for these points.

The phrase “folk ontology” has been thrown around, with phenomenology generally the target. “Only a naive person believes in individual objects just because the manifest image is made up of individual objects, etc. etc.” (Never mind that that’s not where I get my argument for individual objects.)

But the real folk ontology, the one that is rarely stated up front but is always in the back of people’s minds, is vulgar materialism. I love the part at the beginning of Logics of Worlds when Badiou says that “bodies and languages” are what most people think exists these days.

In other words, people might lay claim to all sorts of supposedly sophisticated dark materialist doctrines in which even individual material things disappear, but what they really think deep down is that the world is filled with lots of tiny micro-things that slam into each other and explain all larger things. And then they have the gall to accuse me of that. Billiard balls slapping each other around on a numbered Cartesian grid, as I once put it. Their apparent disdain for such theories in favor of incoherent variants that seem subtler are really an effort to mask their own olden-times materialist assumptions.

Vicarious causation is certainly something I “really believe.” I do walk around each day trying to conceive the everyday world in those terms, for the simple reason that rational considerations led me to it. It is not I who am the prisoner of common sense.