A new episode just dropped today. Would love to know what you guys think:
@madrush – Happy to hear you enjoyed the episode on Harman’s essay. Although I haven’t been able to check out the interview (link won’t work for some reason), I think the criticism that Ingold makes against OOO is one that has been made elsewhere. There’s a sense in which it’s a valid argument and a sense in which we may be dealing with a bit of a strawman. Nothing in Harman’s philosophy forces us to think of objects as static; that is, nothing other than our tendency to conceive of them that way, whereas in fact they’re anything but static. This is clear in Harman’s work, I think. Objects are potentialities, events, and as such they share many qualities commonly attributed to flows or processes in the work of other philosophers. Which I don’t think is surprising since flows, if they are to be anything at all, must logically have some kind of objective existence – that is, they need to be thought of as objects themselves on some level or other. Harman’s objection to the philosophies of flow (Bergson, Whitehead, Deleuze, and so on) is that in reducing every object to its relations, they can’t account for real change. I say this as a devout reader of those same flow philosophers, especially Bergson and Deleuze.
You take it a beautiful step further than Harman by returning subjectivity to the object, in the form of an I-Thou (animistic, or even panpsychistic) type relationship. But even so, doesn’t that still leave us within the same subject-object based language game, just with softer boundaries and different aspects emphasized?
Yes it does! And there’s a lot to be said for soft boundaries and alternative aspects. But although I see what you mean coming at it from a classic Cartesian or Kantian standpoint, I’m not sure the subject-object thing is a language game at all in anyone’s actual experience of reality. It’s kind of primordial. There is something it is like to be you, something irreducible to any of the things you do or become or know. If this singularity, stability and self-existence is what we mean by subjectivity, then it happens long before language or even intellect come into play. What Harman is doing is extending the privilege of self-existence to all things rather than restricting it to humans. And when I claim that this implies subjectivity, all I’m saying is that the only way to really know what a pebble or a pinecone are would be to become – to be – a pebble or a pinecone. It’s those who would respond to this by saying that there is nothing it is like to “be” these things who are playing language games, because they have conflated being with intellection and thereby reduced being to thinking, experience to consciousness. When you’ve made that move, you’re already in the kind of anthropocentrism that makes things exist for the mind that thinks them.
Basically, I don’t think you could ever have an honest picture of reality without including what we call subjectivity within it. I don’t think you can really transcendentalize subjectivity so that it exists in a supernal Outside as in Kant or even Sartre. My sense is that we get to the truth of the world, not by subtracting from ourselves that which we cannot observe and measure outside of us, but by adding everything that seems to exist only internally to the very things to whose interior we have no immediate access. This is how I read Martin Buber’s message from I and Thou. My two cents to an age-old conversation that is no doubt far from over.