He seems to take no joy in renouncing his belief, but it’s clear he finds uncertainty infinitely more comforting, and comfortable, than holding on to a doubtful faith.
— from
this review of a recent David Bazan show. I have no interest in his music anymore, but that sentence right there describes me so perfectly it’s a little scary.
Instead of continuing to embrace the hip “specter” of realism, contemporary philosophy should begin funneling arms and humanitarian aid toward some sort of guerrilla realism—a fresh insurgency on behalf of objects themselves.
— from Tool-Being, by Graham Harman. On to the final chapter, then Mille Plateaux. I have officially switched sides.
I always prefer the both/and to the either/or. It’s why object-oriented thinking is so appealing. It’s like a pragmatism with transcendence included. The mundane and the sublime all mixed in together.
It’s like I’ve joined a secret club with secret knowledge, but this one is far more friendly than the club I used be in. And questions that show a complete lack of familiarity or knowledge are answered with warmth, not derision.
However, where the anti-realist epistemologists and the realist ontologists part ways is with respect to the thesis that questions of our access to beings is sufficient to determine what beings are. For the object-oriented ontologist, over and above questions of how we know objects there remains an important and crucial question of what it means for a being to be. This question, following Roy Bhaskar, is not, for the realist ontologist, exhausted by how we know. Likewise, while the object-oriented ontologist readily acknowledges the limitations of our knowledge, the fact that we must engage in inquiry to know any particular type of object, and so on, the realist ontologist rejects the thesis that the differences discovered in and through inquiry belong to the domain of outputs alone. Rather, the realist ontologist begins from the premise that these differences cannot be restricted to outputs alone, but rather that there must be something about the inputs, about the world that produces these differences, that is mind-independent.
—
From this post.
There’s something beautiful and inspiring about using the limits of our knowledge as aids in seeing just how unlimited objects are. We are limited observers, there’s whole worlds we don’t have access to (yet?). What object-oriented approaches do, to my mind, is successfully knock us off our pedestals. It’s a humbling move, but one that feels more honest. And one that opens up whole new possibilities, and seems full of hope. Harman’s writing in particular helps restore wonder to the world by admitting there are interactions we’re not privy to, and what we see is just a slice, but that slice is not ALL THERE IS.
…when an artist tells you that the bombing or dramatic events that take place next to your house can be ignored by changing the channel, it signals the end of civilazation.
— George Lazongas in the Sept/Oct issue of Art Papers. While I don’t agree entirely, there’s something important being expressed.
The number of times I have accidentally tried to add, say, GMail to my Amazon wishlist with the universal add to wish list bookmarklet is ridiculously high.
I feel like there’s often a pull, especially from the critical end, that demands constant novelty, and when that expectation isn’t met, there is disappointment and the artist is said to have lost it, to become a shade of her former self. But the pleasure that comes from listening to this music isn’t the pleasure of discovery, but the pleasure of watching them play their aesthetic game, exploring the ideas they’ve already discovered and finding new and interesting ways to hit those concepts. Maturity isn’t just the realm of monotony and routine, but rather the phase where artists have the ability to start on the same page as their audience and thus investigate the aesthetic the artist has created in concert with their listeners.
— From
this review of the new Built to Spill. I agree, and would include a hearty “So stop calling Sonic Youth necro-whatever, stupidheads.” But in my most mature, insightful critic voice.
No, this is not an disentanglement from, but a progressive knotting into…
— Gravity’s Rainbow
