This lecture was given by Graham Harman, an Object-Oriented philosopher, to architecture students at UCL. It was called Objects in Art and Architecture.
The notes are in three sections. First Graham Harman's introduction to Object Oriented Ontology. Then his links to architectural theory (or, how Object-Oriented Ontology [OOO] 'brushes up against architecture' as he put it). Then the Q&A.
--
-On the desk in front of every auditorium seat there is a numeric keypad with "Turing Technologies Response Card RF" on it. I have only vague ideas about what it might be used for but its presence suggests that UCL is a very wealthy university.
-The auditorium is hot. Properly hot.
-Graham Harman (GH) has been fitted with a good quality, well positioned microphone. Someone's job is to position that microphone.
-Objects and Relations.
-Philosophy is not a master discipline.
-Objects cannot be reduced to what they're made of, or how they appear.
-GH has coined the term "overmining". I would suggest that neologisms are how you know you are a proper philosopher.
-(Scientism: What if everything was made of tiny Graham Harmans?)
-GH is dwarfed by: The projector screen, the multiple whiteboards, a huge periodic table up on the wall (we're in the chemistry building), the sound of his own voice (which can be heard in multiple: 1stly - in full tonal depth emitting from the four high quality speakers positioned evenly around the auditorium, 2ndly - a split second later, tinny and distant, emitting from his mouth.
-Humans are gullible, are objects gullible?
-You cannot define a thing simply by the effect it is having on other things right now.
-Tristan Garcia - up and coming French philosopher, first book about to be translated.
-Philosophy is dominated by two forms of reduction (under and overmining - reduction to 'real' distinct particles, or reduction to single homogeneous mass).
-Bruno Latour - Actor Network Theory -> He invokes "plasma" as the stuff between networks that allows change to happen - a sort of ether!
-Non-reductive ontologies:
+Aristotle - primary substances (though it has artificial, imposed limits on what those are)
+Phenomenology - Husserl, despite Idealism, writes about objects of consciousness, and Heidegger, objects are real but withdrawn.
+Whitehead/Latour, entities/actors. No transcendence or reducability, everything is an entity/actor.
-Even the bin in the auditorium is massive. It's bright yellow too, the brightest thing in the room.
-Critique of OOO: a poetic of objects. Response: philosophy is not a search for knowledge but a love of knowledge (he comes back to this later in the Qs and explains that he doesn't mean some lyrical, blurry idea of philosophy as love of knowledge, but that philosophy must use metaphor to aim at deeper knowledge - e.g., ontology is a study of being not beings).
-Everyone's clothes are very dull. Architects dress very conservatively.
-Zizek, Badiou, Meillassoux: All indebted to Heidegger, but never assimilate his philosophy.
-Hegel: you can't interact with the thing in-itself outside of your interaction with it.
-Heidegger: Hegel's phenomenology is a reduction to "presence".
-Some objects are not present until the malfunction, e.g. if this chair broke now, it would be the first time I noticed it. Not phenomena, just a tool. Objects that we don't conceive of even as we use them.
-The chair is not reducible to my use of it. Withdrawl, objects are dark.
-"Fire burns cotton" is a commonly used example in Islamic philosophy - a bit like like billiard balls in western philosophy.
-A student in here is so well off that she is successfully unironically wearing a Burberry print scarf.
-Meillassoux - After Finitude: GH thinks that finitude is still valid. Objects cannot be exhausted, in practical or any other terms. As in, there is no way of totally knowing an object, but GH thinks this should be expanded to include object to object relations, not just human subject to object relations.
+Is there a psychological dimension to this? Is it more that only "subjects", (or human objects or whatever we call our/my experience of being in the world) are bothered by not being able to completely comprehend an object? Our not knowing the world is a source of anguish for us, possibly the source of anguish for us.
-Husserl: Objects are unified in experience (and in the world).
-GH's 4 categories - Real Objects, Real Qualities, Sensual Objects, Sensual Qualities.
OOO tries to work out the interactions between these categories.
-Fourfold structures are common in history of philosophy: Four elements, Plato's divided line, Aristotle'sfour causes.
-The walls of the auditorium are thickly coated with heavily textured rendering.
-The girl in front of me smells very much like a girl I was seeing over summer of 2012. We would walk around London, drink lager in terrible pubs, eat McDonalds and then go back to her flat and fuck. Then usually we'd have a massive argument and I'd leave and get the bus home in the middle of the night.
-Meillassoux: Contingency is chaos <-- I've been working with this for ages but thought it was a (purposeful) misreading of After Finitude. Maybe re-buy the book...
--
-Networks and Fields vs Architectural Objects.
-Perception: in architectural theory, OOO is a reaction to the success of relational theories.
-Communications: Flat Ontology and Relational Ontology. Patrick Schumacher's theory or architecture as communication
- Attempts at Flat Ontology almost always have exceptions, e.g., contradictory/imaginary objects. The problem with making exceptions is that you then tend to privilege relational objects, which creeps towards privileging humans.
-Space is a site of relation and no-relation - a site of potential for partial relation. (I thought objects had space-time, objects are prior or creators of space-time [via Einstein and shit]).
-(What I thought was a German student starts asking a very long non-question about the status of philosophy. I later found out that this was Patrick Schumacher, who GH had referenced directly in his lecture.)
-Basically, at this point, Scumacher uses philosophy, or relies on it to write and think, but he doesn't like it. The question is going on for ages. He hasn't even made the pretence of going up at the end of a non-question sentence to make it sound questiony. Makes an interesting point about art, philosophy and maths being 'free floating disciplines.'
-He has been talking for seven minutes. Claims that philosophyis an 'agent provocateur'.Claims he is in the 'real world' (not making this up, after a whole hour long lecture about reality and the problems we face describing it). He means market reality: 'big projects', clients, money, buildings. He finds a universal ontology problematic (duh).
-Looking to my right, the side of the auditorium where the big yellow bin resides, I see a student with a jumper and another student with a notebook in the same shade of yellow as the bin.
-The professor who introduced GH is telling Patrick Schumacher to stop talking.
-Patrick turns around to acknowledge the professor with a frightening, masochistic face and says 'I was just finishing off'.
-GH keeps his cool. Total pro, very coherent responses to the Qs that he has picked out from the long rant.
-Ahh, shame, he lost his mojo because he accidentally knocked the desk lamp with his hand.
-Heidegger's tool theory points towards objects being in the world, even as he insists on their unknowability.
-Change might not occur within objects, but through symbiosis with another object.
-A student asks a question about tool theory and then has to say tool about seven times. Three times he says something like 'I consider myself a tool'.
-GH uses the term "object" because he comes from a phenomenological tradition where that term has specific meaning. "Object" as a term has different resonances in different traditions.
-The professor who introduced GH is super hot.
-A student asks about post-human feminism. I feel a bit guilty for finding the (female) professor hot. For the record, GH is an average looking man in his mid 40s, not particularly attractive/unattractive.
-GH describes a post-human feminist philosopher as 'Fesity'.
-Approaching an object on its own terms.
-Student in front of me is fingering an apple, turning it over and over in his hands. Touching and rubbing it.
-People have started coughing, not one person with a recurrent cough, but the audience in general.
-GH: real = not replaceable by a description.
-Scientistic philosophers have a problem because they have to posit a level at which reality exists.
-The Bourgeois, Neo-Liberal subject "making decisions".
-Joke about Aristotle: he was a great philosopher of mid-sized, everyday objects.
-GH thinks that all objects might be mid-sized in a non anthropocentric ontology.
-Q: the birth of an object
-The idea of an object can be false. (Thought: could this be reversed into a description or technique of the creative act: Could art begin as a "False Object"?)
-Patrick Schumacher jumped in again.
-OOO doesn't promise criteria for what an object might be, or what might be real or not real.
-Patrick Schumacher goes on and on with no reason as to why he might be talking ,like an English person talking about American politics.
-Q: Objects and discreteness.
-You cannot only have continuum if there are to be real objects.
-GH thinks there is discreteness in real objects, and individual continuums (discrete continuums?) in sensual objects.
-Lacan's "real" is only their as a traumatic event for humans.
-The lecture theatre is colder now.
-My mouth tastes bad and I need a shit. I wonder if they're related sensations?
-The guy who was fingering his apple has eaten around the whole rough sphere of the apple, carefully removing all of the skin before replacing it back on the desk in front of him.
-The girl next to him is drinking German rhubarb water.
-An infinite regress of objects (ahh, ok - because to have a prime mover, first cause ultimate reality would be a metaphysics).
-Islamic Occasionalists: God should cause all things, or causality is through God.
-GH: Speculative Realism privileges maths as having access to reality.
-Patrick Schumacher gets the last Q, is asked to keep it short. People start talking, people get up to leave. Patrick Schumacher does not hear the people talking, he does not see the people leave.
-Apple guy puts on a snood.