Harman’s insistence on the non-relational kernel of objects, their resilient or self-concealing withdrawal from relation, actually distances him from pansychism. Harman’s account of “vacuum-sealed” objects suggests that the global order of things is more a kind of universal unconscious: objects are deeply unconscious of each other, and deeply inaccessible to any kind of consciousness, such that the “translations” or prehensions that obtain between objects are a kind of flickering of sensuous interaction in the midst of a dark and nameless void of incomprehension – like an orgy during a blackout, if I can put it that way. Another way to put this might be to say that the ways in which objects make sense together and of each other, drawing each other into networks of mutual comprehension, constitute a shifting, ultimately contingent pattern of sense against a background of fathomless non-sense.
The strange thing is that this is not so different from a position that Harman explicitly rejects: the position that says that objects are a second-order phenomenon which only exist insofar as they are coalesced – whether by an observing consciousness or by some autopoetic mode of creative individuation – out of a primal flux. Harman is adamant that objects are what there is – that our ontology must be an ontology of beings, or an “onticology” (to use Levi Bryant’s useful term) – and yet his position on the withdrawing of objects from relationship means that the way in which objects are never fully coincides with the way they are together – the “network” composed by actants moving in concert or conflict is always subject to a lack or insufficiency owing to the subtraction of objects themselves from the lattice of relationships in which they participate. At the level of sensuous interaction, then, the opposition between meaningless primal chaos and second-order meaningful structure returns – even if objects remain the indissoluble support of both sides of this divide.
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Dominic Fox (Poetix) on Graham Harman. I find this helpful and suggestive; the assertion of objects’ withdrawal is how Harman avoids panpsychism. (And indeed, in Harman’s article on panpsychism in the Skrbina anthology, he says that not all objects are conscious because objects not involved in relations are asleep). I reject the idea that objects are ever apart in a vacuum or without relation, as I think that the withdrawn-objects thesis is an unnecessary extension of Harman’s prior observation (which I accept) that no object is ever exhausted or fully grasped by all the other objects that prehend it. Even in sleep, one’s withdrawal from the world is not total. And this goes together with the Whiteheadian claim that all entities have experiences, and mentality — a version of panpsychism, I think, but one where mentality does not necessarily imply consciousness. But what I find most useful about Fox’s analysis is the suggestion that withdrawn objects perform for Harman the role that flux does for Bergson or Deleuze, and that (somewhat differently) actual entities, as opposed to the enduring entities that are societies, do for Whitehead. We get two levels in all these thinkers, as follows:
This helps my argument in two ways. First, because it gives more specificity to my claim that Harman doesn’t take temporality, or becoming, or the processes by which objects come into being and fall out of being, seriously enough. And second, because it suggests a different distribution of terms than the one I made in my book (where I equated Deleuze’s virtual vs. actual with Whitehead’s eternal objects vs. actual entities). |
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