illusionistic painting in order to call our attention to astonishing content, Duchampian Dada offers the most banal content imaginable (bicycle wheel, bottle rack) in an attempt to challenge our sense of what counts as a valid artistic object. Using an analogy from Heidegger’s philosophy, I argue that Dada and Surrealism are diametrical opposites in how they go about dismantling literalism, while arguing further that they are not radical departures from the history of Western art.
Chapter 7 (“Weird Formalism”) concludes the book. First, we consider the present state of art as surveyed by one well-informed observer: Hal Foster. Second, given that the most unusual claim of the first six chapters is that beholder and work theatrically constitute a new, third object, this chapter asks what the implications of this idea might be. As for the term “weird,” it is no empty provocation, but a technical term drawn by OOO from the fiction of H.P. Lovecraft. Weird formalism is a kind that pertains neither to the object nor the subject, but to the unmapped interior of their union.
Notes
1 1. Graham Harman, “Aesthetics as First Philosophy,” “The Third Table,” “Art without Relations,” “Greenberg, Duchamp, and the Next Avant-Garde,” “The Revenge of the Surface,” “Materialism is Not the Solution.” See also Timothy Morton, Realist Magic.
2 2. Harman, “Aesthetics as First Philosophy.”
3 3. Graham Harman, “On the Undermining of Objects,” “Undermining, Overmining, and Duomining.”
4 4. Harman, “The Third Table”; A.S. Eddington, The Nature of the Physical World.
5 5. Wilfrid Sellars, “Philosophy and the Scientific Image of Man.”
6 6. Harman, “Greenberg, Duchamp, and the Next Avant-Garde”; Graham Harman, Dante’s Broken Hammer; Clement Greenberg, Late Writings, pp. 45–49.
7 7. Robert Pippin, “Why Does Photography Matter as Art Now, as Never Before?”, p. 60, note 6.
8 8. Claire Colebrook, “Not Kant, Not Now: Another Sublime,” p. 145.
9 9. Melissa Ragona, personal communication, August 5, 2017. Cited with Ragona’s permission.
10 10. Hasan Veseli, personal communication, December 4, 2016. Cited with Veseli’s permission.
11 11. See especially Caroline Levine’s wonderful book Forms.
12 12. No less a figure than Hal Foster slips into the “fetishist” trope in The Return of the Real, pp. 108–109. See also his related attacks on OOO allies Jane Bennett and Bruno Latour in Hal Foster, Bad New Days, Chapter 5. Another recent example can be found in the second paragraph of J.J. Charlesworth and James Heartfield, “Subjects v. Objects.” For a general response to the claim that realism about objects is a form of fetishism, see Graham Harman, “Object-Oriented Ontology and Commodity Fetishism.”
13 13. David E. Wellbery, “Schiller, Schopenhauer, Fried,” p. 84.
14 14. Dante Alighieri, The Divine Comedy.
15 15. Immanuel Kant, Critique of Pure Reason, Prolegomena to Any Future Metaphysics.
16 16. The classic example is Salomon Maimon, Essay on Transcendental Philosophy.
17 17. Immanuel Kant, Critique of Practical Reason, Groundwork of the Metaphysics of Morals.
18 18. Immanuel Kant, Critique of Judgment.
19 19. Virgil, Aeneid.
20 20. Bruno Latour, We Have Never Been Modern. There is another interpretation of modernity – or at least of its degenerate forms – that reads it in the opposite way as an improper commingling of thought with world. This can be found in the valuable polemic against “correlationism” by Quentin Meillassoux in After Finitude, which nonetheless resembles Latour’s position in agreeing that thought and world count for the moderns as the two basic ingredients of reality. In this book I will focus on Latour’s “purity” interpretation or modernity rather than Meillassoux’s “impurity” version, since the Latourian stance is the one more relevant to Kant’s aesthetics and formalism in the arts.
21 21. Dante, The Divine Comedy, La Vita Nuova.
22 22. Max Scheler, Formalism in Ethics and Non-Formal Ethics of Values.
23 23. Max Scheler, “Ordo Amoris.”
24 24. Denis Diderot, Diderot on Art, Vols. I and II; Michael Fried, The Moment of Caravaggio.
25 25. Michael Fried, Absorption and Theatricality, Manet’s Modernism.
26 26. Clement Greenberg, Homemade Esthetics; Michael Fried, Art and Objecthood.
27 27. See Bruno Latour, Reassembling the Social and Jane Bennett, Vibrant Matter. I had the opportunity to raise this issue with Fried in person on February 10, 2018 during his visit to Los Angeles, and he was helpfully direct in his response.
28 28. Timothy Morton, Hyperobjects, p. 60.
29 29. Alain Badiou, Being and Event; Meillassoux, After Finitude.
1 OOO and Art A First Summary
Let’s begin with an overview of the basic principles of OOO, since it cannot be assumed that all readers of this book are familiar with these matters. Object-oriented philosophy hinges on two major axes of division, one of which is usually ignored by our critics and sometimes even our supporters. The first and best-known axis concerns the difference between what OOO refers to as the withdrawal or withholding of objects. A hammer or candle is present to us, and yet they are also more than what is present to us. Though it may seem that this simply repeats the unpopular Kantian rift between noumena and phenomena, or the thing-in-itself and appearance, OOO adds the crucial twist that the thing-in-itself does not just haunt human awareness of the world, but is found even in the causal relations of non-human things with each other. While it is true that numerous thinkers since Kant have made room for an excess, surplus, or otherness of the world beyond our perception or theorization of it – Heidegger in particular – none to my knowledge have seen that such unformatted residue also exists in relations that do not involve human beings. The second and often forgotten axis concerns the connection between objects and their qualities, which OOO treats as being unusually loose. This counteracts the widespread empiricist tendency to treat objects as nothing over and above the bundles of their qualities, as if “apple” were merely a joint nickname for a set of tangible features bound together by habit, as in the philosophy of David Hume.1 Joined together, these two axes yield a fourfold structure that OOO employs as a framework for illuminating everything that happens in the cosmos, whether in art or elsewhere. The best way to clarify these points is to begin with two of the most recent great European philosophers: the phenomenologist Edmund Husserl and his deviant heir Heidegger.
Heidegger’s Insight: The Concealed and the Unconcealed
Kant launched a philosophical revolution with a trio of great works published in less than a decade: Critique of Pure Reason (1781), Critique of Practical Reason (1788), and Critique of Judgment (1790).
