Object-Oriented Ontology
Metadata
- Author: Graham Harman
Highlights
The esthetic object is inwardness as such – it is each thing as ‘I’. — location: 849
The esthetic object is inwardness as such – it is each thing as ‘I’. — location: 849
Ortega is effectively saying that Kant’s noumenal realm is not inaccessible, but that art consists precisely in giving us this noumenal realm in person. Yet he adds an important qualification: ‘Notice I am not saying that a work of art reveals the secret of life and being to us; what I do say is that a work of art affords the peculiar pleasure we call esthetic by making it seem that the inwardness of things, their executant reality, is opened to us.’ — location: 851
see into the life of things
In the case of a successful metaphor, we are able to experience a new entity that somehow combines cypress and flame. — location: 883
Instead, it replaces the absent cypress with us ourselves as the real object that embraces the qualities of the flame: not digging downward but building upward to a higher layer. — location: 1003
Though Ortega did not push forward far enough to see this theatrical kernel of the arts, he did come close to recognizing that we ourselves, rather than the cypress, are the real objects at stake in aesthetics. — location: 1016
In other words, even though every image we encounter gives us just an outline or shadow of the inwardness of the thing itself, I myself am fully invested in all these experiences, and inwardly invested rather than as just a shadow or outline of myself. I myself am the sole real object in all experience, encountering any number of sensual things, though the tension between these real and sensual poles becomes explicit only in art and a limited number of other cases. — location: 1021
If I do not step in and attempt the electrifying work of becoming the cypress-substance for the flame-qualities, then no metaphor occurs. — location: 1046
The successful metaphor, much like the successful joke, will occur only when the reader or auditor is sincerely deployed in living it. — location: 1048
Instead, the metaphor is theatrical in the same sense in which living one’s role on stage is theatrical. When reading the poem by López Pico, we are method actors playing a cypress playing a flame. — location: 1050
All we are saying is that the real object at stake in metaphor is neither the absent cypress-object to which we never gain direct access, nor the human being who takes note of it, but rather the new amalgamated reality formed from the reader (who poses as a cypress-object) and the qualities of the flame. — location: 1061
Heidegger, a great twentieth-century philosopher who gives priority to poetic language for what he sees as its supreme profundity, and — location: 1078
We concluded that the true dose of reality in art comes from the spectator’s own replacement of the metaphorical object (cypress), and consequent alliance with the metaphorical qualities (flame-qualities). This led us directly to the notion of art as primarily theatrical in nature, since the spectator in art necessarily becomes a sort of ‘method actor’. — location: 1128
In one sense we are merely observers, the knights of anti-realism, since we reduce the things we encounter to mere caricatures incommensurable with their genuine depth. This is what Ortega was referring to when he complained about the empty shadows of things encountered in everyday perception and actions, and above all in literal language. Yet in a second sense, humans are also the knights of realism, since we are always the only real objects on the scene (despite our inability to see ourselves directly), given that cypresses, flames and red boxes are never directly graspable by us or by anything else. It is in this sense that theatricality is a necessary part of aesthetics, — location: 1220
The effort found in some quarters to reduce both art and philosophy to the handmaid of political revolution misunderstands the mission of art, which can include politics and anything else, but only by first aestheticizing it. — location: 1243
There was the discovery that art is not the production of knowledge about things, but that it creates new things-in-themselves. — location: 1247
ANT has taught us a great deal about how human society would be stranded at baboon level if not for the stabilizing work performed by inanimate objects such as roads, contracts, buildings, wedding rings and fingerprinting techniques. — location: 1265
In this way, aesthetics gives us a rift between real objects and what we have called their sensual qualities, — location: 1783
In sum, Heidegger sees the world as made up of a constant reversal between ‘tools’ (referring not just to tools in the strict sense, but to anything that operates without our noticing it) and ‘broken tools’ (referring to anything that becomes explicitly noticeable for any reason). — location: 1829
two real objects in the world make contact not through direct impact, but only by way of the fictional images they present to each other. — location: 1952
And since RO (sea) is permanently unavailable, it is replaced by RO (beholder). I myself, as the reader of the poem, must perform the metaphor by standing in for the absent sea, or else no metaphor results. Rather than burrowing downward towards the reality of the sea, the metaphor builds a new theatrical sea-reality upward, on top of the sensual qualities of the wine. — location: 2183
In this example as in others, we want to know what the real qualities of the sun are, even though ironically we are concerned here with the sensual sun (SO) rather than the real sun (RO), since the latter is the concern of aesthetics rather than science (what does science care about objects that withdraw from all direct access?). — location: 2196
To repeat, this is not theatrical work by the beholder in the metaphorical manner in which RO (beholder) is combined with SQ (wine-qualities), since we are not ourselves stepping in as objects the way we did when replacing the absent sea of Homer. Instead, it is somehow the case that real qualities drawn from us are lent to SO (sun), in a way we will try to clarify shortly. This is why knowledge does not require the same degree of personal absorption as aesthetic experience: we can look on dispassionately at a riddle of knowledge rather than constantly sustaining it with our own being as we must in aesthetics. As soon as we are bored the artwork is no longer an artwork, but boredom in matters of knowledge is not a rare case at all, and by no means does it destroy the object of knowledge. — location: 2209
To repeat, this is not theatrical work by the beholder in the metaphorical manner in which RO (beholder) is combined with SQ (wine-qualities), since we are not ourselves stepping in as objects the way we did when replacing the absent sea of Homer. Instead, it is somehow the case that real qualities drawn from us are lent to SO (sun), in a way we will try to clarify shortly. This is why knowledge does not require the same degree of personal absorption as aesthetic experience: we can look on dispassionately at a riddle of knowledge rather than constantly sustaining it with our own being as we must in aesthetics. As soon as we are bored the artwork is no longer an artwork, but boredom in matters of knowledge is not a rare case at all, and by no means does it destroy the object of knowledge. — location: 2209
Instead of theatricality we might speak here of commitment, since a paradigm does not require our individual attention to exist in this moment in the way that a metaphor or artwork does, though we continue to live our lives in accordance with it nonetheless. — location: 2317
All viscosity, Morton argues, is really just a watered-down version of its greatest possible intensity: death. As he puts it: ‘When the inside of a thing coincides perfectly with its outside, that is called dissolution or death. Given a large enough hyperobject … all beings exist in the jaws of some form of death, which is why the Buddhist thangkas of the Wheel of Life depict the six realms of existence cycling around within the open, toothy mouth of Yama, the Lord of Death.’ — location: 2815
The bamboo forest ruthlessly bamboo-morphizes the wind, translating its pressure into movement and sound. It is an abyss of bamboo-wind.’ — location: 2897
One of the implications of this is that we cannot ‘extract’ a form from a thing and express this form in mathematical or other directly knowable terms; or rather, we can do this, but only by paying the price of changing the form into something else. There is no translation of anything without energy loss, and hence it is impossible to grasp anything perfectly. — location: 3137
There is also a gap within things, and we call it the object/qualities rift. Neither the sensual object nor the real one is just a bundle of qualities. Instead, the object precedes its qualities despite not being able to exist without them. In combination, these two separate axes of the world (withdrawn/present and objects/qualities) yield a fourfold structure (as shown in Figure 1) that is the basis of the OOO method in every field where it has found relevance. — location: 3151
For this reason, the vanished real object is replaced by the aesthetic beholder herself or himself as the new real object that supports the sensual qualities. Thus we can speak of the necessary theatricality of aesthetic experience, — location: 3158