Materialism is Not the Solution

On Matter, Form, and Mimesis

Graham Harman

a bs t r ac t This article defends a new sense of “formalism” in philosophy

and the arts, against recent materialist fashion. Form has three key opposite

terms: matter, function, and content. First, I respond to Jane Bennett’s cri-

tique of object-oriented philosophy in favor of a unified matter-energy, show-

ing that Bennett cannot reach the balanced standpoint she claims to obtain.

Second, I show that the form/function dualism in architecture gives us two

purely relational terms and thus cannot do justice to the topic of form. Third, I argue against Greenberg, Heidegger, and McLuhan that content cannot be

trivialized in favor of deeper form. I close with a new conception of mimesis

as performance rather than as the fabrication of copies. The form underlying

any work’s content is provided by the spectator herself as the only real object that does not withdraw from the aesthetic scene.

k e y wor ds Formalism, materialism, mimesis, Jane Bennett, Patrik Schu-

macher, Clement Greenberg, Martin Heidegger, Marshall McLuhan

Object-oriented philosophy is often included on lists of recent materialist

philosophies. Let me begin by decisively rejecting the term “materialism,”

which I view as one of the most damaging philosophical temptations of

our time. Nonetheless, the people who call object-oriented philosophy ma-

terialism are not fools. There is a reason why they see a close proximity

between my approach and that of other nearby authors who sympathize

with materialism, whereas no one has ever called object-oriented philoso-

phy “Hegelianism” or “Marxism,” for instance. For this reason, I will begin

by considering the defense of materialism offered by Jane Bennett. That

will take us only partway to the goal, since I want to say something about

aesthetics. My rejection of materialism is made in favor of something that

might be called “formalism.” But formalism already has a long and contest-

ed history in literature, architecture, and the visual arts. I will try to show that the kind of formalism I advocate has little to do with the familiar sort.

In fact, I will try to show that formalism (in the usual sense of the term)

and materialism (in every sense of the term) are two faces of the same

error. Lastly, I will try to revive a term that is even older and more discredited in the arts than formalism is: namely, mimesis, or the idea that art is

primarily an imitation of the world. My claim here is that art is mimesis,

but in the theatrical sense of method acting, rather than the productive

sense of fabricating imitations. The artist imitates not by producing copies

of external things, but by becoming external things.

The Nordic Journal of Aesthetics No. 47 (2014), pp. 94–110

Materialism Is Not the Solution

1. Materialism

The word “form” has several opposites. We speak of form vs. matter, but

also of form vs. content and form vs. function. “Matter” is not as versatile,

and almost always appears in opposition to form. Whereas form must

have some kind of shape – usually a visible one – matter is that which

escapes this shape and resists taking on definite contours. This might

happen in one of two different ways. Matter can either be some ultimate

term into which all derivative shapes break down, as when we say that

all physical things are composed of the elements in chemistry’s periodic

table. But beyond this, matter can also be that which lies in the depth as

absolutely formless, an amorphous reservoir more primordial than any

definite thing.

This ambiguity defines the two basic types of pre-Socratic philosophy,

as Aristotle already noted in the Metaphysics. All pre-Socratic philoso-

phy can be described as materialism of one of the two sorts just dis-

tinguished. Either it tries to identify some privileged physical element

from which everything else is built (air, water, air/earth/fire/water com-

bined, or atoms) or it chooses instead to defend a formless apeiron from

which all of these elements provisionally emerge. Even today, we find

two basic kinds of materialism, both of them deriving from pre-Socratic

philosophy. First, there is the materialism beloved by the Marxist and

physicalist traditions, in which ultimate material elements are the root of

every thing and higher-level entities are merely secondary mystifications

that partake of the real only insofar as they emerge from the ultimate

material substrate. This kind of materialism owes everything to the line

of Thales, Anaximenes, Empedocles, and Democritus. It generally has a

critical flavor, and thus was preferred by the figures of past and present-

day Enlightenment standpoints: even tables, trees, and the brain must

be eliminated in favor of the ultimate elements, to say nothing of angels,

gods, and folk psychologies.

But second, there is the materialism of the apeiron, for which even the

physical entities of science are not deep enough since they already have

too much particular structure to deserve being called the bottom layer of

the cosmos. This brand of materialism inherits the line of Anaximander

and Anaxagoras, usually with a bit of Heraclitean flux-loving thrown

into the mix. The cosmos is not inherently made of tiny physical pieces,

but is an amorphous or hemimorphous whole from which individual

pieces arise only as transient local intensities. The world is pre-individual

in character, and is made up primarily of fluxes and flows and becom-

ings. The world is basically a continuum, and all attempts to break it

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into local districts are inherently provisional and relative. This type of

materialism is usually not critical in flavor, but tends to be holistic and

affirmative. All things are interconnected; emotions and social practices

are no less real than the particles which themselves are nothing but a

fleeting manifestation of a cosmic whole.

Both standpoints have their merits, but object-oriented philosophy

firmly rejects them. Against the two kinds of materialism, object-orient-

ed philosophy insists on the rights of form, as that which has structure

at every level of scale, and which cannot be reduced either to a privileged

layer of triumphalistic physical being, or to a cosmic holism that treats

differences as merely continuous gradients in an uninterrupted, quiver-

ing flux. The cat and the table may not be eternal, yet they withstand

environmental fluctuation nonetheless, and can gain and lose certain at-

tributes or shift their relations to all other things, while only sometimes

being infiltrated or destroyed. The world is made neither of physical ul-

timates nor of a whole, but of objects, and what most typifies objects is

that they always have structure or form. Against Heidegger’s veneration

for the pre-Socratics, we must say that the task of philosophy begins only

when it becomes distinct from the surprisingly similar tasks of physics

and of cosmic holism: namely, only when philosophy ends the worship

of matter and begins to account for the problem of form. This occurs in

distinct ways in Plato and Aristotle, who remain the foundational giants

of our discipline and are still the two greatest philosophers of the West.

What is ultimately wrong with the two materialist standpoints, which

I often call strategies for “undermining” the object? Their shared defect

is their inability to account for true emergence at levels other than the

most basic one. Consider a body of water such as Lake Michigan. It may

be difficult to specify in geological terms exactly when this lake was

formed and when it will have changed so much as to turn into something

else completely. But let’s suspend that problem for a moment. There is a

certain stability to Lake Michigan despite the fact that its population of

water molecules is never quite the same. Evaporation occurs constantly.

Water splashes ashore with the waves and some of it is lost for good, and

the coastline alters slightly. Tourists sometimes pour unwanted drinking

water over the side of the boat, augmenting the lake with what used to be

the consumer’s Evian or Dasani. Some rivers flow directly into the lake.

And of course, somewhere it may be raining. While it may never be clear

precisely where the lake begins and ends, it is purely arbitrary to claim

that the lake is identical with its exact population of water molecules at

the moment. The lake has lake-effects not found in individual droplets

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Materialism Is Not the Solution

of water, and might have an endless number of other effects that it does

not currently have. The lake has a robust character that withstands the

arrival or departure of its individual droplets. The lake has a structure

different from the structure of other things. In short, the lake is a form.

The scientistic lake would treat it nominalistically as just a nickname for

a series of varying collections of water that have enough family resem-

blances over time that we can call it “Lake Michigan” in a loose and only

a loose sense. Meanwhile, the holistic position would treat it as just a

zone of relative lakeness, one that is basically continuous with neighbor-

ing lakes and with the shore. What both materialisms miss is the way

in which the lake cuts itself off from its neighbors and its own causal

components, allowing a certain degree of entry and exit to all the forces

of the non-lake, but remaining a form that endures for some time even if

not eternally. The lake endures until other entities actually do the signifi-

cant and not inevitable work of destroying or changing it.

Object-oriented philosophy treats objects as forms that do not automati-

cally dissolve back into that from which they came. By contrast, material-

ism is a reductionism that falls short of the true task of philosophy: the

study of the elusive forms which are never identical either to that of which

they are made or the ways in which they are described or known. The form

of the object is that which hides midway between its material substrate

and its concrete manifestation at any given moment in any given context.

Forms are hidden in the floorboards of the world, and cannot be known by

replacing them with something that seems to be known already: whether

it be their constituent material or their effects. In this sense, materialism

is a strictly anti-philosophical position, and that is why I have written elsewhere that materialism must be destroyed.1 Many of the calls for “materi-

alism” today are calls to resume the Enlightenment legacy of critique, in

the sense of the debunking of superstition and a critique (from the Left) of

existing social institutions. But while this tradition has much to be proud

of, it is unclear that we can or should extrapolate it into the future, given

the intellectual weakness of the materialism whose banner it waves. The

work of debunking and of revolution may need to be transformed rather

than extended in view of new intellectual circumstances, or else it risks

turning into a moralistic revival movement.

We can only expect that this call for a non-materialist philosophy will

be attacked by its enemies, who have much to lose if the project succeeds.

But what about the intellectual friends and neighbors of object-oriented

philosophy, who continue to call for materialism as a way to address

object-oriented defects? As promised, I will speak here of Jane Bennett,

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who among other things is an unusually powerful writer. I have written

elsewhere about her wonderful book Vibrant Matter.2 Here I will deal

instead with Bennett’s response to me and Timothy Morton in the pag-

es of New Literary History, where Morton and I had proposed different

object-oriented theories of literary criticism.3 Bennett shows a clear un-

derstanding of what object-oriented philosophy is all about, with its at-

tempt to reverse the recent fashion of “networks, negotiations, relations,

interactions, and dynamic fluctuations.” 4 When I call it a “prejudice” to

favor these terms, Bennett wants me to acknowledge an equal degree of

prejudice on my part in favor of objects. And that leads her to proclaim,

quite rightly, that a theory ought to be able to deal with both of these

extremes. As she puts it:

But perhaps there is no need to choose between objects or their relations. Since everyday, earthly experience routinely identifies some effects as coming from

individual objects and some from larger systems (or, better put, from individuations within material configurations and from the complex assemblages in

which they participate), why not aim for a theory that toggles between both

kinds or magnitudes of “unit”?

Compromise always sounds reasonable. Yet Bennett explains her com-

promise in terms that quickly return objects to a secondary status. As she

has it, the broader compromise position “would then understand ‘objects’

to be those swirls of matter, energy, and incipience that hold themselves

together long enough to vie with the strivings of other objects, includ-

ing the indeterminate momentum of the throbbing whole.”5 Notice that

far from making a peace offering to object-oriented philosophy, Bennett

simply reasserts the privilege of a “throbbing whole” that we already

encountered, in germ, in the pre-Socratic apeiron. The main innovation

is that Bennett does not just speak of a whole, but also describes it as

“throbbing.” One online dictionary defines the word “throb,” accurately

enough, as meaning “to beat or sound with a strong, regular rhythm; [to]

pulsate steadily.”6 This word is obviously Bennett’s attempt to avoid the

specter of stasis that arises whenever we think of the world as a unified

whole rather than as carved into discrete and competing districts. That is

to say, Bennett wants it both ways. The world is a whole, but also a whole

that is somehow injected with a principle of motion and local differentia-

tion. The world needs fluctuation in local intensities in order to avoid a

purely motionless apeiron. She also holds that there is a place for objects

in this throbbing whole. Objects, we have seen, would be “those swirls of

matter, energy, and incipience that hold themselves together long enough

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to vie with the strivings of other objects, including the indeterminate

momentum of the throbbing whole.”7 Bennett’s cosmos is a throbbing

matter-energy (form is not mentioned) containing local “swirls” that

sometimes last long enough to be recognized (by people, it seems) as hav-

ing a sort of fleeting identity. In order to attain a balanced perspective,

we would have “to make both objects and relations the periodic focus of

theoretical attention.”

This might seem to recall the famous, evenhanded particle/wave duality

of light in modern physics. The difference is that if we translate Bennett’s

views into physical terms, she would treat photons (light particles) as noth-

ing but swirls emerging from a more primordial throbbing wave. In short,

she allows for no duality at all, except insofar as people sometimes take

swirls to be durable. In echoing the object-oriented dualism between ob-

jects and relations, Bennett never explicitly clarifies how relations fit into the picture of the throbbing whole, but given that the word “whole” suggests a pre-established link between all that resides in its embrace, it seems disingenuous for Bennett to suggest that she merely wants a balanced as-sessment of the two. It is clear enough which term is the dominant one for

Bennett and which the dominated. Though adopting the role of a diplomat,

Bennett has already shown her anti-object-oriented cards.

Bennett adds that she “finds … attempts to do justice both to systems

and things, to acknowledge the stubborn reality of individuation and the

essentially distributive quality of their affectivity or capacity to produce

effects, to remain philosophically and (especially) politically productive.”8

But where is the supposed imbalance in my own approach? She continues:

Harman rejects the very framing of the issue as things-operating-in-systems,

in favor of an object-oriented picture in which aloof objects are positioned as the sole locus of all the acting. And yet … Harman, against that object-prejudice, finds himself theorizing a kind of relation – “communication” – between

objects. He tries to insulate this object-to-object encounter from depictions

that also locate activity in the relationships themselves or at the systemic level of operation, but I do not think that this parsing attempt succeeds.9

With the words “and yet,” Bennett suggests that I work at cross-purpos-

es in first insisting on the aloofness of objects and then also, perhaps

against my will, referring to a kind of communication between them.

But this twofold fate of objects as both communicating and non-com-

municating is the whole point of object-oriented philosophy, which is

designed precisely to create a “balance” between objects and relations

that no theory of swirls and throbbing wholes can ever give us. The point

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is not that relations are either non-existent or secondary. The point is that

relations are neither automatic nor easy, as the theory of a pre-existent

unifying whole would suggest. Humans are not affected by every tini-

est thing that happens in their vicinity, just as tectonic plates do not

constantly generate major earthquakes and volcanoes do not constantly

erupt. Things are not always affected by each other, not always in relation

to each other. The claim that all stasis can be reduced to an imperceptible

motion simply adopts motion as the principle of the world without earn-

ing the right to say so. And despite what Bennett says, objects for me are

by no means the sole locus of all the acting, since objects insofar as they

are aloof do not act at all: they simply exist, too non-relational to engage

in any activity whatsoever. Their relations with other objects are a very

special case, and demand an explanation that cannot seriously be pro-

vided if we assume that they are always already related in the embrace

of a cosmic matter-energy.

2. Formalism

I have explained why we must reject materialism, whether it defends one

privileged type of entity at the expense of others dismissed as immaterial,

or whether it champions a deeper pulsating whole from which all specific

entities are held to emerge. Further, I have claimed that both types of ma-

terialism are essentially pre-Socratic in origin, and therefore (contra Hei-

degger) belong to a still immature phase in the history of philosophy when

it did not yet struggle with the crucial status of form. Reality consists of

objects of all different scales, complicit in the production of other objects, which can never be identified either with the smaller objects that compose

them or the larger objects that they compose. Relation and interference

occur, but remain somewhat rare. Not everything that happens is relevant

to everything else. All things do not reflect all other things as if in a mirror; there are firewalls between things breached only occasionally and with dif-ficulty. What is admirable in materialism is its sense that any visible situa-

tion contains a deeper surplus able to subvert or surprise it. Yet this surplus is never shapeless; it always has form. And no level of form can be considered more real than any other. This is why we must defend formalism over

materialism: not (as in most formalism) because there is no excess beneath

the forms that are given, but because the excess is itself always formed. Here is the problem with Heidegger’s view of the artwork as strife between world

and earth, since the earth that juts through in Heidegger’s artwork has too

much of Bennett’s throbbing whole about it.10 Earth is not formed, but acts

only to subvert any given form, just as his Being is too often hinted to be a

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One in opposition to the many beings, rather than being treated as the hid-

den faces of the many individual beings.

Having defended form against matter, I would now like to defend it

against function and content as well. The duel of form and function is

most familiar in architecture, where functionalist architecture embeds

the art of building in a system of wider social needs, while formalist

architecture rejects this task and occupies itself with the self-contained

character of visible form. The architect Patrik Schumacher rejects both

extremes in the following way:

Architectural discourse is organized around the lead-distinction of form versus function. Architecture, like all design disciplines, hinges upon this distinction.

That architecture always has to address both terms of this distinction has been asserted over and over again by many architects and architectural theorists.

Whenever one term of the distinction seems to be in danger of being neglected, vehement reminders are issued … There are countless instances of this theoretical steering effort against the twin evils of a one-sided Formalism and one-sided Functionalism. The perennial Formalism-Functionalism controversy is itself

the clearest evidence for the thesis proposed here that the distinction between form and function is the lead-distinction of architecture/design and thus a fun-damental, permanent communication structure of [architecture].11

While Schumacher, like Bennett, strives to balance two concerns, there is

a sense in which form and function are not distinct at all. Note that func-

tional concerns treat architecture in its relation to external needs, such as

the features of housing or schooling or government that a building must

serve, so that the building is dissolved into ulterior purposes. But note as

well that even form is relational, since it is always a form for designers

and observers. Form in Schumacher’s sense is still not the building itself,

but merely its outward look. Whether we consider the building as exist-

ing for a client with practical needs, or for an avant-garde architectural

public, in both cases the building is overdetermined by its relations. The

building itself remains unacknowledged as a source of surprise or resist-

ance to both its formal and functional concerns.

This is reminiscent of the usual reading of Heidegger’s famous tool-

analysis.12 As is well known, Heidegger distinguishes between the pres-

ent-at-hand and the ready-to-hand. To perceive an object is to perceive

its form or outward look (Schumacher’s “formal”); to use an object is

to let it function in relation to all other objects in a referential whole

(Schumacher’s “functional”). The hammer has a definite visual look, yet

this look emerges only rarely in cases of breakdown; the rest of the time,

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the hammer functions smoothly in relation to a whole system of other

things. This often yields the interpretation that Heidegger shows us that

praxis comes before theory, or (in architectural terms that he never uses)

function before form. Heidegger argues further that the visible hammer

seems to be independent, while the functional hammer belongs to a sys-

tematic whole. Yet as I have often argued, this cannot be the case. The

hammer’s true independence comes not from the fact that it is some-

times seen as an isolated thing, but from the fact that it can break. And

insofar as the hammer can break, this makes it a surplus not contained

in the holism of systematic functions anymore than the kingdom of vis-

ible form. Insofar as we see the hammer, it exists in relation to us; insofar

as the hammer is engaged in relation with nails, boards, and construc-

tion projects, it exists in relation to these other things. But the fact that

the hammer can break shows that it is deeply non-relational, that it re-

sists being appropriated by us and by other equipment. What is this real

hammer lying in the depths, beneath our perceptions and beneath all

invisible function? This real hammer is also a form, since it has structure

and qualities that distinguish it from all other things, but a form that

exists regardless of any contact with us or anything else. It is not unlike

what the medievals and Leibniz called “substantial form.” This deeper

formalism of objects simultaneously refutes materialism, functionalism,

and formalism (in the derivative sense of outward visual look).

Let’s speak now of the opposition between form and content. This will

prove to be the most important of the three, since form and content turn

out to be a more ambiguous pair than the others. And here we will make

use of the great Canadian media theorist Marshall McLuhan, perhaps the

most explicit champion of form against content. When McLuhan speaks of

media, he is speaking of the hidden background condition of any medium

that makes its content irrelevant.13 It is foolish to speak of the difference

between good and bad radio shows, since what is really at stake are the

features of radio itself: which differ from those of newspapers or televi-

sion, and which structure our consciousness differently regardless of how

we judge the content of individual programs. The content of any medium,

McLuhan once provocatively remarked, is no more relevant than the graf-

fiti on an atomic bomb.14 The medium itself is the deep, the unnoticed, and

the decisive. Gutenberg’s press is of greater significance in changing ratios

of human perception than any Bible or other book that came from it.15

Like Francis Bacon (one of his heroes) McLuhan thinks that objects are not

what their surface properties tell us, since in Bacon’s words “every body

contains in itself many forms of natures united together in a concrete state,

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[and] the result is that they severally crush, depress, break, and enthrall one another, and thus the individual forms are obscured.”16

It seems at first that for McLuhan, depth is everything and surface

is a mere distraction. In this respect he obviously resembles Heidegger,

whose contempt for the surface of beings is no less vivid than McLuhan’s

own. For Heidegger, any surface configuration of the world is merely

“ontic,” whereas the real is that which is veiled, concealed, sheltered, har-

bored, or withdrawn. But along with McLuhan and Heidegger, we should

add a third dark knight of depth against surface: Clement Greenberg.17 At

first it might sound counterintuitive to call Greenberg a theorist of depth.

After all, it was he who defended the flatness of painting and denounced

the post-Renaissance tradition of three-dimensional illusionism as a

spent force, as the very embodiment of “academic art” in his time. Yet

the point is not so much that the flat canvas is flat, but the fact that it

is a medium deeper than any possible content. For Greenberg, pictorial

content degenerates into “literary anecdote” unless it somehow incorpo-

rates a reference to the flatness of the painting. Consider his rejection of

Salvador Dali as just another academic painter, since for all the bizarre-

ness of his content he uses the same now-discredited techniques of post-

Renaissance illusionism that we find in full-blown academic painting.18

Or even more surprisingly, consider his rejection of Kandinsky, who in

Greenberg’s view misunderstands the essence of cubism as abstraction

rather than as flatness, and thus gives us circles and triangles floating in

empty space in a way that indulges in what Greenberg calls “academic

reminiscence,” or even “provincialism.”19 For Greenberg the canvas me-

dium is the depth hiding behind any surface content, which is obliged

to incorporate that depth in some way for any painting that wishes to be

avant-garde rather than academic.

Yet all intellectual theories of depth have the inherent problem that

there is not much for us to say about a depth beneath all access. Some

such theories, including Heidegger’s, have the additional problem that

we cannot gain access to this minimal depth in the first place. By be-

littling content at the expense of form, Heidegger, McLuhan, and Green-

berg seem to give little role to content other than to be mocked by its

deeper condition. Nonetheless, all three of these authors are aware of this

problem to some extent, and all are forced to give way to what we might

call “the revenge of the surface.” Heidegger, after all, is less a theorist of being than of human Dasein’s striving towards this being. Being needs

us, he says, in order to come to presence in manifold ways through the

unfolding of the history of being. Perhaps more importantly, though Hei-

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degger did not quite see this, his theory of the withdrawal of all beings

makes causal relation itself into a problem. If we push his theory of tools

beyond its initial holism, we are not only led to a hammer-in-itself and

nail-in-itself outside the tool-system. We also need to ask how a hammer

could ever hit a nail in the first place if they are both too deep to engage

in mutual contact. If tool-beings exist only at an ultimate depth for Hei-

degger, then their relations can only occur on the most superficial sur-

face of the world. Whereas Gilles Deleuze tends to view surfaces as loci of

sterile effects, for Heidegger there is the paradoxical fact that events must

unfold entirely on the surface.

In Greenberg’s case, it cannot just be a question of an artist’s reflex-

ive awareness that there is a flat canvas medium behind the content of

a painting. This insight is quickly mastered, but not all masterpieces

of modern painting do it in precisely the same way. Displaying a plain

white canvas is not the best artwork imaginable, since even for Green-

berg the aesthetic challenge of such a work would not be very rich.

What is crucial for Greenberg is the way the content of the painting as-

similates background flatness and embeds it within the content, which

thereby rises above the literary anecdote of academic painting that takes

an illusion istic three-dimensional tradition for granted. There are still

at least two problems here – and they are historical problems, despite

Greenberg’s admission that flatness is binding only for a limited era of

art. The first points backward in time. Since Greenberg concedes that

incorporation of the flat background is the principle of advanced art only

in his own time, by what criteria shall we judge pre-modern painting?

It is noteworthy that while Greenberg occasionally passes judgments on

the older Florentines and Venetians and Spaniards, these topics occupy

a relatively minimal part of his output, and often seem free-floating or

unconnected with his general theory of painting. Do Raphaël or Velas-

quez exceed their lesser contemporaries through better incorporation of

the conditions of the background medium, or is it not for some other rea-

son? The second problem points forward in time. Doesn’t the principle

of hinting internally at the background medium eventually grow as stale

as every other principle? Is it not the case that abstraction itself turned

into academicism, despite Greenberg’s definition of academic art as “art

that is unaware of its medium”? Unless we wish to read the history of

art after Pollock, Noland, and Olitski as a prolonged decadence with no

end in sight, art needs a different guiding principle than flatness. Artists

themselves have known this for half a century.

In the case of McLuhan, the revenge of the surface is even more ob-

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trusive. For all his talk of the inaccessibility of the background medi-

um, these media do nothing but silently dominate us. Their very depth

makes them unable to communicate with us or with each other, just like

Heidegger’s tool-beings. The only two ways in which McLuhan allows

media to change are both surface-events. The first is what he calls the

reversal of the overheated medium, when the quantitative increase or

overdevelopment of a given medium overloads the world with informa-

tion, leading to a sudden flip of the medium into something that looks

like the opposite. Cars begin as a speedy convenience and tool of free-

dom, but eventually turn into urban clutter: increasing our travel time,

the pollution of our breath, and slavery to parking ramps, banks, and

insurance companies. Note that all these effects are side-effects, emanat-

ing not from the inherent functional shape of the car itself, but from its

accidental surface features such as price, exhaust, and metallic bulk. The

second way media change is through what McLuhan calls retrieval. We

are surrounded with the dead media of yesteryear, but McLuhan grants

artists the special power to revive these dead clichés by bringing them

into relation with the living background of our own time, thus making

the dead things credible again. In this sense artists are “the antennae of

our race,” not because they glimpse the hidden background of the world

in superhuman fashion, but because they turn the dead forms of the past

into creatures of the background.

But not only does the formerly despised surface become our fresh gate-

way into the dark and rumbling underworld. More than this, we discover

that the depth is not something distinct from the things, but is incarnated

directly in them. Think again of Heidegger’s “earth,” which supposedly

juts forth in every artwork. The problem is that earth tends to be just as

monistic as his concept of Being. Just as Being is always the same no mat-

ter in what plurality of beings it chooses to manifest itself, earth is the

same earth in every artwork. Or maybe not, you say? Maybe Heidegger

realizes that the earthy red of a painting is different from the earthy gold

leaf of another, just as it differs from the earthy marble of a sculpture?

But in that case he has already conceded the central point: that the earth

is many rather than one, and that the depths are already formed.

Think too of Marshall McLuhan. Unless we accept that only media

revolutions show any skill, and thus that all radio and television pro-

grams are equally stupid in their ignorance of the background, we have

to conclude that McLuhan allows for more and less successful programs,

with the more successful ones shaping their content in a way that bet-

ter reflects the inherent conditions of the medium. McLuhan seems to

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know this, since he reports that Kennedy defeated Nixon in their debate

among television viewers, while those listening on radio tended to favor

Nixon – a sign that Kennedy-content was a better match for one medium

and Nixon-content for another.20 Or consider McLuhan’s related assertion

that Hitler could never have risen to power in the age of television, a me-

dium in which his shrill proclamations would have been ridiculous to the

masses rather than energizing. Greenberg must make the same conces-

sion. The background incorporated by all the aspects of a modern paint-

ing cannot just be a single canvas apeiron like that of the pre-Socratics,

since then the flat canvas would jut forth in the same way in each image.

All elements of all paintings would be interchangeable stand-ins for each

other, as long as each performed the sole task of hinting knowingly at

the background behind them. Instead, each painting, each artwork, must

generate its own background. More than this, each part of each artwork

must have its own background, so that we do not fall into the untenable

holism of claiming that an artwork is a well-oiled machine in which each

part is thoroughly determined by all the rest. If this were the case then

any modification of any artwork, however trivial, would result in the

production of a completely new artwork. It would be art as a “bundle of

qualities,” to use David Hume’s famous and regrettable phrase.

In short, the relation between figure and ground cannot be the relation

between many and one. Each figure embodies its own ground, and em-

bodies it concretely. In the terms of ancient philosophy, this is analogous

to a shift from Plato to Aristotle. One of the clearest but least convincing

aspects of Alain Badiou’s Logics of Worlds is his basically Platonic con-

ception of art.21 Art, of course, is one of Badiou’s four “truth procedures,”

which he tells us have been the same four since at least Ancient Greece.

The others are politics, love, and science, (though science is inexplica-

bly replaced in Logics of Worlds by the easier case of mathematics). Ba-

diou is concerned to secure the objectivity or even eternity of these truth

procedures. Romantic love, especially of the heterosexual sort, is freed

from all historicizing and is described as a recurrently enacted truth.

Politics is guided at all points in history by the “communist invariant.”

Mathematics, the easiest case of the four, bears witness to truths about

prime numbers that weigh heavily on every subject, irrespective of his-

torical time or place. This leads him to a rather unconvincing account of

art, one that Greenberg would have dismissed as a reversion to academi-

cism. Badiou’s example of an artistic invariant is that both Picasso and

prehistoric cave painters painted horses, and that the same “horsiness”

is at work in both cases. There is an invariant form of the horse across

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thousands of years. Although Badiou seemingly allows art to deal with

a plurality of backgrounds (since there are many other things one might

paint besides horses), to say that both cave painters and Picasso are paint-

ing the same thing is a needlessly literal reading of both, and mainly

serves a Platonizing function of creating a forced analogy between art

and mathematics, the love of Badiou’s life. It would be closer to true if we

said that pre-historic art gives us one horse and Picasso gives us another.

Each painted horse is a different horse, just as for Aristotle there is no

perfect eternal horse-form, but simply many individual horses. But what

is the individual aesthetic horse behind the pigments through it which

it is suggested? Or more generally, what is the relation between the form

and the content of any given thing?

3. Mimesis

One of the central concepts of object-oriented philosophy is the notion of

objects as withdrawn from access, so that only their sensual qualities are

accessible. This already gives us something that Heidegger’s position can-

not, since it zeroes in on Being as plural rather than as a hemimorphous

apeiron, as in Heidegger’s works. This already oversimplifies a broader

situation, since the tension between concealed objects and their tangible

qualities is just one instance of tension between objects and their quali-

ties. Under the object-oriented model, there are actually two kinds of

objects (the real and the sensual) and two kinds of qualities (the real and

the sensual again).22 Each type of object is bonded to each type of qual-

ity, yielding a fourfold of real objects, real qualities, sensual objects, and sensual qualities, with time, space, essence, and eidos as the four possible

permutations in the group. I mention this only to indicate the scope of

the problem, since only one of the four is relevant to us here: the tension

between real objects and sensual qualities, which can be identified with

space, and whose breakdown can be called allure.23

The theory goes as follows. Whereas in everyday perception we tend to

identify a tree or an apple with its series of manifest qualities, there are

special cases in which the tree, apple, or anything else suddenly seems to

stand at a distance from these qualities. Metaphor is a good example. If

we say “Churchill is like Roosevelt,” there is no metaphorical effect, since

the two compared items have such an obvious historical similarity that

the resemblance creates no friction. But if we follow Ortega’s example

and say “a cypress is like a flame,” this metaphor (in the special case of a

simile) does not have a banal effect unless we are inattentive, or unless

we have read the poem many times before and have now lost interest.24

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Though cypress and flame do have a vaguely similar shape, this similar-

ity seems so accidental that their marriage seems far less possible than

that of Churchill and Roosevelt. What happens, according to Ortega’s

analysis, is that the palpable flame-qualities seem to cluster around the

cypress as the tree’s own properties. Yet it is not the easily accessible

cypress of perception, since this tree already has banal qualities of its

own. Instead, the cypress in the metaphor is like the hammer following

its Heideggerian breakdown: our attention is drawn to it, yet it is still a

withdrawn enigma inaccessible to us, incommensurable with any pos-

sible relation we might have to it.

The problem arises as to how, if this cypress is withdrawn, it could

ever participate in the metaphor. Is the metaphor nothing but a set of

accessible flame-qualities supplemented by the cypress tree as an absent

void? In a sense yes, but this is only one side of the situation. The flame-

qualities cannot be attached to the sensual cypress that we see and talk

about, because then it would simply be a failed comparison: we know

that the cypress tree shares few if any important qualities with flames.

But qualities never exist without an object, and if these flame-qualities

cannot belong to any object of sense, then they can only belong to a real

object. Yet we have seen that the real cypress (like all others) is inherently withdrawn, which means that it cannot touch anything else: not even

poetic flame-qualities. And this seems to leave us at a dead end.

But there is one alternative, which I mention with reluctance since it

took me years to begin to accept. When speaking of cypress and flame,

the real objects to which these words refer are both withdrawn, stationed

beyond all possible direct access, including even access of the causal

kind. Only one real object is present on the scene, fully involved in the

situation rather than withdrawn: and that object is each of us, as readers

of the poem (or the author, who is also a reader). Since we cannot hope to

bind sensual flame-qualities to an absent real cypress, we must concede

the strange result that each of us is the real object to which the flame-

qualities become attached. Stated differently, each of us as readers (if we

are not bored or unmoved or distracted) becomes the cypress tree, just as

method actors are supposed to become the tree or rock they are assigned

to portray.

This is the surprising sense in which we must defend the long-aban-

doned concept of mimesis: not that art is about producing imitation

things that copy natural things, but that it imitates in the sense that actors imitate rocks, trees, Jim Morrison, or Nixon. The role of being a tree is

transferred from the tree to us, with the difference that we ourselves are

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now trees with flame-qualities, which orbit us impossibly like demonic

moons. This model would shed light on Aristotle’s interesting remark

that the poet must be nearly insane, crying when writing a tragedy and

enraged when presenting the wrath of Achilles. In this way, it seems that

the form of any aesthetic content must be found in the involvement of

the spectator of that content. One implication of this has already been

in the air for awhile: an end to irony, self-reflexivity, distance, and the

placing of everything in quotation marks. Just as the notion of critique

as tearing things down with a sneer from nowhere should be replaced

by the critique of wine and food critics and their deep personal invest-

ment in their topics, sincerity may need to return to places in art from

where it has long been exiled. Oscar Wilde once remarked that “all bad

poetry is sincere,” and perhaps he would have extended this remark to

the arts in general. And though the critic Harold Bloom claims that Oscar

Wilde is right about everything, it is a small step from being right about

everything to being wrong about everything. What if Wilde’s remark

were valuable precisely because it finds the truth precisely in negating

it? What if it were the case that all good art is sincere, in the sense that

it provokes our investment precisely by placing us inside the scene, let-

ting us step in as understudies for the real object, forcing us to play the

part of the cypress enslaving the qualities of the flame? If this were the

case, then all art would be a branch of the performing arts. Form defeats

content, not because content must refer to its background medium, but

because aesthetic participants themselves provide that medium, stand-

ing in for the cypress and stone that cannot attend in person.

Notes

1. Graham Harman, “I Am Also of the Opinion That Materialism Must Be Des-

troyed,” Society and Space 28, no. 5 (2010): 772–90. See also Graham Harman,

“Realism Without Materialism,” SubStance 40, no. 2 (2011): 52–72.

2. Jane Bennett, Vibrant Matter: A Political Ecology of Things (Durham, NC:

Duke University Press, 2010.) For my review of this book see Graham Harman,

“Autonomous Objects,” new formations, no. 71 (2011): 125–30.

3. Jane Bennett, “Systems and Things: A Response to Graham Harman and

Timothy Morton,” New Literary History 43, no. 2 (Spring 2012): 225–33. This is a response to Graham Harman, “The Well-Wrought Broken Hammer: Object-Oriented Literary Criticism,” New Literary History 43, no. 2 (Spring 2012): 183–203, and Timothy Morton, “An Object-Oriented Defense of Poetry,” New Literary History 43, no. 2 (Spring 2012): 205–24.

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4. Bennett, “Systems and Things,” 226, citing from Harman, “The Well-

Wrought Broken Hammer,” 187.

5. Bennett, “Systems and Things,” 227.

6. Oxford Dictionaries, http://oxforddictionaries.com/definition/english/throb.

7. Bennett, “Systems and Things,” 227.

8. Bennett, “Systems and Things,” 228.

9. Bennett, “Systems and Things,” 228.

10. Martin Heidegger, “The Origin of the Work of Art,” in Off the Beaten Track, trans. J. Young & K. Haynes (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002.) 11. Patrik Schumacher, The Autopoiesis of Architecture, vol. 1 (London: John Wiley & Sons, 2011), 207.

12. For a full account of Heidegger’s tool-analysis, see Graham Harman, Tool-

Being: Heidegger and the Metaphysics of Objects (Chicago: Open Court, 2002).

13. Marshall McLuhan, Understanding Media: The Extensions of Man (Cam-

bridge, MA: MIT Press, 1994); Marshall and Eric McLuhan, Laws of Media: The

New Science (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1992).

14. Marshall McLuhan, “The Playboy Interview: Marshall McLuhan,” Playboy,

March 1969.

15. Marshall McLuhan, The Gutenberg Galaxy (Toronto: University of Toronto

Press, 2011).

16. Francis Bacon, The New Organon, Book 2, 24. Edited by F. H. Anderson (In-dianapolis: The Library of Liberal Arts, 1960).

17. See Graham Harman, “The Revenge of the Surface: Heidegger, McLuhan,

Greenberg,” Paletten 291/292 (2013): 66–73. English translation by the author of the German booklet: Graham Harman, Die Rache der Oberfläche: Heidegger,

McLuhan, Greenberg (Köln: Verlag der Buchhandlung Walther König, forthcom-

ing 2013).

18. Clement Greenberg, The Collected Essays and Criticism, vol. 1, Perceptions and Judgments, 1939–1944 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1986), 9, note 2.

19. Clement Greenberg, The Collected Essays and Criticism, vol. 2, Arrogant Purpose, 1945–1949 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1986), 3–4.

20. McLuhan, Understanding Media, 329.

21. Alain Badiou, Logics of Worlds, trans. A. Toscano (London: Continuum,

2009.)

22. See Graham Harman, The Quadruple Object (Winchester, UK: Zero Books,

2011).

23. For a discussion of allure, see Graham Harman, Guerrilla Metaphysics: Phe-

nomenology and the Carpentry of Things (Chicago: Open Court, 2005).

24. José Ortega y Gasset, “An Essay in Esthetics by Way of a Preface,” Chapter 8

of Phenomenology and Art, trans. P. Silver (New York: Norton, 1975).

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