Sole and Sacred Fruit

Yesterday Dr. Zamalek again repeated k-punk’s injunction to “surround yourself with people who have projects.” Dr. Z elaborates:

“Tearing down other projects does not count as a project.”

On an earlier thread we explored the “hermeneutic of suspicion” as applied both to the tearer-downers and the project managers. We also saw how mark k-punk’s resistance to tearer-downers is explicitly rooted in what he regards as the need to protect the boundaries and integrity of projects, with an authoritarian hand if need be. But what about Graham Harman? Are we just indulging in armchair psychologizing about his resistance to criticism? I don’t think so. Here’s an excerpt from Harman’s paper in Collapse II:

“While analytic philosophy takes pride in never suggesting more than it explicitly states, this procedure does no justice to a world where objects are always more than they literally state. Those who care only to generate arguments almost never generate objects. New objects, however, are the sole and sacred fruit of writers, thinkers, politicians, travellers, lovers, and inventors.”

First off, it’s clear that in Harman’s system new objects are spawned not only by humans but also by collisions between billiard balls, fire encountering cotton, and all manner of non-human interactions. Secondly, in that same article Harman says that “every connection is itself an object.” An argument generated by an analytical philosopher results from an intentional connection initiated by the arguer in response to some feature of the idea being critiqued. The result, per Harman, is itself an object. So it seems that Harman, in invoking the sacred charge to create objects bestowed upon a certain elite class of humans, is stepping outside the bounds of his own theory. We can only speculate why, but we can certainly identify the self-contradiction explicitly.

We’ve not clarified what’s meant by a “project,” but I’d say it refers to the intentional and systematic and usually goal-directed work undertaken by individual humans or groups of humans. The project is a kind of dynamic meeting-place where objects and subjects interact to produce new products, inventions, events, ideas, and so on. I suppose that a bunch of boulders and pebbles and what-not could have as a project the production of an avalanche, but I don’t think that’s what Dr. Z is talking about here — though I’d say that preventing or stopping the avalanche would constitute a project in its own right. No, both Graham and Mark are talking about projects as the laboratory or incubator for the creation of “sacred fruit” — objects of human genius like theories, inventions, books, discoveries. It seems that for Harman the creation of such objects is better than other kinds of activities in which humans can engage.

I tend to subscribe to this romantic notion of the heroic creator. But critiquers and destoyers can also create heroic objects, just as writers and politicians and inventors can create quite ordinary and even terrible objects.