A Holiday gift: Objects and Subjects

“The true substance of things lay in the depths, while the dramatic power of material churns and crashes like waves on the surface.”

A paraphrase of Graham Harman, I commandeer his polemic to notice a felicity to the actuality of the situation.

We are taught, both religiously and philosophically, that The truth of things lies in our subjectivity. We are taught that all the drama that’s occurring, all the argumentation, The passions, the perceptions And conceptions, the interaction, is where we are to look for the truth.

We tend to ignore post-structuralism’s critique as merely another subjective argument. Namely, that post-structuralism as a philosophy appears to arise from nowhere, has no basis, ultimately having no substance that could’ve made the argument or pointed out the various things.

And everyone seems to just take that as a given. Indeed the whole comment of Post-structuralism is that subjectivity itself, while involved in these various negotiations of historical and discursive elements, is ultimately repressed by them, the truth of the very interaction repressed, is denied, is excluded from the negotiation itself as subjectivity, the knowledge-power. The conclusion that we tend to rely on and work with is that, well, the truth of the matter must be that human beings and the world lie only in their subjectivity.

The radical truth which begins to describe the fallacy of orientating substance upon the exchange of materials concerns objects, and ultimately, the truth of the situation.

As this rephrase tells, true substance lay in the shadowy depths.

So ironically, it is a counseling, it is an anthropology, as I call it, which uncovers the true substance of what we’re dealing with between the Selfand the world, what true universal objects are in themselves.

Conventional Philosophy. becomes ultimately this place of politics, this place of “playing around”, at once comedic, at once tragic. We find d that a group of human beings which attempt to find itself and themselves in a substance of material negotiation – ultimately these human beings become fucked up. They don’t know how to behave. They begin to collapse in upon themselves, to create discord and problems everywhere because ultimately the source of “there being” it problematic in insubstantial.

The failure of the enlightenment is the victory of ideological power which subjugates human beings to its whim despite themselves.

It is not “we” that are subjects of ideological power. It is that we are involved with a faith that ideological power is synthetically a priori not only to our own very ontological substance…

….And the substance of everything in the universe

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