:: Graham Harman’s Response to a (Mild) Critic :: and comment

I was asked to write a response to Sheldon Richmond’s (rather mild) critique of Architecture and Objects. That response has been published HERE.

Response to a (Mild) Critic

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My comment:

First, I don’t really need to defend Graham Harman’s OOO against the growing idea-writers that place him as a New Materialist.

On one hand, Harman has said enough to rebut this incorrect conflation. On the other hand, I don’t follow idea-makers thoroughly enough to find out if Harman still cares about that obvious mis-categorization.

FYI. Here is an obvious refutation of the conflation of O.O.O. into Materialism by Harman (2013) Zero Person and the Psyche. One of many.

What is more interesting to me is why (it seems) so many idea-writers want to lump the talk about things and objects into a subheading under material.

The significance, I feel, lay in the modern media-intellectual lazy-ism. It is so easy to sound smart that the impetus for philosophical commodity lay in the show, rather that the substance. Which is to say, most people who are supposedly thinking are indeed thinking more about the media material than they are about the philosophical substance. So the philosophical market gluttons “see” objects as material.

Alert: it is the opposite.

It is due to the media authorial fashionable gluttony that conflates everything into Material. It feels better to the phenomenalist mind.

Hence, the next significant question is for my blog and work:

Why or how do I say that mental health is about objects?

Well, it is because psychology is about material. It is regularly common: psychology and phenomenology go together like mind and meaning.

Mental health, on the other hand, is about the substance of the psychological material.

Or, with reference to Harman’s architecture push:

Mental health is about how things form structure. Less about material means and more about how meaning informs mental issues. Which is to say, how mental issues arise due to the implicit disconnect involved in semantics and structure in the modern frame.

Here, aesthetics is not meaning, but how form is the basis of meaning. I do not follow the usual phenomenal equation though:

Form is substantial where efficiency is phenomenal.

Causality is not unilateral. Rather, cause arises along two basic routes that resolve Non-philosophically. Mental Health is the condition of knowing evidenced by the non-philosophical reckoning of modern phenomenal meaning.

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You can look in my previous posts for that discussion.

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