Jackson Hammers the Ice

This is yet another interesting installment of Jackson on objects, algorithms and Michael Fried. I think Jackson and I have some work to do together. Maybe it's just the way my brain is wired but I really think, and I think Jackson is going there too, that the aesthetics-and/as-causality line in Harman's work is not just a helpful or entertaining side show, but a main feature.

It's easy to shy away from it because it's so counter-intuitive. But it does a lot of the heavy lifting. Like I said I my lecture it's swimming against not only the scientistic rejection of occasionalism (that has a thousand year old pedigree), but the split between rhetoric and science, and aesthetics (a five hundred year old pedigree).

I want to know more about Fried but what I see in his work are some strong parallels to why I think OOO can talk about Buddhism. The contemplative inwardness of Buddhism I see as common to all objects in OOO (sort of). Fried writes about paintings that withdraw, that depict withdrawn humans... There's some kind of Möbius-like recursivity at work here that makes it hard to think about.

There's a whole thing about taking hammers to Antarctica in his post, which I'll talk about in a separate post.