Art and Objects

W. Hill
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Abstract

The American philosopher Graham Harman is one of the more lucid writers associated with the ‘material turn’ in humanities scholarship over the last twenty years. Identified with Object-Oriented Ontology (OOO) and Speculative Realism— distant cousins of the likes of New Materialism, Thing Theory and New Realism—Harman is part of a broader movement of theorists who, in the words of Steven Shaviro, are interested in how ‘things are active and interactive far beyond any measure of their presence to us’. While their common ground is much disputed, if there is such a thing as ‘theorists of the material turn’ the deprivileging of human-world relations is key; they advocate not critical modes of debunking, to discover ‘where subjectivity begins and ends’, but more speculative inquiries into non-human agency and the nature of things independent of thought. Like the French sociologist Bruno Latour (whose 2005 slogan ‘Back to Things!’ anticipated this ontological flattening of subjects and objects, turning all into actors), Harman thinks that art plays a valuable role in the contemporary rethinking of things. He states that, when it comes to OOO, ‘aesthetics is first philosophy’. Published in 2020, Art and Objects is the first book to address in detail the place of aesthetics in OOO’s perceptual schema. Unsatisfied by explanations of engagement that focus on subtractive ‘internal’ qualities or imbricated ‘external’ relations of things, OOO instead delivers the world to us as two kinds of objects [O] with two kinds of qualities [Q]—real and sensual [R and S])—thus four separate classes of aesthetic phenomena: RO-RQ, RO-SQ, SO-SQ, and SO-RQ. Whether living, nonliving, natural, artificial, or conceptual, according to OOO all things can be treated as objects whose sensual qualities exist only as translated emanations of some inaccessible real object anterior to presence. From the beginning, Harman makes it clear that his book is not intended as a survey of contemporary art practices. Instead, it reads as an exercise in revitalizing the almost embarrassingly anachronistic subject of beauty under the banner of OOO, defining art as ‘the construction of entities or situations reliably equipped to produce beauty’ (xii). So, what is beauty? Harman’s delectably concise definition is ‘the theatrical enactment of a rift between a real object and its sensual qualities’ (140). As alluded to in the title, Michael Fried’s seminal 1967 essay Art and Objecthood is a key point of comparison throughout. He joins Fried in advocating absorbed and anti-literalist encounters, asking readers to reconsider formalist
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艺术与物品
美国哲学家格雷厄姆·哈曼(Graham Harman)是过去二十年来与人文学科“物质转向”有关的较为清晰的作家之一。以面向对象本体论(OOO)和思辩现实主义(思辩现实主义是新唯物主义、物论和新现实主义的远亲)为代表的哈曼是一个更广泛的理论家运动的一部分,用Steven Shaviro的话来说,他们对“事物是如何活跃和互动的,远远超出了它们对我们的存在的任何衡量”感兴趣。虽然他们的共同点有很多争议,但如果存在“物质转向理论家”这样的东西,那么人类与世界关系的特权剥夺是关键;他们提倡的不是批判的揭穿方式,去发现“主体性的开始和结束”,而是对非人类的能动性和独立于思想的事物的本质进行更多的思辨性的探索。比如法国社会学家布鲁诺·拉图尔(Bruno Latour),他2005年的口号是“回归事物!”(预期这种主体和客体的本体论扁平化,把所有人都变成演员),哈曼认为艺术在当代对事物的重新思考中发挥着宝贵的作用。他说,当谈到OOO时,“美学首先是哲学”。《艺术与对象》出版于2020年,是第一本详细论述美学在OOO感知图式中的地位的书。OOO不满足于专注于减法的“内部”品质或事物的“外部”关系的参与解释,而是将世界作为两种具有两种品质(真实的和感性的)的对象(O)传递给我们,因此有四种不同的审美现象:RO-RQ, RO-SQ, SO-SQ和SO-RQ。无论是有生命的、无生命的、自然的、人工的还是概念性的,根据OOO的观点,所有的事物都可以被视为物体,它们的感官品质只存在于一些难以接近的真实物体的存在之前。从一开始,哈曼就明确表示,他的书并不是对当代艺术实践的调查。相反,它被解读为在OOO的旗帜下复兴几乎令人尴尬的过时的美主题的练习,将艺术定义为“实体或情境的构建,可靠地装备来产生美”(xii)。那么,什么是美呢?哈曼令人愉快的简洁定义是“一个真实物体和它的感官品质之间的裂痕的戏剧表演”(140)。正如标题所暗示的那样,迈克尔·弗里德1967年开创性的文章《艺术与客体》是贯穿全文的一个关键的比较点。他和弗里德一样,倡导专注和反字面主义的相遇,要求读者重新考虑形式主义
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