Abstract
This article defends a new sense of “formalism” in philosophy and the arts, against recent materialist fashion. Form has three key opposite terms: matter, function, and content. First, I respond to Jane Bennett’s critique of object-oriented philosophy in favor of a unified matter-energy, showing that Bennett cannot reach the balanced standpoint she claims to obtain. Second, I show that the form/function dualism in architecture gives us two purely relational terms and thus cannot do justice to the topic of form. Third, I argue against Greenberg, Heidegger, and McLuhan that content cannot be trivialized in favor of deeper form. I close with a new conception of mimesis as performance rather than as the fabrication of copies. The form underlying any work’s content is provided by the spectator herself as the only real object that does not withdraw from the aesthetic scene.
Highlights
Graham Harman abstract This article defends a new sense of “formalism” in philosophy and the arts, against recent materialist fashion
There is a reason why they see a close proximity between my approach and that of other nearby authors who sympathize with materialism, whereas no one has ever called object-oriented philosophy “Hegelianism” or “Marxism,” for instance
I will begin by considering the defense of materialism offered by Jane Bennett
Summary
Graham Harman abstract This article defends a new sense of “formalism” in philosophy and the arts, against recent materialist fashion. Against the two kinds of materialism, object-oriented philosophy insists on the rights of form, as that which has structure at every level of scale, and which cannot be reduced either to a privileged layer of triumphalistic physical being, or to a cosmic holism that treats differences as merely continuous gradients in an uninterrupted, quivering flux.
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