The McLuhans and Metaphysics

Harman, Graham

doi:10.1057/9780230227279_6

Cited by 15 publications

(28 citation statements)

References 2 publications

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“…A style is nothing other than the specific animation of a body, the invisible force that renders it recognizable in its singularity (PP 327/378). 210 For Descartes, by contrast, it is the mind that judges an object's identity as continuous throughout its modifications, or that determines a cloaked figure perceived from some distance to be a person rather than an automaton. 216 It is this same mind which, removed from the mutable world of extended substance, retains its identity and subsists through every Style is one of the most supple phenomena adduced by Merleau-Ponty.…”

Section: Identity: Physiognomy and Stylementioning

confidence: 99%

Plastic Bodies: Rebuilding Sensation After Phenomenology

Sparrow¹

2015

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The world is due for a resurgence of original speculative metaphysics. The New Metaphysics series aims to provide a safe house for such thinking amidst the demoralizing caution and prudence of professional academic philosophy. We do not aim to bridge the analyticcontinental divide, since we are equally impatient with nail-filing analytic critique and the continental reverence for dusty textual monuments. We favor instead the spirit of the intellectual gambler, and wish to discover and promote authors who meet this description. Like an emergent recording company, what we seek are traces of a new metaphysical 'sound' from any nation of the world. The editors are open to translations of neglected metaphysical classics, and will consider secondary works of especial force and daring. But our main interest is to stimulate the birth of disturbing masterpieces of twenty-first century philosophy. Tom Sparrow Plastic Bodies: Rebuilding Sensation After PhenomenologyLondon 2015 OPEN HUMANITIES PRESSOpen Humanities Press is an international, scholar-led open access publishing collective whose mission is to make leading works of contemporary critical thought freely available worldwide. More at http://openhumanitiespress.org Abbreviations Texts by Levinas EE Existence and Existents OB Otherwise than Being TI Totality and Infinity TO Time and the OtherTexts by Merleau-Ponty Translated by Mark Allan Ohm and Joel AndrepontThe body becomes worthy of philosophical examination when it is no longer a question of the body but of my body. Husserl introduces a fundamental distinction between Körper, the objective, anatomico-physiological body, andLeib, one's own body [le corps propre], the living body, the place of sensations and emotions, the "flesh." This distinction marks a decisive development in his thinking and saves the body from being merely an object of conceptual devaluation. By rejecting the methods of descriptive psychology in order to establish a transcendental phenomenology, Husserl grants a constitutive role to the "flesh" as lived body. My body must be considered in its individuality, its incarnation or embodiment (Verleiblichung), which amounts to considering the living corporeal body [le vécu corporel] in the purity of its manifestation.My body is a token of my own immediate worldly presence; it presents to the mind what Husserl calls hyletic data (the body's perceptual, sensory content, like touch, look, voice, kinaesthesia). In this way, the body becomes the worldly presence of an intentional subject's mental life.The phenomenological body stands in the sphere of immanence (the sensation that I have of my body's immediate presence in the world), a sphere which, after the epoché, is reduced to the presence of the thing itself.14 Catherine MalabouSensation means that the thing reveals itself in the flesh and stands there before our eyes as something given to itself and in actuality.The Husserlian analyses of the living corporeal body once again mark a major advancement in the history of philosophy. As a result of th...

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Section: Identity: Physiognomy and Stylementioning

confidence: 99%

Plastic Bodies: Rebuilding Sensation After Phenomenology

Sparrow¹

2015

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“…85 Now before the reader accuses me of logocentrism, realize that it's not that voice really gives access to the hidden Voice has what Harman calls allure, the sensual energy of the dimension in which causality happens. 86 We can proceed from thinking of voice as an object in its own right to asserting that a pencil resting against the inside of a plastic cup is a delivery of a pencil, a certain kind of physical posture similar to a loud voice or a cajoling whine. A house is delivery, disporting its occupants and its rooms and its backyard into various configurations.…”

Section: Objects Are Hypocritesmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…Harman argues that metaphor makes even the sensual qualities of objects, which seem readily available to us, seem withdrawn. 87 What metaphor does, then, is not unlike another trope, which the old manuals call obscurum per obscures: describing something obscure by making it seem even more obscure. 88 Percy Shelley was very fond of this trope-his images endarken rather than enlighten.…”

Section: Objects Are Hypocritesmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…Harman hints that the linguistic trope of metaphor might be alluring precisely because it gives us a taste of some kind of deeper causality. 97 Can we imagine the interaction between a pen and a wooden table as made up of rhetorical phrases and periods, whereby the elements of one object persuade another? Consider the Latin root of persuasion (suadeo), which has to do with how one object urges, impels, induces or sways another.…”

Section: Objects Are Hypocritesmentioning

confidence: 99%

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Realist Magic: Objects, Ontology, Causality

Morton¹

2013

176

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The world is due for a resurgence of original speculative metaphysics. The New Metaphysics series aims to provide a safe house for such thinking amidst the demoralizing caution and prudence of professional academic philosophy. We do not aim to bridge the analyticcontinental divide, since we are equally impatient with nail-filing analytic critique and the continental reverence for dusty textual monuments. We favor instead the spirit of the intellectual gambler, and wish to discover and promote authors who meet this description. Like an emergent recording company, what we seek are traces of a new metaphysical 'sound' from any nation of the world. The editors are open to translations of neglected metaphysical classics, and will consider secondary works of especial force and daring. But our main interest is to stimulate the birth of disturbing masterpieces of twenty-first century philosophy. Timothy MortonRealist Magic: Objects, Ontology, Causality Everything profound loves the mask. List of Figures -Friedrich NietzscheWhat constitutes pretense is that, in the end, you don't know whether it's pretense or not. -Jacques LacanAs kingfishers catch fire, dragonflies draw flame;As tumbled over rim in roundy wells Stones ring; like each tucked string tells, each hung bell's Bow swung finds tongue to fling out broad its name; Each mortal thing does one thing and the same: Deals out that being indoors each one dwells; Selves-goes itself; myself it speaks and spells, Crying, What I do is me: for that I came. -Gerard Manley Hopkins IntroductionObjects in Mirror are Closer than They Appear Nature loves to hide.-Heraclitus I love the disturbing corniness of the P.M. Dawn song "Set Adrift onMemory Bliss" and the accompanying video, in particular the extended mix that features footage from Spandau Ballet's song "True," which provides the backbone of the tune.1 The corniness of the tune and the video is a little threatening, and it has a personal resonance for me. I heard it emanating over and over again from my brother's bedroom, in the summer of 1992, while he was rapidly descending into schizophrenia.It was so sad to watch Steve doing this: it was as if he was saying goodbye to his mind. He kept listening to it over and over. And of course, that's what the song does: it attends to an affective state, memory bliss, over and over, as a way to say goodbye to someone-or to hold them in mind, not letting go. We just can't be sure. It's why the song works. It's a hip-hop song, made of pieces of other songs, samples. The song is almost like something you'd sing over one of your favorite records, a cherished object you play over and over again. And of course these pieces of objects are also elegiac, also about holding on to the feeling of something slipping away, being faithful, being true, but knowing that you are losing something. Treasuring an illusion, while kissing it goodbye. I found this so poignant in my brother's listening to this tune, my own cherished memory of my brother which I turn over and play again and again, reciting ...

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“…Heidegger (Harman 2009). However, those analogies will not occupy us directly here; we're seeking a concept of transparency in McLuhan's media theory.…”

Section: Media Criticism: Marshall Mcluhan and Paul Levinsonmentioning

confidence: 99%

In Between Us: On the Transparency and Opacity of Technological Mediation

Eede¹

2010

Found Sci

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In recent years several approaches-philosophical, sociological, psychological-have been developed to come to grips with our profoundly technologically mediated world. However, notwithstanding the vast merit of each, they illuminate only certain aspects of technological mediation. This paper is a preliminary attempt at a philosophical reflection on technological mediation as such-deploying the concepts of 'transparency' and 'opacity' as heuristic instruments. Hence, we locate a 'theory of transparency' within several theoretical frameworks-respectively classic phenomenology, media theory, Actor Network Theory, postphenomenology, several ethnographical, psychological, and sociological perspectives, and finally, the "Critical Theory of Technology." Subsequently, we render a general, systematic overview of these theories, thereby conjecturing what a broad analysis of technological mediation in and of itself might look like-finding, at last, an essential contradiction between transparency of 'use' and transparency of social origins and effects.

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The McLuhans and Metaphysics

Cited by 15 publications

References 2 publications

Plastic Bodies: Rebuilding Sensation After Phenomenology

Plastic Bodies: Rebuilding Sensation After Phenomenology

Realist Magic: Objects, Ontology, Causality

In Between Us: On the Transparency and Opacity of Technological Mediation

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