David Wallis - Is it Normal to Hoard?

Randy Frost's Stuff: Compulsive Hoarding and the Meaning of Things (2010) is one of the best books on hoarding I have read. It's not a treatment guide so much as an explanation for how hoarding develops and how it impacts the lives of those afflicted with it. This article from Nautilus mentions Frost's work and offers a nice overview of the hoarding phenomenon and our culture's fascination with it (there are two different reality shows about hoarders).

Is It Normal to Hoard?

Hoarding shows us at our best, and worst.

By David Wallis Illustration by Yuko Shimizu February 20, 2014



ANIMALS like to hoard. Christopher E. Overtree, director of the Psychological Services Center at the University of Massachusetts, Amherst and a specialist in treating hoarding, says that “the mechanisms triggering this kind of biological reflex are present in all of us.” A friend of his in Minnesota had an eagle’s nest on his property fall from a tree. This led to a surprising discovery: 23 dog and cat collars. “The eagle ate the animals but saved the collars,” says Overtree. His own cat, Gus, wasn’t much better. Overtree recently tailed his cat sneaking off with his wife’s costume jewelry, dragging the trinkets into the attic and stashing them in a hole in the floor. “I realized he must be saving it,” says Overtree. “I think it is interesting to see a behavior that has no practical value in an animal.”

Hoarding, some scientists suggest, is a sensible action to take in an uncertain world. “We have been shaped by evolutionary pressures in the past to deal with resource scarcity, and hoarding is one of those possible strategies,” says John L. Koprowski, professor of wildlife conservation and management at the University of Arizona and an authority on squirrels. He refutes the conventional wisdom that squirrels only gather what they need to survive winters. Studies of eastern gray squirrels, for instance, suggest that up to 74 percent of buried acorns are never recovered. They could be lost—or simply stored, just in case.

While saving up in this manner seems both sensible and prevalent among animals, it is a bona fide disease among humans. This year, for the first time, the fifth edition of the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders, or DSM—the bible of psychiatrists and insurers—listed it as a distinct disorder. It is also one with serious consequences, with the potential to ruin relationships, result in evictions, and fuel lethal fires. And according to the American Psychiatric Association, 2 to 5 percent of the United States population suffers from it.

After all, we are being pushed to consume. “Contemporary U.S. households have more possessions per household than any society in global history,” explains Jeanne E. Arnold, professor of anthropology at the University of California, Los Angeles (UCLA). In 2012, Arnold and a team of sociologists and anthropologists published a book, Life at Home in the Twenty-First Century, based on a four-year study of 32 middle class, dual-income families in Los Angeles. The authors found that 75 percent of families banished their cars from garages “to make way for rejected furniture and cascading bins and boxes of mostly forgotten household goods.” Superstores like Costco, they argued, have increased our tendency to stockpile food and cleaning supplies—and the result at home is stress. Women who described their homes as cluttered had higher cortisol levels—a sign of stress—than those who didn’t.

The line between hoarding, the mental disorder, and hoarding, the bad habit (or natural tendency), is worth considering. Does saving your children’s finger paintings from 1982 mean you have a de-acquisitioning problem? What about those boxes of clothes sized 30 pounds ago in your closet instead of at Goodwill? The popularity of hit reality shows like Hoarders and Hoarding: Buried Alive is surely due in part to the fact that we see ourselves in even the most extreme cases. The boundaries of this debate reveal something about who we are as people.


ON A TIDY street in a resurgent New England mill town, where the trimmed bushes look like green thimbles mounted in mulch, Melvin’s large Victorian house sticks out. Two bicycles, one missing the front wheel, lean against threadbare front steps; stacks of two-by-fours, rakes, and bicycle tires piled up on a desk surround the front door. Melvin, an erudite lawyer in his late 60s who requested a pseudonym, wears khakis and a pressed blue-and-white shirt with neatly rolled up cuffs, looking a bit like the late Canadian actor Conrad Bain. He speaks fluent French and can get by in Russian. He nimbly chats about Robert Pinsky one minute and Oriana Fallaci the next. The divorced father of two is quick with a joke or a boast about his children. He loves to bake, particularly Linzer tortes.

Melvin hasn’t invited anyone into his home in more than a year; he reveals this while leading me, single file, through piles of possessions on narrow paths, known in hoarder parlance as “goat trails.” Cans, dishes, and mugs blanket kitchen countertops. He hands me a laser pointer so I can ask about his many inaccessible items as we stroll through the house. We encounter roughly 200 musical instruments in various states of repair, scores of VHS tapes, racks of dress shirts, vintage radios, several skis, a dozen or so motorcycle helmets, and countless books—some in barrister bookcases, others in boxes. He owns a valuable watercolor by Whistler as well as a worthless stuffed blue parrot that looks like a carnival prize.

Melvin says he can remember a time before the clutter crept up on him and the house was “light and airy.” He bought his place about 20 years ago after a bitter divorce and soon found a housemate he enjoyed socializing with. He hosted home-cooked dinners and raucous dance parties, but after his housemate moved out, stuff moved in. “Slowly it got filled up floor to ceiling,” he says. Melvin, however, insists that he is not a hoarder. “I don’t think of it as hoarding at all,” he says. “That implies greed, one of the medieval sins. It’s really an accumulation of stuff, and it happens because I have an eye for everything under history.” But, I ask, wouldn’t he admit his collecting has gotten out of hand? He thinks about it and responds, gently, “I have a problem de-acquisitioning things.”

Is Melvin’s self-diagnosis right? Is he really a quirky, but normal, collecting enthusiast with a particularly strong attachment to what he judges as treasures? Probably not. In fact, it is this very human feeling of attachment which is the first step in a hoarding disorder. Randy O. Frost, a professor of psychology at Smith College, and coauthor of Stuff: Compulsive Hoarding and the Meaning of Things, saw this extreme attachment form in real time, in a set of psychology experiments involving a rather unexciting collectible: Key chains. He distributed key chains to both hoarders and non-hoarders, asking each group to rate their attachment to the trinket during the course of a week. He expected the connection to grow gradually. “That didn’t happen,” he recounts. “[Hoarders] had it immediately. It told me something about the way in which attachment occurs, that it happens immediately on ownership.”

Attachment becomes strengthened by forgetting that the object is just an object. Carolyn Rodriguez, who directs the Hoarding Disorder Research Program at Columbia University, says some of her clients assign human qualities to objects. “For many patients, the main relationship in their lives is not with another person,” she observes. “Instead, it’s a relationship they have with their stuff—and their stuff is what they turn to for companionship and comfort.” The objects can serve as a stand-in for a person. “People will pull a calendar from 2002 out of a box and cry at how deeply that calendar connects them to the things they did in 2002, or the people they loved in 2002,” says Overtree, the Amherst psychologist. Discarding something stops being a simple or rational act.

Those with hoarding disorders, then, have an amplified sense of something that all of us cherish: Our deepest feelings for our families and close friends, and our artistic sensibilities. On the second floor of Melvin’s house, he has half-a-dozen pairs of cowboy boots in boxes, but he owns many more. “This isn’t my Western boot room,” he jokes. He has a thing for the Luccese brand—“the best American cowboy boots” in his opinion—so he buys them at yard sales, flea markets, and thrift shops. “I’ll pick them up for any friends I have that might be that size,” he says. Melvin’s daughter says that her father is one of the most generous people she knows, but he obviously amasses more gifts than he has potential recipients.

While Melvin’s house is overstuffed, many of his books, vintage radios, and musical instruments mean the world to him. “I appreciate the craftsmanship and the beauty that goes into them,” he says. “Everybody else has an iPhone and walks around being governed by an iPhone. For me it’s objects, and I love them.”

Overtree says people who can’t part with their possessions often see an inherent beauty in them. And that’s a quality he doesn’t want to tarnish. “I have been trying to figure out where is the sweet spot between curing somebody and helping them live a happy and productive life,” he says. Beauty is a dangerous thing, another psychologist told me. How do we hold onto the things that we love and cherish without being overwhelmed by them? How do we learn to let go?

THERE IS, however, a second component to hoarding disorders that has less to do with an amplification of what makes us human, and more to do with a diminishment. Psychiatrist Sanjaya Saxena of the University of California, San Diego, found that patients with compulsive hoarding syndrome showed “diminished activity in several parts of the cingulate cortex,” the part of the brain that governs motivation, executive control, and response to conflict. Phil Wolfson, a psychiatrist based in San Francisco, told me patients with hoarding problems “are often depressed, they are often isolated socially or socially phobic, or they are obsessive-compulsive people; they have all kinds of other habits, difficulties, and anxieties.”

But some of the same brain areas that are underactive under normal circumstances become hyperactive when hoarders are confronted with their possessions. David F. Tolin of the Yale University School of Medicine asked participants in a study to decide whether their old papers can be shredded, while monitoring their brain activity. He found that hoarders’ brains zoomed into overdrive like a seismograph measuring an earthquake—compared to healthy controls. (That didn’t happen when they watched someone else’s papers being ditched.) “The parts of the brain involved in helping you gauge that something is important are kicked into such overdrive that they are maxed out, so everything seems important,” Tolin explains.

Monika Eckfield, a professor of physiological nursing at California State University, San Francisco, concurs that many hoarding patients struggle with processing information. To avoid the anxiety of throwing something away, they simply put off the decision to do so. “This is common to all of us,” Eckfield says. Like the neuroscientists, she believes hoarding becomes abnormal as a result of “mis-wiring” in the brain’s executive functions. Chronic hoarders “have a much harder time following through,” she says. “They get distracted. They get disorganized. They end up adding to the pile, and the idea of sorting through those piles is very overwhelming.”

MODERN science has clearly revealed why hoarding deserves the designation of “disorder”: It is reflected in physical differences in how the brain is wired. At the same time, it is something that reflects to us some of the qualities and decisions with which we all struggle: Consumerism, attachment, decision-making, time management—and, at some level, survival. I’m left wondering if it is any coincidence that it was in 2013, when society demands so much from us in each of these capacities, that hoarding has taken on full-fledged disorder status in the DSM-V handbook.


~ David Wallis has contributed to The New Yorker, Wired, Esquire, The New York Times, and other publications. He is also the editor of Killed: Great Journalism Too Hot To Print, and Killed Cartoons: Casualties from the War on Free Expression.

The New School | The Limits of an Object: Michael Sailstorfer

Nice talk, in a geeky artist kind of way.

Michael Sailstorfer: The Limits of an Object






THE NEW SCHOOL FOR PUBLIC ENGAGEMENT


Public Art Fund Talks at The New School: The Limits of an Object - Michael Sailstorfer


The fall 2011 Public Art Fund Talks series examines the transformative potential of sculpture—its ability to transcend physical form. Inspired by the influence of conceptual art on contemporary sculptural practice, this series explores how the limits of an object can be redefined both literally and metaphorically in the public realm.The series opens with an artist talk by Michael Sailstorfer, who explores the topic in relation to his work. Using a variety of objects and materials—lampposts, helicopters, cars, the forest floor—Sailstorfer creates artworks dealing with states ranging from euphoria to disintegration. Absurdity and comedy play an important a part in his work. In his new large-scale sculpture Tornado, on display in Central Park starting September 20, Sailstorfer transforms the inner tubes of truck tires into dark clouds that swirl above visitors' heads. In Tornado, as in his other works, Sailstorfer uses found materials to create "a transformation machine" that expands the presence of objects beyond what meets the eye. Michael Sailstorfer lives and works in Berlin. He received his MFA from Goldsmiths College, London. His work has been exhibited in Berlin, São Paulo, Paris, and Milan.image credit: Michael Sailstorfer, Raketenbaum, 2008, diptych: diasec on aluminium, museum glass. Courtesy Johann König, Berlin


Public Art Fund Talks at The New School are organized by the Public Art Fund in collaboration with the Vera List Center for Art and Politics at The New School.
http://www.newschool.edu/vlc
http://www.veralistcenter.org

Documentary - Objectified

Interesting film about our relationship to manufactured objects and our rather complicated relationship with the environment that is filled with these objects.

Objectified

Objectified is a feature-length documentary about our complex relationship with manufactured objects and, by extension, the people who design them. It’s a look at the creativity at work behind everything from toothbrushes to tech gadgets. It’s about the designers who re-examine, re-evaluate and re-invent our manufactured environment on a daily basis. It’s about personal expression, identity, consumerism, and sustainability.

Through vérité footage and in-depth conversations, the film documents the creative processes of some of the world’s most influential product designers, and looks at how the things they make impact our lives. What can we learn about who we are, and who we want to be, from the objects with which we surround ourselves?

Objectified is the second part of a three-film “design trilogy” by Gary Hustwit, details on the third film will be released soon. Objectified had its world premiere at the SxSW Film Festival in March 2009, and is currently screening at film festivals, cinemas, and special events worldwide.

Watch the full documentary now. 

Graham Harman Interviewed about Speculative Realism (from Mute)

Mute magazine posted this interview with philosopher Graham Harman on the topic of speculative realism, a newer philosophical model that rejects the postmodern focus on language and looks instead at the relationship between objects.

Missives from the Fortress of Uncertainty

Submitted by mute on Wednesday, 8 June, 2011

By Diarmuid Hester

Placing the cross-hair of analysis over the postmodern notion that everything is language, Speculative Realism is a philosophy that instead considers the relations between objects. Here Graham Harman, one of the school's key proponents, discusses what such a non-anthropocentric description of reality allows. Interview by Diarmuid Hester

Coined for the purposes of a Goldsmiths conference in April 2007 as an umbrella term under which to group the disparate work of four philosophers (Ray Brassier, Quentin Meillassoux, Iain Hamilton Grant and Graham Harman), the term ‘Speculative Realism' quickly captured the imagination of many acquainted with the continental tradition of philosophy. Initially drawn to its practitioners' readiness to shed new light upon philosophical problems assumed to have been definitively solved since Kant, their mutual resistance to perceived anthropocentric and subjectivist biases in philosophy and their shared appreciation for the weird, the Speculative Realist ‘community' continues to multiply at an unprecedented rate. It has yielded offshoot movements like Levi Bryant's object-oriented ontology, Reza Negarestani's virulent vitalism of decay and Graham Harman's object-oriented philosophy (OOP). I had the opportunity to ask Harman about his past, the present incarnation of OOP and what the future might hold for the Speculative Realist.

Diarmuid Hester: I wonder if you wouldn't mind explaining, for the Mute audience, the central principles of your Object-Oriented Philosophy.

Graham Harman: Most activities deal with only a limited range of entities. Physicists are interested in fields and tiny particles. Chemists deal with slightly larger things. Politicians work with larger corporate bodies while ignoring molecules and artworks. Animals are interested mostly in food, mates and rival animals. But philosophy has always had a more global vocation, concerned with reality as a whole, though in rougher outline than the various special forms of human activity.

Image: Human object series, from left to right, Iain Hamilton Grant, Graham Harman, Quentin Meillassoux & Ray Brassier

The first major principle of object-oriented philosophy (OOP) is that objects are the most universal topic. The universe is not just made of tiny micro-particles or mathematical structures that explain everything else. Nor is it made of a gigantic language or society that constructs everything else. No, reality is autonomous from us. And despite recent fashion it is not made up of process, fluxes, and flows - instead, it is made of individuals. In this sense OOP picks up and rejuvenates the Aristotelian tradition. Aristotle was not just the first Greek philosopher to take everyday objects seriously, rather than pulverising them into tiny physical elements or despising them as the corrupt shadow of otherworldly forms. He was also the first to recognise that the most important substances in the world are not necessarily eternal. For the pre-Socratics and Plato, it was always the case that air, fire, water, atoms, the boundless apeiron, or the perfect forms all had to be indestructible. But not for Aristotle, who knew that cats, horses and trees might be destroyed even though they count as primary substances.

But OOP is much weirder than Aristotle, and does a number of things he would dislike. First, OOP denies that substance must be either natural or simple. OOP can deal with complicated artificial objects such as airplanesarmy battalions, secret societies, art installations and so forth.

Second, at least in my version of OOP, objects cannot make contact directly but only through a mediator. Objects withdraw, to use Heidegger's term. Bruno Latour has a similar view that every relation needs a mediator, but the problem Latour runs up against is that there would also need to be mediators between the mediators, and so on to infinity, so that contact would never occur. This problem disappears for me, because for me there are sensual mediators which have no difficulty making direct contact with real objects. These mediators are the merely phenomenal entities we encounter in experience, and there are primitive versions of them even for inanimate beings. Two real objects never touch each other, but both can be in contact with the same sensual object, which allows for a form of vicarious causation. Whereas the occasionalists blamed all causation on God, and Hume and Kant rooted it all in the human mind, OOP holds that all entities are capable of causal interaction, but only in an indirect manner.

What real objects have in common is that all are inexhaustible by the relations into which they might enter. What all sensual objects have in common is that they exist only in the experience of other entities, and have no existence at all outside of this relation. What both kinds of objects have in common is that they exist in permanent tension with their own qualities. There are two kinds of objects and two kinds of qualities, and by analysing the rifts in this fourfold structure, fresh perspectives are generated on space, time, art works, jokes, literature, truth and perhaps even ethics and politics.

DH: In a recent article, Michael O'Rourke quite rightly observes that ‘right now, speculative realism is "hot" and the sheer pace [...] with which it has evolved, developed and extended its pincers into and across disciplines is nothing short of astonishing.'ⁱ Why do you think SR in general, and OOP in particular, has garnered so much popularity and interest? What would you say is significant about this historical juncture which has brought forth an interest in and a desire for OOP?

GH: Speculative realism (SR) is the name for a loosely affiliated group, and some of its founding members no longer wish to be associated with it. Yet the term has an undeniable staying power. SR refers to a type of philosophy working roughly within the continental tradition, but which rejects the continental tendency to turn all philosophy into a discussion of the human-world interaction. This regrettable process began with Kant, but was really cemented by Husserl and Heidegger (who are two of my heroes for other reasons).

The ‘realism' part of SR means that the world exists independently of humans, which is what continental philosophy likes to call ‘naïve' realism. The ‘speculative' part of SR means that the models of reality it generates are all notably strange. This is not the middle-aged sort of schoolmaster realism that likes to annihilate daydreams and turn everything into a bland acknowledgment of tables and cats on mats.

But the phrase ‘speculative realism' survives as a useful signal for a generalised revolt against the continental philosophy of the 1980s and 1990s, which turned everything into language games or power games. The new realist spirit wants to be open to a world beyond human influence, though in my philosophy this can only happen obliquely.

It's hard to say which brand of speculative realism is the most popular among philosophers (perhaps Quentin Meillassoux's), but in humanities fields outside philosophy there's no question that object-oriented philosophy is the dominant version. This is not surprising, given OOP's highly democratic approach to objects. Those forms of SR which claim that sociology is worthless compared with neuroscience are obviously not going to be useful to sociologists. By contrast, OOP is far less judgemental about the other disciplines and welcomes interaction with them. OOP makes room to an equal degree for electrons, medieval history, literary criticism, and musicianship, so it's little wonder that we've become a quick favourite across the widest variety of disciplines.

DH: What do you think of this proliferation of object-oriented theories and their extension to a variety of fields beyond philosophy (social sciences, art history, literary theory, political theory)?

GH: I love this proliferation, especially since it often occurs in fields I don't understand. Nothing makes me happier than to receive mail from people who say that they're doing work in anthropology that is inspired by my books, or doing an art installation named after one of my book titles. I don't believe in ‘purifying' philosophy, but in trying to let philosophy give and receive impacts in every direction.

My friend and fellow object-oriented philosopher Levi Bryant says that philosophies succeed when they give other people work to do. I agree with this formulation, and also suspect that it means the doom of most analytic philosophy as time passes, despite its long-standing dominance in the elite Anglophone universities. Analytic philosophy seems quite proud of the fact that it's read only by analytic philosophers. But I don't see the grounds for pride in writing in an arid jargon of interest only to narrow technical insiders.

There are so many brilliant and interesting people out there who don't do academic philosophical work: sculptors, geographers, chess champions. The more of these people you are able to address in some way, the more likely it is that you've reached the truly universal subject matter that philosophy was born to address. Otherwise, perhaps you're just trying to build a Fortress of Certainty from which to assault all possible opponents. What I want to build, instead, is a Fortress of Uncertainty. Socrates already began this project for us, and it's called philosophia: or love of wisdom, not wisdom. Philosophy was never meant to beat up the ignorant, since it was in many ways nothing but the systematic practice of ignorance.

DH: Towards Speculative Realism (London: Zero, 2010), your collection of essays and lectures, candidly charts your rise from upstart graduate student to tenured professor of philosophy at the American University of Cairo: do you find the confines of the academy conducive to your kind of work or were there advantages to being outside of the establishment?

GH: I'm not sure it's really possible to be an insider in the Western academic establishment while living in Cairo. In the wider world, if I'm known at all then it's through my books, which remain rather offbeat in flavour.

But within the university structure in Cairo, I suppose I'm now in the establishment. As of September 2010, I administer large research grant projects with a relatively sizeable budget, and as Associate Provost for Research Administration I am invited to important meetings where big decisions are sometimes made.

This is all purely accidental. As recently as 1999 I didn't plan to enter academia at all, for the simple reason that I hadn't enjoyed school since about age eight (I had enjoyed my undergraduate curriculum, at least, but not the student experience itself). In total, I spent 20 or more years as an alienated rebel in all academic settings.

What happened? First, I was offered a one-year professorship at DePaul University in Chicago where I had done my Ph.D. While filling that one-year post I thought ‘what the heck?' and looked at the job advertisements in philosophy departments. Cairo was one of the handful of fascinating opportunities that stood out, and I was lucky enough to get it. Initially it looked like this would be a four-year job at most, but one thing led to another, and it's now a tenured full professorship as well as an administrative post.

You ask whether there were advantages to working outside a university position. Maybe there are, but this one works well for me. There simply aren't many other careers at this stage in history that offer such leisure time and intellectual incentives for people lacking independent fortunes. Academia will probably be swept away by the forces of history at some point, but why rush that process? We won't necessarily end up with anything better.

DH: On reading your work, one is immediately struck not only by the clarity (and often welcome levity) of your style, but also by the persistence of - apparently random - objects: parrots, billiard balls and microbes often share space with cotton, sail boats and grapefruit. Is this a conscious decision on your part? Do you feel it is important that philosophy equally weigh the means and the matter of its expression?

GH: These lists of objects, which often appear in my writings, are not my own stylistic innovation. They can be found in any author who wants to reawaken our awareness of the particularity of individual things. Ian Bogost calls them ‘Latour Litanies' just because Latour does them so nicely, but they are far older than Latour.

In many cases I try to have the lists include one object from the sciences, one living creature, one machine, one compound entity, one human political unit and perhaps one fictional entity, just to enforce the notion of a ‘flat ontology' in which all objects are equally objects. So here's a sentence you might find in one of my books, though I'm inventing it right now: ‘The world is packed full with objects: neutrons, rabbits, radar dishes, the Jesuit Order, the Free City of Bremen, and Superman.' Generally readers enjoy such lists, though the usual cranky contrarians always pretend to be annoyed by them. They remain useful as a way of encouraging the idea that all objects must be granted the dignity of objects, without immediately reducing 500 kinds of objects to two privileged kinds such as quarks and electrons.

More generally, I think style is an utterly crucial question in philosophy. I doubt that any important philosopher has ever been a bad writer. There are difficult writers among great philosophers (Aristotle, Kant, Hegel) and even some relatively boring writers (Husserl, Whitehead). But all of them are capable to an unusual degree of extremely powerful metaphors and one-line formulations.

I've always agreed with Nietzsche's claim that the only way to improve your style is to improve your thoughts, but also believe that the best way to improve your thoughts is to improve your style. There is a tendency to think that philosophy is about explicit propositional content, and that style is merely pretentious ornament plastered on top of explicit propositions. Yet this assumes that correct representational statements about the world are possible, which is precisely what I deny. As I see it, truth is a matter of allusion, not of representational picture-drawing. To improve as a writer means primarily to improve one's allusive and suggestive power. We should not say ‘there is no truth', since this vapid relativism is irresponsibly empty. But we should also not demand a frictionless contact with the real, as many scientistic and absolutist philosophers do. Instead, approaching the truth requires something like insinuation or innuendo. That's precisely what style is: saying something without explicitly saying it. A style is the tacit background condition in which all explicit utterances are made. Philosophical breakthroughs are always rhetorical breakthroughs. And as Aristotle already knew, rhetoric does not mean ‘devious non-rational persuasion', but ‘establishing the tacit background conditions for later explicit statement.'

This is why truly bad writers cannot be good philosophers. All they can do is launch a salvo of explicit propositional statements, while the real action in philosophy is elsewhere, because philosophy is the investigation of backgrounds rather than of garrulous propositional figures. Here I am deeply indebted to Marshall McLuhan, who is in fact one of the most important 20th century figures in the humanities.

DH: You have stated in a recent article that ‘all philosophy should be grounded in aesthetics', and have even made initial sallies into an Object-Oriented Aesthetics when, in some beautifully rendered passages from the same article, you talk about ‘allure' as ‘the root of beauty'.ⁱⁱ Could you describe in more detail what this means for artistic experience?

GH: George Santayana notes that while aesthetics has usually been a minor sub-neighbourhood of philosophy, the sense of beauty plays a major role in the lives of both humans and animals. Every day we choose what clothing to wear and how to groom ourselves based on aesthetic principles. We avoid ugly streets when choosing a residence and going out for evening walks. We are stopped dead in our tracks by something mesmerising about the eyes or voice of a specific person, and may throw away everything to chase them for a while.

But aesthetics has an important role in my work for technical no less than temperamental reasons. The world is a set of polarisations in which the real exists in tension with the sensual and objects in tension with their qualities. Absolutely everything that exists, whether real or fictional, is dominated by these tensions. I've borrowed the mock term ‘ontography' from an M.R. James ghost story and turned it into a serious term for the systematic classification of these tensions. I call them time, space, essence and eidos, and place all four on an equal footing. There is also a special way in which each of these tensions breaks down, and I call them confrontation, allure, causation and theory. ‘Allure' is the realm of the aesthetic. It involves the tension between an absent real object and the sparkling surface qualities that seem to revolve around it while never quite belonging to it. For me this happens not only in art works, but in all experiences that involve any degree of shock or surprise. It would be interesting to compare and classify all the different forms of allure, and that's what I will do before long. For now, it is best to read my short book The Quadruple Object, which came out in French last year, and will appear in English in late July.

DH: You've become known, not only as a hugely productive thinker and author but also as a prolific blogger, and you have been quick to extol the virtues of the internet, stating in a recent interview that ‘anyone doing continental philosophy who isn't currently involved in the blogosphere (whether as a blogger or simply as a reader) is falling behind.'ⁱⁱⁱ How does OOP consider the rapid technologisation of modern society? Does the discrepancy between, on the one hand, orienting ones thought towards the insistent reality of objects and, on the other, communicating these thoughts through a hyper-abstract means ever impress itself upon you?

GH: On the whole, I think the blogosphere hasn't fully matured as a medium of philosophical expression. Levi Bryant is the only blogger I know who does some of his very best philosophical work while blogging. He has pioneered the blog mini-treatise in philosophy, a genre that no one else seems able to practice so far.

As for my own blog, I treat it as an intellectual snack bar. It's a place for quick observations that would not fit in a book or article, and also a place for the rapid dissemination of news or reports on what I am reading.

I do think it's a mistake not to be involved in the early days of this new medium. Things happen so quickly in the philosophy blogosphere, and a certain degree of progress is made towards consensus about various topics, or developing fault-lines that cannot immediately be bridged. Some critics mock this link of philosophy with speed of transmission. But the great periods of philosophy have all been periods of rapid invention and sudden shifts, unfolding in relatively short periods of time. The fact that speculative realism went from non-existence to global recognition in four years is a point in its favour, not incriminating evidence: it shows that the world was hungry for something new, and found it.

Meanwhile, the slow, sober, incremental approach to philosophy is more characteristic of derivative periods of scholarly compiling and collating. These periods have their virtues as well, but I would rather run with the cheetahs. The past five years have been the most interesting period in continental philosophy in decades.

DH: Continental philosophy has a history of giving sporting endeavour fairly short shrift - yet in your previous incarnation, you have been a sports journalist, and your blog regularly devotes days to developments in the NBA, MLB etc. not to mention your absorbing coverage of the 2010 world cup. Do you think your philosophical outlook makes you particularly sympathetic to the world of sports?

GH: I do love sports, but I'm not sure I can make an immediate connection between my sporting interests and my philosophical interests. Actually, there may be a purely biographical way to do it, and I mention this only to put an interesting name on the table.

The first ‘philosophical' author I read was at the age of fourteen: a well-known American baseball writer named Bill James. If you were to interview everyone in my age group in America who writes in any genre, I think you would find that a surprisingly high percentage were influenced by James, who is not so old and now works as a valued consultant for the Boston Red Sox.

There were two things James always did well. The one for which he is most famous is analysing statistics in quirky ways leading to unusual insights. This has become more common in various fields: we now have Freakonomics, things like that. But in those days it was fairly rare, and it came as a revelation to see the genius of James at work, shedding intellectual light on the inner workings of baseball, which had seemed like mere entertainment.

The other thing he did very well was write. James wasn't a polished high-literary stylist, perhaps, but informal, often folksy, friendly, and blunt. This was a mind on its own path, and James knew how to reach the most paradoxical conclusions about the simplest topic. He once wrote a mini-essay about a promising young player named Juan Samuel who never really flourished despite abundant potential. The problem, as James saw it, was the ‘What do you with him?' problem. Samuel had plenty of talent, but none of it fit into any particular, available role on a baseball team; no matter what role he was placed in, his deficiencies for the task dragged down his talents. This led James to a more general philosophical reflection on how certain friends can't fit into our lives for the same reason, certain employees can't work for us, certain lovers are impossible on the very same grounds, and so forth.

At this point I'm expecting readers to be either bored or sceptical, since I'm addressing a non-baseball nation here. But I always wanted to be the Bill James of metaphysics. It won't happen; my skill set is too different from his. Yet once in a while I find myself editing or deleting a sentence because I've just written something in James's voice rather than my own. The influence of this baseball writer on my philosophical work is that powerful, nearly 30 years after I first read him.

DH: Whither OOP?

GH: There are three things that OOP must do.

First, there are numerous technical issues still to be addressed. This is the sort of work I like to do, and it will ultimately result in a big systematic treatise of the sort that all philosophers want to write. Now that I've just turned 43, youth is no longer an excuse and I just need to sit down and try to write it. But I first need to finish off some intermediate commitments before I get back to writing Infrastructure, as it is called. An infrastructure is different from a system. A system lays a geometrical grid over the universe and tries to explain everything with it. But an infrastructure limits itself to a small number of existing population centres, gradually extending itself as a city develops by nature or by plan. The point is that philosophers are never brilliant on every issue. We have perhaps 10 percent original thoughts, and the remaining 90 percent are simply the typical platitudes and biases of our era, nation, age, and gender. It follows that if we expect philosophers to address all issues on demand, we will mostly be hearing vapid clichés. Instead, we should follow the method of building infrastructure, focusing only on those few points where we do have something original to say, linking them together by a sort of light rail system that can gradually be expanded to incorporate future insights.

Second, OOP will want to say more about numerous concrete topics. Here I'm not as worried, because other people are doing much of the work for us already. It's not my job to tell anthropologists and video artists how OOP should affect their work. That's their job. They're supposed to tell me what they learned, and maybe it will have a retroactive effect on my philosophy.

Third and finally, one of the hidden advantages of OOP over other forms of SR is that we have perhaps the deepest roots in the tradition of Western philosophy. With our focus on the power of individual things, we are heirs to the long Aristotelian tradition, whose stock price is badly undervalued at the present moment. No major philosopher is greeted in continental philosophy with a more jaded sense of ennui than Aristotle. But I tend to agree with the Spanish philosopher Julian Marías that the greatest moments in Western philosophy have generally come from a serious engagement with Aristotle. My programme for the next few years involves lectures and writing projects connected with Aristotle and his tradition. Here I'm talking not about the supposedly ‘middle-aged' Aristotle described by Alasdair MacIntyre. I don't recognise that figure. For me, Aristotle is among the weirdest of jokesters, and we are going to make him even more weird, since the task of philosophy is always to make things a lot more weird than we ever believed they were.

Graham Harman is Professor of Philosophy and Associate Provost for Research Administration at the American University of Cairo. His Quentin Meillassoux: Philosophy in the Making (Edinburgh: Edinburgh U.P) and The Quadruple Object (London: Zero) will be published in July 2011. The Prince and the Wolf (London: Zero), co-authored with Bruno Latour, will also appear in July.

Diarmuid Hester <diarmuid.hester AT googlemail.com> is a graduate of the Centre for Research in Modern European Philosophy and blogs at schoolboyerrors.wordpress.com .

Footnotes

i‘Girls Welcome! Speculative Realism, Object Oriented Ontology and Queer Theory', Speculations: Journal of Speculative Realism II, 2011, p. 277.

http://www.publicpraxis.com/speculations/?page_id=326

ii'A larger sense of beauty', http://dialogicafantastica.wordpress.com/2011/02/01/a-larger-sense-of-beauty/

iiiInterview with Peter Gratton, Speculations: Journal of Speculative Realism I, 2010, p.85.

http://www.publicpraxis.com/speculations/wp-content/uploads/2010/07/Interviews.pdf

Tags: Object Oriented Ontology, Graham Harman, Interview, Speculative Realism, Mute, object-oriented philosophy, Ray Brassier, Quentin Meillassoux, Iain Hamilton Grant, Graham Harman, Levi Bryant, Diarmuid Hester, Reza Negarestani, Philosophy, realism, objects, reality

Steve Bradt - How Touch Can Influence Judgments (Harvard Gazette)

A cool article from the Harvard Gazette - researchers suggest that "interpersonal interactions can be shaped, profoundly yet unconsciously, by the physical attributes of incidental objects: Resumes reviewed on a heavy clipboard are judged to be more substantive, while a negotiator seated in a soft chair is less likely to drive a hard bargain."

How touch can influence judgments

Researchers say that how objects feel can influence the ways in which people proceed to interpret them

By Steve Bradt, Harvard Staff Writer

Thursday, June 24, 2010

Christopher Nocera displays rough and smooth puzzle pieces used for research showing how tactile sensations can influence social judgments, perceptions of people, and decision making.

Psychologists report in the journal Science that interpersonal interactions can be shaped, profoundly yet unconsciously, by the physical attributes of incidental objects: Resumes reviewed on a heavy clipboard are judged to be more substantive, while a negotiator seated in a soft chair is less likely to drive a hard bargain.

The research was conducted by psychologists at Harvard University, the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, and Yale University. The authors say the work suggests that physical touch — the first of our senses to develop — may continue to operate throughout life like a scaffold upon which people build their social judgments and decisions.

“Touch remains perhaps the most under-appreciated sense in behavioral research,” said co-author Christopher C. Nocera, a graduate student in Harvard’s Department of Psychology. “Our work suggests that greetings involving touch, such as handshakes and cheek kisses, may in fact have critical influences on our social interactions, in an unconscious fashion.”

Nocera conducted the research with Joshua M. Ackerman, assistant professor of marketing at MIT’s Sloan School of Management, and John A. Bargh, professor of psychology at Yale.

“First impressions are liable to be influenced by the tactile environment, and control over this environment may be especially important for negotiators, pollsters, job seekers, and others interested in interpersonal communication,” the authors wrote in the latest issue of Science. “The use of ‘tactile tactics’ may represent a new frontier in social influence and communication.”

The researchers conducted a series of experiments probing how objects’ weight, texture, and hardness can unconsciously influence judgments about unrelated events and situations:

• To test the effects of weight, metaphorically associated with seriousness and importance, subjects used either light or heavy clipboards while evaluating resumes. They judged candidates whose resumes were seen on a heavy clipboard as better qualified and more serious about the position, and rated their own accuracy at the task as more important.
• An experiment testing texture’s effects had participants arrange rough or smooth puzzle pieces before hearing a story about a social interaction. Those who worked with the rough puzzle were likelier to describe the interaction in the story as uncoordinated and harsh.
• In a test of hardness, subjects handled either a soft blanket or a hard wooden block before being told an ambiguous story about a workplace interaction between a supervisor and an employee. Those who touched the block judged the employee as more rigid and strict.
• A second hardness experiment showed that even passive touch can shape interactions. Subjects seated in hard or soft chairs engaged in mock haggling over the price of a new car. Subjects in hard chairs were less flexible, showing less movement between successive offers. They also judged their adversaries in the negotiations as more stable and less emotional.

Nocera and his colleagues say these experiments suggest that information acquired through touch exerts broad, if generally imperceptible, influence over cognition. They propose that encounters with objects can elicit a “haptic mindset,” triggering application of associated concepts even to unrelated people and situations.

“People often assume that exploration of new things occurs primarily through the eyes,” Nocera said. “While the informative power of vision is irrefutable, this is not the whole story. For example, the typical reaction to an unknown object is usually as follows: With an outstretched arm and an open hand, we ask, ‘Can I see that?’ This response suggests the investigation is not limited to vision, but rather the integrative sum of seeing, feeling, touching, and manipulating the unfamiliar object.”

Nocera said that because touch appears to be the first sense that people use to experience the world -- for example, by equating the warm and gentle touch of a mother with comfort and safety -- it may provide part of the basis by which metaphorical abstraction allows for the development of a more complex understanding of comfort and safety. This physical-to-mental abstraction is reflected in metaphors and shared linguistic descriptors, such as the multiple meanings of words like “hard,” “rough,” and “heavy.”

Nocera, Ackerman, and Bargh’s work was supported by the Sloan School of Management at MIT and by the National Institute of Mental Health.

Tags: Psychology, touch, research, objects, Steve Bradt, How touch can influence judgments, Harvard Gazette, Christopher C. Nocera, Joshua M. Ackerman, MIT, Sloan School of Management, John A. Bargh, tactile environment