Graham Harman in the Garbage City of Cairo

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A conversation about object oriented ontologies in the middle of things. Can be viewed with Google Cardboard or Occulus Rift • Can be also viewed in 2D at • Graham Harman with Daniel Fetzner abo... • http://waste.metaspace.de • • How does Harman´s plastic bottle relate to its Umwelt? • »The perceived thing is not an ideal unity in the possession of the intellect; it is rather a totality open to a horizon of an indefinite number of views which blend with one another according to a given style, which defines the object in question.« • Maurice Merleau-Ponty [1] • The ultimate launch of the anthropocene takes place at Trinity July 16, 1945 5:29 am. This moment in the Nevada desert terminates the causal forward motion of any specific agent with a given final determination. One can also mark this event as the fraction of the Deleuzian ›movement-image‹ and ›time-image‹. Film is no longer understood as a stimulus-response scheme, but as a meshwork of narration and its total absence. In other words: the reception of a ›movement-image‹ versus the perception of a ›time-image‹. • Following the anthropocenery change of perspective the philosopher Graham Harman (1999) imagines a chunk of plutonium abandoned in the desert with its diverse Umwelt-relations. A classical cinematic expression of this embedding would be the ›temps morts‹ time-image photography as realized by Michelangelo Antonioni in »L´Eclisse« and »Blow Up«. • • »The look does not overcome depth, it goes round it.« • Maurice Merleau-Ponty [2] • But let´s imagine this assemblage captured as a bunch of 360° video shots implicating a multitude of line of sights. The sono-optical signs of the radioactive ›hyperobject‹ (Timothy Morton, 2013) emerge a tactile dimension of viscosity by triggering mental experiences at the viewer. The interaction and handling of the projected sphere as an inner eyeball contracts not just her time experience. The seeing becomes less an intentional act, than a psycho-tactile entanglement of a re-embodied spectator. • Jump cut to Cairo, Garbage City May 2016: two intellectuals sit amongst plastic collectors talking about matter and waste. The unusual environment shall catalyse their thinking. A staged setting with an inherent parasitic moment*. One of the intruders, the philosopher Graham Harman, is holding a plastic bottle in his hands with a pastic bag on his lap - similar to the objects sorted on the floor. The bottle is not just a supply of water in the heat, stink and dust, but is part of his body language and expression. Following the definition of waste as »matter in the wrong place« (Mary Douglas, 1966) Harman´s bottle is an ambiguous figure in this ›Umwelt‹. Captured as a 360° recording the object undergoes an inverted section. The radical shift of perspective tries to catch its multiple dimensions without clear POV. • although the workers got paid for being filmed during their work • • [1] Maurice Merleau-Ponty, »The Primacy of Perception and Its Philosophical Consequences«, from The Primacy of Perception, trans. James M. Edie, ibid, pp. 15-16. • [2] Maurice Merleau-Ponty, »The Visible and the Invisible«, Alphonso Lingis, Evanston: Northwestern University Press, 1968, p.219. • Annotation by Graham: • Everyone who lives in Cairo for awhile has heard about the Muqattam Hills garbage city, where the waste of Egypt's capital city is sorted and a great deal of it recycled. But until Daniel Fetzner invited me there for an interview (during perhaps my final month there after 16 years of teaching), I was not aware how much I had been missing. Our discussion on-site in the garbage city was memorable in its own right, but was made even more memorable by the way in which it was filmed. • The statement cites Merleau-Ponty several times, but I have my objections to his approach, despite his undeniably fine writing. There is a famous passage where he says that the house is not the house viewed from nowhere, but the house viewed from everywhere. To this I object that a house is not made of views! Rather, a house is that which makes house-views possible. His famous concept of the flesh, which intimately links both subject and object, still retains both subject and object as necessary components, while failing to tell us anything at all about object-object relations.

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