The Anti-political Aesthetics of Objects and Worlds Beyond (Svenja Bromberg)

quotes:
“Since dOCUMENTA there has been a real explosion in art exhibitions that explicitly centre around objects and articulate a relation to the philosophical strand of Object-Oriented Ontolgy (OOO)
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As Diedrich Diederichsen outlines in a recent e-flux article, it is precisely what was still antithetical to the Fordist assembly line – different modes of dreaming ‘dangerously’ or living authentic or alternative lives – that seems to have become part of the post-Fordist ‘imperative to produce a perfect self as a perfect thing’.
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Harman’s ‘Object-Oriented Aesthetics’
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Interaction, relationship, causation, linkage are finally the names for a complex process that can be initiated between two real objects or two sensual objects only by a third intentional agent of the opposite type (in the first case sensual, in the second case real). Because, while real objects cannot touch each other, ‘sensual objects always touch real ones’, as they only exist for real objects.
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There is no way in which Harman could account for the accumulation of powers and forces within specific objects or object constellations that violate certain relations or even deny access to them; there is no way in which objects might be distributed unequally in different networks of relations or in which relations might bind objects to conditions of extreme suffering, of suffocation, of death – and we could here speak of relations between people and their means of subsistence as much as of the relation between a company that emits toxic fumes and its surrounding biosphere.
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Philosophy and simultaneously aesthetics have thus become extremely impoverished, as they have lost any concepts that could allow judgements that go beyond the question if a ‘new’ relation has been forged or not. With respect to the spectator, Harman seems to remain extremely Kantian, in the sense that for him art is fundamentally about the encounter between the artwork and the spectator and the emerging aesthetic reaction or ‘judgement’.
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Meillassoux’s ‘Inaesthetics’
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[P]hilosophy is concerned with a real and dense possible which I call the ‘may-be’ [peut-être]. This peut-être […] is very close to the final peut-être of Mallarmé’s Un coup de dés…
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Against his master Alain Badiou, Meillassoux sees these questions not resolved in Coup de dès in relation to an evental configuration of the poem towards a newly emerging truth, but as precisely eternalised in a hypothetical ‘perhaps’, by means of a metre that simultaneously exists and in-exists: the activity of ‘fixer l’infini’. Meillassoux argues this on the grounds of the ‘unique Number’ that we can find alluded to but finally suspended in the line of the poem ‘it was the number – were it to have existed’, but that nevertheless has an, albeit questionable, hidden existence via a code within the poem.
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At the same time the aesthetics of hope Meillassoux’s philosophy offers us is not a Blochian ‘not-yet-being’ that, in its utopian sense, is nevertheless directed in a very concrete way against the oppressive material conditions of existence under capitalism, and which is itself only generated by the participation in that very same struggle. Meillassoux’s real of superchaos, which art might help us to access is, whilst radically contingent, also absolute, containing in itself ‘the equal contingency of order and disorder, of becoming and sempiternity’.