Graham Harman: Guerrilla Metaphysics. Phenomenology and the Carpentry of Things (2005)

Too unorthodox to be conservative, too systematic to be postmodern, Guerrilla Metaphysics is a unique attempt to describe the carpentry of things. At once systematic and offbeat, technical and poetic, it is a startling new vision of phenomenology’s motto: To the things themselves!

Instead of the occasional cause that makes God responsible for all events, Guerrilla Metaphysics seeks the vicarious cause that links human beings, tools, rivers, mountains, plastic, and clowns. Professor Harman argues for a radical shift in the phenomenological attitude to objects, and explains how phenomenology can be reunified with the physical world that it wanted to bracket from view.

In Part Two Harman takes a fresh approach to metaphor and comedy, showing how even physical causation has the structure of allure. In the final Part, he offers a new account of causation, which is shown to be not only vicarious but also asymmetrical and buffered.

Publisher Open Court, 2005
ISBN 0812694562, 9780812694567
Length 283 pages

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Jonathan Crary: Suspensions of Perception: Attention, Spectacle, and Modern Culture (1999)

“Suspensions of Perception is a major historical study of human attention and its volatile role in modern Western culture. It argues that the ways in which we intently look at or listen to anything result from crucial changes in the nature of perception that can be traced back to the second half of the nineteenth century.

Focusing on the period from about 1880 to 1905, Jonathan Crary examines the connections between the modernization of subjectivity and the dramatic expansion and industrialization of visual/auditory culture. At the core of his project is the paradoxical nature of modern attention, which was both a fundamental condition of individual freedom, creativity, and experience and a central element in the efficient functioning of economic and disciplinary institutions as well as the emerging spaces of mass consumption and spectacle.

Crary approaches these issues through multiple analyses of single works by three key modernist painters—Manet, Seurat, and Cezanne—who each engaged in a singular confrontation with the disruptions, vacancies, and rifts within a perceptual field. Each in his own way discovered that sustained attentiveness, rather than fixing or securing the world, led to perceptual disintegration and loss of presence, and each used this discovery as the basis for a reinvention of representational practices.

Suspensions of Perception decisively relocates the problem of aesthetic contemplation within a broader collective encounter with the unstable nature of perception—in psychology, philosophy, neurology, early cinema, and photography. In doing so, it provides a historical framework for understanding the current social crisis of attention amid the accelerating metamorphoses of our contemporary technological culture.”

Publisher MIT Press, 1999
October Books series
ISBN 0262531992, 9780262531993
397 pages

Reviews: Juliet Koss (CAA Reviews, 2000), Jodi Brooks (Screening the Past, 2000), Steven Z. Levine (Bryn Mawr College, 2001), Kimberly Lamm (Cultural Critique, 2002).

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Don Ihde: Listening and Voice: Phenomenologies of Sound (1976/2007)

“Listening and Voice is an updated and expanded edition of Don Ihde’s groundbreaking 1976 classic in the study of sound. Ranging from the experience of sound through language, music, religion, and silence, clear examples and illustrations take the reader into the important and often overlooked role of the auditory in human life. Ihde’s newly added preface, introduction, and chapters extend these sound studies to the technologies of sound, including musical instrumentation, hearing aids, and the new group of scientific technologies which make infra- and ultra-sound available to human experience.”

First published by Ohio University Press, 1976
Second edition
Publisher SUNY Press, 2007
ISBN 0791472558, 9780791472552
276 pages

Reviews: V. A. Howard (Journal of Aesthetic Education, 1978), Ansa Lønstrup (MedieKultur, 2010).

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