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8/8/2019 C4 Graham Harman Keith Tilford

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Keith Tilford

Singular Agitationsand a Common Vertigo

COLLAPSE IV, ed. R. Mackay (Falmouth: Urbanomic, May 2008)

ISBN 978-0-9553087-3-4

http://www.urbanomic.com


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Graham Harman

On the Horror of Phenomenology:Lovecraft and Husserl

In a dismissive review o a recent anthology onSchelling, Andrew Bowie accuses two authors o a stylehe increasingly thinks o as continental science ction.1There is room or urther increase in Bowies thinking. Withhis implication that science ction belongs to the juvenile orthe unhinged, Bowie enorces a sad limitation on mentalexperiment. For nothing resembles science ction morethan philosophy does unless it be science itsel. Fromits dawning in ancient Greece, philosophy has been theasylum o strange notions: a cosmic justice using oppositesinto a restored whole; a series o emanations rom xedstars to the moon to the prophets; divine intervention in the

1. Andrew Bowie, Something old, something new , in Radical Philosophy 128(November/December 2004), 46. The review is oThe New Schelling, J. Norman & A.Welchman (eds.) (London: Continuum, 2004). The targets o Bowies censure areIain Hamilton Grant and Alberto Toscano.

COLLAPSE IV, ed. R. Mackay (Falmouth: Urbanomic, May 2008)

ISBN 978-0-9553087-3-4

http://www.urbanomic.com


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movement o human hands and legs; trees and diamonds

with innite parallel attributes, only two o them known;insular monads sparkling like mirrors and attached to tinybodies built rom chains o other monads; and the eternalrecurrence o every least event. While the dismal consensusthat such speculation belongs to the past is bolstered by thepoor imagination o some philosophers, it nds no supportamong working scientists, who grow increasingly wild in

their visions. Even a cursory glance at the physics literaturereveals a discipline bewitched by strange attractors,degenerate topologies, black holes lled with alternateworlds, holograms generating an illusory third dimension,and matter composed o vibrant ten-dimensional strings.Mathematics, unconstrained by empirical data, has longbeen still bolder in its gambles. Nor can it be said that science

ction is a marginal eature o literature itsel. Long beorethe mighty crabs and squids o Lovecrat and the tribunalso Kaka, we had Shakespeares witches and ghosts, Mt.Purgatory in the Pacic, the Cyclops in the Mediterranean,and the Sphinx tormenting the north o Greece.

Against the model o philosophy as a rubber stamp or

common sense and archival sobriety, I would propose thatphilosophys sole mission is weird realism. Philosophy mustbe realist because its mandate is to unlock the structure othe world itsel; it must be weird because reality is weird.Continental science ction, and continental horror, must be transormed rom insults into a research program. Itseems ruitul to launch this program with a joint treatment

o Edmund Husserl and H.P. Lovecrat, an unlikely pairthat I will try to render more likely. The dominant strando twentieth-century continental thought stems rom the


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phenomenology o Husserl, whose dry and aable worksconceal a philosophy tinged with the bizarre. In almost thesame period, the leading cratsman o horror and sciencection in literature was Lovecrat, recently elevated rompulp author to canonical classic by the prestigious Libraryof America series.2 The road to continental science ctionleads through a Lovecratian reading o phenomenology.This remark is not meant as a prank. Just as Lovecrat

turns prosaic New England towns into the battlegroundo extradimensional ends, Husserls phenomenologyconverts simple chairs and mailboxes into elusive units thatemit partial, contorted suraces. In both authors, the brokenlink between objects and their maniest crust hints at suchterriying vistas o reality, and o our rightul positiontherein, that we shall either go mad rom the revelation

or fee rom the deadly light into the peace and saety oa new dark age3 or preerably, revive a metaphysicalspeculation that embraces the permanent strangeness oobjects. I philosophy is weird realism, then a philosophyshould be judged by what it can tell us about Lovecrat.In symbolic terms, Great Cthulhu should replace Minervaas the patron spirit o philosophers, and the Miskatonic

must dwar the Rhine and the Ister as our river o choice.Since Heideggers treatment o Hlderlin resulted mostlyin pious, dreary readings, philosophy needs a new literaryhero.

2. H.P. Lovecrat, Tales(New York: The Library o America, 2005).

3. Ibid., 167. From the amous rst paragraph o The Call o Cthulhu.


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LovecraftsMateriaLisM

In the great tales o Lovecrat we nd a mythologycentered in New England, but ranging rom the Antarcticto Pluto as well. Humans are no longer lords o the cosmos,but are surrounded by hidden monstrosities who evade orcorrupt our race, sometimes plotting its downall. The OldOnes, or Those Ones, are the disturbing general terms bywhich these creatures are known. They vastly exceed us in

mental and physical prowess, yet occasionally interbreedwith human emales, preerring women o a decayedgenetic type. The least encounter with the Old Ones otenresults in mental breakdown, and all reports o dealingswith them are hushed. But their unspeakable powers arear rom innite. To achieve their aims, the Old Ones seekminerals in the hills o Vermont, inltrate churches in

seaport towns, and pursue occult manuscripts under theeyes o suspicious librarians. Their researches are linkednot only with Lovecrats ctional authors and archives (themad Arab al-Hazred, Miskatonic University), but real onesas well (Pico della Mirandola, Harvards Widener Library).Their corpses are carried away by foods, and even themighty Cthulhu explodes, though briefy, when rammed by a human-built ship. There are also rivalries betweenthe monsters, as becomes clear in At the Mountains oMadness. The powers o the various Old Ones are nomore uniorm than they are innite.

This balance in the monsters between power and railtyis mentioned to oppose any Kantianreading o Lovecrat.

Such a reading is understandable, since Kants inaccessiblenoumenal world seems a perect match or the crypticstealth o Lovecrats creatures. His descriptions o their


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bodies and actions are almost deliberately insucient, andseem to allude to dimensions beyond the nite conditionso human perception. His monsters are not just mysterious,but oten literally invisible; they undermine our stock oemotional responses and zoological categories. The veryarchitecture o their cities mocks the principles o Euclideangeometry. A ew examples will indicate the style:

When a traveler in north central Massachusetts takes the

wrong ork at the junction o the Aylesbury Pike [] he comesupon a lonely and curious country [] Gorges and ravines oproblematical depth intersect the way, and the crude wooden

bridges always seem o dubious saety. When the road dipsagain there are stretches o marshland that one instinctivelydislikes []4

Odd wounds or sores, having something o the aspect oincisions, seemed to infict the visible cattle []5

[Wilbur Whateley] would sometimes mutter an unamiliarjargon, and chant in bizarre rhythms which chilled the listener

with a sense o unexplainable terror.6

And most compellingly:

It would be trite and not wholly accurate to say that no humanpen could describe [the dead creature on the foor], but one

may properly say that it could not be vividly visualized byanyone whose ideas o aspect and contour are too closelybound up with the lie-orms o this planet and o the threeknown dimensions.7

4. Ibid., 370-1. Italics added.

5. Ibid., 375-6. Italics added.

6. Ibid., 379. Italics added.

7. Ibid., 389. Italics added.


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At the climax o The Dunwich Horror, when CurtisWhateley briefy glimpses the ormerly hidden creatureon the mountaintop, he describes it as made o squirmingropes, shaped somewhat like a hens egg, with dozens olegs like barrels that shut halway as it walks a jelly-likecreature having nothing solid about it, with great bulgingeyes and ten or twenty mouths, somewhat grey in colorwith blue or purple rings, and a hal-ace on top.8 In the

later tale At the Mountains o Madness, the vast Antarcticcity displays no architecture known to man [] with vastaggregations o night-black masonry embodying monstrousperversions o known geometrical laws.9 When this deadmetropolis is rst sighted rom the air, the narrator assumesit must be a polar mirage:

There were truncated cones, sometimes terraced or futed,

surmounted by tall cylindrical shats here and there bulbouslyenlarged and oten capped with tiers o thinnish scalloped discs;and strange, beetling, table-like constructions suggesting pileso multitudinous rectangular slabs or circular plates or ve-pointed stars [] There were composite cones and pyramidseither alone or surmounting cylinders and cubes or fattertruncated cones and pyramids, and occasional needle-likespires in curious clusters o ve. All o these ebrile structures

seemed knit together by tubular bridges [].10

The near-incoherence o such descriptions undercutsany attempt to render them in visual orm. The verypointo the descriptions is that they ail, hinting only obliquely atsome unspeakable substratum o reality. It is obvious whythis might seem Kantian in its implications.

8. Ibid., 409-10.

9. Ibid., 508.

10. Ibid., 508-9.


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Nonetheless, the Kantian reading ails. Even i weaccepted a metaphysics splitting the world into noumenaland phenomenal realms, there is no question that theOld Ones would belong entirely to the phenomenal. Themere act o invisibility is surely not enough to qualiythe monsters as noumenal. The so-called Higgs boson opresent-day physics, assuming it exists, lies beyond the gazeo current particle accelerators. No one has ever witnessed

the core o the earth, or the center o the Milky Way whichmay or may not be home to a massive black hole. Countlessother orces must exist in the universe that could be onlydecades away rom discovery, while others will remainshielded rom human insight in perpetuity. But this does notmake them noumenal: these orces, however bizarre, wouldstill belong to the causal and spatio-temporal conditions

that, or Kant, belong solely to the structure o humanexperience. Let us grant urther that the Old Ones mayhave eatures permanentlyoutstripping human intelligence,in a way that the Higgs boson may not. Even so, this wouldbe the result not o the transcendental structure o humannitude, but only o our relative stupidity. The game ochess is not noumenal or dogs through their inability to

grasp it, and neither is Sanskrit grammar or a derangedadult or a three-year-old. In The Whisperer in Darkness,the Old Ones even invite humans to become initiated intotheir larger view o the world:

Do you realise what it means when I say that I have been onthirty-seven dierent celestial bodies planets, dark stars, andless denable objects including eight outside our galaxy and

two outside the curved cosmos o space and time? [] Thevisitors are eager to know men o knowledge like yoursel, and


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to shew them the great abysses that most o us have had todream about in anciul ignorance.11

Humans prepare to reach these deeper abysses, neitherthrough HeideggerianAngstnor a mystical experience thatleaps beyond nitude and reduces philosophy to straw, butthrough purely medical means: My brain has been removedrom my body by ssions so adroit that it would be crude tocall them surgery.12 The great horror o Lovecrats universe

lies not in some sublime innite that no nite intelligencecan ully grasp, but in the invasion o the nite world bynite malignant beings. For all the limits imposed on ourintellect by Kant, he leaves us reassured that the nite andphenomenal world is insulated rom horror, governedand structured by our own amiliar categories. Far moretroubling is Lovecrats subversion o the nite world: no

longer a kingdom led by innocuous rational beings, but onein which humans ace entities as voracious as insects, whouse black magic and telepathy while employing mulattosailors as worse-than-terrorist operatives.

The Old Ones are anything but noumenal. Noumenalbeings scarcely have need o buildings, whether Euclideanor otherwise. Noumenal beings are not dissected on the

tables o polar explorers, do not mine or rocks in Vermont,and have no purpose mastering Arabic and Syriac dialectsto consult the writings o medieval wizards. They wouldnever speak in physical voices, not even with the droneo some loathsome, gigantic insect ponderously shapedinto the articulate speech o an alien species [] [with]singularities o timbre, range, and overtones [placing it]

11. Ibid., 468.

12. Ibid.


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wholly outside the sphere o humanity and earth-lie.13Michel Houellebecq, in a brilliant study o Lovecrat,14is correct to emphasize his absolute materialism: Whatis Great Cthulhu? An arrangement o electrons, like us.Lovecrats terror is rigorously material. But, it is quitepossible, given the ree interplay o cosmic orces, thatGreat Cthulhu possesses abilities and powers to act that arexceed ours. Which, a priori, is not particularly reassuring

at all.

15

The terror o Lovecrat is not a noumenal horror, then, but a horror o phenomenology. Humans cease to bemaster in their own house. Science and letters no longerguide us toward benevolent enlightenment, but may orceus to conront notions o the cosmos, and o [our] ownplace in the seething vortex o time, whose merest mention

is paralysing, and impose monstrous and unguessablehorrors upon certain venturous [humans].16 Conrontedwith the hal-human ospring o the Old Ones, even thepolitical Let will endorse the use o concentration camps:Complaints rom many liberal organizations were metwith long condential discussions, and representatives weretaken on trips to certain camps and prisons. As a result,

these societies became surprisingly passive and reticent.17

13. Ibid., 434.

14. Michel Houellebecq, H.P. Lovecraft: Against the World, Against Life, trans. D. Khazeni,Introduction by Stephen King. (San Francisco: Believer Books, 2005).

15. Ibid., 32.

16. Ibid., 719. From The Shadow Out o Time.

17. Ibid., 587. From The Shadow Over Innsmouth.


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To expand on a passage cited earlier:

The most merciul thing in the world, I think, is the inability othe human mind to correlate all its contents. We live on a placidisland o ignorance in the midst o black seas o innity, and itwas not meant that we should voyage ar. The sciences, eachstraining in its own direction, have hitherto harmed us little;

but some day the piecing together o dissociated knowledgewill open such terriying vistas o reality, and o our rightulposition within, that we shall either go mad rom the revelation

or fee rom the deadly light into the peace and saety o a newdark age.18

18. Ibid., 167.


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Though ostensibly Kantian on a rst reading, nothingcould be less Kantian than this passage in its call or barriersto enlightenment, and its placement o terriying vistasnot in some transcendent sublime, but in the electrons thatorm the pulpy torso o Great Cthulhu.

the Weirdnessof objects

The literary critic Harold Bloom shares the ollowing

anecdote:Some years ago, on a stormy night in New Haven, I sat down toreread, yet once more, John Miltons Paradise Lost[] I wantedto start all over again with the poem: to read it as though I hadnever read it beore, indeed as though no one had ever read it

beore me [] And while I read, until I ell asleep in the middleo the night, the poems initial amiliarity began to dissolve[] Although the poem is a biblical epic, in classical orm, thepeculiar impression it gave me was what I generally ascribe toliterary antasy or science ction, not to heroic epic. Weirdnesswas its overwhelming eect.19

Science ction is ound not only in science ction,but in great literature o any sort. More generally, Bloomcontends that one mark o an originality that can win

canonical status or a literary work is a strangeness thatwe either never altogether assimilate, or that becomessuch a given that we are blinded to its idiosyncracies.20Although Bloom has little time or philosophy, whichhe views as cognitively less original than literature, hisstandard o canonical achievement seems equally valid or

19. Harold Bloom, The Western Canon, 24-5. (New York: Riverhead Books, 2004).Italics added.

20. Ibid., 4.


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philosophical work. I there is one eature that unites thegreat works o philosophy, it is surely their inability to beully assimilated, or their tendency to become such a giventhat we are blinded to their strangeness. Though Platoand Kant can be seen as restrictive establishment gures,their works are saturated with deviant images and nearlyantastic concepts; they exceed all possible interpretation,resist all attempted summary, and appeal to readers o

any nationality or political orientation. The education oyoung philosophers builds on these works as on bedrock.And they come alive only when some gited interpreterrediscovers their strangeness.

Pressing urther, it also seems evident that thestrangeness o works comes less rom the works as a wholethan rom the weirdness o the personae that ll them,

whether in literature, philosophy, or science. Though DonQuixote and Lears Fool appear solely in literary works,they are no more reducible to extant plot lines than ourriends are exhaustively grasped by our dealings with them.Characters, in the broadest sense, are objects. Though weonly come to know them through specic literary incidents,these events merely hint at a characters turbulent inner

lie which lies mostly outside the work it inhabits,and remains ully equipped or sequels that the authornever produced. I a lost Shakespearean tragedy werediscovered, dealing with the apparent suicide o the Fool(who disappears without explanation rom the existingtext oKing Lear), the same Fool would have to be presentin the new work, however unexpected its speeches. Thesame is true o philosophical concepts, which must also beviewed as characters or objects. While recent philosophy


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insists on precise denitions o every term, a genuinephilosophical concept always eludes such precision. Wecould list the known eatures o Leibnizs monads in alaminated chart, yet the list includes contradictions, andsurely leaves us hungry or more. The same holds true oargon in chemistry or the string in physics. A thing cannotbe reduced to the denitions we give o it, because thenthe thing would change with each tiny change in its known

properties, as Kripke has sharply objected.

21

A good rule othumb is as ollows: unlessa character gives rise to dierentinterpretations, unless a scientic entity endures changednotions o its properties, unlessa philosopher is entangledin contradictory assertions over one and the same concept,unless a new technology has unoreseen impact, unless apoliticians party is one day disappointed, unlessa riend is

able to generate and experience surprises, then we are notdealing with anything very real. We will be dealing insteadwith useul surace qualities, not with objects. Let objectreer to any reality with an autonomous lie deeper than itsqualities, and deeper than its relations with other things.In this sense, an object is reminiscent o an Aristotelianprimary substance, which supports dierent qualities at

dierent times. Socrates can laugh, sleep, or cry at variousmoments while still remaining Socrates which entails thathe can never be exhaustively described or dened.

My thesis is that objects and weirdness go hand inhand. An object partly evades all announcement throughits qualities, resisting or subverting eorts to identiy it withany surace. It is that which exceeds any o the qualities,accidents, or relations that can be ascribed to it: an I know

21. Saul Kripke, Naming and Necessity. (Cambridge, MA: Harvard Univ. Press, 1996).


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not what, but in a positive sense. Against requent eortsto dismiss objects as antasies assembled by humans roma pre-given surace o experienced contents, I contend thatreality is object-oriented. Reality is made up o nothing but substances and they are weird substances with ataste o the uncanny about them, rather than sti blockso simplistic physical matter. Contact with reality beginswhen we cease to reduce a thing to its properties or to its

eect on other things. The dierence between objects andtheir peripheral eatures (qualities, accidents, relations) is


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absolute. Though this thesis is deeply classical, it cannotpossibly be reactionary, since the objects o which I speakresist all reduction to dogma, and in act are the only orcein the world capable o doing so.

intentionaLobjects

Few will object to the term weird realism as a descriptiono Lovecrats outlook. Weird Tales was the periodical that

spawned his career, and weird ction the term mostoten used or his own writings. Lovecrat was opposed torealism in the literary sense o James or Zola, their minutedescriptions conned to the subtleties o human lie. Yethe seems like a realist in the philosophical sense, hintingat dark powers and malevolent geometries subsisting well beyond the grasp o human lie. By contrast, Edmund

Husserl seems to be neither weird, nor a realist, and evenlooks like the opposite: a non-weird antirealist. No reader,however emotionally unstable, is terried by Husserlsworks. Even in his lie history, the suerings we nd stemrom personal and political burdens, not rom the amilystrain o madness that paralyzed the young Lovecrat anddestroyed his parents. Moreover, when phenomenology

is critiqued or abandoned, this is usually because o itswholehearted idealism. All o phenomenology results roma decision to bracket the world, suspending refectionon real waves, genes, and chemicals in avor o what liesentirely within human consciousness. Ironically, this pointhas led some to compare Husserl with Kant as well. Herethe comparison ails yet again, but or the opposite reason:while Lovecrats monsters are too shallow to be noumenal,Husserls intentional objects are too deep to be purelyphenomenal.


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Husserl oten proclaimed his motto: to the thingsthemselves. Though the phrase is partly misleading, itshould be taken more seriously by those realists who ndlittle o value in his thought. The rst step is to rememberthat Husserls things themselves are obviously not meantin the Kantian sense. His bracketing o nature leaves himwith an immanent world o pure experience. Description(not explanation, as with realists) is taken to be the sole

philosophical method. Furthermore, there is no room inHusserl or real things that might be viewed directly byGod and that lie outside the parameters o human access tothe world. All o this might seem to lead to a mere fatteningo the noumenal into a special case o the phenomenal, asound in Fichte and his heirs. In his ontology, Husserl wouldseem to belong to the tradition o German Idealism; his

own student Heidegger sometimes makes this claim, hintingvaguely that Husserlian phenomenology is the same basicproject as Hegels Science of Logic. Some observers might evenbe seduced by the recurrence o the term phenomenologyin both Husserl and Hegel.

But despite Husserls xation on the immanent worldo appearance, he injects a dose o obstinate reality into the

immanence. This occurs through his notion o intentionalobjects. The principle o intentionality is well-known:every mental act has some object, whether it be thinking,indicating, wishing, judging, or hating. This principlehas not been correctly understood. It does not mean thatHusserl somehow escapes idealism: his intentional objectsremain purely immanent, and must not be conused withreal orces unleashed in the world. The trees I perceive, theood I enjoy, or the swindlers I despise, remain phenomenal


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entities. Ater all, their real existence is bracketed, so that ourdescription o them takes no account o whether they trulyexist. Intentionality remains phenomenal. But Husserlsgenuine dierence rom the idealists lies in the act thatintentional reality is made up oobjects, which play no roleat all or Fichte or Hegel. It is said that Husserl would leadhis students through painstaking descriptions o a mailbox;perhaps on other days it was lampposts, inkwells, cats,

rings, or vases. The point o such descriptions was eideticvariation, considering these objects rom a variety o anglesso as to approach their unvaryingessencebeneath all passingmaniestation. The mere act that intentional objectshave an essence should prevent our seeing Husserl as astraightorward idealist, since essence is normally a realistterm, linked with the inherent eatures o a substance apart

rom all access to it. It is unthinkable that Fichte or Hegelwould guide their students through minute descriptionso a specic solid object, since in their current o thinkingobjects have no stubborn essence o their own. Essence, orHegel, is sublated into the higher unity o the concept, andHegelians even like to accuse later continentals o a xationon essence. By contrast, though Husserl brackets the world

in order to ocus on an immanent eld o consciousness,the ego is not entirely master in this immanent realm. Catsand lampposts resist our rst approach, demanding patientlabours i their essence is to be gradually approached. Whilethe shadows in Heideggers thought lie buried beneathperception, Husserls mysteries riddle the eld o perceptionitsel. Yet both thinkers allow or secrets to be harboured in

the core o the things, and this is what separates them romidealism. Despite their regrettable ocus on human reality,Husserl and Heidegger are object-oriented philosophers.


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In one sense Husserls obvious rival is psychologism,which holds that logical laws have only psychologicalvalidity. Husserl assaults this position in his massiveprologue to the Logical Investigations, concluding that logic isobjective through its ideal validity within the phenomenalrealm. But an equally important rival is British Empiricism.Logical InvestigationsII is a detailed critique o the positions oLocke, Berkeley, and Hume. For all the dierences between

these three classic gures, it is sae to portray them as alliedin advance against intentional objects. What comes rst orthe empiricists are isolated qualities, sometimes known asimpressions. By contrast, the tradition o phenomenology begins not with qualities, but with phenomenal objects.While the British school holds that objects are a bundleproduced through the habit o linking diverse qualities

together (Hume), or by imagining that hidden powersunderlie qualities already seen (Locke), phenomenologistssuch as Husserl and Merleau-Ponty insist on beginningwith the total Gestalt beore any reduction to discretetones and hues. For phenomenology, the slamming doorand the black ountain pen precede their qualities, whichgain sense only through a relative enslavement to those

objects. Herein lies the greatness o phenomenology, whichis more empirical than the empiricists. Experience is noto experienced contents, but o objects; isolated qualitiesare ound not in the world we experience, but only in theannals o empiricism.

In Logical InvestigationsV, the rival is Husserls own teacherBrentano, whether airly or not. I Brentano held that allmental acts are grounded in some sort o presentation,Husserl twisted the ormulation slightly, countering that


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all mental acts are object-giving. The dierence is subtle, butateul. A presentation seems to put all its contents on the

same ooting. To represent a globe or a tower is to witnessa specic conguration o colors, textures, shadows, andphysical co-ordinates. But i we see experience as object-giving rather than presentational, we shit our ocus towardthe essential nucleus o the perception, stripping the paintand conetti rom its outer shell through eidetic variation.And here we nd the crucial dierence between Husserlsintentional objects and the real objects o realist philosophers.Real objects, which play no role in the bracketed thinking


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o Husserl, subsist apart rom their relations to anythingelse; no reality could be independent i it were generatedby eorts to perceive or infuence it. In this sense, it seemsobvious that real objects must partly withhold themselvesrom all perception, description, registration, or cataloguingo their traits. A substance simply is what it is, and exceedsthe endless summation o qualities that can be ascribedto it. But strangely enough, this is not true o Husserls

intentional objects, where an inverse relation holds. Withoutbelabouring a point made elsewhere,22 whereas real objectstaunt us with endless withdrawal, intentional objects arealways already present. A real tree would be deeper thananything that can be said or known about it, but the treeo intentional experience is entirely present rom the start it is always a genuine element o experience, aecting my

decisions and my moods. I the real tree is never presentenough, the intentional tree is always excessively present,its essence accompanied by the noisy peripheral detailthat eidetic variation needs to strip away. The real objectre is able to scald, burn, boil, melt, and crack otherreal objects, while the intentional object re has a verydierent unction: it merely unies a shiting set o proles

and suraces whose various fickerings never aect its idealunity. Real objects hide; intentional objects are merelyweighed down with trains o sycophantic qualities, coveringthem like cosmetics and jewels.

22. See On Vicarious Causation, in coLLapse II, and Guerrilla Metaphysics:Phenomenology and the Carpentry of Things(Chicago: Open Court, 2005).


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the Weirdnessof husserL

The strangest deect o the books that Husserl publishedduring his lietime lies in how ew descriptions they actuallycontain. Whatever he may have done in the classroom,one scours his principal works in vain or more than ahandul o concrete examples. Husserl seemed content,in his major published writings, with hesitant maniestoesor phenomenology; Merleau-Ponty and Lingis, heirs o

greater stylistic gits, were let to put the method to the test.Consider the case o some massive artiact say, a hotelcomplex such as the Nile Hilton, in my adopted home city.The phenomenologist might see it as ollows: The hotel isnot an arbitrary conglomerate pieced together rom feckso color and sound. What we rst encounter is the hotel as awhole, its visible proles all joined in allegiance to the total

reality o the object. Observers may disagree over the exactboundaries o the acility, over where its style begins andceases to reign, but all will agree that the hotel is present inconsciousness as a unit. The various doors, plants, gates,windows, and guards are clearly imbued with a kind ohotel-being, since all would strike us quite dierently istripped rom this zone and encountered elsewhere. We

now circle the hotel, soaking up the eel o its variousentryways: grand entrance in ront, dusty two-guard accessin back, glamorous terraces when viewed rom the southat a distance, and grim windowless aade to the north.We explore the interior, passing rom ood court to travelagencies to weight room to rootop lounge, nally knockingon random doors and asking to examine individual rooms.Never in these movements do we see the whole o theHilton, yet never do we lose the sense o a general styleto


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which the individual scenes belong. It is not important thatmoths and beetles would not also see it as a hotel, since weare dealing here not with objective reality, but only with ourhuman intentiono the hotel as a unied whole. Normally, wemake no separation between an intentional object and thesurace eatures through which it is announced. Though weonly see one ace o the hotel at a time, the presence o hoteland surace seem to be simultaneous, and joined together

without ssure.Yet this intimate bond between object and qualityis an illusion, as both Husserl and Lovecrat are aware.Lets begin with a Lovecratian version o the hotel. Thisrequires an attempt to mimic his own literary style amethod o reverent parody that deserves to become a stapleo philosophy. The ollowing paragraphs might be ound in

an unwritten Lovecrat tale, The Nile Hilton Incident:Though apparently o recent date, the Nile Hilton is builtaround strange inner corridors o disturbingly ancientprovenance. Its membership in the Hilton chain, meant toreassure travelers rom the Occident, conceals grotesque legalmaneuvers and deviant managerial practices o a purely localorigin, and provides cover or a dubious history long expunged

rom brochures. The doormen are slumped and sullen in amanner atypical o Egypt, while their complexions speakvaguely o a strange admixture o Aztec and Polynesian bloodnot consonant with the known history o the city.

Unnoticed by the casual witness, the building itsel embodiessubtle though monstrous distortions o sound engineeringprinciple. Though the outer walls seem to meet at solid rightangles, the hue o the concrete departs rom accustomed valuesin a manner suggestive o railty or buckling. The gaping air-shats are striking or an edice o such late construction, and


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doorman remains a legitimate element o our experience,he is now a menacing kernel that seems to control hisouter eatures like ghastly marionettes, rather than beingimmediately used with them. Merleau-Ponty would agreethat the durability o concrete is somehow legible in itscolour, though the total emotional and perceptual eecto a wall is normally simultaneous and unied. But tosuggest that something is amiss in the expected colour o

a wall, something that aintly suggests imminent physicalbreakdown, is to decompose the usual bond between thephenomenon and the outer orms through which it isannounced. Language is also able to hint at depth, at realthings lying outside all access to them. Surprisingly, thisis not the method o Lovecrat, whose materialism giveshim a philosophy rooted in the surace, but one in which

the relation between objects and their crusts is renderedproblematic. His monsters are not deep in themselves, andunction in his stories only to disturb the assumptions ohuman observers. One can imagine third-person tales othe Old Ones battling in outer space, aeons beore theemergence o human beings. Such stories would yieldmore o antasy than o horror, since we would miss the

gradual awareness o human subordination that providesthe Cthulhu mythos with its terror. There is nothinginherently compelling about a humanoid dragon with anoctopus or a head; any teenager could draw such a thing,while scaring no-one. The horror comes instead rom thedeclared insuciency o the description, combined with aliterary world in which this monster is a genuine player

rather than a mere image. The description is horric onlyinsoar as it undermines any distinct image: I I say that mysomewhat extravagant imagination yielded simultaneous


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pictures o an octopus, a dragon, and a human caricature,I shall not be entirely unaithul to the spirit o the thing.A pulpy, tentacled head surmounted a grotesque and scalybody with rudimentary wings; but it was thegeneral outlineo the whole which made it most shockingly rightul.23Whatever this general outline may be, the narrator eelsthat his descriptions are at best not entirely unaithul toits spirit. But this is the very principle o phenomenological

description, whose eidetic reductions never quite grasp theessence o the thing, and which diers rom Lovecrat onlyin its usual avoidance o the theme o existential threat.In both cases, the known link between objects and theirproperties partially dissolves.

23. Lovecrat, Tales, 169. From The Call o Cthulhu.


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While there are palpable similarities between Lovecratand Poe in their preerence or moods o horror, too littlehas been said about their similarities o style. In bothauthors we nd hesitant and fowery wording that not onlypaints their narrators as rail aesthetes, but eectively stuntsthe relation between things and their traits. In Poes taleThe Fall o the House o Usher, the narrator describesRoderick as having a nose o a Hebrew model, but with

a breadth o nostril unusual in similar ormations; a nelymoulded chin, speaking, in its want o prominence, o awant o moral energy.24 To claim directly that there is atypical Jewish nose with a specic nostril size, or that thecharacter o a person can be read rom structures o theskull, would merely make one a racist and a phrenologist.But Poes strange appeal to unexpected disproportions

o nostril and chin manages to disassemble the complexamalgam o surace and inerence that silently accompaniesevery new ace. To say that Roderick can bear no soundsexcept the music o guitars would merely give an eccentricdescription, not a horric one. The terror comes insteadthrough Poes meandering way o depicting the trait:there were but peculiar sounds, and those rom stringed

instruments, which did not inspire him with horror.25Rodericks panpsychist theory o inanimate perceptionmight be just a vitalist platitude i stated in a journal article.Yet Poe surrounds the idea with enlivening obstacles: Hisopinion, in its general orm, was that o the sentience o allvegetable things. But, in his disordered ancy, the idea hadassumed a more daring character, and trespassed, under

24. Edgar Allan Poe, Poetry and Tales, 321. (New York: Library o America, 1984.)

25. Poe, Poetry and Tales, 322.


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certain conditions, upon the kingdom o inorganization.26The phrasing should not be dismissed as belonging toa lost era o forid English style; the circumlocution isdeliberate, and creates a gap between object and prole thatis concealed in everyday experience. The same holds orthe narrators description o Rodericks macabre paintingo an underground tunnel, in which certain accessoryportions o the design served well to convey the idea that

this excavation lay at an exceeding depth below the suraceo the earth.27 And nally, Poes descriptions o music are asimpossibly vague as Lovecrats stunted polar travel diaries.Foremost among Rodericks improvisations on the guitar isa certain singular perversion and amplication o the wildair o the last waltz o von Weber.28 I a musicologist wereto speciy the precise distortions o Rodericks melodies in

a report commissioned by psychiatrists, or i we heard arecorded version o the music, the eect would be ruined.The point is not to pin down his exact deviations rommainstream musical practice, but to hint that somethingis terribly amiss in the relation between the music and itsexact tones.

In Lovecrat as in Poe, the horror o things comes not

rom some transcendent orce lying outside the bounds ohuman nitude, but in a twisting or torsion o that nitudeitsel. The immediate usion between a thing and itstangible signals gives way to the detachment o a torturedunderlying unit rom its outward qualities. In similarashion, cubist painting renders its gures paradoxically

26. Ibid., 327.

27. Ibid., 325.

28. Ibid., 324.


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distinct rom the amassing o planes and angles throughwhich they are presented. It is no accident that only certain

paintings by Georges Braque seem to approach a notiono what Lovecratian architecture might look like,29 andsurely no accident that Ortega y Gasset links Husserl withPicasso.30 That said, we should turn briefy rom Lovecratand Poe to the Husserlian version o cubism.

29. Among other instances, see Braques 1908 canvas House at lEstaque, best

viewed in conjunction with Lovecrats description o the Antarctic city.

30. Jos Ortega y Gasset, On Point o View in the Arts, trans. P. Snodgress andJ. Frank. In The Dehumanization of Art (Princeton, NJ: Princeton Univ. Press, 1968),129-130.


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What is most disturbing about intentional objects is thatthey are both alwaysand neverpresent. Husserl establishedthat the eld o perception is made up o objects, not sensedata. Yet hotels, museums, and trees require the mostlaborious work o eidetic variation to ree them o all noise,and even this method never succeeds. The hotel is presentrom the start, yet we never reach a truly exemplary visiono it, ree o environmental accident. Nor are these accidents

ever directly present. As soon as we shit our ocus rom thehotel as a whole to the peripheral dance o light along itsaade, we have turned sunbeams or moon-rays into ournew intentional object, and the eidetic reduction will nowbe blocked by urther shimmering variations that do notaect the beams or rays as a whole. Intentional objects areeverywhere and nowhere; they bubble and blaspheme

mindlessly at every point in the cosmos. Although vividlypresent as soon as we acknowledge them, intentional objectsexpress their reality only by drawing neighboring objectsinto their orbit, and these things in turn are only present byenslaving still others. As Merleau-Ponty rst observed, thestructure o perception is not obvious in the least. There is nosuch thing as a directly given experience. Even less directly

given would be the real objects lying outside all intentionalexperience, bracketed by Husserl and hence not consideredin this article. Just as Lovecrats horror has nothing todo with transcendent things themselves, the horror ophenomenology arises even though all transcendent realityis suspended. Lovecrats heroes cannot maintain their aithin the amiliar contract between things and their properties,

since the creatures they encounter are never quite capturedby any list o tentacles or strange vocal timbres. A weird


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reading o phenomenology (the only possible reading) losesaith not just in the given sense data o empiricists, but evenin the clean separation between objects and qualities. Whatis present is never objects or qualities, but only a ssion between one object and the satellite objects bent by itsgravitational eld, even i everyday perception deadens usto this act.

Without having even considered the status o real

objects, we nd that intentional objects already have aweirdness that eludes denition. It is oten alsely heldthat phenomena have denite qualitative eatures, whichis the position o empiricism, not o Husserl. It is heldeven more widely, and just as alsely, that real objects musthave denite material eatures and exact positions in space-time. These views orm the apparent motive or recent

philosophies o the virtual. I real and intentional objectsare both somehow actual, both ully enshrined in the worldin a manner that could in principle be described, thenboth seem ully inscribed in a context or web o mutualinterrelations. And since true realism requires that things be considered apart rom all relations, the only solutionwould be to shit the scene o realism away rom concrete

objects and phenomena towards disembodied attractors,topological invariants, or other virtual entities, all o themoutstripping any possible embodiment in specic entities.31

What this step misses is the already abominableweirdness o concrete objects, whether real or phenomenal.But Lovecrat and Husserl do not miss this point. Though

the materialism o Lovecrat and the idealism o Husserl

31. See especially Manuel DeLandas wonderul Intensive Science and Virtual Philosophy.(London: Continuum, 2002).


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might seem to divide them, these doctrines go hand in hand.For we are never really sure just what an object is. Whetherwe dene it as nothing more than electrons, or as just a shapepresent in consciousness, we replace the athomless realityo things with an intellectual model o what their underlyingreality ought to be. In this sense, realism tends to opposethe outlooks o Lovecrat and Husserl. Yet in a dierentsense, they save the weirdness o objects rom its neglect by

philosophies o the virtual. While such philosophies maydeserve admiration or insisting on realism against anyidealism or narrowly physical materialism, they are wrongto hold that objects are always utterly specic. Lovecrat(surprisingly) and Husserl (unsurprisingly) remain xed ona material/phenomenal plane that prevents them rom beingull-blown metaphysical realists. But at least they grasp the

weird tension in the phenomena themselves, always in tensedissolution rom their qualities. It is a one-legged realismthat misses the genuine hiddenness o things, but a weirdrealism nonetheless.


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