Wednesday, April 29, 2020

pretension is the professional risk we run in the humanities

--- Graham Harman, in "Graham Harman and Slavoj Zizek: talk and debate: On Object Oriented Ontology" (YouTube), a talk at the "Lost-Weekend" Cafe, Munich, December 1, 2018, at timecode 35:43

Quote in context
[After quoting Daniel Dennett's wine tasting example of a "flamboyant and velvety
Pinot lacking in stamina":] There are a lot of pretentious wine tasters, there are pretentious theater critics, pretentious architecture critics, pretentious philosophers.  You're probably not going to find a pretentious chemist or physicist. That's not the congenital vice of the sciences – pretension.  You might find arrogance or narrow mindedness, lack of intellectual breadth; but you're not going to find pretension. This pretension is the professional risk we run in the humanities, because we have to rely on indirect discourse in a way that the other the sciences do not. And we should own that; we should become comfortable with that.
More on indirect discourse from the talk:

At [33:00]
I've already talked about undermining and overmining, and how philosophy can't get a knowledge of the things because the things are never reducible downward or upward; that kind of knowledge of the things can never exhaust the things. And so this is why for us aesthetics is important; why indirect discourse is important.  
At [37:05]
I mentioned jokes before. A joke only works when it's indirect. When you literalize a joke, you ruin it.