Harman asserts that the hammer has the same kind of relationship to the nail as I have to the hammer; the nail both offers sensuous properties and practical affordances to the hammer, and withdraws from this relationship into a separate existence, there being more to a nail than its capacity for being hammered. Even though a hammer is a rather unknowing, unfeeling sort of entity, without what might be called projects of its own, it nevertheless has its own relationship with the nail as an object for it, and it is from this relationship that the nail is simultaneously withdrawn as an object in its own right. The Harman Manoeuvre, then, is the move whereby an aspect of the human-world relationship is attributed to relationships between objects in general, such that the ability of humans to sustain such relationships with bits of the world is reframed as only a local instance of a general rule.

¶ 1:55 PM