Robert Paul Jackson

What follows is a cursory response to Graham Harman’s article “Materialism is Not the Solution.” It seeks to branch out his conception of ‘form’ and more specifically, ‘aesthetic form’ whilst expanding on Harman’s principal objections to the materialist account of change, and how this may challenge the contemporary aesthetic trajectory of relational encounter: particularly Bourriaud’s Relational Aesthetics. Quite generally, Harman’s Object Oriented Ontology might be understood through two chief aesthetic mechanisms; the contingency of counterfactuals complimented with the preliminary development of a nonmodern formalism. The latter is briefly cashed out in a philosophical juxtaposition to Greenberg and Fried’s modernist principles

Considering recent re-assessments of Pareto and Mosca, I discuss whether these thinkers’ socio-political orientations contribute to the ‘disfiguration’ of democracy or provide a resource for the renewal of democratic institutions. Femia presents Pareto as being in the “Machiavellian tradition of sceptical liberalism,” revealing the liberal potential of Pareto’s realist political theory. Finocchiaro ameliorates the conservative consequences of Mosca’s thought by reinterpreting him as a ‘democratic elitist,’ who holds a conception of political liberty “as a relationship such that authority flows from the masses to the elites.” Highlighting the significance of internal tensions within each thinker’s work foregrounded by these readings, between the causal primacy of psychic states and the ‘mutual dependence’ of social factors, and between the elite principle and ‘balanced pluralism’, I ask whether the ‘sceptical liberal’ Pareto or the ‘democratic elitist’ Mosca elude Urbinati’s unpolitical, populist and plebiscitarian ‘disfigurations’ of democracy.