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Bells and Whistles

More Speculative Realism

John Hunt Publishing Ltd.

CHAPTER 1

Brief SR/OOO Tutorial (2010)

Along with traditional print media, the blogosphere has become increasingly important in the dissemination of Speculative Realism and Object-Oriented Ontology. If the online philosophy world often resembles the Wild West with all its shootouts, marshals, and cattle rustlers, it also offers frontier justice and scattered nuggets of gold. In January 2009 I launched my own blog, "Object-Oriented Philosophy," under the nickname Doctor Zamalek (a reference to the Cairo island neighborhood where I live). After a brief shutdown in March 2009, the blog was relaunched at a slightly different address. The following post, from July 23, 2010, is the one most often cited in standard academic publications, and thus it seems useful to place it in the present collection. Its topic is the difference between two philosophical movements with which I am closely involved: Speculative Realism [SR] and Object-Oriented Ontology [OOO], which partially overlap but do not coincide. Due to increased public confusion of the two phrases by the summer of 2010, it seemed wise to state their differences explicitly. I have made no attempt to smooth out the typically improvised and shoot-from-the-hip style so common to the blogosphere, but I have made some minor changes in punctuation and paragraphing, while adding a few explanatory footnotes concerning related material.

An increased amount of email has started to pour in over the past few weeks, much of it quite gratifying. One thing I've noticed from a lot of the mail is that SR and OOO have started to bleed together in many people's minds. For example, [Quentin] Meillassoux is sometimes being referred to as an "object-oriented philosopher," which isn't true. So, for those who are new to this part of the blogosphere, here is a renewed summary of what the different terms mean.

"Speculative Realism"

This term was a Ray Brassier coinage. It was his idea, in 2006, to assemble the two of us along with Meillassoux and Iain Hamilton Grant for a single event, which then happened in April 2007.

Initially we had a very hard time coming up with a good term for that group of people. At first I was prepared to cave in and let it be called "speculative materialism," Meillassoux's term for his own philosophy, even though I am an anti-materialist myself. But at some point a few months before the event, Brassier came up with "speculative realism" instead, and I loved it. He and Meillassoux both eventually soured on the term, for different reasons, but I'm still quite fond of it.

"Speculative realism" is an extremely broad term. All it takes to be a speculative realist is to be opposed to "correlationism," Meillassoux's term for the sort of philosophy (still dominant today) that bases all philosophy on the mutual interplay of human and world.

Please note that the speculative realists don't even agree about what is wrong with correlationism! For example, what Meillassoux hates about correlationism is its commitment to "finitude," the notion that absolute knowledge of any sort is impossible. But he doesn't mind the correlationist view that "we can't think an X outside of thought without thinking it, and thereby we cannot escape the circle of thought." (He simply wants to radicalize this predicament and extract absolute knowledge from it. Meillassoux is not a traditional realist; German Idealism is his true homeland, just as it is for Zizek and to a slightly lesser extent Badiou.)

By contrast, I see the problem with correlationism as the exact opposite. I don't mind the finitude part, which seems inevitable to me. What I hate instead is the idea that the correlational circle ("can't think an unthought X without turning it into an X that is thought") is valid. I see it as flimsy.

In any case, speculative realism survives as a useful umbrella term for many different kinds of new realist-feeling philosophies that work in a generally continental idiom, but the original group of four will have no repeat meetings. The intellectual divergences are now simply too great.

"Object-Oriented Philosophy"

This term is my own coinage, dating to 1999. (If anyone used the phrase earlier than that, I was unaware of it but would be happy to credit them if it is brought to my attention.)

None of the other original speculative realists do object-oriented philosophy. In fact, they are all rather anti-object, each in his own way. (Even Grant, whose position is much closer to mine than those of Brassier or Meillassoux, does not think the world is made up primarily of individual entities. These arise for him through obstructions or retardations of a more primal global energy.)

Object-oriented philosophy can be viewed as a subspecies of speculative realism (even though it's seven or eight years older). To be a speculative realist, all you have to do is reject correlationism for whatever reason you please. To be an object-oriented philosopher, what you need to do is hold that individual entities of various different scales are the ultimate stuff of the cosmos. Note that this includes both [Bruno] Latour and [Alfred North] Whitehead as well; I define the term in such a way that Latour's actors and Whitehead's actual entities (and possibly even societies) also count as "objects" in the widest sense.

But then I criticize both Whitehead and Latour for reducing these individual entities to their relations. And I continue to maintain this point despite an increasing number of claims that Whitehead and Latour do no such thing. I'm willing to keep fighting this battle, but I really don't see how the point can be avoided. Both of them not only reduce entities to their relations, but do so quite proudly and explicitly. Indeed, both of them consider this to be among their own major innovations.

In short, object-oriented philosophy involves a fairly general set of minimal standards that leaves a good bit of room for personal variation. You can agree with Whitehead rather than me and still be an object-oriented philosopher. My own version has not just one, but two basic principles:

1. Individual entities of various different scales (not just tiny quarks and electrons) are the ultimate stuff of the cosmos.

2. These entities are never exhausted by any of their relations or even by their sum of all possible relations. Objects withdraw from relation.

The rest of my philosophy follows from these two points, I think. As for the related term "Object-Oriented Ontology," this was coined by Levi Bryant in July 2009. Levi, Ian Bogost, and I, along with Steven Shaviro and Barbara Stafford (more as friendly in-house critics, the latter two) kicked off the OOO movement in April 2010 at Georgia Tech in Atlanta.

I hope that helps clarify the difference between the two terms. Yes, I consider myself both a speculative realist and an object-oriented philosopher, just as I consider myself both a U.S. citizen and a permanent resident of Iowa. OOO can be seen as one of the "states" within a larger Speculative Realist union.

CHAPTER 2

The Return to Metaphysics (2011)

This lecture was delivered on April 9, 2011, as the keynote address at the 16th Annual Philosophy Conference at Villanova University, located in the Philadelphia suburbs. The lecture criticizes several "reductionist" and "immanentist" approaches to objects (which elsewhere I have called "undermining" and "overmining" approaches). On the basis of this critique, my fourfold model of objects is then sketched, a few months prior to the English publication of The Quadruple Object by Zero Books. On a personal level, it was a moment when things felt like they had come full circle. In October 1990 I had come to Villanova for the first time, as a newbie graduate student attending my first academic conference: the annual meeting of the Society for Phenomenology and Existential Philosophy (SPEP). I remember feeling not quite at home at that 1990 conference, where I had functioned mainly as a chauffeur for faculty and older graduate students in a Penn State University car. Just over two decades later, on my first visit to Villanova ever since, I found myself giving a keynote address directly across the street from where the 1990 conference was held. The intervening twenty years of difficult work flashed constantly through my mind. After the conference I drove to my undergraduate alma mater, St. John's College in Annapolis, also for the first time in twenty years. In the library at St. John's, I found my old crudely penciled marginal notes (from 1988) in the English translation of Heidegger's Vom Wesen des Grundes, and was both charmed and exasperated by the primitive efforts of those notes. None of my old teachers at St. John's recognized me on sight, and some of them clearly did not remember me even following detailed reminiscence in their presence. The effect of this amnesia on their part was strangely liberating, rather than insulting. Why be bothered any longer by things that no one else can even remember? I should also add that the passport officials at the Philadelphia Airport were extremely rude upon my arrival. After more than a decade spent in Egypt, I was finally being treated as a foreigner in my own country, despite the laughable "Welcome home!" that followed their absurdly sarcastic interrogation and snarky luggage inspection. The GPS device in my rental car then led me in circles through the Philadelphia suburbs for two hours before finally taking me to my city center hotel.

Almost from the beginning, "metaphysics" has been an unpopular word in continental philosophy, with a small number of prominent exceptions: the positive use of the term by Emmanuel Levinas comes to mind. But the case of Levinas is the exception that proves the rule, since he is often denounced for the apparent theological bias of this turn to metaphysics. The related term "ontology" has been treated more favorably, as for instance in the early Heidegger. Yet even "ontology" is not one of the major slogans of post-Heideggerian continental thought. In fact, the two terms date from very different historical periods. The word "metaphysics" is famously ascribed to the editors of Aristotle, with ta meta ta physika (the writings "after" the Physics) reinterpreted to mean what lies beyond the physical. The origin of "ontology" is less widely known among those well-versed in philosophy, but it seems to have arisen as late as the seventeenth century. But there is little use getting wrapped up in etymologies, since the two terms have continually been redefined by thinkers with differing agendas. Nonetheless, in connection with recent continental thought, the meaning of the term "metaphysics" is relatively clear. Let me start by describing some of the ways in which "metaphysics" is used in our circles, and also by briefly stating how I would support or reject the various usages.

First, there is the critique of metaphysics in the sense of ontotheology, as defined by Heidegger and pursued by Derrida. The complaint here is that metaphysics has always been a metaphysics of presence. One specific kind of being has been elevated to the level of being itself, set down as the foundation for all others. Whether it be water, air, atoms, or the boundless apeiron among the pre-Socratics, the Platonic forms, the primary substances of Aristotle, the God of medieval philosophy, matter for Giordano Bruno, the Cartesian substances, Leibnizian monads, the impressions and ideas of empiricism, the Kantian categories, the idealist subject or spirit that followed Kant, Schopenhauer's will, Nietzschean power, Husserlian phenomena, or Bergson's êlan vital, some entity internal to the world has been taken for the root of the world itself. That privileged entity is always described as directly present to the mind, or at least to the world. This means that in principle it can be described by a known list of features, and all else that exists is explained in terms of this chosen God of each philosophy. In my view, the critique of ontotheology is the greatest forward step of twentieth century philosophy, and should be endorsed and even expanded. I will do so tonight, while also defending my own concept of objects as remaining untouched by the critique, and even as the best extension of it.

Second, the critique of metaphysics as onto-theology is often mistaken for a critique of realism. This is somewhat paradoxical. After all, the critique of onto-theology requires that something always escapes presence in every new model of the most important entity in the world, taken as the root of all others. For example, the engine of Heidegger's philosophy is his critique of the presence of Husserl's phenomena in consciousness. The excess of reality beyond phenomenal presence seems to entail realism, the doctrine of a mind-independent reality. But even Heidegger has often been interpreted as an anti-realist (as in Lee Braver's otherwise excellent book), and Derrida is in fact an anti-realist despite an increasingly vocal minority who claim he was a realist all along. As I see it, this claim immediately fails when we look at a piece such as the "White Mythology" essay. Here Derrida jumps from Aristotle's insistence that there must be a univocal being of a thing behind any multiplicity of descriptions of it, to the less justified assertion that Aristotle thinks there must be univocal meanings for terms, though this is surely refuted in advance by Aristotle's appreciative treatment of poets and metaphor. To be a realist does not entail that one is also an onto-theologian. On the contrary, I hold that only realism, only a model of individuals with real constitutions outside our interactions with them, can defeat onto-theology. The return to metaphysics that I advocate is a return to realism, which as far as I know was never defended by name in continental circles until the early twenty-first century. Yet we should not advocate a return to onto-theology, which Heidegger is right in viewing as disastrous. While onto-theology and realism are often viewed as twin brothers, I see them as mortal enemies. Only a reality irreducible to any encounter with it, whether by humans or by anything else, provides guarantees against the onto-theology that claims to deliver the root of the universe in person.

On a related note, the word "metaphysics" is sometimes uttered with contempt by those who work in a more scientistic tradition. For them, metaphysics means mere conceptual speculation done in an armchair, devoid of contact with empirical fact. To give an example, my own distinction between the real and the sensual, meaning the real and the phenomenal, has sometimes been dismissed as a "metaphysical" distinction in this pejorative sense. For this sort of philosophy (which is devoted less to science per se than to epistemology) we confront a set of images, and what we need are criteria to distinguish good scientific images from bad manifest "folk" images. Yet this standpoint is already not just metaphysics, but a metaphysics in the bad sense of ontotheology. It holds that everything can, in principle, be made adequately present to us (even if in practice this can only take the form of an asymptotic approach), and that it is merely a question of using epistemologically valid techniques to sift the wheat from the chaff. Rather than water, atoms, Platonic forms, God, or Cartesian substance, we now have good images as the root of the world.

But as long as we are stuck on the level of images, even if we decree some of them to be scientific and others as worthy only of the naive folk, then this is not genuine realism. It may see itself as the most hardheaded realism imaginable, since it fights so ardently to destroy all illusions and bring us face-to-face with an utterly minimal remnant of the real. Yet this real is no reality at all, since it is completely isomorphic with the possible knowledge we might have of it. Realism is not realism if the reality it describes can be translated without energy loss into human knowledge, or indeed into any sort of relation at all. That will be another of my claims tonight, a thesis I have often defended in print but which still has numerous skeptics: realism requires an absolute gulf between reality and relation. No human epistemologist can drain reality to the dregs, and for the very same reason no inanimate thing can exhaust any other simply by bumping into it. Realism does not just mean a world of images verified by science. Nor does it mean merely that some dark, haunting residue lies beyond the grasp of humans alone. Instead, it also means that even inanimate causation does not exhaust the entities that are engaged in it. Human knowledge deals with simulacra or phantoms, and so does human practical action, but so do billiard balls when they smack each other and roll across a green felt phantom. We can develop this theory further in an armchair, a library, a waterbed, or a casino, but waiting for empirical results will never settle the issue, since all such results will be grasped through a prior metaphysical decision: an onto-theological model in which good images are the epistemological foundation of the real.
(Continues...)

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Excerpted from Bells and Whistles by Graham Harman. Copyright © 2013 Graham Harman. Excerpted by permission of John Hunt Publishing Ltd..
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