Ontology for Ontology’s Sake: Object-Oriented Philosophy as Poetic Metaphysics
When asked if the object-oriented approach has grown out of a crisis in contemporary
philosophy (in an interview given in early 2012), Graham Harman responds by citing J. G.
Ballard’s description of the task of the modern writer, which he paraphrases as follows:
‘The role of the imaginative writer has flipped in our time. Previously, the
imaginative writer was supposed to produce fictions. However, we’re now
completely surrounded by fictions - we’re surrounded by advertisements, by
artificial environments... The role of the author now is to create realities, or to
discover realities perhaps.’
Harman often talks about literature’s unique capacity to apprehend and manifest a reality
that is not visible to less oblique methods of apprehension (‘reality itself is not an explicit
proposition’ he opines in the same interview, ‘the only way to get at reality is to be able to
allude, to hint, to suggest’) and it is in just such an oblique manner that this somewhat
nonchalant allusion to the words of an eminent science fiction writer tell us more about the
cut of object-oriented philosophy than some of its more didactic textual instantiations
arguably do. From an important yet implicit alignment between the literary and
philosophical task, Harman constructs a metaphor in which the proponents of poststructuralism figure as the ‘imaginative writers’ of a previous era busily engaged in the
production and proliferation of fictions, while the philosopher of contemporary realism
bravely steps up to mitigate this insufferable surfeit by undertaking, instead, to biographise
the real. The slippage, in the final sentence, between create and discover is perhaps the
most telling element of all.
Object-oriented philosophy is not shy about proclaiming its realist orientation and Harman
rarely misses an opportunity to rail against the injustices of ‘correlationism’ in his texts. But
is Harman’s position really as anti-correlationist as it might at first appear? This, I would
suggest, comes down to the difference between creating and discovering the real.
Rejection of Epistemology as First Philosophy
Whatever conclusion one draws about the validity of speculative materialism,
Meillassoux’s strategy is exemplary in its attempt to confront Kant on epistemological
terms. After all, this was the Critique of Pure Reason’s brilliant maneouvre - to transfer the
dispute between dogmatic rationalism and empirical scepticism onto epistemological
terrain, a context (inspired by the latter) in which Kant could then reconstruct a
philosophical position capable of satisfying the demands of a new critical methodology.
Consequently, the legacy of finitude is first and foremost an epistemological problem and it
does no good to forget that one of the most important objectives of the first Critique was to
purge philosophy of spurious metaphysical constructions that cannot furnish a proper
epistemological foundation for whatever it is they claim. By engaging Kant’s legacy on its
own terms and attacking it at its strongest point, speculative materialism discovers an
epistemological loophole that opens onto the real. The path it locates between the for-us
and the in-itself, or the phenomenal and the real, is necessarily one cleaved by
knowledge.
Despite fervent declarations of anti-correlationism or of ‘reversing Kant’s Copernican
Revolution’, Harman seems to deal with epistemology very little. He only ever tackles the
subject briefly and indirectly, anecdotally even - alluding here and there to Stove’s Gem as
a general refutation of strong varieties of idealism or rallying Socrates’ solution to Meno’s
paradox against idealism’s weaker iterations, before topping it off with a reminder (native
to pre-critical philosophy) that philosophical work as philosophia means love, not
possession, of wisdom.
Like correlationism, object-oriented philosophy begins with an affirmation of the
epistemological limit: we can never know the reality of the objects we encounter. Like
speculative materialism, object-oriented philosophy then radicalises the correlationist
position, but where speculative materialism pushes finitude into a positive epistemological
premise, object-oriented philosophy simply extends finitude beyond the bounds of the
human to bestow it democratically upon everything. However, this extension of negativity
cannot occur without mobilising a series of metaphysical assertions. Namely, that
nonhuman objects encounter other objects as sensual objects (following a consummately
human model), and that all objects have a real, transcendent core that withdraws from
access. Rather than presenting a means by which this failure of knowledge might be
overcome, object-oriented philosophy simply relocates the finitude of the human subject to
the object (or from the real object to the sensual object that it relates to with sincerity, in
Harman’s schema) where it becomes an essential property, and thereby quietly switches
an epistemological assertion for a metaphysical, ontological one. What begins as a
negative epistemological claim about the human subject becomes a positive metaphysical
claim about the object. But if the real posited by object-oriented philosophy is
epistemologically and causally withdrawn, how can positive claims about it (for even
positive negative claims are positive claims) be made without straying into dogmatism?
Harman answers Kant on one level by demoting the status of the human-world relation to
that of all relations, but he neglects the principal challenge of the first Critique by doing so
without first furnishing the epistemological means necessary to arrive at this conclusion. If
one is to credit his claim of anti-correlationism then it must be conceded that objectoriented philosophy is also dogmatic (dogmatism, of course, being one way of kicking the
Copernican Revolution into reverse), alternatively, object-oriented philosophy can eschew
the charge of dogmatism insofar as it admits that it remains a correlationist position. As
Peter Wolfendale has so astutely put it, ‘[w]hen it is properly understood, Harman’s work
should be seen not as a critique of correlationism, but a consolidation of its central
tenets.’ (293)
If object-oriented philosophy ignores the Kantian injunction and plunges brashly down the
passageway to the real it is because it maintains that, even though the core of an object
withdraws from all access, something of its reality is traceable under particular conditions,
only these conditions are not epistemological, they are aesthetic.
Aesthetics as First Philosophy
Harman contends that it is possible to circumvent the correlationist argument that ‘it is
impossible to think the outside of thought without turning it into a thought’ by means of
‘allure’. In The Quadruple Object he writes:
‘The choice is not just between speaking of something or not speaking of it. We all know a
way of speaking of a thing without quite speaking of it; namely, we allude to it. Allusion
occurs in thinking no less than in speaking. To say “the tree that lies outside thinking” is
neither a successful statement about a thought nor a failed statement about a thing.
Instead, it is an allusion to something that might be real but which cannot become fully
present.’ (68)
Allure, as a mode of apprehension of the real, operates something like Heidegger’s broken
hammer (in accordance with the model outlined in Harman’s realist reading of the toolanalysis). In order to apprehend something of an object’s real core, one must experience
the detachment of its real, unified essence from its phenomenal accidents. When it
surprises us by coming to pieces in our hands, something that exceeds the hammer’s
phenomenal presence makes itself apparent specifically by not being explicable in terms
of the object’s phenomenal instantiation. Allure is thus a modality of failure: in failing to
capture the real, allusion forces it to separate from certain sensual qualities, momentarily
generating a negative image of the unified, real object. Harman elaborates on this
occurrence in ‘On Vicarious Causation’, where he also explicitly locates the operation of
allure in metaphor:
‘In the sensual realm, we encounter objects encrusted with noisy accidents and
relations. We may also be explicitly aware of some of their essential qualities,
though any such list merely transforms the qualities into something accidentlike, and fails to give us the unified bond that makes the sensual thing a single
thing. Instead, we need an experience in which the sensual object is severed
from its joint unified quality since this will point for the first time to a real object
lying beneath the single quality on the surface. For humans, metaphor is one
such experience. When the poet writes “my heart is a furnace,” the sensual
object known as a heart captures vaguely defined furnace-qualities and draws
them haltingly into its orbit. The inability of the heart to fuse easily with furnacetraits (in contrast with literal statements such as “my heart is the strongest
muscle in my body”) achieves allusion to a ghostly heart-object lying beneath
the overly familiar sensual heart of everyday acquaintance.’ (199-200)
Alongside metaphor, Harman also locates the operation of allure in beauty, hypnotic
experience, and cuteness under the rubric of ‘charm’. Charm designates a genre of allure
that occurs in sympathy with the object, while ‘humour’ (charm’s counterpart), engages the
object from a position of superiority, entailing ‘some form of mild or serious disdain’.
(Guerrilla Metaphysics, 142) Each of these styles of relation, functioning under the
category of allure-operations, provides a conduit between the sensual and the real in a
way that knowledge is barred from doing (following object-oriented philosophy’s first
premise). Allure rises up to replace knowledge as the exemplary instrument of realist
discovery. The claim that all objects relate sensually liberates aesthetics from the poverty
of the human-world relation and allows it to exist as a potential modality for all object
relations. Furthermore, because the real resides at the heart of every object and
necessarily withdraws from access, allure furnishes the sole means of communion
between real objects; it is the singular occasion in which real objects might ‘touch without
touching’. (‘On Vicarious Causation’, 204) Aesthetics, then, not only absorbs epistemology,
it absorbs causality as well. One might pause here to note that this usurpation of the task
of epistemology by aesthetics is underwritten by the two errant metaphysical assertions
cited above.
Speculation Without Epistemology
When epistemology is exchanged for aesthetics in the pursuit of metaphysics,
philosophical thought must follow by becoming literary. For some, this is precisely the
appeal of the object-oriented approach, however, harking back to Harman’s paraphrase of
Ballard, is object-oriented philosophy really doing what it is telling us it is doing? Do the
structures that form the foundation of object-oriented philosophy allow it to ‘discover the
real’, or is it just ‘producing more fictions’? What is speculation without epistemology, if not
speculative fiction?
The claim about essential withdrawal opens up a vast space for speculation which,
because it is constructed on an aesthetic foundation alone, curiously, has human
imagination as its only limit, unchecked or unguided by any positive principle that might
lead it outside of the negativity it has housed itself in. For Harman, speculation equates
roughly to metaphysics - as long as one refuses to be confined by Kantian prohibitions on
knowledge, one is speculating. Meillassoux’s definition of speculation, however, is quite
different. One way of looking at it is to say that the former practices speculation in the
weak sense, while the latter practices it in the strong sense.
For Meillassoux, speculative activity is constituted by a ‘non-correlational mode of
knowing,’ which does not necessarily infer a metaphysical standpoint. (After Finitude, 119,
italics added) In fact, he deliberately keeps metaphysics and speculation separate,
defining the factial as ‘the very arena for speculation that excludes all metaphysics' (in
accordance with the precision that metaphysics either posits a necessary entity or relies
on the principle of sufficient reason to access the absolute). (128) Thus, for the speculative
materialist, the speculative act is buoyed up by the absolute possibility that any theory
entertained about the in-itself is potentially absolutely true. Mounted, thus, from the
epistemological foundation that Meillassoux has carefully and painstakingly laid (via the
deduction of factiality), the speculative act attains an unprecedented level of gravity that
just does not hold true (in comparable terms) in the context of object-oriented philosophy.
Rather than constructing a positive epistemological entry-point into the real that can then
be used to shore up further claims, ontological or otherwise, object-oriented philosophy
affirms epistemological negativity and then proceeds to flip it into a positive ontological
claim about the in-itself. This is its speculative activity in a nutshell. But while the premise
of epistemological finitude is entirely uncontroversial, its construal as a positive, realist
metaphysics is much less so. To reiterate, attempting to go beyond critique without first
positing an epistemological structure either misses the Kantian point or skirts dangerously
close to dogmatism. As we have seen, object-oriented philosophy attempts to resolve this
problem by asserting that the speculative activity proper to its position is anchored in
aesthetics, not epistemology. Nevertheless, speculation without genuine epistemological
reinforcement is simply fiction: the creation of the real, rather than its discovery.
Take the epistemological pressure off Harman’s metaphysics and his schema thrives as a
fantastic narrative about the world and how it works; one that does not so much confront
human finitude as use it to re-enchant the world. Such enchantment thrives in the poetic
space opened up by the collapse of the dream of the logical or divine language (the one
underwriting its correspondence to the real with rational precision, the other with the
guarantee of a necessary entity) and it could be said, by way of a brute simplification, that
the poetry of the modern era can be understood in terms of either a celebration or a
mourning of this loss. Object-oriented philosophy, in responding to finitude by attributing it
to everything and cordoning-off the real so that nothing can be known of it (and anything
can be said of it) is committing the modern poetic act par excellence - and rallying all
philosophy to do the same. Harman might spare the humanities from ‘finger-wagging
lectures [...] on behalf of science’ but the inverse is not true, for the theory of vicarious
causation (as allure) casually reduces the sciences to fiction on behalf of the humanities,
berating them for making a methodologically misguided attempt on a truth they can never
discover. (The Quadruple Object, 143) Everything it touches turns to literature, and yet,
object-oriented philosophy continues to proclaim its overcoming of the linguistic turn.
Without a legitimate epistemological foundation, the ‘speculative turn’ it espouses, if it is
anything, is poetropic.
Adopting, momentarily, Harman’s ‘hyperbolic method’ in which one ‘imagines the complete
triumph of a philosopher, focusing on virtues rather than vices’ and asking ourselves
‘[w]hat would still be missing from philosophy if this particular thinker were to triumph
completely?’ we return, finally, to the opening metaphor between philosophy and literature
to find that it cannot be made at all, for there is no longer any philosophy. (Quentin
Meillassoux: Philosophy in the Making, 126)
Amy Ireland, Sydney, 2013.
Harman, Graham. ‘The Well-Wrought Broken Hammer: Object-Oriented Literary
Criticism.’ New Literary History (2012) 43: 183-203.
-------. Interview with Bernard Dionysius Geoghegan, Cultural Technologies Podcast,
February 1st, 2012:
[http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ktCfqKqeONk&feature=youtu.be&t=10m12s]
-------. The Quadruple Object. Winchester: Zero Books, 2011.
-------. Quentin Meillassoux: Philosophy in the Making. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University
Press, 2011.
-------. ‘On Vicarious Causation.’ Collapse (2007) II: 409.
-------. Guerrilla Metaphysics: Phenomenology and the Carpentry of Things. Chicago:
Open Court, 2005.
Meillassoux, Quentin. After Finitude: An Essay on the Necessity of Contingency. trans. Ray
Brassier. London: Continuum, 2008.
Wolfendale, Peter. ‘The Noumenon’s New Clothes: Part 1.’ Speculations (2012) III:
290-366.