{"id":1117,"date":"2009-09-08T22:55:53","date_gmt":"2009-09-09T03:55:53","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/blog.uvm.edu\/aivakhiv\/2009\/09\/08\/harmans-object-oriented-philosophizing\/"},"modified":"2009-09-08T22:55:53","modified_gmt":"2009-09-09T03:55:53","slug":"harmans-object-oriented-philosophizing","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/blog.uvm.edu\/aivakhiv\/2009\/09\/08\/harmans-object-oriented-philosophizing\/","title":{"rendered":"Harman’s object-oriented philosophizing"},"content":{"rendered":"

I\u2019ve been reading Graham Harman\u2019s Tool-Being: Heidegger and the Metaphysics of Objects<\/a> and Prince of Networks: Bruno Latour and Metaphysics<\/a>. More accurately, I\u2019ve been dipping into and sipping from the first and systematically digesting the second. Given the amount of blogging that goes on under the rising star(s) of \u2018object-oriented philosophy,\u2019 \u2018speculative realism,\u2019 and Graham Harman himself, I figure it\u2019s okay and may even turn out productive for me to air some of my reactions in public.<\/p>\n

To start with, I will say that Graham is one of the most engaging, entertaining, enjoyable, rhetorically satisfying, and utterly lucid of the contemporary philosophers I have read in recent memory. And his project, as far as I can discern it so far, is of fairly direct relevance to the thinking through of socio-ecological issues, or at least to the philosophical working-out of some of the dilemmas, the conceptual blockages and theoretical miasmas, that have made it difficult for us to think our way through the complex socio-ecological issues that confront us.<\/p>\n


\nTool-Being, or Heidegger as told by the hammer<\/b><\/p>\n

In Tool-Being<\/em>, Graham presents an argument that pushes Heidegger\u2019s tool-analysis to \u201cits most extreme form,\u201d or at least to its most non-anthropocentric form. In the process, he proposes an understanding of reality, or the things that make it up, as both relationally expressive and ultimately (on some level) unknowable — something akin to what Heidegger\u2019s distinction of \u2018world\u2019 and \u2018earth\u2019 might amount to, where \u2018world\u2019 is the relationally, referentially networked cosmos of meanings and interactions in which we live, and \u2018earth\u2019 is the \u201cbearing and supporting system on which all else forever rests but which itself forever recedes from view\u201d (197). (I\u2019m poaching this quote from Graham\u2019s discussion of the fourfold, and the earth\/world duality is not identical to the earth\/sky duality he discusses there, but I think the point holds well enough.) Rather audaciously, however, he takes this duality to be constitutive not so much of the universe as a whole as it is of every thing in it: \u201cevery point in the cosmos is both<\/em> a concealed reality and one that enters into explicit contact with others\u201d such that \u201cthere is no such thing as a sheer \u2018relation\u2019; every relation turns out to be an entity in its own right\u201d (288-9).<\/p>\n

Our, human, role in this is as engaged participants: \u201cThere is no exit from the density of being, no way to stand outside the brutal play of forces and vacuum-packed entities that crowd the world. We ourselves are only one such entity among innumerable others\u201d (289) and we can \u201cnever manage to rise above <\/em>the massive clamor of entities, but can only burrow around within <\/em>it\u201d (294). \u201cEverywhere, the world is a plenum crowded by tool-beings, by formal units that retreat behind any external contact with them.\u201d (288)<\/p>\n

By the term \u2018tool-being,\u2019 Harman intends, craftily and perhaps a little sneakily, to open up Heidegger\u2019s own analysis of the \u2018readiness-to-hand\u2019 of tools to the more radical insight that tools are not only objects that we make use of or engage with, but they are what the universe is made up of — things that are engaged with by other things, all of which are also (crucially) things that are never fully knowable by another thing (including an outside observer). A tool or object, in this expanded definition, is not a category restricted only to things that we see, use, or relate to. Anything<\/em>, from an idea or perception of something to the universe itself, is such an object. The world, for Harman, is \u201ca dense and viscous universe stuffed absolutely full with entities\u201d (295), \u201cforms wrapped inside of forms\u201d (293), each of which is relationally engaged with other forms, but not reducible to any of them. \u201cThe contrast between tool-being and its relations permeates all of reality, both animate and inanimate. In addition to objects in their prehensive relations with one another [that is, relations in which one object \u2018prehends\u2019 or takes note of, makes use of, interacts with, appropriates, another], there is something withdrawn behind any of these relations, irreducible to them.\u201d (289)<\/p>\n

Harman\u2019s ontology is thus a kind of realism and a kind of formalism. It also sounds, at least in this book, like a kind of processualism insofar as he claims that \u201cA tool exists in the manner of enacting itself\u201d (22) — a statement that is resonant with the enactive cognitive biology that Varela, Maturana, and others have developed with their notion of living <\/em>things being autopoietic, self-organizing systems (though Harman would no doubt push their view well beyond one centered only on living systems) and <\/em>with Whitehead\u2019s ontology of things always in process, actual entities that are always in the process of becoming (and perishing), subjectifying (and objectifying). But Harman\u2019s focus on objects <\/em>rather than processes <\/em>is intentional, and it comes carrying the subsidiary argument that relational theories of reality, such as Heidegger\u2019s and Whitehead\u2019s, have \u201calready performed\u201d their \u201chistorical mission, and [are] now burdening us with [their] excesses\u201d (23-4).<\/p>\n

Here\u2019s where I register my first hint of disagreement, and where my dialogue with The Prince of Networks<\/em> will become fairly animated. I would readily acknowledge that processual or relational theories of something <\/em>have been widely influential — for instance, all of poststructuralist thought and many of its antecedents, from Saussurian linguistics and even Marxist political economy through to Derridean deconstruction and Foucauldian genealogy, can be taken as relational theories, theories that blur the distinctiveness of objects or individual entities in order to make sense of them within relational contexts, systems, networks, and so on. And even in some of the sciences, notably those of complexity, systems theory, and the like, we find relational theories at the fore. But for something to be a \u2018relational theory of reality<\/em>\u2019, it would have to adequately encompass all <\/em>of reality, including human cultural reality as well as the physical and biological worlds. Poststructuralism, by and large, has avoided accounting for the complexity of the physical and biological, while the systems theories coming from the natural sciences have, by and large, taken inadequate measure of the human and cultural. Neither <\/em>has particularly successfully grappled with the full density of their intermingled networkings \u2013 which is what makes the work of Latour, Deleuze, Whitehead, and other process-relational thinkers of reality <\/em>(and not merely of culture, or of physical and biological systems) important and exciting.<\/p>\n

On to Prince of Networks<\/em>, then, to see what Harman does with Latour (and Whitehead, and Meillassoux, and many others). I\u2019ll post that tomorrow. But as a bit of foreshadowing, I\u2019ll propose the alternate subtitle \u201c\u2018Latour\u2019 + \u2018Heidegger\u2019 vs. Kant\u2019s Copernican Revolution\u201d (where the scare quotes indicate Harman’s role as puppeteer behind the stage, and Kant\u2019s role is leader of the revolt that made \u201call reality [take] its measure from the conditions of human experience\u201d).<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

I\u2019ve been reading Graham Harman\u2019s Tool-Being: Heidegger and the Metaphysics of Objects and Prince of Networks: Bruno Latour and Metaphysics. More accurately, I\u2019ve been dipping into and sipping from the first and systematically digesting the second. Given the amount of blogging that goes on under the rising star(s) of \u2018object-oriented philosophy,\u2019 \u2018speculative realism,\u2019 and Graham […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":99,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_monsterinsights_skip_tracking":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_active":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_note":"","_monsterinsights_sitenote_category":0,"advanced_seo_description":"","jetpack_seo_html_title":"","jetpack_seo_noindex":false,"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":false,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","default_image_id":0,"font":"","enabled":false},"version":2}},"categories":[688977],"tags":[16805,16776,392,16806,16789],"class_list":["post-1117","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-geo_philosophy","tag-harman","tag-heidegger","tag-metaphysics","tag-object-oriented-philosophy","tag-speculative-realism"],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p4IC4a-i1","jetpack-related-posts":[{"id":5586,"url":"https:\/\/blog.uvm.edu\/aivakhiv\/2012\/02\/28\/process-objects-at-the-nonhuman-turn\/","url_meta":{"origin":1117,"position":0},"title":"Process-objects at The Nonhuman Turn","author":"Adrian J Ivakhiv","date":"February 28, 2012","format":false,"excerpt":"The preliminary schedule is out for The Nonhuman Turn in 21st Century Studies. The list of speakers reads like a \"who's who\" of the neo-ontological, speculative-realist crowd in cultural and media theory: Steven Shaviro, Jane Bennett, Brian Massumi, Erin Manning, Mark Hansen, Ian Bogost, and Tim Morton are among the\u2026","rel":"","context":"In "Philosophy"","block_context":{"text":"Philosophy","link":"https:\/\/blog.uvm.edu\/aivakhiv\/category\/geo_philosophy\/"},"img":{"alt_text":"","src":"","width":0,"height":0},"classes":[]},{"id":5298,"url":"https:\/\/blog.uvm.edu\/aivakhiv\/2011\/09\/13\/democracy-of-objects\/","url_meta":{"origin":1117,"position":1},"title":"Democracy of Objects","author":"Adrian J Ivakhiv","date":"September 13, 2011","format":false,"excerpt":"Levi Bryant's The Democracy of Objects is finally available and readable on-line, courtesy of a wonderfully innovative relationship between Open Humanities Press and the University of Michigan Library's Scholarly Publishing Office. The book is part of OHP's New Metaphysics Series, edited by Graham Harman and Bruno Latour. As regular readers\u2026","rel":"","context":"In "Philosophy"","block_context":{"text":"Philosophy","link":"https:\/\/blog.uvm.edu\/aivakhiv\/category\/geo_philosophy\/"},"img":{"alt_text":"","src":"","width":0,"height":0},"classes":[]},{"id":8278,"url":"https:\/\/blog.uvm.edu\/aivakhiv\/2015\/06\/09\/harmans-reply\/","url_meta":{"origin":1117,"position":2},"title":"Harman’s reply","author":"Adrian J Ivakhiv","date":"June 9, 2015","format":false,"excerpt":"Graham Harman's reply to my critical response to his book Bruno Latour: Reassembling the Political, which appeared as part of\u00a0a book symposium in\u00a0Global Discourse\u00a0earlier this year, is readable\u00a0online,\u00a0here.\u00a0 I won't address the details of that\u00a0reply here. Some of them relate to our divergent\u00a0interpretations of Latour, and since Harman has\u00a0now written\u2026","rel":"","context":"In "Philosophy"","block_context":{"text":"Philosophy","link":"https:\/\/blog.uvm.edu\/aivakhiv\/category\/geo_philosophy\/"},"img":{"alt_text":"","src":"","width":0,"height":0},"classes":[]},{"id":1037,"url":"https:\/\/blog.uvm.edu\/aivakhiv\/2009\/03\/09\/philosophical-sitings\/","url_meta":{"origin":1117,"position":3},"title":"philosophical sitings","author":"Adrian J Ivakhiv","date":"March 9, 2009","format":false,"excerpt":"I really think that philosophy's production site is shifting more and more from the library\/study and cafe and scholarly journal to the web and blogosphere. Kvond over at Frames \/sing has been putting out some very interesting and detailed blogs about Bruno Latour. Larvalsubjects (philosopher and ex-Lacanian analyst Levi Bryant)\u2026","rel":"","context":"In "Media ecology"","block_context":{"text":"Media ecology","link":"https:\/\/blog.uvm.edu\/aivakhiv\/category\/media_ecology\/"},"img":{"alt_text":"","src":"","width":0,"height":0},"classes":[]},{"id":1366,"url":"https:\/\/blog.uvm.edu\/aivakhiv\/2010\/11\/05\/process-relational-theory-primer\/","url_meta":{"origin":1117,"position":4},"title":"Process-relational theory primer","author":"Adrian J Ivakhiv","date":"November 5, 2010","format":false,"excerpt":"One of the tasks of this blog, since its inception in late 2008, has been to articulate a theoretical-philosophical perspective that I have come to call \u201cprocess-relational.\u201d This is a theoretical paradigm and an ontology that takes the basic nature of the world to be that of relational process: that\u2026","rel":"","context":"In "Eco-theory"","block_context":{"text":"Eco-theory","link":"https:\/\/blog.uvm.edu\/aivakhiv\/category\/ecophilosophy\/"},"img":{"alt_text":"","src":"","width":0,"height":0},"classes":[]},{"id":1308,"url":"https:\/\/blog.uvm.edu\/aivakhiv\/2010\/06\/29\/sr-whitehead-etc\/","url_meta":{"origin":1117,"position":5},"title":"SR, Whitehead, etc.","author":"Adrian J Ivakhiv","date":"June 29, 2010","format":false,"excerpt":"I'm just catching up with this interesting exchange between Gary Williams (Minds and Brains), Graham Harman, and Tom Sparrow (Plastic Bodies). Williams takes issue with Harman's and others' portrayal of Speculative Realism as \"revolutionary.\" \"The narrative of 'finally' moving beyond the 'Kantian nightmare'\", he writes, \"is tired and overplayed.\" He\u2026","rel":"","context":"In "Philosophy"","block_context":{"text":"Philosophy","link":"https:\/\/blog.uvm.edu\/aivakhiv\/category\/geo_philosophy\/"},"img":{"alt_text":"","src":"","width":0,"height":0},"classes":[]}],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/blog.uvm.edu\/aivakhiv\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1117","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/blog.uvm.edu\/aivakhiv\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/blog.uvm.edu\/aivakhiv\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blog.uvm.edu\/aivakhiv\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/99"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blog.uvm.edu\/aivakhiv\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=1117"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/blog.uvm.edu\/aivakhiv\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1117\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/blog.uvm.edu\/aivakhiv\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1117"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blog.uvm.edu\/aivakhiv\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=1117"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blog.uvm.edu\/aivakhiv\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=1117"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}