Interview with Graham Harman (2)

© Graham Harman and Figure/Ground
Dr. Harman was interviewed by Andrew Iliadis. October 2nd, 2013.

Graham Harman is Distinguished University Professor at the American University in Cairo. He is the leading figure associated with the speculative realism and object-oriented philosophy movements. Dr. Harman is author of many books, including Tool-Being: Heidegger and the Metaphysics of Objects, Guerrilla Metaphysics: Phenomenology and the Carpentry of Things, Prince of Networks: Bruno Latour and Metaphysics, Quentin Meillassoux: Philosophy in the Making, and Weird Realism: Lovecraft and Philosophy. His forthcoming book, Bells and Whistles: More Speculative Realism, is due out in November.

You have written monographs on Martin Heidegger, Bruno Latour, Quentin Meillassoux, and H. P. Lovecraft. What is it that draws you to these thinkers? Are you “paying your dues,” as they say?

There are at least two good reasons to write about other thinkers on a regular basis, especially living thinkers.

First, though I’ve been critical of analytic philosophy in certain respects, one of the things we can learn from this tradition is the way it draws subtle distinctions between various contemporary philosophies. In the continental tradition we tend to write “vertically” about the dead classic figures rather than about each other, and hence there is often a cloudy understanding of the differences between various living authors. It is good to fight against this tendency.

Second, I think it’s important that we begin to establish the profession of the philosophy connoisseur. In philosophy, unlike some other fields, we are too quickly concerned with who is right or wrong, whose positions we like or dislike. “Criticism” becomes a way of tearing down or eliminating ideas we don’t like. Yet consider how different it is with the other types of criticsm: art, theater, music, literary, food, or wine criticism. In these cases it’s less a matter of negative judgment (though it often occurs) than of trying to capture the subtle individual shadings that make one bottle of wine or one avant-garde dance show different from all the rest.

I spend a fair amount of time reading critics such as Clement Greenberg in art or Edmund Wilson in literature— or for that matter Edgar Allan Poe, a great literary critic. But I can’t think of many good philosophy critics. In books such as Prince of Networks: Bruno Latour and Metaphysics, or Quentin Meillassoux: Philosophy in the Making, I tried to make both of these thinkers more tangible and interesting to my readers, and also tried to develop the differences between my own position and theirs. In both cases I learned a lot about my own philosophy as well. Our ideas are never fully articulated until we are forced to distinguish them from neighboring but different ideas.

Part of your work can be seen as an ongoing critique of the notion of anthropocentrism, particularly with regard to your Latour project. Latour’s recent work concerns a notion called the Anthropocene, a new era of geological history where humans play a dominant role. Is there any conflict here, or is Latour gunning for a new conception of a certain post-epistemological era?

Some elements of Latour’s recent philosophy are new compared with his earlier work, but I don’t see that this is one of them. The Anthropocene in Latourian terms does not mean that nature is now subsumed by culture. Instead, it is just the familiar Latourian theme aired most lucidly We Have Never Been Modern: there has never been a taxonomical split between two basic kinds of entities, one called nature and another called culture.

In this sense, Latour’s discussion of the Anthropocene simply echoes his critique of deep ecology in Politics of Nature. Humans were never an ontological domain separate from nature in the first place.

One might ask how I can approve of this recurrent notion of Latour’s, given that I am a speculative realist who dislikes the correlationism that forever intertwines human and world as mutual correlates of one another.

My answer is that correlationism covertly bundles together two separate concepts. One of them is finitude, the idea that we cannot speak of reality outside its givenness to us. The other is the centrality of one kind of relation: that between human and world, such that we can only talk about the causal relation between two rocks insofar as we humans encounter this relation, so that humans always make up 50% of any philosophical situation.

Contra Meillassoux, it is this privileging of the human-world relation over all others, not finitude, which is the central defect of the Kantian legacy. Finitude is a genuine step forward by Kant, though this cannot be seen clearly at the moment due to the current upsurge of rationalism, mathematism, and German Idealism in continental philosophy. Everyone’s beating up the Ding an sich and finitude these days, but I don’t think this will last as long as some people assume. I see it as just a transient neo-German Idealism. We need to respect the intellectual challenge posed by the in-itself, not eliminate it through the word trick that to think the in-itself is already to turn it into a thought.

The nice thing about Latour is that in principle (and usually in fact as well) Latour does not privilege the human-world relation over all others. The relation between a scientist and a petri dish has no special status compared with that between a canoe and the varnish that covers it, or a flame and the cotton it burns. This is what Latour takes from Whitehead, though he also develops Whitehead in original ways that I’ve discussed elsewhere.

In this manner, Latour and Whitehead overcome one aspect of correlationism (the centrality of the human-world relation) that Meillassoux, Badiou, and Žižek do not overcome, given the obsession of the latter trio with finitude and their desire to remove it from the philosophical scene.

What bothers me about Meillassoux in particular (though my great admiration for him is a matter of record) is that he sticks with the form of modernism that Latour blew apart in 1991: the notion that there are two types of entities, one of them a dead matter that serves as an empty receptacle for mathematical formalization, and another called “thought” which transcends and mathematizes the world and thereby gains both absolute knowledge of eternal truths and liberation from political ideology.

Though I agree with Meillassoux’s 2012 remarks in Berlin about the theoretical virtues of dualism by contrast with monism, I don’t agree that this dualism must amount to a taxonomical classification of different types of things. That’s simply Cartesianism revived, and one of its many problems is the inability to shed any light on intermediate forms of existence: dolphins, dogs, caterpillars, bacteria, and flowers. Whereas Descartes puts all these creatures on the side of res extensa and asserts they are free of pain, Meillassoux lumps them into a new intermediate category called “life.” But then just like Heidegger in 1929/30 he invests little energy in clarifying the place of life in his ontology. It seems to be there just to reassure us that Meillassoux doesn’t view animals as mere machines. What really interests him is not life (which he sees as the domain of supposed “vitalists” like me) but the old Cartesian opposition between matter and thought. But I think Latour already dug the grave of that particular dualism in We Have Never Been Modern.

Some of your most central terms –“object-oriented philosophy,” “vicarious causation” and “weird realism”– have been praised and criticized in equal measure. Could you explain to our readers, in simple terms, what you mean by these concepts, and what you think is most often misread in them?

With pleasure.

“Object-oriented philosophy” is a term I coined in the late 1990’s, borrowed from computer science without being inspired by it. There are perhaps three central features of this type of philosophy.

First, it initially implies a flat ontology in which even hallucinations and fictions count as objects, and in which composite objects such as machines and societies are objects no less than pillars of granite or tiny little quarks. In this respect object-oriented philosophy is an anti-reductionism. And here it is not altogether new, since a number of late nineteenth-century thinkers of the Austrian school were already moving in this direction, Husserl among them.

Second, it entails that objects are something over and above the properties they carry. An object is not just a nickname for a bundle of qualities, and hence object-oriented philosophy is also an anti-empiricism: one that sides with phenomenology in taking the object to be prior to its concrete manifestations in various instants.

Third, there is the most central claim of object-oriented philosophy: that the human-object relation is merely a special case of object-object relations more generally. The tree-in-itself is withheld from us not because we humans are specially tragic finite beings, but simply because we are objects at all. The wind has no more and no less direct access to the tree than I do. The phrase “relations are external to their terms” is valid not just for human empirical observers, but for brute causal interactions as well.

The reason many people become angry about object-oriented philosophy is that they sense its vigorous anti-reductionism, but they want philosophy to be a kind of debunking reductionism in one or both of two possible ways. Either we must debunk downward by showing that science gives the best description of what is real, with the rest counting as nothing more than epidermal illusion; or, we must debunk upward by showing that everything is constructed by language, society, perception, or events, so that only naïve, life-hating oppressors would insist on a “reality” hiding beneath the play of surfaces. I call the first group “underminers” and the second group “overminers.”

The first group dislikes me because I think Popeye and sunflower seeds can’t be broken down to scientifically privileged entities. The second group dislikes me because I insist on reality and essences, which sounds to them like an old-fashioned doctrine of patriarchal imperialism— though in fact it’s the exact opposite, since I don’t think the essences can ever be directly known, and hence they can never be used as political measuring-sticks.

We now turn to the concept of “vicarious causation.” This follows naturally from the model of objects as withdrawn. If two objects make contact only with caricatures, translations, or distortions of one another, it follows that they never make direct contact at all, and hence they need a mediating term.

On a side note, this is the point that Levi Bryant seems to miss. He’s willing to accept that all relation is a form of translation, yet he still insists that direct contact between entities is possible. But here’s the problem: if entities are already capable of direct contact with each other, then why would they ever create supplemental distortions of one another? Translation is a starting point, not just a result. Objects never encounter each other directly at the starting line any more than at the finish. Instead, they never encounter anything but translations of each other, and this requires that causality unfold in what I call the sensual dimension rather than the real one.

As I’ve often written elsewhere, vicarious causation is a contemporary heir of the occasionalist problem. For some conservative Islamic theologians of the Middle Ages, and later for some seventeenth century French thinkers, God is the only locus of causal activity. Nothing happens unless it is done by God directly. We easily smirk at this notion in our present-day default atheism, but notice that we have simply replaced God with the human mind as the sole locus of causation: for Hume causation means habit or customary conjunction in appearance, and for Kant causation is explicitly a category of the understanding. So, even though we seem to have liberated ourselves from God, we still have one entity enforcing a full monopoly on causation: human being. This monopoly is the main problem, not the divinity.

Whitehead took a bold gamble in the 1920’s by routing all relations (i.e., “prehensions”) through God once again. But Whitehead’s great admirer, Bruno Latour, is the first to secularize occasional causation. This is a step without precedent, and is perhaps the most important thing Latour has done in philosophy. Every relation needs a mediator. Politics and neutrons have no connection until Frédéric Joliot links them. And this link need not be a human being; any entity will do.

But if Joliot is needed to link politics with neutrons, what links Joliot to each of these entities in turn? There will be an infinite regress, to which Latour can call a halt only by pragmatic means, by saying that we can stop when the process is no longer interesting. Yet this tells us nothing about the metaphysics of the problem, and leaves us trapped in a version of one of Zeno’s most famous paradoxes: you can never go all the way to the door, because you must first go halfway, and so on ad infinitum. You can’t escape the paradox the way Bergson did, because whereas time might be viewed as a continuum that is only potentially divisible into individual chunks, you can’t claim that entities themselves are a grand continuum without commiting yourself to a fairly wild and unsuccessful ontology.

My view is that this problem arises directly from Latour’s “flat ontology.” If all actors are equal, then you cannot avoid an infinite number of mediators between any two entities. Yet the solution provided by object-oriented philosophy is that there are two kinds of objects, not just one: there are real and sensual objects that mediate each other one at a time, much like the north and south poles of a magnet which alone can make contact, leading to a potentially endless chain of magnets.

As for “weird realism,” it denotes a kind of realism that is not simply a question of matching the contents of the mind with a real world outside the mind. My sort of realism is “weird” because it claims that the real is too real to be known, or too real to be accessed. I choose the word “weird” because of its desirable association with things that never fully appear insofar as they are not quite of this earth: Shakespeare’s “weird sisters,” H.P. Lovecraft’s “weird tales.”

Your approach to causality is unique in that you argue against the search for underlying material causes. You have also criticized what you call “scientism” in other thinkers. Could object-oriented philosophy be reconciled with the scientific method? Are they mutually exclusive?

My battle is with scientism, not with science, which I have always loved. Scientistic philosophy makes a miserable twofold gesture that must be resisted.

First, it tells philosophers that they have no right to speculate beyond what the natural sciences currently tell us about a given topic. A good case of this can be found in James Ladyman and Don Ross’s book Every Thing Must Go: the metaphysics of space and time must be decided by relativity theory, the metaphysics of natural kinds by evolutionary theory, the metaphysics of substance by quantum theory, and so forth. But this is not even what most good scientists want! The physcist Carlo Rovelli has asked philosophers to take the risk of leaping ahead. When I met the quantum theorist Anton Zeilinger in Kassel last summer, he said that he finds most philosophers too timid in discussing nature. But scientism (that of Thomas Metzinger, for example) always proclaims science as the winner in advance, and at best consigns philosophers to “normative” ethics panels dealing with the “grave social consequences” of this or that discovery.

Second, having supposedly secured the pre-eminence of science, scientistic philosophy now grovels at its feet. “How may I serve thee, master?” Philosophy’s sole remaining task, other than sitting on the aforementioned ethics panels, is to provide a framework for the discoveries of science (though I don’t recall scientists ever expressing interest in such a boring device). Having barely escaped the status of handmaid of theology a few centuries ago, we now wish to be the handmaid of physics and neurology!

How do we get out of this mess? By abolishing the current division of labor in which the sciences deal with object-object relations and philosophers become involved only when human thought or normativity enters the scene. This is the situation as Kant left it, since along with his endorsement of finitude (which I support) he also valorized the human-world relation as prior to any other. You can’t talk about two billiard balls colliding in their own right, but only about how this collision appears to us according to the categories of the understanding. Again, this proposed division of labor is taxonomical: natural scientists shall talk about non-human things, while philosophers and social scientists shall only talk about human things.

I reject this exile of philosophy from the realm of object-object relations. It’s actually incorrect to say that I argue against the search for underlying material causes. That’s what physics already searches for, and with plenty of success. But there is also an aspect of metaphysics that deals with the interaction of inanimate things, and one that does not conflict with or try to surmount physics, since the division of labor involves different methods of dealing with the same realities. Physics has little choice but to treat things as bundles of empirically determinable qualities, but this is precisely what philosophy must not do. This does not mean that philosophy needs to stay away from inanimate objects, only that it cannot deal with objects as bundles of determinate qualities.

What are you currently working on?

Right now I have four book contracts, which isn’t as hard as it sounds. Having multiple simultaneous projects limits the risk of writer’s block, since if you’re stuck on one book then one of the others is always likely to be flowing a bit better at the time. Furthermore, you’ll often find unexpected resonance between your simultaneous topics, and they feed off each other in ways that are hard to predict.

As for the four current projects…

First, there is Prince of Modes, a sequel to my 2009 book Prince of Networks, in which I’ll try to explain Latour’s later philosophy as explained in An Inquiry Into Modes of Existence, recently published in English by Harvard University Press.

Second, there’s Bruno Latour: Reassembling the Political, an attempt to outline the political philosophy implicit in Latour’s books but which he never states in overt form. Why two books on Latour simultaneously? Well, this one fell into my lap unexpectedly.

The third book has changed titles several times, but is now called On Epistemism, a term I coined as a counterpoint to Meillassoux’s “subjectalism”— an interesting concept that is in my view a sheer polemical fantasy aimed at me and Iain Hamilton Grant (though we all remain on friendly terms personally) The primary figures covered in this book will be Badiou and Žižek, who along with Meillassoux are exemplars of the present-day triumph of an idealism that masquerades as materialism, whose critical Enlightenment legacy it wishes to emulate. These days we also have an emerging continental scientism which, despite its claim to be the most hardnosed sort of materialism, is just another idealist movement in disguise. What psychologism was to phenomenology, epistemism is to object-oriented philosophy. We cannot accept the currently popular blend of German Idealism, mathematics, empirical science, and Halloweenish mood music as the future of continental thought.

The fourth book is called Skirmishes, and will be a series of bite-sized responses to both critics and friends.

Though I’m still working at the American University in Cairo, I’m now living in Ankara, Turkey, and that means recalibrating my work routine to a new daily schedule and new surroundings. And that too is a bigger project than it might seem.

What do you think will be the future task of philosophy?

The same task as always: the love of wisdom, outflanking all transient claims to wisdom itself.

Science must aspire to knowledge, whatever caveats one adds about this knowledge being a “telos” that is never fully reached. And mathematics must be an actual knowledge rather than simply a telos, even if revolutions occur in this field as well.

But philosophy cannot be a knowledge. Indeed, it is even a counter-knowledge. Among other things, this means that philosophy has a great deal in common with the arts, as I wrote last summer in “The Third Table,” the essay for the Documenta art show.

In philosophy we have spent the entire modern era trying to mimic the evident success of mathematics and the natural sciences, and thus the new tendency towards mathematism and scientism in continental philosophy is not as new as it appears. It’s simply a stylistic corrective applied to some of the recent über-literary and human-centered vices of the continental tradition. Ultimately, it doesn’t free us from the rut of thinking that philosophy should mimic either the deductive procedures of mathematics (as Badiou and Meillassoux propose) or the professional culture of the natural sciences (as analytic philosophy proposes).

Now as ever, the only people who can be convinced are the young, since they alone are not yet truly convinced of anything. A few years down the line, everyone has already placed their bets and it’s increasingly hard to change those bets with age. Our careers are made by those older than we are: the mentors and bosses who put in a good word for us. But our reputations are made by those younger than we are, including those who are not yet born at the time of our deaths. These are the unknown readers who find or ignore us on stormy nights in deserted bookstores, perhaps years after our funerals. These are the ones who shape the future task of philosophy in directions we cannot predict.

Prof. Steven Galt Crowell (in his Figure/Ground interview of June 22, 2011) says, against the claims of object-oriented philosophy, that phenomenology does give us access to the world as it is. Can you respond?

Though Crowell cautions in the interview that he only has a loose and second-hand familiarity with the object-oriented way of thinking, he seems to have a generally accurate notion of it (though he makes no distinction between object-oriented philosophy and speculative realism more generally, which is a wider concept containing a number of different positions). Let’s recall the major points from Crowell’s remarks:

1. Calling phenomenology “idealism” overlooks a crucial distinction between transcendental-phenomenological idealism and metaphysical or subjective idealism.

2. Phenomenology does give us access to the world as it is.

3. Phenomenology already treats human and inhuman entities on an equal footing, because it lets entities show themselves as they are and does not privilege one entity over all others.

4. It is naïve to think that one can discuss reality without any concern with human access. Even physics does not do this. Quite aside from the examples from quantum theory that show how the observer is implicated in nature, physics is a theory and set of practices that provide the normative basis for determining truth. Since every theory must provide such normative conditions, every theory (including speculative realism) is bound up with the conditions of human access to the world.

5. Philosophical questions are inherently bound up with the question of human access, and there’s nothing wrong with that. Husserl and Heidegger already do justice to this point (with the transcendental subject and Dasein, respectively) without privileging human beings in the usual sense. If the object-oriented “democracy of objects” treats the subject as just another object, then a crucial distinction has been lost.

All of these points boil down to two central claims: (a) there is no escaping the fact that questions of human access to the world are the foundation of philosophy, but (b) phenomenology can gain direct access to the world anyway. Let’s consider each of these points in turn.

We begin with the claim that human access to the world plays a central role in philosophy. Well, there’s an obvious and trivial sense in which this is true. We’re humans, and philosophy is done only by humans, and therefore human access to reality is involved in all philosophy. Agreed, but Crowell is claiming much more than this. He is claiming an ontological priority for human access to the world, not just a methodological-chronological one.

Crowell mentions physics, which makes pre-eminent claims to deal with the world as it really is apart from all human access. His first objection is that quantum theory shows that reality and the obervation of it are always entangled, and therefore it is naïve to speak of a reality apart from observers. But this doesn’t follow: not only because the status of quantum theory is not yet settled, but also because this very entanglement of reality and thought is asserted by quantum theory to be a reality apart from our thinking of it. Manuel DeLanda has noted the even more obvious fact that human societies are completely entangled with humans, but DeLanda is right that even in this case, human societies have an inherent character that is irreducible to our comprehension of them.

But perhaps this is somewhat unfair, since Crowell only mentions quantum theory in passing. His heavier investment is in the priority of “normativity.” Since all knowledge of the world requires internal methodological criteria for the difference between knowledge and non-knowledge, it seems that human access retains the upper hand. But this cuts both ways. Normativity is no more the concern of theory than of what exceeds theory. Without the specter of a reality outside thought, we would hardly need to invent our often complicated methods and normative criteria to approach that reality.

Here Crowell’s view is both mainstream and dangerous. It implies that the unique task of philosophy is to take a step back from the world and reflect on the conditions of our meaningful encounter with that world. We can leave the world itself to all the special sciences. And while at first glance this may look humble, it also gives philosophy a transcendental privilege over all other sorts of human knowledge and activity, since only philosophy takes a critical stance towards the human-world relation as such. In other words, it’s a fairly typical post-Kantian position.

The question is not whether human thinking has a special methodological status (which it must, since we are human) but whether it has a special ontological status. In other words, is the human-world gap different in ontological kind from the gaps between raindrops and wood or fire and cotton? No, it is not. The human relation to cotton in thinking about it may be far more intricate than fire’s relation to that cotton in destroying it, but we can easily see that both human thought and fire have the following feature in common: both of them fail to encounter the cotton as a whole. Both of them are translations of the cotton; they are distortions, caricatures, or oversimplifications of the cotton. This is the usefully non-Kantian side of Whitehead and Latour: their awareness that the philosophical problem is translation as such, not the very special and limited form of translation that appears in human experience. The fact that we can only think these thoughts from within a human mind does not entail that thought has a special ontological status that makes it something other than causal translation.

Indeed, we could say that Whitehead and Latour are the ones who revived causation as a global philosophical problem, not reducing it to just a question of how humans know causation— which is the obsession of Hume and Kant and their dominant heirs today. Epistemology is sometimes interesting but it will always be trumped by ontology, because epistemology is just a specific (and unconvincing) ontology: one which assumes that the human-world relation has a central ontological status not shared by all other relations in the cosmos.

This leads us to Crowell’s second basic claim, which is that phenomenology can claim to know the world directly without collapsing into a harmful form of idealism. Like Crowell (and unlike many of my friendly age-group peers) I am a great admirer of phenomenology. Unlike Crowell, I do not agree that phenomenology escapes idealism.

Consider Heidegger’s basic objection to Husserlian phenomenology (and I certainly did my time as an enthusiastic sympathizer in the interior of these schools). For Husserl, everything is grounded in the direct presence of reality to consciousness. All scientific speculation about hidden causal entities is grounded in the potentially direct intuitive presence of reality to the mind.

Heidegger’s objection in his famous tool-analysis (and in his other reflections about Husserl in History of the Concept of Time) is that direct presence to the mind is a relatively rare incident. Our primary way of dealing with things is through their non-presence to the mind, in simply taking them for granted as the subterranean basis on which all consciousness is built. I do not often think of my bodily organs, atmospheric oxygen, or the solidity of the ground, yet I rely upon them constantly. By comparison, the direct presence of things before the mind is already a deficient mode that usually occurs in moments of failure or malfunction.

Now, the usual reading of this tool-analysis (even by Heidegger himself) is that Heidegger shows us that all theorizing about isolated entities is grounded in a holistic network of praxis in which all entities are entangled with each other. Yet this misses the real greatness of Heidegger’s breakthrough, which is that all of these invisible tools can break: and insofar as they can break, they must not be fully deployed in their relations with all the other tools! If I look at a tree or make up theories about it, I have already transformed the tree, or “cut it off at the knees,” as the young Heidegger puts it. Yet the same holds true even if I use the tree for lumber or bask in its oxygen output. No human relation to the tree, whether theoretical, perceptual, or practical, ever fathoms the depth of this tree. And neither does the contact of any other entity with this tree ever exhaust it. Finitude is not a category of the human mind or human Dasein, but of relationality as such. Relations are external to their terms. Relations do not exhaust their terms. This entails a realism in which objects lie at greater depths than any access to them.

It is quite different with objects in Husserlian phenomenology, of course. A chair or an apple can be said to differ from their various adumbrations. The apple is not equal to its current appearance, but can be varied indefinitely in the mind or in reality while still remaining the same apple; that’s what the eidetic reduction helps us to determine.

Yet notice that the apple in Husserlian phenomenology does not “hide” behind its appearances. The apple is directly there before me. We simply need to be careful not to confuse it with the transient accidental features found in any given perception of it. The apple is a sort of essential nucleus apart from those features. But in no way is it concealed or hidden or veiled. This is why the claims of some admirers that Husserl’s concept of “horizon” already does the work later credited to Heidegger’s tool-analysis are not sustainable (Burt Hopkins comes to mind). There is a radical difference in kind between Husserl’s intentional objects and Heidegger’s tool-beings. Husserl’s objects are always potentially the correlate of some intentional act, but Heidegger’s tools necessarily withdraw from any intentional act, surprising these acts with unanticipated ruptures or breakdowns.

I love Husserl, and he is currently one of the most maltreated of the great classic philosophers, just as Aristotle is maltreated at the moment (in my student years it was always Plato, but Plato has been rehabilitated in the meantime). But there is no question that Husserl is an idealist, and any distinction here between “transcendental” and “subjective” idealism is a red herring. Any philosophy which holds that an object might be adequately known in some sort of direct intuition (however rare or difficult) is automatically a form of idealism, since it cannot distinguish between a tree and perfect knowledge of a tree, except through vague appeals to an extra material substrate in the former case.

The greatness of Husserl lies in his distinction between objects and the bundles of qualities with which they were formerly and wrongly identified. Husserl is in many ways the anti-Humean messiah, the one who defends the rights of the apple against all claims to reduce an apple to an empty nickname for a bundle of  particular features. This does not mean that he also does justice to the Heideggerian apple, a withdrawn mysterious core never exhausted by any of our relations with apples. The Husserlian apple is perfectly exhaustible in principle, through direct phenomenological insight into its essence, but is also encrusted with numerous superfluous feaures that need to be scraped away through theoretical labor to get at the true essential core.

In a word: Heidegger’s apple is always more than it seems, but Husserl’s apple is always less than it seems.  Husserl’s apple is always there immediately in consciousness as soon as we encounter it. It does not exceed the encounter, whereas Heidegger’s apple does. (Or at least it does in principle. Heidegger still has an alarming tendency to view specific beings such as apples only as “ontic” surface-phenomena, whereas the depths of being tend to be treated as unified.)

I am therefore led to deny both of Crowell’s basic claims. Human access has no special status in philosophy, and —as Heidegger already noted— phenomenology is blind to the excess of beings over and above their potential presence to the mind, and is therefore one of the frankest forms of idealism to appear in the history of philosophy, whatever its other virtues.

Bruno Latour has said (in his Figure/Ground interview of October 1, 2013) that he’s only interested in concepts if they allow us to do something different to register fieldwork and that he is not aware of empirical field studies which have been influenced by OOP.

Obviously, Latour is a key influence on my thinking. I had already fled the Heidegger Temple before reading Latour for the first time in 1998, but Latour drove the getaway car and dropped me off miles from the scene, in a new and fascinating place. But beyond this personal interest, Latour is probably the most important living philosopher: a claim that sounds wildly excessive in 2013, but one that may seem obvious and trivial a few decades from now.

Let me respond to Latour’s remarks about fieldwork in two steps before following up with a reflection on our key difference.

OK, fieldwork… In one sense, Latour is simply stating an indisputable fact. He is a major figure in the social sciences, and his actor-network theory has inspired thousands of researchers working on the widest range of topics. By contrast, object-oriented philosophy has had little concrete impact on the social sciences so far; I can think of just a handful of isolated examples.

I would also agree with Latour that it’s not a good sign if a philosophy has no impact beyond philosophers. For instance, I think analytic philosophy may be in trouble in the long run due to its professionally insular culture of philosophy professors speaking to other philosophy professors in the language of technical shoptalk.

But that’s not what is happening with object-oriented philosophy. “Fieldwork” is not just a question of the social sciences, even if that happens to be Latour’s special interest. In the arts and architecture, for example, object-oriented philosophy is inspiring a large number of people, and I doubt Latour would want to call these fields less important than anthropology and sociology.

We’ll have to see how this pans out over time, but the fact that object-oriented ventures in various disciplines have often been tentative, amorphous experiments is only to be expected. As Imre Lakatos argues, new research programs need quite a bit of time to be worked out in detail, and cannot immediately reach the sweeping influence possessed by an already established method such as actor-network theory. Latour even concedes this point in his interview when he says roughly: “maybe someone will eventually come up with good object-oriented social science methods.”

But in a second sense, I want to point out that Latour is using the term “fieldwork” in an ambiguous manner. For it is Bruno Latour himself who taught us that all human thought is fieldwork! The propositions of Euclid or Spinoza are not contained “in” the axioms any more than a cake is contained “in” the recipe; in both cases there are translations from one step to the next that must be studied concretely. We can no more doubt the laws of Newton than we can drive our car in the Metro, and for the same reason. Latour’s writings abound in formulations of this sort, since for him it is crucial that we follow the actors in their associations: whether these actors be apricots in a warehouse, neuropeptides in a laboratory, or triangles in a treatise of geometry.

In a way, Latour’s entire theory boils down to the notion that everything is fieldwork, that the natural and social realms assemble actors in basically the same way. But having made this very important point, Latour sometimes bends his own rule and implies that “some fieldwork is more equal than others.” He happens to love anthropologists and does not mix as frequently or as comfortably with philosophy professors. Most of his friends and associates are working on very concrete topics (refreshingly so, I might add). He thinks the sociologist Gabriel Tarde is a pivotal intellectual figure, but has no use for Husserl or Heidegger, two of the greatest philosophers of the twentieth or any other century. This is all a natural consequence of Latour’s uncanny sense for the philosophical weight of empirical research, which makes him so liberating for open-minded people coming from a background of a priori metaphysical philosophy.

Nonetheless, there is no reason why object-oriented philosophy drawing up models of objects in tension with their qualities shouldn’t be considered fieldwork just as much as Philippe Descola speaking with tribal informants is considered fieldwork. They’re simply different sorts of fieldwork, as Latour of all people should know. The question of how far object-oriented philosophy can be applied to other domains can only be worked out over time, and most of it can’t be worked out by me, but only by practitioners in the various fields. Lately it is architects who have become interested in my work, but obviously I can’t tell them how to design urban environments in accordance with object-oriented principles. That project belongs to them, even if I can offer a word of support or counsel here or there.

Now, let’s briefly discuss the key theoretical difference between me and Latour. Where we agree is that philosophy cannot begin with a taxonomical distinction between natural and cultural entities. We can’t split up all beings into one kind that works according to rigid mechanical clockwork and another kind that involves the projection of arbitrary human cultural values onto cold, inanimate matter. Galileo unified celestial and terrestrial physics, and in our time we must unify natural and cultural ontology without reducing the first to the second (social constructionism) or the second to the first (scientific naturalism). This is the still-fertile thesis of Latour’s 1991 masterpiece We Have Never Been Modern. Failure to take this book seriously has already cost us two decades in philosophy, and the delay will probably continue for at least another two decades.

This unified theory of nature and culture is all well and good. But then I think Latour does something unjustified. While he is right to reject nature as a taxonomically unique kind of being different in kind from humans and their cultures, he goes on to conflate the refuted nature with the real thing-in-itself beyond human access. That is to say, he assumes that when he refutes nature as a freestanding ontological kingdom he is also refuting the thing-in-itself. And this leads him to a completely relational metaphysics in which any notion of things outside their interactions counts as the supreme naiveté.

Yet here as ever, we don’t need to agree with the discoverer’s interpretation of his own discovery. It seems to me that Latour doesn’t actually demonstrate the non-existence of the in-itself. What he demonstrates, instead, is that the same ontological status belonging to protons, chromosomes, and supernovae must also be granted to factories, Popeye, courts of law, and the doings of bishops and shamans. This is already quite a lot. No philosophy ever attempted it to the same degree as Latour, since previous theories of objects (as in the Austrian philosophies of the late 1800’s) were always theories of objects as referred to by subjects. But Latour like Whitehead allows in principle for philosophy to discuss object-object interactions not mediated by humans, and that is what places these two among the least Kantian thinkers of the past century.

Unfortunately, there is an important aspect of Kant that should not have been abandoned, however unpopular it remains: the thing-in-itself. Latour thinks that the reason all “natural” and “human” actors have the same status is because they are all fragile constructions that have been painstakingly assembled by (human) institutions and thus owe their existence to complicated networks. For Latour, entities are real precisely insofar as they do not exist as things-in-themselves, but only through their carefully assembled links and associations with other things.

But I hold the opposite. All entities are on the same footing, not because protons and superstitions are equally defined by their alliances with other things, but because both are cut off from those alliances and have a robust internal character that can withstand many changes in their environments.

Latour has famously made the self-deprecating joke that actor-network theory has three problems: the actor part, the network part, and the hyphen part. But this sweeping witticism conceals the truly problematic part of the phrase. As I see it, the real problem is that the hyphen gives a misleading impression of democracy, even though for Latour the “network” part actually remains dominant over the “actor” part. Actors are treated as transient local crystallizations of relational networks rather than as that which has an autonomous internal character outside all networks.

What interests me in Latour is the way he is able to place all actors on the same ontological footing, not the way in which actors are denied a hidden interior due to their supposed fragile dependence on other actors. The point is that actors withdraw from their networks even while participating in them, and in this sense my philosophy might be viewed as a Heideggerian variant of actor-network theory.

And in the long run, this difference may well have consequences for fieldwork in the social sciences. Every method has its strengths and its weaknesses. The weakest point of actor-network theory (amidst so many inspiring strengths) is its tendency to overdetermine entities as equivalent to their effects. But nothing is reducible to its effects: things always have numerous possible effects, only some of which are ever manifested. How, then, do we speak of a thing apart from its effects, apart from its current relational entanglements and its list of palpable qualities? This is the question on which object-oriented method hinges in every field where it is introduced.

Some historians, not without controversy, deal in “counterfactuals”: what if Hitler had invaded the Middle East rather than attacking Stalingrad? By analogy, we might push back at Latour with counter-relational considerations. Rather than emphasizing the fact that Pasteur was produced by his networks (as Latour’s brilliant study illuminates) we might make the equally valid point that these networks were produced by Pasteur rather than by someone else, and that microbes also have an independent character that resists Pasteur’s researches in turn. Latour at his most extreme has denied even this latter point, arguing that microbes pre-existed Pasteur only for Pasteur.

So the question is, what was Pasteur aside from the specific alliances he happens to have achieved with the hygienists, the doctors, and the microbes? And what was the independent reality of these other entities apart from their encounter with Pasteur? What were the never fully actualized tendencies and aims and never-manifested qualities of these entities? What were the Pasteur-surplus and microbe-surplus that failed to be deployed by any of these networks and were therefore lost to history, though not to reality and our speculations about reality?

I suspect that someone is going to build a method out of this concern, because actor-network theory has this particular blind spot, and the blind spot of any important theory often becomes the explicit topic of whatever successor theories emerge. It is not unlikely that object-oriented philosophy will play a role in this development.

—

© Excerpts and links may be used, provided that full and clear credit is given to Graham Harman and Figure/Ground with appropriate and specific direction to the original content.

Suggested citation:

Iliadis, A. (2013). “Interview with Graham Harman,” Figure/Ground. October 2nd.
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Questions? Contact Laureano Ralón at ralonlaureano@gmail.com