Peter Gratton
Assistant Professor of Philosophy University of San Diego
guistic turn in contemporary philosophy. Harman’s work looks to side with the oppressed objects said to be held under the thumb of our conceptual schemes, languages, or subjective stances. Two questions relate to Harman’s work on aesthetics, collected in the forthcoming Towards Speculative Realism: Essays and Lectures (London: Zero Books, 2010), which offer greater depth to Harman’s claim that “aesthetics is first philosophy.”
Peter Gratton: Graham, just to bring you up to speed, in the course we’ve read some of your most widely available works on the web: your book Prince of Networks, your essay “On Vi-carious Causation,” your essay on “Intentional Objects,” and several other works. In addition, my students have peeked into your work on your blog. Thus, I thought I’d start with a self-referential question, one that has interested me greatly in doing the Speculative Realism course: what do you make of this online environment for doing philosophy?
Graham Harman: It’s changed everything, and that’s the main reason I’ve stuck with it. Anyone doing continental philosophy who isn’t currently involved in the blogsophere (whether as blogger or simply as reader) is inevitably falling behind. A new community has been building over the past two years, primarily through the blog medium, and Dundee in late March was perhaps the first time that many of the key blog players assembled together in person.
The philosophy blogosophere has its upside and its downside.
The upside is that international philosophical discussion has become a daily event rather than an intermittent one. I’ve often been prompted to rethink certain things based on blog exchanges, and in one well-known case I actually co-edited a book [The Speculative Turn: Continental Materialism and Real-ism] with two people I had never met in person! (I refer here to Levi Bryant and Nick Srnicek.)
The blogosphere also has a democratizing effect, since all blogs are in principle equal. In my graduate student days there was no way I’d have been able to make open challenges to articles by continental kingpins such as John Sallis and
T
he context for these interviews was a seminar I conducted on speculative realism in the Spring 2010. There has been great interest in speculative realism and one reason I surmise is not just the arguments offered, though I don’t want to take away from them; each of these scholars are vivid writers and great pedagogues, many of whom are in constant contact with their readers via their weblogs. Thus these interviews provided an opportunity to forward student questions about their respective works. Though each were conducted on different occasions, the interviews stand as a collected work, tying together the most classical questions about “realism” to ancillary movements about the non-human in politics, ecology, aesthetics, and video gaming—all to point to future movements in this philosophical area.Interview with Graham Harman
“You can’t have Realism without Individual Objects”
Graham Harman is Associate Provost for Research Administration and Associate Professor of Philosophy at the American University in Cairo, Egypt, and has written numerous books and articles arguing for an “object oriented ontology.” His modus operandi, which we discuss below, is to offer a counter-revolution to the
lin-Interviews
Graham Harman, Jane Bennett, Tim Morton, Ian Bogost, Levi Bryant and Paul Ennis
Peter Gratton
Assistant Professor of Philosophy University of San Diego
guistic turn in contemporary philosophy. Harman’s work looks to side with the oppressed objects said to be held under the thumb of our conceptual schemes, languages, or subjective stances. Two questions relate to Harman’s work on aesthetics, collected in the forthcoming Towards Speculative Realism: Essays and Lectures (London: Zero Books, 2010), which offer greater depth to Harman’s claim that “aesthetics is first philosophy.”
Peter Gratton: Graham, just to bring you up to speed, in the course we’ve read some of your most widely available works on the web: your book Prince of Networks, your essay “On Vi-carious Causation,” your essay on “Intentional Objects,” and several other works. In addition, my students have peeked into your work on your blog. Thus, I thought I’d start with a self-referential question, one that has interested me greatly in doing the Speculative Realism course: what do you make of this online environment for doing philosophy?
Graham Harman: It’s changed everything, and that’s the main reason I’ve stuck with it. Anyone doing continental philosophy who isn’t currently involved in the blogsophere (whether as blogger or simply as reader) is inevitably falling behind. A new community has been building over the past two years, primarily through the blog medium, and Dundee in late March was perhaps the first time that many of the key blog players assembled together in person.
The philosophy blogosophere has its upside and its downside.
The upside is that international philosophical discussion has become a daily event rather than an intermittent one. I’ve often been prompted to rethink certain things based on blog exchanges, and in one well-known case I actually co-edited a book [The Speculative Turn: Continental Materialism and Real-ism] with two people I had never met in person! (I refer here to Levi Bryant and Nick Srnicek.)
The blogosphere also has a democratizing effect, since all blogs are in principle equal. In my graduate student days there was no way I’d have been able to make open challenges to articles by continental kingpins such as John Sallis and
Charles Scott, but in the blogosophere students are empowered to do just that. 23-year-old students are calling me confused and mistaken in the blogosphere all the time. Sometimes it’s pretty annoying, in fact, but on the whole I think it’s healthier than the generational conditions under which you and I were educated. Some of these young people have already become blog celebrities, and a few of them even have book deals as a result of it.
The downside is that it can be emotionally draining to maintain a blog. There are certainly days when I wish I had never started mine, because once you have a blog, it feels like a garden that can’t be left unattended for long. There’s also an obvious dark underside to the “democratization” part, which is that you have a certain number of rude people lipping off beyond the limits of civility (some of them shielded by pseudonyms), including people who have never completed a significant piece of work in their lives. At times it’s unavoid-able that you want to punch back at those people, but while momentarily satisfying, it just becomes another energy drain in the end, and you have to learn to ignore them.
Furthermore, there is a problem not just with trolls, but even with the more useful comments. Back in the days when I was allowing comments on my blog, along with the worthless trolling remarks there were also many good critical points. But then you feel expected to answer those points quickly, and if it’s three or four per day, it starts cutting into your own work to a significant degree. And your own work is going to need a certain degree of privacy, distance, and slow-paced reflection for which the blogosphere leaves no room. For this reason, I have not seriously considered re-opening comments, and probably never will reopen them.
At the moment the blogosophere is still mostly a supple-ment, with “real” work still appearing in traditional brick-and-mortar publishing formats. But soon that will change as well, in ways that are difficult to foresee, and everyone is eventually going to need an online presence of some sort.
That’s why I don’t quit (I did quit once, for less than a day, but a number of people asked me to restart the blog). If I did
quit, I know I’d just have to come back online a few years later.
The medium has so many advantages that its triumph is in-evitable. However, we’re all still figuring out the rules in this new world. What’s the best way to handle the town drunks?
How to punish the vandals? It’s being done piecemeal at the moment, but over time I think certain behavioral standards, and the enforcement thereof, will start to take root.
Peter Gratton: We have studied Meillassoux’s work as well as your 2007 review of After Finitude from Philosophy Today. Obvi-ously, you take much away from his critique of correlationism.
My students agree with your recent formulation, described often on your blog (http://doctorzamalek2.wordpress.com/), that Meillassoux is a “correlationist” himself. Yet, despite your great respect for him, nothing seems farther from your work than his idea of a “chaotic in-itself” behind the phenomena of our world. Another way to think this is that many philosophers who argue for a form of realism seem to leave us without objects, but with a chaotic form of the real that bedevils our descriptions.
Graham Harman: Naturally, I agree that you can’t have real-ism without individual objects. Otherwise, you’re just left with a vague notion of “resistance” or “recalcitrance” or
“trauma” or “obstruction” at the limit of human experience, and if it isn’t articulated into individuals, then you have to explain how the magical leap is made from a unified Real to a pluralized Experience. And as far as I can see, such a leap cannot plausibly be explained.
Some attempt a subtler solution in which the Real isn’t just one, but it’s also not quite many. Examples of such solutions include Simondon’s “pre-individual” and DeLanda’s “het-erogeneous yet continuous” realm. In my opinion Deleuze’s
“virtual” never escapes this predicament either. We see it on the analytic side in thinkers such as Ladyman and Ross, the targets of my critique when I lectured in Dundee in March 2010. The real for Ladyman and Ross is “structure,” which supposedly avoids being a monolithic lump and also avoids
Charles Scott, but in the blogosophere students are empowered to do just that. 23-year-old students are calling me confused and mistaken in the blogosphere all the time. Sometimes it’s pretty annoying, in fact, but on the whole I think it’s healthier than the generational conditions under which you and I were educated. Some of these young people have already become blog celebrities, and a few of them even have book deals as a result of it.
The downside is that it can be emotionally draining to maintain a blog. There are certainly days when I wish I had never started mine, because once you have a blog, it feels like a garden that can’t be left unattended for long. There’s also an obvious dark underside to the “democratization” part, which is that you have a certain number of rude people lipping off beyond the limits of civility (some of them shielded by pseudonyms), including people who have never completed a significant piece of work in their lives. At times it’s unavoid-able that you want to punch back at those people, but while momentarily satisfying, it just becomes another energy drain in the end, and you have to learn to ignore them.
Furthermore, there is a problem not just with trolls, but even with the more useful comments. Back in the days when I was allowing comments on my blog, along with the worthless trolling remarks there were also many good critical points. But then you feel expected to answer those points quickly, and if it’s three or four per day, it starts cutting into your own work to a significant degree. And your own work is going to need a certain degree of privacy, distance, and slow-paced reflection for which the blogosphere leaves no room. For this reason, I have not seriously considered re-opening comments, and probably never will reopen them.
At the moment the blogosophere is still mostly a supple-ment, with “real” work still appearing in traditional brick-and-mortar publishing formats. But soon that will change as well, in ways that are difficult to foresee, and everyone is eventually going to need an online presence of some sort.
That’s why I don’t quit (I did quit once, for less than a day, but a number of people asked me to restart the blog). If I did
quit, I know I’d just have to come back online a few years later.
The medium has so many advantages that its triumph is in-evitable. However, we’re all still figuring out the rules in this new world. What’s the best way to handle the town drunks?
How to punish the vandals? It’s being done piecemeal at the moment, but over time I think certain behavioral standards, and the enforcement thereof, will start to take root.
Peter Gratton: We have studied Meillassoux’s work as well as your 2007 review of After Finitude from Philosophy Today. Obvi-ously, you take much away from his critique of correlationism.
My students agree with your recent formulation, described often on your blog (http://doctorzamalek2.wordpress.com/), that Meillassoux is a “correlationist” himself. Yet, despite your great respect for him, nothing seems farther from your work than his idea of a “chaotic in-itself” behind the phenomena of our world. Another way to think this is that many philosophers who argue for a form of realism seem to leave us without objects, but with a chaotic form of the real that bedevils our descriptions.
Graham Harman: Naturally, I agree that you can’t have real-ism without individual objects. Otherwise, you’re just left with a vague notion of “resistance” or “recalcitrance” or
“trauma” or “obstruction” at the limit of human experience, and if it isn’t articulated into individuals, then you have to explain how the magical leap is made from a unified Real to a pluralized Experience. And as far as I can see, such a leap cannot plausibly be explained.
Some attempt a subtler solution in which the Real isn’t just one, but it’s also not quite many. Examples of such solutions include Simondon’s “pre-individual” and DeLanda’s “het-erogeneous yet continuous” realm. In my opinion Deleuze’s
“virtual” never escapes this predicament either. We see it on the analytic side in thinkers such as Ladyman and Ross, the targets of my critique when I lectured in Dundee in March 2010. The real for Ladyman and Ross is “structure,” which supposedly avoids being a monolithic lump and also avoids
being a realm of genuine individuals. All of these proposed solutions are, to my mind, the simple unearned positing of a wish. For there is in fact a serious philosophical problem in how to balance the autonomous isolation of things with their mutual relations, and these positions solve the problem merely by saying: “reality itself is already sort of individual-ized and sort of in relation.” You can’t do it that way. You have to grant that the two extreme poles exist and then try to show how they are unified. That’s what I’m up to with vicarious causation: trying to show how links are possible despite the inherent separation of things. You can’t start out by calling it a “pseudo-problem,” because then you’re left to solve it by fiat. And in general, it displays incredible arrogance to call other people’s problems “pseudo-problems.” I hope this fashion eventually dies.
As for Meillassoux (I respect his work greatly and he is a personal friend as well) he rejects the principle of sufficient reason whereas I support it. In other words, he has a sort of occasionalist position in which everything is cut off from everything else, which I also start with, but the difference is that I think it’s a crucial problem to be solved whereas he doesn’t think there’s any solution to it. Nothing is truly connected to anything else; any connection remains purely contingent. But I would note the following point. Meillas-soux’s argument, if true, would not only apply to the causal relation between separate things, but also to the part-whole relation within specific things. It’s strange enough to say that a flower could disappear at any moment and be replaced by a moose. But it’s even weirder to think that a flower at any given moment could be made of moose-pieces and still be a flower. If we look at sufficient reason inside a given moment rather than between two moments, it seems even harder to give it up than Meillassoux thinks.
Incidentally, I should say to your students that the study of parts and wholes is called “mereology.” It was founded in analytic philosophy by a Polish thinker named Stanislaw Lesniewski, and those who want a good introduction to the topic should read the book Parts by Peter Simons, which still
seems to be the best introduction to mereology more than 20 years later. Mereology has always been something of a rival to set theory, which is of course what dominates in Badiou and his followers. But one problem (shared by classical mereol-ogy, I admit) is that Badiou’s set theory is an extensional set theory, meaning that there is no internal organizing principle of the sets. You can randomly stipulate 17 assorted objects as members of a set, and then by fiat they become a set; it is the one who counts who determines membership, not some internal principle. Perhaps it is obvious why that’s an anti-realist gesture, and indeed very close to British Empiricism with its “bundle of qualities” theory of what makes a thing be one. But I have a realist take on parts and wholes myself.
Peter Gratton: I want to take head on the question of language.
A number of my students (and not just them of course) have really appreciated your clear expositions of Latour. But the problem they had, which is similar to what you describe as a problem as well, is the endurance of what Latour calls a
“black box” or “plasma.” This is an old philosophical problem about the relation between identity and change, and Latour’s gamble is to say that there is nothing but relations. How then can the White House, etc., be seen to endure? Your route is to discuss an “alluring” interiority of things that can’t be related to anything, which is, thus also “nothing” (that can be described) but yet is the attractor for relations to other things. Would this be correct?
Graham Harman: First, I would say that the black box and the plasma in Latour are two different things. Black boxes are any individual things (technical devices, animals, societies) insofar as they are viewed as obvious units without internal structure. Much of Latour’s method involves opening black boxes that used to be closed. For example, instead of saying:
“Pasteur was a genius and a great man who brought light to the darkness of medicine,” Latour retraces the history of how Pasteur got there, and at times it’s quite a surprising history.
My favorite part of The Pasteurization of France is the story
being a realm of genuine individuals. All of these proposed solutions are, to my mind, the simple unearned positing of
being a realm of genuine individuals. All of these proposed solutions are, to my mind, the simple unearned positing of