OOO'S ABANDON OF SPECULATION ABOUT THE REAL

Imagine a contemporary philosophy whose theses are totally counter-intuitive, verging on the ridiculous, denying reality to even the most familiar objects of every day experience. Suppose further that no method is given to support or to test such unfamiliar assertions, other than an appeal to an intellectual intuition that is to say the least not universally shared. How can one make such a philosophy seem tenable? One method is to avoid comparing this philosophy to the world, to bypass considering whether its theses are true, and to engage principally in meta-discussions. One does not examine the lineaments of the world it projects, and instead immerses it in a series of bookish comparisons with philosophical positions that can be related to it historically and/or formally.

Harman's OOO is just such a philosophy. It denies the reality of every single aspect of our experience, including that of time. Yet paradoxically Harman accuses other philosophies of losing sight of the concrete world of objects, and of being incapable of explaining change. Far from provoking hilarity, such a revision of our most basic assumptions has encountered adhesion not onlyamong artists, literary theorists, anthropologists, architects, and digital artisans, but also among a dispersed but vocal community of philosophers.The most frequent response has been to welcome Harman's contribution and to discourse learnedly about the "great promise" of OOO if only it could be freed of its residual Platonism. One writes five or ten or fifty pages on the "problem of temporal relations" in Harman's OOO, comparing his view to that of Heidegger, Whitehead, Latour, and of course to Kant and to Aristotle. Thus a sort of "meta-credence" is given not just to an impossible series of unsupported and wildly implausible theses, but also to one's own scholarly competence.

I am in fact in favour of such seemingly crazy leaps of speculation, and I believe that without them there would be no progress not just in philosophy, but also in the arts and the science, and in life in general. Counter-intuitive speculation what the philosopher of science Feyerabend discusses under the name of “counter-induction”, arguing that it is a key methodological procedure in the conduct ofscience. He demonstrates that many important figures in the history of science, including Galileo and Einstein made use of counter-inductive hypotheses and went against the evidence of the senses and the findings of observation, and had to do so in order to open up implicit common sense assumptions to critique and modification. However, he emphasised that counter-inductive manoeuvres were to be used in view of increasing testability and of improving our knowledge of the real. Counter-induction for its own sake, leading to hypotheses that are then protected from all criticism, counter-inductive speculation that misrepresents itself as its opposite, as “naiveté” (see the beginning of Harman’s THE FOURFOLD OBJECT) is to be excluded as increasing the already considerable burden of dogmatism and immobilism in the world.

What I object to in the case of Harman's philosophy is the immunising procedure of learnedly discussing OOO at the meta-level by comparing it to other more or less similar hypotheses forming a contextual array. Not only does this serve to defuse criticism, but it also dilutes our apprehension of the theory’s craziness, as it seems to be just one variation of an extended array of more or less equally tenable positions. This comparatist meta-assemblage commentary “de-crazifies” the conjecture, and reinforces its subtraction from all tests, even conceptual ones.

Thus it is that Harman’s OOO is rarely stated without a deceptive rhetorical wrapping. However, its principle ideas lead to extremely unacceptable consequences. For Harman everything we perceive and know is illusion, belonging to a "sensual" realm of "utter shams". In particular, time is an illusion. Literature, science, common sense are all a dream. History is a dream. Change is a dream. Real change is impossible. Objects cannot be distinguished by any known, perceived, or imaginableproperty or relation. Objects withdraw from relation. Mathematical relations are no exception. Objects are non-relational. Difference is no exception, not even bare numerical difference. There is only one object (in a non-relational, and therefore non-numerical sense of “one”). This object is

cognized by intellectual intuition, its very existence a bold conjecture, in plain words an unsupported guess. The conjecture not only is not supported, it cannot be supported, since there is no referential and no inferential relation going from the unreal to the real, as the real is non-relational (“withdrawn”).

One often fails to note that Harman's thesis is not “Objects withdraw from each other”, but “Objectswithdraw from relation”. Time as we know it in the common sense world and in modern science is relational, containing chronological, kinetic, and dynamic relations, thus Harman correctly deaws the conclusion that time is unreal. Unfortunately Harman fails to see that the same applies to space, to any space that we may perceive or conceive, so he cannot hold on to space to mitigate the non-relationality of absolute withdrawal. Arithmetic too is relational, therefore his objects are non-numerical. Given his theory of allusion we may talk about the “one” object, but even this use of “one” is a metaphor.In a very interesting blog post Jon Cogburn seems to imply that his article written in collaboration with Mark Allan Ohm, ACTUAL QUALITIES OF IMAGINATIVE THINGS, contains a reply to Nathan Brown's critique of Harman's OOO as being conceptually incoherent. Cogburn and Ohm's article puts emphasis on the historical problem context for OOO and on the progression of arguments. This context and argument based approach is very commendable. But as to the ontology of OOO, the text remains very much on the meta-meta-level. They compare and contrast 3 sorts of OOO: withdrawal ontology (Harman), capacity metaphysics (Bryant, Cogburn, and Silcox), differential ontology (Garcia).

However Cogburn and Ohm do not say much about the actual ontologies, especially Harman’s (despite Brown’s main point being the conceptual incoherence of Harman’s OOO). They then go onto say that these 3 positions are “pure” ontologies giving rise to a multitude of “regional” ontologies. I am glad that they say so, as this has been my analysis from the very beginning of my writing on the subject, that Harman’s OOO is not so much an ontology as a meta-ontology. So I am happy to receive indirect confirmation from them on this point.

A second thesis that I argue for is that the by now classic “withdrawal” ontology is in its very natureincompatible with regional ontologies, unless they are asserted as belonging to the realm of illusion,to the domain of “phantoms and simulacra” as Harman calls it in his BELLS AND WHISTLES. This tension is also what Nathan Brown’s discussion adumbrates. Cogburn and Ohm give indirect credence to this in their discussion of Harman’s possible counter-critique of capacity metaphysics asreductionist.

This confirms as well a third thesis of mine, that capacity metaphysics is not in fact a “pure” ontology in Harman’s terms, but is already only one possible instantiation of Harman’s meta-ontology (I have constantly made this claim in comparing Bryant’s and Harman’s ontologes). That is to say that capacity metaphysics is a concrete instantiation of pure OOO, and so is necessarily in conflict with its basic principles, and must necessarily be criticised by Harman's OOO as being reductionist, despite its being at a higher level of generality than the various regional ontologies.

Cogburn and Ohm's exposition of these three ontologies, despite remaining fairly allusive, does not dispel the claim of conceptual incoherence, but rather confirms it. There is no way out of this problem as long as one retains Harman’s notion of absolute withdrawal. Cogburn and Ohm do a great job of explaining withdrawal in terms of a primacy of normative modal properties and relations. But absolute withdrawal doubles up not just objects (into real and sensual) but also doubles properties and relations. Such a concept of withdrawal produces too much ontological clutter, and Harman's real objects, properties, and relations do not only multiply entities unnecessarily by providing them all with inaccessible duplicates, they also de-temporalise the world, whereas Cogburn and Ohm's alethic and deontic possibilities and permissibilities comport a temporal aspect. This is behind their unwillingness to take on Harman’s full-blown fourfold ontology.

Thus Cogburn and Ohm confirm my tentative suggestion that one possible way out of Harman's aporia of the real as an a-temporal innaccessible realm of duplicates of sensual entities (where "sensual" means scientific, social and common sense) would have to be dropping the notion of absolute withdrawal. However one must not ignore the price that must be paid for that. The price is the recognition that Harman is talking past himself i.e. that Harman as meta-metaphysician (ontology of withdrawal) is talking past himself as metaphysician (ontology of autonomous objects)and vice versa.

A higher price for absolute withdrawal is paid in what Cogburn and Ohm euphemistically call “externalizing”, and that is, in Harman’s case, the generalization of the bifurcation of nature into every single interaction. If as they call it “the advent of Garcia” helps them in their struggle to redefine OOO as an autonomy ontology involving only weak or relative withdrawal rather than a withdrawal meta-ontology, I can see the advantage in they may find in insisting on the importance of that movement.

We are now witnessing the entry of OOO into a new phase, that of established paradigm for a wide ranging series of comparisons that presuppose the conceptual coherence of its basic theses. Harman's particular ideas can even be safely contested on the basis of the object-orientation that they express without exhausting. An object-attitude is now more important than any particular thesis, as articles like Cogburn and Ohm's, and books like Peter Gratton's, present OOO as an array of options within the wider array of Speculative Realism.

Graham Harman's theses are absurd: this is an open secret, and none of his major acolytes contests the fact of this absurdity. Invisible, untouchable, inaccessible phantomatic "real" objects, in the name of which OOO can declare that the common sense table, the scientific table, and the sociological table are unreal, mere shams. Time itself declared to be unreal by means of a method ofobjectal intuition that cannot be specified, yet alone justified. A pseudo-concept of absolute "withdrawal" whose definition cannot be clearly stated without its self-refuting nature being apparent to all. One of the most simplistic abstract and static ontologies imaginable packaged as its opposite. Nobody believes this pseudo-philosophical abracadabra, and noone makes any attempt to defend it.

Hence the almost complete absence of any critical discussion of fundamental concepts and theses. Does Levi Bryant reject every major thesis of Harman's ontology? So be it - as long as he keeps to the object-attitude, OOO has been not contested but supplemented, not refuted but enriched, not weakened but reinforced and protected by the addition of a further variant. Yet variation inside the disciplinary matrix of a pre-validated framework is not individuation, it is merely a supplement of normalisation.

When one begins to see the mimetic resonances between an array made up of a seemingly dispersedensemble of blogs that are content to refer to each other only sporadically, one is properly horrified by the pretence of scholarly objectivity and the affectation of academic reference and argument. Letan unknowing enquirer enter into this charmed collegial circle and he must either admire the beautiful clothes of the emperor or suffer the mimetic defence strategy of sneer, snob, and silent squeeze.

How does one choose one day to become OOO? How can it seem that one's unrecompensed fidelityto Lacan or to Derrida or to Turing can be seamlessly transformed into a more narcissistically lucrative investment in a ridiculous ontology that relies on systematic ambiguity and intellectual equivocation to entice people into the adoption of a toxic lexic of empty passwords and pseudo-arguments? Do the more experienced acolytes not see how tame, domesticated and possessive they have become? Let someone come along who is not impressed by their tutelary vocabulary and references, and they quickly lose their much vaunted bonhomie and generosity, their collegial politeness.

Often I am told: "If you do not like these ideas do not criticise them, do not try to discuss them, go

elsewhere, or be damned as the atrabilious incarnation of the negative thinker when real thought is positive". Only favorable interpretations allowed: keep off the hermeneutical grass!" However, suchadmonitions only show how far their proferers have wandered from the well-springs of philosophy. My individuation as a human being and as a philosopher requires that I fight back against the forcesof disindividuation that I encounter on my path. The very terms of this "psychic" defence that is employed in the place of argument only confirms the diagnostic of OOO as a pathological formation, one that requires curative attention.

It will be apparent from the above analysis that I cannot agree with the widespread impression that object-oriented ontology provides the metaphysics that is lacking to actor-network theory. On the contrary, I think that Latour’s ANT is totally incosistent with Harman’s OOO. Bruno Latour can be seen as a modern day Heraclitus. His system proposes a pluralistic diachronic ontology that gives primacy to “being-as-other” (including both alterity and alteration) over being-as-being. Graham Harman is a contemporary Parmenides whose synchronic metaphysics excludes time and the objects of common sense and of the sciences as illusory, prohibiting change and plurality.

Parmenides enshrined the split between the way of Truth and the way of Falsehood. The way of Truth speaks of the real as a withdrawn unchanging non-multiple block; the way of Falsehood is ourillusory world of change and multiplicity. Graham Harman’s OOO is a Parmenidean vision where none of our ordinary “sensual” concepts apply. Neither time nor space (in the sensual sense) nor number as we know it are pertinent to the withdrawn real.

This conflict with experience, as long as it is acknowledged openly and not passed over in silence orobstinately denied, is not a problem for me. We need strongly divergent theories and counter-intuitive hypotheses in order to break thought out of its ruts, and to open our minds to new interpretations. We need counter-induction to make our automatic, taken-for-granted interpretations visible, and to allow us not only to become aware of these entrenched interpretations and to criticisethem, but also to replace them with more accurate and more satisfying hypotheses and interpretations.

The problem arises when such a counter-intuitive interpretation is developped a priori, in total abstraction from any testable consequences. A bold and fruitful instrument for the criticism of established views turns into a dogma even more inflexible and untouchable than the interpretations that it is trying to bring to conscious awareness and open to test and to transformation. Harman’s bold speculative leap is immediately ossified by being removed from all scientific knowledge and empirical test. Latour’s speculative ontology is, at least in principle, open to what he calls the “protest” of experience. Harman’s system allows no such protest to get beyond the veil of withdrawal.

Speculative Realism is now used as an argumentative shield by Harman to great effect. Just as in quantum theory an elementary particle is never to be found in isolation but only surrounded by a cloud of virtual particles, Harman’s OOO can never be approached on its own, but only as surrounded by a cloud of virtual philosophies popping into and out of existence as the argument demands. One cannot discuss Harman’s OOO without at the same time discussing Morton’s versionand Bryant’s and Speculative Realism and Meillassoux.

Is Graham Harman’s OOO misanthropic? The quick answer is “No!”, and the justification is easily given. OOO itself is devoid of wholesale normative judgements, having consigned such valuation tovicarious interfacing with the sensual realm. But this very explanation gives us the means to reversethat judgement. Harman’s OOO is misanthropic because humans, instances of the only concept of humanity that we know, belong, according to this system, to the sensual (or unreal) realm, as does our concept of humanity. “Anthropic” is always sensual (although the converse does not hold). Realobjects “withdraw” from the human, and in several places (cf. THE THIRD TABLE) Harman explicitly accuses the “humanities” of reductionism. For the same reason, Harman’s OOO is dark. Real objects withdraw, and we cannot know them, only allude to them darkly, after a dark ascesis.

Harman’s OOO is not just anti-humanist, in its de-centering of ontology away from the primacy of the human, but misanthropic. Human beings, instances of the only concept of humanity that we know, belong, according to this system, to the sensual (or unreal) realm, as does our concept of humanity. “Anthropic” is a sensual predicate, refering to the realm of “utter sham”, of simulacra. Real objects “withdraw” from the human, and Harman explicitly accuses the “humanities” of missing the real table and falling into reductionism. For the same reason, Harman’s OOO is dark. Real objects withdraw, and we cannot know them, only allude to them darkly, after a dark ascesis.

Any “worth” or value that can be granted to human beings is necessarily sensual worth, and thus must be understood under erasure, as illusory. Harman deftly deploys familiar terms, but each predicate invoked is to be understood in terms of the double language of OOO: the esoteric (real) and exoteric (sensual) sense. In the exoteric sense, the world is an abundance of objects, always more than our encounters with them allow us to apprehend. However, in the esoteric doctrine the sensual abundance of our experience and the conceptual abundance of our knowledge (whether scientific, humanistic, or common sense) is illusion. The "real" object is an abstract monster, it is invisible, untouchable, unknowable.

Feyerabend vigorously combated such Parmenidean ontologies as being both conceptually incoherent and, more importantly, ethically inhumane. In CONQUEST OF ABUNDANCE he writes:

"According to Parmenides, human beings, or “the many” as he calls them somewhat contemptuously, “drift along, deaf as well as blind, disturbed and undecided,” guided by “habit based on much experience” (Diels-Kranz, Die Fragmente der Vorsokratiker [Berlin: Weidmannsche Buchhandlung, 1934], fragments B6.7, B7.3, and B6.6 ff.). Their fears and joys, their political actions, the affection they have for their friends and children, the attempts they make to improve their own lives and the lives of others, and their views about the nature of such improvements are chimeras" (270).

One may compare this with Harman's affirmation:

"Human knowledge deals with simulacra or phantoms, and so does human practical action, but so do billiard balls when they smack each other and roll across a green felt phantom. We can develop this theory further in an armchair, a library, a waterbed, or a casino, but waiting for empirical resultswill never settle the issue, since all such results will be grasped through a prior metaphysical decision: an onto-theological model in which good images are the epistemological foundation of thereal" (BELLS AND WHISTLES, 12).

Intellectuals tend to see themselves as missioned by humanity to express and articulate its knowledge, its needs and desires, and the principles on which they are based. They are thus also missioned to humanity to guide it on the right way to truth and virtue. Feyerabend argues that such views are not only naïve and simplistic, they are also inhumane and dangerous.

These views are naïve and simplistic because they are examples of the pretention of intellectuals to speak in the name of humanity to justify the imposition of their categories and values without consulting the opinions and desires of the vast mass who are being imposed upon. In the eyes of intellectuals such as Parmenides and Plato, and Harman, the “many” live in a world of illusion, cut of from true knowledge and true value.

These views are also inhumane and dangerous because they ignore their own shadow: “Philosophy is not a single Good Thing that is bound to enrich human existence; it is a witches’ brew, containingsome rather deadly ingredients. Numerous assaults on life, liberty, and happiness have had a strong philosophical backing.” Further, to impose their categories in a complex and variegated world intellectuals need the backing of power, influential institutions, government agencies and apparatuses, to give their directives force, to browbeat and brainwash people into submission.

For Feyerabend, the past is no dead matter to be studied and embalmed in intellectual history, but a living repository of values and ideas that can be drawn on at any moment to contest and even overthrow the status quo:

“There is no idea, however ancient and absurd, that is not capable of improving our knowledge” and, we must add, of enriching our life (cf AGAINST METHOD p33).

So in order to criticise and go beyond the Platonic tradition that is still with us today, Feyerabend turns to the Greek world before Plato, before Parmenides, and finds material for the improvement ofour knowledge and the enrichment of our life in the Homeric world.. In Homer, concepts such as the virtues are not static universal essences but complex assemblages depending on and varying with circumstances, best illustrated by examples rather than defined by principles, embedded in community practices and skills rather than in the autonomous will of the rational agent:

“The Homeric epics reflect this situation. They do not define, they use examples, including cases that show, without explicitly saying so, under what circumstances a virtue turns into a vice” (ibid, paragraph 5).

Virtues are not simple unambiguous entities, they are not only complex and context-dependent they also have their shadow side. Homer can show Diomedes’ courage sometimes veering towards madness, and Odysseus’s wisdom and intelligence merging into cunning and ruse. The virtues’ complexity implies also their openness, we can enrich them with our imagination and our spontaneity, we can apply them to new situations or in new ways in familiar situations. For Feyerabend, the Homeric epics do not define or regulate, they do not submit things to rigid rules and universal principles, they use examples and cases, their appropriation and their projection into other circumstances. In Deleuzian terms, we can say that for Homer:

“the universal does not exist, but only the singular, singularity, exists. “Singularity” is not the individual, it is the case, the event, the potential (potentiel). or rather, the distribution of potentials in a given matter ” (DIALOGUES II, p160).

In such an open field of examples and cases, of events and potentials, of singularities and their prolongations, the best way to learn is by immersion, we are learning moral (and perceptual and cognitive skills) not methods and algorithms. The best style to convey such immersive concepts, remarks Feyerabend, is not a systematic account aligning “conceptual artifacts” (which seemed to him a particular, and often very superficial, literary form) but the Homeric (and Biblical) style of telling stories. STORIES FROM PAOLINO’S TAPES is from this point of view a fitting form for Feyerabend’s exposition of various virtues and their exemplars.

One of Feyerabend’s aims from very early on was to outline a theory of knowledge that would present the sciences and the humanities on the same plane, as “different parts of one and the same enterprise.” (NATURPHILOSOPHIE, p347). He imagined this theory as more like a manual of rhetoric containing various illuminating examples, useful rules of thumb, and diverse observations and remarks on the suitability of the rules to various circumstances. He wanted to avoid “easy syntheses” and “facile generalisations”. He claimed never really to have achieved that goal, but he wrote and spoke out of that guiding intention, in order to be true to the abundance of the world.

Harman’s concept of “withdrawal”, on the other hand, is not an innovative revisioning of familiar phenomena, but represents an incredible simplification of the world that renders it computable while dispensing us of the need to individuate it and individuate ourselves with it. There can be no withdrawal without abundance (in Feyerabend’s sense in his CONQUEST OF ABUNDANCE), but abundance can and does exist without withdrawal. “Withdrawal” is tied to a calulative or computational understanding of Being. The sensual object, demoted to the status of “utter sham”, is de-valorised ontologically in favour of the real object that is purely intelligible. Abstractions are given primacy over what makes a concrete difference in our lives.

Despite its promises, Harman’s OOO does not bring us closer to the richness and complexity of the

real world but in fact replaces the multiplicitous and variegated world with a set of bloodless and lifeless abstractions – his unknowable and untouchable, “ghostly”, objects. Harman’s exposition of his system may begin with a preliminary gesture of recognising the multiplicity and abundance of the world, but he rapidly reduces these concretely given multiple elements to overarching “emergent” unities that exclude other approaches to and understandings of the world (cf. THE THIRD TABLE) – OOO’s objects are the “only real” objects.

Harman does not really begin from “naiveté”. He produces and persuasively imposes a highly technical concept of object such that it replaces the familiar objects of the everyday world, and the less familiar objects of science with something “deeper” and “inaccessible”. He then proceeds to equivocate with the familiar connotations and associations of “object” to give the impression that heis a concrete thinker, when his philosophy takes us to new heights of abstraction: the real is the unknowable, ineffable, untouchable object that withdraws. According to Harman’s THE THIRD TABLE (page 12):

The world is filled primarily not with electrons or human praxis, but with ghostly objects withdrawing from all human and inhuman access.

Yet Harman’s OOO has legislated that its object is the only real object. In THE THIRD TABLE Harman calls his table, as compared to the table of everyday life and the scientist’s table, “the only real one” (10), and “the only real table” (11). As for the everyday table and the scientific table: “both are equally unreal“, both are “utter shams” (6). “Whatever we capture, whatever we sit at or destroy is not the real table” (12). And he accuses others of “reductionism”! Harman constantly conflates ontological and epistemological theses while proudly claiming the contrary. To say that the real object is unknowable (“the real is something that cannot be known”, 12) is an epistemological thesis. As is the claim that the object we know, the everyday or the scientific object,is unreal.

Harman needs his “sensual” objects, despite being obliged to declare them unreal (“utter shams”) because he has an impoverished notion of reality, and also of scientific research. The bifurcation operated by the notion of “withdrawal” is too absolute (there are no degrees of withdrawal) and thussplits the world a priori into two (real/sensual) realms. Harman’s system is too globalising with its dualisms to be able to deal with the fine-grained distinctions that come up in our experience.

OOO de-valorises the sensual qualities to mere secondary status . Harman’s real objects are not sensible but only intelligible in the sense that they can only be objects of our intellection. They are transcendent abstractions (unknowable and untouchable, according to Harman). Both for the Homeric understanding (i.e. prior to Parmenides’ invention of metaphysics with its bifurcation of Being into real and apparent) and for our post-Nietzschean world things do not withdraw, rather they assemble and abound.