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Artforum, summer 2015, pp. 318-23

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Those Obscure

Objects of Desire

Andrew Cole on the Uses and Abuses of Object-Oriented

Ontology and Speculative Realism

OVER THE PAST TEN YEARS, people in all manner of disciplines have turned to things:

to matter, stuff, obdurate objects. Often loosely grouped under the rubric new

materialisms, these strains of thought have captured the imagination of artists and

critics alike. The art world just cant quit them, apparentlya perverse situation, since

art and art history have, of course, already devoted hundreds of years to thinking

precisely about objects as objects. But are things really as they seem? In the following

pages, scholar ANDREW COLE takes the measure of the two new-materialist

philosophies that have come to dominate the art-world conversation, arguing that

object-oriented ontology and speculative realism are beset by contradictions, misguided

assumptions, and outright fallacies. [eds.]


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[320]

A BRICK HOUSE CRUMBLESin the village of Veselovka, Russia, just a few miles

from Kaliningrad. Its said that Immanuel Kant had something to do with this house

back when the region was part of Prussia (and when Kaliningrad was known as

Knigsberg), but what, exactly, is not clear. Ambiguities such as whether the

philosopher really lived here didnt stop someone from regarding the house as his

and tagging it with the declaration . These words, spray-painted in green

and garnished with a groovy heart and a cute flower beneath, were translated in

English-speaking media as Kant is a moron.

You rarely hear the words irony and Kant used in the same sentence, but whats

ironic about this vandalism is the fact that the house isnt Kantsthe existing

structure dates from the nineteenth century. Only the foundations are contemporary

with the philosopher, who lived in the area in the late 1740s. What we have here, I

think, is a vivid illustration of how the critique of Kantwhether inscribed in graffiti

or couched in academic proseusually misses its mark. You will often hear

contemporary critics say that Kant is a moron owing to this or that failing of his, but

this assessment almost always involves a misreadinga misidentification, as itwereof his philosophy. In such cases, the foundations of Kants system remain

untouched and solid as ever. You see, even in death Kant is the reigning All-

DestroyerDer Allzermalmende, as his friends called him, ribbing him for his

annoying habit of exiting debates completely unscathed and triumphant.

Yes, Kantian moral philosophy leaves something to be desired, as when the

philosopher exemplifies the categorical imperative by asking readers to imagine

having sex near the gallowseasy to say for a person who never got laid. But Kants

epistemology, in particular his insight into how we experience the world, remains

foundational. He tells us that ours is a world of phenomena, the infinite array of

objects and events we experience, and he says also that the world is composed of

noumena we cannot experience, the equally infinite number of things that exist, and


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processes that transpire, apart from our minds thinking them. These two domains

are radically different but nonetheless linked, inasmuch as noumena are the basis for

the phenomena. Of course, theres far more to Kants critical philosophy than that,

as well soon see. For example, we cant ignore such famously unfraught topics as

thinking the unthinkable. But this is the gist, and enough to get us going.

Our interest here is in showing that Kant doesnt crumble like his ersatz house

(though props to the house for lasting this long). In fact, Kants ideas remain a

crucial component of recent philosophies that try hard to vitiate his philosophy.

Object-oriented ontology is one such philosophy, as is its cousin, speculative realism.

What is object-oriented ontology, however? You might surmise that its a return to

the object qua objecta renewed focus on the composition, vitality, materiality,

autonomy, wonder, and durability of objects large and small, near and far. In this

sense, you could say that any discipline or practice is object oriented, including not

only art history and criticism but also architecture, graphic design, museum studies,

archaeology, science and the philosophy of science, book history, literary criticism

and rhetoric, and the culinary artsindeed, any field of study whose subject is

objects. This crude understanding of object-oriented ontology also applies to

speculative realism,which may explain why both have become irresistibly appealingto the art world.

But object-oriented ontology, as it happens, isntall that. Instead, it is, well, an

ontologyand, as such, involves a set of theses about All That Is. Lets dive in,

surveying its three major tenets. First, everything is an object, including you and

each of your thoughts. Second, and accordingly, no object relates to any other

object, because the universe itself is devoid of all relation. Why is there no relation

in the universe? Its because objects sever relations with every other object and

withdraw into themselves to become self-subsisting, autonomous beings. Its also

because relation is typically a human mode of apprehending, describing, and

interacting with the world. Given that not every object is a human, though every

human is an object, you cant have an object-oriented ontology if humans are at the


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center of it. Such an anthropocentric object-oriented ontology would be a

contradiction in terms, because objects are not a means to our ends: They are

meaningful whether or not we perceive them. Thirdand finallyall objects are

equal and, ontologically speaking, on the same plane. You, a speck of flea shit, an

electric chair, and a solar flare are all equal objects.

NOT EVERY SCHOLAR, critic, curator, or practitioner adheres to these major points,

much less retails them, when declaring an object-oriented approach to this or that

field of study or aesthetic endeavor. You see this quite a lot: People follow a trend,

but only in spirit. For that reason, it might be helpful to think about this new

philosophy as a philosophyto look at the letter of its laws and [321] see how it

fares against the likes of Kant, the All-Destroyer. Why this focus on Kant? To be sure,

object-oriented ontology builds on the work of several thinkers (Heidegger, Husserl,

Whitehead, Latour, even Deleuze), but it devotes much of its energy trying to get

out from under Kant. Does it succeed?

That sounds like a rhetorical question. But its earnest. For no sooner does Graham

Harman, the founder of object-oriented ontology, start to divide objects into

different kinds with various sorts of qualities than we begin to wonder whether wearent in Kants domicile. Harman establishes the basic elements of an object-

oriented metaphysics in his short, lucid book The Quadruple Object(2011), arguing

that, while there may be an infinity of objects in the cosmos, they come in only two

kinds: the real object that withdraws from all experience, and the sensual object that

exists only in experience. And along with these we also have two kinds of qualities:

the sensual qualities found in experience, and the real ones Husserl says are

accessible intellectually rather than through sensuous intuition.1So we have a

distinction between the real object and the sensual object. The former is

withdrawn, autonomous, and free of all relation, and the latter is available to our

perception. Hasnt this been thought already by Kant, whose insight in the

Transcendental Analytic put forward in his Critique of Pure Reason(1781/1787)


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we make of it). Rather, he understood that the problem of relation is exactly the

same as the problem of the thing-in-itself: There are relations in the noumenal

world, but we cannot think them directly because we have access only to

phenomenal relations, the imperfect representations of noumenal relations. The

human version of relation, in other words, isnt the same as noumenal relation, and

isnt the only kind of relation. This idea is all over Kants lectures in metaphysics,

which none of the object-oriented ontologists seem to know.

The epistemological gambit of object-oriented ontology is to say that object

relations are thinkable because they are real, even if withdrawn and unknowable.

Realism is obviously what you could call this philosophyor, as Harman has it,

weird realism. But realism (weird or otherwise) is a point of view about the world

a human point of view that requires the world to be accessible to us and structured

in such a way that we can think it. Its here that Harmans ten modes of relation

reveal themselves to be equivalent to Kants forms of possible experience. These

ten modes guarantee in advancethat, say, an object somewhere will be sincere to

another object at some point in time, or that an object somewhere will confront

another object three days from now. Even if we arent on[322] the scene,

somewhere in Ohio, observing an object indifferently theorizing another object, wecan know that objects are doing things with other objects and will continue to do so

behind our backs. Now, one might say that Harman has simply extended the Kantian

forms of possible experience to objects, which thus experience other objects in

multifarious ways. That would be partly right, foraccording to this philosophy

objects themselves have experiences, as you will see below. But theres more: The

fact that we can also think these object relations means that the relations are

already thinkablealready correlated to our minds and thus already something we

knowabout the world. The much maligned correlationism that object-oriented

ontology hopes to expunge from its thinking is in fact its preeminent feature.

THIS QUESTIONof thinkingversus knowingis an important one, because it points

to further Kantian problems lingering at the center of a purported anti-Kantianism.


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For example, Harman urges us to reject the idea that we cannot think something

without thinking itthat is, to reject the notion that we can only think what is

available to us as phenomena we experience.7He asks us instead to perform a

thought experiment by thinking what you cannot think, such as the tree outside of

thought.8Here, Harman attempts to get the human mind out of the picture entirely

by resorting to a realism that assures us that we can think objects as those objects

are, outside our minds.

These are intriguing claims because they are Kantian at heart. Kant was obsessed

with precisely these questions of what we can think and what we can experience,

what is intelligible to us and what is knowable. You could say that one feature of his

intellectual biography, ever since the writing of his inaugural dissertation, shows Kant

offering a variety of opinions about how we can think the unthinkable noumena. He

tells us early in the Critique of Pure Reasonthat to thinkan object and to knowan

object are by no means the same thing.9This distinction between thinking and

knowing is crucial for Kant, for it bespeaks the difference between thinking what you

cannot experience firsthand, such as the cinnabar outside of thought, and knowing,

or cognizing, the cinnabar in thought, the cinnabar as you experience it.

Kant goes on to expand the possibilities of thinking what we cannot experience or

know. In fact, his entire Critique of Judgment(1790) is nothing if not an exercise in

extending the possibilities of thinkingnoumena of various kinds: positive, causal,

worldly, natural, human, and divine. He tells us that to think these noumenal

realities, no matter how mundane or sublime, you have to make up your own

concepts and, in short, use whatever imaginative means you have at your disposal.

He suggests we can think the unconditioned from our vantage point in the sensibly

conditioned, using various media as the bridge from here to there: language, poetry,

art, analogy, math, and allusion. This is precisely what Harman and his followers

claim to have invented: We can think the unthinkable if we adopt allusion or other

oblique approaches to the object world we cannot directly experience.10Again,

thats about as Kantian as you can get. Similarly, thespeculative realist Quentin


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Meillassoux says that objects have mathematizable properties that exist equally in

thought as outside itreal properties we can think as they really are. Having studied

a few semesters of advanced calculus, I admit that Alain Badiou is right in saying

that Kant was terrible at math. But he nevertheless tried his hand at it, attempting to

construe extension (after Descartes) as just one way to think the noumenal or, as he

also terms it, the supersensible (bersinnliche) world. Meillassoux, for his part,

broadens the Cartesian insight about extension into a whole thesis about our

mathematical perception of objects, but writes as if Kant had never attempted this

himself.11

The only answer I have for why two voracious readers of philosophy, from whom

many others receive lessons about the history of Western thought, would exhibit

such a partial view of Kant is that either their reading of Kant is incomplete or they

know this about Kant already but arent telling. Ill abstain from answering

definitively, becausebelieving in dialecticsI think its a little of both. Harmans

Kant is only the Kant of the Critique of Pure Reason; Meillassouxs Kant is the Kant

of the critical philosophy. Meillassoux in fact embraces a pre-critical philosophy in

order to revise decisions often considered as infrangible since Kant.12That we are

supposed to look to precritical philosophy as an end run around the critical Kant is acompelling idea for theorists who can sense the persistent mdivalitor

dogmatism of modern thought. Butand this is a pronounced problem in theory

more broadlyit is wrong to uphold the distinction between the pre- and

postcritical, insofar as Kant himself violates the distinction left and right in his work

up to the very end. Contra Meillassoux, we can embrace the critical Kant and still

think the unthinkable, if we so wish.

THERE'S MORE TOthe curriculum of object-oriented ontology. Each object, no

matter what it is, is abstracted in the same way. Each, that is, conforms to a

template: All objects have insides and outsides, interiors and exteriors, depths and

surfaces, andespeciallyessences and accidents. Its here, in the ontologists very

idea of the object, that another contradiction in the philosophy appears. As


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Heidegger, Merleau-Ponty, and Deleuze have shown, each in his own particular style,

the construct of inside/outside in any ontology, whether it concerns objects or

subjects or both, is a function of the old subject/object dualism, which is a dualism

precisely because there is a sovereign subject around to proclaim what makes the

cut, what qualifies as an object or notand whose very perspective on that object

determines what is inside and what out. The point isnt that object-oriented

ontology unwittingly centers an autonomous subject at the heart of objects simply

in the way it tells us to look at objects. Rather, its that Heidegger had already

created a philosophy whose very purpose was to destroy these old ontological

constructions of essences and accidents, interiors and exteriors. Such terms, he

thought, obstruct the genuine thinking of Dasein, or being there in the moment.

This is important because object-oriented ontology claims to be a Heideggerian

philosophy based on select passages in Being and Time(1927). Likewise, the reader

(i.e., Harman) who could discover in Heideggers opaque essay The Thing (1950) a

schematic for quadruple objects must have missed this philosophers poetic

discussion of the jug in that very same paper, along with his caution about realist

perspectives on objects: Science represents something real, by which it is objectively

controlled. Butis this reality the jug? No.13 [323]

Regarding anthropomorphism and anthropocentrism, object-oriented ontology cant

seem to avoid these perspectives after all: The aforementioned modes of relation

fission, fusion, allure, sincerity, theory, confrontation, and so forthare themselves

human-centric. Some of these terms read like authorial observations on the fickle

characters in a novelDickensian descriptions of who is sincere, who is

confrontational, who is alluring, and so forthwhile others, such as theory, denote

contemplation in its most humanly reclusive form. Yet other terms, such as fusion,

recall problems my friend Charlie is trying to solve in the plasma lab where

astrophysicists are creating a miniature star. Fusionevokes the mysterious

supersensible processes in our sun as much as it conjures up the human effort to

duplicate and harness these processes before we destroy the planet with our

capitalism and carbon emissions. Maybe its just me, but fission prompts a similar


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thoughtthis time about whether an atomic bomb is really equal to a doorknob,

or the blasts at Hiroshima and Nagasaki equal to a unicorn. This term requires

some serious epoch, or mental bracketing, for us to picture the pure object relation

its meant to describe.

Can we bracket our thoughts in this fashion, when the father of this practice,

Husserl, could never do it himself, describing (for example) a piece of paper on his

desk but never thinking the paper as the paper really is? To be sure, these new

terms for relation in object-oriented ontology are meant to help us decenter

ourselves as we reflect on objects relating to other objects, forcing us to realize that

a rock cares not a whit about the difference between a nuclear weapon and a

doorknob when it confronts them. But we access this object relation by thinking

about the nameof the relation, and all of these names are decidedly human,

cultural, social, and literarythat is, the names are in fact predicates, chock-full of

meanings you cant unthink or bracket. Contemplate fusionor fission, for example,

and youll soon encounter the problems of production and technology right where

they shouldnt manifestin the object relation. Or think about confrontation and

youll eventually face the politics of what it means to be autonomous, right where

issues of freedom or necessity shouldnt appearin the object relation. This problemextends to the ethics of why we should even think a thoroughly reified world, as

called for by object-oriented ontology, or why we should even fantasize about

objects as scholastic assemblages, Erector Sets of the imagination.

AT THIS STAGE, you could throw up your hands and just admit that Kant was right:

There are object relations, yes, but we cant really know or describe them in detail,

only allude to them in our inevitably human way. Or you could press on, chalking up

these considerable difficulties in naming to the problem of language and solving

them by taking a page from Heidegger, who uses neologisms to refresh the addled

language of philosophythough who really wants to hear more jargon? You could

also consult your local analytic philosopher, who will tell you that metaphysical

mistakes are mistakes in natural language: Artificial languages, anyone? In any event,


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meaning for us nonetheless and becomes ensouled under our gaze. We so admire

the table as a commodity that it magically changes into a thing like no other. It

not only stands with its feet on the ground, but . . . stands on its head, and evolves

out of its wooden brain grotesque ideas, far more wonderful than if it were to begin

dancing of its own free will.18This is what Marx calls the mystical character of the

commoditymystical because we can only think the objects inner properties by

personifying it in a focus so narrow that we ignore the larger drama, the greater

historical process that makes a commodity a commodity, an object an object, and

capitalism capitalism. This is, in short, the metaphysics of capitalism, then as now.

Ours is a time when schools of interpretation ask us to personify and caricature

objects as autonomous and alivewhether they are the objects who speak in the

new so-called vibrant materialism, or objects who fuss and act up in actor-network

theory, or objects with primitive psyches in object-oriented ontology. Is this really

the way to think at this moment? For Marx, at least, this way of thinking about

objects is what keeps capitalism ticking. To adopt such a philosophy, no questions

asked, is fantasycommodity fetishism in academic form. To identify such

philosophy as the metaphysics of capitalism is theory, ever attentive to historys

impress on our imaginations, whatever we may dream.

Andrew Cole,a professor of English atPrinceton University,is the author ofThe

Birth of Theory(University of Chicago Press, 2014).

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NOTES

1. Graham Harman, The Quadruple Object(Alresford, UK: Zero Books, 2011), 49.

2. Immanuel Kant, Critique of Pure Reason, trans. Norman Kemp Smith (New York: St.

Martins Press, 1965), 116.

3. Ibid., 118.

4. Harman, The Quadruple Object, 47, 128.
https://princeton.academia.edu/AndrewColehttps://princeton.academia.edu/AndrewColehttps://english.princeton.edu/people/andrew-colehttps://english.princeton.edu/people/andrew-colehttps://english.princeton.edu/people/andrew-colehttp://press.uchicago.edu/ucp/books/book/chicago/B/bo18008957.htmlhttp://press.uchicago.edu/ucp/books/book/chicago/B/bo18008957.htmlhttp://press.uchicago.edu/ucp/books/book/chicago/B/bo18008957.htmlhttp://press.uchicago.edu/ucp/books/book/chicago/B/bo18008957.htmlhttp://press.uchicago.edu/ucp/books/book/chicago/B/bo18008957.htmlhttp://press.uchicago.edu/ucp/books/book/chicago/B/bo18008957.htmlhttp://press.uchicago.edu/ucp/books/book/chicago/B/bo18008957.htmlhttps://english.princeton.edu/people/andrew-colehttps://princeton.academia.edu/AndrewCole


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5. Ibid., 108.

6. Ibid., 107, 11415.

7. Ibid., 62.

8. Ibid., 6566.

9. Kant, Critique of Pure Reason, 161.

10. Harman, The Quadruple Object, 98.

11. Quentin Meillassoux, After Finitude: An Essay on the Necessity of Contingency, trans. Ray

Brassier (London: Bloomsbury, 2013), 76, 31, 35.

12. Ibid., 26.

13. Martin Heidegger, The Thing, in Poetry, Language, Thought, trans. Albert Hofstadter

(New York: Harper & Row, 1971), 170.

14. Harman, The Quadruple Object, 103.

15. Ibid., 110.

16. Ibid., 103.

17. Ibid., 133.

18. Karl Marx, Capital: A Critique of Political Economy, vol. 1, trans. Ben Fowkes

(Harmondsworth, UK: Penguin, 1976), 16364.

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