Graham Harman

The Well-Wrought Broken Hammer: Object-Oriented Literary Criticism

This article sketches the outlines of an object-oriented literary criticism, contrasting it with several familiar critical schools. We begin with a summary of two new philosophical trends: speculative realism and object-oriented philosophy. The latter approach offers new arguments for the autonomy of objects from their relations, and allows us to consider whether various approaches to literature do justice to this autonomy. The New Criticism insists on the independence of the text, but only at the price of destroying the independence of its internal elements, due to its excessively holistic vision of the textual interior. New Historicism famously embeds the text in its cultural and material surroundings, thereby over-relationizing it, which is found to be philosophically untenable. Deconstruction leads to similar difficulties through its misinterpretation of identity as a form of presence, thereby disallowing any independence of things. In closing, some suggestions are offered for new methods of criticism capable of living up to the unity and autonomy of both the text and its internal elements.

I am also of the opinion that materialism must be destroyed

This paper criticizes two forms of philosophical materialism that adopt opposite strategies but end up in the same place. Both hold that individual entities must be banished from philosophy. The first kind is ground floor materialism, which attempts to dissolve all objects into some deeper underlying basis; here, objects are seen as too shallow to be the truth. The second kind is first floor materialism, which treats objects as naive fictions gullibly posited behind the direct accessibility of appearances or relations; here, objects are portrayed as too deep to be the truth. One major thesis of this paper is that these two forms of materialism are parasitical on one another and need each others resources to make sense of the world. The second major thesis is that both forms of materialism thereby stand condemned, and that philosophy must be rebuilt from the individual objects that the two forms of materialism disdain. These points are made through a detailed consideration of the book Every Thing Must Go by the analytic structural realists James Ladyman and Don Ross, which has gained a surprising following among some speculative realists in continental philosophy. Ladyman and Ross claim to preserve objects by treating them as “real patterns”, but they do so at the price of destroying their autonomous reality. Furthermore, they are unable to tell us whether the mathematical structures they see as the basis of human knowledge are also the basis of reality itself. In short, their ontology is scientism for scientisms sake (or ‘Bunsen burner realism’) and must be eliminated in favor of a genuine realist metaphysics of objects.

Entanglement and Relation: A Response to Bruno Latour and Ian Hodder

In this article Graham Harman responds to pieces by the philosopher of science Bruno Latour and the archaeologist Ian Hodder in the same issue of New Literary History. A brief summary is given of Latour’s intellectual career, including his recent transition from actor-network theory to the “modes of existence” project. An asymmetry in Latour’s approach is also identified: though he abolishes both nature and culture as distinct realms of being, he retains and expands the “foritself” of culture even while abolishing the “in-itself” of nature. An opposite problem is identified in Hodder’s approach, which takes account of the virtue of the nonrelationality of things, but which retains the very nature/culture dualism that Latour had succeeded in dismantling. This leads Hodder in the direction of an untenable politics guided by the model of prehistoric humans uncontaminated by excessive dependence on things.

Realism without Materialism

After years of obsession with written texts, continental philosophy has recently raised the colorful banners of materialism and realism. The two terms are often linked by a hyphen or a slash. And yet everyone vaguely senses a difference between them, as can be detected in the more fashionable status currently occupied by materialism than by realism. This article will begin by driving an explicit and (I hope) permanent wedge between the two terms. It will conclude by asserting the minority position, exalting realism at the expense of materialism. Nothing could be more urgent for present-day philosophy, which for two centuries has lost touch with all the specific real and fictional entities that populate the cosmos. My claim is that reality is object-oriented, and that a corresponding shift is needed from the analysis of consciousness and written words towards an ontology of dogs, trees, flames, monuments, societies, ghosts, gods, pirates, coins, and rubies. Despite appearances to the contrary, materialism can only ruin this shift. For it either undermines objects from below, reducing them downward to their material underpinnings, or it overmines them from above, reducing them upward to their appearance for human beings. Both strategies have abundant prestige, but both are disasters, since they strip objects of their autonomy and enslave them to a less worthy principle. To make this case will require some initial precision in how we define realism and materialism. Once this labor is accomplished, the reader will enjoy the spectacle of numerous past and present philosophies collapsing into one of two basic fallacies. What survives this collapse is a promising new standpoint in which the jaded and cynical human observer of recent centuries is dethroned in favor of a landscape riddled with countless mysterious entities. In this way, philosophy regains much of its ancient vigor and innocence. 1. Realism There have been flirtations from time to time with the word “materialism” in continental philosophy. “Realism” has been less lucky. If we consider that the continental tradition arose largely from phenomenology, then the reasons for this become obvious—both Edmund Husserl and Martin Heidegger usually express disdain for the crusty old dispute

Dwelling With the Fourfold

This article explains Martin Heideggers notorious fourfold (Geviert) as the intersection of two distinct dualisms in Heideggers philosophy. The role of the fourfold in Heideggers concept of “the thing” is discussed in especial detail.

The McLuhans and Metaphysics

In his 1988 preface to Laws of Media, Eric McLuhan calls the tetrad ‘the single biggest intellectual discovery not only of our time, but of at least the last couple of centuries’ (pp. ix–x). He has not backed away from these claims in recent years, avowing that he ‘[does] not retract one iota of that statement about the importance of our laws’.1 Yet there is an obvious disjunction between his devotion to the tetrads and the lack of intensity with which others have pursued them. His father’s theories of technology reached their popular zenith during the 1960s, with a later resurgence during the Internet boom of the early 1990s. But in neither case did Marshall McLuhan attain a status in the intellectual canon befitting ‘the single biggest intellectual discovery of… at least the last couple of centuries’. Even McLuhan’s fans rarely devote much energy to the tetrad, despite his son’s gripping narrative of how the tetrad was meant to summarize his father’s work as a whole.

An outline of object-oriented philosophy.

This article summarises the principles of object-oriented philosophy and explains its similarities with, and differences from, the outlook of the natural sciences. Like science, the object-oriented position avoids the notion (quite common in philosophy) that the human-world relation is the ground of all others, such that scientific statements about the world would only be statements about the world as it is for humans. But unlike science, object-oriented metaphysics treats artificial, social, and fictional entities in the same way as natural ones, and also holds that the world can only be known allusively rather than directly.

Asymmetrical Causation: Influence without Recompense

This is an article on metaphysics, but I have tried to make it both clear and interesting to those with little background in philosophy. The article develops a model of the world that is notably weird, and therefore potentially fascinating to everyone, just as ghosts and shipwrecks are universally intriguing. My topic is causation, which I hold to be an asymmetrical relationship displaying many properties of a non-reciprocal gift. Though we generally assume that impact is mutual, and that every action has an equal and opposite reaction, these suppositions arise from a narrowly physical concept of causation. As I see it, there is no such thing as reciprocity; influence is never mutual, but always leads in just one direction. This may sound paradoxical, since it is obvious that two people or cities can shape one another, and that symbiosis seems necessary to explain so much of what happens in biology and elsewhere. I do not deny these facts, and even celebrate them. What I deny is that relation is a reciprocal partnership between two equal terms. Instead, mutual influence would merely be a special case of two simultaneous one-way relations in which two objects happen to relate to one another independently. If fire and cotton affect one another, then this happens only through two parallel and disconnected relations: fire-cotton and cotton-fire. This entails that every relation must have an active and a passive term, without implying that one object is always active and the other always passive. Causation is never reciprocal except by accident; influence is always a free gift, without recompense. While this claim may sound counter-intuitive at first, I will try to show that there are sound reasons for it.

Demodernizing the Humanities with Latour

At first glance, the primary lesson of Bruno Latour for the humanities appears to be simple: the humanities are not just about humans. Though the ultimate picture is more complicated than this, it remains a useful guiding principle, since few contemporary thinkers have had more success than Latour at incorporating nonhuman entities into their writings. Such popular human-centered terms as “language,” “society,” “power,” or even “capitalism” are reassigned by Latour to a derivative position. None of these things is made up of purely human material; all are shown to be composed of hybrid networks that feature viruses, earthworms, computers, and ozone holes no less than police stations and other cynical panoptica. Indeed, one of the reasons that Latour is starting to look like Michel Foucault’s eventual replacement as the default citation in the humanities—he is quickly approaching that point in the social sciences—is that whereas Foucault treats inanimate entities primarily as means by which the human subject is historically molded, Latour’s ever-expanding oeuvre better equips us to take such entities on their own terms, rather than merely as human accessories.

Object-Oriented Ontology

Object-oriented ontology (hereafter ‘OOO’) is relatively new, and hence not as well known among film and television critics as other theoretical standpoints. For this reason, the discussion that follows must take a somewhat circuitous path. First, I will give a brief history and conceptual overview of OOO itself. Second, I will give an assessment of how OOO might fit with some current discussions of trans- and posthumanism. Third and finally, I will give some basic examples of how OOO might be applicable to film and television criticism.