A response to Graham Harman’s
“Marginalia on Radical Thinking”
First let me say that, while
this post will likely come across as confrontational, I do have a respect for
Harman, particularly for his intellectual energy and literary output. I’ve
never met him and can’t count him a friend, but I have corresponded with him on
a few occasions. I must admit that his philosophy and politics (or lack
thereof) leave me cold. A bit of context: my dissertation of 2001, which became
my first book in 2004, is an analysis of networks as political systems, so I feel
I have a lot to say about the topic of objects and networks. I’m also a
computer programmer and, similar to someone like Ian Bogost, have actually
coded the kind of object-oriented systems that OOO describes. (To his credit
Harman rejects this association, claiming that “his” OO has nothing to do with
computer science’s OO. But that’s a flimsy argument in my view, particularly
when the congruencies are so clear. As Zizek might say, channeling Groucho
Marx: if it’s called a duck, and quacks like a duck, don’t let that fool you —
it really is a duck!)
I already wrote a bit
about some
shortcomings of the new realism particularly with Meillassoux. And I
have a forthcoming long article that expands my position, in which I argue that
SR/OOO is politically naive because it parrots a kind of postfordist/cybernetic
thought, and that this constitutes a secondary correlation between
thought and the mode of production that SR/OOO can’t explain. Shaviro, Bogost,
and Bryant have all read this paper privately, but as I said, due to the
ridiculous slowness of academic publishing, it’s still forthcoming.
Again, I do respect Harman’s
energy, but like David
Berry and Christian
Thorne I’m more and more concerned about the political shortcomings of
OOO. A case in point is this recent
interview with Harman titled “Marginalia on Radical Thinking.” Harman’s
comments in this interview coalesce a number of different threads in OOO, and
for me galvanize precisely what I see as some of its main challenges.
So what exactly are Harman’s
political instincts? Let’s use this paragraph as a starting point:
Harman: “I saw parts of the
Arab Spring up close, and the events of that period taught me something, as
genuine events should. There were plenty of protest movements throughout my
time in Egypt against Hosni Mubarak, against torture, against the Emergency Law.
And one could always agree with these criticisms while still thinking that ‘for
now, Egypt is probably better off than it might be under other circumstances.’
But in January 2011, I like others was shocked into realizing suddenly what a
wrong-headed attitude that was. Mubarak became for me, retroactively, something
terrible that always had to be thrown out all along. The Revolutionaries showed
me this through provoking a brutal response that showed the truth of the
situation in Egypt, which I now see that I had accepted too lazily as a given.
Indeed, I had been guilty of a failure of imagination, which is what
philosophers should always be ready to avoid. The killings by snipers, the use
of plainclothes thugs on camels and horses, and the cynical machinations of
Mubarak in response to calls for his ouster, may simply have brought the
pre-existent life of the Egyptian dungeons onto the street, as one of the human
rights groups remarked at the time. But it took the events on the street to
shake me from slumber, and I have not yet recovered from that experience.”
I cite this as a textbook
example of the liberal bourgeois position that people from the likes of Zizek
to Carl Schmitt have called “depoliticization and neutralization.” It shows
Harman’s anti-political position quite clearly. Today we might even call this
an anti-badiousian position (although Harman of course has no interest in being
badiousian in the first place!). The reason is because he has no opposition to
the state of the situation. By his own admission, he only expresses revulsion
*after* the confrontation with the state has taken place, after he witnesses
the excesses to which the state will go to hold on to power. That’s a classic
case of liberal neutralization (“don’t rock the boat,” “we just need to go
along to get along,” “this is the best of all possible worlds,” “ontology
shouldn’t be political,” etc.). This is thus not a political desire of any
kind, merely an affective emotional response at the sight of blood. But such
palpitations of the “sensitive” bourgeois heart, no matter how reformed, do not
a politics make.
By contrast, Badiou’s position
is so useful today because he says that it’s all about the *first* antagonism,
not the last. To be political means that you have to *start* from the position
of incompatibility with the state. In other words the political is always
asymmetrical to the state of the situation. The political is always “trenchant”
in this sense, always a “cutting” or polarization. Hence the appeal of Badiou’s
“theory of points” which forces all of the equal-footed-objects in OOO into a
trenchant decision of the two: yes or no, stop or go, fight or retreat. Hardt
and Negri say something similar when they show how “resistance is primary
vis-a-vis power.” For his part Harman essentially argues the reverse in this
interview: ontology is primary (OOO “is not the handmaid of anything else”),
power is secondary (Mubarak), resistance is a tertiary afterthought (the Arab
Spring). Yes we should applaud the Spring when it arrives, Harman admits, but
it’s still just an afterthought that arrived from who knows where.
If you’re still skeptical just
use the old categorial imperative: if everyone in Cairo were clones of Harman,
the revolution would never have happened. That’s political neutralization in a
nutshell. In other words there is no event for Harman. And here I agree
with Mehdi
Belhaj Kacem’s recent characterization of Tristan Garcia’s ontology,
modeled closely after Harman’s, as essentially a treatise on “Being Without
Event.”
It’s also symptomatic that
throughout the interview Harman assumes that the political means “liberation.”
Liberation may be involved with certain kinds of political projects. And
certainly liberty and freedom are appealing social virtues that should be
promoted when appropriate. But political means liberation only for a liberal.
(And let’s not forget that liberalism itself is quite limited historically and
more or less coincides with the history of western capitalism.) A more
expansive view on politics will quickly reveal that the political means
something else. The political means *justice* first and foremost, not
liberation. Justice and liberation may, of course, coincide during certain socio-historical
situations, but politics does not and should not mean liberation exclusively.
Political theory is full of examples where people must in fact *curb* their own
liberty for the sake of justice. This is why people like Zizek and Badiou talk about
discipline and militancy, but not so much about liberty as such.
This brings out a secondary
problem with OOO in that it falls prey to a kind of “Citizens United fallacy”..
everything is an object, and thus Monsanto and Exxon Mobil are objects on equal
footing just like the rest. Like other (human) objects, Monsanto is free to
make unlimited campaign donations, contribute to the degradation of the
environment, etc.
The way out of this problem,
at least for Bogost and Bryant, seems to be a kind of cake-and-eat-it-too
Animal Farm koan: that all objects are equal, but some objects are more
equal than others. This seems to be rather nonsensical, since on the one hand
they want to reject correlation and put all objects on equal footing, but on
the other hand retain a pop science view of the world in which some
equal-footed objects nevertheless have more “gravity attraction” than other
equal-footed objects. What this produces is a kind of marketplace ontology that
essentializes and reinforces hierarchy even as it claims to circumvent it. The
only thing worse than inequality is an inequality founded in equality. But
that’s capitalism for you: everyone is equal in the marketplace except for,
ta-da, the 1%. Or American race relations: we take these truths to be self
evident that all men are created equal, but, ta-da, in comes Jim Crow. Or
protocological control online: universal adoption of networking standards
between peers, but, ta-da, Google owns you. In other words inequality rooted in
equality is not a very “liberating” political theory.
Harman and these others in OOO
often take pride in calling this a “democratization.” But now let’s be clear,
it is actually an anti-democratization, in two ways. First because it
removes the point of decision from people (the demos) to the object world at
large. So the word simply doesn’t make sense in the context of OOO. In fact the
closest English word we have for Harman’s cosmology is “bureaucracy” (rule by
office furniture), but “pragmacracy” (rule by things) or “hylecracy” (rule by
stuff) are probably closer to Harman’s intent. And second because it allows
certain objects to have more natural “gravity” than others, thus in essence letting
their “votes” count double or triple.
So despite their protestations
OOO still doesn’t have a reliable way to distinguish between “good” and “bad”
objects. In other words OOO doesn’t make much room for a theory of judgment,
since it’s busy kneecapping the human. And this is why we’ve seen that OOO
can’t seem to produce the two things that philosophy has always grounded in a
theory of judgment: an aesthetics and a politics.
(We should of course cite the
evolution of Harman’s position, and his flirtations with aesthetics:
“metaphysics may be a branch of aesthetics, and causation merely a form of
beauty” [Towards Speculative Realism, 139]. Shaviro picks up on this in his
essay “The
Actual Volcano,” where he argues that Harman is essentially a modernist who
is ultimately focused on the sublime.)
It’s easy to see how a
non-flat ontology allows for a theory of judgment. If things are non-flat then
there’s always some kind of dynamic or asymmetry to rely on. The dynamic could
be “the human” or it could be “God.” It could be some other kind of arbiter
like “nature” or “the natural state of things,” or even “the essence of the
thing, to which it must accord.” Politics in a non-flat ontology is so easy
it’s basically cheating.
However it’s harder to see how
a *flat* ontology allows for a theory of judgment. The most notorious flat
ontology that we know of today is that old friend capitalism: all things are
reduced to objects on equal footing with everything else, be they wool or
machine or man; everything has a use-value which recedes and is masked over by
the sensual skin of exchange value; no arbiter impedes the endless flow of
objects through circuits of exchange, no arbiter except that ultimate mystical
medium, the marketplace. This is obviously the world of Latour, and now more
recently the world of Harman (likewise De Landa falls prey to some of these
same pitfalls, as he lauds a kind of market ontology, a kind of deleuzian
awesome-ology of emergence and becoming). Harman has of course denied on
several occasions that his ontology “looks like” capitalism, but if it quacks
like a duck…
I don’t know if flat
ontologies are bad per se, but they are certainly dangerous, particularly in
this day and age, because they can be so easily co-opted by power. Hence the
most successful flat ontologies are the ones that fortify their flatness with
some newfound political dynamic. The two best examples I can think of here are
Deleuze and Laruelle. Deleuze because of his timeliness and his sense that
deterritorialization (in the late ’60s and ’70s) would really be the most
political thing that could happen faced with the then current form of power as
territorialized capitalism, territorialized patriarchy, territorialized
subjectivity, etc. His flatness was thus a *strategic* flatness. Although that
was forty years ago now, and already in the early ’90s when he wrote the
“control society” essay near the end of his life, he was perhaps realizing that
power had already co-opted his rhizomatic relational ontology in new ways. And
in fact today it’s not that difficult to show how deleuzian ontology is quite
compatible with capitalism (i.e. how Google or Facebook valorizes multiplicity
and distributed networks, etc.).
Laruelle is the other good
example, only now because of his profound untimeliness. Laruelle has a kind of
flat ontology after all, being the “original” anti-correlationist, twenty years
before Meillassoux made the tactic fashionable. But of course Laruelle’s
flatness is *so* flat that it becomes “one,” unilateral, deterministic, etc.
And here we see again how the deepest form of justice might actually have
nothing to do with liberation, but rather with a kind of ontological
determination, a kind of “destiny” (to use an extremely unfashionable word).
It’s also why Laruelle has been roundly excluded by everyone involved in OOO,
both the insiders like Harman and Bogost, but also some of the outliers like
Shaviro.
Laruelle starts from many of
the same assumptions that OOO endorses — to reject correlationism, to introduce
democracy into ontology, such ideas all come from Laruelle — but Laruelle
actually walks the walk! He actually follows these axioms all the way to the
end of the line. And what he discovers is a profoundly weird kind of realism.
But also a profoundly political one — in my view Laruelle is one of the most
radical political thinkers of recent years. Let’s not forget that Harman never
rejects correlationism. On the contrary he merely “democratizes” correlation so
that all entities including humans follow the as-structure. I think this is
ultimately why Harman and OOO “can’t handle” Laruelle. (See for example
Harman’s now notorious review
of Laruelle’s book Philosophies of Differencein which he muddles and
misreads even the most rudimentary axioms in Laruelle.)
If we look at the argument
from The Exploit (the second book on networks I wrote in 2007 with
Eugene Thacker), Harman is stuck in step two of the three historical steps we
describe. That is, he’s willing to admit that there’s a new hegemony of
flatness, even a new hegemony of relation/networks. That’s precisely what we
describe in the opening section of The Exploit as the “new symmetry”
position, or the “networks contra networks” position. This is more or less the
position of a kind of global Latourianism or even a global Deleuzianism, where
both power and resistance are flat, networked, and rhizomatic. But what Harman
is unwilling to do is to take the third step, which requires the
superimposition of a new asymmetry. This is what we call the “exceptional
topology,” or for short the “exploit.”
Step two is essentially the
position of today’s liberal — the dot-com exec, the Obama supporter, the OOO
philosopher, those who ultimately desire a kind of
capitalism-with-a-friendly-face. But this is not a “political” position proper,
or at the least we can’t really call these kinds of people leftists. (Which is
fine, since Harman doesn’t want to be called a leftist in the first place!)
Only step three is today’s political position proper. This is where you will
find the Occupy movement, Wikileaks and Anonymous, radical feminism, Tiqqun,
Act Up, anti-racist campaigns, anti-capitalist parties, and so on.
Maybe in the end it’s a very
boring tale to tell, because it’s just the same old story. It’s the liberals
versus the radicals. The New Philosophers versus the old Marxists. The third
way liberals versus the Leninists or Maoists. The reformers versus the
revolutionaries. It’s OOO versus Zizek/Badiou/Laruelle/whomever. I’m not trying
to change the debate, I just want it to be clear. Harman is not the vanguard of
“radical thinking,” whatever that means. And Harman is most certainly not a
political thinker of any caliber. In fact it’s the opposite. Harman’s
self-stated goal is to remove politics from ontology, creating a new kind of
pure ontology in which, as he says in the interview, philosophy should not
be the handmaid of anything else. So we have to ask the old question again:
Does Harman descend into the street? And if not, should we trust what he says
about being? In the age of Occupy and Monsanto, of Citizens United and
ecological collapse, of the Obama drone assassinations and unpaid online
microlabor — there’s a litany for you! — I think the answer is a resounding no.
Let’s hope that OOO wakes up soon and realizes that a philosophy without a
political theory is no philosophy at all.
—-
[Note: My several previous
attempts to address “the political question” in OOO have all been met with,
shall we say, some skepticism by those involved, whether it be on Facebook, on
blogs, or in personal correspondence. When they’re not accusing me of bad faith
or attacking me personally they usually either (1) put their head in the sand
and pretend the political question will go away as they hunker down with the ontological
purism argument (La trahison des clercs!; “ontology shouldn’t be polluted by
politics in the first place!”), (2) position themselves as “victims” of a
leftist faculty cabal who forced them to read too much Haraway and Butler in
graduate school, or (3) simply ignore me and go play somewhere else. So let me
issue a preemptive challenge to OOO: surprise me! how about an *actual*
response that *actually* addresses the political question? My guess is it won’t
happen — although, if anyone, Bryant is probably the one to do it.]
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