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Bells and Whistles: More Speculative Realism
In this diverse collection of sixteen essays, lectures, and interviews dating from 2010 to 2013, Graham Harman lucidly explains the principles of Speculative Realism, including his own object-oriented philosophy. From Brazil to Russia, and in Poland, France, Croatia, and India, Harman addresses local philosophical concerns with the energy of a roving evangelist. He reflects on established giants such as Greenberg, Latour, and McLuhan, while refining his differences with such younger authors as Brassier, Bryant, Garcia, and Meillassoux. He speaks to philosophers in Paris, hecklers in New York, media theorists in Berlin, and architects in Curitiba, as object-oriented philosophy consolidates its position as the most widespread form of Speculative Realism. There has never been a more upbeat introduction to one of the most challenging philosophical schools of our time.
- GenresPhilosophy
310 pages, Paperback
First published November 7, 2013
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May 20, 2014
Today, OOO is at a loss. None of its supporters accept its tenets in the original form that Graham Harman proposed and still defends.Its hackneyed set of critical terms (philosophy of access, shams and simulacra, lavalampy overmining, atomistic undermining) clearly have no point of application at all to the new lines of research opened up by contemporary Continental philosophers such as Bruno Latour, Bernard Stiegler, and François Laruelle. Nor do the OOOxians manifest any comprehension of these post-deconstructive thinkers. Thus their claim to “move beyond” deconstruction is an empty bluff. They do not even understand the arguments of deconstruction and of post-structuralism, and so are ill-equiped to engage the ideas of its successors.
Graham Harman's new book BELLS AND WHISTLES: MORE SPECULATIVE REALISM is a compendium of OOO's familiar but disappointing history of misunderstandings and failed encounters, and its publication is a fitting monument to a set of gesticulations that never quite cohered into a philosophy. Harman’s OOO is an abstract monism, reducing the multiplicity and abundance of the world to “emergent” unities that exclude other approaches to and understandings of the world – his objects are the “only real” objects. More importantly, his (philosophical) knowledge of objects is the only real knowledge. All that is ordinarily thought of as knowledge, both theoretical and practical, is "utter sham": "Human knowledge deals with simulacra or phantoms, and so does human practical action" (BELLS AND WHISTLES, 12). Harman's "realism" de-realises everything except his own abstract knowledge and his withdrawn objects.
Harman’s OOO is profoundly reductionist. Repeatedly, Harman goes to great pains to criticise a generic “reductionism”, but he seems to have no idea what reductionism is. He easily wins points against straw men, and then proceeds to advocate one of the most extreme forms of reductionism imaginable: the reduction of the abundance of the world to untouchable unknowable yet intelligible “objects”. He produces a 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”, and then proceeds to equivocate with the familiar connotations and associations of “object” to give the impression that he is a concrete thinker, when the level of abstraction takes us to the heights of a new form of negative theology: the invisible, unknowable, ineffable object that withdraws. No example of a real object can be given. All that is given in experience, all that is contained in our common sense and scientific knowledge is "utter sham", "simulacra", "phantoms".
Harman’s OOO is a school philosophy dealing in generalities and abstractions far from the concrete joys and struggles of real human beings (“The world is filled primarily not with electrons or human
praxis, but with ghostly objects withdrawing from all human and inhuman access”, THE THIRD TABLE, p12). 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 of science and common sense with a set of bloodless and lifeless abstractions ("ghostly objects").
For Harman, we cannot know the real object. The object we know is unreal, a “simulacrum”. Harman’s objects do not withdraw, they transcend. They transcend our perception and our knowledge, they transcend all relations and interactions. As Harman reiterates, objects are deep, deeper than their appearance to the human mind, deeper than their relations to one another, deeper than any theoretical or practical encounter with them. This “depth” is a key part of Harman’s ontology, which is not flat at all, but centered on this vertical dimension of depth and transcendence.
Harman remains stuck in a crucial ambiguity over the status of his real objects, oscillating between the idea of an absolutely unknowable, uncapturable reality and the idea that it can be captured in some very abstract and indirect way. In virtue of the unknowability of his real objects he is obliged to place all types of knowledge, including the scientific one on the same plane (knowledge of "simulacra or phantoms"), as illusory, and at the same time presume that we can know something about these objects (e.g. that they exist, and that they withdraw).
In effect, science is demoted to the status of non-knowledge, as the real cannot be known. Harman is caught in a series of contradictions, as he wants to have his unknowable reality and yet to know it. Common sense cannot know reality, nor the humanities, nor even science. This leaves to philosophy the role of knowing ontologically the real, which accounts for the strange mixture of ontological and epistemological considerations that characterises Harman's philosophical style. This
generates such contradictions as pretending to accomplish a return to the concrete and giving us in fact abstraction, and pretending to criticise reduction and in fact performing an even more radical reduction.
Harman’s epistemology is relativist, demoting science to an instance of the general relativism of forms of knowledge. However, by fiat, his own philosophical intellection and some artistic procedures are partially excluded from this relativisation. Yet no criterion of demarcation is offered. Harman dixit must suffice. Harman judges science in terms of the crude philosophical criteria of another age and finds it lacking in knowledge of reality. He is then obliged to posit a shadowy “withdrawn” realm of real objects to explain the discrepancies between his naive abstract model of knowledge as access and the reality of the sciences. BELLS AND WHISTLES), like the whole of his philosophy, is the record of Harman noticing the discrepancies, but refusing to revise the model. His solution is a dead-end, a timid, nostalgic action propounding an antiquated epistemology under the cover of a "new" ontology.
Graham Harman proclaims that his philosophy is realist, when it is one of the most thoroughgoingly idealist philosophies imaginable. Time is unreal, and so is every common sense object and every physical object. All are declared to be “simulacra”. “Space”, one may object, is real for Harman, but that is no space one would ever recognise: neither common sense space nor physical space (both “shams”), Harmanian space is an abstract “withdrawn” intelligible space.
Ontology is not primary for Harman. His real polemic is in the domain of epistemology against a straw man position that he calls the philosophy of human access. No important philosophy of at least the last 50 years has been a philosophy of access, so the illusion of OOO as a revolution in thought is an illusion generated by the misuse of the notion of “access”, inflating it into a grab-all concept under which anything and everything can be subsumed. But a philosophy of non-access is still epistemological, in Harman's case it takes the form of a pessimistic negative epistemology that subtracts objects from meaningful human theoretical knowledge and practical intervention (cf. THE QUADRUPLE OBJECT, where Egypt itself is declared to be an object, albeit, strangely enough, a “non-physical” one, and so unknowable and untouchable). The ontological neutralisation of our knowledge is allied to its practical (and thus political) neutralisation.
One is entitled to ask: how can a withdrawn object “de-withdraw”? Harman cannot explain any interaction at all, he can only just posit it. Harman systematically confuses access, contact, relation and interaction, making claims about one of these notions that can only apply to another. He gives us no reason to postulate an absolute bifurcation between interaction on the one hand and withdrawal on the other. Whitehead is more realistic when he tells us that: “continuity is a special condition arising from the society of creatures which constitute our immediate epoch” (PROCESS AND REALITY, 36). I think that the notion of intervals, or discontinuous relations, may well be a far more useful concept than the bifurcation operated by the notion of “withdrawal”, which is too absolute (there are no degrees of withdrawal) and splits the world in two (real/sensual). Harman’s
system is too absolute with its summary dualisms to be able to deal with the fine-grained distinctions that come up in our experience.
July 24, 2016
I noticed Graham Harman's philosophy for the first time in Steven Shaviro's "The Universe of Things", which is a very important guide book with regard to speculative philosophy and includes serious arguments particularly against Harman. As Shaviro criticizes Harman by specifically referring to Whitehead, I felt myself closer to Harman's philosophy because of his attacks on relationality which provides a productive field in order to criticize both Whitehead and Latour. After finishing Shaviro's book, I decided to read Harman more deeply and thoroughly which steered me to read "Bells and Whistles".
This is a book including several essays, interviews and lectures that attempt to explicate object oriented philosophy. I have to confess that the arguments repeat themselves several times in different chapters about which Harman warns the reader that chapters were written separately, therefore the book may seem repetitive as reading it. (2) Despite repetetiviness of the arguments, I would like to draw attention some promising points striked me.
The fundamental premise of Harman reflects itself in his tool analysis, mainly borrowed from Martin Heidegger, claiming that "objects withdraw from all theoretical and practical contact alike." In this context, an object cannot present itself entirely, because for Harman it is not possible to exhaust an object utterly which is not solely peculiar to human beings, but it is also valid among objects themselves. We can think at this point that Harman follows Kant's proposal of things-in-themselves; "we can think them but not know them." (236) Things exist by themselves, but we cannot know them directly. This is the very idea Harman suggests when he talks about that objects withdraw from any kind of contact. That is why, as Harman puts it, "what we encounter is not reality itself," because "each thing is an inexhaustible surplus." (61) Even when we use a tool, we cannot exhaust it which differentiates Harman from Heidegger. In short, in Harman's ontology, objects always hide themselves, not only from human beings, but also from other objects.
Harman constitutes his criticism against Alfred North Whitehead or Bruno Latour on this ground: "If everything that exists were exhaustively deployed in its current state, without surplus or reserve outside their current effects, there would be no reason for anything ever to shift from its current state." (36) Or in a more obvious statement: "If people, classes, or societies are nothing but their relations, then they are already everything they ever can be, and have neither the reason nor the ability to change." (39) The dynamism Harman pictures here is not based on relations, but rather on objects' capacity to withdraw themselves. He simply argues that, if there is no hidden reality unique to objects, then any change is out of question. I am not sure whether this is a fair judgment, as neither in Whitehead's, nor in Latour's philosophies, I do not think that there is a dismissal of change; but rather, change can be comprehended within relations. At least, one might argue that in Whitehead's and Latour's perspectives, change is portrayed within the boundaries of evolution, whereas Harman's philosophy understands change in a more revolutionary context just because he reserves a place for objects outside relations. This is why Harman asserts "a world where tools can break is automatically a world where everything is not connected." (122)
The political aspect of the story, which is more important for me than philosophical sophistication and complexity, begins here. Harman states in his interview with Erik Bryngelsson: "Take politics, for instance. If people were nothing more than their relations, then why would they ever revolt? Why would they ever feel oppressed? Why would the Egyptians have rebelled in Tahrir square if the Egyptians were nothing more than their alliances with Mubarek's regime? Obviously that's not what they were. They were something more than that. There was something dignified and worthy that was held in reserve, something not adequately expressed under the Mubarak regime, and that is why a political upsurge was possible." (225) Fair enough. But an ANT sociologist would likely object this statement by claiming that a sociologist of associations can find the traces of the revolt within relations, since the revolt is not hidden from relations, but exist within relations. Put it differently, revolution itself is subsumed by the immanence of relations. Yet we can argue that Harman's philosophy is implicitly more inclined to the idea of "change", whereas Whitehead's or Latour's approaches have a tendency more for "explanation", which is the exciting part of Harman's philosophy, of course for my philosophical and political concerns.
A last remark. Harman says: "I can write the most detailed book ever written about dogs, yet there will always be something more about dogs that I haven't said." (130) Absolutely true. But what is the meaning of the unknowable knowledge of dogs? What is its function in the end? The question coming one's mind is Wittgenstein's statement, which is also asked by Gitanjali Dang in the book, saying: "whereof one cannot speak, thereof one must be silent." (130) The ontological assumption of Harman concerning objects is ok, we cannot know an object entirely, but it seems that it does not lead anywhere more than the assumption itself. Should we be silent about things we do not know? Harman says, no. But I could not find any clue of the reasons of this answer throughout the book. For instance, Alain Badiou proposes "the void" or "the inexistent" of the situation which are not recognizable within the eyes of the situation. But he also proposes the concept of event in which the void or the inexistent find the opportunity to show itself. This is what I cannot find in Harman. He proposes an ontology, but it remains somehow at an infant level that does not point out the next step.
I have read neither "Tool Being", nor "Guerilla Metapyhsics", nor the other important studies of Harman. These are the comments only based on "Bells and Whistles", so I am not sure whether I presented an accurate framework of Harman's object oriented philosophy. But speaking for this book, as far as I understood, I can say that it is promising by its arguments, but tacitly imprisoned within its own boundaries.
This is a book including several essays, interviews and lectures that attempt to explicate object oriented philosophy. I have to confess that the arguments repeat themselves several times in different chapters about which Harman warns the reader that chapters were written separately, therefore the book may seem repetitive as reading it. (2) Despite repetetiviness of the arguments, I would like to draw attention some promising points striked me.
The fundamental premise of Harman reflects itself in his tool analysis, mainly borrowed from Martin Heidegger, claiming that "objects withdraw from all theoretical and practical contact alike." In this context, an object cannot present itself entirely, because for Harman it is not possible to exhaust an object utterly which is not solely peculiar to human beings, but it is also valid among objects themselves. We can think at this point that Harman follows Kant's proposal of things-in-themselves; "we can think them but not know them." (236) Things exist by themselves, but we cannot know them directly. This is the very idea Harman suggests when he talks about that objects withdraw from any kind of contact. That is why, as Harman puts it, "what we encounter is not reality itself," because "each thing is an inexhaustible surplus." (61) Even when we use a tool, we cannot exhaust it which differentiates Harman from Heidegger. In short, in Harman's ontology, objects always hide themselves, not only from human beings, but also from other objects.
Harman constitutes his criticism against Alfred North Whitehead or Bruno Latour on this ground: "If everything that exists were exhaustively deployed in its current state, without surplus or reserve outside their current effects, there would be no reason for anything ever to shift from its current state." (36) Or in a more obvious statement: "If people, classes, or societies are nothing but their relations, then they are already everything they ever can be, and have neither the reason nor the ability to change." (39) The dynamism Harman pictures here is not based on relations, but rather on objects' capacity to withdraw themselves. He simply argues that, if there is no hidden reality unique to objects, then any change is out of question. I am not sure whether this is a fair judgment, as neither in Whitehead's, nor in Latour's philosophies, I do not think that there is a dismissal of change; but rather, change can be comprehended within relations. At least, one might argue that in Whitehead's and Latour's perspectives, change is portrayed within the boundaries of evolution, whereas Harman's philosophy understands change in a more revolutionary context just because he reserves a place for objects outside relations. This is why Harman asserts "a world where tools can break is automatically a world where everything is not connected." (122)
The political aspect of the story, which is more important for me than philosophical sophistication and complexity, begins here. Harman states in his interview with Erik Bryngelsson: "Take politics, for instance. If people were nothing more than their relations, then why would they ever revolt? Why would they ever feel oppressed? Why would the Egyptians have rebelled in Tahrir square if the Egyptians were nothing more than their alliances with Mubarek's regime? Obviously that's not what they were. They were something more than that. There was something dignified and worthy that was held in reserve, something not adequately expressed under the Mubarak regime, and that is why a political upsurge was possible." (225) Fair enough. But an ANT sociologist would likely object this statement by claiming that a sociologist of associations can find the traces of the revolt within relations, since the revolt is not hidden from relations, but exist within relations. Put it differently, revolution itself is subsumed by the immanence of relations. Yet we can argue that Harman's philosophy is implicitly more inclined to the idea of "change", whereas Whitehead's or Latour's approaches have a tendency more for "explanation", which is the exciting part of Harman's philosophy, of course for my philosophical and political concerns.
A last remark. Harman says: "I can write the most detailed book ever written about dogs, yet there will always be something more about dogs that I haven't said." (130) Absolutely true. But what is the meaning of the unknowable knowledge of dogs? What is its function in the end? The question coming one's mind is Wittgenstein's statement, which is also asked by Gitanjali Dang in the book, saying: "whereof one cannot speak, thereof one must be silent." (130) The ontological assumption of Harman concerning objects is ok, we cannot know an object entirely, but it seems that it does not lead anywhere more than the assumption itself. Should we be silent about things we do not know? Harman says, no. But I could not find any clue of the reasons of this answer throughout the book. For instance, Alain Badiou proposes "the void" or "the inexistent" of the situation which are not recognizable within the eyes of the situation. But he also proposes the concept of event in which the void or the inexistent find the opportunity to show itself. This is what I cannot find in Harman. He proposes an ontology, but it remains somehow at an infant level that does not point out the next step.
I have read neither "Tool Being", nor "Guerilla Metapyhsics", nor the other important studies of Harman. These are the comments only based on "Bells and Whistles", so I am not sure whether I presented an accurate framework of Harman's object oriented philosophy. But speaking for this book, as far as I understood, I can say that it is promising by its arguments, but tacitly imprisoned within its own boundaries.
June 1, 2018
Maybe not the best book to start with to get into Speculative Realism, but one of the most accessible thinkers I have encountered yet. Unlike Badiou or Zizek or Meillassoux who occasionally make me nauseous trying to understand their texts sometimes, Harman succinctly breaks down each part of his thinking through Husserl, Heidegger, and McLuhan into incredibly readable parts. In fact, I find myself sometimes tediously reading very similar texts, as many of the pieces in this book are lectures to different groups about Harman's ideas, so one is obliged to find him repeat his findings on Heidegger maybe 2 or 3 times. By the last chapter I felt a little worn out on it, but at least I feel that I could probably explain it in a sufficient way.
What's fun and also maybe surprising are the hidden digs against the other Speculative Realists in this book. Though I had no illusions that the other thinkers within the Speculative Realism movement (also known as Speculative Materialism or Object-Oriented Ontology), Harman is not afraid to point out the discrepancies in the logics of Gilles Deleuze, Bruno Latour, Levi Bryant, Tristan Garcia and more, all very exciting to a reader who is interested in seeing the frictions of these competing systems of thought. Objects rejoice!
What's fun and also maybe surprising are the hidden digs against the other Speculative Realists in this book. Though I had no illusions that the other thinkers within the Speculative Realism movement (also known as Speculative Materialism or Object-Oriented Ontology), Harman is not afraid to point out the discrepancies in the logics of Gilles Deleuze, Bruno Latour, Levi Bryant, Tristan Garcia and more, all very exciting to a reader who is interested in seeing the frictions of these competing systems of thought. Objects rejoice!
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