There are at least two ways of approaching a book like this - as a 'good faith' work offering a popular version of academic philosophy (in this case Object-Oriented Philosophy or OOO) and as a 'phenomenon'. The first can be critiqued by other reviewers better than I.

To treat the book seriously as philosophy requires a depth of engagement and usage of time that, frankly, the book does not inspire me to undertake. Its analysis (and its tangential obscurities) may require to be challenged but show more can only be challenged 'professionally' in the form they are presented.

It is the 'phenomenon' that I want to deal with. Why, at this point in history, was a major publisher willing to invest in this particular book and what may it say about the situation we are in. Philosophy is a fashion product like many others and this one clearly has a 'market'.

It reads as if it is seeking such a market. Initially it is clear and even persuasive. It then goes into analytical philosophical mode that requires serious effort (to the point that most otherwise well educated people are going to be embarrassed by their inability to 'get it').

From there, it closes with what amounts to a sales pitch for a school of philosophy in which the author has clearly invested himself heavily over a long period of time, a pitch clearly directed at a particular class of person - the modern urbanised Western liberal intellectual.

In the interstices of this project lies a politics, sometimes made quite explicit but mostly implicit or even just hinted at, one closely associated with that same target market, a loose non-analytical implication of beliefs centred on a shared aestheticisation of shared liberal (US sense) norms.

All philosophies may be useful steps to a perhaps unattainable 'truth' but they are also perspectives embedded in the psychologies not only of their proponents but of their class and 'civilisation'. OOO simply seems more obviously so than many which is why I think we should be wary of it.

We should not, of course, be over-wary. There is a sincere 'good faith' alternative ontological perspective here that requires taking seriously even when, especially when, one is not persuaded that its 'newness' is a guarantor of its meaningfulness.

The politics is more 'occult'. It is only occasionally explicit in the book but it is there. We need to tease out OOO's potential implications for our society if it ever got a real hold (although I suspect it is too abstruse for that in its pure form). Those implications might be worrying to some.

On the other hand, simply reconstructing our perspective on reality to suit the interests of a battered Western educated liberal class may help reinforce the walls of its fortresses but it does nothing to change the fact of the hordes outside and the collapse of morale within.

OOO in this book seems to manage (in accordance with one interpretation of its meaning) to hover uneasily between academic philosophy and something close to a proto-ideology. Its critique of existing ideology seems to be a clearing of space for a new ideology.

In all such cases, we have to ask what gap does it fill and what is it trying to sweep away. Harmon is good on that. But we also have to ask whether the gap is a gap in thought or ideology and what social forces require that gap to be filled and why.

OOO strikes me as very much a 'fashion product', a creature of its time, attempting to meet the needs of part of an educated class out of its depth and looking for an intellectual saviour. The tone is of a 'sales pitch' in the eternal academic game of philosophical one-upmanship.

The rare but important references to Trump and climate change (in the UK, it would be Brexit) merely hint at its potential ideological use-value but those references may help us to see why the philosophy has shot out of the Academy to get a major publisher interested in it.

It is striking that Harman gives up the ghost on any attempt to try to counter new populist trends in politics through traditional Enlightenment-derived critiques. He knows that battle is lost and, instead, tries to forge new weapons by marrying analytical and continental philosophy.

Sometimes he is highly persuasive. There are flaws in Western philosophical thought that OOO exposes and his objections to the easy acceptance of dubious assumptions are well within the task of the professional philosopher. It is what he puts in its place that can seem equally dubious.

Cynically one might say that the liberal mind has looked at the divisions in its own ranks and demanded discipline, a partial return to Plato and Aristotle (via Heidegger's critique and clearly owing a great deal to Latour), in order to restore order. Harman certainly offers discipline.

Harmon seems to want to appropriate the whole Western philosophical tradition in order to subvert it from within. To dismiss the 'modern' in good part in order to reconstruct a radical philosophical perspective from the ground up. There is nothing wrong with that. It is creative.

He uses analytical methods in the context of continental philosophical questions to get his cake and to eat it - to have the weight of traditional authority in place for a subversive vision of being detached from Man the observing and conscious animal.

OOO is thus on a potential roll as a tool or weapon - a potential intellectual equivalent to Russia's hypersonics - in the age-old struggle between 'civilisation' and 'barbarism'. Its potentially de-humanising equivalence of all possible objects (things) in the world clears the decks for battle.

One senses a conservative pessimism lurking in minor key being transformed into justification for liberal action. It is not blatant but Harman clearly admires Latour's turn towards (liberal) moralism on a bedrock of an understanding of what Harman calls Power Politics.

Latour seems to abandon the idea of there being political knowledge with great ease and moves to a position of issues and coalitions that is precisely identical to the practical politics of the Western liberal-left. It is a politics that had become hegemonic before the crisis of 2016.

The OOO political philosophy (which seems more detached from the actual ontology than Harman allows us to see) strikes me as an intensification of liberal-left tactics and ideology despite these having failed to deliver anything of true substance except more jobs for the educated classes.

The point is to ensure that this culture of the Western intelligensia remains hegemonic against the threats from populism and what is defined as foreign authoritarianism ... by, if necessary, embracing a justification by hook or by crook of a new liberal authoritarianism based on 'issues'.

Climate Change, Trump, Remain, Diversity, Nato and so forth ... these are all 'issues' that unite around a political and intellectual class shoring up walls to keep out the savages despite those walls crumbling from ineptitude and past neglect. Perhaps OOO is to come to the rescue!

Perhaps the jump from a human-centred ideology to an ideology of all objects in the world being equal is a useful way to dish both communitarian nationalists (unless they are Ukrainian, of course) and working class Leftists.

For, after all, the main aim of politics, surely, is to ensure that the vast over-supply of graduates in the market and the huge educational apparats all have jobs and incomes higher than the uneducated and that the values that bind them as a class remain hegemonic for ever.

Yet, although pre-dating speculative realism and its tendency towards nihilism, OOO seems haunted by despair even if its response is to adopt an existentialist front in order to redirect humanity (meaning the educated liberal intelligensia) to their own salvation.

It certainly helps to clarify a confusion in politics - the Left as we have always understood it is almost dead in the West with half its clothing stolen by authoritarian rivals to liberal democracy and the other half crushed under the weight of progressivism and liberalism.

Yet conservatives persist in confusing the terms liberal and Left. OOO simply disposes of the Left as it has traditionally been understood as a way of seeing derived from the Scientific Enlightenment and replaces it with an implicit 'occult' justification for liberal authoritarianism.

If aesthetics (art), nature (the planet) and ideas in themselves are of equal ontological status to persons, then, of course, some persons (those the real Left were interested in) can be told that their economic demands are secondary to 'values' and 'the planet', problems defined by the hegemons.

It is no accident that its heroes are poets, architects and artists, that its stance is fundamentally 'aesthetic' and that it makes a nod indirectly to Plato and his 'guardians'. These are the sub-Randian creatures who believe that their creativity is truth and truth is to impressed on others.

The abandonment of a perfectly justifiable anthropocentrism by our apex predator species is an act of despair, of course, but it becomes necessary for a significant minority of anthropoi to present the totality of existence as prior in order to ensure their priestly functions and access to resources.

I suppose I too can be creative in marrying the analyses of Nietzsche in the 'Genealogy of Morals' with the insights of Marx and Engels and so create a counter-ideology to that of twenty-first century late liberal capitalist 'bourgois pessimism'.

If it is only a short jump from philosophy to ideology, it is a similar short jump from ideology to religion. The battered graduate classes who expect to rule by divine right are badly in need of something like a faith - pessimism about existence and ritual action to placate (whatever).

OOO does not go so far and I have spun off in a direction that the contents of the book do not justify as a criticism of it and yet ... and yet, one can see the seeds in OOO of a desperate need to make sense of a world in chaos more than a need to understand the world as it actually is.

Architects and artists today, in particular, live in a half world between left-liberal values and the struggle for survival in a liberal-capitalist economy. They are obligated to innovate but most innovate along lines that appeal to the 'market'. OOO may help fill their needs as a new Idea.

OOO's commitment to giving aesthetics primacy over everything, including ethics, has not been seen since the fascists drew that lesson inappropriately out of Nietzsche. Aesthetics is neat because while ethics soon finds itself bogged down in futility, aesthetics can disregard all crimes.

The aestheticisation of ontology and its broad spread and faux-equality under OOO manages to remove responsibility from individual human relations and towards 'issues' and abstractions now privileged as 'things in themselves'.

The mechanics of politics is simply the holding of office in order to do aesthetic big things and create coalitions of issues managed (or manipulated) through like-minded media. It ceases to be what is most fruitful, the struggle of individuals, interests, classes and even nations.

Dropping the anthropocentric principle in ontology may have some considerable abstract meaning but applying that abstraction to 'really existing humans' and we start to go down a dark road where Ideas, Causes, Issues and Coalitions dictate terms to populations who, of course, turn to 'populism'.

This is not to say that there is not merit in Harmon's perspective. At times he is persuasive. But the game here may not be 'truth' (that slippery term) but sufficient truth to buttress a pessimistic, unstable and insecure Western culture with the tools for its own fight-back against populist reality.

I was struck (in the discussion of politics) with the barely concealed frustration at the liberal intelligentsia losing too many battles (the book was published in 2018) and looking for a harder-edged Straussian/Schmittian solution to its problems while rejecting their particular formulations.

The result is an endorsement of the issues-based and coalitional politics implied by Latour and of the methods of the liberal activist class (and its artists) in trying to exert hegemony over populations. OOO is an after the fact philosophical justification of a new form of Power Politics.

This Power Politics is actually a class politics, not of the middle class as such but of a sort of lumpen-bourgeoisie based in the universities, media, influencer networks in both private and public sector, foundations and so forth. It is like the Buddhist priestly class in ancient Japan.

Its purpose is to promote not the Idea (as in Idealism) but a network of ideas that become an ideology of social hegemony centred on this class's need to maintain and increase public spending on 'culture' and increase its presence in the private sector. Values maintenance is survival.

It becomes a 'mass', centred on the cities and so capable of more effective organisation than rural or small town areas, but it lacks a cohesive philosophy since Marxism and the Enlightenment are tainted and 'post-modernism' is too fragmented and can incline, in fact, to futile action.

Perhaps OOO wants to fill that gap. It is undoubtedly cohesive. It may be pessimistic at core but it is activist. It is inclusive (a vital requirement for coalitional politics). It implies the superiority of its own kind of thinker over all others.

There is a rather odd long section on the American Civil War where Harman, undoubtedly a very good philosopher within the Western academic tradition, suddenly fancies himself as an historian and attempts to shoehorn past reality into his theory.

Any decently trained historian would demur. His account of the American Civil War proves to be suggestive and interesting but far too neat, falling into that classic fallacy of thinking that we can tell the truth of the past as simply our retrospective analysis.

But it is the sociology of OOO that fascinates - a philosophical movement that is attractive to poets and artists is a philosophy attractive to people who have lost the ability to contest populist claims and promote their own. They desperately need a theory that enables them to make a stand.

OOO perhaps now 'thinks' it provides that theory, re-positioned as philosophy and on the very edge of ideology. It may prove so to those it is intended to serve - a beleagured 'guardian class' besieged in its intellectual fortresses by existentialist cynicism. That does not make it true, merely useful.

This is not to say the book is not worth reading. Far from it. There is merit in Harman's perspective. There are some good ideas. Some of those other OOO-related philosophers that he discusses at end of the book look even more interesting and worth studying.

If you can get past the now-necessary eco-guff (in some cases) Bogost, Bryant, Morton, Bennett and Garcia may each have something significant to offer in shifting our perspective on 'reality' even if the general movement seems to be towards a pessimistic anti-humanism.

But the denial of the anthropocentric is not merely wrong-headed but sinister. It is one thing to say that sustainability is rational to protect our species (which is almost certainly true) but it is another to consider all non-human objects of equal status to the observing human consciousness.

It is almost as if our culture had been infiltrated by acolytes of the Elder Gods, diminishing us in favour of a vast universe of equal things. It feeds the depressive nature of the activist who acts only to avoid thinking about the futility or irrationality of his action but it is also dangerously religious.

After all, the priestly castes of the past, whose thought was based on self-negation and some future state whether of heaven or nirvana, are a variant of our species that never dies off. OOO threatens to provide a similar philosophy of simultaneous negation and ritual group action in the world.

For those of us who are actually more grounded in 'sufficient reality' - real time human consciousnesses inventing and manipulating what is to hand - the idea that OOO might give a stronger intellectual base to young activists detached from that reality should fill us with gloom.

The book certainly may bear a second reading to master the analytical thinking Harman offers although one should be instinctively suspicious of anything that frames reality in analytical terms and then seems to deny the primacy of the human observer as analytical definer of that 'reality'.

In short, Harman over-sells his offer as a theory of everything while being another useful addition to the questioning of reality. The new perspectives are intriguing but they are still only ways of seeing. 'Reality' continues to elude us. OOO is an answer but not the answer.

The impossible question is generally answered not by philosophy but by ideology because, ultimately, 'reality' is just a word and an experience and the word is just a tool or a weapon in the hands of those engaged in existential struggles for power. show less

Feb 17, 20264 other reviews

aasembakhshi 260 reviews

The Quadruple Object by Graham Harman

It is very difficult to place Harman in a popular philosophical tradition since he is among the unique philosophical currents of 21st century. He achieves a number of things here; foremost being the forceful reminder how the human mind overmines or undermines objects. He reminds the naive realists as well as self-assured idealists that philosophy is not wisdom, per se; it is rather the love of wisdom. True to Meno's paradox, we never attain the wisdom, the true objectivity, but nevertheless show more keep trying. Are we just striking our heads to the wall? Harman kind of circumvents this question by transposing the Kantian Copernican revolution, the revolutionary idea that human subject is the mysterious epistemological center of all quest. He strongly objects to this by showing that all relations including the object-object relations are equally mysterious. For this purpose, he posits a fresh interpretation of Heidegger's tool-being and merges into speculative realism where all causality is essentially mysterious. Is he moving towards much neglected medieval occassionalism? Well there are strong hints that since his four-fold object is structurally linked through indirect causality. I would love to read him more. Absolutely loved this one. show less

Aug 3, 20252 other reviews

annarchism 1,874 reviews

Object-Oriented Ontology: A New Theory of Everything (Pelican Books) by Graham Harman

After commenting in my last review that I like personal recommendations as the basis for reading classic fiction, here is an example of the opposite behaviour. I saw 'Object-Oriented Ontology' while browsing in the library and didn’t know what the title meant, but it was a cute little Pelican edition and I fancied a bit of philosophy, so I borrowed it. As it turns out, I’m not as wholly unfamiliar with the concept of object-oriented ontology as I thought, as I’ve come across Timothy show more Morton in this interview and [b:The Ecological Thought|7722063|The Ecological Thought|Timothy Morton|https://images.gr-assets.com/books/1348985833s/7722063.jpg|10474582]. His work is contextualised by the new philosophical theory of object-oriented ontology in this succinct, lucid, and thought-provoking book.

OOO, as it abbreviates itself, is supposedly pronounced as ‘triple O’, however I continually read it as a ghostly ‘oooooooo’. The tone of the book is somewhat argumentative without being aggressive, in fact defensive might be a better term. The author is very conscious of OOO running counter to dominant currents in academic and popular philosophy, and as a consequence a fair chunk of the book details what it isn’t, rather than what it is. If, like me, you are fairly unfamiliar with current academic debates in the discipline of philosophy, this is actually quite helpful. Creating a straw woman to explain what constitutes a ‘theory of everything’ worked less well for me. Apart from anything else, why should a single theory explain everything? That seems like an unnecessarily difficult task to set yourself. On the other hand, I appreciated the references to current politics (Trump, inevitably) and repeated complaints about Slavoj Žižek. Harman is an infinitely clearer writer, I must say. While I found something invigorating in the sheer difficulty of reading Žižek, there wasn’t a lot of substance beneath the relentless verbiage. While that may be a failure of comprehension on my part, I can say with confidence that he was just talking garbage with the Trump is a liberal stuff.

In any event, Harman may not have instantly converted me into an OOO evangelist but he taught me a new and very interesting way of thinking about ontology. This is impressive in part because I’ve always had great difficulty recalling what ontology means; it’s one of those words that always came unmoored in the dictionary of my memory. Now it seems to have stuck, which is great, and I have some grasp on what realist philosophy and flat ontology are. The writing is reassuringly sensible and intentionally non-academic, clearly written for as wide an audience as possible. As a result, I found some very perceptive insights that transcend the topic of OOO and invite wider consideration. A couple of examples follow.

More generally, conservatives and progressives tend to debate too much whether human nature is fixed or malleable, as if human nature were the primary factor in politics.

That is such a good point! OOO’s emphasis on non-human objects having equal importance to humans is a helpful counterpoint to the endless debates on how humans are. Apart from anything else, I don’t think human nature can be reduced to one or several simple maxims, and for another humans exist among objects, many of which we created ourselves. Considering how these objects shape behaviour at the individual and collective levels has a lot more relevance to the problems of today than debating whether we are inherently selfish. Another nuanced point:

By contrast, OOO is inclined to think that every reality supports multiple types of knowledge, but not an infinite number. More concretely, there may be five or six ways to different interpret a medical condition, and a similar half-dozen ways to approach a political dilemma, interpret Hamlet, or follow Emmanuel Kant with a new philosophy of one’s own. The customary postmodernist jump from one truth to infinite truths misses the more interesting option of a finite plurality of them.

The implications of this are then taken further when Timothy Morton’s specific work is under discussion in a subsequent chapter:

This leads Morton to a fine insight about how very large finite amounts of anything are somehow more threatening than supposed infinite amounts of the same thing. For these ‘gigantic timescales [of hyperobjects] are truly humiliating in the sense that they force us to realise how close to Earth we are. Infinity is far easier to cope with. Infinity brings to mind our cognitive powers…’ And later on the same page: ‘There is a real sense in which it is far easier to conceive of “forever” than a very large finitude. Forever makes you feel important. One hundred thousand years makes you wonder whether you can imagine one hundred thousand anything.’

A dichotomy of single/infinite is not often questioned, so I found this a powerful point. Morton’s concept of hyperobjects is especially relevant in ecological contexts, unsurprisingly given his focus on them. To me, infinity implies beyond meaningful human influence, which in an environmental context encourages fatalism. A very large, very complicated, but finite problem is more alarming because it poses a challenge that may or may not be possible to deal with. Infinity can only be shrugged at; vastness requires sustained attention and effort.

I also found new insight into semiotics via Harman’s critique of Derrida:

OOO’s account of the metaphorical and the literal is completely different from Derrida’s. Though we agree with him that there is no literal access to the thing-in-itself, we do not agree that this is because no thing-in-itself exists. For us, the difference between the metaphorical and the literal has to do with whether the bond between the object and its qualities is successfully severed (metaphorical) or whether the object is loosely or explicitly identified with those qualities (literal).
[…]
The situation as Derrida sees it is that everything that exists refers immediately to something else that exists: ‘from the moment there is meaning there are nothing but signs. We think only in signs.’ Here he is too quick to equate ‘we only think in signs’ with ‘there are nothing but signs’, as if the realm of being were one and same as the realm of thinking. […] The argument, in short, is that we never reach some final thing that shines in ‘luminous presence’, therefore everything must be a sign. What Derrida never considers is the OOO option: that signs do have an ultimate signified whose nature is precisely not to become present.

This implies that belief in the thing-in-itself is a matter of faith. In an OOO world, it is by definition forever beyond direct human perception. This plethora of references to the thing-in-itself also reminded me of the philosophical sci-fi thriller [b:The Thing Itself|26187256|The Thing Itself|Adam Roberts|https://images.gr-assets.com/books/1440860820s/26187256.jpg|46157684], a unique and very entertaining riff on Kant (surely an unusual combination of words to find in a sentence).

‘Object-Oriented Ontology’ is definitely worth picking up if you spot it on the library shelves, as it provides a refreshing insight into current philosophical debates. It has undoubtedly encouraged me to seek out more of Timothy Morton’s work. show less

Aug 4, 20244 other reviews

Don_Music 355 reviews

Object-Oriented Ontology: A New Theory of Everything (Pelican Books) by Graham Harman

Object-Oriented Ontology (OOO) is a theory of reality that, after a Kantian fashion, thinks of reality as being inaccessible to us (258). It’s not just the things-in-themselves or the noumenal objects that Kant envisioned but all objects (69). Not just the noumenal concept of Eyeglasses, but the very pair of eyeglasses next to me on the table. “There is no direct knowledge of anything” (52). This is not to say, however, that our lives and actions are not grounded in reality, just that show more reality is unavailable to us for direct acquisition of truth. When we try, we err by either reducing objects to what they are composed of (i.e., “undermining” [41]) or treating objects as the sum of their effects (i.e., “overmining” [47]). Or we do both. Using literal language to describe an object, a hallmark of analytic philosophical work is entirely misguided (37). At best, we can only understand reality “indirectly” (7), through aesthetic means, metaphors most notably (66), which have their own syntax (86-89).

Readers of Bruno Latour will recognize a form of this thinking in his work on Actor-Network Theory (ANT). This is because, like OOO, ANT is based on a flat ontology in which humans and non-humans are ontological equivalents. Neither is more object-like than the other. Both are equally capable of combining with other objects into new, emergent objects. The main difference between OOO and ANT is that where ANT sees things in the world as actions (i.e., networks of [re]enacted relations) OOO sees them only as objects. So, where ANT might see a family as a network of continually re-enacted relationships (i.e., as an ongoing action) OOO would see that depictions the object as a form of “overmining” or reducing the object to the sum of its relations. (Note: to “undermine” goes in the opposite direction: a family is comprised of these constituent parts …). To the object-oriented ontologist, a family may be a collection of “real objects” (i.e., the individuals) with “real qualities” that we relate to each other via a “sensual object” (i.e., the family) with its own “sensual qualities.” Real objects and qualities are those experienced in space. Sensual object and qualities are those experienced in time (81). Time and space are also Kant’s two essential media of experience through which we can have phenomenal experience that is conceptually relatable to the noumena. In OOO, however, even the objects around us retreat from knowability because, as Harman invokes from Heidegger — (human) being is in time.

Sensual objects are just as consequential as real object but they are more ontologically complicated. Take the example of a family and imagine a photo of five people against a blank background. The photo might depict a family but “family” is not a quality observable in the photo. We might see a similar of facial features but not “family” per se. And yet, “family” is a real, felt thing.

I can’t say that I really get the importance of seeing things as objects instead of actions except that Harman believes the former doesn’t reduce objects to their relations to other objects. Harman draws his example from Latour’s Pasteurization of France to ask what would become of the germ theory of disease if Pasteur was removed from the network. As an object, Pasteur is both more and less than his role in the network. Latour gets around this problem by noting that with enough actors already aligned in a network, removing one piece may not disrupt the whole. Instead new pathways form to survive the trial of strength. After a certain arrangement of data from battlefield surgeons, observations of livestock, and reports of post-surgical care, enough of the right actors would be in place for the germ theory that some actor would have served the role of Pasteur even if it wasn’t Pasteur. I sense that Harman doesn’t find this argument satisfying (144), but it seems equally plausible as the explanation coming out of OOO.

Neither to I really get the importance of perceiving the combination of objects as a new, merged object instead of perceiving it in terms of how the objects relate to one another (e.g., A is related to B is related to C = a family). I suppose that the latter feels more like a natural fit to common language and the rules of ordinary syntax, which is why he calls the merged object “family” as a sensual object with its own emergent qualities (134) that are not accounted for in the parts or in their relationships to each other (31). That’s probably it, but this gets to my main complaint about the book, which is that there is too little argumentation in this book about OOO theory, its premises and its perspectives, and there is a whole lot of “this is what OOO isn’t” (150-193) and “we’re not associated with these scholars” (197-217) and “people who say this just don’t get it.” That’s all fine, but I need to know what is being defended before I can even appreciate differentiating it from what it isn’t. That seems like a big let down, especially if this book is attempting to be for a general reading audience. show less

Jan 18, 20264 other reviews

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