Harman, Graham. Skirmishes: With Friends, Enemies, and Neutrals.

In Graham Harman’s aptly titled book

Skirmishes

, Harman succeeds twofold; in consolidating a “speculative” theory of

the real

robust enough to challenge past and present

faux

,

quasi

, or

pseudo

philosophical realisms, and in responding to his contemporary critics decisively yet in a refreshingly candid manner. All valuable responses to objections require time in the domain of philosophy and this was certainly worth the wait.

As the book is a whopping 351 pages in length,and presents Harman’s philosophy in its most comprehensive form to date,I have limited myself to reviewing only the first half of the book (“Part 1”),which includes an introduction followed by four chapters, each referring to separate authors who directly address Object-Oriented Ontology(OOO) and contribute somewhat to its general reception.In turn I will also use these author titles to structure my review.

Tom Sparrow

In Harman’s first section on Tom Sparrow’s

The End of Phenome-

nology

Tom Sparrow, , Speculative Realism Series(Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2014).entitled “Realism and Anti-Realism in Continental Philosophy,” Harman sets up a more comprehensive definition of realism (dare I say a more historical formulation of realism) than is commonly seen in his own “speculative realist” renditions of realism which occupy his oeuvre.This taxonomy of realists, moving through Hobbes and Schmitt, to the “direct realism” of Berkeley, then later to contemporary realists such as Ferraris and Braver, show us at least three things. (1) That realism is a rather ill-defined (or eclectically defined) term, and that such ambiguity and versatility might be preventing us from defining the particular premises that initially characterise it from say idealism or anti-realism. (2) That such explications of “realism” havent been

real enough

.This is exemplified in Harman’s counter-critique of Michael Devitt’s “strong scientific realism” as merely displacing “something (that) objectively exists independently of the mental” (for Devitt this is the objectivity of the natural sciences) into the position of an

absolute objective real

commensurate with such scientific findings (27). In this sense, conversely, Devitt’s attitude is similar to many “common-sense realists” who claim the sovereignty of the real through the realm of the empirical, particular anthropocentric/transcendental spatio-temporal constructs,and the structural integrity of physics, which ostensibly remains intact and transparent defacto, tout court, and as turtles all the way down (without any act of translation). Note that realism can be equated to some condition distinct from our experience, or alternatively, something within the very fabric of experience that simultaneously withdraws from such experience.(3) Corresponding to the prior two numbered points, Harman notes that “today’s continental realism is a different bird from the realism of yesteryear, as the present book will show in several distinct ways” (23). This will allude to Harman’s renaissance of Kants “noumena” but also to the more exotic continental realisms that do not focus exclusively on the distinction of mind and world (or human and world)but instead envisage

reality

as being formulated beyond the auspices of reason and science (as well as how

objects

might interact with one another beyond such auspices).Harman then turns to Sparrow’s stringent views on phenomenology in the section entitled“Phenomenology and Speculative Realism.” Whilst Harman agrees with much of what Sparrow identifies as an idealist temperament hidden in the emperor’s new clothes of phenomenology,which half-heartedly touches the real through the “carnal flesh” of Merleau-Ponty’s phenomenology of perception, the “intentionality” and “directedness” of Husserl, the theory of“affects” in Bergson, the “Other” of Levinas, and the “inter-subjectivity” of many of its later proponents, Harman nevertheless sees particular merit in the

object-oriented

strand of phenomenology found in such thinkers, a strand that is sensitive to “the play of profiles and shadows” in

objects

(36), in contra-distinction to the kind of

absolute phenomenology

I coin the term and defend what I believe to be an “absolute phenomenology” in Hegel’s work in my new book; the theory that manifestation is both a universal and objective trait which is self-determined as“Spirit.”found in the Hegelian tradition, which subordinates strict phenomenological analysis of objects to make way for “the moving shapes of consciousness” or the

sublation

of objects into larger systems of knowledge. G.W.F. Hegel, (Oxford: O.U.P, 1976), Chapters 1–3.Whilst I may be the only living person (bar Robert Stern) who believes that Hegel

is

a philosopher of objects; that natural and conceptual totalities exist within his map of the absolute, I agree that Hegel spends far too little time in describing their particular qualities (in

Philosophy of Nature

) and their changing, developing status (in

Phenomenology of Spirit

), opting for a more formal,

logical

system than a phenomenological description of the object.Harman thus reminds us that the phenomenological tradition, in contrast to empiricism, and in contrast to contemporary neo-materialist interpretations of Hegel,

achieves

formulating a unified object beyond arbitrary bundles of qualities, beyond “the qualities immediately present to the mind” (37) and above its many changing states.I sometimes wonder, regarding the “intentional object” in terms of idealism and realism, and the distinction of subjective and objective, that it is Harman’s

irreduction

(found in his critical theory of “undermining” and “overmining”) that allows him to affirm

both

the reality of the “real object” distinct or irreducible to the phenomenological relation, and the reality of the “sensual object” as irreducible to merely the epiphenomenal or simply the “correspondence theory of truth,” whilst Sparrow seems to want to legitimate the validity of a philosophical method (such as phenomenology) through what is“external” or what “conditions” such methods as commensurate with it

as

the real.

Steven Shaviro

In this chapter Harman takes issue with Shaviro’s Whiteheadian and Deleuzian inclinationsand how such process-philosophical insights permit Shaviro to accuse Harman’s OOO of being insensitive to change and novelty. We will also learn that, at stake in this disagreement, is the proclivity towards abundance and bilaterality in Shaviro; “everything affects everything all the time” Marshall McLuhan, (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1962), 32, referenced in , 70.and has “the same degree of reality,” Steven Shaviro, (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press,2014), 29.in contrast to Harman’s proclivity towards scarcity and unilaterality; that significant “metamorphosis” is relatively rare, unimportant relational effects mainly ensue, and when some radical change occurs between two objects, they never directly encounter each other through the same all-encompassing reality (opting instead for sensual and real counterparts/translation). Harman’s rejoinder to Shaviro is to throw his criticism back at him; if Object-Oriented Ontology is ostensibly too “static,” Shaviro’s reformulation of Whitehead is too

dynamic

and cannot account for why entities do

not

dramatically change from one moment to the next (let alone why objects have specific qualities in the first place and are not merely paint strokes of some universally dynamic yet arbitrary materialism)(61). I recall Harman giving us a nice summary of Aristotle’s work and noting the difference between a metaphysics of “pure becoming”and the finitudes of some primary substances which, although vulnerable to eventual perishment,simultaneously constitute actual, discrete objects that

undergo

change.As we move through the chapter we find that

phenomenology

becomes the elephant in the room. Whitehead, Shaviro, and Levi Bryantall reject the gifts of phenomenology through the same manoeuvres of conflation I describe above: (1) the fusion of all relations as taking place and affecting one another in one and the same realm (objectivity or “the view from nowhere”); (2) the fusion of phenomenological qualities with physical relations as the extermination of “essence” (or more controversially/anachronistically, the Idea). Harman quotes a passage from Shaviro, wherein Shaviro speaks of the inadequacy of the notion of an intentional object “to describe the way that the actual moon really and truly

affects

me” Shaviro, , 119.(90). Whilst this “inadequacy” might be true, there is no need to suggest that the sensual object has no place within this encounter, nor that this “contact at a distance”which “truly affects me” must be the

only

mode of confrontation I or any other object has with its reality. Contrary to the traditional, static essences found in the history of philosophy (a tradition surely influencing Shaviro’s

pejorative

description of the “intentional object” as “oversimplified”), Harman gives us rich possibilities to discern differences in the sensual realm

itself

; as shifting objects, their profiles, and their adumbrations For an engaging introduction to these methods see: Graham Harman, (Winchester, UK: Zero Books, 2011).. In other words,dynamism should not be simply attributed to material, physical, chemical etc. flux, but can be discerned in the rift between independent objects (real objects), their “real qualities,” the “sensual object” produced through confrontation, and their “sensual qualities.” This is a movement in space just as much as it is in time.I believe that it is apt for Harman to finish this chapter with the significance of

panpsychism

in Shaviro’s work immediately after the analysis of Shaviro’s non-phenomenological leanings because the two have more than a passing connection. If there is no difference between

being and its appearance

, a difference that

traditional

phenomenology wishes to bypass through the direct interaction of essences—whilst neo-phenomenologists like Harman wish to preserve the infinite lacunae between objects and relations as constitutive of reality itself—then Shaviro sides with their conflation by insinuating that any “private interior” is always already seen as “outwardly public and available.” Shaviro continues: “As far as I can tell, this withdrawal is nothing more (but nothing less) than the ‘what-it-is-likeness, ’ or private interior, of a thing that is also outwardly public and available. My problem with Harman is that he seems to underestimate this latter aspect.” Shaviro, , 104–5. Quoted by Harman in , 99.Not only does this conflate the phenomenological with the non-phenomenological (or real),it superimposes a woolly theory of embodiment onto the interior of objects (panpsychism)which—as Harman himself notices—mobilises the same type of

descriptions

for interior

and

exterior. Not only are descriptions

relations

(and hence can never fully “access” the object itself),such descriptions always appear from “the outside of what I intrinsically am” (100). Very briefly,this decision to make interiority

ontologically

elusive—regarding Harman’s theory of object and relation—is similar to Hegel’s decision to make the internal

irreducible

to the external. For Hegel the internal is the virtual; that intrinsic element of an object which cannot be reduced or exhausted by the multiple accounts of exteriority (calling this virtual interior “design,” “telos,” or “Idea”).For different reasons Harman must come to the same conclusion because the superimposition of first-person phenomenological consciousness as “private interior,” or as simply a

reflection

of its exterior, only takes into account the

externalisation of an interior

, i.e., its representational structure,or, in Harman’s terminology, it makes the internal purely

accessible

and

relational

(description is a relation of equivalence after all In the Merriam-Webster dictionary equivalence is defined as “the of terms” (my italics).). A proper object-oriented metaphysics of interiority acknowledges that all interiorities (of subjects and objects)—at varying degrees—must translate externality, and that this “mechanism” is a difference in kind and not degree (like the Copernican Turn in Kant’s formulation of phenomenal translation). Hence, the outside and the inside cannot be conflated but only negotiated (or problematised/complexified).

Peter Gratton

In this chapter Harman takes issue with Gratton’s theory of time (or rather Gratton takes issue with Harman’s “dialectical” I argue that Harman’s theory of time, space, essence, and eidos, as tensions of the object itself, is properly dialectical. Charles Johns, (forthcoming). I do not think this tarnishes Harman’s theory, on the contrary it extends the cogency and accessibility of his theory through a Hegelian perspective. Please note: I personally apply this term (“dialectical”) to Harman’s formulation of time, space, essence, and eidos, but it is not found in his oeuvre and he would argue otherwise.characterisation of time). Even in Shaviro’s section we begin to see that what is at stake is a notion of temporality which is ontologically subsuming

contra

a more discrete notion of time constituted as different forms of the object-quality tension. Gratton follows suit in what now feels like a ubiquitous manner, claiming that OOO reduces Being “from its utter contingency and creativity to an order of given objects.” Peter Gratton, (London: Bloomsbury Academic, 2014), 116.Everyone is now familiar with the onslaught of “non-metaphysical” accounts of time over the last hundred years, culminating in “the trace” of Derrida but ostensibly discernable already in Heidegger I am in agreement with Harman when, in , he argues that Heidegger in fact rarely talks about time as a process (or alterity) and instead relapses into a twofold tactic of explaining time through readiness-to-hand and present-at-hand modes of being. (Graham Harman, ); a temporality which spends more time criticising normative, atomistic, See for example Friedrich Nietzsche, “Time-Atom Theory,” trans. Keith Ansell-Pearson, s 20 (2000): 1-4.and transcendental forms of time than it does in giving a properly robust philosophical account of itself. I believe Harman is in fact too amiable here; what exactly is this non-descript, abstract flow or flux of contingency and novelty that so many philosophers find respite in? Considering both Harman and myself do not believe in any “preformed” I have used this exact same critical term (“pre-formed”) in my book (New York: Springer, 2020) at the time unaware that Harman himself had used this term. It suggests the impossibility of ever reaching “matter” as a formless basic substrate.account of matter, or any notion of temporality which is not already complicit with objects and phenomena, is this description not itself a metaphysical account which undermines its anti-metaphysicalist leanings? Whilst I plainly disagree with Gratton’s claim that Harman is a“reductionist,” Harman offers the candid and amicable point that “no philosophy can place equal valuation on everything” (123) and that “there are always ways of arguing for the primacy of one sort of reality over another” (124). That being said, Harman does not deny that relations exist as tensions within objects or as tensions between parts and wholes (an infinite regress of turtles all the way down) whilst process philosophy

does

deny that objects are simultaneously co-constitutive of reality itself.Who is the reductionist now?Other than these passing critiques of the inherent“undermining” in both process and materialist philosophies, Harman offers us a more direct rejoinder; that “undermining cannot explain emergence” and that “overmining cannot explain change” (124). I am yet to find a satisfactory response to Harman’s accusations here.

Peter Wolfendale

Considering that a kind of dialectical formulation of contra-distinctions has already been made in this review—static instants/becoming, phenomenology/materialism, objects/processes, etc.—we can now add to this list non-rationalism/rationalism. The issue at stake with Wolfendale’s rationalist predilection regarding OOO is not that rationalism has no place in a realist ontology of objects (it certainly does apply to the sensual realm in humans for example), but that it cannot take centre stage because reason is traditionally both an anthropocentric and subject-object discourse,which OOO is trying to get away from. This applies at least to “reason” formulated in the subjectivist tradition starting from Descartes. However, there is of course a more universal formulation of reason found in aspects of Hegel, Schelling, and even Spinoza, which neither Harman nor Wolfendale wishes to address at present (understandably so). However, theories of dialectics, conceptual animism, interactionism, and Platonic realism might allow Wolfendale to secure a type of rationalism without being stuck in the thought-world correlation that Harman accuses him of being allegiant to (where

epistemology

ostensibly starts). Alternatively, it may even allow Harman to consider theories of

identity

that are not constrained by that same subjective model; not as an

undermining

model (mathematics or logic) but as—however paradoxical it may seem—a

speculative

“theory of knowledge” outside of subjectively instantiated epistemological means.Overall this review does little justice to the plethora of erudite views and remarks exhibited in the book. I would urge those who have reservations with Harman’s philosophical work in general to read

this

book primarily above any of his others. Who knows, you might just become a convert.