Artforum, summer 2015, pp.

318-23

[319]

Those Obscure
Objects of Desire
Andrew Cole on the Uses and Abuses of Object-Oriented
Ontology and Speculative Realism

OVER THE PAST TEN YEARS, people in all manner of disciplines have turned to things:
to matter, stuff, obdurate objects. Often loosely grouped under the rubric new
materialisms, these strains of thought have captured the imagination of artists and
critics alike. The art world just cant quit them, apparentlya perverse situation, since
art and art history have, of course, already devoted hundreds of years to thinking
precisely about objects as objects. But are things really as they seem? In the following
pages, scholar ANDREW COLE takes the measure of the two new-materialist
philosophies that have come to dominate the art-world conversation, arguing that
object-oriented ontology and speculative realism are beset by contradictions, misguided
assumptions, and outright fallacies. [eds.]

[320]
A BRICK HOUSE CRUMBLES in the village of Veselovka, Russia, just a few miles
from Kaliningrad. Its said that Immanuel Kant had something to do with this house
back when the region was part of Prussia (and when Kaliningrad was known as
Knigsberg), but what, exactly, is not clear. Ambiguities such as whether the
philosopher really lived here didnt stop someone from regarding the house as his
and tagging it with the declaration . These words, spray-painted in green
and garnished with a groovy heart and a cute flower beneath, were translated in
English-speaking media as Kant is a moron.
You rarely hear the words irony and Kant used in the same sentence, but whats
ironic about this vandalism is the fact that the house isnt Kantsthe existing
structure dates from the nineteenth century. Only the foundations are contemporary
with the philosopher, who lived in the area in the late 1740s. What we have here, I
think, is a vivid illustration of how the critique of Kantwhether inscribed in graffiti
or couched in academic proseusually misses its mark. You will often hear
contemporary critics say that Kant is a moron owing to this or that failing of his, but
this assessment almost always involves a misreadinga misidentification, as it
wereof his philosophy. In such cases, the foundations of Kants system remain
untouched and solid as ever. You see, even in death Kant is the reigning AllDestroyerDer Allzermalmende, as his friends called him, ribbing him for his
annoying habit of exiting debates completely unscathed and triumphant.
Yes, Kantian moral philosophy leaves something to be desired, as when the
philosopher exemplifies the categorical imperative by asking readers to imagine
having sex near the gallowseasy to say for a person who never got laid. But Kants
epistemology, in particular his insight into how we experience the world, remains
foundational. He tells us that ours is a world of phenomena, the infinite array of
objects and events we experience, and he says also that the world is composed of
noumena we cannot experience, the equally infinite number of things that exist, and

processes that transpire, apart from our minds thinking them. These two domains
are radically different but nonetheless linked, inasmuch as noumena are the basis for
the phenomena. Of course, theres far more to Kants critical philosophy than that,
as well soon see. For example, we cant ignore such famously unfraught topics as
thinking the unthinkable. But this is the gist, and enough to get us going.
Our interest here is in showing that Kant doesnt crumble like his ersatz house
(though props to the house for lasting this long). In fact, Kants ideas remain a
crucial component of recent philosophies that try hard to vitiate his philosophy.
Object-oriented ontology is one such philosophy, as is its cousin, speculative realism.
What is object-oriented ontology, however? You might surmise that its a return to
the object qua objecta renewed focus on the composition, vitality, materiality,
autonomy, wonder, and durability of objects large and small, near and far. In this
sense, you could say that any discipline or practice is object oriented, including not
only art history and criticism but also architecture, graphic design, museum studies,
archaeology, science and the philosophy of science, book history, literary criticism
and rhetoric, and the culinary artsindeed, any field of study whose subject is
objects. This crude understanding of object-oriented ontology also applies to
speculative realism,which may explain why both have become irresistibly appealing
to the art world.
But object-oriented ontology, as it happens, isnt all that. Instead, it is, well, an
ontologyand, as such, involves a set of theses about All That Is. Lets dive in,
surveying its three major tenets. First, everything is an object, including you and
each of your thoughts. Second, and accordingly, no object relates to any other
object, because the universe itself is devoid of all relation. Why is there no relation
in the universe? Its because objects sever relations with every other object and
withdraw into themselves to become self-subsisting, autonomous beings. Its also
because relation is typically a human mode of apprehending, describing, and
interacting with the world. Given that not every object is a human, though every
human is an object, you cant have an object-oriented ontology if humans are at the

center of it. Such an anthropocentric object-oriented ontology would be a

contradiction in terms, because objects are not a means to our ends: They are
meaningful whether or not we perceive them. Thirdand finallyall objects are
equal and, ontologically speaking, on the same plane. You, a speck of flea shit, an
electric chair, and a solar flare are all equal objects.
NOT EVERY SCHOLAR, critic, curator, or practitioner adheres to these major points,
much less retails them, when declaring an object-oriented approach to this or that
field of study or aesthetic endeavor. You see this quite a lot: People follow a trend,
but only in spirit. For that reason, it might be helpful to think about this new
philosophy as a philosophyto look at the letter of its laws and [321] see how it
fares against the likes of Kant, the All-Destroyer. Why this focus on Kant? To be sure,
object-oriented ontology builds on the work of several thinkers (Heidegger, Husserl,
Whitehead, Latour, even Deleuze), but it devotes much of its energy trying to get
out from under Kant. Does it succeed?
That sounds like a rhetorical question. But its earnest. For no sooner does Graham
Harman, the founder of object-oriented ontology, start to divide objects into
different kinds with various sorts of qualities than we begin to wonder whether we
arent in Kants domicile. Harman establishes the basic elements of an objectoriented metaphysics in his short, lucid book The Quadruple Object (2011), arguing
that, while there may be an infinity of objects in the cosmos, they come in only two
kinds: the real object that withdraws from all experience, and the sensual object that
exists only in experience. And along with these we also have two kinds of qualities:
the sensual qualities found in experience, and the real ones Husserl says are
accessible intellectually rather than through sensuous intuition.1 So we have a
distinction between the real object and the sensual object. The former is
withdrawn, autonomous, and free of all relation, and the latter is available to our
perception. Hasnt this been thought already by Kant, whose insight in the
Transcendental Analytic put forward in his Critique of Pure Reason (1781/1787)

concerns precisely the difference between the thing-in-itself and the objects of
sense perception, the noumena and the phenomena?
The answer is a resounding yes. If we join Kant at the table of categories, we can
see precisely how. Kant presents this table quite early in the Critique, gathering
concepts from Aristotle, as well as a few of his own, to portray the forms of
experience, "all the elementary concepts of the understanding in their
completeness.2 You can regard these forms, or categories, as filtering mechanisms
within our minds that instantly translate the random data of the world into coherent
and spontaneous experience. Thanks to the categories working in the background,
we dont need to pause and decode our experience every time we look out the
window and see a distant tree blowing in the wind, or close a door and hear the
latch click. Kant calls these forms possible experience, because without them
experience would not be possible; we would simply be bombarded by meaningless
data. Instead, our minds are always ready to render the world into experience, so
that we already know that the swaying tree is actually large but far away, not small
but close at hand.
One form of possible experience, Kant shows us, is relation. This means,
importantly, that relation, as we experience it, is never a quality of things-inthemselves, or noumena. Nor are any of the other categories inherent to noumena.
In fact, Kant is very specific about this, saying that these categories have been
incautiously converted from being criteria of thought to be properties of things in
themselves.3 It is technically incorrect to say (as Harman and his followers do) that
Kant imagines things-in-themselves as already correlatedi.e., already relatedto
the subject, or that objects wait around for the subject to hoover up their qualities,
as it were, and exhaust them. Nothing of the sort. In fact, Kants primary suggestion
here is that objects are only partially correlated to our minds, and are so only when
they make themselves available to our experience.

However, in object-oriented ontology, and in alleged rebuke to Kant, we are to

understand that reality is free of all relation and pay obeisance to the founding
principle of object-oriented philosophy, which is the insight that . . . objects make
no direct link whatsoever to us or other objects.4 But this is about as Kantian as you
can getand heres the kicker that exposes a contradiction in this philosophy: We
are to turn around and adopt relation as the supreme philosophical category
anyway. According to Harman, we can confidently claim that there are a number of
different kinds of relations . . . in the cosmos: ten of them, to be exact.5 Objects
be they sensual objects, real objects, sensual qualities, or real qualitiesenter into
relations, after all. These relations are assigned a variety of intriguing names for
noveltys sake, such as fission, fusion, sincerity, allure, theory, and confrontation. And
these latter threeallure, theory, and confrontationare named tensions and are
illustrated on the page by broken, squiggly lines that crisscross one another as they
connect to the four poles of the sensual and the real like so many entangled
Slinkys.6
Amid all the excitement about object-oriented philosophy, no one has paused to
work out how talk about these new terms for relation is supposed to improve
radically on the concept of relation in the history of philosophy. The problem is
that the original sins of relation are not rendered entirely clear in Harmans and his
followers writing, apart from glib remarks about poststructuralist relationality,
systems theory, and human observation. Theres really no need to overturn the
concept of relation in the cursory manner of the object-oriented ontologists,
because theres already plenty in the history of philosophy since Aristotle to instruct
us that relation is not always human or correlational, reciprocal, or even fixed or
permanent, or anything more than a moment of relating thats always vanishing by
dint of becoming and decay. Thats why philosophers in the late Middle Ages
commonly distinguished between relationes reales, relations among all entities apart
from human perception, and relationes rationis, those relations weve reasoned out
in our inspection of the world. Kant, for his part, knew that relation is not only
aesthetic (what Aristotle derided as the said-of of relation; i.e., that relation is what

we make of it). Rather, he understood that the problem of relation is exactly the
same as the problem of the thing-in-itself: There are relations in the noumenal
world, but we cannot think them directly because we have access only to
phenomenal relations, the imperfect representations of noumenal relations. The
human version of relation, in other words, isnt the same as noumenal relation, and
isnt the only kind of relation. This idea is all over Kants lectures in metaphysics,
which none of the object-oriented ontologists seem to know.
The epistemological gambit of object-oriented ontology is to say that object
relations are thinkable because they are real, even if withdrawn and unknowable.
Realism is obviously what you could call this philosophyor, as Harman has it,
weird realism. But realism (weird or otherwise) is a point of view about the world
a human point of view that requires the world to be accessible to us and structured
in such a way that we can think it. Its here that Harmans ten modes of relation
reveal themselves to be equivalent to Kants forms of possible experience. These
ten modes guarantee in advance that, say, an object somewhere will be sincere to
another object at some point in time, or that an object somewhere will confront
another object three days from now. Even if we arent on [322] the scene,
somewhere in Ohio, observing an object indifferently theorizing another object, we
can know that objects are doing things with other objects and will continue to do so
behind our backs. Now, one might say that Harman has simply extended the Kantian
forms of possible experience to objects, which thus experience other objects in
multifarious ways. That would be partly right, foraccording to this philosophy
objects themselves have experiences, as you will see below. But theres more: The
fact that we can also think these object relations means that the relations are

already thinkablealready correlated to our minds and thus already something we

know about the world. The much maligned correlationism that object-oriented
ontology hopes to expunge from its thinking is in fact its preeminent feature.
THIS QUESTION of thinking versus knowing is an important one, because it points
to further Kantian problems lingering at the center of a purported anti-Kantianism.

For example, Harman urges us to reject the idea that we cannot think something
without thinking itthat is, to reject the notion that we can only think what is
available to us as phenomena we experience.7 He asks us instead to perform a
thought experiment by thinking what you cannot think, such as the tree outside of
thought.8 Here, Harman attempts to get the human mind out of the picture entirely
by resorting to a realism that assures us that we can think objects as those objects
are, outside our minds.
These are intriguing claims because they are Kantian at heart. Kant was obsessed
with precisely these questions of what we can think and what we can experience,
what is intelligible to us and what is knowable. You could say that one feature of his
intellectual biography, ever since the writing of his inaugural dissertation, shows Kant
offering a variety of opinions about how we can think the unthinkable noumena. He
tells us early in the Critique of Pure Reason that to think an object and to know an
object are by no means the same thing.9 This distinction between thinking and
knowing is crucial for Kant, for it bespeaks the difference between thinking what you
cannot experience firsthand, such as the cinnabar outside of thought, and knowing,
or cognizing, the cinnabar in thought, the cinnabar as you experience it.
Kant goes on to expand the possibilities of thinking what we cannot experience or
know. In fact, his entire Critique of Judgment (1790) is nothing if not an exercise in
extending the possibilities of thinking noumena of various kinds: positive, causal,
worldly, natural, human, and divine. He tells us that to think these noumenal
realities, no matter how mundane or sublime, you have to make up your own
concepts and, in short, use whatever imaginative means you have at your disposal.
He suggests we can think the unconditioned from our vantage point in the sensibly
conditioned, using various media as the bridge from here to there: language, poetry,
art, analogy, math, and allusion. This is precisely what Harman and his followers
claim to have invented: We can think the unthinkable if we adopt allusion or other
oblique approaches to the object world we cannot directly experience.10 Again,
thats about as Kantian as you can get. Similarly, the speculative realist Quentin

Meillassoux says that objects have mathematizable properties that exist equally in
thought as outside itreal properties we can think as they really are. Having studied
a few semesters of advanced calculus, I admit that Alain Badiou is right in saying
that Kant was terrible at math. But he nevertheless tried his hand at it, attempting to
construe extension (after Descartes) as just one way to think the noumenal or, as he
also terms it, the supersensible (bersinnliche) world. Meillassoux, for his part,
broadens the Cartesian insight about extension into a whole thesis about our
mathematical perception of objects, but writes as if Kant had never attempted this
himself.11
The only answer I have for why two voracious readers of philosophy, from whom
many others receive lessons about the history of Western thought, would exhibit
such a partial view of Kant is that either their reading of Kant is incomplete or they
know this about Kant already but arent telling. Ill abstain from answering
definitively, becausebelieving in dialecticsI think its a little of both. Harmans
Kant is only the Kant of the Critique of Pure Reason; Meillassouxs Kant is the Kant
of the critical philosophy. Meillassoux in fact embraces a pre-critical philosophy in
order to revise decisions often considered as infrangible since Kant.12 That we are
supposed to look to precritical philosophy as an end run around the critical Kant is a
compelling idea for theorists who can sense the persistent mdivalit or
dogmatism of modern thought. Butand this is a pronounced problem in theory
more broadlyit is wrong to uphold the distinction between the pre- and
postcritical, insofar as Kant himself violates the distinction left and right in his work
up to the very end. Contra Meillassoux, we can embrace the critical Kant and still
think the unthinkable, if we so wish.
THERE'S MORE TO the curriculum of object-oriented ontology. Each object, no
matter what it is, is abstracted in the same way. Each, that is, conforms to a
template: All objects have insides and outsides, interiors and exteriors, depths and
surfaces, andespeciallyessences and accidents. Its here, in the ontologists very
idea of the object, that another contradiction in the philosophy appears. As

Heidegger, Merleau-Ponty, and Deleuze have shown, each in his own particular style,
the construct of inside/outside in any ontology, whether it concerns objects or
subjects or both, is a function of the old subject/object dualism, which is a dualism
precisely because there is a sovereign subject around to proclaim what makes the
cut, what qualifies as an object or notand whose very perspective on that object
determines what is inside and what out. The point isnt that object-oriented
ontology unwittingly centers an autonomous subject at the heart of objects simply
in the way it tells us to look at objects. Rather, its that Heidegger had already
created a philosophy whose very purpose was to destroy these old ontological
constructions of essences and accidents, interiors and exteriors. Such terms, he
thought, obstruct the genuine thinking of Dasein, or being there in the moment.
This is important because object-oriented ontology claims to be a Heideggerian
philosophy based on select passages in Being and Time (1927). Likewise, the reader
(i.e., Harman) who could discover in Heideggers opaque essay The Thing (1950) a
schematic for quadruple objects must have missed this philosophers poetic
discussion of the jug in that very same paper, along with his caution about realist
perspectives on objects: Science represents something real, by which it is objectively
controlled. Butis this reality the jug? No.13 [323]
Regarding anthropomorphism and anthropocentrism, object-oriented ontology cant
seem to avoid these perspectives after all: The aforementioned modes of relation
fission, fusion, allure, sincerity, theory, confrontation, and so forthare themselves
human-centric. Some of these terms read like authorial observations on the fickle
characters in a novelDickensian descriptions of who is sincere, who is
confrontational, who is alluring, and so forthwhile others, such as theory, denote
contemplation in its most humanly reclusive form. Yet other terms, such as fusion,
recall problems my friend Charlie is trying to solve in the plasma lab where
astrophysicists are creating a miniature star. Fusion evokes the mysterious
supersensible processes in our sun as much as it conjures up the human effort to
duplicate and harness these processes before we destroy the planet with our
capitalism and carbon emissions. Maybe its just me, but fission prompts a similar

thoughtthis time about whether an atomic bomb is really equal to a doorknob,

or the blasts at Hiroshima and Nagasaki equal to a unicorn. This term requires
some serious epoch, or mental bracketing, for us to picture the pure object relation
its meant to describe.
Can we bracket our thoughts in this fashion, when the father of this practice,
Husserl, could never do it himself, describing (for example) a piece of paper on his
desk but never thinking the paper as the paper really is? To be sure, these new
terms for relation in object-oriented ontology are meant to help us decenter
ourselves as we reflect on objects relating to other objects, forcing us to realize that
a rock cares not a whit about the difference between a nuclear weapon and a
doorknob when it confronts them. But we access this object relation by thinking
about the name of the relation, and all of these names are decidedly human,
cultural, social, and literarythat is, the names are in fact predicates, chock-full of
meanings you cant unthink or bracket. Contemplate fusion or fission, for example,
and youll soon encounter the problems of production and technology right where
they shouldnt manifestin the object relation. Or think about confrontation and
youll eventually face the politics of what it means to be autonomous, right where
issues of freedom or necessity shouldnt appearin the object relation. This problem
extends to the ethics of why we should even think a thoroughly reified world, as
called for by object-oriented ontology, or why we should even fantasize about
objects as scholastic assemblages, Erector Sets of the imagination.
AT THIS STAGE, you could throw up your hands and just admit that Kant was right:
There are object relations, yes, but we cant really know or describe them in detail,
only allude to them in our inevitably human way. Or you could press on, chalking up
these considerable difficulties in naming to the problem of language and solving
them by taking a page from Heidegger, who uses neologisms to refresh the addled
language of philosophythough who really wants to hear more jargon? You could
also consult your local analytic philosopher, who will tell you that metaphysical
mistakes are mistakes in natural language: Artificial languages, anyone? In any event,

object-oriented ontology may, as a philosophy, want to decenter the human, but as

a languageand perforce as a way of thinkingit expands the human into all
relations, raising serious political and ethical questions along the way, but never
answering them.
Names, characters, objects, and, of course, quirky lists of things, like aardvarks,
baseball, and galaxies; or grilled cheeses, commandos, and Lake Michiganthese
(Latourian litanies, as they are called) salt the prose of every object-oriented
ontologist. They humanize the philosopher. This is a people-persons philosophy,
after all, in the sense that objects are people too. Or, to be technical as well as to
the point: Objects are subjects. In describing the life of objects, Harman offers up
what he calls a speculative psychology, which holds that primitive perception is
found even in the nethermost regions of apparently mindless entities.14 It is not
true that the psychic pertains only to the animal,15 he argues, so whats needed is a
category of experience applicable to the primitive psyches of rocks and electrons as
well as to humans.16 The effort here is to extend consciousness to the object world
and to regard experience itself as the result of objects grinding up against one
another: Experience is nothing other than [the] confrontation of an experiencing
real object with a sensual one.17 These quotes speak for themselves and confirm
what the great modernist poet Marianne Moore once told us: It is human nature to
stand in the middle of a thing.
Marx knew a thing or two about human nature as wellespecially our tendency to
personify objects. In his great work Capital, he speaks about commodities and, in a
memorable passage, talks about that table you just have to have, especially now
that its on sale and would look so good in the front room. (Who cares if we never
have guests over for dinner. I need this table!) The table has a certain allure, Marx
tells us, thanks to its metaphysical subtleties and complex of properties. We dont
know how those properties satisfy our needs and wantswhat is it about the wood?
or the shape? Likewise, we cant fathom what those properties tell us about how the
table was madeby whom and under what labor conditions. But the table has

meaning for us nonetheless and becomes ensouled under our gaze. We so admire
the table as a commodity that it magically changes into a thing like no other. It
not only stands with its feet on the ground, but . . . stands on its head, and evolves
out of its wooden brain grotesque ideas, far more wonderful than if it were to begin
dancing of its own free will.18 This is what Marx calls the mystical character of the
commoditymystical because we can only think the objects inner properties by
personifying it in a focus so narrow that we ignore the larger drama, the greater
historical process that makes a commodity a commodity, an object an object, and
capitalism capitalism. This is, in short, the metaphysics of capitalism, then as now.
Ours is a time when schools of interpretation ask us to personify and caricature
objects as autonomous and alivewhether they are the objects who speak in the
new so-called vibrant materialism, or objects who fuss and act up in actor-network
theory, or objects with primitive psyches in object-oriented ontology. Is this really
the way to think at this moment? For Marx, at least, this way of thinking about
objects is what keeps capitalism ticking. To adopt such a philosophy, no questions
asked, is fantasycommodity fetishism in academic form. To identify such
philosophy as the metaphysics of capitalism is theory, ever attentive to historys
impress on our imaginations, whatever we may dream.
Andrew Cole, a professor of English at Princeton University, is the author of The

Birth of Theory (University of Chicago Press, 2014).

[384]
NOTES
1. Graham Harman, The Quadruple Object (Alresford, UK: Zero Books, 2011), 49.
2. Immanuel Kant, Critique of Pure Reason, trans. Norman Kemp Smith (New York: St.
Martins Press, 1965), 116.
3. Ibid., 118.
4. Harman, The Quadruple Object, 47, 128.

5. Ibid., 108.
6. Ibid., 107, 11415.
7. Ibid., 62.
8. Ibid., 6566.
9. Kant, Critique of Pure Reason, 161.
10. Harman, The Quadruple Object, 98.
11. Quentin Meillassoux, After Finitude: An Essay on the Necessity of Contingency, trans. Ray
Brassier (London: Bloomsbury, 2013), 76, 31, 35.
12. Ibid., 26.
13. Martin Heidegger, The Thing, in Poetry, Language, Thought, trans. Albert Hofstadter
(New York: Harper & Row, 1971), 170.
14. Harman, The Quadruple Object, 103.
15. Ibid., 110.
16. Ibid., 103.
17. Ibid., 133.
18. Karl Marx, Capital: A Critique of Political Economy, vol. 1, trans. Ben Fowkes
(Harmondsworth, UK: Penguin, 1976), 16364.