IS ONTOLOGY MAKING US STUPID?

PLURALIST THOUGHTS ON GRAHAM HARMAN'S MONIST IDEALISM

(This paper conducts a critical discussion of the object-oriented ontology of Graham Harman, and
compares it with the similar ontology of Louis Althusser, and with the radically different ontology
of Paul Feyerabend).

Abstract: I begin by deconstructing the title and explaining that Feyerabend does not really use
the word ontology, though he does sometimes call his position ontological realism. Feyerabend
calls his position indifferently a general methodology or a general cosmology, and he seems to
be be hostile to the very enterprise of ontology, as a separate discipline forming part of what he
critiques as school philosophy. I then go on to say that there is a concept of a different type of
ontology, that I call a diachronic ontology that perhaps Feyerabend would have accepted, and that
is very different from ontology as ordinarily thought, which I claim to be synchronic ontology
(having no room for the dialogue with Being, but just supposing that Being is already and always
there without our contribution). I discuss Althusser's structuralist epistemology and ontology as a
predecessor of Graham Harman's object-oriented ontology, and analyse both as exemplifying
synchronic ontology, giving a reading of Harmans recent book THE THIRD TABLE. I then discuss
Feyerabends ideas as showing a different way of doing philosophy and of thinking about Being,
that of a diachronic ontology, in which there is no stable framework or fixed path.
A) INTRODUCTION
The question posed in the title, is ontology making us stupid?, is in reference to Nicholas Carrs
book THE SHALLOWS, which is an elaboration of his earlier essy IS GOOGLE MAKING US
STUPID?, and I will destroy the suspense by giving you the answer right away: Yes and No. Yes
ontology can make us more stupid if it privileges the synchronic, and I will give two examples: (1)
the marxist ontology of Louis Althusser and (2) the object-oriented ontology of Graham Harman.
No, on the contrary, it can make us less stupid, if it privileges the diachronic, and here I will give the
example of the pluralist ontology of Paul Feyerabend.
Normally, I should give a little definition of ontology: the study of being as being, or the study of
the most fundamental categories of beings, or the general theory of objects and their relations.
However, this paper ends with a presentation of the ideas of Paul Feyerabend, and it must be noted
that Feyerabend himself does not use the word ontology, preferring instead to talk, indifferently,
of general cosmology or of general methodology. Sometimes as well he talks of the underlying
system of categories of a worldview. And towards the end of his life he began to talk of Being with
a capital B, but he always emphasized that we should not get hung up on one particular word or
approach because there is no stable framework which encompasses everything, and that any
name or argument or approach only accompanies us on our journey without tying it to a fixed
road (Feyerabends Letter to the Reader, Against Method xvi, available here: http://www.kjf.ca/31-
C2BOR.htm. Feyerabend explicitly indicated that his own deconstructive approach derived from
his fidelity to this ambiguity and this fluidity. Thus ontology for Feyerabend implies a journey, i.e. a
process of individuation, without a fixed road and without a stable framework.
As for stupid, it refers to a process of stupidification or dumbing down, of dis-individuation,
that tends to impose on us just such a fixed road and stable framework. The word making also
calls for explanation. We are noetic creatures, and so the good news is that we can never be
completely stupid, or completely disindividuated, except in case of brain death. The bad news is
that we can always become stupider than we are today, just as we can always become more open,
more fluid, more multiple, more differenciated, in short more individuated. Ontology is not a magic
wand that can transform us into an animal or a god, but it can favorise one or the other fork of the
bifurcation of paths.
ARGUMENT: My argument will be very simple:
 1. traditional ontologies are based on an approach to the real that privileges the synchronic
dimension, where the paths are fixed and the framework is stable. Althusser and Harman are
good examples of synchronic ontology.
2. another type of ontology is possible, and it exists sporadically, which privileges the
diachronic dimension, and thus the aspects of plurality and becoming, the paths are multiple
and the framework is fluid. Feyerabend is a good example of diachronic ontology.
NB: For the sake of brevity, I talk of synchronic and of diachronic ontologies, but in fact each type
of ontology contains elements of the other type, and it is simply a matter of the primacy given to the
synchronic over the diachronic, or the inverse.
Philosophy is inseparable from a series of radical conversions where our comprehension of all that
exists is transformed. In itself, such a capacity for conversion or paradigm change is rather positive.
A problem arises when this conversion amounts to a reduction of our vision and to an
impoverishment of our life, if it makes us stupid. My conversion to a diachronic ontology took
place in 1972, when I read Feyerabends AGAINST METHOD (NB: this was the earlier essay
version, with several interesting developments that were left out of the book)., where he gives an
outline of a pluralist ontology and an epistemology. On reading it I was transported, transformed,
converted; unfortunately, at the same period my philosophy department converted to a very
different philosophy Althusserianism.
B) ALTHUSSER AND ALTHUSSERIANISM
In fact, 1973 was a year that marked a turning point between the diachronic tempest of the 60s
and the synchronic return to order desired by the Althusserians. I am deliberately using the
expression that Bernard Stiegler uses to describe the invention of metaphysics as it was put to work
in Platos REPUBLIC, in support of a project of synchronisation of minds and behaviours. I was the
unwilling and unconsenting witness of an attempt at such a synchronisation on a small scale: my
department, the Department of General Philosophy, sank into the dogmatic project, explicitly
announced as such, of forming radical (ie Althusserian) intellectuals under the aegis of Althusserian
Marxist Science. A small number of Althusserian militants took administrative and intellectual
control of the department, and by all sorts of techniques of propaganda, intimidation, harassment
and exclusion, forced all its members, or almost all, either to conform to the Althusserian party line
or to leave.
Intellectually the Althusserians imposed an onto-epistemological meta-language in terms of which
they affirmed the radical difference between science and ideology, and the scientificity of Marxism.
It is customary to describe Althusserianism from the epistemological point of view, but it also had
an ontological dimension, thanks to its distinction between real objects and theoretical objects:
scientific practice produces, according to them, its own objects, theoretical objects, as a means of
knowing the real objects. The objects of everyday life, the objects of common sense, and even
perceptual objects, are not real objects, but ideological constructions, simulacra (as Harman will
later claim, they are utter shams).
Faced with this negative conversion of an entire department, I tried to resist. Because I am counter-
suggestible (as Feyerabend claimed to be) in other words, because I am faithful to the process of
individuation rather than to a party line I devoted my philosophical efforts to a critique of
Althusserianism. Its rudimentary ontology, the determination of Being in terms of real objects,
corresponds to a transcendental point of view of first philosophy which acts as a hindrance to
scientific practice, and pre-constrains the type of theoretical construction that scientific research can
elaborate. To maintain the diachronicity of the sciences one cannot retain the strict demarcation
between real objects and theoretical objects, nor between science and ideology. The sciences thus
risk being demoted to the same plane as any other ideological construction and having their objects
demoted to the status of simulacra. This is a step that the Althusserians did not take, but that, as we
shall see, Harman does, thus relieving the sciences of their privileged status.
NB: The set of interviews with Jacques Derrida, POLITICS AND FRIENDSHIP, describes the
same phenomenon of intellectual pretention and intimidation supported by a theory having an aura
of epistemological and ontological sophistication but which was radically deficient on both counts.
Derrida emphasises that the concepts of object and of objectivity were deployed without
sufficient analysis of their pertinence nor of their theoretical and practical utility and groundedness.
After the period of Althusserian hegemony came a new period of diachronic storm, this time on
the intellectual plane. Translations came out of works by Foucault and Derrida, but also of Lyotard
and Deleuze. Althusserian dogmas were contested and deconstructed. But for me there still
remained serious limitations on thought despite this new sophistication. There was an ontological
dimension common to all these authors, and this ontological dimension was either neglected or
ignored by the defenders of French Theory. Feyerabend himself seemed to be in need of an
ontology to re-inforce his pluralism and to protect it against dogmatic incursions of the Althusserian
type and against relativist dissolutions of the post-modern type. I obtained a scholarship to go and
study in Paris, and I left Australia in 1980 to continue my ontological and epistemological research.
What I retain from this experience, over and above the need to maintain and to push forward the
deconstruction by elaborating a new sort of ontology to accompany its advances, is the feeling of
disappointment with the contradictory sophistication in Althusserian philosophy. I had the
impression that it pluralised and diachronised with one hand what it reduced and synchronised with
the other. Thus, despite its initial show of sophistication it made its acolytes stupid, disindividuated.
Further, as an instrument of synchronisation on the large scale it was doomed to failure by its
Marxism and its scientism, both of which made securing its general adoption an impossible mission.
It would have been necessary to de-marxise and de-scientise its theory to make it acceptable to the
greatest number. Further, its diffusion was limited to the academic microcosm, because at that time
there was no internet. These limitations to the theorys propagation (Marxism, scientism, academic
confinement) have been deconstructed and overcome by a new philosophical movement, called
OOO (object-oriented ontology) which has conquered a new sort of philosophical public. Lastly, I
retain a distrust of any movement in philosophy, and of the power tactics (propaganda,
intimidation, harassment, exclusion) that are inevitably implied. Oblivious to this sort of wariness
with respect to the sociology of homo academicus, the OOOxians publicise themselves as a
movement and attribute the rapid diffusion of their ideas to their mastery of digital social
technologies.
C) HARMAN AND OBJECT-ORIENTED ONTOLOGY
We are living through a period of intellectual regression in the realm of Continental Philosophy, a
regression that proclaims itself to be a decisive progress beyond the merely negative and critical
philosophies of the recent past. Yet the philosophies of Deleuze, Foucault, Derrida and Lyotard
cannot be summed up in the image of pure critique. Their critical dissolution of the dogmatic
residues contained in even the most innovative philosophies they had encountered did not leave us
in a powerless void of negativity and paralysis. Their deconstruction went all the way down,
deconstructing even the notion of critique and liberating the possibility of new assemblages and
new processes of subjectivation.Beyond the critique of the new figures of transcendence and
ontotheology they gave concrete sketches of how to see the world in terms of a very different sort of
ontology based on immanence a diachronic ontology.
The recent promotion of philosophical successors to this constellation of thinkers of immanence,
such as Badiou and Zizek, has not led to any real progress but to a labour of travestying the past
(one has only to look at Badious DELEUZE and Zizeks ORGANS WITHOUT BODIES) and to a
return to such intellectual deadends as Lacanian psychoanalysis. But even these regressive
philosophers remain in dialogue, however one-sided and unjust, with their illustrious predecessors,
and strive to confront them at the level of conceptual richness that characterised their work. The
next step was to keep up the general aura of having gone beyond the older supposedly negative
thinkers but to radically simplify the conceptual level, presenting easy summary presentations of the
new thought while conveniently forgetting the conceptual paths followed.
One can agree with both Mehdi Belhaj Kacem and Alexander Galloway that it is Badious set-
theoretic philsophy that expresses in its purest and most general form the new paradigm that
articulates explicitly what is elsewhere just blithely presupposed as a form of thought too evident to
even be aware of. They indicate that the next step in consolidating the regression that Badious
philosophy, however innovative, does not initiate but rather registers and legitimates, corresponds to
the far less ambitious productions of the object-oriented ontologists. I say far less ambitious in the
sense of conceptual ambition, because their ambition is of a different order. They are the marketised
version of the Badiou-Zizek constellation, and so the extremely politicised tone has been discreetly
dissolved to leave a more demagogic packaging to the stale ideas that OOO trumpets ambitiously as
the new construction after so much critique. They promulgate a dumbed down de-marxised version
of the set-theoretic universe explicated by Badiou.
It is normal that in this context Franois Laruelles philosophy is at last coming into its own. It
could not fully succeed while the work of Deleuze and Derrida were in progress, as his critiques of
that work were only half-true, based on giving it an ultimately uncharitable reading as remaining
within the norms of sufficient philosophy, and refraining from considering other possible readings.
Laruelle pursued over the decades his unwavering commitment to immanence, and this project
shines forth now against the background of the regression that Badiou-Zizek-Meillassoux and the
OOOxians represent.
Despite his insinuations to the contrary, Bruno Latour with his compositionism is the direct
application of deconstructionist and post-structuralist thought, which he is very familiar with. His
talk about his empirical research is very misleading and contains overtones of scientistic bravado,
as his system is in many places a logical continuation of the work of on these predecessors. He is
however a good populariser of good ideas, and his work should be encouraged as long as we do not
accept his own contextualisation of his ideas. Latour is vey much an inheritor of Deleuze, Lyotard,
Foucault, Derrida, and Serres, and the intellectual contemporary of Laruelle and Stiegler. It is this
philosophical inheritance that gives his work its superiority over Badious and of Harman's, not any
primacy of the empirical over the philosophical.
Beyond the critique of the new figures of transcendence and ontotheology these thinkers gave
concrete sketches of how to see the world in terms of a very different sort of ontology based on
immanence a diachronic ontology. The recent promotion of philosophical successors to this
constellation of thinkers of immanence, such as Badiou and Zizek, has not led to any real progress
but to a labour of travestying the past (one has only to look at Badious DELEUZE and Zizeks
ORGANS WITHOUT BODIES) and to a return to such intellectual deadends as Lacanian
psychoanalysis (especially understood synchronically, as Badiou understands everything, as a
system). But even these regressive philosophers remain in dialogue, however one-sided and unjust,
with their illustrious predecessors, and strive to confront them at the level of conceptual richness
that characterised their work.
The next step was to keep up the general aura of having gone beyond the older supposedly
negative thinkers but to radically simplify the conceptual level, presenting easy summary
presentations of the new thought while conveniently forgetting the conceptual paths followed. This
step was taken by the epigoni: Meillassoux, who still retains an elvated style and at least an
intention of conceptual rigour; and its pop variant in Graham Harmans adaptation for the masses.
For example, in THE THIRD TABLE Graham Harman gives a popularised version his theoretical
position in the form of a flawed reading of and an unsatisfying response to Sir Arthur Eddingtons
famous paradox of the two tables. Unfortunately, Harman shows himself incapable of grasping the
anti-reductionistic import of Eddingtons argument and proposes an abstract philosophical dualism
to replace Eddingtons pluralist vision of scientific research. It is tacitly implied that the theoretical
justification for this unsatisfying presentation is to be found elsewhere in Harmans works, but this
is not the case.
Harman judges science and common sense in terms of the crude philosophical criteria of another
age and finds them lacking in knowledge of reality. He is 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. Works such as THE QUADRUPLE OBJECT, THE THIRD
TABLE and BELLS AND WHISTLES, like the whole of his philosophy, are the record of Harman
noticing the discrepancies, but refusing to revise the model. His solution is a dead-end, the timid,
nostalgic propounding of an antiquated epistemology under the cover of a "new" ontology.
It will be seen in this review essay that Harmans position is one of a surface pluralism (there are
multiple rgimes of knowing for an object) overcoded by a deep monism and demarcationism (the
humanist, the scientific, and the everyday objects are simulacra, only the withdrawn object is
real) embedded in a synchronic ontological frame (time is not an ontologically pertinent feature of
real objects.
D) HOW ABSTRACT MONIST IDEALISM MASQUERADES AS ITS OPPOSITE
Today, OOO is at a loss. 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 Bruno Latour, Bernard Stiegler, and Franois Laruelle.
One has only to look at the utter incomprehension that OOOxians manifest with regard to Laruelle
to see that their claim to move beyond deconstruction is an empty bluff.

OOO is a perfect example for Laruelles non-philosophical analysis: a selection is made in the given
of a datum (objects) that is then elevated to the status of a condition of the given. Objects that are
present in the immanence of the given are selected out as the transcendent condition of this given
and this transcendental gesture imposes a disjuncture in the immanent field between these new (in
fact posited by a posteriori selection) transcendent real objects and the merely empirical sensual
objects. The distinction between the real objects and sensual objects is both intrinsic to their
immanent difference and an extrinsic transcendent distinction that supposedly constitutes this
difference. The various strategies to conjoin (vicarious causality, allusion) what has thus been
disjoined (withdrawal) constitute the charm of OOO.

So Harman's OOO would be an easy target for a Laruellian non-philosophical analysis, and I look
forward to such a critique, now that OOO has shown its sterility as a research-programme. As for
myself, I consider that Deleuze and Feyerabend give us the material for what I call a non-Laruellian
non-philosophical critique. I have been pursuing my own version of non-philosophy for some time
now and am curious to see what people can do with Laruelle.

Harmans ontology is one of transcendence, and Levi Bryants insofar as it concords with Harmans
meta-categories is one of transcendence too, even if he fills in these meta-categories with immanent
categoreal content. Laruelle, once again, gives good analyses of this sort of mixes of transcendence
and immanence that give themselves out as pure philosophies of immanence. My point of view is,
however, purely Feyerabendian: these ontologies are far too constraining on matters that only
empirical, though not necessarily scientific, research can decide.

Once one no longer accepts its proclamation at face value, it is easy to see that OOO is a form of
nostalgic return to ontotheology by means of its watered down version of transcendence, renamed
withdrawal. This appeal to an absolute, a realm of transcendent "withdrawn" objects, is OOO's
solution to a problem that it claims to have discovered, that it designates under the bogus concept of
correlationism (Meillassoux) or philosophies of access (Harman). Correlationism is a bogus concept
that trades on a confusion between a narrow conceptual sense that would best be designated (post-
kantian) idealism and an extended notional sense that can cover anything and everything. So it
manages to combine the very narrow negatively valued intension of the first (idealism) and the very
large extension of the second (anything that is not OOO).
The objectual reductionists never even understood the arguments of deconstruction and of post-
structuralism, and so are ill-equiped to engage the ideas of its successors. Graham Harman's newly
published retrospective collection of articles BELLS AND WHISTLES: MORE SPECULATIVE
REALISM is proof of that. It is a compendium of OOO's familiar but disappointing history of
misunderstandings and failed encounters, of affective slogans hammered out as if they were
arguments, and its publication is a fitting monument to a set of gesticulations that never quite
cohered into a philosophy.

Harmans 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 (cf. THE
THIRD TABLE, passim) his objects are the only real objects. More importantly, his own
(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 (reduced to the status of "phantoms" and "simulacra") except his
own abstract knowledge and his withdrawn objects.
Harmans 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 worst 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".
A very amusing example of the inability of a synchronic ontology to comprehend even the terms of
a diachronic ontology, yet alone to refute it, is given by Graham Harmans repeated argument
against relational ontologies. Harmans ontology is a classic static ontology, spatialised to the point
that he cannot even conceive of time as being real. Time, it will be recalled, in Harmans system is
the tension between sensual objects and their sensual qualities (THE QUADRUPLE OBJECT,
100), and so is confined to the sensual realm, the realm of utter shams as he calls it in THE
THIRD TABLE (6). Harmans real objects are spatialized essences that are absolutely atemporal, so
Harman has a very big problem indeed in accounting for time, which is in effect unreal in his
system: Time concerns nothing but the superficial drama of surface qualities swirling atop a
sensual object that is somewhat durable but ultimately unreal (interview faslanyc).
Harmans OOO is a-temporal and a-historical: Harman proposes no understanding of change, his
philosophy has no place for it except by arbitrary posit. His often reiterated master argument
against relational ontologies is that they cannot explain change, that if everything were related
nothing would change. This is patently false, as relations include temporal relations. Deleuze for
example talks about both kinetic (relative speeds and accelerations) and dynamic (relative forces,
and relative capacities to affect and to be affected) relations. It is ludicrous to claim that Deleuzes
system entails that change is impossible.Harman's denegation of temporal relations is preparatory to
his re-essentialising of the object
This shows not only Harmans incomprehension of relations (that he systematically confuses with
specific subsets of relations such as interactions, and also with specific types of relation such as
contact and access), but also his inability to understand the positions he is arguing against, and that
he is supposed to have gone beyond. He critiques only straw man positions that have never existed.
He has no understanding of, for example, Deleuze, and just deprecates his philosophy without
getting into any detail. He gives pseudo-conceptual affective refutations with no citations and no
analysis. Further, he has given no substantial account of what is wrong with so-called relational
ontologies in general, except for his master-argument that if everything were related change would
be impossible. Harman tries to insinuate that in his ontology change can be accounted for.
However, Harman denies the reality of time and so his ontology is synchronic in a very strong
sense. His understanding of other philosophers is based on a synchronic reduction of their style.
Even his reading ((in THE THIRD TABLE) of Eddingtons two tables argument falsifies it by
extracting it from the whole movement of Eddington's "Introduction" to his book THE NATURE
OF THE PHYSICAL WORLD, and from his vision of the movement of research in general.
Harman just doesnt get temporal relations. Hence his repeated, and absurd, claim that if
everything was composed of relations nothing would change. As if moving faster or slower than,
accelerating faster or slower than, being attracted or repelled or pushed or whirled around were not
relations.
Far from being a crushing objection to relational ontologies, Harmans Master Argument is in fact
rather a description of his incomprehension of diachronic ontologies.
A related objection put out by Harman is his critique of internal relations: that if everything is
constituted by its relations and one thing changes its relations even slightly, it becomes another
thing. This is based on an equivocation on the word internal: Internal relations are relations that
enter into the very essence or definition of the things related. Given a thing all its relations are given
and so all other things and relations are given. This is the ultimate block universe, true, but it is also
the ultimate static or synchronic universe. Once again this objection does not take into account
dynamic relations. It also confounds such internal relations with the relations that are internal to
the thing in a different sense: the relations between the thing and its parts, and the relations of these
parts between themselves. If a thing is composed of processes or becomings and their relations
(Harman always leaves that clause out when he accuses others of reductionism) then it becomes
different when these relations change, but it does not necessarily become a different thing. The
thing is constituted also of the emergent relation between its parts and their relations (this is part of
the explanation of the phrase from Whitehead that Harman has such trouble with: the many
become one, and are increased by one). Harman simply assumes that such emergent relations are
ontologically fragile and dissolve or decompose at the slightest modification. Harman is not the
inventor of robust emergence, and in fact is deeply indebted to the real Whitehead (and not his
spatialised caricature).
The Sokal Hoax was a one time affair, but Harman seems to have perennised his own argumentative
hoaxes, repeating the same old sophisms instead of engaging seriously with rival points of view.
Harman presents us with a caricature of Heidegger, as he caricatures Bergson, Whitehead, and
Deleuze on time, ie spatializes them into a caricature that can then easily be refuted. This is to
distract attention from the fact that his own system is incapable of dealing with change.
Harman needs his sensual objects, despite being obliged to declare them unreal (utter shams)
because he has an impoverished notion of reality. As to the question of internal relations or not, I
see no reason to decide in advance in favor of one side of the binary choice or the other. In my view
entertaining one or the other idea amounts to adopting a special hypothesis within a more general
ontology, applicable in some cases and not others.

E) THE PARADOX OF WITHDRAWAL

1) HOW CAN A WITHDRAWN OBJECT DE-WITHDRAW?
Harmans 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, Harmans 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, an utter sham.
Harmans 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
(objects are deeper than their appearance to the human mind but also deeper than their relations to
one another, p4, the real table is a genuine reality deeper than any theoretical or practical
encounter with itdeeper than any relations in which it might become involved, p9-10). This
depth is a key part of Harmans 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 (cf. THE THIRD TABLE, Whatever we
captureis not the real table, p12) and the idea that it can be captured in some very abstract and
indirect way. In virtue of the unknowability of his 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 it up to
philosophy to assume 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.
Harmans 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.
Graham Harman proclaims that his philosophy is realist, when it is one of the most thoroughgoingly
anti-realist philosophies imaginable. Time is unreal, and so is every common sense object and every
physical object. All are declared to be utter shams. 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 is a philosophy of access, so the illusion of 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 (Harman systematically confuses access, contact, relation and interaction), he can
only just posit it. I see no reason to postulate an absolute bifurcation between interaction on the one
hand and withdrawal on the other. Whitehead 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, is 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). Harmans system with its summary
dualisms is unable to deal with the fine-grained distinctions that come up in our experience.
2) WITHDRAWAL IS LITIST
There is an affective split between a pure ascetic aristocratic discourse of absolute withdrawal,
where objects are unknowable and untouchable, and an apparently more democratic, in fact
demagogic, discourse for the philosophical pleb (i.e. for Harman, computer programmers and
artists) where examples can be given. Thus is implicitly generated an unspoken, and so untheorised,
notion of relative withdrawal, or degrees of withdrawal.
Harman combines a rather traditional metaphysics with a lexic that connotes a turgid pathos that
seems to attract some people by its vague but portentous associations. For all their talk about a
democracy of objects the OOOxians have an litist worldview and comportment. Harmans views
on undermining and overmining allow him to promulgate his philosophy as both healing the
two cultures divide and going far beyond it. There is a sort of mirror effect where some
philosophically curious computer programmers can recognise themselves in a flattering avant-garde
image. Yet this gratifying philosophical image is at the conceptual level an impoverishment. There
is just one kind of thing, objects, and they withdraw, no examples of real objects can be given, they
can only be known by philosophical intellection and artistic allusion.
F) TABULA TRIFECTA: HARMAN'S "THIRD TABLE"
In THE THIRD TABLE, Harman gives a brief summary of the principle themes of his object-
oriented ontology. It is a little book, published this year in a bilingual (English-German) edition, and
theEnglish text occupies a little over 11 pages (p4-15). The content is quite engaging as Harman
accomplishes the exploit of presenting his principal ideas in the form of a response to Eddingtons
famous two tables argument. This permits him toformulate his arguments in terms of a continuous
polemic against reductionism in both its humanistic and scientistic forms. All that is fine, so far as it
goes. However, problems arise when we examine his presentation of each of Eddingtons two
tables, and even more so with his presentation of his own contribution to the discussion: a third
table, the only real one in Harmans eyes.
In the introduction to his book THE NATURE OF THE PHYSICAL WORLD (1928), Eddington
begins with an apparent paradox: I have just settled down to the task of writing these lectures and
have drawn up my chairs to my two tables. Two tables! Yes; there are duplicates of every object
about me two tables, two chairs, two pens (xi). Eddington explains that there is the familiar object,
the table as a substantial thing, solid and reliable,against which I can support myself. But, according
to him, modern physics speaks of a quite different table: My scientific table is mostly emptiness.
Sparsely scattered in that emptiness are numerous electric charges rushing about with great speed
(xii). Eddington contrasts the substantiality of the familiar table (a solid thing, easy to visualise as
such) and the abstraction of the scientific table (mostly empty space, a set of physical measures
related by mathematical formulae). The familiar world of common sense is a world of illusions,
whereas the the scientific worl, the only real world according to modern physics, is a world of
shadows.
What is the relation between the two worlds? Eddington poses the question and dramatises the
divergence between the two worlds, but contrary to what Harman seems to think, he gives no
answer of his own. He declares that premature attempts to determine their relation are harmful,
more of a hindrance than a help, to research. In fact, Eddington refuses to commit himself on the
ontological question posed in his introduction because he is convinced that it is empirical research,
mobilising psychology and physiology as well as physics, which must give the answer. It is clear
that he would have regarded Althusserianism as just such a premature and harmful attempt. But
what would he have thought of OOO? We shall return to this question in the last part of this talk.
In his little text Harman explains very succinctly the difference between the two tables. But in
opposition to Eddingtons supposed scientism, Harman affirms that these two tables are equally
unreal (p6), that they are just fakes or simulacra (utter shams, 6). Assigning each table to one
side of the gap that separates the famous two cultures dear to C.P.Snow (the culture of the
humanities on one side, that of the sciences on the other), he finds that both are products of
reductionism, which negates the reality of the table.
The scientist reduces the table downward to tiny particles invisible to the eye; the humanist
reduces it upward to a series of effects on people and other things (6).
Refusing reductionism and its simulacra, Harman poses the existence of a third table (the only
real table, 10) which serves as an emblem for a third culture to come whose paradigm could be
taken from the arts which attempt to establish objects deeper than the features through which they
are announced, or allude to objects that cannot quite be made present (THE THIRD TABLE, 14).
Philosophy itself is to abandon its scientific pretentions in order to speak at last of the real world
and its objects.
In WORD AND OBJECT Quine proposes a technique called semantic ascent to resolve certain
problems in philosophy. He invites us to formulate our philosophical problems no longer in material
terms, as questions concerning the components of the world (objects) but rather in formal terms,
as questions concerning the correct use and the correct analysis of our linguistic expressions
(words). The idea was to find common ground to discuss impartially the pretentions of rival
points of view. Unfortunately, this method turned out to be useless to resolve most problems, as the
important disputes concern just as much the terms to employ and their interpretation as soon as we
take up an interesting philosophical problem.
Inversely, Graham Harman with his new ontology proposes a veritable semantic descent (or we
could call it an objectal descent), to reverse the linguistic turn, and to replace it with an
ontological turn. According to him the fundamental problems of ontology must be reformulated in
terms of objects and their qualities. These objects are not the objects of our familiar world, let us
recall that Harman declares that the familiar table is unreal, a simulacrum, an utter sham. The real
object is a philosophical object, which withdraws behind all its external effects (10). We cannot
touch the harmanian table (for we can never touch any real object) nor even know it.
The real is something that cannot be known, but only loved (12).
Thus Harman operates a reduction of the world to objects and their qualities which is intended to be
in the first instance ontological and not epistemological (here Harman is mistaken, and the
epistemological dimension is omnipresent in his work, but as the object of a denegation). This
objectal reduction is difficult to argue for, and sometimes it is presented as a self-evident truth
accessible to every person of good will and good sense, and Harmans philosophy is trumpeted as a
return to naivet and concreteness, triumphing over post-structuralist pseudo-sophistication and its
abstractions. But we shall see that this is not the case.
This reduction of the world to objects and their qualities amounts to a conversion of our
philosophical vision that is disguised as a return to the real world of concrete objects:
Instead of beginning with radical doubt, we start from naivet. What philosophy shares with the
lives of scientists, bankers, and animals is that all are concerned with objects (THE QUADRUPLE
OBJECT, 5).
Once we begin from naivet rather than doubt, objects immediately take center stage (idem, 7)
This self-evidence of the point of view of navet is in fact meticulously constructed and highly
philosophically motivated. We must recall that Harmans objects are not at all the objects of
common sense (we cannot know them nor touch them). So the naivet that Harman invokes here
is not some primitive openness to the world (that would only be a variant of the bucket theory of
mind and of knowledge, denounced by Karl Popper). This naivet is a determinate point of view,
a very particular perspective (the naive point of view, as the French translation so aptly calls it).
Under cover of this word naivet, Harman talks to us of a naf point of view, that is
nevertheless an objectal point of view., that is to say not naf at all but partisan. Harman deploys
all his rhetorical resources to provoke in the reader the adoption of the objectal point of view as if it
were self-evident. This objectal conversion is necessary, according to him, to at last get out of the
tyranny of epistemology and the linguistic turn, and edify a new ontology, new foundation for a
metaphysics capable of speaking of all objects. We have seen that this self-evident beginning
implies both a conversion and a reduction.
We see the parallels and differences of object-oriented ontology in relation to Althusserianism. Both
relegate the familiar object and the perceptual object to the status of social constructions. OOO goes
even further and assigns the scientific object to the same status of simulacrum (utter sham): only
philosophy can tell us the truth about objects. Both propose a meta-language, but OOOs meta-
language is so de-qualified that it is susceptible of different instanciations, and in fact no two
members of the movement have the same concrete ontology. Finally, OOO spreads in making
abundant, liberal (and here the word has all its import) use of the means that the internet makes
available: blogs, discussion groups, facebook exchanges, twitter, podcasts, streaming.
I have spoken here principally of Graham Harmans OOO because I do not believe that OOO exists
in general and I also think that its apparent unity is a deceitful faade. There is no substance to the
movement, it is rather a matter of agreement on a shared meta-language, ie on a certain terminology
and set of themes, under the aegis of which many different positions can find shelter. I have spoken
here almost exclusively of THE THIRD TABLE because Harmans formulations change from book
to book, and I find that in this little brochure Harman offers us his meta-language in a pure state. In
his other books Harman, without noticing, slides constantly between a meta-ontological sense of
object and a sense which corresponds to one possible instanciation of this meta-language, thus
producing much conceptual confusion.
My major objection to Harmans OOO is that it 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, 12). Despite its promises, Harmans OOO does not
bring us closer to the richness and complexity of the real world but in fact replaces the
multiplicitous and variegated world with a set of bloodless and lifeless abstractions his
unknowable and untouchable, ghostly, objects. Not only are objects unknowable, but even
whether something is a real object or not is unknowable: we can never know for sure what is a real
object and what isnt.
Yet Harman has legislated that his object is the only real object (cf. THE THIRD TABLE, where
Harman calls his table, as compared to the table of everyday life and the scientists table, the only
real one, 10, and the only real table, 11. As for the everyday table and the scientific table: both
are equally unreal, both are utter shams, 6. Whatever we capture, whatever we sit at or destroy
is not the real table, 12. And he accuses others of reductionism!). To say that the real object is
unknowable (the real is something that cannot be known, p12) is an epistemological thesis. As is
the claim that the object we know, the everyday or the scientific object, is unreal.
Harman has invented a new vocabulary to describe various types of reductionism that he believes
he has discerned in various philosophical moves. The move of explaining a macroscopic object
such as a table in terms of its atomic and sub-atomic is called undermining. Explaining the table
in terms of the flux of perceptions is called overmining. Harman has recently detected arguments
that make both moves at once, so he has baptised them duomining. A notable feature of all three
moves is that their reduction operates inside only one of the worlds that Harman discusses the
world of utter shams. But Harman himself operates a different sort of reduction that reduces the
reality of one world, the sham world of sensual objects, to that of the real world of withdrawn
objects. As this reduction cuts across both worlds, I propose to call it transmining.
How can this philosophy help us in our lives? It is a doctrine of resignation and passivity: we cannot
know the real object, the object we know is unreal, an utter sham, we cannot know what is or isnt
a real object. Harmans 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
(objects are deeper than their appearance to the human mind but also deeper than their relations to
one another, 4; the real table is a genuine reality deeper than any theoretical or practical encounter
with itdeeper than any relations in which it might become involved, 9-10). This depth is a key
part of Harmans ontology, which is not flat at all and is the negation of immanence. Rather, it is
centered on this vertical dimension of depth and transcendence.
Harman practices a form of ontological critique which contains both relativist elements and
dogmatic elements. At the level of explicit content Harman is freer, less dogmatic than Althusser, as
he does not make science the queen of knowledge. Harman situates himself insistantly after the
linguistic turn, after the so-called epistemologies of access, after deconstruction and post-
structuralism. He considers that the time for construction has come, that we must construct a new
philosophy by means of a return to the things themselves of the world objects. But is this the
case?
G) HARMAN'S ABSTRACTIVE ONTOLOGY: A COMPARISON WITH BADIOU
We have traversd a period of polarisation during which the neoliberal doxa reigned uncontested
almost everywhere, except in a few academic and para-academic enclaves, where a refined or
aristocratic critique was elaborated. The philosophical result of the extenuation of this polarisation
is in part the development of an abstractive (and a-political) ontology of objects as relay and
effectuation of the neoliberal hypothesis (Graham Harman), and in part the elaboration of the
subtractive ontology of multiples as relay and effectuation of the communist hypothesis (Badiou).
In both cases we have a truncated form of pluralism: a synchronic ontology of objectal multiples
where the diachronic is added on afterwards as a supplement.
For Harman time is not a real relation between real objects, but rather a sensual relation between
sensual objects, in the illusory domain of simulacra (THE THIRD TABLE calls these sensual
objects, i.e. the objects of common sense and of the sciences, utter shams, page 6). For Badiou
time in the strong sense belongs to the event in the naming intervention, and there also, as for
Harman, seems to be dependent, at least in part, on subjectivity.
There is also a monism which comes to overcode this ontological pluralism, at both the ontological
and the epistemological level:
a) ontological For Harman the real is a unique and separate domain, real objects are withdrawn;
the objects of common sense, of the humanities and of the sciences are pure simulacra. For Badiou
the real is the non-qualified mathematical multiple, and the objects of common sense, but also of the
sciences and of the humanities, are constructed out of these multiples (it is to be noted, and this is
an important difference with Harman, these constructed objects are not necessarily simulacra). In
both cases there is ontological primacy of one domain placed over and above the others.
b) epistemological For Harman scientific knowledge does not accede to the reality of objects, the
only possible knowledge is indirect and appertains to the arts under the control of object-oriented
ontology, which dissipates the ontological and epistemological illusions, such as the naturalist
prejudice and the scientistic prejudice. For Badiou, to each truth-domain there corresponds a
generic and paradigmatic procedure (matheme, poem, political invention, love). Philosophy serves
to enounce the common configuration of these paradigmatic procedures and to dissipate the
prejudices coming from the suture of philosophy to just one of these truth-domains. Badiou here is
again more pluralist than Harman, as he recognises the existence of four truth-domains, and not
just one.
In considering the relation of Harman's philosophy to that of Badiou the important point is not what
Harman says explicitly about set theory, his position on set-theory is non-existent compared to
Badiou. The point is not one of intellectual biography, but of the structure of OOO's ontological
paradigm. There is no claim that Harman was personally influenced by Badiou, just that Badiou
enounces this sort of paradigm in its purest form. People can be positivists without having read a
single positivist text or even having heard of positivism. The same is true for Badiousian-type
ontologies.
Harmans real objects are devoid of all sensual qualities and are thus reduced to the status of pure
elements and combinations of elements. Harman also refuses Meillassouxs mathematical
reductionism, but I think that this leaves him with a hard choice: either real objects are numerically
distinct and he falls into a set-theoretic ontology, or they are not numerically distinct and they are so
noumenally unqualified that the epithet object is inappropriate and his ontology becomes totally
indeterminate.
Conclusion: abstractive and subtractive ontologies are in regression compared to the pluralist
philosophies of their predecessors. They are the complementary representatives (a politicised
communist version in Badious case, a de-politicised neoliberal version in that of Harman) of a
truncated pluralism, the synchronic shadow of the diachronic ontologies that they ape without being
able to rival in their force of thought. Materially pluralist, they remain formally monist. Harmans
OOO is a specific variant within the general paradigm set out by Badious philosophy. The
terminological differences are important. Badiou speaks in terms of multiples and events, Harman
in terms of objects. Badiou explicitly emphasises the pluralist aspect of his ontology (multiples) and
makes room for time and change (events), even if he gives them a secondary place in his ontology.
Harman prefers the more unitary term, and consigns time and change to the realm of the sensual,
i.e. of utter sham.
H) PHILOSOPHIES OF ACCESS
Harman argues against philosophies of access, but this is just to redo, only much more sloppily,
the critical work done by Popper and Sellars, Quine and Kuhn, Bachelard and Feyerabend, Lacan
and Althusser, Wittgenstein and Rorty refuting and dismantling the dogmas of empiricism. Far from
going beyond the post-structuralists Harman has not even caught up with the structuralists. No
important philosophy of the 20th Century has been a philosophy of access, and Harmans OOO is a
regression on most of the preceding philosophy that he claims to critique and surpass.
Knowledge is not access, it is not contact. Propositional relations are not access. An interaction is
not in general access, either. More importantly, a relation is not the same thing as an interaction.
Harman conflates all this to obtain some blurry straw-man that even a 10 year old child would have
no trouble refuting. So the whole picture of relations as not exhausting the qualities of the object
accessed is erroneous. Thus withdrawal has no sense as a general concept. These terms access,
exhaust withdrawal are normally part of a temporal, dynamic vocabulary. They are used
illegitimately in Harmans system and serve to give an allure of temporality to what is in fact an
ontology of stasis.
Harman is so concentrated on criticising the privilege given to human access and to anthropocentric
assumptions in general, a rearguard action if ever there was one, that he has no understanding at all
for the recent and contemporary pluralist philosophies that attempt to track down and dissolve the
privilege given to reified categories and to monist assumptions in general. Harmans ontology falls
under the pluralist critiques of the post-structuralists and the post-empiricists.
Harmans OOO relies on a systematic ambiguity in his key terms (object, withdrawal) between their
use as meta-categories and their use as categories. We can never see or touch or know an object
(meta-category) but he constantly gives examples from different domains (category). Withdrawal
means ultimate abstraction from sensual qualities and relations, absolutely no direct contact or
relation (meta-category), or it just means the sensual richness of objects, always more than our
immediate experience of them. We get a contradictory synthesis between a Northern asceticism and
a Mediterranean sensualism. But in the last instance this concrete abundance, this aesthetic
sensualism is declared to be an utter sham.
It is at the level of his ontology as rudimentary set of meta-categories that the homology of
Harmans OOO with speculative capitalism can be affirmed. Badiou accepts the existence of this
homology for his own ontology, and takes it very seriously as a problem. Hence his repeated
engagement with the concepts of the event and change, requiring him to complete his synchronic
ontology with a diachronic supplement. Harmans response is just incomprehension and denialism,
as with all the other critiques that his system has received. Nevertheless it is the internal homology
between meta-categories and the categories that instantiate them (which makes of Harmans system
an elaborate play on words) that makes possible the external homologies between Harmans system
and various concrete domains, including the economy.
The question of primacy remains moot in contemporary philosophy. Despite repeated allusions to
the collapse of foundations and the attempt to construct a post-foundationalist philosophy,
contemporary thinkers still grapple with this question. One must ask of each philosophy: to what
does it give primacy to philosophy, science, art, religion, or common sense (or to none)? Badiou
and Harman give primacy to (transcendental, meta-level) philosophy. Laruelle is more ambiguous,
giving primacy to science, yet including non-standard philosophy on the same level as the sciences.
Deleuze and Guattari in WHAT IS PHILOSOPHY? are somewhere between the two positions, and
so seem to avoid the pitfalls of primacy: they situate philosophy on the same level as the sciences
(and the arts) but make philosophy capable of meta-operations that take functions in physics (and
affects and percepts in the arts) as objects of its own philosophical concepts.
I) HARMAN'S CONTRADICTORY HERMENEUTICS OF SUBJECTIVITY
Harman's OOO splits hermeneutic, i.e. participative, exploration of the world into objective
speculation (an absolutised and thus withdrawn context of justification) and sensual or subjective
encounter (an absolutised, and thus sham, context of discovery). This splitting demotes the
subject to the world of shams, which leads to a reurn of the repressed, in the form of an implied
subjectivity, but one that he is either unaware of or unwilling to endorse explicitly, adapted to the
neo-liberal order. Far from eliminating subjectivity from the world of objects Harmans OOO is
subtended by an all-pervasive degraded subjectivity masquerading as its opposite. Harman then
proceeds to re-subjectify his philosophical vision with expressions connoting a subjectivity that is
ruled out by the strict application of that philosophy.
Waxing lyrical, Harman talks of how we must love the object: The real is something that cannot be
known, only loved (THE THIRD TABLE, 12); thinking must be indirect, its approach to objects
can only be oblique (12), and allude to objects that cannot quite be made present (14). All this
talk of loving and hunting and approaching and alluding to, all these expressions are strictly ill-
formed. A sensual subject (for example Harman, or the reader) cannot love, hunt, approach, or even
allude to a real object. Its not that objects cannot "quite" be made present, they cannot be made
present at all. Withdrawal is all or none, it does not admit of degrees (from hardly to not quite
withdraw). Yet to give appeal to the theory Harman has need of descriptors of the subjective attitude
of those who endorse it. Hence the constant talk of objects that redounds in unthematised subjective
participation in the theory as vision of the world. The objectal conversion, as the passage to the
constructed naivet that sees objects everywhere, is thus a subjective conversion to a hard-headed
noetic asceticism of intelligible objects coupled with a soft-hearted sensual hedonism of the
aesthetic play of simulacra. With OOO, you can be a geek and an esthete at the same time, with the
contradiction being covered up by the medial subjectivity of loving indirectness, of hunterly
obliquity, and of diaphonous allusion.
Despite appearances to the contrary, Harman in fact privileges subjectivity in various key aspects of
his philosophy: while trying desperately to contain it within his conceptual reductions it seeps out
and contaminates the whole with a geeko-esthetic compound subjectivity fusing cold intellectual
manipulation and warm sensual enjoyment and thus proscribing the ethical encounter which can be
neither merely conceptual nor merely esthetic nor some conflicted hybrid of the two.
Harman is in denial of hermeneutics, and as with his denegation of epistemology (which results in
his elaborating a bad epistemology under the guise of ontology), ends up doing bad hermeneutics.
His hermeneutics of specific texts such as Eddingtons "Introduction" is quite inadequate and
erroneous, as is his hermeneutics of the history of philosophy. Harman's key terms, such as
withdrawal and access, are ill-formed hermeneutical concepts, giving a grotesque simplification
and deformation of the history of philosophy and of contemporary rival philosophies. Feyerabend
and Latour argue that the sciences are not abstract cognition only, but have a constitutive, and thus
necessary, hermeneutic dimension. This is why even the sciences provide some resistance against
neo-liberal neo-leibnizian abstraction and speculative modeling and manipulation. Harman's model
is not enough to account for knowledge, and it is he who is being reductionist with his real objects
and their supposed sensual instanciations.
J) OOO: A SUBJECT WITH A GREAT PAST
Over the last few years the OOOxian movement has multiplied signs of success at the same time as
showing unmistakable symptoms of decline. Based on a denial of epistemology and on blindness to
its own status as (bad) epistemology OOO was able to capture the attention of those who were
looking for a new speculative style, after the Science Wars and in opposition to those who were
content to just parrot Deleuze or Derrida or Foucault. Stanley Cavell and Richard Rorty had each in
his own way sought to attain to the status of homegrown American Continental Philosophy, but
their Wittgensteinian and Heideggerian framework was too obscure and abstruse, too litist and
erudite. A more pop version of the same ambition was needed and Graham Harmans OOO satisfied
a strongly felt need to have done with deconstruction and return to naivet (Harmans word from
the opening of THE QUADRUPLE OBJECT). Harman is by far the more radical thinker when we
compare his ontology of withdrawn objects to the mathematism of Meillassoux, the scientism of
Brassier, and the Lacanian naturalism of Bryant. Harman alone has been willing to discard the
scientistic prejudice that vitiates the work of these thinkers.
Yet this superiority of Harman could only be maintained by sticking to the pathos of an escape from
epistemology. As long as he did not explicitly engage with epistemological themes in his own name
the denegation of its status as epistemology on which his work was built gave it even more force of
conviction and persuasive power. The objectual conversion remained a potent possibility. With the
publication of THE THIRD TABLE this anti-epstemological posture was revealed as an imposture,
OOO was revealed not as superior insight over and above common sense and scientific realities,
thus gratifying the narcissism of the artistic community while saving it from the accusation of
postmodern relativism, but rather as a mode of philosophising that was intellectually incompetent to
give a satisfying account of the domains of science, the humanities and common sense. Instead of
an account we get dismissive gesticulation: these domains are "sham", their objects are "simulacra"
or "phantoms". The absence of any understanding of diachrony, from the diachrony of science and
that of common sense, to the diachrony of a simple argument is patent. Real philosophical positions
and arguments are replaced with absurd caricatures which are then easily rebutted, giving the
impression of a lively polemical force ready to accept and reply to objections.
K) LATOUR DE-TEMPORALISED
1) Harman's synchronic travesty of Latour's empirical metaphysics
I have analysed Graham Harmans metaphysical strategies of semantic descent, of objectal
reduction, and of synchronic translation (cf. The discussion of withdrawal as the synchronic shadow
of abundance). These function together to produce a system that is a regressive travesty of
poststructuralist and pluralist thought. Further, OOO is a-temporal and a-historical, it has no place
for time except by arbitrary posit. This denegation of time is preparatory to Harmans re-
essentialising of the object by means of his split between changing sensual objects and real objects
or essences.
All of these (denegation of time and temporal relations, dualism of the real and the sensual,
essentialism of the real object) are profoundly anti-Latourian, yet they figure as key aspects of
Harmans reading of Latours work. I commented in the last post on Harmans objectual reduction
of Latours ontology, his usage, in PRINCE OF NETWORKS, of the term objects to replace
Latours more varied lexic (which includes actors, agents, actants, and even elements, as well as
objects) composed of elements and relations, of actors and networks. .This is a reductive move that
both homogenises Latours terminolgy, and replaces a dynamic relational process ontology with
with its synchronic shadow.
Harmans denegation of time and of temporal relations in Latour can be seen in his confusion of
immanence with actuality, leading to the rather surprising diagnosis of actualism to describe
Latours system: Everything is immanent in the world, nothing transcends actuality (16). The
whole set of dynamic relations that Latour appeals to (assembling, transforming, creating alliances
etc.) is forgotten in this move. In fact, this is the problem behind Latours desire to find new
synonyms for actor-network theory. In a survey of its history (Recalling ANT) Latour remarks
that due to the rise of the internet, the word network has lost its original sense. Originally, when
the name of actor-network theory was coined, Network at the time clearly meant a series of
transformations -translations, transductions, that is to say of dynamic, diachronic relations. Now
the meaning has changed to a more static, synchronic version: now, on the contrary, it clearly
means a transport wthout deformation, an instantaneous, unmediated access to every piece of
information. That is exactly the opposite of what we meant.
The third point, that of real/sensual dualism with respect to objects, is perhaps the most ruinous to
the understanding of Latours ideas. Where Latour devotes much effort to establishing the reality of
scientific objects on a par with every other sort of object inscribed in a network not of static
relations but of movements, trajectories, circulations. It is when we stop the movement and see only
static relations that we decide that we can bifurcate the world into immutable essences and
superficial changes:
John and Anne Marie Mol have used the word fluid. Adrian Cussins the word trails. Charis
Cussins the word choreography. All of these words designates in my view what the theory should be
and what the overdiffusion of the `double-click networks has rendered unretrievable: it is a theory
that says that by following circulations we can get more than by defining entities, essences or
provinces.
ANTs method is to follow the circulations (dare we say go with the flow?), and not to treat
the scientific and common-sense objects as utter shams, as Harman does. Latours double-clic
network is an example of what I have been calling a synchronic ontology, where transformation is a
mere secondary modification of objects that are conceived of as finished or de-temporalised units.
2) MODES OF EXISTENCE: REAL TRAJECTORIES (Latour) vs SIMULACRA (Harman)
The question of the pluralism of modes of existence in Latours later philosophy is very interesting.
Latour (in Recalling ANT) explains that his second philosophy, that of modes of existence, is an
attempt at giving more content to the idea of trajectories, that had become too spatialised. He
wanted to examine different types of trajectories, and so different modes of existence. All this is lost
on Harman, who allows only one real mode, that of his withdrawn objects. But as time does not
qualify real objects can they be said to have a trajectory? All other modes of existence are declared
to be "simulacra" or utter shams. Once again, Harmans philosophy turns out to be the exact
opposite of Latours.
In Latours dialogue with Harman, THE PRINCE AND THE WOLF, Latour has this to say about
their very different types of ontology: its a very different type of production of metaphysical
questions when you follow the prey, so to speak, than when you want to establish the basic furniture
of the universe (page 45). Follow the prey is the task of what I have been calling diachronic
ontology, establish the basic furniture of the universe is the task of a synchronic ontology.
All this results in the diagnostic that Harmans book supposedly on Latour is in fact much more a
book on his own philosophy than on Latours: it is a book about your own philosophy, not about
my philosophy necessarily (Latour to Harman, 48).
L) FEYERABEND AND THE HARMFULNESS OF THE ONTOLOGICAL TURN
1) EDDINGTONS REPLY TO HARMAN: THE WAY OF RESEARCH
Feyerabend stands in opposition to this demand for a new construction, and wholeheartedly
espouses the continued necessity of deconstruction. He rejects the idea that we need a new system
or theoretical framework, arguing that in many cases a unified theoretical framework is just not
necessary or even useful:
a theoretical framework may not be needed (do I need a theoretical framework to get along with
my neighbor?). Even a domain that uses theories may not need a theoretical framework (in periods
of revolution theories are not used as frameworks but are broken into pieces which are then
arranged this way and that way until something interesting seems to arise) (Philosophy and
Methodology of Military Intelligence, 13).
Further, not only is a unified framework often unnecessary, it can be a hindrance to our research and
to the conduct of our lives: frameworks always put undue constraints on any interesting activity
(ibid, 13). He emphasises that our ideas must be sufficiently complex to fit in and to cope with the
complexity of our practices (11). More important than a new theoretical construction which only
serves to confuse people instead of helping them we need ideas that have the complexity and the
fluidity that come from close connection with concrete practice and with its fruitful imprecision
(11). Lacking this connection, we get only school philosophies that deceive people but do not help
them. They deceive people by replacing the concrete world with their own abstract construction
that gives some general and very mislead (sic!) outlines but never descends to details. The result
is a simplistic set of slogans and stereotypes that is taken seriously only by people who have no
original ideas and think that [such a school philosophy] might help them getting ideas.
Applied to the the ontological turn, this means that an ontological system is useless, a hindrance to
thought and action, whereas an ontology which is not crystallised into a system and principles, but
which limits itself to an open set of rules of thumb and of free study of concrete cases is both
acceptable and desirable. The detour through ontology is useless, because according to Feyerabend
a more open and less technical approach is possible. In effect, Feyerabend indicates what Eddington
could have replied to Harman: just like Althusserianism OOO must be considered a premature and
harmful failure because it specifies in an apriori and dogmatic fashion what the elements of the
world are. This failure is intrinsic to its transcendental approach: it is premature because it
prejudges the paths and results of empirical research, it is harmful because it tends to exclude
possible avenues of research and to close peoples minds, making them stupid.
Eddingtons position is in fact very complex. He gives a dramatised description of what amounts to
the incommensurability of the world of physics and the familiar world of experience. This is
implicit in the whole theme of the necessary aloofness (xv) that scientific conceptions must
maintain with respect to familiar conceptions. He then goes on to pose the question of the relation,
or linkage, between the two. Sometimes he seems to give primacy to the familiar world eg: the
whole scientific inquiry starts from the familiar world and in the end it must return to the familiar
world (xiii), and Science aims at constructing a world which shall be symbolic of the world of
commonplace experience (xiii). Sometimes he gives primacy to the world of physics, and seems to
declare that the familiar world is illusory, eg: In removing our illusions we have removed the
substance, for indeed we have seen that substance is one of the greatest of our illusions (xvi),
though he does attenuate this by adding: Later perhaps we may inquire whether in our zeal to cut
out all that is unreal we may not have used the knife too ruthlessly. On the question of the relation
between physics and philosophy he is no mere scientistic chauvinist. Indeed, he gives a certain
primacy to the philosopher: the scientist has good and sufficient reasons for pursuing his
investigations in the world of shadows and is content to leave to the philosopher the determination
of its exact status in regard to reality (xiv). But he considers that neither common sense nor
philosophy must interfere with physical sciences freedom for autonomous development (xv).
His conclusion is that reflection on modern physics leads to a feeling of open-mindedness towards
a wider significance transcending scientific measurement (xvi) and warns against a priori closure:
After the physicist has quite finished his worldbuilding a linkage or identification is allowed; but
premature attempts at linkage have been found to be entirely mischievous.
As we can see, Graham Harman s discussion of this text in THE THIRD TABLE makes a mess of
Eddingtons position, treating him as advocating the scientistic primacy of the world of physics.
Harman can then propose his own solution: the objects of both common sense and physics are
utter shams, the real object is that of (Harmans) philosophy. This is why I think that Harmans
OOO is a contemporary example of what Eddington calls premature attempts at linkage and that
he finds mischievous, ie both failed and harmful.
2) A MACHIAN CRITIQUE OF OOO
My thesis is that much of OOO is a badly flawed epistemology masquerading as an ontology. An
interesting confirmation of this thesis is the touting of Roy Bhaskars A REALIST THEORY OF
SCIENCE. For those too young to remember: this book came out initially in 1975, after the major
epistemological works by Popper, Kuhn, Lakatos and Feyerabend. It was an ontologising re-
appropriation of their epistemological discoveries. It was hailed as a great contribution by the
Anglophone Althusserians (I kid you not!), as it gave substance to their distinction between the
theoretical object, produced by the theoretical practices of the sciences) and the real object. The
Althusserians used Bhaskar to legitimate their posing of Althusserian Marxism and Lacanian
psychoanalysis as sciences. Their universal critique of any philosophical view that did not square
with theirs was to disqualify it as demonstrably belonging, sometimes in very roundabout and
tortuous ways to the problematic of the subject. Does this begin to sound familiar? real object vs
theoretical object, problematic of the subject = correlationism. These themes are not new, but go
back to the dogmatic reaction of the 70s!). It is amusing to see that Bhaskar, who is a prime
example of someone who invented an ontological correlate to epistemological insights, is now
being used as the proponent of a non-correlationist realist position, to condemn those who
supposedly give primacy to epistemology over ontology. The whole procedure is circular. That is to
say, far from really asking the transcendental question of what must the world be like for science to
be possible? (this is an ideological cover-up for the real historical stakes of Bhaskars intervention)
Bhaskar proceeds to an ontologisation of insights and advances in epistemology, and so constrains
future research with an a posteriori ontology projected backwards as if it were an a priori neutral
precondition of science. So Harmans supposed primacy of ontology is in fact based on his
continual denegation of his de facto dependence on results imported from epistemology and on the
dogmatic freezing and imposition of what is at best only a particular historical stage of scientific
research and of epistemological reflection.
One of my biggest objections to OOO concerns the question of primacy, which remains moot in
contemporary philosophy. As we have seen, Harmans ontological turn gives primacy to
(transcendental, meta-level) philosophy. Feyerabend articulates an Eddingtonian position, one that
gives primacy neither to philosophy nor to physics, but defends the open-mindedness of empirical
(though not necessarily scientific) research. I think this can be clarified by examining Feyerabends
defense of the way of the scientist as against the way of the philosopher. Feyerabends
references to Mach (and to Pauli) show that this way of the scientist is transversal, not respecting
the boundaries between scientific disciplines nor those between the sciences and the humanities and
the arts. So it is more properly called the way of research. Eddington too seems to espouse this
Machian way out of the pitfalls of primacy.
Ernst Mach is often seen as a precursor of the logical positivists, an exponent of the idea that
things are logical constructions built up out of the sensory qualities that compose the world, mere
bundles of sensations. He would thus be a key example of what Graham Harman in THE
QUADRUPLE OBJECT calls overmining. Feyerabend has shown in a number of essays that this
vision of Machs philosophy (the quotation marks are necessary, according to Feyerabend
because Mach refused to be regarded as the proponent of a new philosophy, SCIENCE IN A
FREE SOCIETY, p192) is erroneous, based on a misreading by the logical positivists that
confounds his general ontology with one specific ontological hypothesis that Mach was at pains to
describe as a provisional and research-relative specification of his more general proposal.
Following Ernst Mach, Feyerabend expounds the rudiments of what he calls a general methodology
or a general cosmology (this ambiguity is important: Feyerabend, on general grounds but also after
a close scrutiny of several important episodes in the history of physics, is proceeds as if there is no
clear and sharp demarcation between ontology and epistemology, whereas Harman, without the
slightest case study, is convinced of the existence of such a dichotomy). Feyerabends discussion of
Machs ontology can be found in SCIENCE IN A FREE SOCIETY (NLB, 1978, p196-203) and in
many other places, making it clear that it is one of the enduring inspirations of his work. Machs
ontology can be summarised, according to Feyerabend, in two points:
i) the world is composed of elements an their relations
ii) the nature of these elements and their relations is to be specified by empirical research
One may note a resemblance with Graham Harmans ontology, summarised in his brief SR/OOO
tutorial:
i) Individual entities of various different scales (not just tiny quarks and electrons) are the ultimate
stuff of the cosmos.
ii) These entities are never exhausted by their relations. Objects withdraw from relation.
The difference is illuminating. Whereas Mach leaves the nature of these elements open, allowing
for the exploration of several hypotheses, Harman transcendentally reduces these possibilities to
one: elements are objects (NB: this reduction of the possibilities to one, enshrined in a
transcendental principle, is one of the reasons for calling Harmans OOO an objectal reduction).
Further, by allowing empirical research to specify the relations, Mach does not give himself an a
priori principle of withdrawal: here again withdrawal is just one possibility among many. Another
advantage of this ontology of unspecified elements is that it allows us to do research across
disciplinary boundaries, including that between science and philosophy. Feyerabend talks of Machs
ontologys disregard for distinctions between areas of research. Any method, any type of
knowledge could enter the discussion of a particular problem (p197). in my terminology Machs
ontology is diachronic, evolving with and as part of empirical research. Harmans ontology is
synchronic, dictating and fixing transcendentally the elements of the world.
Thus correlation is not the only bogus concept that OOO has tried to foist on the world as if it
were a serious contribution to ontological analysis, the notion of withdrawal is perhaps even more
void of sense. Withdrawal is tied to a computational understanding of Being. The sensual object,
being a "simulacrum" or an utter sham, is de-valorised ontologically in favour of the real object
that is purely intelligible. In this way abstractions are given primacy over what makes a difference
in our lives. Withdrawal is one of those at first glance intuitively appealing but ultimately
incoherent concepts that Harman tries to found his philosophy on.
The computational understanding of Being is the understanding that originates with Descartes and
renders possible the various specific computational disciplines that exist today. It is the hegemony
of the count. This is what de-valorises the sensual qualities to mere secondary status . Harmans
real objects are not sensible but only intelligible in the sense that they can be objects of our
intellection. I have thus argued that they are transcendent abstractions (unkowable and untouchable,
says Harman). Far from being a self-evident property of real objects, the universal withdrawal of
real objects characterises only one particular type of approach to Being. For the Homeric approach
things do not withdraw, argue Hubert Dreyfus and Sean Kelly in ALL THINGS SHINING and
Feyerabend in AGAINST METHOD. In Herman Melville's work ((as exemplar of the pluralist
paradigm), once again things do not universally withdraw but abound, argue both Dreyfus and
Deleuze, though Melville does make room for withdrawal as well in specific cases. For a pluralist,
withdrawal is by no means the rule, but is a special case within the paradigm of abundance.
By universalising withdrawal Harman loses any means for discriminating between epistemic
withdrawal and ontic withdrawal. The notion of withdrawal is both, inextricably epistemic and
ontic. It is not empirical, nor can it be. Any statement such as this object is withdrawing is
malformed, as all ostensivity (this object) is sensual, or non-real. We cannot indicate the real
withdrawn object, precisely because it withdraws. This sort of empirical emptiness and logical
circularity is for Wittgenstein a sign of the misuse of language.
Further, Harman cannot tell the difference between a relation and an interaction. Do objects
withdraw only when they interact with each other or in their relations with each other, which can
only be partial? The pseudo counter-concept of a total relation is suggested but can not be assigned
any coherent meaning.
Finally, withdraw seems to be the name of an action effectuated by an agent, the object. Yet it is
universal and inevitable. To be withdrawn seems to be a universal meta-property of any real
object, and "withdrawn from each other" a meta-relation between objects, in which case a risk of
circularity exists: are objects withdrawn from their own withdrawal etc., or is withdrawal itself not
real?
It is clear that we are dealing not with a well-formed concept, but rather with a notion based on an
intuitive but fuzzy picture that arises in our mind with the use of examples that can mean nothing,
since examples are sensual presentations. This fuzzy picture seems to be saying something deep
about objects, but it cannot really be re-formulated outside the pictue-word that is supposed to
convey it to our understanding. One imagines some sort of deep receding, the object as Eurydice
receding from the gaze of Orpheus. But this picture-thinking is no basis for a coherent account of
real objects.

3) BEING IS MULTIPLE AND THUS POLITICAL

Feyerabend uses most often a dialogical method, although he was led to complain that this was
often a one-sided dialogue. This was because many of the his philosophical reviewers were what he
called illiterate, what I am in this talk calling stupid, that is to say instances of a dogmatic and
decontextualised image of thought conjugated with a disindividuated academic professionalism. Of
these failed dialogues Feyerabend writes (in SCIENCE IN A FREE SOCIETY, 10):
I publish thembecause even a one-sided debate is more instructive than an essay and
because I want to inform the wider public of the astounding illiteracy of some
professionals

Fortunately, not all his dialogues were so one-sided. In his encounters with interlocutors Feyerabend
tends to function like a zen master, trying to get people to change their attitude, to get them to
sense chaos where they perceive an orderly arrangement of well behaved things and processes
(cf. his LAST LETTER). A very instructive example of this can be seen in his correspondence on
military intelligence networks with Isaac Ben-Israel, over a 2 year period stretching from
September 1988 to October 1990.
Though Feyerabend mainly refers to the philosophy of science, after all it was his domain of
specialisation for many long years, he gives sporadic indications that his remarks apply to all
philosophy, to all school philosophies, and not just to epistemology and the philosophy of
sciences. So it is possible to see in a very general way what Feyerabends ideas on ontology are in
this epistolary dialogue which begins with considerations of school philosophy as a useless detour,
comparing it unfavourably to a more naive unacademic critical approach (Feyerabends first
letter, L1: p5-6), goes on to consider in a little more detail what an unacademic critical philosophy
would look like (L2: p11-14) proceeds to plead for the non-demarcation of the sciences and the
arts-humanities and for the need to see epistemology and ontology as parts of politics (L3: p21-
23),, and culminates in L4-5 (p31-33) with a sketch of Feyerabends own views on ontology. This is
an amazing document, as the dialogue form takes Feyerabend into a domain that he has not
discussed before (intelligence networks) and permits a concise yet progressive exposition of his
later ideas and of their fruitful imprecision.
Feyerabend tells us that ontological critique, or the detour through ontology, is unnecessary, because
a more open and less technical approach is possible. He gives various figurations of that
unacademic approach: the educated layman, discoverers and generals, certain Kenyan tribes, a
lawyer interrogating experts, the Homeric Greek worldview, his own minimalist ontology. The
advantages he cites of such an unacademic approach are:
1) ability to work in partly closed surroundings where there is a flow of information in some
direction, not in others (p5)
2) action that is sufficiently complex to fit in to the complexity of our practices (p11) and of the
real world (p12)
3) ability to work without a fixed theoretical framework, to work outside well-defined frames
(p22), to break up frameworks and to rearrange the pieces as the circumstances demand, to not be
limited by the undue constraints inherent to any particular framework (p13)
4) ability to work not just outside the traditional prejudices of a particular domain (p5) but outside
the boundaries between domains, such as the putative boundary between the arts and the sciences
(p21)
5) an awareness of the political origins and consequences of seemingly apolitical academic subjects:
ontology without politics is incomplete and arbitrary (p22).
But one could object that Feyerabend is a relativist and so that empirical research for him could
give whatever result we want, because in his system anything goes. In fact the best gloss of this
polemical slogan is anything could work (but mostly doesnt). Feyerabends epistemological
realism is supported by an ontological realism: reality (or Being) has no well-defined structure but
reacts in different ways to different approaches. This is one reason why he sometimes refuses the
label of relativist, because according to him Relativism presupposes a fixed framework. For
Feyerabend, the transversality of communication between people belonging to apparently
incommensurable structures shows that the notion of a frame of reference that is fixed and
impermeable has only a limited applicability:
people with different ways of life and different conceptions of reality can learn to communicate
with each other, often even without a gestalt-switch, which means, as far as I am concerned, that the
concepts they use and the perceptions they have are not nailed down but are ambiguous.
Nevertheless, he distinguishes between Being, as ultimate reality, which is unknowable, and the
multiple manifest realities which are produced by our interaction with it, and which are themselves
knowable. Approach Being in one way, across decades of scientific experiment, and it produces
elementary particles, approach it in another way and it produces the Homeric gods:
I now distinguish between an ultimate reality, or Being. Being cannot be known, ever (I have
arguments for that). What we do know are the various manifest realities, like the world of the Greek
gods, modern cosmology etc. These are the results of an interaction between Being and one of its
relatively independent parts (32).
The difference with relativism is that there is no guarantee that the approach will work, Being is
independent of us and must respond positively, which is often not the case.
Feyerabend draws the conclusion that the determination of what is real and what is a simulacrum
cannot be the prerogative of an abstract ontology, and thus of the intellectuals who promulgate it.
There is no fixed framework, the manifest realities are multiple, and Being is unknowable. Thus the
determination of what is real depends on our choice in favour of one form of life or another, ie on a
political decision. This leads to Feyerabends conclusion: ontology without politics is incomplete
and arbitrary.
Inversely, Harman has repeated many times that ontology has nothing to do with politics. Seen
through Feyerabends eyes Harmans OOO is thus both incomplete, because it is apolitical, and
arbitrary, because it is a priori and monist, we have already said that, but also because it attributes
to a little tribe of intellectuals the right to tell us what is real (Harmans ghostly objects
withdrawing from all human and inhuman access, THE THIRD TABLE, 12) and what is unreal
(the simulacra of common sense, of the humanities, and of the sciences). It is also harmful because
it is based on ghostly bloodless merely intelligible real objects that transcend any of the rgimes and
practices that give us qualitatively differentiated objects in any recognisable sense. Objects
withdraw from the diverse truth-rgimes (the sciences, the humanities, common sense, but also
from religion and politics), i.e. etymologically they abstract themselves: real objects are
abstractions, indeed they are abstraction itself. This is not a revolutionary new weird realism, this
is regressive transcendent realism, cynically packaged as its opposite. I consider Harmans OOO as
a purified and consensualised (i.e. demarxised depoliticised descientised) version of Althussers
ontology of the real object and of his anti-humanism, and as exhibiting the same defects as any
other synchronic ontology.
M) ON DISAPPOINTMENT IN PHILOSOPHY: THE DEPRESSING CASE OF OOO
We easily talk about our enthusiasms in philosophy, as if our path of thinking was one of the
accumulation of truths and elimination of errors, one of progress. But disappointment is just as
important a driving force, a non-philosophical affect that shadows our enthusiasms. A philosophy
can seem to express what we find essential to hear at a turning point in our life, and to promise a
new world of insight and freedom, only to turn out to be a lure, a deceitful mirage unable to live up
to its promises.
When I first read Graham Harmans books I found them promising. At least there was a reference to
contemporary pluralist thinkers and a willingness to engage in explanation and argument. It took me
only a couple of months to realise that the promised explanations were either totally inadequate (the
myth of epistemologies of access for example is maintained only by lofty ignorance of huge parts
of recent philosophy, and by refusing to engage any real reading of texts: just global denunciation)
or not forthcoming.
The initial shock of recognition was tempered by the realisation that Harman was building on ideas
that were widespread in Continental circles 35 years ago, and that I had already subjected to a
thoroughgoing critique before moving on to something else. His progress was in fact a regression
to barely disguised rehashes of old refuted ideas. I was astounded at the pretentiousness of the
claims of OOO, given their flimsy basis, and at the credulousnesss of the supporters, too young to
have personal knowledge of the prior avatars of these ideas.
Luckily, I quickly found far more satisfying and intellectually challenging thinkers (Bruno Latour,
John Law, Andrew Pickering, William Connolly, Bernard Stiegler, Catherine Malabou, and Franois
Laruelle, to name a few) and began to elaborate the non-standard pluralist philosophy that I had
discovered in Deleuze and Feyerabend and Hillman, and that I think has still not seen its day. I
decided to deconstruct OOO as a way of clarifying why I had initially been attracted and why I
thought it was a great step backwards.
I do not care for OOO in any of its variants, and I think its only value is pedagogical: a warning of
the stupidity that dogs us all of enthrallment with the plausible products of cognitive marketing. I
think that OOOs popularity is based on a cruel misunderstanding. People seem to think that OOO
announces a return to the things themselves, but as we have seen this is not so. Nor is it a return to
the concrete diversity and abundance of the world. This impression is an illusion. OOO gestures at
the world, even as it withdraws any real possibility of exploring it and coming to know it.
In my own case, I have used OOO to help me clarify my own ideas on pluralist ontology, and
especially onDeleuze and Feyerabend. OOO is a debased synchronic travesty of the diachronic
pluralism that Feyerabend and Deleuze espouse. What people are looking for and think they find in
OOO is the exact opposite of what is there. People are looking for intellectuality, strange new
concepts to go further on the paths opened by the preceding generation of philosophers, and
concreteness, an engagement with the abundance of the world, its passions, its pleasures, and its
problems. But OOOs intellectuality is a tawdry sham, and its concreteness is a cynical bluff.
Harmans OOO is the worst form of dualism imaginable, a dualist epistemology and ontology in
regression from the great pluralist philosophies that preceded it. Are these pluralist philosophies that
I admire perfect? No they are very incomplete and one-sided, developped in response to concrete
contexts that are now behind us. Are they, these deconstructive philosophies, themselves immune to
deconstruction? Not at all! They themselves even call for their own deconstruction, and Stiegler,
Latour, and Laruelle continue the effort and deconstruct, each in their own way, what remains un-
deconstructed in their predecessors ideas.
A liberation from the conceptual schemas of philosophy is possible if, as Paul Feyerabend invites
us, we think and act outside stable frameworks (There are many ways and we are using them all
the time though often believing that they are part of a stable framework which encompasses
everything) and fixed paths (Is argument without a purpose? No, it is not; it accompanies us on
our journey without tying it to a fixed road). This is what I have been calling diachronic
ontology. It is the exact opposite of the path that OOO has chosen, where we find a synchronic
ontology incapable of dealing with time and change, and a monism of transcendent "withdrawn
entities".

N) CONCLUSION
The structure of my argument is very classical, and very abstract, as it remains wholly in the
domain of philosophy, and even worse of first philosophy. I think that a consequent philosophical
pluralism has its own dynamic that leads from a pluralism inside philosophy (e.g. Feyerabends
methodological pluralism), to a pluralising of philosophy itself as an ontological realm and a
cognitive rgime claiming completeness and universality (eg Feyerabends Machian way of
research and his later ontological pluralism: the target of philosophy as a discourse that covers
everything an all-encompassing synthetic view of the world and what it all means). Here I think
comes the move of putting philosophy in relation to a non-philosophical outside (non-philosophical
not meaning a negation but a wider practice, as in non-Euclidean geometries). Franois Laruelle has
written on this sort of thing at length, but I dont think he can claim exclusive ownership (nor even
chronological priority for) of this idea, nor is he even necessarily the best exemplar of the practice
of such a non-philosophy. But at least his work is a gesture in the right direction. So a non-laruellian
non-philosophy is a reasonable prolongation of pluralism. Feyerabend's work is a good example of
such a non-Laruellian non-philosophy, or, in more positive terms, of a diachronic, immanent,
pluralist philosophy.
Deconstruction as it began to succeed left people both disoriented and disappointed. Disoriented,
because it seemed to lead through the critique of all foundations into a form of relativism that could
only be perceived as nihilist. Disappointed, because it led to a form of discourse so convoluted that
it assured plausible deniability on any idea or thesis that its opponents attributed it in order to
criticise it, thus generating a new lite with a sort of cognitive diplomatic immunity. Thus the
spectre of what must be called litist relativism began to haunt the academy. This post-modernist
litism is to be contrasted with the democratic relativism that Feyerabend defended, specifying it
as epistemological relativism allied with ontological realism.
Feyerabends voice was not heard, as a confused wild-man anarcho-relativist stereotype was
quickly constructed to exclude his ideas from the conversation. As deconstruction began to run out
of steam, and its arguments were forgotten, it became possible to philosophise in the old
constructive manner once again. Regression set in, multiplicity and difference were retained but
they were strictly limited to the object-level. These regressive constructions took the radical form
that one sees most clearly in Badiou, injecting critique from the outside of ontology in the form of a
communist hypothesis. Or a more value-free, i.e. neoliberal conformist form that one can see in
Harmans "withdrawal" hypothesis.
Objects and multiples became the new barrier against further deconstruction, permitting a return to
intellectual order while conserving a sophisticated veneer. Instead of pushing the deconstructive
process further, a dogmatic bulwark was erected. But to no avail: others have been calmly and
quietly pursuing the critique of all such dogmatic stopping points. Laruelle, Latour, and Stiegler
have been busily at work, each in their own way, undermining the synchronic presuppositions of
these new dogmatic constructions. Their criteria of analysis are close to my own. Pluralism for me
is on the side of abundance, historicity, and interaction, as opposed to monist doctrines of
withdrawal, stasis, and retreat from dialogue. To those who object that I am setting up a new
dualism, I reply that I am faithful to Deleuzes idea that resistance, or deterritorialisation, comes
first. In Deleuzian terms this amounts to saying that multiplicities come first. Even deconstruction
maintains that it can be a necessary preliminary move to privilege one term of a binary couple, the
marginal resisting term. Deleuze and Feyerabend seem to maintain that we must give precedence, at
least some of the time, to the term bearing the most plurality. For both, this precedence is not
absolute, but depends on the dialogical and political context.