At last, we come to the point where I reveal the moral of the story. This book does indeed have such a moral, remarkably like that of the children’s fable at which its title hints. The fable is never just about a specific emperor, or the particular finery in which they claim to be attired. It’s really about people in general, and the way our shared wishes and prejudices cause us to buy into certain ideas against our better judgement, whether we be those standing naked or those who look on idly, unwilling (or unable) to state the obvious. What I have attempted to do in this book is not just to show that a certain fashionable garment is threadbare to the point of nonexistence (the poverty of OOP as a philosophical system), but also to analyse why many people are tempted to don it regardless (its simple yet powerful blend of radical humility in both the epistemological and ontological domains), and why others stand awestruck, unsure of what to say or do in response (a combination of historical circumstance, clever rhetorical defences, and surprisingly effective branding).
Maybe it is presumptuous for me to paint myself as the innocent youth speaking truth to power, but I genuinely feel that someone had to write a book like this—for the sake of my sanity if nothing else. I say this as someone who was intrigued by the loose confluence of themes brought back to prominence in anglophone Continental philosophy circles by Speculative Realism, who was ultimately weaned off his dependence upon Deleuze by working through these themes, and yet who finds himself thoroughly disappointed by what its initial promise has given way to, largely because of the need to accommodate the undeservedly prominent precepts of Object-Oriented Philosophy.
One of the founding myths of SR is that what distinguishes OOP from the philosophies of Quentin Meillassoux (speculative materialism), Iain Grant (transcendental materialism/speculative idealism), and Ray Brassier (speculative nihilism/transcendental realism), is its rejection of materialism.1 However, the word ‘materialism’ is used so differently by these three thinkers that it is useless as a line of demarcation between their ideas and Harman’s. The real reason that OOP is the odd man out of the initial SR group is not that it refuses materialism, but rather that it refuses to have any truck with positive epistemology whatsoever. Regardless of the supposed ontological realism in which it dresses itself up, its epistemological anti-realism is pervasive and corrosive to the realist spirit that the other approaches, for the most part, represented. Most tellingly, the rallying cry of Meillassoux’s arche-fossil narrative and its demand that we take the literal pronouncements of the sciences seriously is completely rebuffed by OOP, despite its claims to the contrary. In the end, it is speculative in only the most facile way, and realist in only the most impoverished fashion. It has diluted Speculative Realism until nothing is left but Specious Realism, and thereby destroyed any promise that the original grouping might have had.
Although the other constituents of SR were all opposed to the correlationist approaches that did indeed begin with Kant, they did not for that matter take this to warrant a return to precritical metaphysics.2 All of them in different ways champion as essential elements of their work philosophical manoeuvres, devices, and strategies that are distinctly post-Kantian. OOP is the exception, insofar as its only debt to Kant is its fetishization of the noumenal—which is precisely the aspect of Kant responsible for the genesis of correlationism. It is not Kant’s focus on the transcendental conditions of knowledge that makes him the father of correlationism, but his insistence that these conditions somehow colour or irreparably distort our grasp of the real. The elaborate way that Harman takes this misguided epistemological claim and transforms it into a sceptical cosmology capable of justifying any and all personal prejudices in the face of reasoned debate, scientific or otherwise, is truly amazing to behold. He takes the core intuition driving correlationism—that epistemic access is internally undercut by its own semantic mediation (e.g., forms of sensibility, language games, cultural practices, etc.)—simplifies it by stripping away any need for an account of this mediation, and weaponizes it into a doctrine capable of filling the sceptical niche left in the wake of the continuing collapse of orthodox correlationism.
OOP is leaner and meaner than traditional correlationism. It is capable of taking up the traditional role that the loose grouping of ideas referred to by non-philosophers as ‘postmodernism’ played in legitimating selective doubt (i.e., the easy dismissal of conclusions one does not like as ‘metaphysical’, ‘logocentric’, ‘dogmatic’, or even ‘proto-fascist’—relayed by OOO’s trigger-words such as ‘scientistic’, ’anthropocentric’ and even ‘epistemicist’ ). But it also fulfils the more recent role that certain extreme appropriations of Deleuze and Guattari have played in encouraging capricious speculation (i.e., the ‘deterritorialization’ of our philosophical culture in favour of unconstrained, transdisciplinary ‘conceptual creation’). OOP is willing to give a whole new generation of theorists what they want at the expense of what they need. This makes it the intellectual equivalent of high-sugar, low-nutrition junk food.
If you listen closely, you can already hear the clacking of keyboards as a plethora of new Object-Oriented essays are written: ‘An Object-Oriented Approach to Tattoos as a Means of Cultural Expression’, ‘Object-Oriented Solutions to Urban Gentrification’, ‘Angels and Vicarious Causation’, ‘Are Hipsters Independent of their Relations?’, ‘Sensual Objects, Quantum Consciousness, and Meister Eckhart: Towards an Object-Oriented Mysticism’... or so I fear. The hard question that anyone tempted to add to this hypothetical litany has to ask themselves is this: Do you like OOO because you agree with its basic tenets, or do you like it because it lets you do whatever you want? Are the concepts you are borrowing from it placing explanatory constraints upon your project that lead you to draw more interesting and powerful explanatory connections, or are they simply permitting you to pick and choose whichever constraints you want, while at the same time signalling your affiliation with a new and exciting theoretical trend? If your use of OOO has less to do with constraint than permission, and less to do with explanation than affiliation, then you are repeating a pernicious social dynamic that has been festering at the core of anglophone Continental philosophy and the disciplinary groupings that lie intellectually downstream from it for decades.3This, then, is the moral of the story: theoretical flexibility is not always a virtue. When it is, it comes from a determinate thesis that matches very specific reasons with very general consequences. When it’s not, it comes from a vacuous thesis that mirrors the inclinations of whoever gazes upon it.
In essence, this book is one long obituary for Speculative Realism. The only thing that could possibly bind SR together as a coherent intellectual movement was Meillassoux’s intellectual call to arms in the fight against correlationism, but it has become increasingly apparent that if we are at indeed at war with this pervasive epistemological scepticism that metastasised across the humanities in the latter half of the twentieth century, then OOP is our manchurian candidate. Putting it in the most stark terms, if OOP is included within SR, then whatever thematic unity SR might have been able to muster is annulled in advance. Moreover, it is important to recognise that, beyond this, SR presented us with an opportunity to overcome the pernicious intellectual dandyism that has thrived in the wake of correlationism. The other aspect of its tragicomic transformation into Specious Realism is that this opportunity was not only squandered, but that, through its association with OOO, it has become precisely the kind of vapid philosophical fashion that exemplifies this trend.4
Still, despite everything, the call to arms has not been silenced, and there are many still keen to respond to it in earnest. But their voices have been drowned out by the inrush of erstwhile correlationists permitted by the ascendancy of OOO. Those who enthusiastically leapt into the melée, enthused by the renewal that SR seemed to promise, have found themselves at once unwillingly conscripted into a dubious ‘movement’ promoted by an efficiently-organised PR operation, and continually reprimanded for stepping out of line (a ‘neurology death cult’ charged with ‘continental scientism’, ‘reductionism’, and more besides). We must refuse to march under a banner that has been co-opted as a means to suppress rather than to stimulate thinking; and we must admit: Speculative Realism was dead on arrival. But the time for mourning is over, and it is now time to rally the troops under other banners, in order to return to the vital task at hand.
1. See Harman’s narrative of SR in Philosophy in the Making, 77–80.
2. Harman’s pre-SR narrative regarding his return to such pre-Kantian themes is explained best in—and indeed as—Guerrilla Metaphysics (75).
3. At this point I expect to be subject to two divergent objections from self-identified anglophone Continental philosophers: (a) that I am failing to show the solidarity with my Continental brethren that is required if we are to stand up to standard analytic challenges (e.g., ‘obscurantism’, ‘logical ignorance’, ‘excessive historicality’, etc.); or (b) that I have betrayed them by throwing in with, or having always secretly been part of, analytic philosophy, and can thus justly be ignored insofar as I am merely echoing its characteristic prejudices (e.g., ‘obsessive clarity’, ‘superfluous formalism’, ‘spurious trans-historicality’, etc.). There was a point at which I accepted some variant of the standard analysis of the ‘Continental/analytic divide’, but I find it increasingly counterproductive, as my response to these challenges will attest.
In response to (a), I think that solidarity has become a weight around the collective necks of Continental philosophers that encourages the very problematic social dynamic at issue. To break with it, Continental philosophers have to be both able and willing to denounce bad philosophy sold under the same heading as their own. In response to (b), I certainly draw upon a lot of traditionally ‘analytic’ figures (e.g., Wittgenstein, Quine, Sellars, Brandom, etc.) and themes (e.g., pragmatics, logic, epistemology, semantics, etc.) within in my own work, but I aim to do so in a way that seamlessly switches between them and more traditionally ‘Continental’ figures (e.g., Hegel, Husserl, Heidegger, Deleuze, etc.) and themes (e.g., historical dialectics, methodological immanence, ontological difference, metaphysical immanence, etc.). We should all endeavour to do ‘post-divide’ philosophy to the extent that we should paint our own philosophical pictures with the broadest conceptual palette the history of our discipline can provide, and not restrict ourselves to more or less arbitrary groupings of figures or themes.
Finally, for those worried that my criticisms are somehow one-sided, there are equally pernicious social dynamics in the rival analytic camp, some of which are geographically and linguistically specific, and some of which are not. However, this is not the place to go into the deep waters of the ‘divide debate’, as it is very easy to drown one’s substantive commitments therein.
4. There is a certain decadence to the way Harman draws his historical narratives which is indicative of this. We are treated to an analysis of philosophical trends as fashions, whose principle virtues are aesthetic values such as originality, weirdness, and style. Although such commentaries are not devoid of interest in themselves, the way Harman deploys them often illicitly blurs the line between aesthetic evaluation and philosophical justification.