A Further Response to Graham Harman

Part 2: Scoreless in Obscurity

I know Graham Harman has already agreed to agree that my approach lacks a certain degree of sensitivity and etiquette and has subsequently moved past our original disagreements, but I am still posting part two of my response with the hope that he will not take my criticisms too personally, because what I say here (and in previous posts) is really just me thinking ‘out loud’ and in no way meant as a personal attack. My only reason for posting this second part is that I have just recently come off a much needed rest/retreat deep in the Canadian Rockies I am more and more feeling the need for clarity on my own positions. And Graham’s comments offer an opportunity for just such clarification.

Graham writes:

Michael hasn’t done the work of showing the specific academic traces on my own thought. Essentially, he’s just hinting that my manner of earning a living (a fairly typical one; not exactly slave trading and gun running à la Rimbaud) somehow compromises the content of my books. But no internal connection has been shown. How does the mere fact of teaching roomfuls of 19-year-old Egyptians each semester subvert the internal logic of object-oriented philosophy and reduce its imaginative powers?

Again, being a professor does not disqualify Graham’s framework. In fact, it is probably only by virtue of his education and vocation that he is even capable of developing such a nuanced object-oriented schema. The only relevance his vocation has to his thought is that he necessarily draws upon the intellectual resources of the discipline he has been trained in and the discourses that circulate therein. Hence the word “discipline”. Not a real contentious claim in my opinion. I would think that since we are at least a generation removed from Bourdieu, and couple generations post-Wittgenstein, the sorts of claims (e.g., that academics are deeply embedded within the discourses and language games they attach themselves to) I made about “academia” would be fairly understood? There is a necessary reliance and relationship between an academic philosopher and the institutional systems and discourses of which he is a part.

Here is what I wrote in the comments section of my original post on the topic:

In theory, Harman is no more or less entangled than you or I. We are all entangled – and we are all influenced by what we personally, habitually and professionally do. As I say in my response to Harman, it’s a matter of degree. We can be more or less committed to traditional concepts and projects. I judge his ontology to be un-necessarily reliant on borrowed terms from Husserl and Heidegger and others, while also being quite innovative and productive. And, from what I understand, Harman’s “weird occasionalist” philosophy has its roots in Islamic thinking and Whitehead as well.

And, just to be sure, I do think Graham is doing work less within the purview of “established” philosophical discourse than most philosophers - but more than what I would like him to be.

So what remains is 1) my assertion that much of our thinking will always be entangled with those lived-commitments and social interactions in which we historically and continually engage, and 2) my personal judgement about Graham’s use of distinctions such as ‘objects v. qualities’ as unnecessarily constraining. Both claims are relatively harmless because #1 is a fairly wide-spread observation about human discourse and intellectual activity (discussed in detail by Foucault, Bourdieu, and others), and #2 is merely a personal evaluation based on admittedly limited investigation.

But, to synthesize both claims, I suggest that certain philosophies seem to have an internal “logic” or semantic structure grounded in implicitly assumed (a priori) understandings of the world. These logical-semantical arrangements often lead to particular arguments and certain entailed conclusions. In other words, we think through and with more or less networked conceptual systems brought together by linguistic and logical entailments. So when we accept and operationalize certain discourse-specific distinctions (in this case between objects and their qualities) we, almost by necessity, are lead to particular pathways of thinking, with more or less resultant chains of reasoning (perhaps four-fold conception of objects?) and forms of argumentation.

Here is a related quote from sociologist Loic Waquant:

If you don't know what determines you -- how you are being shaped to think in a certain way because of your professional interests, your proclivities, your membership in a certain discipline, and so forth -- if you are blinded already by all these biases, what chance do you have to produce rigorous analyses of anything? [source]

And my only point in bringing all this up is that I would like to see Graham’s talents being pushed in new ways – beyond conventional metaphysics and towards something approaching a 'post-metaphysical phenomenological ontography'. My question, for example, is what would a post-metaphysical object-oriented philosophy be like? What if, instead of “real objects” and “sensual objects” Graham investigated more closely actually existing and embodied entities (in all their glorious specificity) and their encounters with other specific entities - unmediated by a etheric realm of the “sensual”?

My main issue simply put is that OOP seems to me to be too metaphysical and not all that empirically supported. And this is why I find Gary William’s project perhaps more oriented towards praxis in the long run. [note: I hope to explore more of what a “post-metaphysical phenomenological ontography” might look like in the near future, but not here. See Habermas (here) for a quick inclination]

Again, I have no desire to attempt to dismantle Graham’s project. And I’m fairly certain that I couldn’t do such a thing even if I wanted to, since his intellectual background is probably much different than mine, and I wouldn’t have the theoretical resources to refute, one way or another, the “internal logic” of his philosophy. Graham is no dummy.

Moving along, Graham writes:

Steven Shaviro is credited with showing how I box myself into some very problematic positions, which Michael views as the inevitable result of my employment status. However, Michael neglects to mention that Shaviro is also a university professor: indeed, the holder of a named endowed professorship, perhaps the very summit of official academic recognition. Does this also compromise Shaviro’s critique of my positions in some way? Is the author of Doom Patrols just another bland cog in the university machine? Or has Shaviro found the special trick that allows him to be “in the academy but not of it”?

There are two different things going on here:

1) My mention of Steven Shaviro’s critiques of Object-Oriented Philosophy was only ever meant to provide an example of someone who has brought up some fairly significant critiques of Object-Oriented philosophies that, to my knowledge, remain unanswered. Steven’s posts on OOO and causality (here), and “actual encounters” (here), are strong arguments for including more relationality into our accounts of things. And my linking to him in the original post was meant to direct interested readers to that work and those critiques. So, again, not really about “employment status” at all.

2) On the question of whether I think Shaviro is more entangled in institutional academics than Graham, well, I really don’t have a clue about that. I have yet to read more than a handful of Steven's essays. Much of his thinking on OOP (and many other issues) does indeed seem very close to mine. But I’m sure if I read one of his books I could probably point out where I think Shaviro relies too heavily on Whitehead or Deleuze re: an issue that might be better resolved with reference to biology or neuroscience. But maybe not? Maybe Steven is more rather than less removed from such reliances? I’m not prepared to say either way at this point.

But, again, being a philosophy professor is not a deadly sin – it just means that a person’s intellectual background will be more or less institutional and guided by professional and ‘internal’ disciplinary interests. And, to be sure, we all have such linked-interests and commitments.

Graham goes on to provide some advice:

What Michael ought to do is focus on making more specific criticisms of this or that position taken by me or by others... But with the posts on Archive Fire, it often feels like Michael is simply out to score points, and can’t tell the difference between balls going through the hoop and darts thrown at faces.

I have made a few more specific criticisms in comments on particular people’s blogs and elsewhere (for example here) and they have gone largely ignored so far. Which, as far as it goes, is perfectly fine - because my criticisms, or questions, may not have been presented in the most cordial manner. Or, people just didn’t find them compelling enough to pursue. Whatever the case, I’ve been making them with little response (and with little expectations for response). Take Part 1 of this series for example, I provided a bit more specifics as to where I disagree with OOO and the only (fruitful) reaction came from Skholiast, someone not in the OOO clubhouse.

Moreover, to be quite frank, I’m not in the business of spending my hours making the kinds of detailed criticisms Graham might find appealing. Two reasons: first, I’m not invested in the outcome, as most schematic debates are endless, with little resolve, and I have no stake in being perceived as ‘right’ or ‘wrong’ in these cases. And so who it is I would “score points” with is unclear.

And second, following my own advice, I have little interest is becoming too wrapped up in traditional philosophical schema or immersing myself in strictly academic arguments. I want to maintain a high degree of independence in my thinking. The reason I blog at all on such topics is because I’m thinking for myself but in public, so to speak. I seek to delineate and borrow strains of thought from various places and then mutate my own thinking into something different - to be applied in more pragmatic and political contexts.

And, finally, I consider the comments I make and the issues I take up here to be truly tentative. I consider intellectual activity primarily as play. If I was to enter into an actual “debate”, which this back and forth with Graham never really was, my approach would be much different. I would provide actual arguments and formulate more or less comprehensive replies, but my original post (as I have already said here) was not intended to be a specific argument, much less a debate.

In sum, I do have serious doubts about the efficacy of object-oriented metaphysics (and metaphysics in general) as I interpret them, but will continue to investigate and learn more – and perhaps I may even offer some more specific arguments if I get the urge. Speculative realism, broadly speaking, intrigues me and OOO is simply one possible outgrowth from a more general orientation that takes things and the world intensely seriously.

And as for the anonymity of my posts and comments, well, let me just say that I have very good reasons for this. As someone who has been involved in “radical” politics for the last 15 years or so, had his home searched (twice) by federal officials, been investigated by “anti-terror” organizations and has had his CPU hacked numerous times it would be nothing less that clinically insane to go about advertising my name all over the inter-webs. Were I to be so reckless I would be asking for more trouble than I can currently handle, and would subsequently become unable to express myself freely and explore the topics I do here – which in turn would result in blogging becoming ridiculously pointless for me.

But for those of you who I trust you are invited to email me and ask questions or learn my full identity. If I refuse to disclose then I don’t know you well enough to trust you (yet). And Graham: if you truly want me to disclose who I am to you so that you can feel comfortable in discussion, please, just ask.

See Also: Part 1: Tradition and Metaphysics