Harman and OOO
Graham Harman’s Object-Oriented Ontology as a Symptom of Philosophical Crisis
One of the notable post-postmodern philosophies is Graham Harman’s object-oriented ontology. Its key optic is typical of the postmodern optic of the twenty-first century: the need to clear away the remnants of anthropicity that still remain within postmodernism.
Formally, Harman does not identify himself as a postmodernist. He sees his goal as restoring realism to philosophy and removing the privileged position of the subject. However, the optic and the field of his thought are entirely postmodern. This is because the essence of postmodernism is not the privileged position of the observer or the subject, but flat ontology: the removal of the very possibility of constructing any hierarchical metaphysical objects.
In Harman’s case, the main target is the Cartesian subject-object division inherited from the entire modern tradition.
If modernity, one of whose pillars is Cartesianism, built knowledge from the privileged thinking subject — the assembly point of the whole world — then Harman tries to abolish this hierarchy. Yet he does this in an extremely mechanical way: instead of destroying the subject-object schema, he simply inverts it. The subject does not disappear as a special kind of being; it is merely demoted to one object among others. Instead of a tree of relations growing outward from the human being, we get a flat ontology: a vast graph in which a human being, a stone, a shoe, a fly, the neck of a bottle, and Jupiter all turn out to be entities of the same order, included in a network of object-object relations.
In his arguments, Harman displays an anti-humanist pathos, suggesting that the inner world of a non-human object may be no less important than the incomprehensibility of the human essence. But this is more a manifesto of the anti-anthropic vector than a productive philosophy, because apart from demoting the human being to the same level as a dead physical or metaphysical object, he offers no aesthetic or philosophical instrument based on this assumption.
Here the main weakness of this philosophy appears. Harman does not derive the object; he postulates it. He accepts in advance the object as a ready-made autonomous unit that cannot be reduced either to its parts, or to its relations, or to its mode of appearance. But where does this unity come from? Why does this particular set of elements suddenly become one whole rather than a temporary linkage? His schema gives no answer to these questions.
In Cartesianism, the schema of relations is clear: the subject of knowledge — the human being armed with the apparatus of radical doubt — uses the cogito to extract the object of knowledge from the external, extended world. In Harman’s object-object world, this model is mechanically transferred without any additional explanation.
Moreover, the object-object-oriented flat ontology itself, which is obviously taken from Deleuze’s model of the “rhizome,” is also borrowed purely in form, while the loss of meaning is ignored. If Deleuze’s rhizome is an intensely vital substance, a machine of desire in which subjects are endlessly reconfigured, forming new shapes and meanings, then in Harman it is closer to a dead schema, a mathematical graph in which objects are arbitrarily connected and partly endowed with subject-like properties — some inner essence analogous to consciousness — while being only partially disclosed to the world, or not disclosed at all.
For Harman, an object in its relation to other objects is always disclosed only partially, since it interacts only partially or else remains completely isolated. And yet it possesses an inner essence and a mode of existence. In Descartes, the inner world of the subject was intelligible: it followed from the status of thinking substance. In Harman, this schema is mechanically transferred to any object. Every thing seems to receive a hidden interior by analogy with the human being, but without any clear foundation for why an object should have such an “inner life” at all.
The result is a cold, lifeless plane. Everything is declared to be an object, but almost nothing follows from this. Such a construction does not give birth to a new ontological experience, does not provide an effective instrument of thought, and does not disclose a deeper structure of being. It merely records a philosophical crisis instead of overcoming it.
For this reason, Harman’s philosophy is interesting primarily as a cultural and philosophical symptom. It demonstrates a late stage of postmodernism’s self-unfolding: the struggle against anthropocentrism reaches the point where the human being is completely dissolved into an indifferent multitude of objects. Formally claiming radicality, OOO in fact turns out to be a poor rearrangement of an old schema — a sterile construction that most clearly reveals the depth of the contemporary philosophical dead end.
Speculative Realism
The essence of postmodernism can be defined as thinking through a productive struggle against meaning.
If Harman, in OOO, attacked the Cartesian object-subject relation, then Meillassoux’s target is another major figure of modernity: Kant, and the possibility of knowledge in general. Meillassoux declares his enemy to be so-called correlationism — the correlation between thought and being, between the world and us — and quite wittily proves the existence of “contingency”: the only thing that is absolutely necessary is that everything could be otherwise. He does this through Cantor’s set theory. He uses the theorem showing that the cardinality of the set of all subsets of a set is always strictly greater than the cardinality of the set whose subsets they are. From this, he draws a global conclusion: the only correlation that can be logically derived is the global impossibility of deriving any correlations.
Although Meillassoux strictly follows the academic format and uses rigorous logic and mathematics in his reasoning — formally, the highest standards of philosophical thought — he smuggles in a large number of metaphysical assumptions, which is unacceptable when working in the genre of the philosophical limit of foundations.
First of all, one can immediately point out that his thinking is already limited by the methodological framework of scientism. Working with correlations and mathematical apparatuses is already the pure field of science, which is not applicable to art, existential experience, mystical experience, aesthetic experience, or even to everyday life in general. Most people neither use nor have any idea of mathematics or of the scientific method that rests on correlationism, and yet they continue both to exist and to think.
The next serious metaphysical assumption is the assumption of the neutrality and non-anthropic nature of mathematics. And finally, the last strong assumption is the possibility of applying set theory to correlationism as a model, along with the assumption that such a metaphysical object as a model exists in the first place.
Here one can note that although Meillassoux does not say this directly, he implicitly proposes his own ontological model: contingency, in essence, abolishes the laws of causality, and therefore undermines being as such. We cannot be certain of the present if the laws of causality break down. This announces the possibility of a genuine breakthrough toward being, but it offers no positive methods of thinking — precisely what philosophy has always provided through Socrates, Aristotle, Descartes, Hegel, and Kant.
Meillassoux is therefore moving toward a goal common to him and Harman: the legitimization of metaphysical hell, formally by different methods, but with a common aim.
Metamodernism
Metamodernism as a Weak Alternative
In contemporary mass culture and semi-philosophical journalism, metamodernism is occasionally mentioned as an epoch that has replaced postmodernism. In reality, there is no developed ontology or metaphysics of metamodernism. To a large extent, it is a cultural and social phenomenon without serious theoretical grounding. Its own theorists describe metamodernism as a “structure of feeling” and define it through “oscillations” — movements between modernism and postmodernism. Yet the term itself remains empty. Metamodernism simply says: life may be meaningless, but sometimes it also contains pleasant things, like lavender raf and hugs. It is good that we managed to deconstruct grand narratives, but let us stop at the point where it starts to hurt me.
In many ways, metamodernism simply performs the servicing cultural function of social movements. Implicitly, it proceeds from the following idea: it is good that we managed to deconstruct grand narratives and create a society of total equality and creativity, where traditional families, a great multitude of genders, races, and identities peacefully coexist and are integrated into social processes. But precisely in order to maintain this balance of freedoms, control is required — not through a return to totality, but through the protection of fragility and inclusivity.
Postmodernism, an epoch in which a large number of masterpieces were created, demonstrated the high productivity of artistic devices such as irony, quotation, self-negation, and multilayeredness. A classic example here is Umberto Eco’s semiotic novel, in which a mass detective layer, a historical canvas, and philosophical reflections on the nature of knowledge coexist. In such a work, logic and the thirst for truth reveal reality not because of their own transparency, but rather in spite of it.
Here metamodernism looks more like a step backward. It preserves many of postmodernism’s approaches, but cuts away its depth and sharp edges, legitimizing sensitivity and naivety and transferring the artistic gesture from the field of irony and deconstruction into a culturally protected zone. Among significant works of art, metamodernism does not have many achievements; one might include the film Amélie, as well as some of Greta Gerwig’s works, above all Frances Ha and Lady Bird.
Metamodernism is important rather as a symptom of the legitimization of a particular socio-political epoch. It is a way of legitimizing the taboo on productive instruments of power. In a postmodern culture where logical, cultural, moral, and emotional arguments are placed on the same level, the protection of certain emotional arguments that are important at a given moment acquires practical and structural significance for power.