Guerrilla Metaphysics: Phenomenology and the Carpentry of Things by Harman, Graham(August 10, 2005) Paperback

by Graham Harman

In Guerrilla Metaphysics, Graham Harman develops further the object-oriented philosophy first proposed in Tool-Being. Today’s fashionable philosophies often treat metaphysics as a petrified relic of the past, and hold that future progress requires an ever further abandonment of all claims to discuss reality in itself. Guerrilla Metaphysics makes the opposite assertion, challenging the dominant "philosophy of access" (both continental and analytic) that remains quarantined in discussions of language, perception, or literary texts. Philosophy needs a fresh resurgence of the things themselves—not merely the words or appearances themselves. Once these themes are adapted to the needs of an object-oriented philosophy, what emerges is a brand new type of metaphysics—a "guerrilla metaphysics."

Genres: Philosophy, Theory, Nonfiction

Paperback

First published January 1, 2005

About the author

Graham Harman (born May 9, 1968) is a professor at the American University in Cairo, Egypt. He is a contemporary philosopher of metaphysics, who attempts to reverse the linguistic turn of Western philosophy. He terms his ideas object-oriented ontology. A larger grouping of philosophers, Speculative Realism, includes Harman and the philosophers Iain Hamilton Grant, Quentin Meillassoux and Ray Brassier.

Reviews

[blank · Rating 5 out of 5]

At once paradigmatically upending and philosophically antiquarian, Harman's approach to philosophy is "to find ideas that bore us and invent ways to make them obsolete." (238) In specific the idea boring Harman is born of Husserl's concept of intentionality - namely that what is real is merely what appears as real in the intentional relation between subject and object, reducing the appearance/reality distinction to merely appearance. Harman is bored with the postmodern denigration of metaphysics, his solution: metaphysics.

Harman's ontology begins somewhere around the withdrawal of real objects from all relationships, and this would include my relationship with myself as an object - the real object, Chris-lifeform, is somewhere inaccessible, subterranean to my relation with myself. Similarly my relation to the lamp illuminating my desk clutter is not of the lamp qua real object lamp, but the real object lamp is withdrawn from its relation to me. This is classic phenomenology so far (with the exception of replacing experience with relations), and we begin already to lean towards the appearance side of the appearance/reality distinction. But Harman insists on the existence of stars before and after our relation with them: in other words, the real lamp object is not only withdrawn from my relation with it but from the tables' relation with it. What is left is the interaction of the lamp objects' notes with the table, but not the table qua table, table qua table notes.

Harman does not contend that there are qualities independent of objects that we experience, rather notes of objects, or notes of the object-parts of objects, are what give rise to any caricature of an object we have the pleasure of being possessed by. These note relations require a new form of perception that replaces mere black noise elemental contiguities:

A mere interaction, or contiguity/adjacency as he refers to it, only becomes an enchanted or enthralled relation due to the primordial allure of objecthood. Allure is all or nothing, the relation either forms or it doesn't and Harman has three distinct and interactive causes for the relation: vicarious, asymmetrical and buffered.

To backtrack to the jist of the whole project, to obsolesce boredom, Harman writes, "It has been a puzzle since the time of Aristotle whether a thing is identical with its own essence, and the solution will come only when a way is found to say both yes and no simultaneously." (166)

Vicarious causation involves the descent into the notes, or elements, of an object. Never do objects form direct relations with other objects, for this would result in the subsumption of every object in every object and there would be left only a blob of thingness, an Anaximander-inspired Levinisian apeiron, or a Leibnizian monadology - we know this is not the case because our relation to the world is a relation of specific and particular objects.

Rather, what we have is vicarious causation: relations within the disintegrated notes of objects. However, and contrary to Husserl, who contended only humans experience blobs of color that are later compartmentalized and associated into quales of objects in experience (and that stars do not exist without our perception of them), "these notes do not appear to us directly and in naked form, but only amidst a swarm of flickering accidental features and mutual relations between all of the portions of the interior: that is to say, only as elements." (203)

Here is where the distinction between notes and elements is carried through vis-à-vis the buffered cause, what Harman refers to as the firewall of object-object relations and the black noise cause. The notes only become apparent due to the non-normal perceptual allure, which effectively mechanizes the component notes of the object for our delight in them and not the other elements that are always shared in the frame. In other words, elating at the adorable miniature schnauzer in the midst of its strolling owner, the golden-lit park, the breathing trees and the squawking birds.

The asymmetry of causation is that of the within-ness of object-object relation. The cause is not equal to the effect due to the fact that my relationship to the notes of the miniature schnauzer object subsumes me and not the loyal and innocent wolf-descendent. The fur-framed face and the floppy upright ears, the soft coat and fu manchu obedience of the schnauzer causes the elation in me, and yet my elated relation to these notes of the withdrawn schnauzer object has no effect on the schnauzer.

Harman is a delightful metaphysician: humoristic, aphoristic, poetic, and substantially original. I am excited to continue my study of speculative realism and object-oriented ontology, and I am excited about the future of philosophy.

I do think that there is more room for Harman's conceptions of time and space to fit into his discussions of object-oriented ontology. At some points he mentioned, "this would require a discussion of time and space" then moved right along. I was surprised to see that he did include time and space into his conclusory chapter and that those concepts were conveniently importable into the descriptions throughout the entirety of the book, and likely would have added a different dimension to the explanations.

In addition, there must exist some relative form of symmetrical causation that merits ample description. This is only Harman's second book of many, therefore I think that 1) there is ample room for expansion and 2) this is a great place to start with OOO, though I am interested in Tool Being, naturally.

[Nichejamb Inn · Rating 4 out of 5]

Harman's most admirable note is that he takes metaphysics *seriously*. he tries to grapple sincerely with the consequences of this or that theory:

"if the whole of space and time were relational, all objects would be sucked into these relations entirely and could not be carved up into districts in any way at all" (249)

if the nature of things were one way, and not otherwise, our experience of them would differ. whether or not he's right about their nature as *objects*, he is clear about being led to that theory based on his experience of how things *are* (rather than what they signify politically) - a rarity in contemporary philosophy.

[Kim Gammelgaard · Rating 4 out of 5]

Definitely one of the more interesting books I have read recently. A premise, that 'Normal' philosophy does not care about objects as such, but only what humans perceive, leads to a heavy deep philosophical/metaphysical hunt for the existence of the non-human experienced world and how it is possible to perceive it at all for any object, including humans. I am not up-to-date on the premises of the book, which may be over-stated, but had great interest, entertainment and new understandings reading it.

[Luke · Rating 5 out of 5]

“Elements have no alibi for their actions at any moment, and seek none: they stand before us, utterly and fully deployed in specific form, sincerely being just what they are. If objects hedge their bets within any specific perception, elements bet the farm on being exactly and specifically whatever they are, right now.”

“…really does is make the visible seem
withdrawn: that is to say, metaphor converts the qualities of objects into objects in their own right.”

“But it is possible that we might begin to feel poetic sentiments about money and generate metaphors based on the
Aristotelian ratio that dollars are to
euros as America is to Europe.”

“Indeed, causation and allure are so closely related that they turn out to be one and the same. We should now consider the implications of this view of causation.”

[Annelise]

Ok, I am not an academic nor a trained philosopher so I could only sometimes understand the writing. But when I did understand the writing, I appreciated it. I found it interesting.

[ʕっ•ᴥ•ʔっ · Rating 3 out of 5]

Sometimes unconvincing, but I love Harman’s disdain for the critical intellectual tradition. A necessary contribution to philosophy and thought.

[Tijmen Lansdaal · Rating 1 out of 5]

In this book he's saying all kinds of stuff about phenomenology that are ridiculous and in plain contradiction with everything the phenomenologists themselves say. That's fine with me, as long as then a philosophy becomes apparent that, as unphenomenological, grants new possibilities to philosophy. The result is supposed to be some kind of inhumane interaction of beings, but I simply don't get it. Stuck in a phenomenological way of speaking, he tends to fall back into very typical problems of existence as such in ways that never have the originality the 'solutions' the phenomenologists have. The lack of specific Heidegger and Husserl readings are so stifling that finding out what this book is supposed to be about became impossible to me (and to think Harman has read immense amount of Heidegger! His critiques are plain, simple and especially unhelpful in interpreting his writings). I couldn't finish it fully because I simply wasn't getting anywhere with this book. Maybe I should've read Tool-Being first..

[Eric Phetteplace · Rating 5 out of 5]

There's a lot of humor and the carnivalesque in Harman's style which made this work great. Using literary terms (metaphor, humor, allure) to describe objective processes was a great twist. I'm not all that interested in metaphysics and the dynamics of objects but the writing was good and the parts where he takes on what modern philosophy has become were worth it. I still think you'd be better off reading a biology or physics textbook if you want to know how things work.

NB: Unbelievable, after 13 ratings this book still has a perfect 5 stars average, best in my collection, whilst Tool-Being has like a 2.5 (one of the lowest avg. ratings in my collection). That is weird.

[Erick Felinto · Rating 5 out of 5]

Metafísica de Guerrilha! Título genial. Graham Harman faz o mundo das coisas falar...

[Egor xS · Rating 4 out of 5]

Although Harman does not prove his claims, they are themselves extremely interesting

[Mark · Rating 1 out of 5]

Nooo.