Is there an Object Oriented Architecture?

Engaging Graham Harman

Joseph Bedford, Joseph Bedford

• Editorial: Bloomsbury Academic
• Año: 2020
• ISBN:
  9781350133471
• Edición: 1
• Categoría: Filosofía
• Categoría: Historia y teoría filosóficas

Bringing Graham Harman's philosophy into direct confrontation with contemporary architectural theory in new and creative ways, Is There an Object-Oriented Architecture? provides a dialogue between Harman and six of the world's leading architectural thinkers, Adam Sharr, Lorens Holm, Jonathan Hale, Peg Rawes, Patrick Lynch and Peter Carl. Harman's object-oriented philosophy is one that sees the universe as a carnival of equal "objects" with no hierarchy between humans and nonhumans. In his model, unicorns, triangles, bicycles, neutrons, and humans are all things with enduring essences that outlast their partial transformations. It is a strikingly democratic vision of the universe that knocks humans off their ontological pedestal as arbiters of what is real. It also radically challenges the very precepts of architectural theory, the structure of which remains stubbornly human-centric as it seeks to give form to the human being's place at the centre of the cosmos. In this new book, each thinker develops the implications of Harman's philosophy for the future of architecture by entering into a direct exchange with the philosopher and his thinking, both questioning him and questioning with him.

1

Joseph Bedford

1.1 Joseph Bedford, Is There an Object-Oriented Architecture?

Since his earliest invitations to speak to architects over a decade ago, Graham Harman’s work has elicited increasing interest among architects.¹ With his recent appointment to the faculty at the Southern California Institute of Architecture (SCI-Arc), especially, the encounter between Harman’s philosophy and architecture has picked up pace and promises only to continue. Having recently published a book on art, Harman has indicated his further interest in architecture by promising a book on the subject.

Even at this early stage in the encounter between Harman and architecture, it is possible to ask what potential Harman’s thought holds for architecture; whether on an intellectual and abstract level or on a more concrete and aesthetic level.

How might Harman’s thought offer a new intellectual paradigm for architecture that challenges those once provocative but now cliché? How might it facilitate the re-appraisal of currently unfashionable episodes of previous architectural thought? What ways might it offer to architects to think beyond centuries-old philosophical assumptions and the ethical legacies linked to them? How might it enable architects to engage more skilfully in urgently needed forms of global or ecological thought through their ability to think and work within the increasingly imbricated realms of the human and non-human?

Or might Harman’s thought, for example, offer a new aesthetic paradigm for architecture in which a new form of object-oriented poetics emerges? Might it spark an awakening among architects to appreciate and seek to represent the strange depths of reality itself? Might it help architecture better position its mode of knowledge among the sciences in the university?

And might the exploration of all these possibilities, whatever their outcomes, in the process help to invigorate intellectual work in architecture in general?

The answer to these questions will largely rest on the future path of Harman’s intellectual project, which he is continually developing before his readership in a prolific list of publications – seventeen in as many years – and a continuous stream of lecture appointments often available to view online.² Beginning from metaphysical speculation of which, as a philosopher, he has a measure of surety, he is continually seeking to ‘expand outwards … to cover a wider and wider circle of human affairs’, with ethics, aesthetics, politics as an ultimate goal.³ Yet the very natality and openness of Harman’s endeavour, combined with the rapid and widespread circulation of his discourse, also risks the pitfall of him joining all-too-soon the ranks of past philosophers whose engagement with architecture was (albeit productively) ‘misread’ when they were rapidly translated into metaphors for architectural form.⁴

The aim of this book is to stave off such a risk as long as possible and to promote understanding of the encounter such that other possibilities for reading his work might emerge, before it is enclosed into a particular image or style. In the pages that follow, the reader should find the terms of the debate laid out with sufficient depth to be able to judge for themselves what potential Harman’s thought might hold for architecture.

Before turning to the exchange itself, let us first outline a number of central ideas in Harman’s work that form the basis of that debate, that will likely endure in his work and that will likely inform future interpretation of the relevance of his work for architecture.

First among these is the idea that objects are the basic ontological unit of the universe. Harman defines objects as any durable unified entity. While a random collection of objects placed on a table might not endure for long as a unity and thus would not constitute an object in any significant sense, other complex aggregates of things, despite alterations, or variations in effect, such as all the ships, crewmen, legal documents that compose the Dutch East India Company (VOC), would constitute a unified object in a significant sense because they have stood the test of time.

Harman contrasts his philosophy of objects to materialist or social constructivist philosophies that he claims fails to understand objects. Materialist philosophies that attempt to reduce objects downwards to their parts in order to explain their nature fail to grasp that objects are more than the sum of their parts. Similarly, social constructivist philosophies that attempt to reduce objects upwards to their effects in order to explain them, equally fail to grasp that an object is also more than its effects. The horticultural scientist does not know what the flower truly is by analysing its molecules. As Gaston Bachelard once put it, ‘you cannot explain the flower by the fertilizer’. Yet Harman would also say that the sociologist and economist are also in no better position to know what the flower really is. He would add, ‘you cannot explain the flower by its social role or its price either’. Flowers, boats, cities, nation-states, etc., exist as objects at a level that is between their parts and their effects. It is this level of relatively stable unified entities that Harman believes best explains the ontological composition of the universe.

Because Harman defines objects in such abstract terms as these, his philosophy can easily be applied equally to every scale and type of unified entity and to those that are merely sensed (and not real) as well as those that are real.⁵ This inclusivity – illustrated by the eclectic and incongruous litanies of objects that populate Harman’s books, from dust, numbers, cockroaches, unicorns, empty plastic bottles, diamonds, wishes, rope, neutrons, business partnerships, blackbirds, railway platforms, the European Union, mailboxes, copper wires and bicycles, to mermaids, marriages, pace-makers, ghosts in a Japanese Temple, triangles and signals flashing from the moon – is one of the most distinctive aspects of his philosophy.

While Harman’s philosophy is able to evoke every scale or type of object, it is his claim to be able to account for the interaction between non-human objects in the same terms as the interaction between human consciousness and non-human objects that makes his philosophy a candidate for having broken free of what Quentin Meillassoux calls the ‘correlationist circle’, in which human thought is unable to think about a reality external from the correlation of thought and being for the limitations imposed by thought itself.⁶ Harman’s writings ask us to picture his philosophy (paradoxically) as having gained access to a level of reality (of things in themselves, interacting with one another), which he himself tells us is inaccessible by definition.

How is it that Harman can speak confidently about the nature of objects light-years away in distant galaxies, at scales so small as to be inaccessible to human perception or residing at the beginning of time before human beings evolved? The answer seems to be that, by learning from phenomenological descriptions of how things appear to human consciousness, it is possible to derive a metaphysics able to interpolate how things that no human consciousness can experience must necessarily appear to one another. Though phenomenology traditionally has been antagonistic towards metaphysics, Harman, through aesthetic devices such as metaphor, aims to rethink metaphysics and deploy aesthetics towards a different end, to know reality in itself rather than just the human world.⁷

Harman’s greater ambition may be the thoroughly new definition of knowledge, which situates aesthetics as philosophy, first, above epistemology.⁸ Harman tells us that philosophy never was a form of knowledge but only ever the love of knowledge or wisdom (philo-sophia). He reminds us that while neither Socrates nor anyone after him has ever defined justice or seen a just world, justice nonetheless remains an enduring unified object, to which human thought approaches by indirect, aesthetic means, such that it is possible to momentarily glimpse the essence of a unified entity despite its changing appearances. For Harman, of the things that appear through aesthetic means, there is more than what phenomenologists have described, our world, our historicity, our freedom or our existential condition; there is the enigmatic and infinite noumenal and phenomenal depths of objects themselves.

Harman’s realist metaphysics of objects, irreducible to their parts or effects, inclusive of all scales and types of objects, real or sensed, human or non-human, interacting indirectly with, and always infinitely withdrawing from, one another, was taken up by our six architects in the exchange: Adam Sharr, Lorens Holm, Jonathan Hale, Peg Rawes, Patrick Lynch and Peter Carl. Whether approaching his philosophy from a background in Heideggerian phenomenology, Lacanian psychoanalysis or Spinozist Feminist materialism, each architect wrestled with the potential of Harman’s philosophy for architectural understanding and practice, and each discussed on different points of conflict, focusing on topics such as language, world, consciousness, space and the unity or multiplicity of the Real or nature.

Because architecture has already had a long-standing relationship with phenomenology, and because Harman’s realist modification of Heidegger’s work, or metaphysical extrapolation of his methods, is so controversial, and because this contention lays at the heart of the debate between Harman and Peter Carl, Patrick Lynch and Jonathan Hale, let us begin reviewing the rough outline of the exchange by unpacking the nature of Harman’s relationship to phenomenology.

Edmund Husserl and Martin Heidegger in their respective transcendental phenomenologies of consciousness and practice were, according to Harman, the first to observe – even if they were unaware of it – that objects have depth and that this depth is in principle inaccessible to human beings; that is, the full nature of objects is always located at an infinite distance from any encounter with them, either by a human or by a non-human object.⁹

Husserl had observed the human consciousness of things (perceived or imagined) as able to approach their true nature over time through a shifting relationship to their observer. By playing with an object in one’s consciousness, revolving it and varying it in one’s mind (if it was a purely imaginary object) or by rotating it in one’s hand or moving around it (if it was, in addition, a real object), one could come to understand what it was about that object that was not immediately present in the first instance that one encountered it. Because movement in time and space is required to approach this true nature, and because the totality of time and space is unknowable, no final or absolute knowledge of objects is ever possible. As a result, there is always a kind of hierarchy or depth-structure between the more essential and the more accidental aspects of things. Harman adopts Husserl’s insights in what he describes as ‘sensual objects’, including both those that are purely imaginary like unicorns, which are independent of any real, material things, and those that are the sensed impressions of real objects as encountered by humans or other objects and are thus attached to real objects.

Heidegger, by contrast to Husserl, had observed that, within the practical relations that human beings have towards the things that they use, there is another kind of hierarchy or depth-structure within the world of habits, rituals, practices and social institutions. Heidegger analysed this depth by focusing upon the difference between engaging with things with close attention and circumspectly using them in an inattentive, habituated or semi-forgetful manner. When analysed on an individual level looking at one human being at work, like the carpenter in her workshop, one might, at first, think that the depth that Heidegger observed was between minds and bodies; between thinking intently about something and being absorbed in using it. In the flow of typing this sentence, it is as if my fingers appear to know exactly where the letters on the keyboard are. Yet, if you were to ask me to name the exact order of the letters on the bottom row from left to right without looking at them, I would not be able to do it. Thus, our bodies appear to have a kind of ‘know-how’ different from the ‘knowing-that’ of our minds. Indeed, the majority of movements and activities have a quality much like this, and explicitly noticing things, as Harman tells us, is a fairly minor occurrence in our lives.

Heidegger’s analysis of using things, however, had implications that go far beyond the individual. If the carpenter is in the flow of making a chair, he argued, the full conditions of possibility that one has to account for in order to explain the habitual level of her activity is much more than just her individual ability at any particular moment to reach out and grasp her hammer without having to look at it. For Heidegger, the level of habit includes motivations, customs and the history and culture that shaped the situation of carpentry. It includes, for example, the facts that she is making the chair because she desperately needs the money to keep her workshop open; that this chair will be a prestigious, royal chair, bringing in more business when displayed to the public; and that she has always dreamed of being a carpenter have made her to recently quit her job in banking at the age of fifty-five to pursue her dream, which she feels to be the last chance she has to do so. For Heidegger, every little activity that human beings are engaged in is thus silently haunted in this way by their mortality, and the collective cultural and historical world is shot through with the significance of the existential dimension of projects human beings engage in. Thus, when Heidegger’s carpenter reaches out skilfully picking up the hammer, the depth-structure in question was a depth between the whole historical and cultural world, in which the practical activities that human beings are engaged in have their meaning.

If, today, this is the orthodox reading of Heidegger, Harman offers his readers an unorthodox reading, accusing Heidegger of correlationism due to his emphasis on the primacy of the human world, which he argues is a form of Idealism implicated in imperialism, colonialism, racism and speciesism. Realism, by contrast, promises to shift the balance between human and non-humans towards an equitable centre ground, in which philosophy addresses all things in the universe with equal weight and promises a new ethical accounting as a result.

The unorthodox reading of Heidegger that Harman has developed argues that the hammer too, like the carpenter, has a freedom of its own to be otherwise than it is. When the carpenter’s hammer breaks, she might, Harman suggests, see not only the depth of her world and her freedom within that world but also the depth of the objects all around her in themselves independently of her. Rather than being defined by the world in which it is related to the nails and the wood and the carpenter, her hammer contains the potential to extract itself from this situation and enter an entirely new situation.

Heidegger had attempted through this example to contrast the relative merits of the theoretical gaze of science – which aims to know things epistemologically at the risk of forgetting their hermeneutic context – to the practical knowledge of use that preserves the hermeneutic involvement with things. In Harman’s view, however, this contrast is less interesting than the fact that both equally fail to grasp the thing in itself. Or more precisely for Harman, because he maintains the Heideggerian critique of scientism, a metaphysics of the thing in itself is a better candidate to counter scientism than practice, because it operates on the same plane as science in its relation to nature. Through this fundamental shift of perspective from the carpenter to the hammer, Harman lays out the core of his philosophy. The difference between the ethical implications of Heidegger’s concern for the depth of world and the metaphysical implications of Harman’s concern for the depth of things in themselves lies at the core of one of the central contentions in the exchange, between mainstream interpretations of phenomenology maintained by Peter Carl, Patrick Lynch and Jonathan Hale and Harman’s effort to extract a metaphysics from Heidegger’s work.

Harman tells us that making this shift of perspective is important for several reasons. Firstly, it is important for the sake of philosophy as an independent discipline. Even if it is unclear where it will lead, Harman tells us that it is important to aim for the broadest accounting of things in order to advance the discipline, without limiting that accounting from the outset to ethical and social concerns. ...