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The Object Strikes Back: an Interview with Graham Harman Lucy Kimbell Published in Design and Culture 5(1), 2013

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The Object Strikes Back: an Interview with Graham Harman Lucy Kimbell Published in Design and Culture 5(1), 2013 1 The Object Strikes Back: An interview with Graham Harman Lucy Kimbell Published in Design and Culture 5(1), 2013 Please cite from the published version, not this one Abstract At a time when many design professionals concern themselves with designing interactions, experiences, and services, it seems timely to reconsider the role of objects in design. This interview with philosopher Graham Harman offers a summary of his thinking about objects, using it to reconsider their role in design. Strongly influenced by Martin Heidegger and Bruno Latour, Harman’s philosophy is object-oriented in that it treats objects as real but with hidden depths. In the interview Harman describes how objects have been treated in philosophy and what his approach does that is different; ultimately, his ideas problematize the notion that design is human-centered. Keywords Objects, ontology, metaphysics, Graham Harman, object-oriented philosophy Introduction Objects are central to design. Designers know how to make them, curators organize them in museums, journalists put pictures of them in their magazines and web pages, design historians and researchers describe how they came to be and what they do once they start circulating. A materially-minded anthropologist might argue that objects are central to any field of human activity. But design, along with only a handful of other specialist disciplines or fields of practice, has a privileged relationship with objects. As givers or shapers of form, designers integrate their speculations about users and objects and the social practices which they support. Designers consider material and other constraints, producing the specifications, plans and models for future artifacts that in turn shape future practices and are involved in bringing diverse others into these activities. Given this, we might expect an extensive literature available to students of design to help them understand what objects are, what they do and the interplay between objects, designers and others. The last two decades of academic design studies suggest otherwise; objects have been disappearing while other kinds of 2 entity appear more and more in the cosmologies of designers. With the invention of “the user” came other terms – human-centered design, users’ needs and so on – that focus on the human side of the human-object relation. Such studies are concerned with experiences and intangible services, rather than products. Designers’ practices dematerialized into something called “design thinking.” Interest in the objectness of objects has only recently returned. Arguments to reduce materials intensity to create more sustainable products (eg. Tonkinwise 2003) or attentiveness to “thing theory” (eg. Boradkar 2010; Binder et al. 2011) make it timely to reconsider objects in design. This interview considers these developments from the perspective of the object- oriented philosophy of Graham Harman. Having studied Heidegger for his dissertation, later reworked and published as Tool-Being (2002), Harman then explored the work of French sociologist Bruno Latour. Harman’s excitement on reading Latour is evident in his first paper on the sociologist (published in Harman 2010). Moreover, like Latour, Harman writes in a lively, accessible way. This is theoretical work that pokes the reader and makes her laugh out loud. Here was someone who, for Harman, was doing new things in metaphysics, in particular disabling the Kantian stranglehold of the human over the non-human. In his full-length treatment of Latour, Prince of Networks (2009) Harman takes this work as a kind of metaphysics. While he relishes much of Latour’s work, in particular the sociologist’s attention to things and stuff, however mundane, Harman concludes with an analysis of where for him, this work stops short. Latour’s failing, he says, is not allowing objects to have qualities or relations other than the ones they have right now. That is, it does not explain change. Harman articulates clearly how several theoretical positions tend to ignore the material objectness of things, or make them ultimately serve human purposes. Either objects are real outside of us, and that’s all we need to know about them, or, what matters about objects is our ideas about them. Harman calls himself a realist. For him, the object has qualities apart from its relations, in contrast to Actor Network Theory. The arguments Harman presents in the concluding chapter of The Prince of Networks were subsequently developed in The Quadruple Object (2010). Here he presents a fuller account of the fourfold which is his current thinking on an object-oriented philosophy. This “speculative realism” argues that objects have their own qualities and relations. Harman’s position is immediately attractive for those of us working in design. It allows us to reconsider the assumption of human-centeredness in recent design thinking. Is design primarily concerned with creating meanings for things as Krippendorff (2006) and Verganti (2009) argue, or is it possible to think about design as stuff having relations with other stuff, in which humans are not always implicated? In the interview that follows I explore what Harman’s work brings to research about design. I met Harman in person when he was passing through London from Cairo where he is associate provost for research administration and professor in the Department of Philosophy at the American University. I suggested we walk through Highgate Cemetery in north London, to visit the 3 grave of Karl Marx, another philosopher who thought about objects, although in quite different ways. That initial rain-splattered conversation became the basis of the notes for this interview which was conducted via email. Although he is increasingly interested in art, Harman said he was relatively unfamiliar with design. What follows is also shaped by my presenting a particular account of design that might find resonances with Harman’s work. Undermining the Object Lucy Kimbell: Can we start with a kind of Metaphysics for Dummies? How have philosophers thought about objects? What have been the important contributions and what for you are their weaknesses? Graham Harman: At the origin of Greek philosophy, the program was to destroy objects. The first Western philosophers were the pre-Socratic thinkers. Against common sense, which believes in things like horses, trees, ships, and cities, the pre-Socratics tried to show that all these things are built of something more fundamental. This also made them the first scientists, since this is what science does as well. Some of the pre-Socratics reduced all objects to a tinier physical element: Thales said everything is made of water; Anaximenes said it must be air; Heraclitus said fire. They all set the stage for Empedocles, who claimed that there were four separate physical elements: air, earth, fire, and water, joined by love and separated by hate. Other pre-Socratic philosophers held instead that reality was or should be a giant indeterminate lump, the apeiron, from which all specific objects were derivative. Anaximander said that the apeiron will exist in the future once justice has destroyed all opposites– an idea that influenced our Highgate Cemetery friend Karl Marx, who studied these early Greek thinkers diligently. Parmenides said that the apeiron (which he called “Being” instead) already exists, and only our delusional senses and opinions make us think that many different objects exist. Then there were the philosophers who said that this apeiron existed in the past but was destroyed: Pythagoras said that the apeiron inhaled Void, which broke it into smaller pieces; Anaxagoras said that the apeiron spun so rapidly under the control of a powerful Mind that it broke into fragments. We might think these theories sound quaint and outdated, but they are still with us today. Mainstream scientific materialists still think we can reduce all objects to their physical (or sometimes mathematical) micro-components. In continental philosophy we have the followers of Deleuze and Simondon, who prefer the “pre- individual” realm over any actual objects, and this is the obvious descendant of the apeiron theory of the world. I call these theories “undermining” philosophies, because they say that objects are too shallow to be real. What is real for such philosophies are the tiny elements or the quasi-unified lump deeper than all individual things. The problem with such theories is that they do not allow for the emergent power of larger entities. The powers of a horse or tree are something quite different from the powers of the mini-chemicals of which these objects are made. For example, you can remove quite a large number of atoms 4 from a horse without there being any difference in the horse. Undermining philosophies fail to recognize the autonomy and power of objects at many different scales other than the ultra-tiny or ultra-basic one. But there is also what I call “overmining” philosophies, a word coined by analogy with the existing word undermining. (My French translator had a devil of a time with this term, which only works well in English.) Overminers say not that objects are too shallow to be real, but that they are too deep to be real, and this is an even more common position in our time. Objects, they say, are useless fictions, or at least forever unverifiable. All that is real are the contents of consciousness, the constructions made by society, the workings of language– or relations, effects, and events more generally. Or perhaps what we call “objects” are merely “bundles of qualities” (David Hume). The problem with these theories is that they fail to explain why anything would ever change. If you or I are not autonomous objects, but fully determined by our current socio-linguistic context and our current sum total of relations with all other beings, then there is no reason why either of us would ever change or develop in any way.
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