The critique fails to account for human consciousness its

irreducible
Cole, 2013 - Ph.D. Duke University, Guggenheim Fellow @
Princeton University
[Andrew, 2013, The Call of Things: A Critique of Object-Oriented Ontologies
Minnesota Review, Number 80, ProjectMUSE]//SGarg
These newer areas, however, may just as well avoid talking about consciousness ,
because the term itself is distorted by its history of usage , an accretion of error, and so forth. I can
sympathize with the distaste for consciousness, because it admits philosophical frustration and forces you into
Kantianism. It is a mind bender to take that old Kantian lesson that consciousness is always consciousness of something and write it from the point of view of objects.

What would you write? Well, you would write

something about withdrawn objects , as Harman does, just as Kant would write of things-inthemselves with the key difference being that philosophers who absorb the Kantian lesson know the limits of their
discourse, whereas those who flout that lesson take off into flights of pure reason, speculating about the inte- rior
life of objects and getting inside the heads of things. (The other key difference for Harman, of course, is Heidegger,
whom Harman needs to revise because he does not help with this one Kantian funda- mental: Heidegger admits
that human attention and awarenessthat is, what constitutes a subject are special aspects of human consciousness needing philosophical analysis.) The Kantian problem remains in place :

if there is something that

cannot be thought, then maybe it cannot be though t. You cannot write your way any
closer to the object, circle the wagons of indirection and allusion around it as you may. Until such a time as
there is a materialist, realist, or let us just say scientific explanation for the necessity of the conscious
experience of, say, the color red to accompany the reception of electromagnetic radi- ation in the cones of your
eyeball, the problem of consciousness qua consciousness will remain on the table. And until the universe demands
that we extend this idea and pose a hard problem of thingsand I credit Harman for attempting to offer one in his
critique of Chalmers (Harman 2009b, 26869, 272)there

will always be irreducible

consciousness, always be idealism, always be objects and subjects infi - Cole 115
nitely variously positioned in relation to one another. Talk of thingly consciousness
as vitality or voice will not indicate much of anything but a philosophers love of
language, consumer goods, and entertain- ing thing-examples like hailstones and
tar, aardvarks and baseball. Nor will objects be seen as they wish to be seen in the
more specialized attempts by some speculative realists to suggest that objects
perceive their secondary qualitiesthis being just one result of the critique of the distinction between
primary and secondary qualities (Meillassoux 2008). For its refusal to find these problems to be problems at all,
then, speculative realism amounts to what Hegel called dogmatic realism, which cannot help but posit the

Speculative realists will tell you that

after Descartes everything went off the rails in the history of philosophy, obviously
because his res cogitans was the wrong thinking thing! Which makes it all the more strange
that they do not focus intensely on philosophy and thought of the period before
Descartes but after the Greeksa focus that would make instantly visible the medieval mystical
objective as the real ground of the subjective (1977, 127).

discourses upon which such an investigation into objects is founded, a discourse that is funda- mentally, even

Could these medieval tradi- tions issue another call, then a call
for the reassessment, if not adjust- ment, of the disciplinary language of speculative
realism and the cognate philosophies, their modus procendi et loquendi? Will that
call be heard?
beautifully, logocentric.

The critique is rendered moot fails to take into account

multiple perspectives
Cole, 2013 - Ph.D. Duke University, Guggenheim Fellow @
Princeton University
[Andrew, 2013, The Call of Things: A Critique of Object-Oriented Ontologies
Minnesota Review, Number 80, ProjectMUSE]//SGarg
My point is not to reassert the importance of Tradition over a glossy and emergent
countermovement. It is to say that when any new philosophy proclaims its
wholesale departure from prior philosophical explorations, it is always the Middle
Ages and medieval thought that take the hardest hit, andpredictablyit is usually medievalists who assume the
task of making corrections to the exciting new narrative. In this case, however, critiques of objectoriented ontology and specula- tive realism, of actor-network theory and vitalism,
have yet to emerge from the field of medieval studies , apart from the essays collected in this
issue of minnesota review. Perhaps when the thrill of object-oriented ontology wanes in this
field, some medievalists will not limit them- selves to the application of its ideas
and the mimicking of its lyricism in the reading of medieval texts and will instead show
what it means for a new philosophy to be built almost entirely on the exclusion of the Middle Ages.8 To wit, when
these new philosophies exclude the Mid- dle Ages, they foreclose the possibilities of
generous readingthe practice of reading-with even the unlikeliest and most unmodern of thinkersand
the opportunities to develop a broader conception of 116 the minnesota review what the
speculative realist project even is, what it can do, what its limits are . The deconstructive
lesson about the identity of thought and being perhaps now looks pat, but as speculative realists sever this Par-

and being is taken as its own category irrespective of thought, there

remains consciousness, and the questions of its basis will always be asked, even
when you believe you are thinking about something else entirel y.
menidean nexus

Separating ontology from politics causes pure passivity.

Galloway 13 - Phd in Literature, Associate professor in the Department of Media,
Culture, and Communication at New York University (Alexander, Source: Critical
Inquiry, Vol. 39, No. 2 (Winter 2013), pp. 347-366,
http://www.jstor.org/stable/10.1086/668529, The Poverty of Philosophy: Realism and PostFordism)
In order to address these important questions I will expand the field of view and make some observations about
philosophical realism.9 In this context, realism means quite simply that an external world exists independent of
ourselves and our languages, thoughts, and beliefsalthough it is often also taken to entail the less simple
epistemological thesis that we have direct and verifiable access to knowledge about that external world. In the
wake of Kantianism and subsequent to phenomenology and structuralism, realism had essentially gone extinct in
the continental tradition, despite having healthy offshoots in Anglo-American analytic philosophy, especially
philosophy of science. But things began to change around 2002. In that year Manual De Landa published a book on
Gilles Deleuze, Intensive Science and Virtual Philosophy, stating in no uncertain terms I am a realist; in the same

Harman published his first book, which proposed a realism around a so-called objectoriented philosophy Perhaps the most influential of the recent realist texts has been Meillassouxs book After
year

Finitude, which advocates that one move beyond what Meillassoux calls correlationism and reconcile thought with
the absolute. For Meillassoux correlationism means that knowledge of the world is always the result of a correlation
between subject and object. By correlation we mean the idea according to which we only ever have access to the
correlation between thinking and being, and never to either term considered apart from the other, Meillassoux

Under the system of correlationism, subjectivity and objectivity are forever

bound together. Thus, one might naturally put figures like Immanuel Kant in this camp with his highly
writes.11

mediated model of subject and object. Phenomenology is also a key entry in the history of correlationism, as well as

much of the French philosophical movements of the 1960s and 1970s, obsessed as they were with the inability for
man to move beyond the prison house of language. Postmodernism is considered to be a high water mark for
correlationism, particularly the notion, often attributed rightly or wrongly to postmodern thinkers, that the subject is
ultimately at the mercy of ideology and spectacle, behind which there exists no absolute truth or reality .

For
correlationism human subjectivity always has a crucial role to play; the real world
doesnt exist, or if it does we cannot have direct access to it. Meillassoux pits himself firmly
against the long tradition of correlationism in continental philosophy. For Meillassoux the real world exists, and it

He endorses a so-called Copernican revolution wherein the anthropocentrism of

correlationism is displaced in favor of a system in which reality is at the center, and
the human is but one element in the network of the real . Levi Bryant and others have
called this a flat ontology comprising a single plane, the real, within which exists human In the
can be known.

opening chapter of After Finitude, titled Ancestrality, Meillassoux lays out the basic stakes of what a
noncorrelationist position might look like by making reference to the Kantian trap that has gripped Western
philosophy for some time: Thought cannot get outside itself in order to compare the world as it is in itself to the
world as it is for us. . . . We cannot represent the in itself without it becoming for us, or as Hegel amusingly put
it, we cannot creep up on the object from behind so as to find out what it is in itself (AF, pp. 34). Meillassoux
does not so much creep up on the object but posit a historical time scale outside the cognition of the human, a
historical time prior to humanity altogether. Thus he speaks of the ancestral realm and the arche-fossil:
ancestral claims are claims about things before the existence of man and therefore prior to what the
phenomenologists call the givenness of human experience; the arche-fossil is the trace that allows someone to
make ancestral claims. For example, radiological decay is an arche-fossil that allows a scientist to date prehistoric
fossils. Meillassoux culminates these provocations by asking what if anything correlationism can say about such
ancestral claims; the facts in question technically would fall prior to the subjectobject relation as such and hence
prior to the model proposed by correlationism. If human thought had a beginning, what to think of history prior to
human thought? Science emerges as something of a trump card, as Meillassoux poses the following question to his
correlationist opponents: how are we to conceive of the empirical sciences capacity to yield knowledge of the
ancestral realm? (AF, p. 26; emphasis removed). The opening section of the book also stresses the importance of
mathematics. He describes an enigma in which mathematics is granted the ability to speak about the historical past
in which humanity was absent: how is mathematical discourse able to describe a world where humanity is absent. .
. . This is the enigma which we must confront: mathematics ability to discourse about the great outdoors; to
discourse about a past where both humanity and life are absent (AF, p. 26); but also earlier Meillassoux brings in
mathematics during his discussion of primary qualities: all those aspects of the object that can be formulated in
mathematical terms can be meaningfully conceived as properties of the object in itself (AF, p. 3; emphasis
removed). (I will return to the question of mathematics in a moment, but it is worth identifying it explicitly here.)
Meillassouxs use of the ancestral realm thus allows him to open up a space for a purely real world, a world that
has never had a human eye gaze upon it or a human mind think about it. To

think ancestrality is to
think a world without thought, he writes, a world without the givenness of the world (AF, p. 28). The
phrase givenness of the world is a reference to how phenomenology talks about presence. It refers to the way in
which the world is given into perception by a thinking being. Our task, by way of contrast, writes Meillassoux,
consists in trying to understand how thought is able to access the uncorrelated, which is to say, a world capable of
subsisting without being given. The holy grail for Meillassoux is therefore existence without givenness. He
understands the absolute as something capable of existing whether we exist or not (AF, p. 28). How should we
evaluate Meillassoux and his intervention into contemporary philosophy?13Afew issues spring to mind, all
concerning Meillassouxs relationship to politics and history. I will address two criticisms first in relatively vague
terms, then move to a third, more pointed critique. First is the question of metaphysical necessity itself, be it in the

All of these things were at some

time or another the antagonist of what one calls critical theory in the broadest sense, that is to
say the practice of sociocultural critique invented by Karl Marx in the middle of the nineteenth century and
form of essentialism, the absolute, a natural reality, or universal truths.

practiced in various ways by the Frankfurt school, structuralism and poststructuralism, semiotics, cultural studies,
and certain kinds of queer theory, feminism, and critical race theory up through the end of the twentieth century. In
much of this work, essence and truth themselves are the antagonists, to be replaced by constructed identities and
contingent worlds. (Recall how Marx and Friedrich Engels, in part two of the Communist Manifesto, promised to do

With the new speculative realism, and perhaps also in a different way with Harmans
object-oriented philosophy, one risks switching from a system of subjective
essentialism (patriarchy, logocentrism, ideological apparatuses) to a system of objective
essentialism (an unmediated real, infinity, being as mathematics, the absolute, the bubbling of chaos). Is it
time to trot out the old antiessentialist arguments from our Marxist,
feminist, and postcolonial forebears? Isnt Meillassouxs metaphysical essentialismhis
away with truth!)

support of the universality of contingency (which in its impotent universality becomes meaningless), his pursuit of

endorsement of a pure realjust as repugnant as other brands

of metaphysical essentialism? Thus we must confront directly the fundamental provocation of the
new philosophical realism. For, contra the tradition of materialist critical theory since Marx, much of todays
realism claims that ontologies should not be political ; it claims that ontological
speculations must be separated from political ones . Such choruses are being heard more and
the absolute, his

more frequently today. I have no doubt that many of the figures associated with todays philosophical realism would

And the argument is often heard that the

uncoupling of the ontological from the political is a neutral act in and of itself and in
so doing casts no aspersion as such on the political project . One simply can do metaphysics
view themselves as politicized souls of some caliber.

over here, while doing politics over there. Furthermore, promulgators of such arguments often laud the uncoupling
as a feature of realism, not a liability, because it allows the political to persist inside its own autonomous sphere,
unsullied by the nitty-gritty questions of Being and appearing .

Yet the uncoupling of the ontological

realm from the political realm is not entirely neutral, for it arrives less as an
innocuous attempt to tidy up the cluttered landscape of philosophical discourse (so
that ones talk of Being will not be tainted by ones talk of politics ) than as an
ideological strategy bent unwittingly or not on the elimination of competing discourses. Recall what must be

must also
throw out social constructivism and the various fields that rely on a
socialconstructivist methodology including much of second- and thirdwave feminism, certain kinds of critical race theory, the project of identity
politics in general, theories of postmodernity, and much of cultural
studies. Phenomenology has a politics, to be sure: beyond the ravages of modern life, the return to a more
discarded when overturning correlationism. One must discard phenomenology certainly, but one

poetic state of being guided by care and solicitude. Social constructivism has one too: throw out the violence of
patriarchy, logocentrism, and all the rest. Have no illusions, this is what is at stake with the recent return to the
absolute evident in theoretical discourse from Meillassoux to Badiou, and even evident in other authors such as
iek and Susan Buck-Morss.14 To be sure, certain of these theorists understand the stakes and therefore scaffold
their newfound universalism with a robust and often militant political theoryBadiou and iek, one shall remember, are in no uncertain terms advocating communism, and Buck- Morss herself has a robust political

The question becomes more pressing however

when a philosopher uncouples Being from politics in order to withdraw
from the project of political critique altogethe r.
consciousness. Fading violets they are not.

Even if theyre right that there was never one stable world,
that doesnt make the process of world-making a bad one
Morton throws the baby out with the bathwater and makes
ethical action impossible
Mitchell, 13PhD, Dr. Audra, Professor of Politics @ NYU, Apocalypse then:
worldliness after the end of the world, Nov 18, Worldly IR,
http://worldlyir.wordpress.com/2013/11/18/apocalypse-then-worldliness-after-theend-of-the-world/. //BR
Whats more, he works hard to dissolve one of the few concepts that could form a
basis of an ethics for the end of the world. He focuses much of his attack on the
concept of world, one of the few ideas powerful enough to harness human

attachment and care on a large scale and to translate these affects into ethical
action. In fairness to Morton, he uses the term world in a highly specific and welldelineated way albeit one which is almost the diametric opposite from my own
understanding of it. Morton adopts a Heideggerian notion of world as sphere to
which humans have privileged (if not exclusive) access. World, from this
perspective, is a reified object which floats in a metaphysical void, immune to the
extrusions of other objects and to change. This is, from my viewpoint, an extremely
limiting notion of world. I prefer the non-metaphysical (and post-Heideggerian)
conception of world developed by Jean-Luc Nancy (see my previous post on this
topic). Nancy also believes that (the) world is being destroyed, or at least
exhausted, by the processes of globalization and the over-saturation of meaning.
But at the same time, he is concerned with understanding how a new world can
emerge without metaphysical grounding. Like Morton, Nancy suggests that the
event (like the object) ultimately withholds itself or withdraws, leaving a strange
absence of presence. It is from this nothing that world cultivates itself, as a form
of creation-as-being. World from this perspective, is being-with, or the direct
relation of beings to one another. It has no outside, no metaphysics and no
teleology. It is also the condition of being-toward that is, the co-constitution of
plural beings rather than a metaphysical plane in which beings are separated. This
seems to be very much in line with the object-oriented ontology that Morton
espouses. For me, a world is an instantiation of the conditions of worldliness
discussed here just as, for Morton, what we see of hyperobjects are instantiations
of conditions like viscosity, nonlocality, temporal undulation and phasing. In other
words, there are conceptions of world that seem to fit very well with Mortons
notion of hyperobjects. But I dont want to gloss over Mortons rejection of world as
a matter of a difference in rhetoric or interpretation . When Morton says that the
world has ended, he is certainly referring to the notion of a metaphysical world.
This is also the case in Nancys work. But Nancy also urges humans should address
themselves to (not produce) a new world emerging in the wake of this ending. If I
understand him correctly, Morton argues that humans should do away with worlds
and world-making altogether in other words, that world can only be a
metaphysical concept. This, I think, is throwing out the baby with the bathwater.
Certainly, we can and should do away with the idea that there is a stable,
unchanging world, a separate ontological plane reserved for humans. But can we
really exist without the notion of attachment to and care for other beings that
shapes non-metaphysical notions of world? I think not. One of the main reasons is
that, even if we are able to grasp, at least to some extent, other temporal and
physical scales (whether macro or micro), we still experience ourselves, along with
other living beings, in a meso-level in which we perceive some degree of stasis or
consistency. In other words, even if we can try to see our lives from the perspective
of a planet (like the fictional Melancholia), we cannot actually live in that spatiotemporal scale. Instead, we live in a scale that allows, and also forces, us to overlap
with the lives of other beings. This means that we can experience attachments to
other beings, even if these attachments are temporary. Simply because these
beings (and we) will not exist in the future does not mean that we should not care
for them as they are now. This is akin to saying that we should love in the full
knowledge that we will lose the beings we love, or that they will change irrevocably.

In other words, we should not try to save the world by attempting, in vain, to arrest
change, or by denying finitude from behind the windshields of fantasy worlds. But
there is nothing wrong with remaining attached to our world(s) in a melancholy way:
that is, caring for them in the full knowledge that they are finite . From this
perspective, it is crucial to hold onto a sense of worldliness at the end of the world.
This enables us to avoid the two horns of apocalyptic reasoning: the reactionary and
futile desire to capture the world in a freeze frame; and the nihilistic attitude that
nothing matters unless it is forever. Instead, we need an ethics of care for finite
and dying worlds, and for the attachments between beings that constitute them. At
the end of the day (world?), it is these attachments that save us from falling into the
paralysis that grips Justine in Melancholia. She spends a great deal of the film inert,
unable to eat, move or think. She even plunges into a dark mood in which she
claims that no one will mourn the Earth or the evil life that it fostered. In short,
she is aware of her conditions but can not find a way to be within them. I worry that
banishing world as a concept will produce precisely this mood. Thats why its
interesting to follow Justines arc throughout the film. At various points, she tries to
merge with the Earth, whether by lying naked in the moonlight or immersing herself
in a creek. And at the end of the film, as Earth is pulled into Melancholias
gravitational field, she mourns the planet to which she initially denies any
attachment. This is reflected in the tears running down her face in the final scene,
and the force with which she grips the hands of her sister and nephew. Despite her
attitude of fatalistic acceptance and her rejection of redemption, she faces the end
of the world by building a small world the magical cave. She co-constitutes this
tiny world with her loved ones along with some sticks, soil, trees, grass and air
which are just as integral to the magical cave as the humans that sit inside it. In so
doing, she makes one final attempt to co-constitute a world in the face of absolute
finitude. I suspect (although I may be wrong) that Morton would see this as a
collapse into the fantasy of world-building in the face of terror. But I think its
something quite different. Justine creates this world, and fully experiences it,
knowing fully that it will not save her or anyone/thing else. It is an ethical act
without instrumentalism, without an end. It is an expression of love for, and in, an
ending world. This, from my perspective, is an attitude that can ground ethics in the
face of radical finitude. Only with a melancholic sense of the world, and love for it,
can humans confront the enormity of the challenges that face them without being
paralyzed by fear or nihilism.

They makes commodity fetishism natural by assigning agency

for objects its overly empirical analysis precludes an analysis
of the social forces that produce it
Wolfe, 2k12
Ross, University of Chicago, On Commodities and the False Liberation of the Object,
June 19th, 2012,http://rosswolfe.wordpress.com/2011/06/19/on-commodities-andthe-false-liberation-of-the-object/
Utisz hits the nail on the head when he mentions Object-Oriented Ontologys
obsessive mania to avoid anything that even remotely resembles
anthropocentrism. For the movements adherents, human beings are just one

kind of object leading an unprivileged existence within a more inclusive democracy

of objects, to use Bryants terminology (though Im not quite sure how inhuman
objects can constitute a demos). So while Object-Oriented Ontology is quick to
attribute the category of agency, a faculty usually reserved solely for
human subjects, to non-human objects (Latours actants), itis slower to admit
the qualitative difference of human agents from the rest of nature. A microcosm
of this tendency appears in Levi Bryants post concerning his rather opaque concept
of wilderness ontology, in which he collapses the distinction between human and
non-human architectural enterprises. [T]here is, in a wilderness
ontology, no categorical distinction between the natural and the cultural, the
human and the natural, asserts Bryant. There is just a flat field
where, occasionally, human creations happen to populate this field in
much the same way that we occasionally come across the marvelous
architectural feats of termites on the African and Australian
plains. The astounding difference between anthills or termite mounds, which
are the blind product of natural social instinct, and a modern skyscraper, a
profoundly unnatural, geometricized conglomeration of synthetic materials like
ferro-concrete and glass, designed by an architect or team of architects all traces
of this qualitative difference disappear within a shapeless mass of
equivocation. And this is what returns us, circuitously, to the problem of
commodity fetishism in the first place. For one of the most pernicious features
of the commodity is its tendency to naturalize its own existence within the collective
consciousness of society. The existing social relations it engenders are reified into a
bizarre sort of second nature, wity its own set of seemingly immutable laws and
forces. Or, as Lukcs explained it: [M]en are constantly smashing, replacing, and
leaving behind the natural, irrational, and actually existing bonds, while, on the
other hand, they erect around themselves in the reality that they have created and
made, a kind of second nature which evolves with exactly the same inexorable
necessity as was the case earlier with irrational forces of nature (more exactly: the
social relations which appear in this form). And this is what separates the
speculative realist approach of Object-Oriented Ontology from the critical
realist approach of Marxism. There is nothing in the positiveconstitution of the
commodity would suggest that there is anything peculiar about it; in enumerating
its objective qualities, the social matrix that engendered it is nowhere to
be found. The analysis thus undertaken rises no higher than the level of the
empirical, extracting only the metaphysical properties from the datum of
immediate experience. By contrast, the ruthlessly critical essence of Marxism
presumes a radically anti-empirical approach to the study of reality. Nothing is as it
immediately seems. For only through a rigorous dialectical investigation is
one able to discover the quasi-theological roots of the commoditys
existence. Through this method the underlying category of socially congealed
labor-time is exposed, which allows for the possibility of exchange and a
potential equivalence between otherwise fundamentally different objects
of use. The physical immediacy of the commodified object conceals its dark
origins in the web of social relations, contained within its value-dimension. In
the case of commodity fetishism, a social relation between people becomes
objectified as a permanent state of affairs that exists independent of their own

activity, as just the way things are. Or, as Lukcs put it, a relation between
people takes on the character of a thing and thus acquires a phantom
objectivity, an autonomy that seems so strictly rational and all-embracing
as to conceal every trace of its fundamental nature: the relation between
people. Bryant thus rightly quotes a passage from Adorno that confirms this
totalizing logic of homogeneity within capital and in the commodity fetish in
particular: The barter principle, the reduction of human labor to the abstract
universal concept of average working hours, is fundamentally akin to the principle
of identification. Barter is the social model of the principle, and without the principle
there would be no barter; it is through barter that non-identical individuals and
performances become commensurable and identical. The spread of the principle
imposes on the whole world an obligation to become identical, to become total.

Policy action is key to solving the impact of the K

Bennett, 2012 Professor of political science, John Hopkins
University
[Jane, Spring 2012, Systems and Things: A Response to Graham Harman and Timothy Morton New Literary
History, Volume 43, Number 2, Muse]//SGarg

the distinction between objects and things is ir- relevant for his
purposes, perhaps because he does not want to restrict himself unduly to the (weird)
physicality of objects or to the power that they exhibit in (relatively) direct, bodily
encounters with us. I am more focused on this naturalist realm, and here I find the term thing
or body better as a marker for individuation, better at highlighting the way certain edges within
Harman says that

an assemblage tend to stand out to certain classes of bodies. (The smell and movement of the mammal to the tick,
to invoke Uexkulls famous example.13) Thing

or body has advantages over object, I

think, if ones task is to disrupt the political parsing that yields only active (American,
manly) subjects and passive objects. Why try to disrupt this parsing? Because we are daily confronted
with evidence of nonhuman vitalities actively at work around and within us . I also do so because the
frame of subjects and objects is unfriendly to the intensified ecological awareness
that we need if we are to respond intelligently to signs of the breakdown of the
earths carrying capacity for human life.