Interview with Ian Bogost

Today I am happy to bring you the long-awaited interview with Ian Bogost who is currently an Associate Professor at Georgia Tech Institute at Technology, a co-founder of Persuasive Games, and a board member at the educational publishing house Open Texture.

Most of us know Ian from his discussions about object-oriented philosophy over at his blog and there is no easy way to introduce a man who has the time to research, create, and theorize about videogames. Therefore I'll let the man speak for himself.

Oh, but before we do our next interview is with topographical philosopher Jeffrey Malpas.

> AHB: Can you tell us a little bit about your intellectual background? It seems you’ve had quite the diverse career thus far.

I've been interested in both philosophy and computation since a young age. My family didn't own a computer until later than some, which meant that my time with computers at school and at friends' houses was more precious, more revered perhaps. I was also interested in literature and the arts for as long as I can remember, and I participated in painting, music, writing, and the like. When I was a teenager I thought I wanted to work in finance, but mercifully I had the opportunity to work in that industry in New York as an intern at 16, a convenient time to discover that I'd rather do anything else. After that experience, I had the sense that I wanted my eventual work life to incorporate and integrate philosophy, the arts, and computation, but I didn't have any idea what that meant.

When I started undergrad, I felt that I had to choose between them. In retrospect that was probably wrong. But It was the 1990s, and I figured that I could learn as much about computers as I wanted on my own, from colleagues, or in the industry. But where else was I going to learn philosophy? Internet-connected armchair communities of late-night philosophers weren't a reality, except maybe on USENET. So I made my choice. I'll never forget the experience of changing my major from computer science as a first-year student: walking down the dark hallway of closed, blue doors, keyboards chattering behind them. A closed door, a knock, a pause, a silent pass of the paper, a quiet signature, a closed door again.

I ended up doing majors in both philosophy and comparative literature. At the University of Southern California the philosophy department was very analytical, and the comp lit department very continental, and very focused on critical theory. Comp lit also let me exercise my interest in literature and the arts, of course, and it forced me to pursue study in several languages, for which I am grateful. I feel now like I got the best of both worlds, philosophically speaking.

It turned out I was right about computing, or right enough anyway. The World Wide Web was just beginning to reach the public, and Los Angeles was an active center for its commercialization. I worked in the industry through most of undergrad and grad school, building software, websites, and videogames, primarily for use in the entertainment, automotive, and consumer packaged goods industries. I worked insane hours at times and learned how to make systems that real people used. I dealt with a variety of practical if absurd problems, including inadvertently destroying most of Honda's customer database and suffering the arbitrary wrath of action film director Michael Bay. I got my taste of working in big industry and in Hollywood, and I never need to do either of those things again.

Eventually I quit, finished my dissertation, and started a small games studio (Persuasive Games, which later became the title of one of my books) that makes videogames about social and political issues. I was fortunate to have academic and professional advisers willing to support a research project on philosophy and computing (I was ready to give up on the idea of becoming a professor), but I'd also think that by then I had learned more than a little about how to get my own way from working in the real world of high stakes business. I learned that I would have to forge my own path if I was going to be happy as an intellectual.

My plight seems quaint in retrospect. The faculty gig I landed at Georgia Tech does exactly what I'd hoped I'd be able to do, but never imagined would actually exist: to integrate the liberal arts and computing in a meaningful way. While I sometimes regret not having had a more formal education in computing, formal training can be a burden as much as a benefit. It took me much longer than I might have hoped to reconsider fielty to early intellectual heroes, while I had no trouble ripping through a variety of computer languages and media without concern. Still, as I watch our hundreds of students make their way through our unique degrees in Computational Media (BS) and Digital Media (MS, PhD), I sometimes wonder if they aren't missing out on the struggles of ossified disciplinarily, or the depth of inquiry possible when one focuses on a single subject. These are the compromises one has to make when doing work that is truly new. A while back, I suggested that the best metaphor for intellectual progress is love, not interdisciplinarity. Something always has to give.

> AHB: You mentioned to me before that you had a past life as a Derridean. What made you abandon this path and have you taken any lessons from Derrida into your current research interests?

Hopefully this won't seem like a dodge, but I'd like to start this response by citing a much longer answer to a similar question, one I asked myself the day after Derrida died in the autumn of 2004.

"...my first public paper on the notion of the digital was presented at a conference with Derrida as the respondent. The entirety of my experience with Derrida's work remains very much bound to this personal meeting, and even moreso to the margins of that meeting, the coffee breaks, the conference dinner [at an unassuming Thai restaurant]. ... For me, Derrida personalized philosophy, made me think of it as an activity in which I was personally implicated. Perhaps this is why my experience of Derrida's work is in large part the experience of my own personal memory: that dinner at the Hollywood thai restaurant; long, bourbon-addled ponderings with friends who remain desperately close, even if we speak seldom; purposely driving over Acts of Literature with a Mazda Miata after a particularly colorful reading group; coming to terms with my objections to deconstruction as I wrote my dissertation."

As my previous answer hopefully alludes, there was something of myself that I saw in Derrida's thinking: the idea of an alternative, a neither this nor that. Neither philosophy nor computation, neither analytic nor continental, neither professor nor professional, neither Glas nor glass noodles, but both, or neither, all at the same time.

In this respect, Derrida opened my eyes in ways I will always be grateful for (as I will for the influential American deconstructionists I had the benefit of studying under), but once my eyes were opened, I didn't know what I saw. Nothing. A blank vista. A desert.

Why? Deconstruction is superb at setting things in eternal motion, like some wild steampunk apparatus fastened with magnets of opposing poles. And that apparatus is mesmerizing. But beyond enchantment, it offers little direction on what practical steps to take. It is a paperweight. Once things are destabilized, then what? It is poetic and moving to assert, like Samuel Beckett, "I can't go on, I'll go on," but what sort of coward or psychopath would leave his companions stranded there, in the desert, with this useless joke of a compass? Go where, exactly? To do what, precisely? What's the third term, the structure that offers alternative to the aporia without reconciling it? Deconstruction can never answer this question, by definition, yet it is where the real work resides.

I found myself confused, and angry. Why did this thoughtful, coherent, generous man write books that verged on the incomprehensible, that did more to isolate philosophy from the world than to fold it back in? Why did those who followed his work seem less rather than more engaged, obsessed with illusion, obfuscation, and repetition? Was it some sort of trick that one had to have the opportunity to meet and converse with Derrida to get an insight into his true nature as a thinker? Was he an illusionist or a fool not to have made such matters clear in his work? Most of all, I found myself confused by those who adopted his thinking in the arts, where they might have actually been formed into word, stone, canvas, celluloid, or plush. But instead, it became standard practice simply to argue that the reconciliation of whatever opposing concepts one might find is "always already impossible," philosophy an eternal Easter egg hunt in search of shiny, cubed ovoids to be worshiped over red wine.

I suppose I am still in part a deconstructionist, motivated by the conflicts between domains. I also suspect that Derrida's obsession with language and close reading, something inherited from Heidegger, invited me to think about philosophy as an engineering problem, to use the words Levi Bryant recently put to it. But I am now motivated to do something about some of those conflicts, in a way that people can understand and use. In this respect, it's hard not to admire Slavoj Zizek, even if I do wish he could throw a party without inviting Hegel.

> AHB: Would it be possible for you to give an overview of your ideas regarding technology, and if possible can you give us your opinion on Heidegger’s (infamous) views on technology?

My basic perspective on technology is that it must be understood on many registers. We cannot simply speak of technology as a domain of human activity and call it moral or corrupt, nor the effects of technology and call them good or bad, nor the form of technological works and call them beautiful or ugly, nor the expressive payload of technological artifacts and call them meaningful or useless. Indeed, we ought not to speak of technology as a category if we can help it, but instead, we ought to see specific technologies as having various material forms and interacting with things, both human and non-human, in specific ways.

In our book on the Atari VCS, Racing the Beam, Nick Montfort and I outline one way of engaging with computational creativity that tries to do something like this. We outline five levels that characterize the common focuses of study in digital media:

Reception, focused on the experience of the user
Interface, focused on the user’s relationship to the visible, operable part of a computer system Form and Function, focused on the operation and behavior of the program Code, focused on the way work is programmed and understood by programmers
Platform, focused on the abstraction layer beneath code

Each of these connects to culture and context in specific ways, and in different ways still when combined together into pairs and triads. Very frequently, effective studies of new media will draw from multiple levels of this model. In our work, Nick and I wanted to endorse the platform layer in particular, as both a promising and underexplored aspect of computational scholarship, because we felt it had been ignored the most.

Ours is one model, there could be others. But importantly, it's a model that refuses to take any individual slice through technology as primary: not the social construction of technology perspective that platforms and code are produced solely by human action, not the technological determinist perspective that those two layers set the conditions of interfacing and reception, not the materialist perspective that matters of human labor and capital override all others, not the formalist perspective that operation is king, not the art historical perspective that the visual surface of objects is all that matters, not any of these individually, but not none of them together either. Here I would also resist the temptation to apply a simple model of relation between them, a la actor-network theory. Even a network is too ossified a structure for me when it is constructed only once, in reference to a specific artifact like a dishwasher or a videogame console. An alternate metaphor, perhaps, is a basket of laundry, or a pile of leaves, or a caffe latte.

As for Heidegger, I empathize with the idea that we can embrace neither technofetishism nor luddism. (I.e., technology is neither a fundamental and unquestioned good, its flaws only to be resolved through more technology, or is it a fundamental evil that we can opt-out of). Indeed, the former perspective, which Heidegger expands in the notions of standing-reserve and enframing, is so predominant in some areas of computer science and "geek culture" that it is sometimes tempting to accept the alternative, out in the woods with the blueberries and the chickens. Of course, such a gesture would not help us avoid technology, if we adopt Heidegger's understanding of it.

Still, since I deal largely in computer technology, Heidegger's notion of standing-reserve can be helpful. It can help liberate objects like microprocessors and RJ45 connectors and molded plastic casings from the instrumentality of application, of enframing. One could, perhaps, say that platform studies is an invitation to reconsider enframing in computation. But Heidegger's insistence on totalizing technology as a single whole seems untenable to me, or perhaps just unhelpful. The concept of "world" as a total substance just offers yet another excuse to remain ignorant of specific things, whether they be flint or windmills or hydroelectric plants or videogame consoles. Here I find McLuhan's invitation to investigate the properties of specific technologies to be liberating... not to mention a hell of a lot clearer!

> AHB: You are one of the many thinkers today who have taken an interest in object-orientated philosophy and speculative realism. What attracted you to these areas and can you foresee any applications into your own field arising from this engagement?

To me, the attraction of object-oriented philosophy seems like a given to any scholar of media interested in the thingness of their objects of study in addition to their production, uses, and meaning. In the case of computing, we've done so little collective historical work on material underpinnings that we now have decades of very active productivity in a variety of domains that have ripened without being picked, so to speak. Yet, save the relatively broad-based approach we can inherit from McLuhan, no good critical approaches exist that would invite questions about the media themselves in addition to the messages they carry. (As a sidenote, McLuhan does take things too far when he insists that the content of media doesn't matter). In particular, media studies of all kinds have settled on an implicit obsession with various theories of political economy and reception, some interesting and some outmoded, but none of which take "materialism" to mean "realism." I suspected there would be productive connections with object-oriented philosophy, and I remember waiting for Graham Harman's Tool-Being to be published in 2002 so I could read it and apply it in my dissertation. It seems that potential conjunction of interest is finally being realized.

The applications are immediate. They are already taking place. In my case, I am interested in doing object-oriented philosophy in the service specific classes and instances of objects. The application to game studies and new media studies is already present in spirit, if not always in name, in parts of Unit Operations and all of Racing the Beam. But I'm also interested in looking beyond those fields, to media and technology studies more broadly. I've been floating the term "pragmatic speculative realism" for this, and I've already done some writing that moves in the direction I have in mind (this work will also mark a more explicit return to the concept of the unit operation). The fundamental question that interests me is how speculative realism can help us address specific objects, like McLuhan does, but without the correlationist burden, without always relating them to human experience. Expect to see more on that this year.

> AHB: Do you think philosophy has somewhat underestimated the influence of the gaming revolution?

Yes and no. Or maybe, no and yes.

If we look at the history of philosophy--and we don't even have to look very hard--we find frequent engagement with the idea of game/play (remember that some languages differentiate between "game" and "play" [English, Danish], whereas other's don't [German, French]).

In Plato, for example we find an ongoing relationship between play (paidia) and education (paideia). This is probably most notable in the Republic, where play is presented as a primary mode of pedagogy. indeed, the mode of play is evident throughout the dialogues, Socrates constantly goading and challenging his interlocutors. Then of course we have Kant's idea of "free play" in in the faculties of imagination, Wittgenstein's language games, the breathing room of Heidegger's Zeit-Spiel-Raum, Gadamer's concept of play as a basis for art, Derrida's frequent use of play as a tenet of deconstruction. There are others I am omitting or forgetting.

There are a few true philosophers of games. The idea of playful seriousness comes up in Johan Huizinga's anthropological take on Homo Ludens, man the player. Huizinga's belief is that culture writ large (law, art, poetry, language, dance, even philosophy itself) is underwritten by a "play element." McLuhan adopts a belief somewhat compatible with Huizinga's. He gives a place to games in Understanding Media, arguing that games extend man's social self. Roger Callois offers a classification of games into the categories of agon (competition), alea (chance), mimesis (roleplay), and ilinx (vertigo).

Much of this work has been ignored or glossed over in philosophy (does any philosopher consider Huizinga a member of the club?). Yet, thinkers in game studies and game design who are very sensitive to these key terms often have succeeded in clarifying and expanding on them from a philosophical perspective, in ways philosophy itself remains oblivious to. For example, I think contemporary game designers Katie Salen and Eric Zimmerman offer the most useful and elegant philosophical definition on play ("free movement within a more rigid structure"), and they do so in a textbook on game design.

Furthermore, philosophy generally fails to treat games as artifacts of their own right--not even in the usual continental fashion, as "texts" to be "closely read." While he's not considered a philosopher either, it's interesting to note that Marcel Duchamp was much more interested in chess than in painting all throughout his life. When he says things like "Chess can be described as the movement of pieces eating one another" it's hard not to wonder what he would have thought of Pac-Man. Apart from Duchamp, another artist/thinker of the 20th century looked beyond the quasi-games of the dadaists and surrealists: Guy Debord. NYU professor Alex Galloway has recently re-implemented Debord's unusual boardgame Kriegspiel in a videogame edition, and he has written a definitive article about the game and its relation to Debord's thinking to accompany it..

Speaking of Pac-Man, as for videogames, almost all aspects of contemporary culture have underestimated the role these artifacts play in the contemporary world. So it's easy to say that philosophy has too. That's beginning to change across the board, and philosophy seems to be coming along for the ride, even if slowly. There have now been three "Philosophy of Computer Games" conferences (with a fourth to take place in Oslo this fall), as well as a collection of works drawn from those events. Miguel Sicart, a professor at the IT University Copenhagen, has published a book called the Ethics of Computer Games. As I described above, much of my work is drawn from my background in philosophy.

But all of these examples are those of videogame scholars who have imported philosophy as a tool. Philosophers seem to think as much about videogames as they do about freight logistics, small-batch bourbon distillation, lightning storms, and NASCAR racing.

> AHB: Also have you had any new thoughts regarding the metaphysics videogame?

By the time this interview runs, I should have published two relatively detailed posts on this subject, which I'd encourage you to link out to. [HERE and HERE].

As exciting as the idea sounds in theory, it may prove difficult or impossible in practice. I say this not to be a sourpuss, but because constructing a working game (let alone an interesting or enjoyable one) happens rarely as it is, even when the subject is the zombie apocalypse. Nevertheless, the idea appeals to me at a level far beyond reason, so I'm confident that it's something I will pursue, even if that pursuit takes a very long time and leaves a trail of failures behind it.

Something worth mentioning: the appeal of a metaphysics videogame for me comes partly from my mutual interest in both metaphysics and videogames, not merely because such a work might be an engaging pedagogical or philosophical tool. I'm sure if you asked a professional jazz musician who wrote a dissertation on Husserl if he'd be interested in cutting a hard bop record on phenomenology, he'd jump on board too.

> AHB: I noticed whilst browsing your blog that you try to create videogames with political and social messages. Would I be right in assuming that you think, as someone like Zizek might, that games are already in some sense ideological or contain arguments?

Indeed. One of my books, Persuasive Games, is about this very question. In that book I advance a new form of rhetoric, which I call procedural rhetoric. Oral and written rhetoric describe, and visual rhetoric depicts, but procedural rhetoric models. Procedural systems are rhetorically powerful because they can simulate behaviors; they can make claims about the way things work. Computation is an example of a medium that is fundamentally procedural, and videogames are the apotheosis of computational procedurality.

But, as you anticipate, not all procedural claims are arguments; some represent ideologies which, by definition, remain unseen to their designers and perhaps their players. I devote a chapter to ideology in the book, but my favorite example comes from the game America's Army, which was created by the US Army as a publicity and recruiting tool. It's a multiplayer game, in which players, grouped into teams, compete against one another. In each mission, one team plays as the US Army and one plays a group of guerilla insurgents. Each has a mission objective, and the team who meets it wins.

Here's the thing: both teams think they are the US Army. Their characters wear army uniforms, and they see their opponents as insurgents. The Army did this because, well, it's a game about being in the army, and it tries to simulate the rules of engagement and other aspects of army life. Of course, this design also exposes a fundamental ideology of American military opposition: the enemy is just the same as we are, except he is evil. There's no complexity of history, no collision of different worlds, just two sides, one good and one wicked.

Speaking of Zizek, I've had a silent fear for some time that he might someday discover videogames, and then there goes the neighborhood. But the more I think about it, it seems unlikely. He's got film already, that old, tired medium of the 20th century. He wouldn't want to come out and play.

Principles of Object Orientated Ontology or Speculative Realism

I've been getting a little better at understanding what is occurring in speculative realism. I've even ordered a swathe of speculative realist books (tip: go to Amazon search for Graham Harman and then follow the 'People who bought Graham Harman also bought this). I'm sure my friends will be slightly confused when I turn up carrying books called Unit Operations: An Approach to Videogame Criticism and Prince of Networks.

Another funny thing is that I never know whether to call a post on this area 'speculative realism' 'object orientated philosophy' 'ontography' and so on. Confusing.

So even though we all know SR is not a coherent movement with any obvious pre-programmed direction we can discern a number of basic assumptions held by a its most well known adherents.

List of what Speculative Realism is NOT:

1. 'Naive' Realism
2. Positivism
3. Human-centered

Things SR (might) 'be':

1. The same 'flat ontology' applies to both human-object relations and object-object relations.

2. 'Culture' is not outside nature i.e. humans are not a unique rupture into the cosmos along Cartesian, Hegelian, Heideggerian, or even Zizekian lines. Culture participates in the real at the same ontological level as nature *the divide is artificial*


This is as far as my confusion has taken me. Hopefully I can return when my books arrive at complete my list.

Its all in the name: Object-Oriented Ontology

Introducing OOO. On a side note Levi is firing from all cylinders over at Larval Subjects.

Interview with Adrian Ivakhiv

Our latest interview is with Adrian Ivakhiv, Associate Professor of Environmental Thought and Culture with a joint appointment in the Environmental Program and the Rubenstein School of Environment & Natural Resources at the University of Vermont. He is also runs one of my favorite blogs over at Immanence.

Today he gives us an insight into the world of environmental philosophy, its relationship with Heidegger, and much more!

[NOTE: Our next interview with Ian Bogost will appear on either Monday or Tuesday].

1. Heidegger has long been considered a major philosophical source for environmental, but particularly deep ecological ideas. As somebody attuned to that world can you tell us whether that is a mistaken or superficial understanding on the part of Heideggerians?

There is a strong resonance between Heideggerian thinking and deep ecology (or biocentrism). Many of the influential thinkers associated with the deep ecology movement - Arne Naess, Bill Devall, George Sessions, Neil Evernden, Dolores LaChapelle, among others - refer to Heidegger at least in passing. Some, like Evernden and LaChapelle, have worked with Heideggerian ideas fairly extensively. And ecophilosophers including Michael Zimmerman, Bruce Foltz, Laura Westra, and Ingrid Leman-Stefanovic, while not necessarily identifying themselves as "deep ecologists," have brought a fair bit of refinement into the environmental application of Heideggerian concepts. The key Heideggerian ideas that have been taken up within biocentric writing are, first and foremost, his critique of technology, i.e. its essence as Gestell, the disclosure of things as raw material for human use, and, secondly, his notion of Gelassenheit (commonly translated as "letting things be"). Heidegger's later writings on poetry, art, and language as the "house of being" have also influenced a certain subset of ecocritics (ecologically oriented literary and cultural critics) including Jonathan Bate, Greg Garrard, and Kate Rigby.

That said, Heidegger has been critiqued (rightly, I think) for a residual anthropocentrism and human-animal dualism, and his involvement with Nazism has negatively affected the extent of interest among environmentalists in his philosophy. In the end, I would say his philosophy has been one among several sources, often taken up somewhat superficially (as in the influential 'Deep Ecology' text co-written by Devall and Sessions in the 1980s) though at least occasionally with a fair bit of rigor, but it has been a crucial one only for a limited subgroup of biocentric thinkers, and less so for activists. Deep ecology, it should be mentioned, evolved in constant conversation with the activities of movement activists, including the radical wilderness activism of Dave Foreman and other founders of Earth First! and the more broadly political work of later Earth First! activists and related groups. Its theoretical positions have also been refined and developed in dialogue with those of social ecologists, ecofeminists, postmodern and poststructural ecologists, pragmatist ecophilosophers, more mainstream (rights based, etc) environmental ethicists, and perhaps most closely with Buddhist and process-relational environmental thinkers (some of whom, like Joanna Macy and Freya Matthews, identify with the "deep ecology" label and others of whom do not). Within this broader field of critical environmental thought, Heidegger is one of many reference points, but he does constitute an important link between ecophilosophy and continental philosophy.



2. You made an eloquent post recently on the phenomena of the moon-landings. Do you share Heidegger's pessimism that this event represented an escalation of our homelessness on this earth? Further do you share his characterization of our age as one of En-Framing or has the recent wave of green awareness made this notion out of date?

Heideggerian pessimism regarding technology, including that represented by the moon landings, is a perspective that has influenced me, and it's one I continue to consider important for any future environmental or ecological thought. Along with the writings of a more Marxist-influenced kind of geography (such as Denis Cosgrove's work on environmental and global visuality), a Heideggerian critical philosophy of technology provides a useful counterbalance against those in the environmental movement for whom the photos of Earth from space are nothing but a positive cultural touchstone in the movement toward global environmental awareness. Thinking about the moon landings, I can't help thinking about the space race, the arms race, the Cold War, and the massive technologization of society that followed world war two. In fact, I think of a television ad that played some years ago for "Tang," the orange flavor-crystal soft drink that made its name when it was used by NASA in its Gemini flights. In the ad a couple of animated "moon men" come to Earth bearing rocks which they want to trade for Tang, the drink they apparently gained a taste for when astronauts brought it to the moon. So I think of the moon landings also as part of the commercialization of massive technological enterprise - a way to get the American people on board in something much larger, and much less salutary, than the "one small step for man" that Neil Armstrong famously referred to.

But I also think about how the photographs have affected people on a deep, and not only conscious, level, making it that much more possible for us to think of humanity as a single entity, and more importantly, of the earth as a single interconnected set of living processes. Ecologists in the 1950s and 1960s had tried to teach this kind of idea using energy flow diagrams that looked like electrical circuit diagrams, but it's not until an image of the blue orb floating in black space became visible that many people arrived at that idea on a very visceral level. I think both of these perspectives - the optimistic and the pessimistic, if you will (along with others) - are valid and that the truth, if there be such a thing, is one that holds them in a relationship of dialogical tension, or a kind of paradoxical dance we might think of as double-truth, a sort of Zen koan for our times. One of the concepts I've worked with in my writing on religion is "double-faith," which is how some historians describe the syncretistic fusion of Christian and pagan elements found in traditional East European folk religion, and I think that's an appropriate way also to conceptualize people's relationship to science, religion, and environmentalism today - all of which claim people's faith in different ways. Something can be both "good" and "bad" at once, both enabling and constraining, because it's not a static piece of the world, but rather is part of a series of processes in which we're implicated and in which we can be oriented this way or that way. I'm more interested in the processes by which people take up images and ideas, like the moon-shot; in this sense, I'm a Deleuzian and a Whiteheadian - I see reality as process-relational, so it's more important to think about how we take up and work with the possibilities of a given situation than it is to find a certain explanation that will account for things once and for all. (I also find Bakhtin's emphasis on the dialogical nature of meanings useful; without Heidegger, there'd be no Derrida, no Foucault, and perhaps a different deep ecology as well. But then Heidegger makes room for all these things; he just didn't analyze technology with the nuance and refinement that we can apply in a post-McLuhan, post-Latour, and indeed post-Heidegger world.)

As for the recent wave of green awareness, my sense is that much of the environmental movement is pragmatically oriented, and that it's widely recognized that new technologies, or eco-technologies, are not only possible but are a necessary part of any shift toward a more ecologically sustainable society. If technology were a single entity, it would be correct to say that it contributes to the 'enframing' of our world. But I think it's more accurate and more helpful to say that technology is multiple -- that there are potentially as many technologies, or at least ways of connecting tools to humans to other entities, as there are objects in the world. I tend to follow Latour in this understanding of technology -- which doesn't mean that technology is 'neutral' and only becomes value-laden when we subject it to particular uses (that's the kind of social constructionist perspective Latour critiques) but, rather, that technological systems, and the ways we and the world become incorporated into 'networks' or 'collectives' that including technological mediators, are much more hybrid, variable, and unpredictable than a strictly Heideggerian approach seems to allow for. The moon-shot, for instance, wasn't intended to give people a sense of global ecological relatedness; it was intended to win the space race, to put the American flag on the moon, and to excite American voters (so as to keep the money flowing for other technological projects). That it did the former, too, tells us something about the technology and about the ontological, or at least epistemological, opening that it made possible. So, in a sense, it got out of control of the goals which it (in a pessimist interpretation) was intended to meet. That makes it more interesting than a simple "gosh, we weren't even meant to be up in the stratosphere, let alone on the moon." But once the "gosh, isn't the Earth beautiful" feeling sinks into the sediment of common sense, the pessimist's interpretation becomes valuable again.



3. Can you tell us a little bit about the relationship between environmentalism and philosophy? Do you think continental philosophy and environmentalism are natural allies in that they both, at a basic root level, oppose Cartesian metaphysics and so on?

The relationship is complex. I've written a bit about it on my blog, where I also refer to some of the literature where it's been described. But a lot depends on our definitions of terms - what's meant by philosophy, and by environmentalism. If philosophy is what's taught in university philosophy departments, then environmentalism figures into it only as a marginal side topic, where philosophical or ethical theories get applied to 'current problems,' in this case environmental problems. Of all environmental/philosophical hybrids, the field of environmental ethics is the most developed and widespread; it has its own journals, courses in most universities, etc. Environmental philosophy has more recently been getting institutionalized in this way as well. But if what we mean by philosophy is the practice of philosophizing - thinking through and making sense of things in a rigorous way - then the relationship is much more robust and pervasive. Environmental thought or 'theory' has gone on for as long as there has been an environmental movement - at least since the 1960s, but conceivably much further back (e.g. the conservationism of the late 19th century) - with critical contributions coming from historians (from Lynn White Jr. on), geographers (going back to George Perkins Marsh in the mid-19th century, if not to Humboldt), social scientists, biologists, educators, theologians, and others.

But "environmentalism" can also be traced, in some sense, through the entire history of human relations with the nonhuman world, including philosophical deliberations over that relationship. An important way in which students encounter this environment-philosophy connection is through anthologies and overviews of "ideas of nature" or of the relationship between people and nature, as found in popular writers like Jared Diamond (Collapse), Clive Ponting (Green History of the World), and many others. These are typically superficial, but can still be useful when appropriately approached. I teach a course called "Culture and Nature", which is supposed to provide exactly that kind of background, and which raises all sorts of challenges in terms of how to avoid the typical pitfalls and instead aim for a kind of critical thinking, interdisciplinary, paradigm recognizing, comfortable-with-complexity form of thought that students rarely want to get, but which is essential for environmental scholarship of any kind.

But conceived more strictly - with 'environmentalism' being the mainstream environmental movement of the last 40 years, and continental philosophy being the left branch (so to speak) of academic philosophy - I do think that the two could be natural allies, though this hasn't always been seen as such. The so-called nature wars of the 1990s, emanating from the "science wars" and the fallout from Bill Cronon's cultural constructivist argument about wilderness that appeared in the New York Times Magazine, showed that there was a lot of resentment among environmental academics (and some non-academics) toward their cultural and political theory brethren for the ways the latter seem to get caught up in self-important intellectual navel-gazing, e.g., terminological innovation based on the latest fads from France, and so on, rather than providing useful ways of resolving real-world problems, which were rightly thought of as reaching a point of some urgency. Fortunately, I think that moment has passed, partly because the sort of "high social constructivism" that was so prominent then has dissipated somewhat (with all manner of post-constructivist things arising in social and cultural theory, and now in continental philosophy, as with the "speculative realists"), and partly because of some political realignments in the US, the opening up of a more promising frontier for environmentalism.

The opposition to Cartesian metaphysics seemed an obvious point of alliance for me when I was starting out on my doctoral work at the beginning of the 1990s, and it was both a source of frustration that a lot of other people didn't see that, and a point of identity for me and others to take it on as our "thing." But I also suspect that the opposition of Cartesianism and anti-Cartesianism has also been dissipating somewhat, partly due to the work of people in a range of fields, from philosophy to cognitive science, who have seemed to go beyond the strict Cartesianism that seemed so strong a couple of decades ago. I try to situate my own work within this broad area of fertile and overlapping post-constructivist discourses, where the ideas of philosophers (like Deleuze, Whitehead, and the speculative realists) kick up against ideas from science studies (Latour, Haraway and the feminist technoscience folks), 'new' scientific thinking (such as the emegent/complex systems theorists like Prigogine and Kaufmann, the third-wave cognitivism of Varela et al, etc.), the poststructural and materialist traditions in social and cultural theory, the burgeoning critical animal studies field, and the like. Within all that, Cartesianism seems to be becoming less of a monolithic enemy and more of a ghost. Or maybe that's just wishful thinking on my part...



4. Along with scu over at Critical Animal I think it is fair to state that you both oppose anthropocentric thinking. Does this mean that the early existential analytic of Heidegger's Being and Time does not go far enough? Can you tell us a little about the appeal of the later Heidegger for environmentalism?

The anthropocentrism that I oppose is the kind that understands humans to be the center of the moral universe or the top of the chain of being. I don't particularly feel that humans need to be "demoted" -- that's already been done, in any case, by Copernicus, Darwin, Freud, and Nietzsche (whose work we could gain much more from than many people have, but which I think has gradually been internalized over time). Rather I would want us to learn a more "decentered" view that sees relationships, including relations between people but crucially also relations between humans and nonhumans, as central. Focusing on relational process raises questions of obligation, care, coexistence, and the capacity for living together and constructing viable social-natural collectives -- questions of "cosmopolitics," to use Latour's and Isabelle Stengers' term. Heidegger's earlier work, while it retained a mild form of anthropocentrism, enabled a blurring of the boundaries between self and world, and between mind and body, that has been very useful. Its uptake by other phenomenologists and hermeneuticists, from Merleau-Ponty to their many Continentalist followers (like Edward Casey, John Caputo, John Sallis, Alphonso Lingis, et al) and even social philosophers (like Charles Taylor) and cognitivist theorists (like Francesco Varela, Evan Thompson, and Michael Wheeler) who have been influenced by it, has been very helpful for reorienting our understanding of ourselves toward a more relational, embodied and embedded one. (Incidentally, what Graham Harman said about Husserl in his interview here is helpful and to the point; this is something that Evan Thompson argues about Husserl in his mammoth book 'Mind in Life'.)

I think of Heidegger's later work as providing a set of possibilities for us to work with once we pass through the post-Cartesian door that his early work opened up. In other words, once it becomes clear to me that I am not a mind-monad coming to know a world rationally and objectively, but that I am a 'there-being' (Da-sein) finding myself always already in the midst of situations of care and concern ("I care, therefore I am" rather than "I think, therefore I am"), the question then becomes one of "worlding": What kind of a world is this in which I find myself? How do we continually constitute the world as it is, and how might we do it differently? What's the role of our technologies, our arts and poetry, our languaging practices, in co-constituting the world in this particular way, or in another way? I think it was Derrida (or possibly Caputo) who described Heidegger's four-fold as a beautiful postcard, but a metaphysical postcard nonetheless. I don't reject the need to speculate metaphysically and to come up with ontological descriptions of the world; in fact, I think we could do much more of that, and be creative, open and pluralistic about it. I see Heidegger's later work as providing an important contribution to that, but it's not the end of the line.



5. What has environmental thinking made of object-oriented philosophy or speculative realism? Do you think the two can learn from each other?

I haven't seen object-oriented philosophy, or speculative realism, being taken up by environmental thinkers yet (other than your, my, Scu's, and a few other bloggers' efforts to make that connection). But I think it's a matter of time before that happens in a more serious way, just as Agamben, Badiou, Ranciere, and others are being taken up. This has something to do with the intellectual discourse networks or channels along which ideas move today. I know a number of people working in the diffuse areas of eco-cultural-religious theory and cultural-geographic or "social nature" theory (e.g., anthropologists and theorists of animism like Graham Harvey, geographers like Bruce Braun, Noel Castree, Sarah Whatmore, and others) who've long embraced Bruno Latour in particular, for the way his and other actor-network theorists' opens up possibilities for reconceptualizing human-nature and human-animal relations. I'm sure that Latour's uptake by philosophers like Graham Harman will be welcomed as it filters through into the more applied forms of theorizing that take place in these social and cultural fields. I haven't become familiar enough myself with the "speculative realists" to know exactly what the term means, other than its referring to work that's speculatively ontological (in the sense that Deleuze's and Whitehead's work was) and non-anthropocentric (which can also be said of Deleuze and Whitehead). Perhaps we'll have to see if "OOP" or "SR" becomes more unified and more specific than that, or if it's more a kind of wave of interest that's revitalizing philosophers' ABILITY to deal with the "things of the world" again, and in new ways. Either way, I'm all for it, and I hope other environmental thinkers will also watch it evolve and, even better, participate in a larger dialogue with these thinkers. The indications for that look positive.



6. I've written before about Arne Naess and Martin Heidegger as two thinkers who not only reached the occasional similar conclusion, but actually lived similar lifestyles (huts, mountains and so on). Yet there seems to be an inescapable problem between comparison at the level of politics. Do you think Heidegger is ultimately tainted for environmentalism and deep ecology due to his association with National Socialism?

That's a good point about the similarities in the ways these two thinkers lived their lives, and I think that a lot of deep ecologists have styled themselves in similar ways -- love of mountains, simple living, etc. (Though judging by my students, love of the mountains today goes along best with snowboarding, the Appalachian equivalent of surfing -- it's still about feeling a kind of oneness with nature, though a high-speed one, as my friend Bron Taylor documents in his forthcoming book on Dark Green Religion.) From what I know, Naess in person was a more likeable character than Heidegger, and perhaps that fact, along with the circumstances of their lives (e.g., Heidegger's being well positioned to take himself rather seriously in 1930s Germany, a Germany in which academic one-upmanship was more solidly established than in 1960s-70s Norway), could go some way towards accounting for the differences in their political positions. Heidegger's Nazi episode will always be something for Heideggerians to work out for themselves, I think, since it seems in retrospect to have been an obviously wrong thing to do, and it's important to ask what's missing in his philosophy that made it possible for him to think that Nazism could be good, or at least that it might be redeemed through his own philosophical leadership. If we needed heroes, then I don't think environmentalists, or environmental thinkers, will find one in Heidegger. Naess, the philosopher-mountaineer, Gandhian and Norwegian Green Party activist, and good conversationalist, provides a more attractive figure to idolize. But philosophers shouldn't look for heroes; they should look for useful ideas to work with, and Heidegger had plenty of those. Environmental activists will look to other folks for their heroes (and there are plenty to go around).



7. Can you tell us a little bit about what you are currently working on?

I'm writing a book on film, entitled Ecologies of the Moving Image: Cinema, Affect, and Nature (for Wilfrid Laurier University Press's Environmental Humanities series) and trying to wrap up an earlier, messier work of eco-cultural theory with wide-ranging case studies (including sites ranging from the Celtic Colours music/arts festival in Cape Breton Island to an art exhibition in Ukraine and ethnic identity and quasi-eco-religious movements in Eastern Europe and other places). And I'm beginning to develop a project theorizing religion and secularism from a process-relational perspective - which brings me back to some more ethnographic work I had previously done on pilgrimage and 'place-practices', but allows me to work out the particular fusion of Latourian/Deleuzian/Heideggerian/Buddhist/process-relational ideas I've been grappling with much more clearly than I have to date. I'm moving somewhat from the application of theoretical ideas (hermeneutic, poststructuralist, postconstructivist) to particular issues that interested me (people's relationship with land, landscape, place) to the clarification of those ideas - so maybe one day I'll be actually writing philosophy, in one of its definitions at least. But we'll see about that. And of course there's the usual supervision of students' work, reviewing things, etc.

E-Mail on the Interviews

Out of the blue I received a very interesting e-mail from a fellow graduate who suggested that it might be worth sticking the interviews into a small, self-published booklet type thing as it acts as a kind of insight into thinkers of today/advice booklet. I don't know much about publishing, but it does seem that it would be relatively cheap. Of course it depends entirely on whether the people involved were OK with that, and further there are still three incoming interviews (not to mention all the others yet to be conceived).

Any thoughts?

Flat Ontology

Levi is on fire at the moment over at Larval Subjects. Take this little gem for example:

What the onticologist asserts is not that there are two worlds, the real natural world and the ideal mental world of meaning, but that there is only one level: reality. Onticology thus draws a transversal line across the distinction between mind and world, culture and nature. Culture is not other than reality or the real, but is an element of the real. Since onticology begins with the hypothesis, wishing to know where it will go, that there is no difference that does not make a difference, it proves impossible to exclude the human. Why? Because humans make a difference. What onticology objects to is not the thesis that humans are elements in the real, but the thesis that every relation is a human-world relation.

This is the clearest expression of that which intuitively draws me toward the speculative realist crowd. Academically this is a necessary step in transposing us into a (genuinely) post-Continental intellectual atmosphere.

Flat ontology gives back to nature ('naive' realism) its position without leaving behind culture (human-all-too-human). It does so by tracing a line not between or across them, but around them: they both belong and contribute to reality. Is this not an ontology that lets us see the world anew?


No human left behind!

Interview with Levi R. Bryant

Today we interview Levi R. Bryant, author of Difference and Givenness: Deleuze’s Transcendental Empiricism and the Ontology of Immanence and co-editor (along with Graham Harman and Nick Srnicek of the forthcoming The Speculative Turn: Continental Materialism and Realism. Many of you will also know Levi from his excellent blog Larval Subjects.

AHB: I’ve asked all my interviewees to give some advice regarding graduate school, and getting published. Can you tell us a little bit about your background, formative influences, and the kinds of things future academics can expect to encounter?

I came to philosophy around the age of fourteen or fifteen, after going through a very difficult time in my life. Heidegger, Kant, Spinoza, Descartes, Husserl, and Whitehead came like bolts of lightning to me, allowing me to orient my life around a set of questions and issues. In graduate school, I suppose my three biggest influences where Andrew Cutrofello, Adrian Peperzak, and Patricia Huntington. Andrew Cutrofello taught me to be curious and interested in all philosophical movements and to approach philosophy creatively and eclectically, being unafraid to experiment and “cross-wires”. As a dissertation director he was hands off and gave me the freedom to explore my own project without micromanaging it. Adrian Peperzak taught me the art of close reading and engagement with the history of philosophy. Finally, Patricia Huntington instilled in me the sense that philosophy is not simply an academic or scholarly exercise, but should always have a dimension of existential authenticity to it, bound up with questions of who you are and the social and political milieu in which you’re embedded.

The best advice I can give to graduate students and aspiring academics is to get involved. Too many of us labour over projects in isolation, never revealing them to anyone else until finally, at long last, they are masterpieces ready for publication. I think this is a tremendous mistake both in terms of prospects for professional success and intellectually. Attending conferences, talking to other academics, participating on discussion lists, and blogging all create countless opportunities and assist in your intellectual development. Nor should this engagement be restricted to established academics. Remember, the people you’re talking to will very likely be your colleagues some day. Years later, much to your surprise, you might just find a request to contribute an article or a paper for a conference from someone you haven’t talked to for years but who remembers your engagement in some out of the way place. This has happened to me often.

Second, learn how to disagree without being disagreeable and avoid being a “scholar” outside your publications. If you participate publicly in an abusive and ugly manner, this will not only be remembered by the recipient of your abuse, but also by those witnessing the exchange. Don’t close doors for yourself because you couldn’t resist personalizing the discussion or making it contentious. It is amazing how one indelicate charge of making “strawmen” or “being naïve” can close down all sorts of subsequent opportunities. Similarly, there is something insufferable about the “scholar” who has every minute quote at their fingertips and tries to make all discussion about the intricacies of their pet figure. Learn how to discuss philosophy at the level of issues rather than figures, respect other research orientations, and avoid trying to turn philosophical discussions into textual debates. Save the scholarship for the books and articles you’re writing and resist the urge to show off. A list of references, for example, is not a conversation and expecting your interlocutor to remember every minor detail of the person you’re dissertating on is unreasonable and obnoxious.

AHB: You are sometimes discussed as a relatively recent convert to speculative realism, yet you are already involved in editing the forthcoming book ‘The Speculative Turn’. You must have known quite early upon encountering speculative realism that you identified with it. Can you tell us a little bit about what attracted you to it, and further what you think its future prospects might be?

As I have argued elsewhere, speculative realism doesn’t really exist. Rather, it is a generic term for a group of thinkers that advocate very different ontologies and epistemologies, that are often opposed to one another. Generally there are only two features that unite these thinkers: a commitment to some variant of realism, and a refusal to privilege the world-human correlate. My way to speculative realism occurred very gradually. Larval Subjects started as a blog devoted almost entirely to Deleuze, Badiou, and Lacan. In particular, I was trying to figure out how to synthesize my Deleuzian ontological commitments with my Lacanianism. Back in 2006 the blog was still quite scholarly in flavour, focusing on the careful exposition of these thinkers and working out knots in my understanding of their thought.

However, it could be said that the more recent shifts in my thought have very much been a product of my experience with blogging. Blogging is genuinely a new form of writing, thinking, and intellectual engagement when done properly. This point and blogging’s difference can be illustrated in terms of evolutionary theory. One of the primary ways in which speciation takes place is through geographical isolation. Two populations of a single species come to be reproductively isolated for some reason or other and as time passes their phenotypes diverge and the respective populations become homogenous. It is really no different in traditional academia. You talk to people who share the same interests as you, you attend conferences devoted to your particular issue or thinker, you publish in journals devoted to your privileged thinker, and you read texts on your privileged thinker or problem. These are all forms of geographical isolation that lead to “academic speciations”.

This sort of isolation isn’t operative in the world of blogging. While you certainly encounter specialists in your particular area, you also encounter thinkers from entirely different disciplines, practices, and orientations and you have to find a way to engage with them that doesn’t assume the daunting scholarly apparatus of your particular thought-framework. You encounter all sorts of characters like satirists and trolls, but also housewives, people in business, activists, artists, politicians and all the rest. A good deal of my early work was devoted to trying to fit Deleuze into a correlationist mode, and focused heavily on the signifier and the analysis of cultural artefacts and formations along Zizekian lines. However, in the process of working through these issues I encountered other bloggers such as Nick Srnicek, Reid Kotlas, Ben Woodward, Taylor Adkins, N.Pepperell, Anthony Paul Smith, and others who were suddenly talking about this strange new beast, “speculative realism”. They were referencing unfamiliar names like Quentin Meillassoux, Ray Brassier, Ian Hamilton Grant, and Graham Harman. Much of this seemed to resonate with the direction I was striving to take Deleuze and Badiou in, so I began reading their works.

During this time I was also having intense conversations with the literary, media, and technology theorist Melanie Doherty. She was always emphasizing the role that technology and media technologies play in forming various types of social relations. Well! My signifiers certainly weren’t adequate to theorizing or thinking this dimension of reality, so I began to feel a growing disquiet with the adequacy of semiotic approaches to the world. When I finally got around to reading Meillassoux’s After Finitude, it blew my hair back. As the old expression goes, “the scales fell from my eyes” and I realized that I would need to rework my ontology. Filled with excitement, I contacted Nick Srnicek and proposed The Speculative Turn, as I knew that he was far more familiar with speculative realism than me, and also that he was well disposed towards Deleuze. Initially the collection was conceived as a sort of realist Deleuzian rejoinder to certain critiques of his thought from other speculative realists. The project exploded from there. We were shocked by the enthusiasm and excitement it generated among those we approached to contribute. Graham Harman, especially, was deeply excited and we struck up a very intense philosophical email exchange. Where our positions started out somewhat opposed to one another, I came out the other side as an advocate of object-oriented philosophy, though in an orientation different from Graham’s.

My hope, of course, is that interest in speculative realism will continue to grow. Right now we have an entire generation of emerging thinkers-- and you will be hearing their names soon all over the place, I suspect --who seem very dissatisfied with the philosophical milieu they’ve inherited. There’s a very real sense in which the possibilities of Continental philosophy have exhausted themselves and the time for something new has arrived. This exhaustion isn’t simply to be located in the dearth of research possibilities in academia afforded by traditional orientations of Continental thought, but more importantly by the situation we face in the world today. Philosophical approaches driven by the primacy of the human-world correlate just aren’t very useful in thinking our historical moment, or phenomena surrounding the new technology, the ecological crisis, the new developments in the sciences, and the new economics. We need conceptual tools that will allow us to more effectively think these things. The signifier and lived experience, while crucial components, just don’t do this. However, should speculative realism continue to grow, I suspect that we’ll witness the emergence of divergent orientations of realist thought that enter into debate with one another. In particular, look for debates to emerge between object-oriented strains of speculative realism and materialist strains.

AHB: Your next book includes a proposal for your own realist ontology. Can you give us a sneak preview of what you have in mind?

The Democracy of Objects is still very much in its preliminary stages, so I can only vaguely sketch what I hope to develop. Perhaps the key question of the book is “what is the relation of relation and relata?” Since Locke the old substances have fallen into disrepute, whereas since Hegel the world has increasingly come to be understood in terms of relations. In my view Harman has made a significant contribution to philosophy in trying to resurrect substances, arguing that without any autonomous substances the world becomes unintelligible, evaporating into networks of relations that relate nothing, and that we are unable to explain how change is possible without positing autonomous substances as nothing is left in reserve within these networks of relations.

The Democracy of Objects thus seeks a flat ontology-- an ontology where all objects are on equal footing --that redeems the category of substance. Returning to Locke, the category of substance falls into ill repute because when we strip away all the qualities of an object to get that at that which endures through time, we’re left with nothing at all. This will later lead Kant to claim, for example, that substance isn’t in the things themselves but is rather a category imposed by mind on intuition. With substance ontologists preceding Locke, I agree that substances or objects are not their qualities. Qualities change, but the object remains the same. However, I do not concede that substance is a bare substratum without structure or organization. Rather, I argue that sameness of objects or substances throughout time lies in their structure as a system of attractors in phase space. In developing this thesis, I draw heavily on the work of Zubiri, Deleuze, and DeLanda. In a nutshell, an attractor is a point towards which a system tends under determinate conditions. For example, the bottom of a bowl is an attractor for a marble rolling up and down the side of the bowl, and the richness of the blue of my coffee mug is an attractor state for the mug under certain lighting conditions (the mug appears black under different lighting conditions).

Substance, I argue, is this structure of attractors or what Deleuze called a “multiplicity”. Under this construal, qualities turn out to be actualized points in phase space. In this way, I’m able to undermine the distinction between substance and quality that has vexed so much philosophy since Locke, but I am also able to abolish the distinction between accident and essence, insofar as qualities are actualized as a result of the affects or attractor structure of objects. We even get the beginnings of a realist epistemology in this conception of substance, insofar as part of knowing substance involves placing them in differential fields that allow attractors of substances to manifest themselves. In this regard, philosophy has conceived the activity of knowing in far too passive terms, privileging the gaze or regard of objects, ignoring how we must grock with objects to discover their nature or the differences they contribute to the world.

The Democracy of Objects will approach objects from three interrelated perspectives. After introducing the principles of onticology, it will explore the endo-relational structure of objects or their endo-consistency in terms of their structure as systems of attractors. The second part of the book will explore exo-relations or networks of objects in relation to one another. Here I am heavily indebted to Deleuze and Guattari and Latour. Clearly many of the conditions under which objects actualize a point in phase space are dependent on the object’s relation to other objects. The second part will thus explore these relations of evocation among objects, but will also examine those conditions under which objects come to form a system or organization amongst themselves that becomes self-sustaining and operationally closed from other objects. Finally, the third part of the book will examine the genesis of objects. Under certain conditions objects are pushed into new basins of attraction, generating new objects that have a substantial autonomy of their own. I think there will be plenty in this book to excite the technology, media, social and political, and ecological theorists.

AHB: Further to the point you mention the word ‘ontic’ from time to time: what do you think about Heidegger’s ontology, and in particular, his supposed denigration of the ontic?

My philosophical work actually began with Heidegger and I went to Loyola of Chicago to study with Thomas Sheehan. In particular, I’ve always been fascinated with Heidegger’s account of disclosedness and I think this shows through in certain elements of my own account of objects. Since I understand myself to be doing ontology, I do not understand my use of the term “ontic” as opposed to ontology. From a phenomenological point of view, my use of the term “ontic” or my characterization of my ontology as “onticology” can simply be taken as a radicalization of the imperative to return to the things themselves. If I am critical of Heidegger it is simply because I believe that he privileges the human-world relation too much. I think being gets along just fine without man as its shepherd, nor do I think beings need be sheltered in language.

AHB: You state on your blog that you used to be a Lacanian psychoanalyst and interest in Lacan has sky rocked in the past few years due to the work of Slavoj Zizek. Can you tell us a little about the potential benefits of psychoanalysis for philosophy, philosophers, and philosophical thinking? I am thinking primarily about your ability to give convincing reasons for why philosophers focus on certain areas and dismiss others as in the recent blog exchange between you and Ian Bogost.

I think it is always important to be cautious when giving a psychoanalytic account of the motives that lead one to hold a particular position because such approaches border on the ad hominem and ignore the arguments that might be in favour of that position. Freud, for example, gives all sorts of reasons pertaining to desire as to why people believe in God, but his analysis, in no way, undermines the existence of God. To do that you would need another sort of argument. In other words, it’s entirely possible that everything Freud says about why people are led to belief in God is true, and God nonetheless exists. I think those that practice psychoanalytic critical theory sometimes forget this.

Nonetheless, I do think that psychoanalysis can be of great value in helping philosophers to recognize blind spots in their discourse and philosophical practice. Indeed, Lacan argued that for any discourse to establish itself, it must repress or exclude some element so as to achieve internal consistency. With this repression, of course, there is always a return of the repressed that plagues the discourse in the form of a symptom. Lacan always claimed that philosophy is the discourse of the master, which is to say that it is a discourse that disavows the split in the subject and strives to achieve mastery by unifying the slaves knowledge under a master-signifier transforming it into a smooth conceptual system. We can certainly see this notion of a sovereign and transparent subject without split in Descartes and even Husserl, but I also think this conception of the subject is ubiquitous in the practice of many philosophers. Thus, while the contemporary thinker-- including the psychoanalytically inflected thinker --might give lip service to how the subject is split, going so far as to make it the center-point of their entire system of thought, they nonetheless proceed in practice as if they were sovereign masters. Really this is a variation of the famous Socratic thesis that the source of our tragedy lies in believing that we know when we do not.

Symptoms of this can be detected all over the place. Thus, those who have been influenced by Lacan often approach popular culture, political events, and various cultural artifacts as if they had the interpretive master-key that lays everything bare to the eye that wishes to know. In this way, texts no longer have the capacity to surprise them as readers as they’re already looking for mere exemplifications of their theory. I think, despite all its talk of free play, deconstruction has fallen into a similar cul-de-sac. Calls for a critical stance also strike me as suffering from a similar desire for mastery. They would like to know before they know, determining the conditions under which knowledge, for example, is possible, thereby saving themselves the trouble of going through the process of arriving at knowledge as a result. This can be seen as a defense against the aleatory nature of the world that resists our drive to represent it. Similarly, it is today seen as the height of naivete to actually advocate for a particular position. Rather, one is to be critical of all positions, showing how they are all secretly about something else. In many respects, this resembles the attitude of the obsessional that is perpetually preparing without ever doing anything. In this way, the obsessional is able to disguise his split or incompleteness by never engaging with the world. In my view, philosophical practice can be assisted by becoming more aware of these psychic structures and their role as defences.

AHB: Does Lacan have an affect on your understanding of ontology (as it clearly does on Zizek)? Would it be possible for you to give us some kind of Lacanian insight into Heidegger (no matter how superficial)?

I certainly wouldn’t characterize my ontology as Lacanian, though I have been deeply influenced by Lacan. On the one hand, my practice as an analyst or my experience of the clinic had a tremendous impact on my thought. What I encountered in the clinic, I think, was the real. Nothing works in the clinic as it does in theory. You’re never quite sure what is going on with your patient and each interpretive intervention you make carries a risk. A simple repetition of a patient’s phrase, for example, can lead to them suddenly quitting their job and ending their relationship. This is something advocates of psychoanalytic theory in relation to texts and cultural artifacts never really encounter, I think. Texts do not talk back. You can make of them largely what you would like. This is not the case in the clinic. Just when you think you’ve gotten things figured out the patient’s desire shifts elsewhere and you’re in for new surprises. Additionally, what you discover in the clinic is that people are absolutely different. We go about our day to day business thinking others think like us, that they share our desires, that they share our values, and so on, but what you discover is that this isn’t the case at all. I think a lot of theory and life is organized around repressing this difference. After all, we’d all go mad were we constantly aware of how different others are from all of us. At any rate, psychoanalysis taught me that theories and concepts are not reality laid bare, but rather are more like instruments and lenses. In the clinic, psychoanalytic concepts draw your attention to certain things, make you cognizant of certain things that you might otherwise not notice, but they do not lay bare the truth of your patient. That is something that is only revealed-- if at all, it’s the patient that comes to know, not the analyst after all; the analyst is just a midwife --through long engagement. Often clinical experience contradicts these concepts and calls for the entire remaking of analysis. This lesson significantly transformed my attitude towards philosophy and what it is about.

Beyond my experience of the clinic, I would say that Lacan’s account of sexuation, discourse, and the real also had a decisive impact on my ontology. In one way or another, all of these dimensions of Lacanian thought teach that there is no One, that there is no metalanguage, and that the Whole is not. These are lessons at the heart of my flat ontology.

I am not sure what Lacanian insight I can give into Heidegger’s thought. The case of Heidegger is strange because in certain respects Lacan and Heidegger are so close. As I’m sure you know, Heidegger was a tremendous influence on Lacan’s own thought. For example, Lacan’s concept of time and especially the phenomenon of après-coup comes straight out of Heidegger’s account of time and the manner in which we build our past out of the manner in which we project our future. This is very close to Lacan’s understanding of desire retroactively rewriting the past and is crucial to how analysis shifts the symptom in treatment. Yet while Heidegger, like Lacan, everywhere seems to recognize the destitution of the subject, he still seems to have this underlying desire for identity and mastery. His famous hostility towards technology and science is reflective, I think, of a horror at destitution, for in modern science and technology, we are no longer masters in our own house. There’s a very real sense in which we have become elements in machines rather than using machines. Likewise, his poetic celebrations of Black Forest peasants is reflective of a desire for identity and meaning. I thus think there are two Heidegger’s. There is the Heidegger that went very far in the deconstruction of ontotheology and what I like to call the “little demiurge” or the sovereign subject, but there is also this other Heidegger that seems to perpetually recoil from this destitution, striving to discover some new ground, meaning, or identity. This has led to a lot of mischief both in his own life and in subsequent engagements with his work. For example, technology studies have been pushed back a great deal as a result of his moralizing and Luddite attitude towards enframing.

AHB: You seem to be the first to have noticed a link between speculative realism and aesthetics. Can you elaborate upon this? This may come from my ignorance of Deleuze, but does this insight come from your background in Deleuze, and if so can you tell us a little bit about the influence of Deleuze on the overall formation of your thinking?

The link I see between aesthetics and speculative realism arises from my background in Deleuze, Whitehead, and Nietzsche. In Difference and Repetition Deleuze asserts that his transcendental empiricism re-unites the two sundered halves of the aesthetic. There is, on the one hand, the sense of the aesthetic coming from Kant as a theory of sensibility in the first critique. On the other hand, there is the sense of the aesthetic as a theory of art or the beautiful. In claiming that his transcendental empiricism re-unites the two halves of the aesthetics, I take it that Deleuze is proposing a post-Darwinian theory of sensibility where our receptive faculties are themselves the result of an artistic creation. This is something I’ve taken with me ever since and is one of the reasons I’ve been hostile to the Kant of the Critique of Pure Reason and functionalist models of mind such as we find in Fodor. In short, they do not do justice to the creative formation of the mind.

In the realm of aesthetic theory, aesthetics has been approached in two ways as well. On the one hand, aesthetics is treated as the theory of artistic judgment. This, for example, is what Kant undertakes in the third Critique. We have the object and the question is how judgments of taste regarding the beauty of the object are possible. It is the spectator theory of art. On the other hand, we have aesthetics as the theory of artistic production. Here the accent isn’t on judgment or beauty, but on creation. This is the aesthetic theory we get in Nietzsche and Deleuze, where the emphasis is always on the creation of something. When I discussed the role of aesthetics in ontology, a lot of people expressed concern that this would return us back to a human-centered conception of the real. However, I think this only holds if aesthetics is situated in terms of judgment. Where aesthetics is situated in terms of production and creation, the field of the aesthetic expands vastly, embodying everything from artistic production, to biological speciation, to the formation of solar systems as all of these are processes where the new is being created. The aesthetic becomes a dimension of being itself and objects come to be seen as creations. Whitehead was especially attentive to this ontological and realist orientation of aesthetics. For Whitehead every object is a sort of striving for its optimal aesthetic form.

AHB: Do you think Deleuze and Badiou have supplanted Heidegger with regards to ontological matters? Or do you think there is still something useful to Heidegger’s analysis? Or to put it another way are definitively in the post-Heideggerian age?

With Whitehead, I don’t think philosophies are ever refuted only abandoned. Nor do I think Heidegger’s sun has set. I suspect that Deleuze will continue to inspire interest because he developed so many conceptual tools appropriate to our time. I’m less certain of how Badiou’s thought will age. I think one thing that determines whether or not a philosophy has lasting power lies in whether or not it creates work for others, both at the interpretive level and at the level of generating new research projects. Badiou’s thought, brilliant as it is, just does not seem to afford much work for others. It is difficult to see, however, how Heidegger could be supplanted any time soon. On the one hand, I suspect Harman’s work will continue to inspire interest in Heidegger. On the other hand, I think philosophical texts are a bit like holograms. That is, we view them differently with historical circumstances. Rather than abandoning Heidegger, I suspect that certain themes in his thought will come to be accentuated and that others will fall into the darkness.

AHB: You seem to read widely in the sciences, but particularly in biology. Is this purely a Deleuzian influence or do you think today philosophers need to be, at the very least, acquainted with developments in the sciences?

I wouldn’t say that philosophers need to be acquainted with developments in the sciences, but rather that philosophy always needs its others in order to think. In my view, philosophical thought always occurs in and through an encounter with the other or non-philosophy. These others can be art, engineering, love, political revolution, harrowing defeat, programming, environmental work, ethnographic field work, or whatever else you might like. What is important is that there be some encounter with otherness that provokes the thought in the thinker and leads to the question what is reality? For me this encounter has consisted in moving continuously while growing up, the Lacanian clinic, love, and my encounters with science and scientists. I think this is one of reasons that our greatest philosophers and theorists are very seldom professional philosophers. The best philosophical work of the last century has been done outside of philosophy in sociology departments, literature departments, media studies departments, etc. These people are encountering the real in a way that provokes the development of theory. We seldom see philosophical innovation coming from within philosophy departments themselves because these are places where philosophy has been divested of its others and therefore is only able to comment on texts and highly codified problems that have evolved into language games. The very idea of the “professional philosopher” is very strange and only emerged, really, with Hegel. Those philosophers that we all celebrate from, say, the 17th century, for example, were all outside of philosophy and devoted primarily to other practices in their day to day life. I suppose, then, that if philosophy needs anything today it is others.

New Heidegger Documentary

Looks really interesting. Link.

''Er war Rektor der Freiburger Universität, als Philosoph von großem Einfluss – und gleichzeitig tief in die Ideologie des Nationalsozialismus verstrickt. Ein neuer Dokumentarfilm will jetzt Martin Heideggers gesamte geistig-politische Biographie nachvollziehen.''

Interview with Graham Harman

I probably don't even need to introduce the next interviewee, but I'll give it a bash nonetheless. Graham Harman is the author of Tool-Being: Heidegger and the Metaphysics of Objects, Heidegger Explained, and Guerrilla Metaphysics: Phenomenology and the Carpentry of Things. Many of you will know him via his (awesome) blog Object Oriented Philosophy, and his association with speculative realism. He is currently Associate Vice Provost for Research and Associate Professor of Philosophy at the American University in Cairo.

Today Graham has agreed to answer a number of questions relating to his eventful career. Without further ado!


1. You've stated before that you have read the entire Heidegger Gesamtausgabe and yet you managed to write a book, Heidegger Explained, which is less than 200 pages. Do you think there is a tendency among academic philosophers to mystify Heidegger (to the overall detriment of his reputation)?

There is certainly a tendency to make him too complicated. Great philosophers of the Heideggerian sort, as a group, are not primarily motivated to catalogue all the fascinating concrete details in the world. That impulse can be found in zoology, botany, linguistics, anthropology, and other such fields. By contrast, philosophers tend to be great systematizers, which means great simplifiers as well. In my view, to understand a philosophy means to understand a handful of basic intuitions from which the entire philosophy unfolds. Of course, the true smplicity of a philosophy can take years of hard work to discover, but it remains the goal of interpretation nonetheless. Heidegger suggests this method himself with his famous maxim : “every great thinker has one great thought.” I think that’s a slight exaggeration; it’s more like two or three great thoughts. But the basic point is correct.

Since Heidegger was such a prolific writer (though not a prolific publisher of what he wrote), there is plenty of lush jungle for Heidegger specialists to study. But it’s all fairly repetitive jungle. There’s no shame in that— that’s what first philosophers do, as opposed to zoologists, botanists, linguists, and anthropologists. We are specialists in the simplicity of things. But things aren’t altogether simple, and that’s why philosophers are not masters of all the other disciplines.

One of the benefits of having read the entire Gesamtausgabe, and indeed one of my motives for having done so, is that now I cannot be bluffed with obscure references by other Heidegger specialists who might wring their hands over how complicated he is, and how many years of labor it takes even to understand Being and Time. I’ve already put in those years of labor, and have fully earned the right to say that Heidegger is actually pretty simple.



2. Can you tell us a little about your reasons for writing your dissertation on Heidegger and how you came to place the tool-analysis at the heart of his thinking?

The story began some years before the dissertation itself. Many high school students in Iowa earn money in the summer by detasseling corn. This involves walking down several miles’ worth of rows, pulling the fuzzy tassels out of the plants to prevent unwanted cross-pollination. It’s horrible work in muddy, hot, mosquito-infested fields. Despite the heat you have to wear long sleeves or else your arms get covered with pesticide and a rash breaks out. But it’s good summer money by the standards of high school students.

The relevance of this is that I bought my first copy of Being and Time with a big corn detasseling paycheck, between my junior and senior years of high school. I had become interested in philosophy early in junior year. At that point I hadn’t read much more than the usual Nietzsche that so many people start with, but nine months into my philosophy career I had learned who most of the big names were, and Heidegger was one of those names. But I struggled with Being and Time, and quickly ended my first three attempts to read it. I couldn’t really get a foothold in what the question of the meaning of being was about.

Later, something happened in the second semester of my sophomore year in college. I was at St. John’s in Annapolis, which has as classical a curriculum as you can get. We had a class one day about medieval logic, and for various reasons I found the discussion frustrating, and felt more confused than ever about the topic. After that class I went straight to the college bookstore and bought Heidegger’s Metaphysical Foundations of Logic, hoping that it would help. It was one of those life-changing books. It didn’t teach me much about logic, but did open my way into Heidegger’s thinking for the first time. Immediately thereafter I returned to Being and Time, and this time finished the whole book in a month or less, and this time thought that I understood it. Over the course of the next half-year I read everything the college library had by Heidegger in English, which was about 11 books.

The library also had everything in German too. But I’d been a bit lazy during my 4 years of high school German, and had a tough time with Heidegger’s language at that point. I remember thinking "I’ll never be able to do this."

What made me really serious about reading the German volumes was the publication in 1989 of Heidegger’s Beiträge zur Philosophie, which everyone was immediately celebrating as his second magnum opus. I now view that claim as wildly exaggerated, but that was the word at the time. I didn’t want to be deprived of the supposed second major work, but it was obviously going to take years to translate the Beiträge into English. So eventually I bought a copy of the German, and forced myself to read it and to look up every single word I didn’t know. This took a very long time, more than a year in fact. But it turned out to be an excellent starting point... Learning Heidegger’s German from the Beiträge is like exercising with ankle weights: it’s making things tougher than they really are, and that makes you stronger. None of the other volumes are as hard to read as that one, especially since like all authors Heidegger uses a fairly limited range of vocabulary that is easily mastered with practice. The second volume I read in German was the famous 1929/30 course on boredom and animal life (the English was not yet available then). I took it to a café, unhappy that I had no dictionary with me, but before I knew it I had blazed through 75 pages without a dictionary in just a few hours, and that was when I realized it would be pretty easy to start reading a whole bunch of the volumes. A close friend then asked why I simply didn’t read them all, and inspired by that question, I embarked on the great “Manhattan Project” of my 20’s, finishing the entire set shortly after my 30th birthday. It’s one of those things I’ve never regretted doing, because I’m still convinced there was no greater philosopher in the twentieth century than Heidegger, and no better way to orient your own thinking than with a thorough top-to-bottom survey of his thought. From the ages of 19 to 29, I was convinced that he was right about all philosophical issues other than the obvious political ones, so any criticisms I make are not those of an outsider whose whole purpose is to criticize.

That’s a long prologue to get to the question about my dissertation. But perhaps now you’ll see that by dissertation stage, the choice of Heidegger as a topic was inevitable. I did toy with a few alternatives, but it was just that: toying. But it had to be Heidegger. He was my point of entry into serious philosophy.

You also ask how I came to place the tool-analysis at the center of my reading. That stems from 1991 and 1992, my first two years of graduate school. I’d always liked the tool-analysis, as everyone does, but it gradually occurred to me that there wasn’t really anything else going on in Heidegger than this interplay of shadow and light or veiled and unveiled, which takes on far more concrete form in the tool-analysis than anywhere else in his writing. I thought I had found Heidegger’s “one great thought” at last, and still think that’s the case.

Incidentally, I was not yet a “realist” at that stage. I was still the usual sort of agnostic about the outer world that most people from a phenomenological background tend to be. Only in 1997 (entertainingly enough, it happened on Christmas morning) did I extend the tool-analysis to cover inanimate interactions as well. That was mostly under Whitehead’s influence. I didn’t read a word of Latour until a couple of months after that.


3. There has been talk that you are about to make a break with Heidegger. Would it be fair to suggest that, other than the tool-analysis, you made that break quite some time ago? In other words to what extent have you already rejected aspects of Heidegger's thinking such as authenticity and other well-known aspects of his philosophy?

Nothing dramatic is on the verge of happening in my relationship to Heidegger. As you say, whatever break there is happened more than a decade ago.

1997 was an interesting year for me. I had moved back to the Chicago area after a year in Iowa City. That was the heart of my sportswriting career, which kept my brain lively. But I wasn’t writing much on my dissertation yet, even though I had defended the proposal two years earlier, already a bit later than it should have been. So, from the outside I might have looked like a perpetual ABD. My advisor may even have thought so, though he never said so.

But that’s not really what was going on. I was reading Heidegger like a fiend, as always. More importantly, that summer I was reading both Whitehead and Zubiri. And those two thinkers happen to address two areas where Heidegger needs to be supplemented from the outside.

Whitehead explodes the atmospheric Kantian bias still at work in Heidegger, which places the human-world relation on a pedestal above all other relations in the cosmos. The Sein/Dasein correlate strangles Heideggerians intellectually, to such an extent that they don’t even see it as problematic. But they are hardly alone in this predicament. Look at someone as brilliant as Zizek, so energetic and original, yet so strangely convinced (through his admiration for German Idealism) that the subject is a unique point of rupture with the rest of reality, a special flaw in the cosmic diamond. Heideggerians may use different metaphors, but essentially they say the same thing. But with Whitehead, who is truly a great philosopher and rarely read in continental circles, some of the great lost elements of pre-Kantian philosophy return to the fore.

The problem is that Whitehead (like Latour) relationizes everything. He hates traditional substance so badly that he wants to interpret entities solely as clusters of relations. Zubiri is the perfect antidote for that disease, because Zubiri’s On Essence is about how realities have essences in their own right, not insofar as they affect other things or insofar as they are known. The essence of a thing cannot be “respective” to some other thing. In that respect, Zubiri is the anti-Whitehead. But put the two of them together, and what you get is a world in which all animate and inanimate relations are on the same plane, but in which those things also have an autonomous reality that partly withdraws from that contact.

And that’s pretty much the nucleus of my own philosophical position. Starting from late 1997 I was essentially the same person readers know today. These tendencies were only solidified when I started reading Latour a couple of months later— the right influence at the right time. Where Heidegger’s tone is unbearably solemn, Latour’s is inventive and witty; where Heidegger pours contempt on most individual entities, Latour places trains, apricots, and Adidas shoes on the same level of being as Greek temples, peasant handiwork, and human Dasein.

If anything, I’m starting to appreciate Heidegger even more with age. For instance, with my focus on inanimate entities I’d always been inclined to downplay Heidegger’s analyses of human moods and everydayness. But the last time I read Being and Time (while teaching it in Amsterdam) I was actually quite impressed with his sensitive touch in describing human affairs. In fact, I now wish he had done more of the same.



4. Judging from your blog it is clear that you have an eye for (philosophically) neglected thinkers such as Gaston Bachelard or Bruno Latour. Can you tell us which thinkers have had the strongest impact on your thinking and why? Further by rediscovering neglected thinkers such as Xavier Zubiri do you think that object-orientated philosophy is reviving a forgotten tradition that we managed to lose sight of? If not can you tell us about any isolated predecessors with whom you feel an affinity?


The obvious thinkers who have had a great impact on me are Heidegger, Husserl, Whitehead, and Zubiri. But let me name a few others, in chronological order.

First, José Ortega y Gasset. I was reading Ortega before I was reading Heidegger. He writes brilliantly (he nearly won the Nobel Prize for Literature), and is one of the two major influences on my writing style. I’ve tried to emulate his clarity as well as the light touch with which he includes erudition in his works. I also love Ortega’s commitment to writing newspaper articles and other non-standard genres of philosophy rather than dull, plodding treatises. I’ve also heard him called “the intelligible Heidegger,” so in some ways he may have paved the way for my acceptance of Heidegger a bit later. Finally, if there is one essay by anyone that prefigures all of my philosophical ideas, it is Ortega’s “Essay In Esthetics By Way of a Preface,” found in English in Phenomenology and Art. I discuss that essay in detail in Guerrilla Metaphysics. It’s a masterpiece, though Ortega himself went no further along that trail.

Second, I should mention my old mentor Alphonso Lingis, the most dazzling prose stylist and most interesting human character I’ve ever known. He’s one of the few people who took phenomenology in any sort of realist direction. In American continental philosophy he is left somewhat at the fringes... Sort of an amusing character people tell nice jokes and stories about, and respected to some extent, but nowhere near the center of philosophical debate. And I consider this to be something of an indictment of the scene in America, because when all is said and done, Lingis was one of the few original thinkers to be found in American continental philosophy in the 1970-2000 period. A lot of important translation and commentary was done during that period, but few people were in the same league as Lingis in terms of original ideas, and of course no one remotely equaled him as a writer. If Ortega’s clarity and liveliness was the first thing I tried to emulate as a writer, Lingis’ exoticism and spookiness was the second.

Third, Emmanuel Levinas. The fact that Lingis had translated so much Levinas made me wonder what the appeal was. And Existence and Existents had a major impact on me. No one –I repeat, no one—is a better reader of Heidegger than Levinas. He takes Heidegger so seriously, but without ever lapsing into a pious attitude toward him. It was Levinas who first showed me how to be a Heideggerian and an innovator at the same time, though I think Levinas takes the wrong fork in the road.



5. I've often felt that object-orientated philosophy and speculative realism are missing a trick when they overlook the 'pre-transcendental idealism phenomenology' of Edmund Husserl. Would it be possible to read your breakthrough from Heidegger as a return to the earliest phenomenological analysis of Husserl (but with an eye for the contemporary world)?

Yes! Husserl is badly out of fashion these days, and it often feels that I’m fighting a losing battle in my circles of friends when insisting on his importance. Last summer (2008) I went back and reread the whole of the Logical Investigations, and it was a pleasure, despite the work’s obvious difficulty.

The empiricist doctrine that things of the senses are nothing but bundles of qualities enjoys widespread acceptance even among those who otherwise denounce empiricism. The real greatness of Husserl is to have challenged, and in my view destroyed, the notion of a bundle of qualities.

Everyone wants to dump on Husserl for being an idealist, but many of these same people rush to embrace Badiou, who is no less an idealist than Husserl! While I obviously dislike Husserl’s idealism, he is the first object-oriented idealist, followed in this respect by Merleau-Ponty and very few others. Even if we are trapped in a phenomenal realm, this realm displays a mighty duel between various trees or houses on one side and the wildly shifting profiles or adumbrations through which we grasp them on the other.

In my philosophy, this tension between intentional objects and their qualities is one of four great tensions that make up the fabric of the cosmos, all of them involving the tension between an object-pole and a quality-pole. In my recent writings this has become a new fourfold of time, space, essence, and eidos. Without Husserl, despite his idealism, object-oriented philosophy could not exist.



6. It might be nothing more than my tendency to seek out predecessors, but I find that speculative realism, and especially object-orientated philosophy, contains something of the scholastic atmosphere (specially ontologists such as Franciso Suárez). Is this a fair reading?

Most likely I’m the only one of the speculative realists who has any relation with Scholasticism, and even in my case the relations are indirect: by way of Leibniz and Zubiri.

What are the Scholastic-sounding elements in my thinking? Perhaps there are two obvious ones. The first is their realism. And the second is their focus on individual substances, which not all realists observe. The ultimate forefather of object-oriented philosophy is Aristotle, since he was the first to make individual substances the primary topic of philosophy. But of course I reject the notion that substance must be natural or simple: “objects” for me refers to armies and cartoon characters no less than horses or neutrons. I also regret Leibniz’s doctrine, an unfortunate backslide from Aristotle, that substances must be indestructible. No, many or even all objects may be perishable, as Aristotle’s theory allows for the first time in ancient Greece.



7. Have you had any more thoughts on the metaphysics video game? If so can you tell us more about it?

It’s an idea that Ian Bogost and I were kicking around during our early e-mails, which I think date to September 2006. Ian is an actual game designer no less than an academic. He is also highly literate in philosophy, as his books indicate.

What had me thinking about this idea is a simple fact. Whereas it is hard work to concentrate on difficult philosophy books, videogames can be absorbing for many hours at a time. A Heideggerian would take this as proof of their superficiality, but that’s not necessarily the case. A brilliant piece of architecture is also absorbing. I remember walking through and around the Taj Mahal as if in a dream, for many hours. And in fact I thought at the time: why is philosophy not usually as hypnotic as the Taj Mahal or a good piece of music? It should be.

Fast forward to a few weeks ago, when Bogost asked aloud why philosophers don’t try to create objects other than books. It’s a great question. Visual artists are well beyond the idea of creating only marble statues or paint on canvas. So why do philosophers not try to create videogames or other objects we haven’t thought of yet?

But I haven’t gotten serious about such a game yet. I’m currently thinking about a more immediate non-standard object I will be creating: the book Circus Philosophicus. The description of the book says: “Platonic myth meets American noir in this haunting series of philosophical images, from gigantic ferris wheels to offshore drilling rigs.” I plan to do more things of this kind in the coming years, and a metaphysics video game will, I hope, be on the list.



8. You give some excellent advice about composition over at your blog, and it has proved to be quite popular among struggling graduate students. Why do you think graduate students have such a hard time submitting their dissertations? Do you have any advice about publishing journal articles?

On the dissertation question, I think most destruction is self-destruction. The two main causes of self-destruction by graduate students are (1) perfectionism and (2) paranoia.

Let’s start with perfectionism. It’s often nothing more than a fear of being judged. This is an understandable fear, especially in the young who still have no track record of successes and are so in need of positive feedback from their elders. As long as you are still working to perfect a piece of writing, you have a built-in shield against any criticism of it. It’s not done yet! I also think there’s an ingrained tendency among intelligent humans to defer and delay everything out of fear of success no less than fear of failure. Isn’t it a frightening prospect that you might actually get the things you want? So, quite often we do a lot of work to make them seem inaccessible and far off in the distance. Many of the great moments in life, the moments where we get something really incredible that e wanted for so long, are psychologically destabilizing moments, and part of us wants to avoid those rewards for various reasons. These are the tendencies you have to fight if you want to finish your dissertation. I can assure you that life looks a lot better after you finish.

As for the “paranoia” part, in some ways it is pretty horrible to be a graduate student. There can be problems with one’s professors and with one’s fellow students. At that stage you feel too dependent on the favor of your professors. But don’t feel that way, because they’re always partly wrong about you. They have only the most superficial impressions of you. As a professor I constantly misjudge my students and which of them are the most serious students, because I simply don’t know them as well as their peers do. So try not to worry too much about what anyone says about your work at that stage. And don’t worry if other students seem to be having more success than you are. Often enough, the teacher’s pets and superachievers of their 20’s burn out, while the ones who are struggling to articulate their ideas are the ones with the really good ideas. Personally, I give everyone a free pass until some time in their 30’s, because before that there’s a sense in which we are merely seeing rehearsals of what a person might someday be.

On the subject of professors... There tend to be a couple of mean, nasty professors in any Department. But it is rarely a secret who they are. Graduate students gossip like crazy about their professors, and the older ones can tell you on day one who the rotten ones are who will ruin your morale and maybe your life. So, just listen to those older students. If a professor has done terrible things to other students over the course of many years, what makes you think your case will be any different? Simply avoid the harmful people on your faculty and spend time with the good ones. Who was it who wrote that we all basically know which people and situations to avoid, but “an imprudent curiosity” leads us to seek them out anyway? Don’t have imprudent curiosity. It’s simple. Don’t choose an advisor because you think they’re going to help you on the job market. I wouldn’t even choose one based entirely on dissertation topic. Choose a person you like and respect as a human character—one who is psychologically clean and won’t mess with your mind. And if you do have problems with your advisor, just change advisors! These things happen, and your Department will want you to finish. Don’t wallow in whatever problems you might be having with faculty members. This becomes an alibi not to get work done.

As far as articles, I have no advice to give. I’m in the strange position of having published two books before I published even one article! And many of the articles I’ve published since have been solicited by those who like my books. Only once in awhile do I send an unsolicited article for blind review at a journal, so I am no special expert at how to do that.

As far as book proposals, I do have one piece of advice. We’re taught to be modest when writing cover letters for job applications, because no one wants to hire an arrogant colleague. But it’s somewhat the opposite with book proposals. There, it’s best to err a little on the side of cockiness. Publishers aren’t worried about hiring an arrogant colleague, because they’re not hiring you as a colleague. They’re thinking of investing a lot of money in editing, printing, and distributing something you wrote. Why should they do that if you don’t seem like a fervent believer in your own ideas ?

Also, do not target specific publishers for your book based on some idea of what your career should look like. Or at least I don’t respect that strategy very much. Especially on your first book, most of the responses will be instant form rejection letters. Send the initial proposal to 10 or 12 publishers, not just one, because it can take ages to receive responses. Don’t double-submit manuscripts, which isn’t fair to the publisher, but at the initial inquiry stage you can contact as many as you want.

However, today’s graduate students are going to be facing a radically different publishing environment from the one I faced at my debut a decade ago, so some of my advice will prove to be dated. No one really knows what academic publishing will look like ten years from now, but much will have changed. I suspect that it will become much easier to publish books, even without academic credentials already in hand.



9. You have chosen to published with two non-mainstream publishing houses. Can you explain your reasons for doing so?

re.press offered to publish Prince of Networks 20 months faster than the more mainstream publisher that wanted the book. 20 months is a long time! And they kept their promise, with an unavoidable delay of just one month. As for zerO Books, they approached me. And besides, I don’t know if any other publisher would have taken a gamble on a project as outlandish as Circus Philosophicus. But I think they made the right decision— I think it will be a hit. You’ve never seen anything like it.



10. Finally as somebody who has been through it all before what advice do you have for somebody just starting off with Heidegger? (recommended reading, german advice etc.)

History of the Concept of Time (not to be confused with the very brief The Concept of Time) is a good first thing to read. It contains most of the best content of Being and Time, along with that brilliant 100-page opening about Husserl and his greatest contributions to philosophy. It’s also much better written than Being and Time, since it was a lecture course for undergraduates.

Advice on how to learn German? Other than just plugging away seriously for ten years and looking up words that I didn’t know, I benefited greatly from a couple of summer language courses in Germany, one in Bremen and the other in Leipzig. There are all kinds of summer courses available, and grants can often be had to attend them.

For American students of continental philosophy in particular, it’s also important not to get too sucked into Europhilia. The world is a lot bigger than France and Germany, rich though their intellectual traditions obviously are. It’s a good idea to put one foot in any non-Western tradition, just to make your world larger. And even more simply than this, I would encourage American students to discover the American intellectual tradition as well, which is something we tend not to do. In philosophy there’s William James, who may not be of the magnitude of Heidegger, but can still teach you a lot about how to think and write. In literature and history there are all kinds of good people; Poe happens to be my favorite, just as he was the favorite of the French. In political philosophy, the USA has a treasure trove of figures. If you’re Canadian, don’t you realize how important McLuhan really is? He’s big, big, big. People have no idea how big he is. We’ve only barely begun to appreciate McLuhan.

My point is, young North Americans (especially in the USA) working in continental philosophy have a tendency to feel very insecure in relation to Europe, the motherland of most of what we read in our discipline. It is vital to overcome this insecurity if you ever want to do more than write book reports about famous Europeans. Becoming familiar with the best homegrown intellectual work is one excellent way to do that. Whenever I enter a bookstore in the States, my first trip is to the Library of America rack. Don’t be like T.S. Eliot and think that we’re from a half-savage country with nothing to contribute in intellectual matters. That’s not how they think in analytic philosophy or the hard sciences, let alone on Wall Street.