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Abstract
Despite exerting considerable influence on other academic disciplines and mainstream environmental thought, object-oriented ontology has attracted little critical engagement from academic philosophers as a philosophy in its own right. Here, I address one aspect of this oversight by exploring Timothy Morton’s claim that “being ecological” – cultivating the anticolonial and nonanthropocentric mindset to disrupt environmental crises – requires an object-oriented purview. Working against the backdrop of the Anthropocene, I firstly reconstruct Morton’s two main arguments for the power and ecological promise of object-oriented ontology. With some help from (eco)feminist theory, I then argue that, despite its radically nonanthropocentric façade, object-oriented ontology retains some problematic aspects of the dualistic thinking that it rightly pits itself against. More specifically, because object-oriented ontology retains the absence/presence binary of the subject/object dualism as one of its basic metaphysical commitments, it appears destined to perpetuate an insidious anthropocentrism by either fetishizing or collapsing the alterity of the nonhuman things it aims to rethink. Object-oriented ontology seems, therefore, poorly suited to the task that Morton sets for it.
disclosure statement
No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.
Notes
1 E.g., Booth; Bruno; Golumbia; Leavitt Pearl; Toadvine; Zahavi. Mudde and Alaimo are honourable exceptions.
2 E.g., Graham and Thrift; Meehan, Shaw, and Marston; Meehan; Mitchell; Schwanen; Shaw and Meehan; Thrift, Non-representational Theory; “The ‘Sentient’ City.”
3 Nativ; Oral. Harman had a much-cited piece (“Materialism Must Be Destroyed”) published in the prestigious geography journal Environment & Planning D.
4 TheBestSchools.org. Both Morton and Harman now have more citations than any of the hugely influential philosopher David Lewis’ single most cited works.
5 The Guardian dubbed Morton the “Philosopher Prophet of the Anthropocene” and he was consulted by NASA about which messages to send out to extra-terrestrials in a follow-up to the original Voyager mission (Blasdel).
6 Reading OOO can be a bewildering and infuriating experience. Given that their philosophical preoccupation is primarily aesthetic, rather than logocentric (more on this later), perhaps the evasiveness of their actual (i.e., markedly philosophical) arguments should not be entirely surprising. However, this apparently wilful obscurantism does little to encourage philosophical engagement with OOO. Nonetheless, as their broader impact would imply, I think (apparently contra Zahavi) that one can elicit from Harman’s and Morton’s work a philosophically coherent (if not entirely convincing) set of arguments for the power and promise of OOO. The following is my attempt to sympathetically reconstruct what I take to be their most important underlying arguments.
7 Whilst, like Cuomo (“Anthropocene”), I think the “Anthropocene” term is itself problematic, it goes beyond the scope of this paper to explore that concern here.
8 What ecofeminists are more attentive to, however, is that these ills are usually felt much more keenly by those who constitute dualism’s underside (e.g., women, indigenous peoples, or occupants of the Global South). This lack of attention to heterogeneity in OOO will become important in what follows.
9 Ecologists and ecologically minded philosophers may be more prone to claim that the energy flows constituting biospheric webs are more real than their constituent “objects,” however, Morton thinks, these positions retain the logic of agricultural monotheism via the relational (if not straightforwardly correlationist) “overmining” strategy explored in the following section (Being Ecological 98–99; Harman, Quadruple Object 9–11). Insofar as it reduces things to qualities rather than determinate substances, Harman is amenable to the contention that mainstream science is guilty of undermining and overmining simultaneously (Quadruple Object 13–15).
10 Morton argues that the metaphysics of presence licences a particular lack of engagement with anthropogenic climate change since, unlike localized weather conditions, “global warming” can never be wholly present to us, hence its designation as a “hyperobject” (Being Ecological 22).
11 E.g., Cronon; Vogel.
12 E.g., Toadvine; Bannon.
13 Whilst this relies on a problematic understanding of phenomenology (Booth), here is not the place to discuss that issue.
14 The same problem faces post-Kantian positivistic scientific approaches like Niels Bohr’s (Morton, Realist Magic 172).
15 The same might be said of Meillassoux’s speculative materialism, who, in his eagerness to address mind-independent things-in-themselves, reinstates the dualistic and utilitarian terms of the Cartesian res extensa (After Finitude 3, 115). Morton elsewhere offers a more spurious argument against ecofeminism focusing on its apparent commitment to dualistic essentialism, which I omit here (“Queer Ecology” 274).
16 This argument can, however, only function at a limited epistemic level. The fire is oblivious to the cotton’s aroma, but it nevertheless (ontologically) changes it as it burns. The sort of intentional encounter object-oriented ontologists describe cannot, therefore, be “in any sense definitive” of encounters more broadly (Shaviro 105–06).
17 Levinas never explicitly claims that we are unable to know others due to some epistemic limitation of access. His point is that all knowing totalizes and our ethical responsibility to others is an altogether different manner of relating. Nevertheless, to fully understand Levinas’ objection to phenomenology, he (like Harman and Morton) must think that one cannot gain even a degree of epistemic access to the other without problematically collapsing their alterity. Likewise, OOO is not merely concerned with epistemological or ontological matters. As Morton’s work shows, object-oriented ontologists diagnose a certain ethical salience to the attempt to address nonhuman others on their own terms. The two positions are much closer than one might think.
18 See Harman, Quadruple Object 112, 128; Morton, Realist Magic 56, 78, 174, 190.
19 Ironically, Harman (Guerrilla Metaphysics 41–42) levels this criticism against Levinas.
20 Although Morton would object to Beauvoir’s use of the word “subject,” this can be replaced with Morton’s nonreductive use of the term “object” without diminishing the force of her objection.
21 Beauvoir’s charge has much in common with Meillassoux’s objection that correlationism promotes the conflation of “species solipsistic” norms with (allegedly inaccessible) reality itself, and that “correlational reason thereby legitimates all those discourses that claim access to an absolute, the only proviso being that nothing in these discourses resembles a rational justification of their validity” (44–45, 50).
22 See also Morton, “Here Comes Everything” 177–84; Realist Magic 88, 167; Being Ecological 171.
23 In response to this sort of objection, Morton cites Jane Bennett’s contention that, as a tonic for the reductive mechanism of mainstream scientific naturalism, “a little anthropomorphism […] may be a net benefit to our understanding of things” (qtd in Morton, Realist Magic 203). However, given the force of the charge of incorporation, such anthropomorphism can be only a short sharp shock to awaken us from a reductive physicalist purview. And we do not need OOO for that.
24 I remind the reader that, unlike some of those cited above (e.g., Bruno; Golumbia; Leavitt Pearl), I am more concerned with why the charge of correlationism might matter than with whether it is true. And I see reason for optimism in this regard. See Booth, for instance, for a more in-depth treatment of the claim that ecophenomenology may evade the negative consequences of correlationism even if the charge might in some sense hold true.