on “commodity fetishism,” etc.

Cosmos and History has an interesting new issue posted on the theme of the future of philosophy. You can find it, free of charge, HERE. (It’s an open access journal.)

I’m too busy at the moment to read the whole issue cover to cover, so I’ve been sampling here and there. One article I’ve browsed a bit already is the one by Wesley Phillips, HERE. This was apparently a paper at SEP at York, but I must have been in a different session at the time, or else my memory is getting a lot worse. Phillips gives a critique of speculative realism from what he calls a historical materialist standpoint. He focuses his critique on Iain Hamilton Grant, but there’s one passage about my work that I thought I’d respond to briefly:

“The recent return to ‘thinghood’ emerged with Harman’s account of ‘equipment’. Harman thus reproduced Heidegger’s (neo-Kantian) blindness to the alternative, more radical attack upon thingism presented in German idealism and, subsequently, in historical materialism. In fact, speculative realism remains closer to ‘mainstream’ continental philosophy than it would like to think. Without any historical materialism, Harman’s ‘universal theory of entities’ falls back into a thing-ism of its own: the theoretical pluralisation of entities now precedes their practical pluralisation (for Marx, ‘congealed labour’). Why, then, the return to things themselves? Is it an unwittingly masochistic fetishisation of commodity fetishism (Marx’s thesis that commodities take on a life of their own while life turns into a mere thing)? In a reified world of private things/objects – the homes and corporate buildings of Beech’s Los Angelis, for instance – the only possible denial of reification (Verdinglichung) lies in its exaggerated irony. But such irony might end up naturalising an historically contingent problem.”

I’ll respond in a series of separate points.

1. “Harman thus reproduced Heidegger’s (neo-Kantian) blindness to the alternative, more radical attack upon thingism presented in German idealism…”

First of all, Heidegger’s reaction to German Idealism could hardly be described as “blindness.” He is well aware of what German Idealism is doing, and simply rejects it. Kant and the Problem of Metaphysics is probably the best source here, especially the often overlooked closing words (as sharp a reader as Lee Braver overlooks them in making his case that Heidegger is an anti-realist).

Second, you’ll know any critique is in trouble if it makes use of the prefix “neo-.” It’s always a bad idea to let your adjectives do your arguing for you, and especially the case when that adjective is “neo-,” which implies without proving that someone’s theory is just the warmed-over remnant of a past historical meal that everyone knows is behind us. (Alberto Toscano did something similar in the appendix to The Prince and the Wolf when he critically termed my theory “neo-Leibnizian” without really arguing the point carefully.) Anyway, if you want to make a Hegelian-style argument that Kant is wrong about the things-in-themselves, you are free to do it; Quentin Meillassoux does it, for instance. But Phillips just calls me and Heidegger neo-Kantians without elaboration. I would argue, by contrast, that Hegel is the neo-Kantian, insofar as he preserves the thought-world pairing as the central relation of philosophy. I am not willing to concede the usual claim that the things-in-themselves are what Kant got wrong. That’s just German Idealist propaganda. What Kant actually got wrong is in taxonomizing the phenomena-noumena pair so that human thought was the unique site where that pair is located. (It’s generally a bad idea to identify ontological distinctions with specific ontic beings that embody them. This is what I’ve called the Taxonomic Fallacy.)

Another problem with “neo-” is that it’s fully reversible. I could respond by calling Phillips a “neo-Hegelian,” but this wouldn’t be any more helpful than the original charge.

Finally, Phillips asserts without arguing that the German Idealist critique of thingism is “more radical.” German Idealism is certainly “hot” at the moment, with Badiou and Žižek still the two reigning sorcerers of continental thought. But I don’t see it as “more radical” at all. Instead, it loses Kant’s insight into finitude and implodes everything into the human sphere more than ever before. It is largely responsible for our current idealist impasse.

2. “Harman’s ‘universal theory of entities’ falls back into a thing-ism of its own: the theoretical pluralisation of entities now precedes their practical pluralisation…”

No, it doesn’t. The pluralisation of entities is something that involves the theoretical and practical spheres and all other spheres. Both the theoretical approach and the practical approach give priority to the human as what pluralizes entities, and I’ve tried to show that this leads to an untenable lump-ontology in which the world is carved into districts only when people come on the scene.

3. “Why, then, the return to things themselves? Is it an unwittingly masochistic fetishisation of commodity fetishism (Marx’s thesis that commodities take on a life of their own while life turns into a mere thing)?”

Here’s the “commodity fetishism” critique of object-oriented philosophy that one hears so frequently. I don’t think the people who make this critique realize what an extreme position they are taken.

For Marx, “commodity fetishism” that things have value in their own right, when they really represent “congealed labour.” This is an economic doctrine. Let’s assume Marx was right about it. But even if Marx is right about it, this does not warrant the far more extreme claim made here by Phillips (and made originally by Peter Hallward at the 2007 speculative realism event) that things have no reality in their own right, but are “congealed labor.” In short, it’s one thing to make an economic argument about the source of value in labor, but quite another to make an ontological argument that the source of all reality lies in human activity. Marx himself would be very unlikely to go that far, as his inversion of Hegel suggests. This leads Phillips not only into a relational ontology, but into a full-blown idealist one. (I think Hallward has the same problem with his relationism, and have told him so.)

The rhetorical problem here is that Marx has such moral authority in some circles that even misuses of his theories are often saluted as devastating blows. If you want to accuse object-oriented philosophy of “commodity fetishism,” this means that you’re not just taking an economic position (I’ve said nothing about economics, after all), but that you’re claiming that not just all value, but all reality is created by human labor. It’s a sort of Berkeleyan Marxism that I wouldn’t advise as a promising avenue for the future of the Left.

Furthermore, what’s the point of saying that my philosophy or anyone else’s is motivated by “masochism,” whether “unwitting” or fully conscious? I’ve made numerous arguments in print and in public lectures for why we have to return to things apart from their relations. Why not just deal with those arguments instead of trying to posit a masochistic psyche lying behind the philosophy?

4. “In a reified world of private things/objects… the only possible denial of reification (Verdinglichung) lies in its exaggerated irony. But such irony might end up naturalising an historically contingent problem.”

Here I don’t know what Phillips is talking about. When have I ever defended irony? Au contraire. The return to objects has always been paired with a distaste for ironic, transcendent, self-reflexive, hipsterish cynicism. If you leave human labor and human critique at the center of things, that‘s when you’re going to have a problem with irony.

Also, to call objects “reified” is to beg the question. Whether individual objects have autonomous reality or are only generated by the human subject in its thoughts and deeds is precisely what is in question here. You can’t skip the question and claim that object-oriented philosophy is guilty of “reifying” things unless you first demonstrate that those things have no independent life of their own.

To conclude, the last thing we need right now is even more Hegelianism, especially when it misnames itself “materialism.” But Phillips is far from the only person following that path in recent years.