The Rise of Realism

Manuel DeLanda, Graham Harman

• Publisher: Polity
• Year: 2017
• ISBN:
  9781509519064
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Philosophy
• Subtopic: Philosophy History & Theory

Until quite recently, almost no philosophers trained in the continental tradition saw anything of value in realism. The situation in analytic philosophy was always different, but in continental philosophy realism was usually treated as a pseudo-problem. That is no longer the case.

In this provocative new book, two leading philosophers examine the remarkable rise of realism in the continental tradition. While exploring the similarities and differences in their own positions, they also consider the work of others and assess rival trends in contemporary philosophy. They begin by discussing the relation between realism and materialism, which DeLanda links closely but which Harman tries to separate. Part Two covers the many different meanings of realism, with the two authors working together to develop an expanded definition of the term. Part Three features a spirited exchange on the respective virtues and drawbacks of DeLanda's realism of attractors and singularities and Harman's object-oriented theory. Part Four shifts to the question of the knowability of the real, as the authors discuss whether scientific knowledge does full justice to reality. In Part Five, they shift the focus to space, time, and science more generally, and here Harman offers a defence of actor-network theory despite its obvious anti-realist elements.

Lively, accessible and engaging, this book is the best attempt so far to clarify the different paths for realism in continental philosophy. It will be of great value to students and scholars of continental philosophy and to anyone interested in the cutting-edge debates in philosophy and critical theory today.

Part I
Realism and Materialism

Harman: The reason for this dialogue is that we are both realist philosophers working in a subfield, continental philosophy, that has never been sympathetic to realism. In this tradition the usual procedure, following in the footsteps of Edmund Husserl and Martin Heidegger, is to treat realism as a pseudo-problem. It is said that we “always already find ourselves outside in the world” in the mere act of intending an object before the mind. And since the phenomenologist “brackets” the question of whether or not a given phenomenon really exists, then even when dealing with illusory objects we are already outside in the world. For many years I was inclined toward phenomenology myself, and thus am well aware of the various self-deceptions this otherwise admirable school employs in evading the question of how the phenomenal and the real must differ. I saw this again recently in an anti-realist article by Dan Zahavi, the phenomenology gatekeeper of my generation (Zahavi 2016).

Until quite recently, almost no philosopher who was continentally trained saw anything of value in a realist position. Indeed, in our first correspondence some years ago, you stated accurately that “for decades admitting that one was a realist was equivalent to acknowledging one was a child molester” (DeLanda 2007). The situation in analytic philosophy has always been different. To some extent analytic philosophy was launched explicitly by G.E. Moore and Bertrand Russell as a realist reaction against the neo-Hegelian British Idealism of F.H. Bradley and others (Soames 2014). There are also plenty of anti-realist analytic philosophers, of course, but my point is this: analytic philosophers have always taken realism seriously in a way that continental philosophers generally still do not.

Now, I know that you actually came to philosophy from computers by way of analytic philosophy, when you found yourself wanting to understand programming languages. But you eventually found your chief influence in a continental philosopher, Gilles Deleuze, and despite the precision and clarity of your writing you are better known by continentals than by analytic philosophers. My own career has been less unorthodox than yours, though still atypical. I attended two rather continental graduate programs in philosophy, and was driven to a realist position by finding in my dissertation that Heidegger only makes sense if pushed in a radically realist direction. That dissertation became my first book, Tool-Being (Harman 2002). In a remarkable coincidence, that was the same year that you published your landmark realist interpretation of Deleuze – though even your fans often accept everything but your realism (DeLanda 2002). I can't remember at the moment if your previous books had also declared realism explicitly (DeLanda 1991; 2007). But at least we have a specific date, 2002, as the beginning of a prominent realist current in continental philosophy, flowing from multiple directions. By 2007, there was the Speculative Realist movement, featuring me and three colleagues, which broke apart two years later due to personal and philosophical disagreements (Brassier et al. 2007). In 2011 came the New Realism group of such authors as Maurizio Ferraris (2015) in Turin and Markus Gabriel (2015) in Bonn. I have since learned that Ferraris was on the realist bandwagon as early as 1991, which led directly to a break with his mentor Gianni Vattimo, one of the most vociferous continental anti-realists of recent decades (Vattimo 1991).

DeLanda: Let me add a few remarks to your historical capsule. I was an unapologetic realist after 1991, the year in which my book about warfare was published. The space of the battlefield, although it is decidedly a cultural space, is inhabited by metallic projectiles, shrapnel, shock waves, and fire. All those lethal objects affect human soldiers, leaving corpses and mutilated bodies behind, regardless of whether the soldiers believe the objects exist or not. And for similar reasons my book on the history of the millennium, focusing on matter and energy flows, famines and epidemics, was also unambiguously realist. To take just one example, bacteria and viruses were objectively affecting our bodies centuries before we formed any beliefs about them. On the other hand, I did not offer an argument in those books for the position that all coherent materialisms must be forms of realism. I just took for granted that if human history had been so deeply affected by the material culture of weapons and battles, of vaccines and quarantines, of matter and energy flows in industry and trade, then a belief in a mind-independent world followed logically.

Harman: That brings us to the present moment. On the one hand, we have your philosophy, which is both ardently realist and ardently materialist. Then there is my own position, which is ardently realist while rejecting materialism as a form of either upward or downward reductionism, depending on whether it takes a scientific/Marxist or social constructionist form (Harman 2010a). But there is also a third position that is sometimes confused with both your philosophy and mine, which might be described as “materialism without realism.” Here we find Karen Barad, a materialist who also argues that objects have no reality apart from their interactions with the mind; she bases this on Niels Bohr's Copenhagen Interpretation of quantum theory (Barad 2007). Although Barad calls her philosophy “agential realism,” there is nothing realist about it, since she grants reality no autonomy from the human mind, or at least not from human practices.

Along with Barad's philosophy, we find another, perhaps even more prominent form of materialism without realism. This can be found in the two most influential continental philosophers living today: Alain Badiou and Slavoj Žižek. Despite their differences, Badiou and Žižek are close allies, and it is easy to see why. First, both sympathize with German Idealism's elimination of the Kantian thing-in-itself. And second, both sympathize with Lacan's elimination of the Freudian unconscious as a hidden psychic force in favor of the unconscious as an immanent disruption of consciousness: slips of the tongue as gaps in language itself, the encounter with a traumatic kernel that resists symbolization, and so forth. The German Idealist and the Lacanian moves are clearly anti-realist in both letter and spirit, and this is precisely where most continental philosophers are positioned today. Žižek even goes so far as to say: “The true formula of materialism is not that there is some noumenal reality beyond our distorting perception of it. The only consistent materialist position is that the world does not exist” (Žižek & Daly 2004: 97).

Let me ask you two questions. First, would you like to disagree with or add to anything I have said about the current state of realism? And second, would you agree that Badiou and Žižek are steering philosophy in the wrong direction as regards materialism's relation to realism?

DeLanda: You are correct that I have been using the terms “realism” and “materialism” as if they were interchangeable when they are not. All (coherent) materialists must be realists, but not all realists must be materialists. A devout Christian is surely a realist about heaven and hell, since he would not accept that my disbelief in those transcendent spaces in any way impinges on their actual existence. Yet, such a Christian realist would clearly not be a materialist. My definition of “materialism” is as a form of realism that rejects any entity that transcends the material world. The reason I used the term “realism” in Intensive Science was that it is a term that is much more “in your face” than “materialism,” and because the latter term has been debased in the last few decades beyond recognition. (I also use the term “neo-materialism” for similar reasons.) But I should stop using the terms “realism” and “materialism” as if they were synonymous.

Now, moving on to the debasement of the term “materialism.” The problem with people like Žižek is that they use this term as short for either “dialectical materialism” or “historical materialism.” So the statement you just quoted can be paraphrased as “the only consistent Marxist position is that the world does not exist.” This revised statement is arguably still false: there are plenty of contemporary Marxists who would disagree with it, and certainly the Engels of “The Dialectics of Nature” would condemn the statement as pure bourgeois ideology. But it at least makes sense, since it would point to Žižek's belief that after poststructuralism (most adherents of which were anti-realists), Marxism itself had to change to absorb the new ideas put forward by these thinkers. To me, all this implies (as I have argued for a long time) that Marxism itself is exhausted and that we need to create a brand new leftist political economy based on neo-materialist ideas. You have a more nuanced take on Žižek's strategy. Do you care to share it?

Harman: Žižek for me is a fascinating but sometimes frustrating figure. As an entertainer he's nearly unparalleled in the history of philosophy. Giordano Bruno was probably the last philosopher as funny as Žižek, and before that maybe Diogenes the Cynic. Admittedly, some people don't find him funny at all: all the sex jokes become overwhelming for some readers, and occasionally he crosses the line of decent behavior (the child pornography reference near the beginning of The Parallax View being perhaps the worst instance). Nonetheless, I love Žižek's animal spirits and his tendency to make blunt statements and stick his neck out, unlike his evasive and dithering postmodernist forerunners. I also think he's probably underrated as a philosopher, though of course I agree completely that his statements about how one must now be an idealist to be a materialist are absurd. But I mentioned earlier that he can be frustrating, and what frustrates me most is that he spends very little time on the crucial issue we're discussing right now: realism and anti-realism. He simply takes it for granted that Hegel knocked Kant flat on his back on the question of the things-in-themselves, and Lacan (an extreme idealist whose “Real” has little of reality about it and functions primarily as a trauma for humans) simply bolstered Žižek's confidence in his idealism. I don't get the sense that he has ever really worked through the arguments about realism fully for himself. Above all, he simply seems annoyed by the realist option, and usually just repeats the Hegel–Lacan arguments on this topic.

DeLanda: Žižek as entertainer, or, perhaps more accurately, as social commentator, does have something to offer. There are many social phenomena that are either too insignificant (like the different shapes of toilets across European countries) or too complex and poorly understood to be tackled by sociologists or anthropologists. In these cases, witty social commentary is perhaps the best that we can have, while we wait for a serious theoretical treatment to come along.

Harman: A related point, one that Žižek (1989) raises himself in connection with his discussion of Alfred Sohn-Rethel (1978), concerns another “materialist” but definitely anti-realist use that people have made of Marx in recent years. Whenever I make the realist point that objects must have reality independent of the various networks and social systems in which they are involved, a few people inevitably accuse me of “commodity fetishism.” Yet this seems to be a stunning and rather basic misreading of Marx. “Commodity fetishism” is the first topic of discussion in Das Kapital, where it is clearly a theory of value, not an ontology. In other words, Marx is complaining about people who think that pepper or shirts have value in themselves apart from the labor that went into producing them. Fair enough. But he is not making the anti-realist ontological claim that nothing exists independently of labor. In fact, Marx (1992) gives us at least three examples of economic goods that are nonetheless not commodities: air and water freely used by everyone, items bartered in a tribal system, and even corn-rents delivered to feudal lords. But what we have now are pseudo-Marxists like Andrew Cole (2015) and Alexander Galloway (2012) who misinterpret Marx as an anti-realist metaphysician of culture.

DeLanda: I know what you mean. I once had the misfortune of having an exchange with Galloway in which he dismissed the objectivity of some scientific classifications (e.g., the Periodic Table of the Elements) by simply quoting Foucault quoting Borges. The novelist had come up with a brilliant but nonsensical classification that Foucault used as an example of how arbitrary classifications can be. But Foucault never wrote about any real scientific field: psychiatry, early clinical medicine, grammar...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Table of Contents
• Title page
• Copyright page
• Part I: Realism and Materialism
• Part II: Realism and Anti-Realism
• Part III: Realist Ontology
• Part IV: Cognition and Experience
• Part V: Time, Space, and Science
• References
• End User License Agreement