Graham Harman

The classic and traditional source on actor-network theory and architecture is a co-authored and well-know 2008 piece by Bruno Latour and Albena Yaneva («Give Me a Gun and I Will Make All Buildings Move»: An Ant’s View of Architecture). They argue, based on dynamic-ontology, against viewing buildings as static objects or entity and in favor of treating them as dynamic flux or trajectory that can be broken into fully-formed individuals only through the abstractive sickness of the human mind, however necessary abstraction may be for the practical necessities of life. In this paper, arguing from the standpoint of my OOO (object-oriented ontology), I note some problems and paradoxes of Latour and Yaneva’s approach and I propose a possible solution focused on “relation”: every form of knowledge amounts to telling us either what a thing is made of or what it does, the world is not just the correlate of knowledge.

This article uses the ideas of Marshall McLuhan (and to a lesser extent Martin Heidegger) to argue for a non-relational approach to architecture. The word ‘form’ is used throughout the arts and humanities, though in different ways depending on the term to which it is opposed: as in form vs. function, form vs. content, and form vs. matter. In his book The Autopoiesis of Architecture, Patrik Schumacher argues that form/function is the lead-distinction of the architectural profession. I hold that Schumacher cannot be right in this claim, since form and function are both too relational in character to form a true opposition.

This paper criticizes two forms of philosophical materialism that adopt opposite strategies but end up in the same place. Both hold that individual entities must be banished from philosophy. The first kind is ground floor materialism, which attempts to dissolve all objects into some deeper underlying basis; here, objects are seen as too shallow to be the truth. The second kind is first floor materialism, which treats objects as naive fictions gullibly posited behind the direct accessibility of appearances or relations; here, objects are portrayed as too deep to be the truth. One major thesis of this paper is that these two forms of materialism are parasitical on one another and need each other's resources to make sense of the world. The second major thesis is that both forms of materialism thereby stand condemned, and that philosophy must be rebuilt from the individual objects that the two forms of materialism disdain. These points are made through a detailed consideration of the book Every Thing Must Go by the analytic structural realists James Ladyman and Don Ross, which has gained a surprising following among some speculative realists in continental philosophy. Ladyman and Ross claim to preserve objects by treating them as “real patterns”, but they do so at the price of destroying their autonomous reality. Furthermore, they are unable to tell us whether the mathematical structures they see as the basis of human knowledge are also the basis of reality itself. In short, their ontology is scientism for scientism's sake (or ‘Bunsen burner realism’) and must be eliminated in favor of a genuine realist metaphysics of objects.