There
are several strange elements in Andrew Cole’s recent polemic
against speculative realism and object-oriented ontology [Artforum,
Summer 2015]. First, in a piece written specifically for Artforum,
Cole never bothers to address our views on art, choosing instead to
treat the magazine’s readership to a long lesson on the philosophy
of Immanuel Kant. Second, after trying to make us look disrespectful
by likening us to vandals who spray-painted “Kant is a moron” on
a house in Kaliningrad, Russia, Cole himself takes a crude and
macabre dig at Kant’s personal life: “Yes, Kantian moral
philosophy leaves something to be desired, as when the philosopher
exemplifies the categorical imperative by asking readers to imagine
having sex near the gallows—easy to say for a person who never got
laid.” It’s also strange that while Cole only cites one of my
publications (The
Quadruple Object
[2011]) by name, he laments unanswered questions that are addressed
not only in other publications, but even in the one book that he
seems to have read.
Forgetting
for now these unsettling signals, let’s briefly consider Cole’s
argument, which is really an attempted counterpoint of two separate
arguments. The first is that we have either misunderstood Kant or
deliberately distorted his ideas to conceal the fact that we have
stolen most of our insights from him. The second—always a
crowd-pleaser—is that object-oriented philosophy is hopelessly
complicit with capitalism and the “commodity fetishism” that Marx
linked with the capitalist system. Cole handles the second point more
impressionistically than the first, and a similar argument was
already made by his sometime collaborator Alexander R. Galloway in a
widely read but dreadful 2013 Critical
Inquiry
article entitled “The Poverty of Philosophy: Realism and
Post-Fordism.” In what follows, I will therefore focus on Cole’s
remarks on Kant.
Graham
Harman
which
includes Andrew Cole's reply
You
can read Harman's full response here
https://doctorzamalek2.wordpress.com/2015/09/01/my-response-to-andrew-cole-and-coles-response-to-me/
