Manuel DeLandaGraham Harman - ˜Theœ Rise of Realism

Copyright Manuel DeLanda and Graham Harman, 2017

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First published in 2017 by Polity Press

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ISBN-13: 978-1-5095-1902-6

ISBN-13: 978-1-5095-1903-3(pb)

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Names: De Landa, Manuel, author.

Title: The rise of realism / Manuel DeLanda, Graham Harman.

Description: Malden, MA : Polity, 2017. | Includes bibliographical references and index.

Identifiers: LCCN 2016043508 (print) | LCCN 2016052445 (ebook) | ISBN 9781509519026 (hardback) | ISBN 9781509519033 (pbk.) | ISBN 9781509519057 (Mobi) | ISBN 9781509519064 (Epub)

Subjects: LCSH: Realism.

Classification: LCC B835 .D4 2017 (print) | LCC B835 (ebook) | DDC 149/.2dc23

LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2016043508

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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.