Malte reviewed Immaterialism by Graham Harman
Review of 'Immaterialism' on 'Goodreads'
Great! This is surely needed in Harman's ongoing project. Much of the content will be familiar to anyone who's read Harman before, but the slight change of topic is revealing. The most important contribution is the concept of symbiosis – an object-oriented way of dealing with relations as new, emergent objects in themselves. I find this extremely useful for talking about many of the dilemmas from the old, boring (but so far unresolved) question of structure or actors as determining factors. As Harman point to in the title, this is also a good response to the overly "physical" obsession that much OOO-inspired art, philosophy etc. has taken. Object-oriented ontology is not a "new materialism", quite the opposite. For Harman, materialism is just one version of the many ways objects can be undermined or overmined. We certainly don't become more object-oriented by obsessing about printers, chairs, rugs and water-coolers when dealing …
Great! This is surely needed in Harman's ongoing project. Much of the content will be familiar to anyone who's read Harman before, but the slight change of topic is revealing. The most important contribution is the concept of symbiosis – an object-oriented way of dealing with relations as new, emergent objects in themselves. I find this extremely useful for talking about many of the dilemmas from the old, boring (but so far unresolved) question of structure or actors as determining factors. As Harman point to in the title, this is also a good response to the overly "physical" obsession that much OOO-inspired art, philosophy etc. has taken. Object-oriented ontology is not a "new materialism", quite the opposite. For Harman, materialism is just one version of the many ways objects can be undermined or overmined. We certainly don't become more object-oriented by obsessing about printers, chairs, rugs and water-coolers when dealing with the very immaterial object of a financial corporation. So the title here is a little tongue in cheek I guess. Oh, and Harman is not really a brilliant social theorist (which you can apologize him for, becuase he is such a good philosopher!) and I look forward to someone really applying his principles – and probably change them too.
