QUARRELS OF REDUCTIONISM: Review of Wolfendale on Harman's OOP Over the last few years a self-styled “new” ontological hypothesis, calling itself “object-oriented philosophy”, constituted itself within a more general movement calling itself "Speculative Realism" (SR). This philosophical constellation multiplied self-proclaimed and self-propagated signs of success, at the same time as showing unmistakable symptoms of conceptual regression and communicative pathology. Purporting to effect a step beyond the impasses of post-structuralist “relativism”, it announced itself as a response to widely felt need for a return to the real world. Based on the chimerical denial of a supposed undue primacy accorded to epistemology, and on a wilful blindness to its own status as (bad) epistemology, SR was able to capture the attention of those who were looking for a new speculative style, after the Science Wars. It was promoted in opposition to those who were content to extend and revise the already existing Heideggerian, Lacanian, Deleuzian, Derridean etc. Continental philosophy was thought to have distanced itself both from the real itself and from the metaphysical speculation capable of pronouncing new truths about the real. However, the whole style of Continental Philosophy was now perceived as too obscure and abstruse, too erudite and élitist, and the new realism was in danger of being condemned for the same reasons. A more pop version of the same ambition was needed, and Graham Harman’s OOP (object-oriented philosophy) satisfied the strongly felt need both to have done with the relativist impasses of deconstruction and to return to “naiveté”. (This is Harman’s word for his new starting point, cited from the opening of his THE QUADRUPLE OBJECT). It is this simplicity and radicality of approach that establishes Harman as by far the more radical thinker when we compare his ontology of withdrawn objects to the mathematism of Meillassoux, the scientism of Brassier, and the Lacanian naturalism of Bryant. Harman alone has been willing to discard the scientistic prejudice that vitiates the work of these thinkers. Yet this superiority of Harman could only be maintained by sticking to the pathos of an escape from epistemology. For as long as he did not explicitly engage with epistemological themes in his own name the denegation of its status as epistemology on which his work was built gave it even more force of conviction and persuasive power. The objectual conversion remained a potent possibility. With the publication of Harman’s THE THIRD TABLE this overtly anti-epstemological posture was revealed as an imposture, OOP was seen to be far from expressing superior insight over and above “sensual” common sense, humanistic, and scientific realities, as it purports to do. Harman's wide-ranging critique not just of the reductive illusions of common sense but also of the more sophisticated reductionism in the humanities (overmining) and in the natural sciences (undermining), and his positing of a withdrawn realm of "real objects", allowed him to combine in a new synthesis the appearance of speculative radicalism and that of a return to concrete reality. This new realism had the advantage of gratifying the narcissism of its adherents in the philosophic and artistic community while saving it from the chicanes of postmodern relativism. Unfortunately it's rapid rise to popularity was short-lived, and Harman's OOP can now be seen by all as conceptually incompetent and sterile, unable to give a satisfying account the world, neither of the real objects that it posits nor of the domains that it consigns to the status of "sensual" illusion. In Pete Wolfendale’s preface to his book OBJECT-ORIENTED PHILOSOPHY we learn that Levi Bryant, in an amusing diversion of OOO’s ontological vocabulary for personal polemics, raises the question of “why Pete has obsessively and endlessly written lengthy posts on OOO, striving to undermine our positions, while withdrawing from any sort of serious debate with us” (my emphasis). One recognises the key term “withdrawing”, used to describe the inaccessibility of the real object, applied here to a human being who does not deliver his ideas in the form demanded by the OOO "community". Strangely, to stigmatise Wolfendale’s behaviour Bryant makes use of a verb that places him in the position of the real object posited by OOO. This choice of signifiers betrays the fear that philosophically speaking Wolfendale’s texts criticising OOO are the “real thing” compared to those born of the fealty to a philosophy, OOO, that cannot be saved even by the most extreme operations of weakening, redefintion, hybridation, lacanisation, or ecologisation. Given the extent of OOO’s ongoing philosophical disaster, it is striking that Wolfendale feels the need to explain and analyse, almost to apologise for, what in his case seems to have been merely a passing infatuation with OOO, provoked by the impression of joining a network “permeated by a certain enthusiasm, ambition, and intensity that offline academia seemed to lack”. We see from the acknowledgements at the end of his preface that this impression of belonging to an inspirational community, happily, was not entirely erroneous, but with respect to the principal proponent of OOO the feeling that came to dominate was that of disappointment. What is worrisome is not the overweening smugness of convoking Wolfendale to the “serious debate”, a debate that Wolfendale explains does not exist within the OOO community. What is alarming is the use of techniques of mental manipulation closely related to those of brain-washing and cult-formation. The invalidation of Wolfendale’s multiple blog posts as not “serious” enough, the pretence that a “serious” debate exists and is ready to receive him if he will only make a positive gesture and leave all this sterile negativity behind (“striving to undermine our positions”), the pathologisation of his creative analyses as “obsessional”, the exaggerated and repetitive language (“obsessively and endlessly written lengthy posts”) – this is the language of mind control, not of free exchange, and is designed to command complete submission or complete exclusion. Doing philosophy, that is to say taking philosophy seriously, is a dangerous act. One does not encounter such enunciative double binds in the pursuit of one’s passion without being adversely affected, even when one is capable of seeing through them. If one is lucky (but more than luck is involved), this entrapment in sad affects operates only in the short term. The trap was there from the beginning, if only one had seen it for what it was. One feels like an “idiot”. But the idiot in Deleuzian terms is someone who does not have the “correct” reaction, not the one demanded (in this case join and agree or be banished and stay silent). The idiot thinks that there is something deeper than the appearances. Wolfendale describes this search for something deeper subjacent to his interest in OOO. Yet he feels the need to justify what seems to be a paradoxical effort of having invested more time and energy in analysing a philosophy than is warranted by its intrinsic worth. But that is because he regrets, as if it were due to his own falings, not having been admitted to participate in a dialogue that in fact never existed. Those who came closer to and stayed longer with OOO have been sterilised. Wolfendale went deeper. Many may have become interested, or involved, in OOO because of its implicit appeal to a mythic underpinning for its grand narrative about the history of philosophy. Disappointment and despair at the wasteland of academic philosophy, the discovery of an online community of passionate thinkers, the gradual rise within this community of speculative warriors fighting to preserve the new life that this thought can bring to a dying academia with its unthinking lackeys. It is sad to see all this noetic vitality undermined in favour of branding and commerce. It is a sad thing to see philosophy being perverted into the marketising of pseudo-concepts. Witnessing such a spectacle can be a powerful motive for philosophising. I read Wolfendale’s preface as just as philosophical as the rest of the book, and not as some sort of extra-philosophical appendage. It provides more than a sociology of communicative pathology in the construction of a philosophical movement. It gives us precious indications about what it can be like to be in the grip of a philosophical problem: the passion and the tenacity, the desire to go deeper than the doxa, the need to resist the doxic masters’ discouragement, the feeling of not being understood and of not understanding oneself, the impression of being an “idiot”, that the formation of one’s own incommensurable perspective entails. It is by now obvious to many people who have tried to make sense of the writings of the small network of bloggers and commenters that promote or participate in the discussion of speculative realism that something is seriously wrong with the whole movement of and around OOO. This object-oriented ontology, which announces itself as a great step forward from the major philosophers of the Continental tradition of the 20th Century, embodies and expresses a void of thought and a refusal of all thoughtful dialogue. Such is the will to mental repression of this movement that a struggle is required even to name the situation. Badiou has taught us, following Deleuze, that to speak in one’s own name, outside the codes of clans and teams, means being able and ready to give things and situations their appropriate name. Calling OOO’s thought “void” and its communicational dynamics “pathological” is a philosophical act that, even though it is an exercise in stating the obvious, is an important intervention in a situation where illusion reigns as truth. It is unlikely that the OOO team and its supporters will reply to Wolfendale's critiques. Philosophy may sometimes be a sport of combat, but there is no match here, there never was. Some people, including Wolfendale and myself, may have been fooled for a while into thinking that a discussion was taking place and that they could participate. But we quickly learned that empty mind-numbing slogans in the place of concepts, crude adulation of the big players, and vindictive hounding or cynical ignoring of the critics was the rule of this situation, presented as a noble philosophical movement but that has shown itself to be a pusillanimous business at best. There is no “match” because there is no adverse team. Ray Brassier, Jason Hills, Pete Wolfendale, Leon Niemoczynski, Kevin v Duuglas-Ittu (Kvond), myself, and many others do not form a team, and our positive ideas are mostly very different. I think all of us have had the same experience as Wolfendale, of trying to engage in the discussion, of being perplexed that this was not possible, and of finally realising that there was no discussion, and that the seeming ideas had been voided of all philosophical sense and were being exchanged as empty tokens, connoting concepts that were never forthcoming. Although we share similar experiences of the OOO community, my analysis of Harman's OOO differs from Wolfendale’s. He tries to reconstruct a single coherent ontology of OOO whereas I think that Harman proposes, as if they were one, at least three different ontologies. I agree on many points with many of the book's arguments and analyses, but my main reserve about Wolfendale's critique of Harman’s ontology is that his version of the principle of charity leads him to attribute too much coherence to Harman's system and to give too much weight to the doctrine of the “fourfold” and its metaphors. This cumbersome doctrine consists merely in a series of metaphorical epicycles linking Harman's Ontology 1 (unknowable imperceptible unimaginable timeless withdrawn real objects) and Ontology 3 (everything is objects, we are surrounded by objects). Harman’s talk of “molten cores” etc. constitutes a mediation between these two ontologies, that we may call Ontology 2. So in my critique of Harman, I do not so much disagree with his choice of metaphors as with their position in his ontological geography. A philosophical argument belongs to the space of reasons, which itself belongs to the space of concepts and meanings. One cannot begin to understand an argument without, at least tentatively, situating it inside conceptual space. In the case of Harman’s OOO, his rhetoric of objects creates confusion as to his actual ontological claims and conflates into an ambiguous unity these three ontologies. In his book Wolfendale argues that “pluralism motivates strong correlationism” (346). He sees the break with correlationism that he desires as constituting also a break with pluralism and a return to universalism (i.e. monism). He thus sees Harman as continuous with the poststructuralists. However he seems to exempt Deleuze and Badiou, both pluralists, from this “bad” configuration of pluralist correlationism and yet to include Latour within it, found guily of "ontological liberalism". This judgement, insofar as it is rationally motivated, depends on Wolfendale’s reconstruction of what he calls the “core conceit” of correlationist philosophies: "We briefly mentioned this core conceit of correlationism at the beginning of the last chapter: the idea that knowledge is irredeemably contaminated by its semantic conditions. We are now in a position to see how pluralism radicalises this conceit, by enabling strong correlationism to claim that the separation of the for-us from the in-itself is effected not simply by the inherent plurality of sensibility (e.g., forms of intuition, sensory mechanisms, etc.), but by the inherent plurality of thought as such (e.g., historical thrownness, language games, etc.)", (346-347). The “core conceit” of correlationism that Wolfendale rejects is the thesis of the theory-ladenness of knowledge, and the consequent pluralism of thought and sensibility that this thesis makes possible. The surprising word in this claim is “contaminated”. The semiotic turn in French theory does in fact recognise the pervasiveness of linguistic structuration, but does not for all that reduce everything to language (neither Lyotard, nor Serres, nor Foucault, Badiou, nor Deleuze, nor Stiegler, nor Latour are guilty of that, and even Derrida’s so-called “textualism” is an ambiguous case). "It is this pluralistic dissolution of semantics into a diaspora of historical, cultural, linguistic, and even biological forms that mutates Husserl’s phenomenological suppression of the noumenon into the quasi-mystical celebration of radical alterity that is the mainstay of strong correlationism in the Continental tradition" (347). “Radical alterity”, it must be recalled, is another name for what Quentin Meillassoux calls the “great outdoors”. Alterity, in other words, is the name for the realist, or non-correlational, intent and structure of the pluralist thought that Wolfendale is condemning here. The pejorative use of the expression “quasi-mystical celebration” also is also out of place here, and unjustly partisan: if any of these thinkers is “quasi-mystical” it is Meillassoux, with his espousal of the God Who May Be. In a book whose principal target is supposed to be Harman’s object-oriented philosophy Wolfendale goes out of his way to associate this OOP with the seemingly unrelated idea of pluralism. Thus he conceives the scope of his critique to be much wider than its immediate object: "The parallel between this critical shift from universalism to pluralism and the sceptical shift from weak to strong correlationism indexes the reigning doxa of the Continental tradition in the latter half of the twentieth century" (348-349). It would be interesting to know who Wolfendale has in mind when he refers to “pluralism”. Deleuze was a pluralist, and not a “sceptic” in Wolfendale’s sense. Along with Deleuze, Lyotard, Foucault, and Serres can best be described as pluralist realists. They all criticised “correlationism” and elaborated non-correlationist philosophies long before Meillassoux was even born (1967). I myself came to Paris in 1980 to get away from the “correlationism” that was taking over in Continental circles in Sydney. When I arrived, Foucault was talking about practices of the self outside the linguistic structures, Deleuze was talking about painting forces (Bacon) and inhuman perception (cinema), Lyotard was talking about the Sublime (the noncorrelational divergence of the faculties) and Serres was discussing the noise outside the systems. It was all pluralist and all noncorrelationist. I went on to discover Latour’s emphasis on material networks, Stiegler’s material processes of transindividuation, and Laruelle’s nonphilosophy. So the major French figures have been consistently “non-correlationist” since at least the sixties up to today. I think Wolfendale’s problem is that he employs a reading grid based on too short a period of time (perhaps 5 years) to interpret a longer and philosophically denser period. This is a fault he shares with Harman, and it gives a very distorted picture indeed of recent philosophical history. Wolfendale’s conflation of pluralism and correlationism leads him to claim "this sceptico-critical alliance of strong correlationism and radical pluralism constitutes the reigning doxa of the Continental tradition in the latter half of the twentieth century”, but he continues “that is not to say that it is the only doxa" (352-353). This idea of a sceptical pluralist-correlationism (or radical relativism) as the hegemonic position within recent and contemporary Continental philosophy is simply false, it merely repeats uncritically Harman's and Meillassoux’s fictional histories. This historical fiction was invented and proclaimed by them in order to legitimate their ideas and to make their own interventions seem necessary, but it is promoted only at the price of forgetting or obliterating the living core of poststructural French philosophy, i.e. of more than 70 years of philosophical work. I have often warned against this tendency to rewrite philosophical history so as to present the recent movements of OOO/SR as embodying philosophy awakening from its dogmatic anti-realist slumber and turning at last away from postmodern relativist dreams, orienting itself towards the real that had so long been neglected by our intellectual predecessors. This phantasm of the omnipresence of relativist and anti-realist critical thought and of the abandon of speculation as a means to discover the real is demonstrably false: none of the creative thinkers of poststructuralism (Althusser, Deleuze, Lyotard, Foucault, and Derrida) were anti-realist and their philosophies were constructed to combat such tendencies. One of the consequences of this phantasm is that our immediate philosophical past is forgotten or becomes unreadable when viewed through “new realist” glasses. Another is that contemporary thinkers who maintain an informed and positive relation to that past become unreadable too, while thinkers who present concepts or slogans surreptitiously stolen from that past as if they were major steps forward allowing us to break forever from the dead hand of the erroneous past are taken at face value and held in high esteem. Such falsification of history is to be seen in the very title of the movement "Speculative Realism", as the Continental pluralists that I have cited are far more aptly described as speculative realists than as anti-realist correlationists. An image of the alternative doxa, or non-correlationist “counter-image” of thought, favoured by Wolfendale can be found at work in the dialogue between Deleuze and Badiou, where he praises their substantial and “non-metaphorical” use of mathematics (353-354). He seems to see in this purported shared feature a criterion for demarcating between correlationism and noncorrelationism. As Wolfendale himself explicitly endorses “mathematical structuralism” (352), one may wonder whether this proposed criterion of demarcation is as objective as Wolfendale would like us to think. It is not obvious why the “central and crucially non-metaphorical role played within [this dialogue] by mathematics” (353-354) should provide any guarantee of “non-correlationism”. Harman, on the contrary, sees such mathematical scientism as a sign of undermining, i.e; of reductionism, and thus of correlationism. Just positing that mathematics is a non-correlational language or discipline is not very convincing as an argument. Badiou is contradictory on this point. He poses that mathematics is ontology, and so seems committed to the stability of mathematics, if Being is to be regarded as stable. At the same time he treats the “matheme” (i.e. mathematics and the sciences) as a truth-procedure on a par with poetry, love, and politics. This would seem to open mathematics, the same as for the other procedures, to revolutionary paradigm change. Following Latour and Laruelle we could extend this list of truthprocedures to include religion, an extension that Badiou himself considers, only to reject. Certainly, much of mathematics is stable, or generally treated as stable. Further, it’s only a small number of specialists who change things. On the other hand, religions, even Christianity, evolve a lot. If one includes the gnostics and other heretics, there is quite a lot of multiplication of axioms, of their variation, replacement, subtraction, and destruction going on. Religion is not to be confused with its institutions, which precisely try to maintain stability. Thus there is no necessary primacy of mathematics in terms of quantity of invention. As to quality or depth of invention, it is not clear how much deep change and discontinuity there is in mathematics. Little work has been done on this subject. Michel Serres in his HERMES volumes sketched out a periodisation of very general epistemes that included mathematics alongside other domains. In this model, there are informal paradigms that most research, of whatever domain, fits into in a particular epoch, and that are only recognised after we leave them behind. But even if mathematics is freer and more deterritorialised than other regional ontologies, this is no reason to make it the anchor for a new realism. That is, or should be, a quite separate argument. This freedom to make and break axioms is for Harman a sign that maths is “sensual” rather than real. So we are witnessing an opposition between two philosophical sensibilities in the HarmanWolfendale dispute, and the status of mathematics is itself part of the dispute, not the decisive criterion for resolving it. Nor do I see any reason to accept at face value the thesis that “phenomenology” is inherently correlationist. Bernard Stiegler has often remarked that Husserl's “Origins of Geometry” introduces a new epoch in his thought, that breaks open the subject-object enclosure by making writing as tertiary retention enter essentially into the constitution of mathematics. Hubert Dreyfus and Charles Spinosa argue convincingly that Heidegger’s thing-paradigm breaks with the potential closure and correlationism inherent in his earlier understandings of being paradigm. The spectre of “orthodox correlationism” presiding as the dominant paradigm of post-Kantian philosophy, enslaving thought and paralysing action, is a chimera that has no foundation if one consults the works of the major post-structuralist French thinkers. The remedies proposed for this imaginary illness, both Harman’s absolutism and Wolfendale’s universalism, represent a regression compared to these works. The two perspectives share much that is questionable, and disagree only over the general orientation within that common vision. I think we must reject Meillassoux’s whole scenography of the encounter between subject and object, which constitutes a false problem, so that his solution to that problem is of no interest. One has only to recall Popper’s “epistemology without a knowing subject” to see the conceptual regression embodied in setting up the problem in the way that Mellassoux does in AFTER FINITUDE. (Note: I am particularly indebted to a facebook discussion with Joshua Comer for helping me gain clarity on the problematic status of mathematics in Wolfendale’s polemic with Harman). I did not like Ray Brassier’s postface to the book as much as Wolfendale’s preface, no doubt because in it Brassier combines his own personal anamnesis as an ex-speculative realist with the promulgation of what I regard as a completely false and intellectually harmful historical narrative about the omnipresence of a correlationist orthodoxy and about the attempted “breakout” that SR represented. This breakout was a failure supposedly due to the capture of the movement by Harmanian branding and marketing. As we have seen, Wolfendale associates Harman’s OOP with scepticism and pluralism. In a similar vein Brassier tries to associate it with scepticism and “dandyism” posited as hallmarks of poststructuralism. A strange feature of Brassier’s argument in the postface is that he associates correlationism and its “pervasive epistemological scepticism” (405) with the poststructuralist critique of representation. He even goes so far as to assert the existence of an “anti-representational (or ‘correlationist’) consensus” (417), in agreement with Wolfendale’s notion of “orthodox correlationism” as the “conceptual core” of the “sceptico-critical hegemony” (359). It follows from this conceptually misguided and historically false premise that the critique of correlationism is tied to an escape from scepticism and a return to representation. We are moving at a very general and abstract level of discussion here, where words may be employed with different acceptions depending on the author’s problematic. But as a historical thesis about the concept of representation as actually used in recent Continental philosophy this is the exact opposite of the situation. The critique of representation, for example in Deleuze’s analysis of the image of thought, is the critique of “correlationism” (if one must use that misleading term). Representation is analysed as constructing the world in its own image and repressing awareness of this constructive activity, it is denounced as unconscious correlationism. That is to say that the critique of correlationism began and was accomplished long before Meillassoux set pen to paper. A return to representation risks being a return to the dogmatic image of thought and to its implicit correlational functioning. This is why I do not like the term “correlationism”. If one can be an unconscious correlationist, all the while thinking one is a realist, as Wolfendale claims is the case with Harman, it would seem that anyone and everyone can be diagnosed as “correlationist” when viewed in terms of a dogmatically maintained stance on reality imported from outside commitments into the debate. Similarly, the concept of representation viewed in these terms is itself ambiguous, as both its proscription and its defence could be called correlationist. In its diagnostic use correlationism is not a clear and stable notion capable of serving as a demarcation criterion between “sceptical” and “scientistic” positions (as each calls the other). However, on the question of the association established between correlationism and reductionism, I do not think that accusations of “reductionism” depend necessarily for their validity on a model that gives pre-eminence to scientific explanation. We must distinguish between intra-regional reduction (e.g. within the sciences, but equally within politics or psychoanalysis) and inter-regional reduction, where one or more regional ontologies are reduced to another. Brassier himself can just as plausibly be accused of naturalistic (or even “scientistic”) reductionism if he gives ontological primacy to the natural realm to the point of reducing other proposed forms of existence to that realm. On the other hand, Harman can be accused of anti-natural reductionism, in that he reduces all reality to his realm of real objects, declaring sensual objects, i.e. the objects of the sciences, of the humanities, and of common sense, to be “utter shams”. Thus there are 2 points that I find positive in Harman's philosophy: 1) Anti-scientism: Harman assigns only a regional validity to scientific truths and denies the pretention of scientists to cognitive hegemony. This is important as there has been a recent return to scientism in Anglophone Continental Philosophy. The valorisation of science and mathematics is a turn which constitutes merely an alternative version of the flight from pluralism. 2) Anti-literalism: Harman defends the use of “allusive” language and style against the primacy of referential language and literal understanding. The new scientism valorises a referential mode of language, freed from its ambiguities and from its metaphorical substrate. It is the presence of these two traits that helps to explain why scientistic objections to Harman are ultimately unconvincing. No argumentative strategy can succeed in its critique of OOO if it does not acknowledge the positive nature of Harman's anti-scientism and his anti-literalism.of these two hypotheses and their ensuing suggestions. Wolfendale, like Brassier, is scientistic and literalistic, and despite scoring many points against Harman’s system he cannot provide a convincing alternative ontological hypothesis. An interesting difference between Wolfendale’s explorations of Harman’s contradictory theory of time and my own analysis can be seen in his desperate attempt to construct a logic that would make sense of Harman’s seeming contradictions. We both agree that there is an unresolved tension here. I argue that Harman’s “method” is one of ungrounded intuition – that is to say it is a non-method, as no theory of this intuition is provided by him. This absence of method allows Harman to advance theses on the basis of descriptions that are systematically ambiguous as to their status, oscillating between metaphysical (or speculative) hypotheses and phenomenological (or empirical) experience or sometimes even conflating them. The intuitive acceptance that Harman’s persuasive descriptions aim at relies on the obliviousness to the question of whether this intuition is phenomenological (confined to the sensual realm) or metaphysical (confined to the realm of real objects). A notable example of this can be seen in the opening pages of THE QUADRUPLE OBJECT where Harman appeals to the perspective of “naiveté”, which perceives a world of objects. This is precisely the world revealed by Harman’s metaphysical intuition, except for one detail that Harman omits to mention. This world of objects revealed to naive experience is a sensual world, and thus illusory in terms of Harman’s metaphysical bifurcation of the world into sensual and real. Yet this naive representation of the world revealed by our perception is treated as somehow confirming the metaphysical theory that it is illusory. The status of time in Harman’s system is even more paradoxical than that of method, if that is possible. Harman constantly criticises so-called “relationist” ontologies, such as those of Deleuze, Whitehead, and Latour, as being incapable of explaining change. Harman argues that if everything is related then nothing can change, as the being of any thing is exhausted in its relations, so there is no reserve of potential that is necessary to make change possible. At the same time Harman often repeats that time is sensual and thus unreal. Harman’s own metaphysics is incoherent and he is mistaken about relationist metaphysics since he neglects kinetic and dynamic relations (those concerning rates of change and their relations, i.e. differences of speed and acceleration). No doubt pursuing a charitable reading beyond ordinary hermeneutic limits, Wolfendale feels obliged to posit a concept that is not present in Harman’s system at all: that of “deep time”, or what one could call noumenal time: "The reality of a deep time in which objects can come into being and cease to be provides the phenomenological background against which the intuitions of discreteness and causation emerge. Without this unthematised conception of time, his picture of vacuum-sealed objects that are nevertheless capable of violent interactions makes no sense" (Wolfendale, 206). This conception of "deep time" is certainly “unthematised” as it nowhere appears in Harman’s own expositions of his system, and it is in contradiction with his explicit pronouncements about the unreality of time (itself in contradiction with his insistence on the reality of change). There is no reason to believe that it is part of the “phenomenological” background of Harman's theory, never mentioned but logically required to ground the intuitions of discreteness, causation, and change. Rather the concept of “deep time” is part of the intuitive background for Harman’s invocation of objects, in the sense I have described of an intuition that is systematically ambiguous between the sensual and the real. "Change" is used by Harman intuitively, without explanation, and without taking the trouble to respect the difference between real and sensual that is fundamental to his system. "Deep time" is a concept that provides a way of attributing more coherence to Harman's thought than it actually has. If we follow more closely the letter of Harman’s text it would be more appropriate to talk in terms of real change. I share Wolfendale’s perplexity about how we can have real change without real time. Wolfendale’s critiques of OOP quite often do not originate with him, his book assembles in one place many criticisms of Harman's system that have already been made by others, from its beginning up to now. Where Wolfendale's text differs is that he tries to give these arguments and critical analyses greater scope, sense and weight by incorporating them into his own less than satisfactory unifying framework of "mathematical structuralism", and this unified approach is one of the main advantages of the book. However, this appeal to a mathematico-scientific foundation is question-begging. Wolfendale's own framework relies heavily on scientistic assumptions that are part of what Harman's OOP is reacting against. Thus the chief advantage of the book is also its greatest weakness. Harman's philosophising begins from a point where relativist arguments have weakened the presumption in favour of scientism, and a refutation that presupposes the validity of scientism will have no effect on those who have seen through its presuppositions and who recoil from the descent into chaos and incommunicability that this rejection of scientism seems to entail. For behind the question of correlationism lies the problem of the obstacle to dialogue, communication, discussion, and exchange posed by the existence of incommensurable systems of thought and worldviews. Graham Harman’s OOP tries to provide an answer to this problem, but the solution he proposes is unacceptable as it universalises the problem rather than resolving it. One thing that is lacking in Pete Wolfendale’s book is that he gives a good account of why people were attracted to the original discussions around Speculative Realism and of their subsequent disappointment, but he does not give a positive account of the attraction that Harman’s philosophy itself exercised over many people at the beginning. I do not think that “correlationism” as such was ever the issue, but that underlying this pseudo-problem is the problem posed by the existence of incommensurability and of communicative closure between different ontologies or understandings of Being. This problem is part of the heritage of the later Heidegger, that Harman tried to undercut with his generalisation of tool-being. This sort of incommensurability seems to lead to a radical relativism, and to the impossibility of explaining the changes in worldview that have occurred historically, or that can be found in an individual’s personal history. By proposing a solution to this problem Harman gave the impression that getting acquainted with the principles of his philosophy and with its epicycles was very much worth the effort. I can testify that I deeply felt the problem, and that is why I turned to Harman’s book TOOLBEING for a solution. I had initially been drawn to the contemporary restatement of Heidegger’s incommensurable plurality of understandings of Being that is to be found in Hubert Dreyfus and Sean Kelly’s book ALL THINGS SHINING, but I found that they didn’t confront the problems of dialogue and of theory-change. Looking for alternative accounts and new solutions, I discovered Harman’s work and I was at first impressed by his freedom of style and inspired by his proposed solution. Tool-being was universalised to give us what amounts to a new philosophy of Nature, where there are no incommensurable boundaries thanks to the primacy of objects over the frameworks that attempt to grasp them. However, I soon realised that the solution was worse than the problem it was supposed to resolve. Harman’s account generalised the problem of incommensurability to all beings, treated as vacuumpacked “objects” sealed off from all relation, unable to interact except by a magical ad hoc process called “vicarious causation”. I came to see that Heidegger had already proposed his own solution in his thing-paradigm, which is of the same type as the various philosophies of assemblage extending from Feyerabend through Deleuze to Latour. In these theories the existence of incommensurability is recognised, and it is admitted that it can occasionally prevent communication. Yet, if we take assemblages as primary then incommensurability exists only as a level of abstraction where certain elements of the process of interaction are isolated out and frozen into structures that are regarded as the essence of what is going on. In other words, the problem is a local and historical artefact rather than a universal predicament. In a wider ontology, such as we find in the work of Paul Feyerabend, Gilles Deleuze, and Bernard Stiegler (see my essay IS ONTOLOGY MAKING US STUPID?), the “correlational circle” never gets formed, so there is no need of special means for dissolving it or for going outside. The perceptive reader was able to see that OOO was an imposture already years ago, and Harman's philosophy was born refuted. But with the rise to poularity and the passage of time Harman became over-confident, expressing the basic struture of his philosophy clearly and simply, without the usual smokescreen provided by his tendentious rewriting of history of philosophy, and the Harman hoax is now apparent for all to see. My problem with Wolfendale’s book (and also with Brassier's postscript) is that it still preserves the broad outlines of this historical smokescreen, to which I give no credence. For example, using the bogus concept of “correlationism” (or in Harman's variant, the "philosophies of access") to characterise a problem arising out of post-Kantian philosophy that object-oriented philosophy is trying to solve, and failing. I think that conceding Harman (and Meillassoux) even this much is buying into the smokescreen, and in my writings I argue that correlationism is incoherent as a concept, that it is a disguised yet inferior imitation of the concept of the “problematic of the subject” already deployed critically by the structuralists (and here I would include Karl Popper among the structuralists), and so that it has no pertinence for a critique of the post-structuralists, who have left the problem it ineptly tries to describe far behind. I prefer to examine Harman in contemporary terms, without his legitimating meta-narrative on the history of philosophy, and to show how incoherent his system is, and that it is in fact a simplistic de-temporalised travesty, or “synchronic shadow”, of recent philosophies such as that of Bruno Latour, Bernard Stiegler, and François Laruelle.