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Architecture and object-oriented 
ontology

simon weir in conversation with graham harman

What is, and what isn’t, an ontology ?

SW: Ontology is a word that, wherever it goes, 
changes its meaning. So, to avoid unhelpful 
confusions - some confusions are generative - what 
is an ontology? I tend to think of an ontology 
mathematically, as the set of all things with nothing 
outside the set.

GH: Whereas metaphysics is an Ancient Greek 
term famously coined by Aristotle’s editors, the 
word “ontology” first appeared as recently as the 
17th century. One aspect of my relation to language 
is that I like to have a number of synonyms 
available for every philosophical term in order to 
avoid repetition. I don’t like the sort of pedantic 
precision which demands that each term have a 
single meaning that the author is obliged to define 
exactly at the outset. As an example, many people 
draw a sharp distinction between “object” and 
“thing”; Heidegger is the most prominent of these, 
using “object” in a pejorative sense and “thing” as 
a more positive term. But I prefer to use object, 
entity, thing, and unit interchangeably. I also use 
metaphysics and ontology to mean the same thing, 
though Heidegger and Derrida have turned the word 
“metaphysics” into a kind of insulting nickname for 
everything that ought to be left behind.



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SW: To frame object-oriented ontology’s position, let’s begin with realism. 
Most people understand realism: we are in direct contact with the things 
we touch. Once we recognise there are sounds we can’t hear, lights we 
can’t see, and that there are all sorts of illusions and misapprehensions, we 
might easily accept that our view of reality is not so direct, but mediated. 
We produce some kind of image of reality within us, so it might be called 
representational realism. What may be surprising to readers without 
philosophical training is that this too is rebuked by the philosophical 
tradition of anti-realism.

GH: My position obviously isn’t a form of direct realism, since for me 
it is not only humans who cannot make direct contact with reality: the 
same holds true even for inanimate entities. Object-oriented ontology 
(OOO) is better described as a form of what you call representational 
realism, with the surprising proviso that not only humans and animals do 
the representing. When two inanimate objects make contact, they cannot 
do so directly, since neither has direct access to the features of the other. 
The idea behind OOO’s realism is that reality is so real that it can’t be 
exhausted by any particular depiction of it.

Realism is usually defined as a “belief in a world external to the mind.” 
But this way of putting it betrays an anthropocentric bias: why should 
the mind be the only thing with an outside? Realism should be treated, 
instead, as a general theory of objects and relations, such that objects are 
always withheld from these relations and need a vicarious third term to 
make relations possible. Insofar as reality withdraws from all relation, 
object-oriented realism might also be called an infra-realism.

SW: So object-oriented ontology is an infra-realism. Since the real is 
withdrawn, how do we know it’s there, or how have you induced the 
presence of a real that cannot be touched directly?

GH: This is the same question that led the German Idealists to abandon 
Kant’s thing-in-itself: “If we claim to think a thing outside thought, 
isn’t this already a thought? Therefore, there is nothing withdrawn from 
thought.” In this way, the thing-in-itself implodes into something internal 
and negotiable, whether in the form of a mere external shock or trauma 
(Fichte, Lacan) or in terms of a provisional and immanent limit eventually 



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overcome by the labor of the negative through the 
course of history (Hegel).

The problem with this popular assault on the realism 
of the in-itself is that it forgets what philosophy is 
about: philosophia, meaning the love of wisdom 
rather than wisdom sensu stricto. Socrates does not 
jest when he says that he only knows that he knows 
nothing, that he has never been anyone’s teacher, 
and so forth.

Readers of Plato may recall “Meno’s Paradox,” in 
which Meno repeats the old Sophist’s argument 
that you can’t look for something if you already 
have it (because then there is no need to look) and 
you can’t look for it if you don’t have it (because 
then you could never recognize it if found). Socrates 
responds with what is really the foundational insight 
of Western philosophy: you never really have or fail 
to have something absolutely, but you have it to a 
certain degree and are called upon to enter further 
into its depths.

According to object-oriented philosophy, there 
are a number of ways in which we can know the 
real without knowing it directly. This happens 
in cases where the real falls out of joint with its 
surface qualities: as in Heidegger’s case of the 
broken hammer, or in metaphor where the object 
is ascribed strange properties and therefore becomes 
unknowable yet vaguely compelling. Language is 
often used to hint or insinuate rather than to state 
directly, though the modern era hates rhetoric so 
much that it forgets how crucial insinuation and 
innuendo are to everyday speech. The arts, too, 
are well aware that many things must be hinted 
at subtly rather than stated in literal terms. Lovers 
know this as well when sending alluring messages, 
and comedians know it when telling jokes. To spell 

 

Heidegger 
and Derrida 

have turned 
the word 

“metaphysics” 
into a kind 

of insulting 
nickname for 

everything 
that ought to 
be left behind.

“

”



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things out in literal terms is just one of the tools of human cognition, and 
not the one most important for philosophy.

Causation and perception

SW: Some of the principles of OOO are: there are objects everywhere, all 
objects are inside other objects, all objects have objects inside them, objects 
have qualities, but objects are not only their qualities, it is not possible to 
encounter a quality without an object bearing that quality.

GH: That’s a nice list. I would add that humans also count as objects, even 
if objects of an unusually interesting sort; for this reason, “objects” do not 
exist in opposition to “subjects.” Also, objects and qualities both come in 
two kinds (real and sensual), and both kinds of objects can have both kinds 
of qualities (again, real and sensual) so that reality consists of four possible 
object-quality pairings. On top of this, objects have only a loose relation 
with their own qualities. Aesthetics is first philosophy because it studies 
these loose relations: how they are generated and under what conditions 
they break apart. Real objects cannot make contact unless mediated by 
a sensual object, and sensual objects only make contact when mediated 
by a real one. This still isn’t a complete list, but I can never remember 
everything at once. As our conversation progresses, more features of objects 
will undoubtedly arise.

SW: Are qualities objects? 

GH: The short answer is “no.” It goes back to one of the many valid 
insights still to be found in Aristotle’s philosophy. He tells us that whereas 
sad is always sad and happy is always happy, Socrates can be sad one 
day and happy the next. That’s one major indication that Socrates is a 
substance. A substance remains what it is even if – within certain limits, of 
course – its qualities vary widely. By “primary substance” Aristotle means 
individual things. My parallel term is “real object,” which also refers to 
individual things. Of course, there are a number of differences between 
the two phrases. First of all, I emphasize the inaccessible elusiveness of real 
objects, and while Aristotle has more awareness of that than many people 
realize, he does not emphasize the gap between the mind and the object 
to the same extent that OOO does (coming as we do after both Kant 
and Heidegger). Second, Aristotle is more comfortable with natural than 
artificial things as primary substances, whereas I don’t think the natural 



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vs. artificial divide matters very much: an airplane 
or a city are real objects no less than a raindrop. 
Third, Aristotle does not think there can be primary 
substances inside of primary substances: he holds 
that the parts of a substance are only potentially 
individuals, not actually so. For OOO, however, 
composition in the part/whole relationship does not 
negate the individuality of the parts, which remain 
real objects in their own right even while belonging 
to larger wholes. Despite these differences, OOO is 
a philosophy of individuals in the same Aristotelian 
line that passes through some of the Islamic 
philosophers, some of the Medieval Christians, and 
Leibniz.

But the long answer to your question is that 
anything can become an object. That is to say, any 
quality can turn into a sensual object as soon as 
we treat it as something enduring that undergoes 
variation in details. For example, the red of my 
Mazda CX-5 is initially a quality of the car that can 
be changed without destroying the car or giving it a 
new identity. But I could focus instead on the rather 
unique metallic red that Mazda came up with for 
this car, and substantify it by focusing on current 
variations in the red across the car’s outer surface, or 
by variations over time when we compare the car’s 
red when straight from the factory as opposed to 
now, four years later. Furthermore, there is always 
a point at which sensual objects can become real, 
often through the mechanism of social acceptance. 
The Joker was initially a sensual object, but is now 
a real one: not in the sense that such a character 
actually lurks in the night of New York, but in the 
sense that movie audiences are able to judge which 
actor’s portrayal of The Joker is the most true to the 
character, which ones are completely insufficient, 
and so forth. In this respect even qualities such as 
“green,” “strong,” or “macho” become real objects 

 

Object-oriented 
ontology 

(OOO) is better 
described as a 
form of what 

you  CALL 
REPRESENTATIVE 

REALISM 

“

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that even have their own social histories.

SW: Causation in the OOO schema is the interaction of two or more real 
objects. Whenever real objects causally interact, a sensual object is generated 
by their contact, and this sensual object acts as the intermediary between 
the real objects. This is known as vicarious or occasional causation. Also, 
causation can be symmetrical or asymmetrical. Symmetrical causation is 
all kinds of contact and causation as we normally think of it, and is well 
described by Newtonian physics; asymmetrical causation is perception. 

GH: Actually, causation in OOO can only have two terms. The reason is 
that all causation begins with the interface between one real object and 
one sensual object, which is then modified in such a way that there is an 
indirect influence of one real object on another or of both on each other. 
I’m aware that people like to give seemingly subtle analyses in which there 
are multiple causal factors for any event. These days, multiplicity has a very 
good press and duality a very bad one, so it’s not surprising that everyone 
goes running for the multiple and the many whenever philosophy is being 
done. But in fact, when there are multiple factors they must combine 
beforehand in such a way that only two objects end up confronting each 
other.

SW: This multiplicity is understandable. When I (a real object) am 
watching (asymmetrical causation) a movie (a real object), the factors are 
combined. Yet when I consider myself as comprised of subcomponent 
objects, my ears hear the sounds, and my eyes see the images, et cetera. 
It may be the case that all causal events are multiple causal events, and 
vice versa. The singularity or multiplicity of causal occurrences looks like a 
question of perspective.

GH: As for symmetrical causation, yes, so-called “physical” causation 
provides all the easiest examples of this. In fact, I think the symmetry of 
causation is the important factor here, and what we call physical reality may 
just be a vulgar nickname for symmetrical causation. But no doubt there 
are other forms of symmetrical causation than the kind we associate with 
“matter,” which for me is an almost worthless concept. No one really has 
any idea what matter would be; for OOO there are only forms. Likewise, 
the human realm provides most of the clearest examples of asymmetry: I as 
a human can observe long-dead stars, which thereby have an effect on me 



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even though I can’t possibly affect them in turn. But 
there are probably asymmetrical phenomena even 
in the so-called physical world. In short, I suspect 
that the overworked boundary between physical 
and mental is an accidental product of modern 
philosophy: not because “all is one,” but because the 
most important dividing lines are located elsewhere.

SW: My work in OOO has been drawn from 
perception to the problem of memory and 
consciousness.1  Consciousness can turn sensual 
objects into real ones by making memories of them, 
and vice versa. Consciousness is a machine for 
making post-sensual objects into real objects. When 
we think about asymmetrical causation, about 
perception, the difference between a real object and 
the sensual object of its perception would vary a 
tremendous amount depending on the real object. 
Looking up at the night sky, it’s obvious that our 
sensual object is an infinitesimally small thing, and 
a profoundly different thing, compared to the real 
object that is out there. But with much simpler 
objects like the number 5, for example, what would 
you say are the differences between the real 5 and a 
sensual 5?

GH: Let me first say that I wouldn’t agree that when 
looking up at the night sky the sensual object is an 
infinitesimally tiny thing. This is true only in the 
limited sense that our field of vision doesn’t cover 
much of the sky and can’t penetrate any further 
than a small portion of the Milky Way. The sensual 
object, for me, isn’t limited to what is covered by the 
senses. The term is “sensual,” not “sensible,” after all. 
Edmund Husserl is the one who says that the senses 
can only experience the shifting adumbrations of 
perceived objects while the intellect is able to dig all 
the way down to the essential properties. For OOO, 
by contrast, the senses and the intellect are both on 
the sensual side of the equation rather than the real 

 
 Whenever 

real objects 
causally 

interact, a 
sensual object 
is generated by 

their contact

“

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side.

As for the number 5, I can’t say that there is a fully developed object-oriented 
model of mathematics at this point. I do agree with most mathematicians 
that mathematical objects have real existence (this is one of the few points 
where I am a Platonist). But I would not agree that we have some sort 
of Cartesian intellectual intuition that allows us direct contact with the 
real number 5; that’s Quentin Meillassoux, not me. The question, then, 
is how we would describe the supposed difference between the real and 
the sensual 5. One possible path is shown by Imre Lakatos in Proofs and 
Refutations, where he argues –among other things– that mathematical 
definitions have to be revised in light of mathematical experience, which 
suggests that mathematics is more similar to natural science than we might 
expect.2  If we start to view mathematics in those terms (and I will admit 
there are certain problems in doing so) then it is easier to see why direct 
access to the number 5 is less plausible than one might think, just as direct 
access to gravity or electromagnetism is refuted (in my view, at least) by 
continued revolutions in these areas.

SW: In causation, sensual objects contain real and sensual qualities, so is it 
possible that causation involves the transfer of some real qualities? Can we 
reliably infer the real from this?
In the case of some real objects, like the number 5, are they simple enough 
that we can locate the real qualities within the sensual object? If I add two 
5s in my mind to make a real 10, have real qualities been engaged and 
retained? Do we have a situation where there is no meaningful difference 
between a real quality and a sensual quality?

GH: All sensual objects have both sensual and real qualities. It was Husserl 
who first gave technical precision to this idea. Imagine that I rotate a tennis 
ball in my hand, at different times of day and in various fluctuating moods. 
These are “adumbrations,” as Husserl puts it: the German Abschattungen. 
No matter what the adumbrations of the ball may be at any given moment, 
I continue to recognize this ball as one and the same. Since we are simply 
talking about experience here, not about reality, I am the one who decides 
whether or not it is the same ball. If it turns out later that I was wrong, 
that someone quickly replaced the ball with a different one while I wasn’t 
paying attention, then this pertains to the level of the real object, which is 
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But along with the sensual qualities or adumbrations 
of the tennis ball, it must also have real qualities. 
There are certain features that could arise that 
would convince me that it’s not the same tennis 
ball I initially thought it was: I might realize that 
my roommate replaced It with another, or maybe 
it turns out to be a fake tennis ball produced by 
an artist, or perhaps other such scenarios. Husserl’s 
great error was to hold that the senses give us the 
adumbrations while the intellect gives us the real 
qualities. This is merely a symptom of Husserl’s 
rationalist and mathematicist prejudices: he found 
it inconceivable that there could be any layer of 
reality impenetrable even to the intellect.

Returning to your question, there is no possible 
case where real and sensual qualities are one. This is 
only possible if we believe in intellectual intuition, 
which I do not. Why not? Because I hold that any 
intuition requires a translation of form. Here’s what 
I mean. People who think that intellectual intuition 
is possible think that we can clearly and distinctly 
see, before the mind’s eye, the essential properties 
of a tennis ball or a dog. Now, such people would 
never claim that they are bringing the actual ball 
or dog into their brains. What they are saying, 
most often, is that they are extracting a knowable 
form from an object and bringing it into the mind, 
leaving behind only the “matter” of the object. 
But there is no proof that anything like formless 
matter exists. In fact, the notion of matter was only 
invented as a crutch to prove the existence of direct 
intellectual access! That is to say, the difference 
between a tennis ball in reality and the tennis ball 
in the mind is said to consist in the lack of “matter” 
in the second case, but this is a mere alibi that 
allows us to think that the form remains the same 
when extracted and removed from an object. Yet the 
form always undergoes translation, and this is why 

ALL 
SENSUAL 
OBJECTS 

HAVE BOTH 
SENSUAL AND 

REAL QUALITIES. 
IT WAS HUSSERL 
WHO FIRST GAVE 

TECHNICAL 
PRECISION TO 

THIS IDEA.

“

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intellectual intuition is impossible. In the words of Bruno Latour: “There 
is no transport without transformation.”3  There is always the question of 
whether mathematical objects are a special case, whether they alone permit 
of direct intuition. I suspect not, but all I can do at the moment is suggest 
this, not prove it.

SW: Yes, certainly. It is only in the axiomatic case of simple numbers that 
I cannot see any difference between some of the real and sensual qualities. 
Unlike all other objects, they seem to be stripped of all depth. Continuing 
with perception, since we, as individuals, are real objects, we only have 
access to sensual objects which are created by contact with other real 
objects, and therefore we are truly surrounded by the unreal. Even when 
we look at ourselves, we can only see a sensual object. It seems as if those 
Buddhist and Hindu expressions - see without seeing, hear without hearing 
- are onto something. Without such effortless, causeless perception, we are 
truly imprisoned in a simulacra wrapping the withdrawn real. This isn’t 
what Baudrillard meant by the term simulacra - since he is a nihilist anti-
realist - but in the context of infra-realism, the simulacrum would be the 
enveloping sensual world around every real object.

GH: Baudrillard meant a lot to me when I began graduate study. And even 
though I am now a hardcore realist, I’m still impressed by him. His denial 
of reality doesn’t bother me that much; in a sense, Husserl was already a 
theorist of simulacra. But there is a reality in Baudrillard nonetheless– the 
reality of the one who observes the simulacra and is seduced by them. We 
must always remember that Baudrillard is the philosopher of seduction no 
less than of simulation. And what’s so important about seduction? The point 
is that when we become fascinated by something, we grow so attached to it 
that we and that thing form a new object, a compound made of ourselves 
and the thing. Why do I call that relation a new object? Because it meets 
all the criteria of objecthood established by object-oriented philosophy: 
it has emergent properties not found in either me or the thing separately, 
it is impenetrable to outside description or understanding, and it can 
have different features at different times. In short, the world of simulacra 
becomes a realist world as soon as the observer starts becoming personally 
involved with it, and that’s what aesthetics is all about.

SW: If the simulacra become real by becoming a compound with the 
observer, is that an ontological solipsism? It sounds like psychological 



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growth, and broadening experience, makes more of 
the world real, which certainly seems to accord with 
our experience.

GH: It’s not solipsism, since my experience of an 
object and yours are still referring indirectly to the 
same real object. But there is the same difficulty here 
as with theories of autopoiesis (Maturana, Varela, 
Luhmann) since we need a clearer understanding 
of how the real object, despite being cut off from 
the sensual realm, is nonetheless able to affect and 
possibly be affected by the new object that is the 
compound between simulacrum and observer.

Philosophical de-anthropocentrism

SW: One of the aspects of your work that has been 
broadly supported is its anti-anthropocentrism, 
the refusal to accept anti-realism’s separation of 
everything into two categories, human and other.

GH: We have learned much about the vast size of the 
universe. On top of that, there are now reasonable 
musings about possible other universes, whether on 
the interiors of black holes or in other dimensions 
invisible to us here. All of this tends to indicate that 
our species and planet, even our entire galaxy, are 
fairly minor constituents of reality. By contrast, 
modern philosophy revolves around the centrality of 
humans. The reason, of course, is that it is thought 
we have direct certainty of human experience but 
only mediated access to everything else, which 
suggests a crucial status for human thought. In 
this way, there is a contradiction between the royal 
importance of humans on the one hand and our 
speck-of-dust cosmic tininess on the other. 

SW: I’ve never been sure what to make of the 
assumption of direct access to experience; my 
own experience never seemed direct to me. I used 

 WE MUST 
REMEMBER THAT 

BAUDRILLARD IS 
THE PHILOSOPHER 
OF SEDUCTION NO 

LESS THAN OF 
SIMULATION. 

“

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to presume that maybe some other people, like Descartes, actually had 
direct experience, but later after learning some sleight of hand magic, you 
see that there are always presumptions built into perception, and these 
presumptions can be activated and challenged.4  

GH: The other day I saw an amusing remark on Twitter. When Hollywood 
depicts interracial couples, so the person asked, why does there always have 
to be a white person in the couple? Analogously, I would ask of philosophy 
since Kant: when philosophy discusses a relationship between two entities, 
why does a human always need to be one of them? The answer is that 
it doesn’t need to be. The relation between two inanimate objects isn’t 
different in kind from the relation between a human and an inanimate 
object. The latter sort is not in any way clearer or more immediately given. 
Our access to our own experience is also mediated rather than direct. But 
since the days of Kant, Alfred North Whitehead is one of the few major 
philosophers to have seen this point clearly.

Let me just add the following response to some of OOO’s critics, who 
make the political complaint that OOO shifts its focus away from human 
subjectivity at the precise moment that previously subaltern humans are 
finally gaining full dignity: as if OOO were pulling the rug out from under 
the feet of the previously oppressed in their very moment of triumph. 
I would say that this remark is counterintuitive in the bad sense of the 
term. When OOO shifts the scope of inquiry from humans to the cosmic 
vastness of all entities, are human differences of race, culture, and gender 
not shown to be rather minor, and therefore isn’t our human equality more 
emphasized than ever before? By contrast, if we stick with the modern 
focus on the human subject, it seems to me we are destined to dwell in 
the narcissism of small differences, to revel in all sorts of micro-hierarchies 
within our tiny human sphere.  

SW: There are a lot of assumptions packed into the political critique of 
OOO’s infra-realist anti-anthropocentrism that require longer discussion. 
Politics typically engages in motivated reasoning, looking for effective 
language. But philosophy, like many forms of research, is often focussed 
differently, looking for something resembling truth, whether truth defined 
as logical consistency or paradigmatic coherence or something else. In The 
Rise of Realism you discussed Lee Braver’s 2007 book, A Thing of This 
World with Manuel DeLanda, and you both disagreed with the traditional 



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realist axiom that truth is correspondence with the 
external world.5 How would you describe truth in 
the context of OOO?

GH: I’m interested in reality rather than truth. 
People who favor the word “truth” are usually the 
ones who think they already have it, and what 
they call truth becomes a cudgel to beat up those 
who disagree. Reality interests me more because it 
implies that there is something with which we make 
peripheral contact: something that disrupts our 
current model of the world without it being entirely 
clear what is happening. There are multiple ways 
to do justice to any reality we encounter, whereas 
a focus on truth implies that there is only one way. 
Certain portions of mathematics and logic seem to 
have a very strong claim to truth, but these results 
are often overexpanded in an effort to formalize the 
whole of reality in ways that aren’t very successful.

SW: You have mentioned that you borrowed the 
term “ontography” from a fictional character, 
Parkins, a Professor of Ontography. Parkins 
practices anthropogeography, and diagrams the 
relationship between humans and their landscapes, 
an example of anthropocentric philosophy mapping 
human-object relations without attending to 
object-object relations. Noting the diagramming 
aspect of Parkins’ work, it seemed that ontography 
could also describe any ontology-oriented art. 
This is similar to what inspired Ian Bogost about 
the term. For a while you both were doing these 
poetic ontographs called Latour Litanies, these 
poetic strings of ostensibly unrelated words, like - 
to make one up on the spot -  box jellyfish, love, 
gravel, jedi, street lighting, asteroids. The aim, and 
correct me if I am wrong, was to produce a list 
where the objects could not be associated with each 
other, so humans were not presented as central to 
all relations, and this was an expression of a flat, 

 I WOULD ASK 
OF PHILOSOPHY 

SINCE KANT: 
WHEN 

PHILOSOPHY 
DISCUSSES A 

RELATIONSHIP 
BETWEEN TWO 
ENTITIES, WHY 

DOES A HUMAN 
ALWAYS NEED TO 
BE ONE OF THEM? 

“

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non-anthropocentric ontology. With my long immersion in surrealism, I 
immediately recognised the careful systematization of these lists. As Freud 
supposedly said, in a classical painting I always see the unconscious, in a 
surrealist painting I only see the conscious. So before reading your later 
work, I associated the word ontography with these poetic practices with a 
very personal and slight surrealist flavour to them. You don’t seem to have 
used these litanies recently. Has your feeling about them changed?

GH: I am utterly stunned by how stirred up and annoyed some people 
become by these Latour Litanies. For instance, there are critics who say that 
we do nothing more than produce random lists of objects, or who assert 
that “a list of objects is not an argument.” Of course not. The Litanies are 
simply a useful rhetorical technique, and I mean “rhetoric” in the good old 
classical sense of addressing people’s background assumptions, not in the 
trivial modern sense of devious manipulation. Latour Litanies are useful 
for reminding the reader of how many different types of non-human 
entities exist, and that’s the purpose they serve whenever they appear in a 
OOO text.

ARCHITECTS AND PHILOSOPHY

SW: In Twilight of the Idols, Nietzsche famously stated that architecture 
is the expression of power and that architects are enamoured with 
power, which appears to have a subservient tone until you see that in 
the unpublished Will to Power, everything is an expression of the “will to 
power,” so architecture is not special in this regard.

GH: I’ve never been all that interested in the concept of power, other than 
in high school when I was reading Nietzsche and taking him too literally 
like everyone else at that age. Maybe that’s because the most interesting 
things happen to me when my mind is passive and absorbing unexpected 
insights from others. The intellect is not really about mastery, but about 
finding new drifts or currents or hidden gemstones in the world, and 
letting them compel you to new insights. Believing that one does not yet 
have enough power to do anything is too often an alibi for not doing the 
things already within your grasp.

SW: How do you see anti-realism influencing architecture?



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GH: Primarily in the sense that form and function 
(or program) are usually misread in an anti-realist 
way, in terms of the aspect they present to human 
beings. A realist reconception of form and function 
would have to de-relationize them into “zero form” 
and “zero function,” as I call them.

SW: How do you see infra-realism offering 
alternatives to anti-realism for architectural theory?

GH: We need an improved sense of form that is 
neither purely visual, nor purely conceptual, nor 
purely about the deliberate subversion of function 
(as in some of Eisenman’s houses). But in fairness 
to architects, philosophers repeatedly make the 
same misstep. Husserl draws a distinction between 
intellect and sensation, as though there were really 
such a big difference between the two. Heidegger 
does the same with practical handling on one side 
and explicit looking or theorizing on the other, 
which again isn’t that big a difference. OOO 
demands a difference between reality itself and any 
form of human access. Whether architects find 
significant things to do with this in their work is 
really up to architects.

SW: You have in the past remarked about architects 
making puns of philosophical ideas. I’m not averse 
to the occasional pun, and have even made my own 
OOO pun in the form of occasionalist tectonics, 
taking two elements and sandwiching a wholly 
new formal language between them.6  Sometimes 
visual or formal work that is purely illustrative lacks 
depth and subtlety, but some works of art that are 
truly remarkable started out as illustrations of ideas 
but somehow hold far more allusive and elusive 
qualities. Was your remark pejorative, or is there 
something more to this?

   A REALIST 
RECONCEPTION 

OF FORM AND 
FUNCTION WOULD 

HAVE TO DE-
RELATIONALIZE 

THEM INTO "ZERO 
FORM" AND "ZERO 

FUNCTION"

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GH: It wasn’t meant as pejorative. I was mostly relaying the complaints I’d 
heard from architects I know, who were bothered for instance by the literal 
use of folds on buildings in the period where Deleuze (author of The Fold) 
was widely read in the field. But insofar as puns can verge on literalism, 
that’s a problem. I like your occasionalist tectonics idea, and  also like Tom 
Wiscombe’s idea of half-inscrutable “objects in a sack” hiding behind a 
building’s outer envelope.7  But OOO is really about the tension between 
objects and qualities, and there are some ways of deploying such tension 
that don’t involve anything being hidden in the least.

SW: Yes, Wiscombe’s “objects in a sack” was a lightning strike when I 
first heard it. Probably the most coherent arguments connecting OOO 
and architecture are found in the writings of Wiscombe, David Ruy, and 
Mark Foster Gage, architects I find fascinating. Their ideas might seem 
strange to people outside architecture’s current education system, but are 
very relevant to those inside it.

They all appear to share a fondness for OOO because it provides a rationale 
for valuing architecture for its qualities rather than its associations. 
(This is rather like Eisenman’s concern for architecture’s interiority, for 
what is exclusively architectural. Eisenman’s approach was a kind of 
de-anthropocentrism, but it was framed as anti-humanism, which is quite 
different.) Gage also argues that buildings should be judged as buildings, 
not as diagrams.8  This is apt for architecture education. I wonder if this 
arises from the tension between being an effective academic and the art 
of architecture. When you have a lot of projects to assess, one can feel the 
need to hurry and it helps if you can understand a project quickly, but 
individual works of great architecture are captivating and even mystifying, 
and they refuse our attempts to understand them easily, they require study 
and reflection, and even personal transformation. 

GH: There are a number of other architects who have played around 
with OOO: Peter Trummer is one here at SCI-Arc, and elsewhere I’ve 
had multiple discussions with Ferda Kolatan and Michael Young, among 
others.9  In Object-Oriented Ontology: A New Theory of Everything I 
highlighted Gage and Wiscombe because they represent the two most 
pronounced and opposite tendencies.10  As mentioned, Wiscombe favors 
hidden objects surrounded by palpable surface qualities. Yet Gage isn’t 
about hiddenness at all: he gives us a fiesta-like abundance of qualities 



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inscribed on the surface. In Weird Realism I argued 
that H.P. Lovecraft’s horror fiction uses both of 
these techniques, even though the first is the only 
one people usually mention.11 

SW: What do you think now of Wiscombe’s 
point in “The Object Turn” about an architecture 
inspired by OOO having a suspicion of any form of 
mapping exercises that seem to conjure architecture 
from the context or from the map itself.12  For many 
years, architecture students have been fabricating 
abstract maps of things and using these as visual 
prompts for design. A weakness of this method 
is its meaninglessness, and the insistence to look 
outside architecture. Yet I am ambivalent in this 
critique. Leonardo da Vinci recommended artists 
stare at the infinitely subtle shades and markings of 
rough, stained walls and allow their imaginations to 
inventively see figures, scenes and events. Similarly 
there is a subtly creative act in seeing turtles, 
buildings and faces in the shifting forms of clouds. 
These work as psychological exercises to prompt 
creativity, and even have a little surrealist flair, but 
they belong to the earlier, passive and automatist 
side of surrealism rather than to the later, more 
active side where effects are actively sought. Now 
that you’ve worked in an architectural school for 
a number of years, what observations do you have 
about architectural design processes and the results 
they entrain?

GH: Wiscombe did make that point, as did Ruy 
when he argued against architecture becoming a 
subsidiary of ecology: as if buildings were nothing 
more than local outcroppings of the broader 
environment. I agree completely on this score, since 
no building can be completely site-specific. Certain 
choices have to be made about which aspects of the 
environment to include or exclude. And of course, 
Rem Koolhaas has pointed out that a building also 

There 
are 

a number 
of other 

architects 
who have 

played 
around with 

OOO

“

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presses back against its environment and changes it in turn.

You ask what I’ve noticed after teaching at an architecture school for five 
years. Quite a few things, actually. Architects tend to be very articulate in 
explaining their ideas, even more so than philosophers, in my opinion. 
Architects are under more pressure to innovate, and therefore they have 
their antennae out for new ideas more than philosophers do. On the 
pedagogical level, what strikes me most is that students have a hard time 
defending forms in their own terms. When pressed, they will usually 
give a genetic backstory for how they arrived at the form now before our 
eyes: they started with some everyday object, put it through four or five 
transformations, and this was the result. This just goes to show how hard it 
is to speak allusively or indirectly about something, which is precisely what 
architectural form demands. The best art and architecture critics need to 
have the souls of poets, because in this case literalism won’t do the job.

SW: One of the things you’re known for are the terms overmining and 
undermining.

GH: It is often assumed that the goal of all cognition is knowledge, and 
ultimately there are just two kinds of knowledge. If someone asks me what 
something is, I can (a) tell them what it’s made of, or (b) tell them what 
it does. I call the first of these techniques “undermining” and the second 
“overmining.” 

I mentioned earlier that Socrates practices philosophia (love of wisdom) 
rather than sophia (wisdom). There is no Platonic dialogue in which 
Socrates ends up with the correct definition of anything. Nothing is ever 
quite definable. As Aristotle puts it, things are concrete but definitions 
are made of universals, which means there will always be an imperfect 
fit between reality on one side and thought or language on the other. 
Philosophy fundamentally does something other than produce knowledge. 
and this is even clearer of the arts. There is no way to avoid “mining” in 
direct propositional speech, since this kind of speech (which I call “literal”) 
involves making true statements about the properties a thing possesses. 
But philosophy and the arts are not literalist disciplines, and have more 
to do with producing a gap or fissure between an object and its qualities.  

SW: Often overmining and undermining are misunderstood as critiques. 

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Overmining and undermining are critiques of other 
ontologies, not of thinking or philosophical work 
as such. 

GH: By no means is OOO anti-knowledge. 
Knowledge is good and necessary; it simply gives 
us an incomplete picture of human cognition. 
To know something is to explain it in terms of 
something else: its parts, its history, its uses, its 
effects, its properties, how it looks to us. All of 
this is great. It allows us to create medicines, build 
aircraft, analyze social data, and so forth. But we’ve 
reached the point where many people assume that 
if something isn’t “science,” isn’t knowledge, then 
it’s just rubbish. These days we enthusiastically 
encourage students to pursue STEM subjects, 
while aesthetic taste is left sadly undeveloped. 
This means that the students who are open to it 
end up having to learn it on their own. Granted, 
that’s often the best way to learn things. It’s how I 
learned philosophy, for instance.

SW: Gage has used overmining and undermining as 
critiques of architectural culture and architectural 
education, and this leads us to interesting territory. 
Universities rightly pride themselves on bestowing 
knowledge, but art and architecture are not forms of 
knowledge, yet this fact too needs to be taught and 
understood. How do you think about reconciling 
this dilemma?

GH: It’s probably not something well understood 
enough yet to be codified in the schools. There is 
still some intellectual work to be done in grasping 
the relation between knowledge (which I define 
as detecting the qualities a thing possesses) and 
the very different kind of cognition that includes 
both the aesthetic and the philosophical (defined as 
grasping or producing a gap between any object and 

Overmining 
and 

undermining 
are critiques 

of other 
ontologies, not 

of thinking or 
philosophical 

work as such.

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its qualities). But philosophy is more often guilty of mistaking itself for a 
form of knowledge than the arts and architecture are. 

SW: Back in 2017, you wrote a reply to Bruno Latour and Albena Yaneva’s 
actor-network theory of architectural design.13  Have your views on that 
changed?

GH: No, they have not. It’s always stimulating to read an actor-network 
approach to any topic, and the Latour/Yaneva piece is as interesting as 
any.14 But you just can’t reduce any object, including an architectural one, 
to its backstory as a project– which is what they try to do in that article. 
There they are following Latour’s familiar strategy of referring to any object 
as a black box that can be opened, revealing all of the historical complexity 
within. The problem is that a black box doesn’t just hide its internal 
components. It also renders many of them irrelevant, while also having 
new emergent properties that can’t be equated with what’s inside. Stated 
in architectural terms, not all aspects of a building’s history are relevant 
to the final building, and a building has features that its history does not. 
Latour and Yaneva offer a fine vision for an ethnography of architecture, 
but I doubt there is much that actual architects can do with it. And I say 
this as someone who yields to no one in my admiration of Latour, who in 
my view is the most important living philosopher, bar none.

SW: Finally, how do you seen the anti-anthropocentric aspect of OOO 
engaging with architecture?

GH: We’re starting to see more architecture that isn’t aimed directly at 
humans, such as the “Vulkan Beehives” of Snøhetta. But what I’m more 
interested in is de-anthropocentrizing the heart of architectural discourse: 
namely, the concepts of form and function. The irony is that while these 
terms seem to be meant as opposites in architectural history, they are both 
relational in character: the form of a building is supposed to be its visual 
look to the observer or user, and its function is supposed to be the purpose 
it provides for the client. But in a OOO context, the visual look of a thing 
is simply an expression of a deeper form, and the specific use is simply 
one possible incarnation of a deeper functional landscape. What OOO 
looks for can be called “zero-form, zero-function,” as discussed in my 
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ENDNOTES

1. Simon Weir, The Ontographers (Edinburgh: Uni-
versity of Edinburgh Press, forthcoming 2022).
2. Imre Lakatos, Proofs and Refutations : the Logic 
of Mathematical Discovery (Cambridge: Cambridge 
University Press, 1976).
3. Bruno Latour. Aramis, or the Love of Technology, 
translated by C. Porter. (Cambridge, MA: Harvard 
University Press, 1996), 119.
4. Simon Weir, “Art and Ontography,” Open Phi-
losophy 3/2020, 400-412.
5. Manuel DeLanda & Graham Harman, The 
Rise of Realism (Cambridge, UK: Polity, 2017).
6. Simon Weir, “Object-Oriented Ontology and 
the Challenge of the Corinthian Capital,” in Make 
Sense, (Sydney: Harvest, 2020), 114-116.
7. Tom Wiscombe, “Discreteness, or Towards a 
Flat Ontology of Architecture,” Project, 3/2014, 
34-43.
8. Mark Foster Gage, “Killing Simplicity: 
Object-Oriented Philosophy in Architecture,” Log, 
33/2015, 99.
9. David Ruy, “Returning to (strange) objects,” 
Tarp 2012, 38-42; Peter Trummer, “The City as an 
Object,” Log, 27/2013, 51-57. 
10. Graham Harman, Object-Oriented Ontology: A 
New Theory of Everything (London: Pelican, 2018).
11. Graham Harman, Weird Realism: Lovecraft and 
Philosophy (Winchester, UK: Zero Books, 2012).
12. Tom Wiscombe in: Todd Gannon, et. al. “The 
Object Turn: A Conversation,” Log, 33/2015, 82.
13. Graham Harman, “Buildings Are Not Pro-
cesses: A Disagreement with Latour and Yaneva,” 
Ardeth 01 2017, 113-122.
14. Bruno Latour and Albena Yeneva, “Give me 
a Gun and I will Make all Buildings Move: An 

Latour and 
Yaneva 

offer a fine 
vision for an 

ethnography 
of 

architecture, 
but I doubt 

there is much 
that actual 

architects 
can do with it.

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ANT’S View of Architecture,” Architectural Design Theory, 1/2017, 
103-11.
15. Graham Harman, Architecture and Objects (Minneapolis: University 
of Minnesota Press, forthcoming 2022).
 


