Dear Reader,

7KDQN\RXIRUUHDGLQJP\HVVD\7KH&DOORI7KLQJV$&ULWLTXHRI
Object-2ULHQWHG2QWRORJLHV
Please also see my essay on the same topic, entitled 7KRVH2EVFXUH
Objects of Desire: On the Uses and Abuses of Object-Oriented
2QWRORJ\DQG6SHFXODWLYH5HDOLVPoriginally appearing in Artforum
and now available here.
Thank you,
Andrew Cole
Princeton University
6 October 2015

Andrew Cole

The Call of Things

A Critique of Object-Oriented Ontologies
Blankly I walked there a double decade after,
When thwarts had flung their toils in front of me,
And I heard the waters wagging in a long ironic laughter
At the lot of men, and all the vapoury
Things that be.
Thomas Hardy

People have been using, thinking, and writing about things for . . . lets
just say for a long time. Fast forward to some very recent approaches to
the philosophical problem of things or objects: vitalism, actor-network
theory (ANT), and speculative realism, or object-oriented ontology.
These new areas seek to dispense with old philosophical dualisms that
put a gap between subjects and objects, conferring onto subjects their
humanity and relegating inert objects to whatever is useful for us.
Instead, according to the new line of thinking, objects should be
recognized for their indifference to us, for the sorts of things they do
behind our backs, and for the ways in which they are behind appearances. Objects, that is, do not need us to actualize their ontology in
their own hidden ways, withdrawn into their dim worlds of nonrelation but expressive of their forces and tendencies. Objects are
actants, falling in and out of assemblages and entering into collectives
of their own making. And we are the posthumans, objects in a world
of objects, who in fact have the capacity to describe that which Kant
said cannot be described, to think that which cannot be thought:
things in themselves. How can we think the unthinkable? How do we
write about what cannot be thought?
These questions come to mind when reflecting on the new vitalism, ANT, and object-oriented ontology. I cannot characterize these
new fields as a single movement, because they are not one, though it
may be fair to call all of them object-oriented ontologies (plural) and
recognize accordingly how they are aligned in one particular way,
which is the focus of this short essay. While they all work hard not to
project the human into the heart of things, in their attempt to respect
the indifference of objects in themselves, they do so anyway by dint of

minnesota review 80 (2013)

DOI 10.1215/00265667-2018414

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the ancient Logos principle by which things call out to us and speak
their being. This principle is, I will show, a convenient fiction in this
new work, enabling the philosopher to hear the call of things and to
speak to and for them, despite the new rule that we cannot think of
objects as being-for-us and must reject older philosophies smacking
of presence and traditional ontology or ontotheology. The contradictions within each of these new philosophies it is and it is not
anthropocentrism, anthropocentrism is and is not a bad thing can
be resolved, I suggest, when the idealism and mysticism of these
fields are acknowledged rather than disavowed in facile critiques of
ersatz idealism and pseudosubjectivism. More crucially, a philosophical Middle Ages, which comes into view when generous attention is
paid to the richness of premodern thought, presents an opportunity,
if not a challenge, to these areas, enabling them to acknowledge cognitive limits that will never be breached by colorful, and sometimes
only purple, prose.
Prehumanism
Lets delve within the philosophical tradition that these newer areas
overlook and start with Johann Gottlieb Fichte, who is relevant to these
considerations precisely because of his Kantianism, far more idealist
than Kants own. To make a long story short, Fichte wants to cross the
chasm set in place by transcendental idealism, the Kantian idea that
there are noumena and phenomena, things in themselves on the one
hand and appearances on the other: you cannot know, see, or experience things in themselves, sealed off as they are from our own thinking,
but you can regard their appearances, thanks to the so-called forms of
possible experience. Fichte supports this distinction between humans
and things, subjects and objects, but there is a crucial difference
namely, he tests the distinction, starting with his claim that both [the
subject and the object] are supposed to be unified here; the natures of
both object and subject are supposed to be preserved without either
being lost (2000, 31). He continues to collapse the distinction between
subject and object by showing how the very thought of an object is
indistinguishable from the objects call or summons to the thinker:
Both are completely unified if we think of the subjects being-determined as its being-determined to be self-determining, i.e. as a summons (eine Aufforderung) to the subject, calling upon it to resolve to
exercise its efficacy (31). Fichte is referring to the call of things, the
demands objects make upon subjects: The object is not comprehended, and cannot be other than as a bare summons calling upon the

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subject to act. Thus as surely as the subject comprehends the object, so

too does it possess the concept of its own freedom (32).
So what comes first for Fichte, what stands at the very start of
his most important elaboration of idealism, is clear. Things come first
but in a special way: never mute, they emit noise, but not just any
noise: they summon and exhibit a desire to be heard by an other that
is tentatively a subject. Fichte daringly invites us to look from the
point of view of the object, which speaks to us, we not-objects who are
not yet even subjects because we have still to answer the call and realize our own efficacy and limits. But soon we do realize those limits,
the external check (Ansto, 32), he calls it, which is Fichtes way not
only of reinscribing a Kantian limit in his brand of idealism but also
of putting an end to this mode of inquiry. In other words, Fichte is
playing games, leading us to believe that this object is a thing (to use
the distinction of thing theory between things and objects), when all
along it was something else that, again, we ourselves could not yet
grasp or understand: that thing is a being not any being, as we read
on, but another rational being like us:
The rational being is to determine itself in consequence of the
summons. Thus the external being that is posited as the cause of
the summons must at the very least presuppose the possibility
that the subject is capable of understanding and comprehending; otherwise its summons to the subject would have no purpose at all. . . . Therefore the cause of the summons must itself
necessarily possess the concept of reason and freedom; thus it
must itself be a being capable of having concepts; it must be an
intelligence . . . and thus a rational being. (35)
Patently, Fichte has written a phenomenological narrative, with its
own formative process (or Bildung), leading us to think one thing
and think hard on that thing on the possibility that things call
to us, that they are subjects themselves before thinking something
else. As he says, Up until now, our analysis . . . has been merely
expository (34).
What lies behind Fichtes words, and (as I will argue in a
moment) what informs the contemporary vitalist and neomaterialist traditions under discussion here, is a distinct Logos principle.
That much is obvious, because Fichte is borrowing ideas about
things and the summons from the medieval mystic Meister Eckhart
(ca. 12601327/8),1 who in his commentary on Genesis writes:

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I say that he [God] speaks to all things and he speaks all things.
Some things hear and answer him according to the property of
existence, namely that by which God is existence and the existence of all things is from him. Other things hear him and
receive the Word of God insofar as he is the first and true life.
These are all living beings. The highest beings hear God not
only through and in existence and through and in life, but also
through and in understanding. Intellection and utterance are
the same here. (1981, 115)
In this lovely passage Eckhart reflects on the Logos principle, Gods
formative utterance expressed through all creation. But here he offers
a crucial elaboration, extending common theories of perception associated with Aristotle. In short, what Aristotle says of sight that
vision and object are united, each merging their potentialities to produce a single act, a single concrete being (1984, 116; see 105, 163)
Eckhart says of hearing. He prescribes mindfulness toward things
that, to our ear, will remain quite dumb unless we enter into a face
to face encounter with the object and open ourselves to it. To this
aural scenario, Eckhart applies a passage from the Song of Songs: My
beloved speaks to me; . . . my beloved to me and I to him with the
obvious suggestion that persons and things speak to and hear one
another, lovingly.
Eckhart goes so far as to associate the very common notion of
sympathies within objects, whose natural properties generate propensities and inclinations, with voice, as in the case of the heavy stone:
The gravitational attraction of a heavy object cannot be checked
by time or place in order to be silenced, but it has no rest day
and night in proclaiming and saying, Holy, holy, holy is the
Lord our God (Rv. 4:8; Is. 6:3). He made us (Ps. 99.3); he
spoke and we were made (Ps. 32:9). . . . He commanded and we
were created. Even though the external action, such as the fall or
downward movement, may be silenced when a heavy object is
forcibly held up high so that it does not fall, nevertheless the
attraction of gravity that belongs to the form of a stone and by
which God addresses, commands, orders and directs it is never
silent, but always answers and speaks to God. (1981, 120)
Countermanding the long-standing clichs about mute stones, Eckharts stone speaks while it does what it is. In other words, Eckharts idea

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here contrasts with what John Berger reports of his tour in the hills of
Sardinia, marveling at the stones of silence that are the nuraghi and
enjoying their companionship: To place a stone upright so that it
stands vertical is an act of symbolic recognition: The stone becomes a
presence, a dialogue begins (1998, 3).2 What does it mean, for Eckhart, but to reflect on the significance of holding up a stone that continues, as opposed to begins, to speak, as we see in Berger? Eckharts difference from Berger is philosophically significant, because for Eckhart, it
is as if the stone refuses to be either ready to hand or present at hand
in the Heideggerian sense, its ontological significance at this very
moment of contact with the human indicated by an equipmental totality mattering only to it but inaccessible to us in our moments of sense
certainty. Imprecise as the analogy may be, we are working our way
toward asking how the fundamental Heideggerian principles of speculative realism (Harman 2005, 76) remain informed by medieval mysticism and indeed what a mystical discourse can do for objects deemed
mysterious.3
What we have here in Eckhart is, again, a Logos theology, the
principle that Gods speaking is his making (85; see 4041) and that
what is heard is the voice of God, with objects emerging as transmission devices. This, too, is a crucial revision of Aristotle, from whose
work On the Soul (1984) Eckhart intentionally draws and scrambles, insofar as Aristotle understands sound to be generated by an
impact, with certain objects having no sound (667/419b), and
voice to be a sound characteristic of what has soul in it (669/420b).
Eckhart puts soul into the soulless and thus definitionally, at least in
his relation to Aristotle, emerges as a vitalist (more than a panentheist). For a theologian whose Neoplatonism would strongly encourage
him to turn away from other things (1981, 115), Eckhart certainly
lingers around them, even human products, long enough to hear them
out,4 but this dilation perfectly suits a mystic who commends silence
as the opening to the noise of the world. That Eckhart proposes that
only contemplative mindfulness can foster a conversation with things
and encourage an openness to their calls suggests that Fichte is right.
Fichte knew that this initial relationship with objects is a mystical one
and requires the mystical discourse of the summons. He understood
that our moment of spontaneous receptivity to the call of things is
the moment before self-consciousness. It is the moment before selfthematizing, the moment when the self has yet to define itself over
and against objects, the moment in other words before Kant.5 It
is a posthuman move on account of its prehumanism: the thought of
objects, their call, before the thought of thought.

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Talk Talk
So, what does this Fichtean view of the mystical origins of subjectobject relations have to do with ANT, vitalism, and speculative
realism fields that wish to stand far apart from the Logos principle
and the pitfalls of what Derrida (after Heidegger) calls ontotheology?
The answer is a lot, especially if your hermeneutic demands things to
make the call.
I begin with Bruno Latour, who has inspired much of the work
under consideration here. In Reassembling the Social (2005), he summarizes the effort to create an an object-oriented sociology for objectoriented humans who witness the awakening of noisy objects: As if
a damning curse had been cast unto things, they remain asleep like
the servants of some enchanted castle. Yet, as soon as they are freed
from the spell, they start shuddering, stretching, and muttering (73).
This is not an off moment for Latour, nor is it a mere rhetorical point
with a dash of medieval nostalgia. Rather, this is how he seeks to make
his method persuasive, as in this passage:
To be accounted for, objects have to enter into accounts. If no
trace is produced, they offer no information to the observer and
will have no visible effect on other agents. They remain silent
and are no longer actors: they remain, literally, unaccountable.
Although the situation is the same for groups and agencies no
trial, no account, no information it is clearly more difficult for
objects, since carrying their effects while becoming silent is what
they are so good at as Samuel Butler noted. Once built, the wall
of bricks does not utter a word even though the group of
workmen goes on talking and graffiti may proliferate on its surface. . . . This is why specific tricks have to be invented to make
them talk, that is, to offer descriptions of themselves, to produce scripts of what they are making others humans or nonhumans do. (79)
If, so the idea goes, we make objects mute owing to our instrumental
approach to them, we need to relate to them differently so that they
will tell stories about themselves. Make them utter a word. Make
them talk. Lets stop talking. Or at least, lets allow the objects to be
heard. For, as Jane Bennett says in Vibrant Matter (2010), we can give
a voice to a thing-power (2). She elaborates: I will try to give voice to
a vitality intrinsic to materiality (3). When things actualize this
thing-power they make a call: Stuff exhibited its thing-power: it
issued a call, even if I did not quite understand what it was saying (4).

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And where we fail to understand is right where we endeavor to know

and speak the language of their call.6
Graham Harman, the leading figure of the speculative realist
movement and by far its best writer, celebrates another (and, as we will
soon see, related) idea in Latour the idea that propositions are
actants; they are not positions, things, substances, or essences pertaining to a nature made of mute objects for the talkative mind, but
occasions given to different entities to enter into contact. Harman
names this way of thinking new occasionalism and describes it as
Latours single greatest breakthrough in metaphysics, one that will be
associated with his name for centuries to come (Harman 2009a, 82).
It is the idea that when we speak of things, we put them into contact
with one another and ourselves. But it is not just that we view propositions as actants. Rather, as Latour tells it, when we consider that neither world nor words but propositions differ from one another, we
reduce the yawning gap of Kantianism to a hairs width of difference between propositions (1999, 142, fig. 4.4). We suddenly are in a
new place, in which nothing is mute and all is abuzz with propositions
in close contact with others. Latour is emphatic about the results: We
are allowed to speak interestingly by what we allow to speak interestingly
(144). While Latour aligns the proposition with the idea of articulation, it is hard to see what is significantly different here from the old
but forgotten way of understanding propositions in the most ornate
and complex of Logos theology in the work of John Duns Scotus,
whose contribution to the ontology of propositions, the discovery of
the propositional relays between people and things, can be summed
up in one choice phrase: the univocity of being. Being is inseparable
from propositionality. Voice matters.
My critique so far is not that the Logos principle is all bad. Quite
the opposite: to think about the Logos principle requires one to think
broadly about the history of philosophy and more importantly
how our sense of that history reconfigures itself when something new
comes along. Here, in such a history, one discovers that at the center of the new philosophical project to decenter the human and elevate things lies the patent human mode of self-presencing speaking
being that depends not only on the Logos principle, as Derrida long
ago established in Of Grammatology (1976), but also, and more profoundly, I would suggest, on the languages of mysticism and idealism
by which things speak and propose. I do not see that speculative realists, or vitalists, are aware of the complicated philosophical history
that underlies their project to make things speak. Despite their
attempts to question Derridas criticism of ontotheology, this aspect of

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Logocentrism 101 has not been addressed (Harman 2012, 19697;

Morton 2012, 207, 21819; Bryant 2011, 40, 86, 276).
Hard Problems
The premodern contributions, the role of mysticism and the summons
or call in particular, were not lost to Henri Bergson a philosopher
whom the vitalists, ANTs, and speculative realists hail as a founding
and enabling thinker. Bergson, unlike many he inspired, knew that
the vitalist tradition must account, conscientiously, for the summons,
the soul, and the kinds of mysticism necessary to thinking the vitality
of things.
In an essay called Frenzy, Mechanism, Mysticism (2002),
Bergson writes, Man will rise above earthly things only if a powerful
equipment supplies him with the requisite fulcrum. He must use matter as a support if he wants to get away from matter. In other words,
the mystical summons up (appelle) the mechanical (1932, 166). As
if this point were not big enough, he continues: So let us not merely
say . . . that the mystical summons up (appelle) the mechanical. We
must add that the body, now larger, calls for a bigger soul, and that
mechanism should mean mysticism (339). The world has a soul,
just as Eckhart thought. But and this is crucial for Bergson just
because the world is animate with the hubbub of lan vital does not
mean that consciousness itself dissolves:
Theories of physical determinism which are rife at the present
day are far from displaying the same clearness, the same geometrical rigour. They point to molecular movements taking
place in the brain: consciousness is supposed to arise out of these
at times in some mysterious way. . . . [W]e are to think of an
invisible musician playing behind the scenes while the actor
strikes a keyboard the notes of which yield no sound: consciousness must be supposed to come from an unknown region and to
be superimposed on the molecular vibrations, just as the melody
is on the rhythmical movements of the actor. But, whatever
image we fall back upon, we do not prove and we never shall
prove by any reasoning that the psychic fact is fatally determined by the molecular movement. For in a movement we may
find the reason of another movement, but not the reason of a
conscious state. (1910, 14748)
Here is a reminder for all those object-oriented humans who seek to
decenter the human by equating consciousness with the vitalities

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and intensities. For even Bergson in his most mystical moments

refuses this equation and formulates his philosophy accordingly:
(1) pace Deleuzes misreading in Bergsonism (1988), Bergson himself
talks about consciousness as similar to, but in the last instance distinct
from, the lan vital that animates the rest of the world; (2) he presciently poses the hard problem of consciousness just in the way David
Chalmers has done in The Conscious Mind (1996) for research and philosophy concerning the mind/brain distinction: conscious experience
is irreducible to the material and, for that matter, to other weird and
funny formulations. In short, as Bergson shows us, consciousness cannot be explained away and is rather an ever more pressing topic because
of the relevance of vitality.7
These newer areas, however, may just as well avoid talking about
consciousness, because the term itself is distorted by its history of
usage, an accretion of error, and so forth. I can sympathize with the
distaste for consciousness, because it admits philosophical frustration
and forces you into Kantianism. It is a mind bender to take that old
Kantian lesson that consciousness is always consciousness of something and write it from the point of view of objects. What would you
write? Well, you would write something about withdrawn objects, as
Harman does, just as Kant would write of things-in-themselves with
the key difference being that philosophers who absorb the Kantian
lesson know the limits of their discourse, whereas those who flout that
lesson take off into flights of pure reason, speculating about the interior life of objects and getting inside the heads of things. (The other
key difference for Harman, of course, is Heidegger, whom Harman
needs to revise because he does not help with this one Kantian fundamental: Heidegger admits that human attention and awareness that
is, what constitutes a subject are special aspects of human consciousness needing philosophical analysis.) The Kantian problem remains in
place: if there is something that cannot be thought, then maybe it
cannot be thought. You cannot write your way any closer to the object,
circle the wagons of indirection and allusion around it as you may.
Until such a time as there is a materialist, realist, or let us just say
scientific explanation for the necessity of the conscious experience of,
say, the color red to accompany the reception of electromagnetic radiation in the cones of your eyeball, the problem of consciousness qua
consciousness will remain on the table. And until the universe demands
that we extend this idea and pose a hard problem of things and I
credit Harman for attempting to offer one in his critique of Chalmers
(Harman 2009b, 26869, 272) there will always be irreducible
consciousness, always be idealism, always be objects and subjects infi-

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nitely variously positioned in relation to one another. Talk of thingly

consciousness as vitality or voice will not indicate much of anything
but a philosophers love of language, consumer goods, and entertaining thing-examples like hailstones and tar, aardvarks and baseball.
Nor will objects be seen as they wish to be seen in the more specialized
attempts by some speculative realists to suggest that objects perceive
their secondary qualities this being just one result of the critique of
the distinction between primary and secondary qualities (Meillassoux
2008). For its refusal to find these problems to be problems at all,
then, speculative realism amounts to what Hegel called dogmatic
realism, which cannot help but posit the objective as the real ground
of the subjective (1977, 127).
Speculative realists will tell you that after Descartes everything
went off the rails in the history of philosophy, obviously because his res
cogitans was the wrong thinking thing! Which makes it all the more
strange that they do not focus intensely on philosophy and thought of
the period before Descartes but after the Greeks a focus that would
make instantly visible the medieval mystical discourses upon which
such an investigation into objects is founded, a discourse that is fundamentally, even beautifully, logocentric. Could these medieval traditions issue another call, then a call for the reassessment, if not adjustment, of the disciplinary language of speculative realism and the
cognate philosophies, their modus procendi et loquendi? Will that call
be heard?
My point is not to reassert the importance of Tradition over a
glossy and emergent countermovement. It is to say that when any new
philosophy proclaims its wholesale departure from prior philosophical
explorations, it is always the Middle Ages and medieval thought that
take the hardest hit, and predictably it is usually medievalists who
assume the task of making corrections to the exciting new narrative. In
this case, however, critiques of object-oriented ontology and speculative realism, of actor-network theory and vitalism, have yet to emerge
from the field of medieval studies, apart from the essays collected in
this issue of minnesota review. Perhaps when the thrill of object-oriented
ontology wanes in this field, some medievalists will not limit themselves to the application of its ideas and the mimicking of its lyricism
in the reading of medieval texts and will instead show what it means
for a new philosophy to be built almost entirely on the exclusion of the
Middle Ages.8 To wit, when these new philosophies exclude the Middle Ages, they foreclose the possibilities of generous reading the
practice of reading-with even the unlikeliest and most unmodern of
thinkers and the opportunities to develop a broader conception of

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what the speculative realist project even is, what it can do, what its
limits are. The deconstructive lesson about the identity of thought and
being perhaps now looks pat, but as speculative realists sever this Parmenidean nexus and being is taken as its own category irrespective of
thought, there remains consciousness, and the questions of its basis
will always be asked, even when you believe you are thinking about
something else entirely.
Notes
1. What I cover here, however, is not discussed in Ernst von Brackens Meister Eckhart und Fichte (1943).
2. For an essay that asks, If stone could speak, what would it say about
us?, see Cohen.
3. On Heidegger and Eckhart, see Caputo.
4. See Eckhart 1981, 134; more generally, 13435; see also 131, 14243,
145. Elsewhere, Eckhart speaks of fire that sees (172).
5. Clearly, one could turn next to Emmanuel Lvinass summons in
Totality and Infinity (1969).
6. For a different example of this critical approach, see Dastons collection
of essays entitled Things That Talk, and the editors discussion about talkative
things (1115).
7. Here is one way to object to my (and Bergsons) point:
If a sentient being is like a wind harp, and if, moreover, sensation and thinking are ontologically similar to one another, then we can invert the image.
Wind harps are like sentient beings. We are approaching territory into which
the new philosophy speculative realism has burst, in particular, the insights of
object-oriented ontology (OOO) concerning regions of nonhuman sentience. . . . We OOO philosophers can sound as if we are saying that nonsentient objects are conscious. This is not exactly what is being said. Rather, what
OOO claims is that consciousness isnt all that different from what a tree
does when it translates the wind. (Morton 2012, 205, 2067)
This Rather assumes a false identity it is not even an analogy between wind
activity and human consciousness, taking consciousness to be equal to, and delimited by, anthropomorphic activity: The strings of the wind harp stringpomorphize the wind (207) just as the tree presumably treeopomorphizes the wind.
8. Speculative realism and object-oriented ontology have garnered interest
in some quarters of medieval studies as well as in art and architecture, as Harman
notes (2012, 183). But one starting point for medievalists, I believe, can be the mystical and idealist texts discussed here, because they open up a line of inquiry that
anticipates speculative realism and object-oriented ontology, in turn facilitating an
encounter between the medieval and the modern that reveals and this is key the
philosophical depth of the former and the conceptual limits of the latter. To my mind,
any glance at these texts shows the weaknesses and occlusions of this new philosophy, and I am not sanguine that taking what works while ignoring what doesnt is
the way to go.

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