The “Picard Manoeuvre” is known to fans of Star Trek:TNG as both a novel and daring military tactic invented by the Enterprise’s Captain Jean-Luc Picard, and a gestural tic (the Captain’s habit of adjusting his tunic by pulling down on the hem to straighten it). It’s Picard’s “signature” in both senses, as the actor Patrick Stewart found when he unconsciously reproduced the “Picard manoeuvre” onstage whilst playing Coriolanus, to knowing snickers from a section of the audience. In this post I’m going to talk about one of Graham Harman’s “signature” moves, which is both a novel and daring philosophical invention and a recurring personal motif. In homage to both Picard and Harman, I’m calling this move “The Harman Manoeuvre”.

We need to start with Heidegger, and the “tool analysis” through which Heidegger works out his account of what objects are. In human experience, objects appear as objects of experience: they have a practical relationship to our needs and projects, a sensuous relationship to our perceiving senses, and an epistemological relationship to our theories about and attitudes towards the world. Heidegger analyses these relationships with respect to our way of being in the world, our existence as knowing, perceiving and acting creatures. He also observes that the objects to which we have these relationships seem to escape from our grasp, to “withdraw” from the place they occupy in our experience: tools fall into disuse, buildings fall into ruin, and this “falling” is a kind of falling away from us, a little like the gradual estrangement of a personal acquaintance. The objects of our experience are also objects apart from our experience, but their parting is experienced by us as a kind of haunting separation: the trace, in experience, of something that has become withdrawn or subtracted from experience.

When it comes to interactions between objects of our experience, we clearly experience objects as belonging to a world of causal relationships and natural laws. We swing the hammer so that it strikes the nail, and the nail is driven into the wood. But what of the interactions between objects in their separate existence - the hammer falling off the shelf during an earthquake, and cracking the floor tile below? This is a crucial question for Harman, and it really concerns the possibility of objects relating to each other as objects separately from our relationship to them as objects of experience. In other words, the question is not so much “does the hammer exist when I’m not using it” (Heidegger would readily affirm that it does) as “does the hammer have a relationship to the nail, apart from my intention to use the one to strike the other”?

The move that I’m calling “the Harman Manoeuvre” goes like this. Harman asserts that the hammer has the same kind of relationship to the nail as I have to the hammer; the nail both offers sensuous properties and practical affordances to the hammer, and withdraws from this relationship into a separate existence, there being more to a nail than its capacity for being hammered. Even though a hammer is a rather unknowing, unfeeling sort of entity, without what might be called projects of its own, it nevertheless has its own relationship with the nail as an object for it, and it is from this relationship that the nail is simultaneously withdrawn as an object in its own right. The Harman Manoeuvre, then, is the move whereby an aspect of the human-world relationship is attributed to relationships between objects in general, such that the ability of humans to sustain such relationships with bits of the world is reframed as only a local instance of a general rule.

The most immediately controversial aspect of this move is that for Heidegger the “being” of a hammer is not Dasein, the “being-there” that characterises mortal creatures with practical goals, moods, perceptions and the ability to apprehend the inevitability of their own death. There is a whole lot of structure that the human observer instantiates - not only cognitively, but in terms of its way of being in the world - that the hammer does not, having a quite distinct structure of its own (in particular, its useful qualities of rigidity and durability mean that it does not bear a great deal of mutable state). Does it make sense to speak of the hammer’s structure as being such that it can entertain “prehensions” (to use the term Steven Shaviro has been adapting from Whitehead) of other objects around it? Does the hammer possess a frame of reference into which the nail is “translated” (while the nail itself withdraws from this translation, exempting a shadowy part of itself from the frame)?

The boundary between Harman’s object-oriented ontology and panpsychism is an unstable one; how you draw it depends on what you think the minimal structure of psychism is. If you hold that there is something proto-psychic - or already actually psychic - about “prehension”, and you are working within a Whiteheadian ontology in which objects are concrescences marked in their innermost composition by the trace of an outside (actually I might be mixing Whitehead up with Derrida there, although if so I wouldn’t be the first), then some kind of panpsychism is unavoidable; and this means that the structure of human psychism is not a transcendent (or irredeemably traumatic) exception from the state of nature, but just a particularly refined and convoluted example of the way things are all over.

What’s interesting here that Harman’s insistence on the non-relational kernel of objects, their resilient or self-concealing withdrawal from relation, actually distances him from pansychism. Harman’s account of “vacuum-sealed” objects suggests that the global order of things is more a kind of universal unconscious: objects are deeply unconscious of each other, and deeply inaccessible to any kind of consciousness, such that the “translations” or prehensions that obtain between objects are a kind of flickering of sensuous interaction in the midst of a dark and nameless void of incomprehension - like an orgy during a blackout, if I can put it that way. Another way to put this might be to say that the ways in which objects make sense together and of each other, drawing each other into networks of mutual comprehension, constitute a shifting, ultimately contingent pattern of sense against a background of fathomless non-sense.

The strange thing is that this is not so different from a position that Harman explicitly rejects: the position that says that objects are a second-order phenomenon which only exist insofar as they are coalesced - whether by an observing consciousness or by some autopoetic mode of creative individuation - out of a primal flux. Harman is adamant that objects are what there is - that our ontology must be an ontology of beings, or an “onticology” (to use Levi Bryant’s useful term) - and yet his position on the withdrawing of objects from relationship means that the way in which objects are never fully coincides with the way they are together - the “network” composed by actants moving in concert or conflict is always subject to a lack or insufficiency owing to the subtraction of objects themselves from the lattice of relationships in which they participate. At the level of sensuous interaction, then, the opposition between meaningless primal chaos and second-order meaningful structure returns - even if objects remain the indissoluble support of both sides of this divide.