Graham Harman

This article uses the ideas of Marshall McLuhan (and to a lesser extent Martin Heidegger) to argue for a non-relational approach to architecture. The word ‘form’ is used throughout the arts and humanities, though in different ways depending on the term to which it is opposed: as in form vs. function, form vs. content, and form vs. matter. In his book The Autopoiesis of Architecture, Patrik Schumacher argues that form/function is the lead-distinction of the architectural profession. I hold that Schumacher cannot be right in this claim, since form and function are both too relational in character to form a true opposition.

This article attempts to develop the abandoned occasionalist model of causation into a credible present-day theory. If objects can never exhaust one another through their relations, it is hard to know how they can ever interact at all. This article handles the problem by dividing objects into two kinds: the real objects that emerge from Heidegger’s tool-analysis and the intentional objects of Husserl’s phenomenology. Each of these objects turns out to be split by an additional rift between the object as an enduring unit and its plurality of traits. This explains Heidegger’s notorious ‘fourfold’ model of the thing. This article shows that Heidegger’s Geviert must be reinterpreted as a system of four tensions that can be identified as time, space, essence, and eidos. Time and space can no longer be left as peerless dimensions of the cosmos. Instead, they are shown to arise from the tensions between things and their qualities. And for this reason they are joined by essence (in the classical sense of the term) and eidos (in Husserl’s sense, not Plato’s) as two out of four basic features of the fabric of the world.

Manuel DeLanda is one of the few admitted realists in present-day continental philosophy, a position he claims to draw from Deleuze. DeLanda conceives of the world as made up of countless layers of assemblages, irreducible to their parts and never dissolved into larger organic wholes. This article supports DeLanda’s position as a refreshing new model for continental thought. It also criticizes his movement away from singular individuals toward disembodied attractors and topological structures lying outside all specific beings. While endorsing DeLanda’s realism, I reject his shift from the actual to the virtual.