Beyond Epistemic Paranoia: Graham Harman and the Rise of Object-Oriented Social Theory

Abstract

If someone asks a classical Social Theorist “how do you define your field of research?”, he will probably get a flood of answers, with various shades, colors and even smells, but there is always something on the horizon, an insistent and unavoidable trace. Like any member of the humanities, he is supposed to study the behavior of humans and anything associated with them, right? So we are
supposed to study things like language, culture, ideology, power, class, gender, and so on. It does not matter if you are a structuralist, pragmatist, or postmodernist, it does not even matter your background methodological choices, since there is always a humanism lurking in the epistemic shadows. The “human” in Social Theory, therefore, is not just a moving piece of matter, a simple primate walking around with its complex signs, but a transcendental structure, a kind of persistent and dangerous matrix, at least when used without caution. The aim of this essay is to map this displacement, its ups and downs, as well as to suggest all its unexplored contours, while bringing in the Object-Oriented Ontology (OOO) of the American philosopher Graham Harman as a possible way out of what we call here “epistemic paranoia”.