Graham Harman proposes to engage architecture as a useful irritant. He situates object-oriented philosophy in opposition to most trends in Western philosophy, specifying the tradition of undermining objects as combinations of more fundamental elements, and the complimentary tradition of “overmining” objects as constructions of consciousness, language, power or networks. He discusses antecedents for object-oriented philosophy in Aristotle, Kant, Whitehead and the phenomenology of Husserl and Heidegger. Harman criticizes Patrik Schumacher by observing that claiming everything is continuously differentiated fields doesn’t eliminate the problem of discrete objects. Harman notes that Schumacher’s definition of architecture as a system of communication seems to contradict the obvious function of architecture to create enclosures, barriers and obstacles to communication.
