Thinking from 'being surprising' to 'being surprised'

Chapter proposal (accepted but not presented): EGOS-2018, Sub-theme 57

Thinking from ‘being surprising’ to ‘being surprised’ - a speculative return to the phenomenological from Harman’s object-oriented ontology

Seelan Naidoo PhD candidate, University of St Gallen (HSG), Department of Philosophy Email: [email protected]

Abstract Harman’s speculative take on surprise is read as fundamentally about the object as immanently surprising. In this paper, I engage with this implication of Harman’s object-oriented ontology, and offer a more regional speculative perspective on surprise. One that shifts the emphasis from the general mode of being characterised as always (but not only) immanently surprising, to a more peculiar mode of being characterised as also always (but not only) immanently surprised. This kind of being surprised also stands in need of speculative realist thinking, since it is a real kind of being. Thus, I take it as a point of departure that if we want to think through to organization and organizations in speculative realist terms, then we cannot bypass those modes of being – those kinds of objects - that are also immanently surprised in the way I am trying to describe. To consider this being surprised in ontological terms suggests that experience and temporality have to be brought back in. To describe immanent being surprised, we must return those weird, futural objects which expect and thus experience the world as temporalized, to Harman’s world of timeless yet changeful objects. To fully describe being surprised, we may have to return Heidegger’s Dasein, now demoted, to the world of bare objects. Yet, a phenomenology of being surprised cannot be brought into the foreground in object-oriented ontology as grand ontology - a more regional, speculative realist perspective is called for which may disturb Harman’s intricate system of bare objects. I explore and try to lay out immanent being surprised as a local ontological bridge to a more comprehensive understanding of surprise – even though I worry that it might be a stretch too far from a totalized object-oriented ontology.

KEYWORDS: Surprise, being surprising, being surprised, Graham Harman, object-oriented

ontology, Martin Heidegger, phenomenology, organization.

From ‘being surprising’ to ‘being surprised’/S Naidoo/CFP-EGOS2018-SWG57

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Harman’s turning away from Heidegger’s Dasein is a turning to the real world of bare objects. As Harman (2010) says (in his essay on The Theory of Objects in Heidegger and Whitehead): Here too, it can be seen why the supposed priority of Dasein in Heidegger cannot be maintained. The distinguishing feature of this entity is said to be an understanding of its being. Dasein not only is itself, as even paper and dust are; more than this, Dasein somehow grasps the being of the beings it encounters. But the notion that makes Dasein a kind of transcendental starting point for the question of being is clearly false, even when Heidegger seems to read himself in this way.

At the most basic level what is found are objects in themselves, ontologically independent of experience and knowing, and experiencers and knowers. According to Gratton (2014), “Harman argues that objects are as they are in themselves are not in time, since time is embedded in appearances.” To categorise all that exists, Harman finds that he does not need to account for the human as a necessary object – the human and its peculiar faculties of experience and knowing are thus not necessary to reality either. Dasein, as the subject of time, is displaced and superseded in a thorough-going object-oriented ontology. To the extent that there such things among the furniture of the universe as human beings, they too are first and foremost, objects. And all other stuff such as the characteristics of objects, the processual relations among objects, are merely subsequent to the being of objects. Thus, Harman’s position is entitative – processes are taken seriously but only as consequences of the being of objects as the first category of reality. For Harman, the object exists prior to and independently of any experience of it, which, in any case, always avails only partial access to the object. Harman’s being surprising does not require a knowing subject who is duly surprised by the surprisingness of the object. That is, objective being surprising is, in the first instance, an ontological characteristic that is shared by all objects as objects – it is only secondarily conducive to epistemological access which may or may not become available to experience, thought and knowing. However, Harman should not be misinterpreted as saying that there are no such objects as human beings in the world, whose mode of existence might be approached and described more cogently in phenomenological terms. In this sense, for Harman, the description of Dasein in Heidegger’s Being and Time may be a “regional ontology”, at best. This is a transtemporal slap in the face for Heidegger since it was he who coined the term “regional ontology” to contrast it with his own efforts at “first philosophy”. Yet, the spectre of the subject of time still looms and a “speculative realism may stand the test of time, but only if it takes the reality of time as a test to pass.” (Gratton, 2014) The argument here is that although the reality of objects is not exhausted in experience, as the correlationists would have it, an


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exhaustive account of immanent being surprised is not available to an object-oriented ontology without a return, at the very least, to that peculiar object which is capable of temporalized experience. Objects are indeed immanently surprising, and may also be objectively sur-prised. Objects are sur-prised by other objects, as in a planetary object which is grasped in a star object’s gravitational field. Being sur-prised in this bare objective sense is the plausible counterpart to Harman’s objective being surprising. However, the sur-prised planetary object has no expectations and is not in any way engaged with the future. Yet, all the objects of life may also be characterised as immanently surprised being, steeped in expectation, historical, and yet also always engaged with the ineradicably contingent future. We are also immanently surprised objects-in-the-world in a different ontological sense to that indicated by ‘being objectively sur-prised’. Being objectively sur-prised is thus only descriptive of the enslavement of the object to other objects. Human being is not wiped from the world of objects. With the Mayor of Whoville we shout for our lives: “We are here! We are here!” (Dr. Suess, in Horton Hears a Who) A speculative realist account of the now displaced human, a regional ontological account, is not ruled out by an object-oriented ontology. Yet, what if phenomenological being surprised predominates over purely objective being surprising and being sur-prised in the region of the human or the organic object? I argue that while immanent being surprising, in Harman’s sense, is basic even to the human as object, it is superseded in the region of that being which is immanently surprised in expectation and in its involvement in an engagement with the contingent future. “A planetary system is always underway, but is in no way engaged with what is yet to come.” (Naidoo, 2018, forthcoming) Thus, a regional ontology comes about wherein temporal experience is inaugurated along with a being that is both immanently surprising and immanently surprised. Surprise considered phenomenologically signifies more than one kind experience. The term ‘surprise’ has relatively recent Anglo-French etymological origins – it is a word that emerges in the early-16th century at the onset of enlightenment thinking. To the extent that surprise is of ontological significance, this etymology reveals surprise as also historically induced. A basic distinction is that drawn between the experience of the surpriser, and that of the surprised. In the proposed paper I approach this distinction in terms of the different temporalities involved, in order to describe being surprised in more detailed, general terms. At first thought, the temporal orientation of being surprised appears to be retrospective – as in sensemaking theory (Weick, 1995). That is, the experience of surprise – as involving encounters with the unexpected - is always the experience of it as having already happened. On this view, surprises cannot be foreseen. To speak of being surprised in the future tense


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also then seems to be nonsensical. To say, “I will be surprised tomorrow when it rains”, is nonsensical since I already take it that it will rain tomorrow and cannot therefore be surprised when it rains tomorrow. On this view, it is only really possible to speak of how I was surprised when it rained. In focusing on the experience of being surprised, I critique organizational sensemaking theory for its inability to give a full account of surprise, and I trace this to an exclusive commitment to a retrospective temporal orientation, which is ultimately grounded in an excision of being from knowing. Sensemaking theory is underpinned by “correlationism” (Meillassoux) – the objective world in-itself is bracketed off for the sensemaker. Sensemaking theory approaches experience as solely available in a retrospective mode of knowing. “In this Weick follows Mead and Schutz in their strong commitment to a retrospective epistemology.” (Naidoo, 2018, forthcoming) It is an “attentional” epistemology that is rooted in the processes of making and enacting meanings on the basis of hindsight. Yet, we cannot approach surprise exclusively as a problem of knowing and knowledge since it necessarily involves not-knowing and therefore a kind of being that is not exhausted in knowing. In Heidegger’s terms, being surprised involves a “breakdown” of knowing and knowledge. The phenomenology of being surprised involves being, knowing and notknowing – it is onto-epistemological. Thrown being-in-the-world (Heidegger) entails beingsurprised-in-the-world more than it does being surprising or being objectively sur-prised. Moreover, following Heidegger, being surprised must be approached as involving a futural temporality. In this sense, being surprised is born of the engagement with the in-principle contingency of what is yet to come. The future is neither “present-at-hand” nor is it “readyto-hand” – only the objects of life are involved in an engagement with what is yet to come. Thus, the future is an objective fact of being that is immanently surprised, but it is not an objective fact for other objects that are merely objectively surprising and sur-prised. The exploration of a phenomenology of being surprised makes speculative realist meanings and questions available which do not arise in a bare object-oriented ontology. It is about trying to describe a real mode of being that involves being surprised as immanent to that mode of being. Being surprised is not a choice – it is not in itself amenable to decision. We are surprised beings-in-the-world and we are becoming more surprised. However, it does not necessarily provide a shorter or easier conceptual route to understanding how surprise becomes organizational. And, indeed, what becomes of organization as a mode of being that must incorporate being surprised under in-principle contingency - and even more so in an age of higher-order contingency.


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References EGOS. 2017. Sub-theme 57 call for papers: Object-oriented Ontologies and Organization Studies. Gratton, P. 2014. Speculative Realism: Problems and Prospects. Bloomsbury. Harman, G. 2010. Towards a Speculative Realism. Zero Books. Heidegger, M. 1962. Being and Time: Translated by John Macquarrie and Edward Robinson. Harper Perennial. Heidegger, M. 2000. Introduction to Metaphysics: new translation by Gregory Fried and Richard Polt. Yale. Heidegger, M. 2007a. “The concept of time in the science of history.” In Becoming Heidegger: on the trail of his early occasional writings 1910-1927, edited by Theodore Kisiel and Thomas Sheehan, 60-72. Northwestern University Press. Heidegger, M. 2007b. “The concept of time.” In Becoming Heidegger: on the trail of his early occasional writings 1910-1927, edited by Theodore Kisiel and Thomas Sheehan, 196-213. Northwestern University Press. Naidoo, S. 2018 (forthcoming). Organizational Futurity: Being and Knowing in the Engagement with What is Yet to Come. In How Organizations Manage the Future. Palgrave. Weick, KE. 1995. Sensemaking in Organizations. Sage.


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