Indieoma

We are pleased to welcome Nick Srnicek, editor/writer for influential contemporary philosophy blog site ‘Speculative Heresy’, and editor, along with Levi Bryant Graham Harman, of forthcoming collection of essays (by luminaries and newcomers alike) around ‘Speculative Realism’: ‘The Speculative Turn’. Here Nick introduces us to ‘Speculative Realism’ a new trend in philosophy, which has breathed life into a discipline previously see as out of touch with scientific revelation and the concerns of everyday people.


We’ve been told time and again that our world is socially constructed, that we are bound to our particular place in the world and incapable of universality, and that we’ll never be capable of attaining knowledge of the world. These claims, once so radical and controversial, have passed into the mainstream to the point of becoming dogma. Late night philosophical debates in a pub almost always have one person arguing that quantum mechanics relies on measurement and thus everything is subjective. Students debating politics often argue that all of politics is comprised of opinions and each is equally valid. The fundamentalism of a true believer strikes the Western individual as foreign and, often, frightening. The ‘enlightened’ liberal individual knows that each culture is particular and fears any universalist project – ethical, religious, cultural, political, or scientific.

But what if this wasn’t the end of the story? What if, after passing through and accepting the important critiques of universalism and truth, it was still possible to argue that we aren’t limited by finitude? Such a claim would be radical by the standards of most contemporary philosophy, yet a rising movement argues just that. This movement, loosely labeled as speculative realism, attempts to reject the morass and relativism of the postmodern era by arguing that the reality-in-itself (i.e. outside of its particular appearance to us) can be thought consistently. Beyond our finitude, beyond our situatedness, and beyond our particular perspectives, speculative realism marshals an array of logical arguments and empirical evidence to demonstrate that we are not inherently limited by language or conscious experience. It situates itself against the modesty of most analytic philosophy and the hesitancy of continental philosophy. Yet it also retains the clarity of analytic writing and the system-building of much of continental philosophy. It thus situates itself, not as a synthesis of analytic and continental philosophy, but rather as a third alternative – as a movement that increasingly finds itself at odds with both analytics and continentals.

The claims of speculative realism have been most prominent in four emerging thinkers: Quentin Meillassoux, Graham Harman, Ray Brassier, and Iain Hamilton Grant. It is Meillassoux, a young French thinker and student of Alain Badiou’s, who has arguably synthesized speculative realism around a common foe: the correlationist. As Meillassoux argues in his book, After Finitude, correlationism is any philosophy which argues that being and thought can only be thought as correlated, and never as independent of each other. The idea of thinking reality separate from its appearance in thought is anathema to this position. Equipped with such a generic definition, Meillassoux can plausibly argue that post-Kantian philosophy has been dominated by correlationism of various kinds. Thinkers as diverse as GWF Hegel, Friedrich Nietzsche, Ludwig Wittgenstein, and Jacques Derrida, are all implicitly correlationists. Meillassoux’s genius is to show that correlationism undermines itself. In an effort to ward off full-blown idealism (where thought is all that exists), the correlationist must hold onto a principle which undermines correlationism. Correlationism, therefore, is an unsustainable position, and one that is self-propelled into acknowledging that it already has knowledge of reality-in-itself.

With the enemy named, flanked, and defeated, the question becomes, ‘what is the nature of reality-in-itself?’ – a question which has received a variety of answers, depending on one’s starting presuppositions. For Graham Harman, this means an analysis of tools in Martin Heidegger’s work which shows that every object is split in two. There is the side of an object which becomes enmeshed in our relational world, where objects are used and related to each other. But the other side of an object is a withdrawn aspect, an aspect that forever recedes from becoming involved with other objects. This holds whether it is two nonhuman objects establishing a relation to each other, or whether it is a human experiencing a nonhuman object. In each case, an aspect of the object recedes.

By contrast to Harman’s ‘object-oriented philosophy’, there is the nihilistic and scientifically-inflected work of Ray Brassier. Starting from an analysis of the rising French philosopher, Francois Laruelle, Brassier argues that the task of philosophy is to empty the world of meaning and take nihilism as ‘a vector of intellectual discovery’. From Laruelle, Brassier draws an idea of the Real as an instance that both forever eludes thought’s grasp and that determines its own thought. In addition, Brassier draws upon the most radical philosophy of mind, eliminativism, in order to argue that phenomenal experience is fundamentally flawed and false. Science, with its third-person approach to the world, is capable of discovering and explaining the fundamentally nonconceptual basis for conceptual thought. It is only through science, therefore, that we can purge humanistic platitudes and naïve comforts.

Lastly, there is Iain Hamilton Grant’s work, stemming from a close analysis of Schelling and the immediate post-Kantian debates. In this regards, Grant argues for a neglected line of thought within philosophy – rather than the turn towards Absolute Idealism in Hegel’s thought, Schelling provides the key tools for what might have been, if philosophy had fully taken on Schelling’s materialist inclinations. In this endeavour, Grant argues for a realm of pure productivity, of pure flux, out of which various material objects and immaterial subjects emerge. Thought and nature are immediately united in this productive realm, and it is only their emergence into specific objects and thoughts that brings about their apparent separation.

While a small movement, it has grown quickly, and splinter movements can already be discerned. Beyond the divisions between the four original thinkers, there are arguably two more separate variants: a politically-oriented wing and a psychoanalytically-oriented wing. The former aim to understand what a realist ontology might mean for politics, and whether it can provide any practical use for everyday struggles. The latter focus on the emergence of subjectivity out of a realm of pure nature, and ask what it might mean to have a modern philosophy of nature combined with a modern theory of the subject. The future promises much for speculative realism, with a large number of books coming out soon, a vibrant online community, and numerous conferences scheduled on similar topics. If it achieves nothing further, speculative realism has already achieved much simply by bringing life and vibrancy back to continental philosophy.


Links to the other Open Ideas posts:

Philosophizing Now: Graham Harman Interviewed

3 Randomly Chosen Objects From the Studio: Paul Sakoilsky

ENG/ITA Caposud Magazine breaks new ground: Interview with Alfredo Giangaspero

Reflections From an Artwork Jettisoned in Space: Mike Watson

Non Frontières: Karim Dimechkie