Speculative Realism, just for starters

Having dropped the phrase Speculative Realism a few times, I should probably provide some background and a few links. This is nothing you can't track down yourself with an hour’s research, at most, and of course I will inevitably leave gaps, so feel free to fire back anything else you find.

S.R. is a label of quite recent coinage, and is usually applied to the work of four central thinkers: Quentin Meillassoux, Ray Brassier, Graham Harman, and Iain Hamilton Grant. I seem to have discovered these guys in a way different from the usual—that is, not as a group. (Indeed, this grouping as gang-of-four strikes me as more happenstance than anything else, but for the moment, it's convenient).

I found Graham Harman quite by chance when his book Guerrilla Metaphysics came through the used book shop I worked at. I read it in about three days and realized that here was something new. For one thing, his sources were idiosyncratic. Yes, he clearly knew his Heidegger, but he also cited Xavier Zubiri, possibly the most under-appreciated major philosopher of the 20th century, an absolute giant in the old style; as well as Alphonso Lingis, (under whom he has studied, I learned later); and he had some beautiful words for Jose Ortega y Gasset, certainly not on everyone’s short list today. Most important, Harman’s arguments were both out-of-left-field and impossible to dismiss out of hand. He contends, very simply put, that whereas nearly all Western philosophy since Kant has seen the human being as having to negotiate a chasm separating him or her from the rest of reality (e.g. Husserl’s subject regarding the intentional object), this chasm in fact obtains everywhere, in every single interaction whatsoever—the light hitting a photographic plate, the match scraping along the hearthstone, the needle in the record groove and the spermatozoon finally gaining the egg all alike encounter their “intentional object” across the same “gap” that lies between the human being and the world at any moment. From here he proceeds to develop a whole ontology.

Well before reading Harman, I encountered Quentin Meillassoux in an article in Philosophy Today, while browsing at the newsstand around the corner from the bookshop. As it happens, the article was by Harman—but the name meant nothing to me at the time, and I’d forgotten it by the time I found Harman’s book. Meillassoux’s notoriety comes in large part for his having, in After Finitude, launched a sweeping indictment against almost all contemporary philosophy as having capitulated to the forces of unreason, whether it knows it or not. “Correlationism” is Meillassoux’s name for his enemy, and he defines it as “the idea according to which we only ever have access to the correlation between thinking and being, and never to either term considered apart from the other.” This idea is not synonymous with Kantianism, but it is an inheritance from Kant’s firewall between the subject and the unknowable ding an sich. Once you have conceded that one has no access to qualities that inhere in the object itself, irrespective of the observer, you have abdicated the place of reason. In the place of reality, you are left with a correlation between an unknowable object and an irreducible subject, whether that is a noumenon and a transcendental subject, or power and society, or reality and language, or… and so on. Meillassoux’s critique is twofold. He claims that Kant inaugurated a counter-revolution against the Copernican de-thronement of Man, by reinstating the (human) subject as a privileged center of a phenomenal world. And he claims that this move has necessarily entailed making human finitude thematic, a development we need to undo. (Hence his title).

Ray Brassier I knew first as the translator of Alain Badiou. His essays on Badiou made me at first think of him as a commentator—a very helpful one. But the more I read the more I realized that Brassier saw in Badiou (as well as Meillassoux--he also translated After Finitude), vital allies (of a sort) for a project that is his own: a thinking-through of nihilism “to the end.” This, one might say, is a kind of immanent critique of nihilism, staring the bleak heat-death of the universe in the eye. Brassier wants to follow the ramifications of extinction and the utter absence of any shred of teleology. This means confronting the mere happenstance of thought—its origins in aleatory material processes—and its eventual total disappearance from the whole Universe, when, as Nietzsche wrote, “the clever animals ha[ve] to die.” This takes Brassier from a prolonged engagement with neuroscience, to the confrontation with the eventual death of the last sentient being. This is “Being-unto-death” with a vengeance. The starkness of the void in Brassier's book Nihil Unbound is absolute-zero cold, unflinching and comfortless. Early in the book, Brassier declares: “Nihilism is…the unavoidably corollary of the realist conviction that there is a mind-independent reality which…is indifferent to our existence and oblivious to the values and meanings which we would drape over it.” His opponents are described at the outset: “Philosophers would do well to desist from any further injunctions about the need to re-establish the meaningfulness of existence, the purposefulness of life, or mend the shattered concord between man and nature.” There is a sense in which nihilism is thought itself for Brassier, and a sense in which it is thought’s shadow. “Nihilism is not an existential quandary but a speculative opportunity,” he says in the same preface, and he capitalizes on the opportunity for about 300 pages.

Of the four, it is Iain Hamilton Grant about whose own positions I am still most uncertain. I chanced upon Grant during research on Schelling’s reading of the Timaeus, to contrast with Badiou’s style of Platonism. A web search turned up Grant’s book Philosophies of Nature After Schelling. I soon realized that I would have to make reading this book a separate project of its own. It proves fascinating (and very difficult) reading. He makes a very strong case for the philosophy of nature as the core of Schelling’s thought, and for Schelling, as opposed to Hegel or Heidegger, as the thinker for our age. Schelling provides us with a robust and emphatically non-anthropocentric philosophy of nature, an especially timely contribution at our present ecological impasse. Grant also reads Schelling as the representative of a Platonic and neoPlatonic tradition against Kant (By now you may notice an oft-remarked anti-kantian theme running through S.R.). But to put it like this too easily gives the impression that Grant wants to make a case for the kind of re-enchantment that Brassier contemptuously dismisses. This is too simple, though I do think Grant's work (perhaps despite his intentions) can be turned to the re-enchanters' purposes more readily than can Meillassoux or Brassier. However, it is still early to tell. Because this is Grant’s most substantive book so far, it is easy to mistake him for an explicator (mush as I thought of Brassier). But Grant will, I expect, emerge as much more than an interpreter of Schelling or of anyone else.

There is one more figure who I think deserves some mention: Levi Bryant, whose blog has been one of several online centers of the S.R. storm in the past few years and who has done a tremendous amount of original writing and immediate publishing, rather than sending things through the usual academic channels. Bryant’s ontology, while closest to Harman’s, is different from that of any of the other thinkers presented here. He has just published Part One of an Object-Oriented Ontology Manifesto on his blog Larval Subjects, in which he makes, among other points, the claim that Kant’s Copernican turn inevitably imprisoned philosophy, and willy-nilly all the humanities, in a corral of human discourse, while the sciences, which simply ignored this ghettoization, carried on investigating the world it naively assumed to exist independently of the mind. (This suggests that the “Two Cultures” dilemma diagnosed long ago by C.P. Snow has its roots precisely in Correlationism). Bryant has his detractors, and some see him as a poseur. I think this is simple bad manners; even if you’ve had online run-ins with him, you should respect someone as indefatigable as Bryant. Again, I speak as an outsider; I’ve had no conversations with any of these guys, so I have no idea how easily a flame-war can arise.

Also, precisely because I am an outsider and do not know all the players, no one should take my summary here as definitive. There are several other significant sites in this story, more or less closely involved with S.R. (and not uncritically): k-punk, planomenology, Speculative Heresy, Deontologistics , anotherheideggerblog, and Grundlegung, among others. What emerges from some hours' cruising around on these sites is a whirl of mostly-left politics, cultural commentary, and (on Graham Harman's blog) the occasional sports vignette, as well as a lot of philosophical controversy. I might add, there are several other sites that engage with SR even more critically, and these I will mention next time (though if you spend much time with these links, you'll find them yourself).

I’ll go on record and say that I think that, the trendiness and occasional bad manners of its online discussion aside (and yes, there is some of both), S.R. is a genuinely challenging set of approaches that could go a long way towards snapping philosophy out of its Buridan’s-Ass paralysis between the Continental and Analytic hay-bales. To be sure, I’ve a number of reservations about this rather lose movement, which I’ll put in another post. But (and this is about as polemical as I'm gonna get about this) anyone who doesn't recognize this as real philosophy (maybe not a wholly new thing under the sun, but of indisputable quality) is either kidding themselves, or not really interested in the first place. It may not be what you're into, but this is, and is about, the real thing.

Online philosophy

If web links are, as I suggest, a tool with (potentially) a genuinely philosophical pertinence, a way of dramatizing the interconnections between one discourse and another, I have to confess a certain reticence about them too. Like any technological convenience, they bear as much chance of being a drag on or distraction from thinking, as they have of being a asset to it. Socrates tells Phaedrus that the Egyptian king greeted the invention of writing with fairly mixed reviews; far from being an aid to memory, he warned, it will cause memory to wither. I don't want to get into the Platonic case against writing in this post--it's the matter for a very complex argument I might make in a series on the reconstruction of the evolution of consciousness; but I think the warnings Plato offers--or rather, that he has Socrates put into the mouth of Thamus the king--are certainly well-taken as regards the web. Whatever their (considerable) upside, weblinks themselves are also all too easily a mere distraction, or a gimmick, and can scatter the reader's attention, or merely spread one's own discourse out into a sort of horizontal pool, without making it any deeper. As you may have noticed, I've included no links at all yet in my posts (though I may go back and add some retroactively); I'm still weighing how to use them. Links can make us more aware of the "unity of knowledge," or they might merely be a game that does not occasion thought.

Another side to the question of the Web is community. The community offered by the Web is a new sort, and woe betide us if we mistake it for the old-fashioned, face-to-face, nextdoor-neighbor kind. Aside from the questions it occasions about privacy, property, and propaganda (if I may be permitted an abuse of p's)--questions philosophers ought to weigh in on precisely as philosophers--it can hardly be denied that entirely different mores of communication have evolved online, from a nigh-Orwellian Textspeak to a virtual epistolary renaissance.

The most visible trend currently in philosophy online is the work of the so-called Speculative Realists and their fellow-travelers. These thinkers have embraced the web as a tool for philosophical trend-making, at least, and (I would argue) for considerably more. I have some points of difference with any of them, naturally, but I'll make some of that the matter for further posts. As for their use of online media, it was probably inevitable that some would see it as a savvy move, while others would dismiss it as careerist maneuvering. Since I have no stake in the matter, I prefer to simply read their work and wrestle with it. But here again Plato's point is worth heeding: the new technology won't do the work for you. It's an opportunity (and a challenge), with nothing magic about it, and the very things you think of as perks might turn out to be the biggest liabilities.

I might add that the Platonic critique of writing is the beginning of the Heideggerian critique of technology, and gives the lie to any construal of Heidegger (including, say, his own) that makes him the arch-opponent of "platonism."