Speculative realism
Encyclopedia
Speculative realism is an emerging movement in contemporary philosophy
which defines itself loosely in its stance of metaphysical realism against the dominant forms of post-Kantian philosophy or what it terms correlationism. Speculative realism takes its name from a conference held at Goldsmiths College
, University of London
in April, 2007. The conference was moderated by Alberto Toscano
of Goldsmiths College, and featured presentations by Ray Brassier
of American University of Beirut
(then at Middlesex University
), Iain Hamilton Grant
of the University of the West of England
, Graham Harman
of the American University in Cairo
, and Quentin Meillassoux
of the École normale supérieure
in Paris. Credit for the name "speculative realism" is generally ascribed to Brassier, though Meillassoux had already used the term "speculative materialism" to describe his own position.
A second conference, entitled "Speculative Realism/Speculative Materialism", took place at the UWE Bristol on Friday 24 April 2009, two years after the original event at Goldsmiths. The line-up consisted of Ray Brassier, Iain Hamilton Grant, Graham Harman, and (in place of Meillassoux who was unable to attend) Alberto Toscano
.
.
What unites the four core members of the movement is an attempt to overcome both “correlationism” as well as “philosophies of access.” In After Finitude, Meillassoux defines correlationism 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." Philosophies of access are any of those philosophies which privilege the human being over other entities. Both ideas represent forms of anthropocentrism
. Lee Braver's A Thing of This World: A History of Continental Anti-Realism, credited by Harman as one of the catalysts for his own theory, demonstrates in considerable detail that both Analytic and Continental philosophy have been anti-realist.
All four of the core thinkers within Speculative Realism work to overturn these forms of philosophy which privilege the human being, favouring distinct forms of realism against the dominant forms of idealism in much of contemporary philosophy.
and Analytic
schools of philosophy , there are important differences separating the core members of the Speculative Realist movement and their followers.
Meillassoux follows the opposite tactic in rejecting the Principle of Correlation for the sake of a bolstered Principle of Factiality in his post-Kantian return to Hume. By arguing in favour of such a principle, Meillassoux is led to reject the necessity not only of all physical laws of nature, but all logical laws with the exception of the Principle of Non-Contradiction (since eliminating the Principle of Non-Contradiction would undermine the Principle of Factiality which claims that things can always be otherwise than what they are). By rejecting the Principle of Sufficient Reason
, there can be no justification for the necessity of physical laws, meaning that while the universe may be ordered in such and such a way, there is no reason it could not be otherwise. Meillassoux rejects the Kantian a priori in favour of a Humean a priori, claiming that the lesson to be learned from Hume on the subject of causality
is that "the same cause may actually bring about 'a hundred different events' (and even many more)."
(OOP) is that objects have been given short shrift for too long in philosophy in favour of more “radical approaches.” Graham Harman has classified these forms of “radical philosophy” as those that either try to “undermine” objects by saying that objects are simply superficial crusts to a deeper underlying reality, either in the form of monism or a perpetual flux, or those that try to “overmine” objects by saying that the idea of a whole object is a form of folk ontology, that there is no underlying “object” beneath either the qualities (e.g. there is no “apple,” only “red,” “hard,” etc.) or the relations (as in both Latour
and Whitehead
, the former claiming that an object is only what it "modifies, transforms, perturbs, or creates"). OOP is notable for not only its critique of forms of anti-realism, but other forms of realism as well. Harman has even claimed that the term "realism" will soon no longer be a relevant distinction within philosophy as the factions within Speculative Realism grow in number. As such, he has already written pieces differentiating his own OOP from other forms of realism which he claims are not realist enough as they reject objects as "useless fictions."
According to Harman, everything is an object, whether it be a mailbox, electromagnetic radiation
, curved spacetime
, the Commonwealth of Nations
, or a propositional attitude
; all things, whether physical or fictional, are equally objects. Expressing strong sympathy for panpsychism
, Harman proposes a new philosophical discipline called "speculative psychology" dedicated to investigating the "cosmic layers of psyche" and "ferreting out the specific psychic reality of earthworms, dust, armies, chalk, and stone."
Harman defends a version of the Aristotelian notion of substance
. Unlike Leibniz, for whom there were both substances and aggregates, Harman maintains that when objects combine, they create new objects. In this way, he defends an apriori metaphysics that claims that reality is made up only of objects and that there is no “bottom” to the series of objects. In contrast to many other versions of substance, Harman also maintains that it need not be considered eternal, but as Aristotle maintained, substances can both come to be and pass away. For Harman, an object is in itself an infinite recess, unknowable and inaccessible by any other thing. This leads to his account of what he terms “vicarious causality.” Inspired by the occasionalists
of Medieval
Islamic Philosophy
, Harman maintains that no two objects can ever interact save through the mediation of a “sensual vicar.” There are two types of objects, then, for Harman: real objects and the sensual objects that allow for interaction. The former are the things of everyday life, while the latter are the caricatures that mediate interaction. For example, when fire burns cotton, Harman argues that the fire does not touch the essence of that cotton which is inexhaustible by any relation, but that the interaction is mediated by a caricature of the cotton which causes it to burn.
onward based on the definition of matter. Aristotle distinguished between Form and Matter in such a way that Matter was invisible to philosophy, whereas Grant argues for a return to the Platonic Matter as not only the basic building blocks of reality, but the forces and powers that govern our reality. He traces this same argument to the post-Kantian German Idealists
Johann Gottlieb Fichte
and Friedrich Wilhelm Joseph Schelling
, claiming that the distinction between Matter as substantive versus useful fiction persists to this day and that we should end our attempts to overturn Plato and instead attempt to overturn Kant and return to “speculative physics” in the Platonic tradition, that is, not a physics of bodies, but a “physics of the All”.
Eugene Thacker
has examined how the concept of "life itself" is both determined within regional philosophy and also how "life itself" comes to acquire metaphysical properties. Thacker's book After Life shows how the ontology of life operates by way of a split between "Life" and "the living," making possible a "metaphysical displacement" in which life is thought via another metaphysical term, such as time, form, or spirit: "Every ontology of life thinks of life in terms of something-other-than-life...that something-other-than-life is most often a metaphysical concept, such as time and temporality, form and causality, or spirit and immanence" Thacker traces this theme from Aristotle, to Scholasticism and mysticism/negative theology, to Spinoza and Kant, showing how this three-fold displacement is also alive in philosophy today (life as time in process philosophy and Deleuzianism, life as form in biopolitical thought, life as spirit in post-secular philosophies of religion). Thacker examines the relation of speculative realism to the ontology of life, arguing for a "vitalist correlation": "Let us say that a vitalist correlation is one that fails to conserve the correlationist dual necessity of the separation and inseparability of thought and object, self and world, and which does so based on some ontologized notion of 'life'. Ultimately Thacker argues for a skepticism regarding "life": "Life is not only a problem of philosophy, but a problem for philosophy.
Other thinkers have emerged within this group, united in their allegiance to what has been known as “process philosophy,” rallying around such thinkers as Schelling, Bergson, Whitehead
, and Deleuze, among others. A recent example is found in Steven Shaviro
's book Without Criteria: Kant, Whitehead, Deleuze, and Aesthetics, which argues for a process-based approach that entails panpsychism as much as it does vitalism or animism. For Shaviro, it is Whitehead's philosophy of prehensions and nexus that offers the best combination of continental and analytical philosophy. Another recent example is found in Jane Bennett's book Vibrant Matter, which argues for a shift from human relations to things, to a "vibrant matter" that cuts across the living and non-living, human bodies and non-human things. Finally, Leon Niemoczynski, in his book, Charles Sanders Peirce and a Religious Metaphysics of Nature, argues that a vibrant nature can afford lines of religious insight into its own infinitely productive ground. He identifies this ground as naturans naturata (nature naturing), part of an infinitely becoming divine life. Reality is fundamentally unfixed for such thinkers, who claim that objects are the products of a more primordial process of becoming, which is connected to historical variations of matter, will, or drive.
, instead attempting to find meaning in a world conditioned by the very idea of its own annihilation. Thus Brassier critiques both the phenomenological and hermeneutic strands of Continental philosophy as well as the vitality of thinkers like Gilles Deleuze
, who work to ingrain meaning in the world and stave off the “threat” of nihilism. Instead, drawing on thinkers such as Alain Badiou
, François Laruelle
, Paul Churchland
, and Thomas Metzinger
, Brassier defends a view of the world as inherently devoid of meaning. That is, rather than avoiding nihilism
, Brassier embraces it as the truth of reality. Brassier concludes from his readings of Badiou and Laruelle that the universe is founded on the nothing, but also that philosophy is the "organon of extinction," that it is only because life is conditioned by its own extinction that there is thought at all. Brassier then defends a radically anti-correlationist philosophy proposing that Thought is conjoined not with Being, but with Non-Being.
magazine published in March 2011, Ray Brassier denied that there is any such thing as a 'speculative realist movement' and firmly distanced himself from those who continue to attach themselves to the brandname:
"The ‘speculative realist movement’ exists only in the imaginations of a group of bloggers promoting an agenda for which I have no sympathy whatsoever: actor-network theory spiced with pan-psychist metaphysics and morsels of process philosophy. I don’t believe the internet is an appropriate medium for serious philosophical debate; nor do I believe it is acceptable to try to concoct a philosophical movement online by using blogs to exploit the misguided enthusiasm of impressionable graduate students. I agree with Deleuze’s remark that ultimately the most basic task of philosophy is to impede stupidity, so I see little philosophical merit in a ‘movement’ whose most signal achievement thus far is to have generated an online orgy of stupidity."
, which published the proceedings of the inaugural conference at Goldsmiths and has featured numerous other articles by 'speculative realist' thinkers; as has the academic journal Pli, which is edited and produced by members of the Graduate School of the Department of Philosophy at the University of Warwick
.
In 2011 Edinburgh University Press
launched a series of books devoted to speculative realism, beginning with a monograph on Meillassoux written by Graham Harman.
The following is a list of publications associated with Speculative Realism:
in the form of blogs. Web sites have formed as resources for essays, lectures, and planned future books by those within the Speculative Realist movement. Many other blogs have emerged with original material on Speculative realism or expanding on its themes and ideas.
Publishers such as Zero Books, Re.Press
, and Open Humanities Press
have contributed to this growth as well, publishing PDFs of books and signing contracts with bloggers to produce literature pertaining to speculative realism. This represents a general trend within speculative realism; a willingness to abandon traditional methods of publication/communication in favour of innovation.
Philosophy
Philosophy is the study of general and fundamental problems, such as those connected with existence, knowledge, values, reason, mind, and language. Philosophy is distinguished from other ways of addressing such problems by its critical, generally systematic approach and its reliance on rational...
which defines itself loosely in its stance of metaphysical realism against the dominant forms of post-Kantian philosophy or what it terms correlationism. Speculative realism takes its name from a conference held at Goldsmiths College
Goldsmiths College
Goldsmiths, University of London is a public research university located in London, United Kingdom which specialises in the arts, humanities and social sciences, and a constituent college of the federal University of London. It was founded in 1891 as Goldsmiths' Technical and Recreative Institute...
, University of London
University of London
-20th century:Shortly after 6 Burlington Gardens was vacated, the University went through a period of rapid expansion. Bedford College, Royal Holloway and the London School of Economics all joined in 1900, Regent's Park College, which had affiliated in 1841 became an official divinity school of the...
in April, 2007. The conference was moderated by Alberto Toscano
Alberto Toscano
Alberto Toscano is a cultural critic, social theorist, philosopher and translator best known to the English-speaking world for his translations of the work of Alain Badiou, including Badiou’s The Century and Logics of Worlds...
of Goldsmiths College, and featured presentations by Ray Brassier
Ray Brassier
Ray Brassier is a member of the Philosophy faculty at the American University of Beirut, Lebanon, known for his work in philosophical realism. He was formerly Research Fellow at the Centre for Research in Modern European Philosophy at Middlesex University, London, England.He is the author of Nihil...
of American University of Beirut
American University of Beirut
The American University of Beirut is a private, independent university in Beirut, Lebanon. It was founded as the Syrian Protestant College by American missionaries in 1866...
(then at Middlesex University
Middlesex University
Middlesex University is a university in north London, England. It is located in the historic county boundaries of Middlesex from which it takes its name. It is one of the post-1992 universities and is a member of Million+ working group...
), Iain Hamilton Grant
Iain Hamilton Grant
Iain Hamilton Grant is a lecturer at the University of the West of England in Bristol, United Kingdom. His research interests include post-Kantian European philosophy, especially Philosophical Idealism, contemporary philosophy, the history and philosophy of science, the philosophy of technology,...
of the University of the West of England
University of the West of England
The University of the West of England is a university based in the English city of Bristol. Its main campus is at Frenchay, about five miles north of the city centre...
, Graham Harman
Graham Harman
Graham Harman is a professor at the American University in Cairo, Egypt. He is a contemporary philosopher of metaphysics, who attempts to reverse the linguistic turn of Western philosophy...
of the American University in Cairo
American University in Cairo
The American University in Cairo is an independent, non-profit, apolitical, secular institution of higher learning located in Cairo, Egypt...
, and Quentin Meillassoux
Quentin Meillassoux
Quentin Meillassoux is a French philosopher. He teaches at the École Normale Supérieure, and is the son of the anthropologist Claude Meillassoux....
of the École normale supérieure
École normale supérieure
An école normale supérieure or ENS is a type of publicly funded higher education in France. A portion of the student body who are French civil servants are called Normaliens....
in Paris. Credit for the name "speculative realism" is generally ascribed to Brassier, though Meillassoux had already used the term "speculative materialism" to describe his own position.
A second conference, entitled "Speculative Realism/Speculative Materialism", took place at the UWE Bristol on Friday 24 April 2009, two years after the original event at Goldsmiths. The line-up consisted of Ray Brassier, Iain Hamilton Grant, Graham Harman, and (in place of Meillassoux who was unable to attend) Alberto Toscano
Alberto Toscano
Alberto Toscano is a cultural critic, social theorist, philosopher and translator best known to the English-speaking world for his translations of the work of Alain Badiou, including Badiou’s The Century and Logics of Worlds...
.
The Critique of Correlationism
While often in disagreement over basic philosophical issues, the speculative realist thinkers have a shared resistance to philosophies of human finitude inspired by the tradition of Immanuel KantImmanuel Kant
Immanuel Kant was a German philosopher from Königsberg , researching, lecturing and writing on philosophy and anthropology at the end of the 18th Century Enlightenment....
.
What unites the four core members of the movement is an attempt to overcome both “correlationism” as well as “philosophies of access.” In After Finitude, Meillassoux defines correlationism 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." Philosophies of access are any of those philosophies which privilege the human being over other entities. Both ideas represent forms of anthropocentrism
Anthropocentrism
Anthropocentrism describes the tendency for human beings to regard themselves as the central and most significant entities in the universe, or the assessment of reality through an exclusively human perspective....
. Lee Braver's A Thing of This World: A History of Continental Anti-Realism, credited by Harman as one of the catalysts for his own theory, demonstrates in considerable detail that both Analytic and Continental philosophy have been anti-realist.
All four of the core thinkers within Speculative Realism work to overturn these forms of philosophy which privilege the human being, favouring distinct forms of realism against the dominant forms of idealism in much of contemporary philosophy.
Variations
While sharing in the goal of overturning the dominant strands of post-Kantian thought in both ContinentalContinental philosophy
Continental philosophy, in contemporary usage, refers to a set of traditions of 19th and 20th century philosophy from mainland Europe. This sense of the term originated among English-speaking philosophers in the second half of the 20th century, who used it to refer to a range of thinkers and...
and Analytic
Analytic philosophy
Analytic philosophy is a generic term for a style of philosophy that came to dominate English-speaking countries in the 20th century...
schools of philosophy , there are important differences separating the core members of the Speculative Realist movement and their followers.
Speculative Materialism
In his critique of correlationism, Quentin Meillassoux finds two principles as the locus of Kant's philosophy. The first of these is the Principle of Correlation itself, which claims essentially that we can only know the correlate of Thought and Being, that is to say, that what lies outside that correlate is unknowable. The second is termed by Meillassoux the Principle of Factiality, which states that things could be otherwise than what they are. This principle is upheld by Kant in his defence of the thing-in-itself as unknowable but imaginable. We can imagine reality as being fundamentally different even if we never know such a reality. According to Meillassoux, the defence of both principles leads to “weak” correlationism (such as those of Kant and Husserl), while the rejection of the thing-in-itself leads to the “strong” correlationism of thinkers such as Hegel, Wittgenstein, and Heidegger. For such “strong” correlationists, it makes no sense to suppose that there is anything outside of the correlate of Thought and Being, and so the Principle of Factiality is eliminated in favour of a strengthened Principle of Correlation.Meillassoux follows the opposite tactic in rejecting the Principle of Correlation for the sake of a bolstered Principle of Factiality in his post-Kantian return to Hume. By arguing in favour of such a principle, Meillassoux is led to reject the necessity not only of all physical laws of nature, but all logical laws with the exception of the Principle of Non-Contradiction (since eliminating the Principle of Non-Contradiction would undermine the Principle of Factiality which claims that things can always be otherwise than what they are). By rejecting the Principle of Sufficient Reason
Principle of sufficient reason
The principle of sufficient reason states that anything that happens does so for a reason: no state of affairs can obtain, and no statement can be true unless there is sufficient reason why it should not be otherwise...
, there can be no justification for the necessity of physical laws, meaning that while the universe may be ordered in such and such a way, there is no reason it could not be otherwise. Meillassoux rejects the Kantian a priori in favour of a Humean a priori, claiming that the lesson to be learned from Hume on the subject of causality
Causality
Causality is the relationship between an event and a second event , where the second event is understood as a consequence of the first....
is that "the same cause may actually bring about 'a hundred different events' (and even many more)."
Object-oriented philosophy
The central tenet of object-oriented philosophyObject-oriented ontology
Object-oriented ontology is a metaphysical movement that rejects the privileging of human existence over the existence of nonhuman objects. Specifically, object-oriented ontology opposes the anthropocentrism of Immanuel Kant's Copernican Revolution, whereby objects are said to conform to the mind...
(OOP) is that objects have been given short shrift for too long in philosophy in favour of more “radical approaches.” Graham Harman has classified these forms of “radical philosophy” as those that either try to “undermine” objects by saying that objects are simply superficial crusts to a deeper underlying reality, either in the form of monism or a perpetual flux, or those that try to “overmine” objects by saying that the idea of a whole object is a form of folk ontology, that there is no underlying “object” beneath either the qualities (e.g. there is no “apple,” only “red,” “hard,” etc.) or the relations (as in both Latour
Bruno Latour
Bruno Latour is a French sociologist of science and anthropologist and an influential theorist in the field of Science and Technology Studies...
and Whitehead
Whitehead
-With common given names on further disambiguation pages:*Alan Whitehead *George Whitehead *Henry Whitehead *James Whitehead *John Whitehead...
, the former claiming that an object is only what it "modifies, transforms, perturbs, or creates"). OOP is notable for not only its critique of forms of anti-realism, but other forms of realism as well. Harman has even claimed that the term "realism" will soon no longer be a relevant distinction within philosophy as the factions within Speculative Realism grow in number. As such, he has already written pieces differentiating his own OOP from other forms of realism which he claims are not realist enough as they reject objects as "useless fictions."
According to Harman, everything is an object, whether it be a mailbox, electromagnetic radiation
Electromagnetic radiation
Electromagnetic radiation is a form of energy that exhibits wave-like behavior as it travels through space...
, curved spacetime
Spacetime
In physics, spacetime is any mathematical model that combines space and time into a single continuum. Spacetime is usually interpreted with space as being three-dimensional and time playing the role of a fourth dimension that is of a different sort from the spatial dimensions...
, the Commonwealth of Nations
Commonwealth of Nations
The Commonwealth of Nations, normally referred to as the Commonwealth and formerly known as the British Commonwealth, is an intergovernmental organisation of fifty-four independent member states...
, or a propositional attitude
Propositional attitude
A propositional attitude is a relational mental state connecting a person to a proposition. They are often assumed to be the simplest components of thought and can express meanings or content that can be true or false...
; all things, whether physical or fictional, are equally objects. Expressing strong sympathy for panpsychism
Panpsychism
In philosophy, panpsychism is the view that all matter has a mental aspect, or, alternatively, all objects have a unified center of experience or point of view...
, Harman proposes a new philosophical discipline called "speculative psychology" dedicated to investigating the "cosmic layers of psyche" and "ferreting out the specific psychic reality of earthworms, dust, armies, chalk, and stone."
Harman defends a version of the Aristotelian notion of substance
Substance theory
Substance theory, or substance attribute theory, is an ontological theory about objecthood, positing that a substance is distinct from its properties. A thing-in-itself is a property-bearer that must be distinguished from the properties it bears....
. Unlike Leibniz, for whom there were both substances and aggregates, Harman maintains that when objects combine, they create new objects. In this way, he defends an apriori metaphysics that claims that reality is made up only of objects and that there is no “bottom” to the series of objects. In contrast to many other versions of substance, Harman also maintains that it need not be considered eternal, but as Aristotle maintained, substances can both come to be and pass away. For Harman, an object is in itself an infinite recess, unknowable and inaccessible by any other thing. This leads to his account of what he terms “vicarious causality.” Inspired by the occasionalists
Occasionalism
Occasionalism is a philosophical theory about causation which says that created substances cannot be efficient causes of events. Instead, all events are taken to be caused directly by God...
of Medieval
Medieval philosophy
Medieval philosophy is the philosophy in the era now known as medieval or the Middle Ages, the period roughly extending from the fall of the Western Roman Empire in the fifth century AD to the Renaissance in the sixteenth century...
Islamic Philosophy
Islamic philosophy
Islamic philosophy is a branch of Islamic studies. It is the continuous search for Hekma in the light of Islamic view of life, universe, ethics, society, and so on...
, Harman maintains that no two objects can ever interact save through the mediation of a “sensual vicar.” There are two types of objects, then, for Harman: real objects and the sensual objects that allow for interaction. The former are the things of everyday life, while the latter are the caricatures that mediate interaction. For example, when fire burns cotton, Harman argues that the fire does not touch the essence of that cotton which is inexhaustible by any relation, but that the interaction is mediated by a caricature of the cotton which causes it to burn.
Transcendental Materialism / Neo-Vitalism
Iain Hamilton Grant argues against what he terms “somatism,” the philosophy and physics of bodies. In his Philosophies of Nature After Schelling, Grant tells a new history of philosophy from PlatoPlato
Plato , was a Classical Greek philosopher, mathematician, student of Socrates, writer of philosophical dialogues, and founder of the Academy in Athens, the first institution of higher learning in the Western world. Along with his mentor, Socrates, and his student, Aristotle, Plato helped to lay the...
onward based on the definition of matter. Aristotle distinguished between Form and Matter in such a way that Matter was invisible to philosophy, whereas Grant argues for a return to the Platonic Matter as not only the basic building blocks of reality, but the forces and powers that govern our reality. He traces this same argument to the post-Kantian German Idealists
German idealism
German idealism was a philosophical movement that emerged in Germany in the late 18th and early 19th centuries. It developed out of the work of Immanuel Kant in the 1780s and 1790s, and was closely linked both with romanticism and the revolutionary politics of the Enlightenment...
Johann Gottlieb Fichte
Johann Gottlieb Fichte
Johann Gottlieb Fichte was a German philosopher. He was one of the founding figures of the philosophical movement known as German idealism, a movement that developed from the theoretical and ethical writings of Immanuel Kant...
and Friedrich Wilhelm Joseph Schelling
Friedrich Wilhelm Joseph Schelling
Friedrich Wilhelm Joseph Schelling , later von Schelling, was a German philosopher. Standard histories of philosophy make him the midpoint in the development of German idealism, situating him between Fichte, his mentor prior to 1800, and Hegel, his former university roommate and erstwhile friend...
, claiming that the distinction between Matter as substantive versus useful fiction persists to this day and that we should end our attempts to overturn Plato and instead attempt to overturn Kant and return to “speculative physics” in the Platonic tradition, that is, not a physics of bodies, but a “physics of the All”.
Eugene Thacker
Eugene Thacker
Eugene Thacker is an author and associate professor at The New School in New York. Thacker is known for his work in philosophy, media theory, and the study of genre horror and science fiction. In addition to his writing on science and technology, Thacker has written on the work of Georges Bataille,...
has examined how the concept of "life itself" is both determined within regional philosophy and also how "life itself" comes to acquire metaphysical properties. Thacker's book After Life shows how the ontology of life operates by way of a split between "Life" and "the living," making possible a "metaphysical displacement" in which life is thought via another metaphysical term, such as time, form, or spirit: "Every ontology of life thinks of life in terms of something-other-than-life...that something-other-than-life is most often a metaphysical concept, such as time and temporality, form and causality, or spirit and immanence" Thacker traces this theme from Aristotle, to Scholasticism and mysticism/negative theology, to Spinoza and Kant, showing how this three-fold displacement is also alive in philosophy today (life as time in process philosophy and Deleuzianism, life as form in biopolitical thought, life as spirit in post-secular philosophies of religion). Thacker examines the relation of speculative realism to the ontology of life, arguing for a "vitalist correlation": "Let us say that a vitalist correlation is one that fails to conserve the correlationist dual necessity of the separation and inseparability of thought and object, self and world, and which does so based on some ontologized notion of 'life'. Ultimately Thacker argues for a skepticism regarding "life": "Life is not only a problem of philosophy, but a problem for philosophy.
Other thinkers have emerged within this group, united in their allegiance to what has been known as “process philosophy,” rallying around such thinkers as Schelling, Bergson, Whitehead
Whitehead
-With common given names on further disambiguation pages:*Alan Whitehead *George Whitehead *Henry Whitehead *James Whitehead *John Whitehead...
, and Deleuze, among others. A recent example is found in Steven Shaviro
Steven Shaviro
Steven Shaviro is an American cultural critic. His most widely read book is Doom Patrols, a "theoretical fiction" that outlines the state of postmodernism during the early 1990s, using poetic language, personal anecdotes, and creative prose....
's book Without Criteria: Kant, Whitehead, Deleuze, and Aesthetics, which argues for a process-based approach that entails panpsychism as much as it does vitalism or animism. For Shaviro, it is Whitehead's philosophy of prehensions and nexus that offers the best combination of continental and analytical philosophy. Another recent example is found in Jane Bennett's book Vibrant Matter, which argues for a shift from human relations to things, to a "vibrant matter" that cuts across the living and non-living, human bodies and non-human things. Finally, Leon Niemoczynski, in his book, Charles Sanders Peirce and a Religious Metaphysics of Nature, argues that a vibrant nature can afford lines of religious insight into its own infinitely productive ground. He identifies this ground as naturans naturata (nature naturing), part of an infinitely becoming divine life. Reality is fundamentally unfixed for such thinkers, who claim that objects are the products of a more primordial process of becoming, which is connected to historical variations of matter, will, or drive.
Transcendental Nihilism / Methodological Naturalism
In Nihil Unbound: Extinction and Enlightenment, Ray Brassier maintains that philosophy has avoided the traumatic idea of extinctionExtinction
In biology and ecology, extinction is the end of an organism or of a group of organisms , normally a species. The moment of extinction is generally considered to be the death of the last individual of the species, although the capacity to breed and recover may have been lost before this point...
, instead attempting to find meaning in a world conditioned by the very idea of its own annihilation. Thus Brassier critiques both the phenomenological and hermeneutic strands of Continental philosophy as well as the vitality of thinkers like Gilles Deleuze
Gilles Deleuze
Gilles Deleuze , was a French philosopher who, from the early 1960s until his death, wrote influentially on philosophy, literature, film, and fine art. His most popular works were the two volumes of Capitalism and Schizophrenia: Anti-Oedipus and A Thousand Plateaus , both co-written with Félix...
, who work to ingrain meaning in the world and stave off the “threat” of nihilism. Instead, drawing on thinkers such as Alain Badiou
Alain Badiou
Alain Badiou is a French philosopher, professor at European Graduate School, formerly chair of Philosophy at the École Normale Supérieure . Along with Giorgio Agamben and Slavoj Žižek, Badiou is a prominent figure in an anti-postmodern strand of continental philosophy...
, François Laruelle
François Laruelle
François Laruelle is a French philosopher, formerly of the Collège international de philosophie and the University of Paris X: Nanterre. Alumnus of the École normale supérieure, Laruelle is notable for developing a science of philosophy that he calls "non-philosophy"...
, Paul Churchland
Paul Churchland
Paul Churchland is a philosopher noted for his studies in neurophilosophy and the philosophy of mind. He is currently a Professor at the University of California, San Diego, where he holds the Valtz Chair of Philosophy. Churchland holds a joint appointment with the Cognitive Science Faculty and...
, and Thomas Metzinger
Thomas Metzinger
Thomas Metzinger is a German philosopher. he holds the position of director of the theoretical philosophy group at the department of philosophy at the Johannes Gutenberg University of Mainz and is an Adjunct Fellow at the Frankfurt Institute for Advanced Studies and on the advisory board of the...
, Brassier defends a view of the world as inherently devoid of meaning. That is, rather than avoiding nihilism
Nihilism
Nihilism is the philosophical doctrine suggesting the negation of one or more putatively meaningful aspects of life. Most commonly, nihilism is presented in the form of existential nihilism which argues that life is without objective meaning, purpose, or intrinsic value...
, Brassier embraces it as the truth of reality. Brassier concludes from his readings of Badiou and Laruelle that the universe is founded on the nothing, but also that philosophy is the "organon of extinction," that it is only because life is conditioned by its own extinction that there is thought at all. Brassier then defends a radically anti-correlationist philosophy proposing that Thought is conjoined not with Being, but with Non-Being.
Controversy regarding the existence of a speculative realist 'movement'
In an interview with KronosKronos
Kronos can refer to:*Cronus, a Titan, the father of Zeus, Poseidon, Hades, Hestia, Demeter, Hera, and Chiron.In business*Kronos Foods, the world's largest manufacturer of gyrosIn computing...
magazine published in March 2011, Ray Brassier denied that there is any such thing as a 'speculative realist movement' and firmly distanced himself from those who continue to attach themselves to the brandname:
"The ‘speculative realist movement’ exists only in the imaginations of a group of bloggers promoting an agenda for which I have no sympathy whatsoever: actor-network theory spiced with pan-psychist metaphysics and morsels of process philosophy. I don’t believe the internet is an appropriate medium for serious philosophical debate; nor do I believe it is acceptable to try to concoct a philosophical movement online by using blogs to exploit the misguided enthusiasm of impressionable graduate students. I agree with Deleuze’s remark that ultimately the most basic task of philosophy is to impede stupidity, so I see little philosophical merit in a ‘movement’ whose most signal achievement thus far is to have generated an online orgy of stupidity."
Publications
Speculative Realism has close ties to the journal CollapseCollapse (journal)
Collapse is an independent, non-affiliated journal of philosophical research and development published in the United Kingdom by Urbanomic. It was founded in 2006 by Robin Mackay. It features speculative work in progress by contemporary philosophers, along with contributions from artists, scientists...
, which published the proceedings of the inaugural conference at Goldsmiths and has featured numerous other articles by 'speculative realist' thinkers; as has the academic journal Pli, which is edited and produced by members of the Graduate School of the Department of Philosophy at the University of Warwick
University of Warwick
The University of Warwick is a public research university located in Coventry, United Kingdom...
.
In 2011 Edinburgh University Press
Edinburgh University Press
Edinburgh University Press is a scholarly publisher of academic books and journals, based in Edinburgh, Scotland.-History:Edinburgh University Press was founded over 50 years ago and became a wholly owned subsidiary of the University of Edinburgh in 1992...
launched a series of books devoted to speculative realism, beginning with a monograph on Meillassoux written by Graham Harman.
The following is a list of publications associated with Speculative Realism:
- Brassier, Ray, Iain Hamilton Grant, Graham Harman, and Quentin Meillassoux. 2007. "Speculative Realism" in Collapse III: Unknown Deleuze. London: Urbanomic.
- Brassier, Ray. 2007. Nihil Unbound: Enlightenment and Extinction. London: Palgrave Macmillan.
- Brassier, Ray. 2007. "The Enigma of Realism" in Collapse II: Speculative Realism. London: Urbanomic.
- Brassier, Ray. 2001. "Behold the Non-Rabbit: Kant, Quine, Laruelle" in Pli 12: Materialism.
- Braver, Lee. 2007. A Thing of This World: A History of Continental Anti-Realism. Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press.
- Bryant, Levi, Graham Harman, and Nick Srnicek. 2011. The Speculative Turn: Continental Materialism and Realism. Melbourne: Re.Press.
- Ennis, Paul J. 2011. Continental Realism. Winchester, UK: Zero Books.
- Ennis, Paul J. 2010. Post-Continental Voice: Selected Interviews. Winchester, UK: Zero Books.
- Grant, Iain Hamilton. 2008. Philosophies of Nature After Schelling. London: Continuum.
- Grant, Iain Hamilton. 2008. "Being and Slime: The Mathematics of Protoplasm in Lorenz Oken's 'Physio-Philosophy'" in Collapse IV: Concept-Horror. London: Urbanomic.
- Grant, Iain Hamilton. 2005. "The 'Eternal and Necessary Bond Between Philosophy and Physics'" in Angelaki 10.1.
- Grant, Iain Hamilton. 2000. "The Chemistry of Darkness" in Pli 9: Science.
- Huber, Tobias. 2011. Realismus Jetzt. Berlin: Merve Verlag.
- Harman, Graham. 2011. Quentin Meillassoux: Philosophy in the Making. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press.
- Harman, Graham. 2011. The Quadruple Object. Winchester, UK: Zero Books.
- Harman, Graham. 2010. Circus Philosophicus. Winchester, UK: Zero Books.
- Harman, Graham. 2010. Towards Speculative Realism: Essays and Lectures. Winchester, UK: Zero Books.
- Harman, Graham. 2009. Prince of Networks: Bruno Latour and Metaphysics. Melbourne: Re.Press.
- Harman, Graham. 2008. "On the Horror of Phenomenology: Lovecraft and Husserl" in Collapse IV: Concept-Horror. London: Urbanomic.
- Harman, Graham. 2007. "On Vicarious Causation" in Collapse II: Speculative Realism. London: Urbanomic.
- Harman, Graham. 2005. Guerilla Metaphysics: Phenomenology and the Carpentry of Things. Chicago: Open Court.
- Harman, Graham. 2002. Tool-Being: Heidegger and the Metaphysics of Objects. Chicago: Open Court
- Meillassoux, Quentin. 2008. After Finitude: An Essay on the Necessity of Contingency. Trans. Ray Brassier. London: Continuum.
- Meillassoux, Quentin. 2008. "Spectral Dilemma" in Collapse IV: Concept-Horror. London: Urbanomic.
- Meillassoux, Quentin. 2007. "Subtraction and Contraction: Deleuze, Immanence and Matter and Memory" in Collapse III: Unknown Deleuze. London: Urbanomic.
- Meillassoux, Quentin. 2007. "Potentiality and Virtuality" in Collapse II: Speculative Realism. London: Urbanomic.
Internet presence
Speculative Realism is notable for its fast expansion via the InternetInternet
The Internet is a global system of interconnected computer networks that use the standard Internet protocol suite to serve billions of users worldwide...
in the form of blogs. Web sites have formed as resources for essays, lectures, and planned future books by those within the Speculative Realist movement. Many other blogs have emerged with original material on Speculative realism or expanding on its themes and ideas.
Publishers such as Zero Books, Re.Press
Re.press
re.press is a Melbourne based open access publisher of contemporary philosophy . re.press is an independent publisher that seeks to promote philosophical ideas through making many of its works available for free in electronic form in addition to hard-copy paperbacks.-History:re.press began...
, and Open Humanities Press
Open Humanities Press
is an international open access publishing initiative in the humanities, specializing in critical and cultural theory. OHP's editorial board includes leading scholars and open access advocates such as Alain Badiou, Jonathan Culler, Stephen Greenblatt, Jean-Claude Guédon, J...
have contributed to this growth as well, publishing PDFs of books and signing contracts with bloggers to produce literature pertaining to speculative realism. This represents a general trend within speculative realism; a willingness to abandon traditional methods of publication/communication in favour of innovation.
External links
- Collapse – a journal featuring contributions by "speculative realists"
- Speculations – the journal dedicated to Speculative Realism
- Speculative Heresy – a blog containing many resources in the form of published and unpublished pieces of writing
- Mark Fisher's assessment of "Speculative Realism" written for Frieze after the second conference
- Speculative realism at Bogost.com, a news aggregation website, connected to Ian Bogost's blog, which collects recent posts from the network of blogs connected with speculative realism/object oriented philosophy]
- The Speculative Realism Pathfinder
- Post-Continental Voices - an edited collection of interviews that contains interviews with speculative realists.