a very pretty blog

IMMANENCE weighs in on Levi’s response to the 10 Questions for Specualtive Realism post and my own brief reply.

You can read it for yourself. I just wanted to say, Immanence has one of the physically most beautiful blogs I have ever seen.

I just wanted to make a quick reply to Immanence on one point:

“With his Hegelian-Kantian ontological underpinnings and his commitment to a nebulous Lacanian Real, can Žižek count as a “realist,” or is he being included to grease the movement’s wheels? (I guess we may get a better sense of that when the book comes out. By the way, I like that Lacanian Real; I’m just not sure how well it stacks up against traditional notions of “realism.”)”

Žižek is certainly no realist. But the subtitle of The Speculative Turn is Continental Materialism and Realism. Žižek calls himself a materialist, as does his gifted interpreter Adrian Johnston. (I don’t actually see why either Žižek or Meillassoux are materialists, but why not grant them the right to use the word?)

It’s not a speculative realist anthology, by the way. Over half of the people in the volume would refuse that label. The net was cast more widely.

However, it must be admitted that successful words and phrases tend to take on lives of their own, and we can see this now happening with “speculative realism” just as it did with “structuralism” long ago.

The stages seemed to run like this…

1. The term was invented by Ray Brassier as a last-minute compromise for the 2007 Goldsmiths workshop. (The flavor of our four-way discussions was something like: “All right, we have a meeting and a venue, but now what the hell are we going to call it? We’re all so different.”) Until the last minute it looked like I was going to cave in and go along with Meillassoux’s “speculative materialism”, even though I am not and never have been and never will be a materialist, but no better ideas were on the horizon. But “speculative realism” was a nice phrase, since both words are fairly accurate descriptions for all of us. If memory serves, Meillassoux was uneasy about the “realism” part later on, and Brassier about the “speculative” part, but I still like it, and Grant may still like it too.

2. From that last-minute and somewhat successful descriptive role, “speculative realism” then became mostly a rigid designator for the particular four people who spoke at the April 2007 Goldsmiths workshop.

3. It has now mutated, quite recently, into a sort of useful catch-all for all current trends in the school formerly known as continental philosophy that don’t fit into existing labels, but which have a generally realist flavor and are also just weird enough to be unassimilable to traditional boring schoolmaster realisms. (“There is a real world outside our mind. Deal with it.”) As I said in my DeLanda article, realism has usually been the boring enforcer in philosophy, the reality principle working against imaginative flights of fancy, bearing the same relation to speculative philosophy that health inspectors have to chefs: a sort of “critical” policing role. The strands loosely united under the name “speculative realism” are all bigger gambles than that.

What it has never been is a unified school, and it will only become less of one as more people jump on board and bring completely different orientations into the vicinity.

Already, I think the “post-speculative realist” phase has begun… Those four people appeared on stage together exactly once, in 2007. The exact same assemblage is highly unlikely to reappear together at any time, and to some extent the directions of the four research programs are so different that they will only get further apart as time goes on.

For example, of the other three original members, my own position was probably closest to Grant’s. But by now I have a lot more in common with Levi Bryant than with Grant. That’s no great surprise, given that Levi and are two of the only people in the vicinity of roughly the same generation who are doing metaphysics highly attuned to Latour. The “object-oriented philosophy” constellation (there are some admitted problems with the name, but I’ve been half-wedded to it since September 1999 when I first coined it) will probably take root in the book series I’ll be co-editing with Latour at Open Humanities Press, while Brassier’s more scientistic orientation will probably continue to be expressed ever more intensely in Collapse, with different venues and institutions supporting the other orientations.