SR/OOO tutorial flashback

My old July 23, 2010 post on the different meanings of the terms “speculative realism” and “object-oriented ontology” is getting a lot of traffic today, and it looks like Tim Morton’s blog might be responsible.

In case you want to review it, it’s HERE.

The one thing that’s changed since July 2010 is that some of the non-OOO people connected with speculative realism have distanced themselves ever further from the term “speculative realism,” meaning that it’s no longer nearly as incorrect as it was a year ago to treat SR and OOO as synonyms.

It’s still not quite right, though. To count as speculative realism, a philosophy need only reject idealism and the correlationist alibi designed to cloak it (“we can’t think human or world in isolation, but only a primordial correlation or rapport between the two”). OOO is a far more specific view, since it requires that one treat the human-object relation as no different in kind from the object-object relation. And this is not true, for instance, of Meillassoux.

In fact, Meillassoux is clearly a speculative realist by the definition just given, though I believe he only referred to himself as a speculative realist once– in the transcript of the 2007 Goldsmiths SR event. And we can view that as a friendly piece of diplomacy on Meillassoux’s part, since speculative materialism is the term he prefers for his own system.

And I think that’s both instructive and correct. I happen to think Meillassoux is not a full-blown realist, for the same reasons that I don’t think Badiou is one. I’m not sure materialism is quite the right term either, but it’s the one they prefer.