reference in Documenta review

In an overwhelmingly positive review of the ongoing Documenta show entitled “Why Curator Carolyn Christov-Bakargiev’s Documenta May Be the Most Important Exhibition of the 21st Century,” the following statement occurs:

“The study of material culture and a small group of philosophers coolly called ‘thing theorists,’ among them Quentin Meillassoux and Graham Harman, have been broadening the anthropocentric focus of the sociologues to query the play of the object world in which the human is a single actor among all objects, while the ecological crisis has added a dimension of urgency to the acknowledgment of the life of the nonhuman.”

Meillassoux is not a thing theorist, and wouldn’t want to be called one any more than I would want to be called a “materialist” (which happens to me on a now weekly basis). But no one has done more in the past decade than Meillassoux to point out some of the difficulties with the human-world correlate.

The term “correlationism” is sometimes used with excessive looseness, but I do believe that it’s headed for permanent enshrinement in the philosophical lexicon. Regardless of what happens to any of us, I think people will still be referring to certain positions as “correlationist” in 300 years, 500 years, maybe longer. Meillassoux ran across a genuine concept that badly needed a name, and he nailed it with a very apt term. Applause is in order.