an article from July on Speculative Realism and aesthetics

By Svenja Bromberg, HERE. I was travelling at the time and missed this piece.

Unlike many politically-minded critics of SR, Bromberg actually seems to have done the necessary legwork and actually done a careful reading of some of my and Meillassoux’s writings, rather than simply offer sweeping claims about “homologies” between capitalism and speculative realism. (The simple act of making puns on the words “speculation” and “object-oriented” doesn’t meet the basic standards of good-faith criticism.)

You can read the piece for yourselves, but I wanted to comment on the concluding sentences of the piece, which fail to my mind:

“Whereas this form of hope seems to offer us a new way of ‘dreaming’, the dreams themselves make capitalist social relations and our human struggles appear equally petty, inane and merely from this world. It is a hope of the last resort that is no longer invested in change, but in alleviation of the pain that comes with resignation.”

Who ever said that capitalism and human struggles are “petty and inane”? I’m simply saying that philosophy is not the handmaid of Leftism, and that human politics is not the transcendental condition of reality. We don’t take one step toward alleviating human suffering by pretending that philosophy is inherently political. The primary task of philosophy is conceptual innovation as a means of escaping the stagnant trench wars, including the political and aesthetic ones, that tend to replace thinking with self-righteous, beautiful soul moralism. The fact that today’s pieties are anti-capitalist rather than Christian does not change that fact.

One other:

“There is no way in which Harman could account for the accumulation of powers and forces within specific objects or object constellations that violate certain relations or even deny access to them; there is no way in which objects might be distributed unequally in different networks of relations…”

The problem with this sort of critique is that it could be made of ontology per se, not just of my own. It is effectively an objection to ontology as an idle mental exercise on which we cannot afford to waste time in the face of environmental depredations and imperialist exploitations.

Note that nobody ever makes this objection to mathematics, only to ontology. This suggests a sense that philosophy has a primarily political mission, a notion that I do not accept. Indeed, given the context of the article, it also amounts to a protest that art has a primarily political mission, which I also do not accept.

It is important that philosophy (and art) not become prematurely political, as in this passage by Bromberg:

“But if capitalism wants us to be ever more alive, happy and truly engaged in shaping our own lives on the basis of the endless possibilities this world has to offer, then the critique offered by vitalist theories, aesthetic modes such as Bourriaud’s ‘relational aesthetics’ and more critical forms of emancipated spectatorship against an objectifying and alienating capitalist reality appear assimilated and defused.”

But there may be an interesting debate to be had. The fact that Speculative Realism is provoking this sort of pushback suggests that the time is ripening for a more meaningful interchange about ontology and politics.

But I don’t think Bourriaud is going to do it. The notion of art as the provocation of convivial interchange between gallery-goers doesn’t even seem politically liberating to me, let alone aestehtically liberating.