Does Speculative Realism hold and Irony?
In earlier post I gave a brief description:
And HERE is what WIKI has to say about it.
And : HERE is a REDDIT post.
I also gave my comment here and there throughout this blog. Here is one:
Laruelle and The ‘Speculative realist’?
Revisiting the Conference. 2007
The Actual Case.
This post will try to open up the problem that Speculative Realism revealed in a way that no other philosophy had achieved before, and why this opening presents something different, as we say, in its difference. In this very short introduction, I will try to present the actual case the Speculative Realist philosophers came upon and tried to speak to the world, over the argumentative discourses that they represent in their proposals.
I will speak briefly and summarily, since, much of my work is based within this, what I have called the point of contention. It is from this point that philosophy bifurcates. Speculative Realism was the culmination and elaboration of a sort of ending, even while it was also the traversal and beginning of the new paradigm of the phenomenalist same. The problem that is routinely exercised as it is come upon is not dissimilar to the conundrum that Slavoj Zizek formulated as an incredible difficulty in getting beyond modern capirtalism.
This is the problem posed by phenomenalism, the contradiction suspended within it when it is used as an approach upon things. It was against the grain of the modern orientation upon things that the 19th century philosopher Soren Kierkegaard his seminal question, the perennial question that invades everything proposed: Is there a teleological suspension of the ethical?
The point of contention
The point of contention concerns what it is to be an actual person.
There are basically two ways that people engage with living life and knowing, not just thinking, but what is indeed philosophy itself. These two statements reside at the heart of modern knowledge even to the extent that to think philosophy is a topic to be considered by a person and not a person itself, is reflected in them:
- Philosophy as talking about talking about things.
- Philosophy as indicating something more than what we are talking about, that it is actually talking about things themselves.
Again it is well to keep in mind that these two statements concern every possibility of philosophy that has existed that we know of. Every philosopher that asked “What is Philosophy?” is basically adhering to one of these two routes.
Further —and this is the clincher — in so much as we can read these two statements and understand what they mean, it is really a result of what happened which the philosophical juncture of David Hume and Immanuel Kant effected into Being.
Philosophical Representational Junctures
In their time they likewise came upon a sort of ending which was presented by David Hume. Indeed, Kant said that Hume “awoke me from my dogmatic slumber “. Commenters often make broad claims about what Kant meant, but I believe the simple fact was Hume’s philosophy, when understood correctly, is intolerable to a person oriented in understanding things through the modern method, at least in as much as we continue to do activities, have judgments, and live a life. In fact, one could even say that the contemporary philosopher John Gray is more aligned with David Hume. Gray’s opinions on humanism, Grey calls out liberalism and humanism as the culprit for our modern political woes, by basically calling out Kant’s phenomenalism and modern Existentialism, as a religion.
John Gray was a predecessor to the Speculative Realist philosopher generation. Basically he was around 50 years old in the year 2000 and he had been a philosopher as a career when the next generation were just completing their terminal degrees (probably, lol). And three other philosophers are significant to what Speculative Realism indicates as a presentation of history in reality; Alain Badiou and Francois Laruelle came first, and Slavoj Zizek and John Grey were the bridge. These four philosophers indicated something significant that Speculative Realism tried to push to its end, but in trying to make that push things got split — again!
Philosophical Gymnastics.
Kierkegaard was perhaps the first person to notice the modern split, he used the notion of philosophical “gymnastics” to talk about it (Kierkegaard is the Master of Irony, btw). There are probably many such events of splitting that we know of in philosophy, but the main concern here is how present knowledge is refracted to be represented in modern knowledge. Rene Descartes was one of these seminal philosophers that indicated a split from what philosophy had been known as before, which probably goes back clear to Aristotle, to inseminate the universe for the modern era. And maybe Aristotle was another split from Plato. And then maybe Socrates was a split from the previous philosophers whose records have been eroded away from history, that Heraclitus is just a whisper of them.
Now, when we read those two statements above the ironic thing that happens is that we are basically caught somewhere in between them and it takes a small bit of epistemological gymnastics to get out of the rift, to land in modern reality. We are knowing this when we say things like “human beings are the mediators of reality”, or “human being reflect on things”; the modern manner is the standing in ‘the middle’.
Indeed, It is very likely that someone who’s reading this post, for example, reading those two sentences, is sitting here contemplating what it means, whether I have a point here, coming up with rebuttals, thinking about other philosophers and how they might be relevant or how I’m discounting lineages and various schools of thought and so on and so on. And this is why I say that what the Speculative Realists uncovered was quickly covered by the modern method. It was quickly set aside; at the time there was all sorts of rebuttals and comments about the problems with their philosophy, problems which could be felt to be of a different order then mere intellectual critique. It was more like a reaction from an attack, as though a little more was on the line than mere intellectual posturing with propositions, for sure!
So is the motion of the universe that so much of it got paved over, the meaning of things eroded in analogue signal distortion and Doppler Effect, with the patinas and frequency stretch meaning of their ideas came the institutions nowadays that the New Materialism, and the New Realism (which are strains of philosophy in their own right now) all of these were kind of bubbling around the same time and the speculative realist conference just happened to crack the nut, so to speak. Or so it seems. For sure I am not discounting the reality of the nuances, and this is just one post about SR; but so is a table as a table, according to the method, merely a sort of illusion.
Francois Laruelle pointed to this problem: there are no illusions.
So it is, there was even a sort of contentiousness about the object-oriented Speculative Realists and the New Materialism camps. In very short, the New Materialisms (if I can be so bold) tend to find their heritage overall in a sort of continuum of the kind of feminist postmodern strain of criticism that could be noted to stem (very generally) from Judith Butler and Donna Haraway in the 1980s. It is a stream because there really is no break in what they are saying (from my standpoint anyways); their break was more with ideology (as technology – Haraway) and the patriarchal power (as ideology – Butler); they seem to push materialism to the end where the results seem a little more seamless than the object oriented philosophers. The object-oriented philosophers appear to have made a break specifically treating with regimes of knowledge rather than social use of power discourses; there was even some talk around the time and the late 90s and the early 00’s about the end of philosophy the end of history and so on, because of what these philosophers were really saying. The end of patriarchy is a great thing that likewise did not happen, btw.
So what am I really talking about? I believe the point that the Speculative Realists were making was not the point that the New Materialists were making, but somehow they ended up together in this whole New Realist thing that somehow is happening. But the point of what they’re saying I believe is missed. It becomes exceedingly apparent that it is missed because people talk about what so and so said as if so and so was just stating some sort of opinion on things and that’s it, and lets debate on the logical merits to see if I will believe or agree with it. The very heart of the issue of Speculative Realism questions this approach upon philosophy, and that is why they got such blowback at the time. Basically, because all the rest of the philosophers in academia looked at what they’re saying and said, “Who the hell are you? Philosophy has been going on for some 3000 years. Who are you to come up and say that we can’t discuss other people’s ideas without being correlationalist !?!”.
And that’s it. That’s it right there. After the little foray around the notion of Correlationalism the very people who were at one time so novel, faded forward into their careers and verified that Correlationalism was just more talking about talking. But that is what people have to do. That is reality. One can never be what they say —but they can believe it!
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Going back up to the two statements. It is possible, but not probable, you might start to feel somehow within you what those two statements above are really getting at something that the word-phrases taken as an argument are missing. And if you don’t know what I’m talking about, well, you can always take a deeper dive and read my books and blog posts and papers, and see if you stumble on something there from another direction.
Correlationalism
I guess I’ll have to put in a brief synopsis of this idea.
The very short of it is that it is a way of coming upon philosophy that correlates thought with Being. In other words, what I think is and how I make sense of the world is —not merely a reflection but indeed is Being itself. In particular, the Speculative Realists associated this kind of way of understanding reality to stem back to phenomenalism, that is Immanuel Kant, but also they made connections to Copernicus, bringing a sort of analogy to what happened when there was a big shift in how people understood the universe, namely, that the earth was not the center of the universe, that the sun is. The Copernican Revolution.
In sum: human beings are not the center of the known universe by virtue of their thinking thoughts. Neither are they mediators. Neither do they reflect.
If you see this as an argument in an attempt to prove something, then you are participating in being mediation and reflecting.
It is quite a paradoxical conundrum !
And this is why to this day there is such flack, not just intellectually but emotionally.
The Suspension of the Problem of Philosophy
Of course, they couldn’t say this without really bristling some fur in the establishment of philosophy. We see the repercussions of it now in academia: the reactivity of being called out to the contradiction of the general phenomenalist base of academic work has created a backlash in academic institutional hiring: They want people who are orietned in the modern empirical faith, what some would call analytical thinkers, and for the upcoming children in elementary schools: S.T.E.M. education.
The reaction is due to what is originally suggested in their philosophies, namely, that the way that we, as a general social platform for approach, are understanding what philosophy is, what human beings are, what the universe is, is incorrect. I talk about this all through my work as well.
Somewhere back in the beginnings of this blog, maybe it was around 2014-15, back when this blog was called The Dog Walks, I have a video where I’m walking my dog and its very windy, talking about that thing ‘out there’ and how my thoughts are being shaped, inescapably formed by that thing. (I was searching my archives, but I couldn’t kind it. Maybe you can?) In beginning to understand what these object oriented philosophers were talking about, and possibly still are talking about (though I think they are hedging now), it’s that I am not only Thinking-Being, and in fact —probably a strange but more accurate way of saying i— I am more Being the thinking that is the things that are involved with me in the universe.
But academia will not have this, it is against its method is inquiry. Academia and modern science books its winnings upon the thought that a specific kind of thinking is central to everything we can know of the universe, that the universe it first mediated by thinking, and that’s all we have to go on. Twentieth century Existentialism, what I call the modern apology, says as much.
The significance of this is that they’re not wrong necessarily. However, I do suggest that what happens is everything becomes a concept to consider, which is phenomenalist and correlational, and not carrying an awareness of this has experiential repercussions.
Without all the intellectual hubbub, all this is just simply reaI and constitutes what we call reality. Yet by holding a space for this awareness, setting aside opinions for a moment, begins to show that it does indeed yield specific and knowable outcomes, not just empirically and theoretically profitable ones. Indeed, it has something to do with how people live their lives and how political identities function.
So what happens is even though we may have come across what is actually occurring in reality, so far as we are involved with the universe itself and not just our meaningful world, the way that we have to be as human beings, or at least the way that people believe they have to be, is that they are indeed thinking the universe into existence, which is another word for adhering to the phenomenalist, propositional way of understanding Being that Kant gave us some 250 years ago.
In short, the real world of human beings operates by a manner that we call subjectivity, which is just the most recent version of phenomenalism. It is a tradition that advocates as it enforces a way of thinking to a way of Being. Basically, the way it operates is by suspending an ability within ourselves to recognize what is actually occurring for the sake of the situation where we are expressing beliefs and opinions in a social milieu. This is so much the case that we even think we’re doing this within ourselves, and moreover, that our brains are doing this. In other words, in modern reality we absolutely must be thinking Being into existence, which is Correlationalist, human centered, and Kantian. This was the SR point, but then this is the case by the simple fact that someone would disagree with it —that is the irony neatly avoided by the modern method of Being that says that what we think reflects what Being is. Nonetheless, again It is not wrong, though it is likely incorrect and produces knowable outcomes that could otherwise be remedied if not avoided outright.
Home is When We Left It
Now. Go back to the two sentences above and contemplate how you are coming across them as propositional arguments. And you are being Correlationalist. It is a simple fact by the identification of the term as we discuss it and know of it. And, see what happens in you when you consider, as John Grey puts it, you are participating in a religious belief.
For, if we do not ascribe to what we call religion, e.g., Muslim, Cathoicism, Hinduism, and so on, that is, in as much as people choose what they believe, then the significant and question becomes: what does this indicate that I am able to think of things that might exist outside of thought? What is it to be able to think in a non-Correlationalist way?
YOU.