Scapegoat
Architecture/Landscape/Political Economy
Issue 03
Realism
40
Reviews
The Speculative Turn: Continental
Materialism and Realism, Levi Bryant,
Nick Srnicek, and Graham Harman
(eds.), re.press, 2011, 440 pp.
Reviewed by Thomas Nail
What is speculative realism? Simply
put, it is the philosophical position
that there is a reality independent
from human thought, language, and
culture. This may sound banal, since
it is so widely accepted as “common
sense,” but this sort of argument
has not been seriously made by philosophers for a long time, and never
quite like this. In fact, most of the last
hundred or so years of philosophy has
been explicitly directed at disabusing us of this sort of “naïve” realism
in favour of a vision of reality strictly
limited or mediated by human experience, language, embodiment, social
and political structures, etc.
After decades of post-Kantian
philosophy (phenomenology, structuralism, post-structuralism, and
deconstruction), is it possible to
discern a new philosophical practice
today that would allow knowledge
of reality, untethered by human consciousness, discourse, culture, or power? The Speculative Turn assembles
more than two dozen essays by many
of the key figures in present-day continental philosophy on precisely this
question. If you have heard the words
“speculative realism” (SR) in passing
over the last four or so years and were
curious as to who the main theorists
of this new tradition are, what the
main debates are about, and where
its main critics stand, this is the first
book you need to own. Not only does
The Speculative Turn provide a robust
(440 page!) introduction to this philosophical debate, it marks a new turn in
contemporary continental philosophy
that can no longer be ignored as a
passing fad.
The lineup here is impressive. Among
the many contributors are: Alain Badiou,
François Laruelle, Bruno Latour, Slavoj
Žižek, Quentin Meillassoux, Isabelle
Stengers, Alberto Toscano, Peter Hallward, Manuel DeLanda, Adrian Johnston, and John Protevi. With 25 contributions, this is perhaps one the most
extensive and diverse anthologies of
continental philosophy of the last ten
years. However, attention should also
be directed to its method of publication with re.press, an open-access
publisher that publishes under a creative commons license. In addition to
printing ‘real’ books available in stores
and online, open access titles are also
available free of charge in digital form.
How many book reviews can say, “if
this review sounds interesting to you,
Semblance and Event: Activist Philosophy and
the Occurrent Arts, Brian Massumi, MIT Press,
2011, 224 pp.
Reviewed by Marcus Boon
Just as 9/11 constituted a crisis for Deleuzian
thought in its postmodern incarnation, so the
various liberatory movements that sprung up
around the world in 2011, from Occupy to the
Arab Spring, have constituted a crisis for the
schools of critical thought that have flourished
around Žižek and Badiou in the last decade.
While Badiou’s notion of fidelity to the truth of
an event initially seemed to be an advance over
the Deleuzian project of groundless, immanent
experimentalism—so easily appropriated into the
capitalist marketplace as the logic of consumer
choice—fidelity itself seemed to find its limit in
2011 in Zuccotti Park, as Žižek’s passage à l’acte,
the heroic gesture of intervention, encountered
the full might of spectacular force, and it became
increasingly unclear what would be at stake in
continuing to occupy 100 square metres of corporate/public land at the southern tip of Manhattan
(to use only the most well known location) against
the massed forces of the media and the police.
The courage to act, while praiseworthy, is evidently not enough. But what, then, is? What should
we do, now that we know there is a “we” that has
publically declared itself? Žižek has claimed that it
is a matter of a “strong body able to reach quick
decisions and to implement them with all necessary harshness.”1 There are few takers for this
today other than residual Stalinists and the venture capitalists who currently own the state. We
can formulate the crisis of liberation movements
today as one of practice. Although the word initially evokes little more than the banality of “what
one does,” or perhaps the pursuit of some hobby
or interest, it is clear that our political crisis today
involves our inability to imagine a set of practices
that constitute the basis of an emancipated world.
To put it bluntly: how does one establish a collective practice of being in the world (formerly
known as “political economy”) without it devolving into matters of private, individual, consumer
choice—and without it devolving into a collective
exercise of force that lacks any value or orientation other than the mere reproduction of power
through its repeated exercise?
This is the point at which another look at Deleuze’s work, or more specifically his work with
Félix Guattari, seems to hold potential, since the
key to a radical, new, and emancipatory form of
practice may involve being able to think fidelity
to the truth of the event, in the terms set out by
Badiou, along with the Deleuzian imperative to
experiment. This is where Brian Massumi’s new
book, Semblance and Event: Activist Philosophy
and the Occurrent Arts, comes in. It is not an easy
Scapegoat
you can download the book right now
for free from the publisher”? Books
like The Speculative Turn support and
give credibility to what I hope will be
the future of academic publishing.
The Speculative Turn is organized
into five main thematic sections. The
first section, “speculative realism revisited,” is composed of essays from
the participants of the first Speculative Realism event held in 2007 at
Goldsmiths College, London: Graham
Harman, Iain Hamilton Grant, and
Ray Brassier. Having followed the
published transcriptions of this conference in the third volume of the journal
Collapse, I found this first section
a great marker of how much these
thinkers have changed since then
(Brassier now even rejects the name
Speculative Realism altogether). The
second section is devoted to Quentin
Meillassoux’s book After Finitude
(2006) and includes (among other
essays) a compelling critique of his
notion of a “virtual God,” by Adrian
Johnston. How Meillassoux remains
committed to the absolute necessity
of contingency (non-totality) and still
maintains the potentiality of God
seems entirely inconsistent and gives
the origins of SR a strange theological
dimension that Johnston rejects. The
third section on politics is disappointing. It is clear that Speculative Realism
has demonstrated “a notable absence
so far when it comes to issues of subjectivity and politics,” as Nick Srnicek
says (165). However, in attempting
to locate the implications of SR for
politics, he concludes that realism
constitutes “the necessary, but not yet
sufficient, conditions for constructing
read; if you dislike Deleuzian jargon, then following
its translation into Whitehead’s jargon and back is
going to be even more unpleasant. More frustratingly, the book simply ignores the important critiques made of Deleuze over the last decade as if
they never happened. Nevertheless, the book has
something new to tell us.
One of the interesting things about Massumi’s
work in the last decade (especially Parables for
the Virtual) is its attempt to develop a Deleuzian
philosophy in accordance with contemporary
neuroscience.2 Massumi was recently criticized in
Critical Inquiry for misinterpreting neuroscientific
data to support his elaboration of a world of
pre-subjective affective vectors and a philosophy
of immanence, but his model remains an intriguing one.3 The title of the book, Semblance and
Event, refers to the way that a pre-cognitive,
ever-shifting immanent multiplicity of events are
taken up and figured as perceptible forms which
he calls semblances. Massumi gives the example
of a flash of lightning. The totality of atmospheric
conditions that produce the flash are inaccessible
to the senses. The visible lightning and the boom
of thunder comprise the semblance of the event
of a certain set of atmospheric conditions, their
figuration: “The lightning is the appearing tip of
a more expansive event that never shows in its
entirety. The fullness of the event’s conditioning
and occurrence is perceptually felt, in the dynamic form of how what actually appears steals the
show” (24). The framework here is that of Deleuze’s actual (semblance) and virtual (event). But
the example is problematic, since at the moment
of the flash of lightning, there is a radical and correlative shift in atmospheric conditions. As Massumi observes, the flash is not the semblance of
the build-up of atmospheric tension, but its resolution. In other words, the semblance is itself a
new event, rather than the semblance of the prior
one. The problem is likely that Deleuze’s model of
virtual and actual works well when applied to film,
where a cinematic image clearly has a double
status of virtual and actual, and where the appearance of the image as semblance constitutes
an event. But does it work as an ontology? That
there is a gap between appearance and reality
is well known, but in what way does reframing
this as actual and virtual, or semblance and event,
help us to generate new kinds of practice?
Although Massumi dubs his “activist philosophy” “speculative pragmatism,” there is no
mention in the book of the speculative realist
philosophers who have emerged in recent years.
This is unfortunate because, whether you agree
with them or not, the assertion of a real—either
that of objects that remain beyond all iterations
of appearance in Graham Harman’s case, or of
mathematical forms in the work of Quentin Meillassoux—is significant, especially since the real is
asserted there precisely against the vagueness of
Deleuze’s ontology. Massumi is also vague, tantalizingly so. What is the world beneath, before coevolving with the subject-object relationship? It
is one of movement, process, waves, to use Massumi’s favoured words. But Massumi hesitates to
designate what is in effect a vibrational ontology
as such. Pre-subjective affect, “direct perception,”
“feeling-thinking,” “the amodal in person,” and
other such designations remain more or less Kantian formulations. Furthermore, for Massumi, the
semblance of an event or, if you like, the event
of a semblance, is equivalent to the instantiation
of the virtual as the actual, but what is the
relationship between virtual and real? The virtual
is usually described as a swarm of potentialities—
Architecture/Landscape/Political Economy
new empirico-transcendental spaces
incommensurable with the capitalist
socius” (181). In other words, SR is
so far insufficient for thinking politics.
This insufficiency is further supported
by other realists: for Brassier, “there
can be no ethics of radical immanence”
(178), and for Hallward, SR even fails
to account for any “actual process of
transformation or development” (139).
The fourth section on metaphysics is
quite strong and includes essays from
Meillassoux, Laruelle, Levi Bryant, Bruno Latour, Harman, and Steven Shaviro
on what SR analyzes best: being and
potentiality. The final section on science is diverse, perhaps too diverse to
conclude anything in particular about
SR’s relationship to science beyond
what the individual authors seem to
have already been up to well before
anyone was talking about SR.
The courage and boldness of The
Speculative Turn in announcing a
break with the last 150 years of continental anti-realism is impressive, even
exciting. However, when the editors
compare this with the traditions of
phenomenology, structuralism, poststructuralism, post-modernism, and
deconstruction, one cannot help but
feel the inadequacy of SR. What constitutes a new philosophical tradition?
There are too many characteristics
to list here, but at least one of them
is that it bears directly on the actual
world in some fashion. Every philosophical tradition has been able to
rethink not only “what is,” but also
how being is specifically distributed in
art, love, ethics, and politics. In short,
“there is no theory of the event in SR,”
as Alain Badiou says in the opening
and such a swarm cannot be the same as the
real. The notion of a singular “truth,” which for
Badiou emerges out of the event’s manifestation
of the real and cuts through the multiplicity of
the virtual, is unimportant to Massumi or Deleuze.
A semblance is beautiful, at best a truth rather
than the truth, but better than that, it is “quivering life” or “bare activity,” before things like truth
and content intervene.
In Semblance and Event, Massumi offers a
brilliant reading of Walter Benjamin’s mysterious
notion of “non-sensuous similarity” as the “nonlocal” connection of pre-cognitive entities, which
provide a kind of ground for the production of
sensuous similarities, likenesses, discourse, etc.4
This potentially does provide a way of rethinking the relation of virtual, actual, and real, as
well as a basis for a new kind of practice. But, to
return to the topic of the weather, the example
of the ritual production of similarity that Massumi uses (taken from Benjamin but updated for
rave culture), that of dancers who imitate the sky,
falls apart, because no one today really believes
that this imitation is efficacious in changing the
weather. What one is left with is something “aesthetic.” Massumi has described what the hope
of so much “relational” art is today—using a
local practice to produce a nonlocal effect, but
it remains unclear whether art, in these terms,
is capable of producing the kinds of nonlocal
political effects that this model aspires to. The
creative life that Massumi affirms is captured by
structural elements that enforce particular meanings and ways of living—for Deleuze this was the
Nietzschean cycle of active and reactive forces.
And guess who tends to win?
By “activist philosophy,” Massumi mostly means
“a philosophy of action, of acting” rather than
“political activism,” but he does follow through
on the latter meaning in the final section of the
book. Indeed, he offers a rather stunning reversal
of the two meanings, such that the politics of parties, laws, doctrines, etc. is “apolitical,” while the
creative “techniques of existence” deployed by
modernist masters such as Mahler and installation
artist Robert Irwin, are now key examples of the
“political” because of their inventive iterations. But
if creativity is immanently political, how does one
explain the capture of a relational form such as
interactive art or gaming, which Massumi himself
claims is now one of the fundamental “techniques
interview of this volume (20).
Not only is there no theory of the
event, but much of the focus of SR
remains unconcerned with actual
politics, ethics, or art at all. With such
a large volume, it is a shame that this
lack could not more clearly be filled.
Why should anyone who is working on
aesthetics, ethics, or politics find SR
attractive or useful? Even if they agree
with its ontological convictions, what
consequences do they have? This will
no doubt be one of the largest barriers to establishing the coherency of
SR as more than an “interesting, but
ultimately useless theoretical venture” (165). If SR is defined only by
its ontological commitment to some
variety of realism, but remains too
radically divided in its methodology
and theory of actuality, it will not be
intelligible as a new tradition. This is
a particularly unfortunate dilemma
given that we are witnessing today
the largest constellation of world-wide
revolutionary movements since the
1960s. It is also possible, however, that
The Speculative Turn is an untimely
announcement: something which, at
the moment, sounds absurd and insufficient, but which in time will have already been true. Even still, while philosophical realism may be the necessary
condition for contemporary philosophy to move forward, it is definitely
not yet the sufficient condition. ×
Thomas Nail is a Post-Doctoral
Lecturer in European Philosophy at the University of Denver.
He is the author of Returning to
Revolution: Deleuze, Guattari,
and Zapatismo (Edinburgh University
Press, 2012).
of existence” of global capitalism? More generally,
how does one stop “creativity” qua “immaterial
labour” from becoming the newest form of capital,
as it has today? Isn’t the assertion of immanent
creativity as political per se just another version of
the liberal utopia that Žižek has assailed so well?
My sense of it, as indicated above, is that Massumi needs to explain what happens if the notion
of the real is introduced into his (and Deleuze’s)
system—the Lacanian Real as “that which always
comes back to the same place.”4 And if capture
by the symbolic (in Massumi’s version, the return
of truth, content, etc.) is inevitable, what form
does a “technique of existence,” (aka a practice),
have to take to produce actual novelty rather
than its reified form? These questions also suggest a version of the event closer to Badiou’s,
something perhaps quite rare but which requires
a response, a “technique of existence,” but one
demanding fidelity to the truth of the event. It’s
not that I think Badiou is right and Deleuze and
Massumi are wrong. The point is that practice
must involve some kinds of constraint or logic that
shape creativity in particular ways, allowing it to
be explored collectively, evolve and increase its
efficacy. This remains our challenge today, and it is
in this situation that the important work Massumi
has done here regarding the development of a
practice takes on its full power. ×
Notes
1.
2.
3.
4.
5.
Slavoj Žižek, “Shoplifters of the World
Unite,” London Review of Books (19 August,
2011).
Brian Massumi, Parables for the Virtual:
Movement, Affect, Sensation (Raleigh, NC,
Duke UP, 2002).
Ruth Leys, “The Turn to Affect: A Critique,”
Critical Inquiry 37, no. 3 (2011): 433-472.
Walter Benjamin, “On the Mimetic Faculty” in
Selected Writings: 1931-1934, eds. Michael
W. Jennings et. al. (Cambridge, MA: Harvard
UP, 2005), 720-722.
Jacques Lacan, The Four Fundamental Concepts
of Psychoanalysis: The Seminar of Jacques
Lacan, Book XI (New York, Norton, 1998), 42.
Marcus Boon is Associate Professor of
English at York University in Toronto.
He is the author of The Road of Excess:
A History of Writers on Drugs and In Praise
of Copying (both from Harvard UP) and is
currently working on a book entitled The
Politics of Vibration.
London +10 (Architectural
Association Agenda 10)
2010
Reviewed by Brendan D. Moran
Larger cities and metropolitan
regions constitute richly layered
environments, serving many
purposes and fostering various
cultures and subcultures simultaneously. Within these environs, new aural and televisual
accessibility to both public and
private realms have lately complicated the psycho-geographic
parameters of contemporary
urban life. In the process,
practices involving traditional
social relations dependent
upon space and place are being transformed, as in the case
of smart phone applications
Issue 03
Realism
like Brazil’s Dengue Torpedo
and London’s Urban Green
Line.1 For architectural educators, developments like these
influence the manner in which
fledgling designers are trained
to negotiate the chaotic realm
of social practices (both professional and not) to be found at
work in today’s heterogeneous
territorial expanses, from the
urban to the exurban, as well as
in-between and beyond.
In particular, questions of
how the “urban” inflects the
“architectural” (and vice versa),
as terms specifying distinct
scalar or intellectual qualities of
spaces and environs, are again
(as in the 1960s) newly important, largely because new digital realities have complicated
40