Speculative Realism

A dialog between Tristan Garcia and Flora Katz on the work of the artist Jessica Warboys.

Written in the context of a residency at Parc Saint Leger with Martha Salimbeni, Hélène Bertin, Mathieu Arbez Hermoso and Christèle Selliez-Vandernotte.

Tristan Garcia and Flora Katz « Ciné-Vitrail et Escalier de Penrose, Les objets passagers de Jessica Warboys » in "La Gamme de Shepard", ed. Parc Saint Léger, 2014  (Fr)

El presente texto es el prólogo para mi traducción de Q. Meillassoux, "Metafísica y ficción extracientífica" (Santiago: Roneo, 2020), que co-escribimos M. Ramírez y yo. Contiene una explicación general del 'realismo especulativo' y el rol que el filósofo Q. Meillassoux juega en él, a partir de su propuesta de 'materialismo especulativo' y la crítica a la noción de 'correlacionismo' allí implicada. Luego, el prólogo entrega indicaciones sobre la relación entre metafísica y ficción propuesta por el autor.

Quentin Meillassoux, "Metafísica y ficción extracientífica, seguido de "La bola de billar" de I. Asimov. Santiago: Roneo, 2020. Traducción y notas de Meillassoux por Jean-Paul Grasset B. Prólogo de Jean-Paul Grasset B. y Mario Teodoro Ramírez.
Traducción de 'La bola de billar" por Cristóbal Carrasco y Nicolás Vargas.

Speculative Realism (SR) has often been characterised as a heterogeneous group of thinkers, united almost exclusively in their commitment to the critique of what Quentin Meillassoux terms ‘correlationism’ or what Graham Harman calls the ‘philosophy of (human) access.’ The terms ‘correlationism’ and ‘philosophy of access’ are in turn often treated – at times even by Meillassoux and Harman themselves – as synonymous. In this paper, I seek to analyse these terms to evaluate their similarities, but also possible differences. I shall argue that the difference between the two terms ought to be retained and emphasised, since it hints at important differences between the positions of Harman and Meillassoux.

Este texto foi elaborado para a discussão do (Neo)Hegelianismo aqui exposto no III Congresso Hegel em Diálogo: O Próprio Tempo Apreendido em Pensamento, realizado na Universidade Federal do Rio Grande do Norte, de 29 a 31 de agosto de 2018.
Resumo: Este artigo expõe sucintamente conceitos (filosofia, especulação, Absoluto, Razão, Sistema das Filosofias, Filosofia, Autoconsciência, em si e para si de uma autoconsciência, Sistema das Autoconsciências e Espírito) relativos a um (Neo)Hegelianismo atual, explicitando suas articulações e organização.

This is a speculative fiction and extract from my post-graduate dissertation,
The dissertation itself investigated oikonomia, ‘a set of practices, bodies of knowledge, measures, and institutions’, rooted in the concept of the properly functioning oikos. It analysed the ways in which oikonomia aims ‘to manage, govern, control, orient – in a way that purports to be useful – the behaviours, gestures, and thoughts of human beings.’ 

Within the dissertation, the term oikos was read as the house and the household apparatus: the site of social and reproductive control. With this in mind, it asked what form of life does a practice rooted in the oikos produce and, what do changes in the oikos mean for the style of governing we have come to understand as oikonomia?

This extract was produced following fieldwork at Battersea Power Station and with the Battersea Power Station Development Company.

The 2012-phenomenon includes apocalyptic fantasies regarding an impending collapse of our contemporary society, supposedly prophesized by the ancient Maya and their Long Count calendar. Sometimes connections to the ancient Maya collapse are made. That also happens to be the quite common in academic circles. Some academic researchers believe we can learn from the past failures for future solutions. The objects that were involved in the ancient Maya collapse were not the same as now and therefore we have little to learn from the Maya collapse in relation to our own ecological crisis. The ancient and contemporary Maya’s sensual profiles of ecology, time and space were/are quite different from those found within the “2012-phenomenon” and academia.

Este trabalho consiste em apresentar, analisar e criticar, a partir do sistema filosófico de Quentin Meillassoux, apresentado em seu principal livro: Après la finitude: Essais sur nécessité de la contingence, e desenvolvido em seu seminal artigo: Iteração, reiteração, repetição-Uma análise especulativa do signo desprovido de sentido, seu realismo especulativo, colocando-o em direto contraste com o realismo ingênuo, e ao mesmo tempo, abordando seu diagnóstico sobre o esgotamento da filosofia contemporânea, a qual toma a forma do que ele nomeará de Era da Correlação, era em que o conhecimento sobre o absoluto (ou a coisa em si) encontra-se barrada pela correlação entre pensante e pensado, sujeito e objeto; ou o conhecimento do absoluto se dá através de uma hipóstase metafísica da subjetividade. O objetivo principal da apresentação é uma fundamental investigação sobre esses dois modelos de realismo a partir de uma perspectiva com enfoque na função e relação entre ciência, matemática e ontologia. Logo, esse trabalho será compreendido em três partes: A primeira consiste em uma apresentação esquemática do que seria, para Meillassoux, o realismo ingênuo, as formas de correlacionismo e subjetalismo dentro da Era da Correlação, e por fim, o realismo especulativo; Em segundo lugar, será promovida uma análise crítica do movimento teórico ocorrido na passagem entre cada um destes três momentos-realismo ingênuo, Era da Correlação e realismo especulativo-a partir de uma progressiva mudança no emprego da razão, ora na forma de crítica, ora na de especulação; Concluindo, investigar-se-á a função da ciência, matemática, ontologia, e a relação dentre essas três componentes dentro das duas formas de realismo em cheque-ingênuo e especulativo-a fim de esclarecer as diferenças e similaridades entre as duas doutrinas.

This self-titled essay responds to the prescribed question below: 2. Claire Bishop has said of installation art that 'Rather than imagining the viewer as a pair of disembodied eyes that survey the work from a distance, [it] presupposes an embodied viewer whose senses of touch, smell and sound are as heightened as their sense of vision. This insistence on the literal presence of the viewer is arguably the key characteristic of installation art.' (from Installation Art: A Critical History) Discuss the relevance of these ideas in relation to installation art OR other art forms. In answering limit your analysis to no more than three individual works.

El presente texto es el prólogo  para mi traducción de M. Gabriel, "El poder del arte", Santiago: Roneo, 2019. Contiene una localización general de Markus Gabriel en el panorama del "nuevo realismo" y el previo "realismo especulativo", además de indicaciones sobre su pensamiento sobre arte y sentido.

The present catalogue text discerns between two kinds of eco-centric works the Austrian artist Herwig Scherabon presented in his latest solo exhibition “Against Nature“ (July 2021, Berlin Neukölln): landscapist and objectivist. Whereas Herwig's landscapist works are both nets-of and knots-in, and thus ontology-wise rather conventional; his objectivist works are ontologically most striking as they exclusively are nets, but no knots. For this reason, they are focused on here. The artist conjures these singular existences by means of black space that is isolating, yet not weakening, but rather empowering, even “monstrouizing“ them. In so existing, they emit an ontologically provocative statement: Distance is not debilitating, but rather an invitation to become.

The core presumption of object oriented ontology and other speculative realisms is that we have epistemic access to the absolute-which seems to be a rather weird place looking at the systems these ontologists propose. One of the best cases for said presumption is found in Meillassoux's After Finitude. He aims to secure our access to reality as it is in itself by refuting correlationism according to which we cannot escape reality as it is thought by us. He presents three arguments: ancestrality, facticity and mathematization. On the first argument correlationism fails because it cannot render scientific statements about an universe anterior to us meaningful. I address the worry that he might not take this to be a real argument against correlationism and argue that it in any case fails. On the second argument correlationism is flawed since it remains committed to absolute possibilities. I argue that this argument is untenable as well. On his third argument correlationism fails because science reveals a mathematically describable reality indifferent to our existence. I argue that the almost perfect mathematization of nature can actually be cashed out as an argument for correlationism. I conclude by proposing an alternative way of showing that mathematics is the language of the absolute understood as a radical contingent hyperchaos.

Qu’est-ce que le corps humain ? A la fois la plus familière et la plus méconnue des choses, le corps est au centre de l’expérience mais représente également le lieu d’une préhistoire antérieure à toute expérience. Étrange et inconnu, cet autre aspect du corps a bien trop souvent été négligé par la phénoménologie. En se confrontant à cette négligence, The Thing redéfinit la phénoménologie en tant qu’espèce du réalisme, nommée phénoménologie inhumaine. Loin d’être le simple véhicule d’une voix humaine, cette phénoménologie inhumaine permet l’expression d’une matérialité étrangère aux limites de l’expérience. En associant la philosophie de Merleau-Ponty, Husserl et Levinas à l’horreur de John Carpenter, David Cronenberg et H. P. Lovecraft, Trigg explore la manière dont cette phénoménologie inhumaine place le corps hors du temps. Remettant en question les notions traditionnelles de la philosophie, The Thing fait également écho aux philosophies contemporaines du réalisme. Le résultat n’est ni plus ni moins qu’une renaissance de la phénoménologie redéfinie à travers la focale de l’horreur.

The first edition of The Sympathy of Things, published with V2_Publishing, was quickly sold out to later be published in a revised new edition with Bloomsbury: https://www.academia.edu/19435584/The_Sympathy_of_Things_Ruskin_and_the_Ecology_of_Design_2nd_ed_

This talk starts from the presumption that the quantum challenge, as a set of philosophical questions, was a dialogue far beyond the discipline of physics. Quantum sociologist Gabriel Tarde, and philosophers Henri Bergson and Alfred North Whitehead, amongst others, were active participants in the debates over causality, time, and action at a distance, as well as the grander metaphysical questions about life raised by Bohr and Schrödinger in particular. Following Bohr and Tarde, I argue that quantum phenomena are not constrained to the subatomic, but in fact are essential components of human social and political relations.
Mostly ignored until recently, the panpsychist traditions that emerged from these early interdisciplinary debates over quantum are essential to understanding the character of contemporary terrorism, and more broadly global politics in an age of non-scalable events. By non-scalable I mean that the measurement of the brute materiality of an event does not in any predictable way translate into its effect. In our age, apocalyptic crises barely register, and statistically insignificant events shake the entire international order. In fact, International Relations theory has, from its beginning, endeavored to explain ‘spooky action at a distance’, as the relations of the international are by definition both in a no-space of the international, and habituated into the local practices and places of diplomacy, deterrence, and war. While the entangled and non-locality of global politics has always been true, I argue that media and quantum savvy organizations like ISIS succeed precisely because of their ability to leverage this characteristic of global life.
Given the difficulty of theorizing such events, it is necessary to revise Benedict Anderson’s model of the imagined community as an imaginary space of shared continuity and simultaneity in favor of a quantum-inflected notion of virtual entanglement. Here, the ‘community’ is created by the non-spatial but still real acceleration of distrust for the world, and those bearing the marks of racialized difference. Events like those that erupted in Paris, France and San Bernardino, California are only the most recent examples. The latter event had no explicit connection to ISIS, and yet this spectacular violence is an undeniable asset to the atmosphere of terror that ISIS requires to increase its international significance. In fact, no amount of discourse about the non-connection of San Bernardino to ISIS was sufficient to disentangle them. Events such as those in France and California do not operate in a three dimensional space in which we can measure something like speed or mass. Instead, contemporary terrorism takes place in an affective dimension where space/time is often irrelevant to the intensity of the consequences of an event. When a pineapple soda can becomes a ‘bomb’ and takes down a Russian airliner, the everyday objects around us provoke a sense of metaphysical doubt or skepticism most commonly known as horror. Therefore, International Relations needs a quantum turn so that we can understand the very real consequences of events and things whose capacities defy both physical and casual explanation, but far exceed constructivist concepts of discourse or ideas. Link to talk https://youtu.be/-71newlDkhI?t=13m17s

Russian anarchism of the 1910s-1920s (biocosmism, pan-anarchism) proposed an original political and aesthetic model of "access to space", which possessed a great heuristic and utopian potential, which, due to political circumstances of the first half of the 20th century, was repressed and forgotten. The article reconstructs and interprets this model through questions about (cosmic) language, (anarchic) imagination and (interplanetary) technics.

Understanding the exact nature of Deleuze’s debt to Kant, forms a large part of contemporary Deleuzian scholarship, a project made all the more urgent since the publishing of Meillassoux’s critique of correlationism in 2007.  These Kantian readings present Deleuze as someone who continues Kant’s transcendental project by reconsidering the nature of ‘immanent critique’.  Immanent critique is no longer seen here as part of the critical enquiry into the possible conditions of experience, but as a staging of an encounter with the genetic principle constituting these conditions, the real condition common to both the human subject and the world in which he lives.  Such is the implicit demand of genetic recasting: that critique in its immanent form is something we can experience and learn.

Presented with this demand, the following essay addresses the problem of staging this immanent form of critique. It looks to Deleuze’s essay on the work of Samuel Beckett, ‘The Exhausted’, to suggest a possible site for such an encounter with constitutive principle.  Specifically, in Deleuze’s discussion of …but the clouds… it finds a theory of the image, which can be understood in genetic terms, as a theory of the virtual.  Thus the essay puts forward the thesis, that Beckett, in constructing the image through the exhaustive process, recreates the virtual plane, in its openness and flux.

Revolutionary theory begins with recognizing accumulation as a fact of planetary existence. We find ourselves on a rock on which five billion years of solar accumulation have already taken place. If we also find ourselves in a planetary crisis, it is because rather than capturing the energy already falling on the earth, we have rereleased previously gathered energy back into the air. Rather than shifting our legacy infrastructures away from digging up old, consolidated sunlight and towards capturing contemporary sunlight, the latter continues to fall while we add to it the sunlight buried beneath. This doubling up on sunlight Ð adding the energy from the ground to what continues to come from the sun Ð is the cause, unsurprisingly, of what is called Òclimate change.Ó 1 ÊÊÊÊÊÊÊÊÊÊKnowing what we know about planetary existence in the visible universe, it is likely that this problem Ð of climate change due to semi-intelligent, self-instituting sunlight burning the traces of a previous eraÕs self-organizing sunlight Ð is a fairly common one. Statistically, we can be confident that this planetary drama has played out countless times before across ours and other galaxies, and to various degrees of destructive intensity. ÊÊÊÊÊÊÊÊÊÊWe can imagine a number of different planets confronting our problem in their own ways. Maybe some just solve climate change the way we solved polio. Maybe the sixth planet in Alpha Centauri just got solar power correct relatively quickly and the whole problem was avoided. But maybe this same planet struggled for centuries to construct an internal combustion engine. Maybe they never discovered the novel or invented their version of basketball. I wonder: of all the things we cherish about our semi-intelligent self-instituting existence together, which are truly rare in the universe and which are hopelessly common? ÊÊÊÊÊÊÊÊÊÊIt is important to recognize that climate change is a problem we can solve, based on our institutional track record. It is a very big project, probably top ten, maybe top five, but it is totally manageable, and there are hundreds of thousands of semi-intelligent planetary societies that have solved similar problems. No doubt they struggled with other issues. Perhaps the arrival of the interstate highway system coincided with a residual commitment to fashion that resulted in centuries of passengers going without seat belts until some method was invented to secure these creatures with magnets. And that when confronted with the relative ease by which earth-critters invented the seat belt, representatives from the planet of seat-belt refusers will marvel at our wise intelligence the way we will marvel at how they solved the climate-change problem almost without realizing it.

Black Mirror's "Hang the DJ:" On Love in Algorithmic Embodiment. My paper discusses the episode titled "Hang the DJ" (2017) of Netflix-produced show Black Mirror, which tackles the highly computed experiences of romantic love. Rather than analyzing it as representative of current dating experiences within the regimes of digitization and datafication, I focus on how the episode's approach to these themes engages in ontological reflection about digital technologies, thus aligning with recent speculative philosophy and critical media theory scholarship. This ontological reflection comes with the episode's attempt to represent the algorithmic calculation itself, which I'll refer to here as "algorithmic embodiment." This algorithmic embodiment, I argue, grapples with knowledge-production of computational systems in order to, on the one hand, rethink the agency of digital technologies that decenter the human (which I'll tackle in the first part of my paper), and on the other, lead us, hopefully, to an alternative approach to understanding love in our neoliberal context (which I'll address at the end).

In this paper, I relativize the widespread representation of the generalized relativism of 1970s philosophy. I will show how the group of thinkers of this period often referred to as the 'French Theory' movement is not always defined by the affirmation of a radical relativism, but rather by the obstinate search for an original 'reality' (as thing in itself) capable of competing and denouncing the false 'reality' constructed by reason. To demonstrate this, I will focus on the journey of a philosopher who is emblematic of this period, namely Jean-François Lyotard. I will demonstrate that Lyotard claims a form of realism, which I will qualify as 'tragic realism.' Then, I will compare this 'tragic realism' with the more contemporary forms of realism , in particular speculative realism.
Nous voudrions, dans cet article, relativiser la représentation (aujourd'hui largement répandue) d'un relativisme généralisé de la philosophie des années 70, en montrant comment la constellation formée par les penseurs de cette période ne se définit pas toujours (et pas seulement) par l'affirmation d'un relativisme radical ou conséquent, mais bien plutôt par la recherche obstinée d'un « réel » originaire, susceptible de concurrencer et de dénoncer une « réalité » construite par la raison. Pour le démontrer, nous nous concentrerons sur le parcours d'un philosophe emblématique de la période, à savoir Jean-François Lyotard. Nous nous attacherons à remonter au geste principiel qui, à notre sens, structure toute sa philosophie, par-delà ses apparentes évolutions, à savoir : le nouage qu'il effectue entre l'idée d'une critique de la raison et l'affirmation d'un réel en soi. Ce lien d'implication qui caractérise le premier moment de sa philosophie (I), demeure inchangé dans les années 80, marquées par sa reprise de Kant (II). Ce geste fait de Lyotard le représentant d'un réalisme tragique, que nous pourrons situer, dès lors, par rapport à différentes formes plus contemporaines de réalismes (III), en particulier le réalisme spéculatif.

Verso la fine degli anni Novanta, Graham Harman inizia a parlare di Object-Oriented Philosophy per indicare una proposta filosofica, interna a una revisione critica della tradizione fenomenologica classica, di matrice fortemente realista. Contro le derive anti-realiste della filosofia continentale, radicalizzatesi nel Novecento filosofico con la Fenomenologia e il Linguistic Turn, Harman individua nella categoria di "oggetto" il nocciolo di un rinnovato realismo, volto a mettere sotto scacco la tradizione onto-teo-logica, vale a dire gerarchica, della metafisica a favore di un'ontologia piatta (flat), la quale, decentrando il primato di uno sguardo umano, troppo umano, renderebbe finalmente giustizia agli oggetti, intesi nel senso più ampio del termine, al di là delle classiche distinzioni categoriali (oggetti naturali, ideali, sociali, fittizi, ecc.): dalle pietre alle stelle, dai delfini agli ircocervi, dagli esseri umani alla Compagnia delle Indie. Nel 2009 Levi Bryant conia l'etichetta Object-Oriented Ontology (OOO) per indicare prospettive ontologiche orientate agli oggetti emerse in relazione e in risposta alle tesi di Harman, e non riducibili ad esse, tra le quali, oltre a quella da lui stesso elaborata e sostenuta, quelle di Ian Bogost e di Timothy Morton. Ognuno di questi autori, provenendo da tradizioni filosofiche e teoriche diverse-filosofia, game studies, teoria della letteratura-, ha declinato con originalità e inventiva la propria visione di un'ontologia realista, piatta, orientata agli oggetti e sempre non-antropocentrica. Così, la Object-Oriented Ontology (OOO) non costituisce una posizione unica, né univoca, riguardo agli oggetti e si configura piuttosto, come Harman stesso ha recentemente sottolineato, come "programma di ricerca", definito da una comune cornice ontologica, ma sostanzialmente aperto a declinazioni ulteriori.

La Object-Oriented Ontology (OOO) ha finora ricevuto scarsa attenzione in Italia, soprattutto in ambito filosofico. Intenzione di questo volume è innanzitutto quella di colmare questo vuoto, presentando la OOO e mettendone in evidenza, con sguardo critico e non apologetico, limiti e punti di forza. In particolare, il volume si pone una duplice finalità: da una parte introdurre e discutere le principali tesi della OOO, nelle diverse versioni ad oggi in circolazione, dall’altra mostrare se e come la OOO ci consenta di comprendere il presente e rielaborare il passato, sia nei termini di una reinterpretazione critica dei concetti e dei problemi della filosofia, al di qua e al di là del blocco novecentesco, sia nei termini, più ampi e transdisciplinari dell’anticipazione dei problemi sociali, politici, tecnologici ed ecologici che attendono umani e non-umani in un futuro rivisto alla luce di un passato non solamente specie-specifico.
Autori e autrici interessati alla OOO sono invitati a partecipare inviando entro il 31 ottobre 2019 a rivistakaiak@libero.it un abstract di max. 500 parole.

В знаковой для спекулятивного реализма книге К. Мейясу решается задача получения доступа к «реальности как она есть». Выдвигаются аргументы против корреляционизма классической философии, главным из которых является отказ от принципа необходимости достаточного основания в пользу принципа контингентной фактичности. В качестве нового «недогматического» Абсолюта вводится понятие математизированного Хаоса.Посттеоретический (спекулятивный) реализм есть отражение экспансии искусственной виртуальной реальности, претендующий на парадигмальное объяснение всего сущего. Как превращенная форма философии computer science он обосновывает конечность предметной физической реальности, тем самым лишая человека его жизненного мира. Это вариант нигитологии и проявление апофатического состояния современного сознания. Спекулятивному реализму противопоставляется философия феноменологического субстанциализма. Анализ текста показывает, что это эссенциалистский аналог идей структурализма, онтологии коммуникации и синергетики, которые более убедительно уже разработаны в методологии науки. Сохранение Homo Genus (родового человека) возможно только при условии сохранения его жизненного мира как фактичности «нашей реализации» одного из возможных миров. Философия такого подхода опирается на диалектику нелинейного взаимодействия необходимого и случайного, что допускает существование различных вариантов развития, не отменяя причинных оснований для них.
The landmark for speculative realism book of Q. Meillassoux solves the problem of gaining access to the “reality as it is”. The arguments are put forward against correlationism of classical philosophy, the main of which is the refusal of the principle of necessity of sufficient foundation to the benefit of the principle of contingent facticity. As the new “non-dogmatic” Absolute in introduced the notion of mathematized Chaos. The post-theoretical  (speculative) realism is the reflection of expansion of the artificial virtual reality that claims the paradigmatic explanation of all things in existence. As the converted form of philosophy computer science, he substantiates the finitude of the substantive physical reality by depriving human of his lifeworld. This is the version of nihility and manifestation of apophatic state of modern consciousness. Speculative realism is opposed to the philosophy of phenomenological substantialism. Analysis of the text demonstrates that this is essentialistic analogy of the ideas of structuralism, ontology of communication and synergetics that were formulated more persuasively in the methodology of science. Preservation of Homo Genus is attainable only in terms of preserving his lifeworld as the facticity of “realization” of one of the possible worlds. The philosophy of such approach leans on the dialectics of nonlinear interaction between the necessary and contingent, which allows the existence of various scenarios without rescinding the causes of origin.

Monografia filosófica onde estabeleço as diretrizes centrais de minha meta-metafísica que orienta minhas pesquisas de doutorado. Ademais, como um primeiro "case study", avaliamos a obra Après la Finitude de Quentin Meillassoux, além de vários comentadores. Em conclusão, postulamos uma taxonomia diferente para estudar o correlacionismo e pleiteamos uma filosofia da complexidade.

Ok, Children of the Corn was true classic from the days when Stephen King was the King of horror. However its true glory lies in marking an era where the Green Revolution has shown its true face as the unlikely Terminator. High-yield strains were developed and seeded everywhere around the world, supplanting most of the old gene pools and agrarian biodiversity since Neolithic Revolution to kingdom come. Especially so in the third or the second world, the Communist East being very much into the same ‘let’s have mutant, pest-resistant, gigantic, super-sweet corn’ wave. In fact, we could argue that much of the Eastern ‘collectivization’ was a more or less a camouflaged fertility cult celebrating chthonian energies, renewal and miraculous hybrids.