To start off, somewhat
paradoxically, with an observation regarding human culture: it has been really
astonishing to see how many people have contacted us about Aesthetics After Finitude and demonstrated an interest in this particular type of thought. This is
something that is not infrequently commented on by editors of the various
journals, blogs, and other publications associated with the ‘speculative
realist movement’ (for want of a better term) who all seem to agree that this
interest is in response to what could almost be called the zeitgeist of the
late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries – a feeling of frustration at
the way things are, coupled with a growing impression of human impotence and a
nagging sense of theoretical bankruptcy - or at least - repetition of the latter.
The editors of The
Speculative Turn – which we
mentioned last session – worry that: ‘something is clearly amiss in [the]
trends of anti-realist thought’ that have come to dominate our age. For ‘in the
face of the looming ecological catastrophe, and the increasing infiltration of
technology into the everyday world (including our own bodies), it is not clear
that the anti-realist position is equipped to face up to these developments.
The danger is that the dominant anti-realist strain of continental philosophy
has not only reached a point of decreasing returns, but that it now actively limits the capacities of philosophy in our time.’ (ST3)
Having said that,
perhaps the magnitude of this recent interest in speculative realism is not –
on second thoughts – that astonishing. But what is astonishing is the fact that we’ve had this kind
of response to the proposition of a reading group centred around what is easily
the most treacherous and difficult entry-point into the hard philosophical core
of speculative realism at it most unforgiving – which is to say as distinct from new
materialism and OOO (already both big hits in the art world). To characterise
it in broad strokes, the problem for aesthetics and for art-makers of all
kinds, is first and foremost the disavowal of the human subject, or of
subjectivity full stop –
which of course entails the complete dismantling of the traditional
subject-object relationship upon which aesthetics is built, and secondly, the
critique of secondary qualities – of the entire domain of sensibility. If you
take sensory experience and the human subject out of aesthetics, you’re not
really left with anything at all.
That said, it is our
conviction that thinking these two thoughts together – that of aesthetics and
that of speculation as it has been redefined in the context of new realisms –
has the potential to lead to something fundamentally new in the way we conceive
of and understand representation and aesthetics in the 21st century
– and as theorists – might furnish us with radically different methods of
understanding the work of our modern (and modernist) forebears.
This question of
speculative realism and aesthetics is still a vanguard pursuit in philosophy
and the humanities, and although we couldn’t really choose a more difficult
terrain to venture into, it is also one that remains completely open, as yet
unformed and unbounded.
Introduction February 19th, 2013, Sydney - transcript
Introduction February 19th, 2013, Sydney - transcript
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