Of Lists and an Aesthetics of Experience

— I read to sense the doubling of time: the time of a book’s form, which pertains to the enclosure and topology of rooms, allegories, houses, bodies, surfaces; and the time of my perceiving, which feels directional, melodic, lyric, inflectional. Then, because of the book’s time overlaying my own, reading opens a proposition. It receives in me the rhythm I didn’t know I missed.

- Lisa Robertson, “Time in the Codex”, Nilling

Gérard Genette’s Paratexts: Thresholds of Interpretations athletically theorises those liminal, marginal, associative, and attendant objects that inevitably accompany, and indeed, as he argues, are co-constitutive of, a text: the notes, lists, colophons, addendums, errata slips, biographical lines, dedications, epigraphs (to name but a few); as well as the material circumstances of typesetting, printing, binding, scanning, distributing, reading; and finally the larger, more abstract textual markers, like the century or language that a text is written, or the gender or sexuality with which a writer is interpellated. For Genette, a paratext is any thing that contributes to the actualisation of a given text. He refers to paratexts as “thresholds” that comprise a kind of “fringe at the unsettled limits that enclose with a pragmatic halo the literary work”. “The paratext” he writes “is empirically made up of a heterogeneous groups of practices and discourses of all kinds and dating from all periods.” Crucially, and perhaps surprisingly, he argues that the paratext is “characterized by an authorial intention and assumption of responsibility”—or, to put it differently, “something is not a paratext unless the author or one of his associates accepts responsibility for it”.

I read this emphasis on intentionality and responsibility as one that serves Genette a focus on the specifics of a textual object in its pragmatic materiality. One could easily, as I will suggest here, dilate this definition to include the unintended (which is not say Freudian), unreciprocated, unknown, and unanticipated textual nightlives and afterimages that accompany, sometimes at a distance or wonky angle, any textual form. For, alongside the text is a swarm of paratexts whose very capacity to live alongside affords them a particular kind of subtle efficacy.

At one point, Genette asserts that while there is no text without paratexts, there are paratexts without texts. He means this in an historical sense: there are lists, annotations, indexes, and appendices for which no object survives. These oddities serve as footnotes to an unobtainable textuality that can nonetheless be read via a different, more distant, or perhaps more interrogative, inquiry. To this category of the paratext-with-no-text, Craig Dworkin — American poet-critic and key figure in the so-called and somewhat-contested scene of ‘conceptual writers’ working towards a kind of post-author poetics — adds contemporary examples of purposefully paratextual objects. The paratext-as-text, Dworkin argues, is an aesthetic mode that ironises the sanctity and autonomy of the artwork while critiquing the assumed uniqueness of the artist or author. To this category, Dworkin recruits a number of artists and writers whose work constructs material and thematic paratextualities in the manner of lists, inventories, speculative documentaries, and databases.

The list is a paratextuality with an especially social discursive life: lists most readily point away from the rhetorics and stylistics of the text in which they occur; also, lists are often independent from a single text, say, for example, in the case of a shopping list. In the history of poetry, the list form has figured as a constructive conceit—one that, through the seemingly paradoxical affects of repetition and difference, speaks of a world both heterogeneous and somehow harmonious. Walt Whitman, an exemplary list poet, used the performative affect of the litany to emphasise his most beloved subject: multitudinousness.

Bruno Latour, too, is an accomplished composer of litanies — so much so that Ian Bogost in Alien Phenomenology gives Latour’s name to the list-forms that have become a stylistic trend in speculative realism and object-oriented ontology, especially in the work of Graham Harman. These ‘Latour Litanies’ function as exemplary strings of ‘objects’ in the broad terms set out by this new philosophical position. Objects, as defined by Harman et al, should not be imagined as being restricted to inert lumps of matter as in previous metaphysical schema, nor should they be imagined as restricted to the abstracted realm of the prototype or general category. Rather, they should be readily called on by way of example and in order to demonstrate their radical alterity. An example is this one from Harman, who is explicitly citing Latour’s We Have Never Been Modern: “neutrinos, stars, palm trees, rivers, cats, armies, nations, superheroes, unicorns, and square circles”. This kind of rhetoric is strategic—it aims on the one hand to seem arbitrary and on the other to seem a measured education on ‘flat ontology’: if everything is equally and irreducibly an object in a world of objects, then there can be no such thing as an exemplary object and only a swarm of equal-footed and de-privileged objects. Thus, the litany here becomes a kind of de-emphasis by emphasis.

Interfacing the Real: Adventures in Speculative Aesthetics (Critical Animals, 2013)

Amy Ireland, Baylee Brits, Eddie Hopely and Prue Gibson will be presenting at this year's Critical Animals, a symposium that accompanies Newcastle's This is Not Art festival. 

Interfacing the Real: Adventures in Speculative Aesthetics

'Guided by speculative procedures of theoretical dissolution, this collective considers the potential of aesthetic experience through a parallax interfacing of human and object, thought and matter, and imagination and mathematics.'

The panel will be held at the United Services Club in Newcastle at 4.30 pm on the 4th of October.  Full program here.

Speculative Aesthetics at UNSW: Upcoming Panel

Art After Finitude: Speculative Aesthetics in the Humanities

‘It does not seem to me that we have been as quick, in academia, to prepare ourselves for new threats, new dangers, new tasks, new targets. Are we not like those mechanical toys that endlessly make the same gesture when everything else has changed around them? It has been a long time since intellectuals were in the vanguard. Indeed it has been a long time since the very notion of the avant-garde passed away, pushed aside by other forces, moved to the rear guard, or maybe lumped with the baggage train.’ 

Latour, 'Why has Critique Run out of Steam?' Critical Inquiry, Vol. 30, No. 2, 225-248.

'Speculation' has recently garnered currency in the humanities as a means by which to pursue an avant-garde mode of thought or practice adequate to the scientific, technological, and imaginary demands of a rapidly dehumanising present. This panel will introduce speculation as an alternative to critique and show how this approach, both as an alternative philosophical tradition as well as a contemporary movement, both emerges out of and influences art and aesthetics. What kind of artistic and literary practices might constitute speculative work? How might the non-philosophical take up that which is strictly unthinkable for philosophy? Can concepts such as ambience and paratextuality problematise identity and critical address? How does speculative thought understand time? And what kind of mark does the experience of the non-human leave upon the human?

Through the interrogation of specific modernist and postmodernist literary works that address or transform the possibility of an absolute, the limits of consciousness, the material consequences of signification, or 'the necessity of contingency,' we will attempt to develop a set possibilities for a speculative aesthetics, and in so doing, gesture towards a vision of the humanities that no longer relegates its avant-gardes to the ‘baggage train’.

Presenters

Dr Astrid Lorange is a writer, researcher and teacher. She is an Associate Lecturer at the College of Fine Arts, UNSW. A monograph on Gertrude Stein is forthcoming.

Eddie Hopely is a poet and researcher from the United States currently living in Sydney. He co-edits SUS press.

Baylee Brits is currently writing her doctorate on 20^th century literature and the mathematics of contingency. She coordinates the Aesthetics After Finitude project with Amy Ireland.

Amy Ireland is writing a Creative Writing PhD on philosophical realism, noise and the avant-garde. She co-convenes Aesthetics After Finitude and makes experimental poems that you can throw.

Introduced and moderated by Stephen Muecke, Professor in the School of the Arts and Media and author of Contingency in Madagascar (Intellect: 2012) with photographer Max Pam.

The panel is open to the public and will be held on Tuesday, 24th September, 2013 from 4:30 pm - 6 pm in Robert Webster 327, UNSW as part of the School of the Arts and Media's regular seminar series: https://sam.arts.unsw.edu.au/events/sam-seminar-14/ 

Speculative Attitude

The point of a speculative aesthetic is that space is opened up for artworks to engage with even more force than before. Engage with what or with whom? With the viewer, certainly. With the art institutions, certainly… with politics, even with the sciences… But without reducing art in each case to something else: to a human emotion, to making a living or a reputation, to a political necessity or a scientific truth. Avoid putting works of art on diets and they can really begin to throw their weight around. You get an inkling of that kind of force when you walk into this exhibition.

An inkling, because the speculative carpentry is not just about the physical things. It is all in the subjunctive mood: the force of the speculative aesthetic is ‘what if…?’. Without dietary restrictions, the imagination becomes excessive and impure. Not just human imagination, but indeed multirealist imaginations: ‘objects that comprehend other objects’ (Haley) as one thing, concept, or political urge, gives rise to another in a composition happening even before the artist has willed it, and she is delighted: “So that’s what I was creating!” This is what Etienne Souriau called ‘instauration’: the multiple potentialities that gel as a thing-becomes-art before anyone or anything has quite intended it.

So this is why this carpentry of things is an experiment. Experimentalism, here, is not about human artists breaking the rules of some older school of thought (though that might happen inadvertently). It is about allowing for the vitalism of things (feelings, concepts, etc.) as they take detours in their own unknown worlds and then recompose themselves differently to ask each other, and us, that important speculative question: ‘What if…?’ 

Stephen Muecke, 2013

From 'The Carpentry of Speculative Things: An Art Experiment' exhibition catalogue.

Catalogue Essay - The Carpentry of Speculative Things: An Art Experiment

The concept of flat ontology is useful to the field of aesthetics and therefore to the procedures of making art and gathering works together for exhibition. If the agency of things, all things, has become multiplied and democratised in recent Object-Oriented Philosophy, then the conventional methods of judgement fall under new scrutiny. 

If we are enchanted by the object-oriented themes of egalitarian multiplicities and the Speculative Realist collapse of hierarchies and dogmatic expertise, how do we approach a new kind of aesthetics? Will aesthetics be washed away, along with the limiting dyads of correlationism, in this wave of the more-than-human? Can we think of the phenomenological art experience as another entity in the inter-connected Tardis of flat ontology? 

This exhibition does not force answers to these fundamental questions. Humans are not centrally privileged, in this exhibition, but are not absent either. There is the spectral trail of the hand of the artist in each work, the scent of what has gone before and what might happen in the future.

Drinkall’s UFO formwork are the arche-fossils of the flying machine, the evidence that requires no human witness. Haley’s fragile and immanent watercolours of gemstones remind us of a time, anterior and posterior to human existence. Pailthorpe’s silent radar is a machine agent that sees any remaining humans as the new objects. Ireland’s coded three-dimensional computer-generated poem is a reminder to consider non-human vitality. Eastwood’s model of Giorgio Morandi’s studio is a lingering speculation regarding the systems of possibility across time. All artworks retain qualities which function independently from an observer, but spectators are always welcome.

This is not an attempt to illustrate the critical issues of Speculative Realism or Object Oriented Ontology. It is not a desire to escape the Kantian bind of knowing/being only through human thought, nor is it an example of forcing work to fit a curatorial maxim. The age of speculative contingency, where the laws of nature are subject to change for no reason at all (an idea proffered by French philosopher Quentin Meillassoux), is already upon us. We are no more than tiny pulsing parts of a larger network of interactive and inter-connected forces, a hub of energies. However, this is not a reductive or materialist view. It is causal, in the spirit of Graham Harman and Tim Morton. 

How do we, as lovers of aesthetics and creators of art and art writing, proceed in this new realm that denies its own validity? Well, we work, we make, we write. We consider a world of multiple things that are both human and non-human. We participate, even when we are under threat of aesthetic collapse, due to the anti-subjective removal of limiting anthropocentrism. 

In an age of experimental art, where audience participation with new technologies and interactive electronic experience are key, these OOO concepts of democracy and multiplicity are the vanguard. There are mysterious essences and unexplainable forces, regularly experienced in the world of art, that will always defy a Meillassouxian mathematical logic or deductive reasoning. 

2-7 July, Alaska Projects, Sydney, 2013

Prue Gibson

The Carpentry of Speculative Things: An Art Experiment

Realism and Negative Sensation

There is a moment in Meillassoux's After Finitude that threatens to subvert his entire argument. This moment comes towards the end of the book, in the chapter ‘Ptolemy's Revenge’:

‘The world of Cartesian extension is a world that acquires the independence of substance, a world that we can henceforth conceive of as indifferent to everything in it, that corresponds to the concrete, organic connection that we forge with it – it is the glacial world that is revealed to the moderns, a world in which there is no longer any up or down, centre or periphery, nor anything else that might make of it a world designed for humans. For the first time, the world manifests itself as capable of subsisting without any of those aspects that constitute its concreteness for us’ (115).

The modern world is a ‘glacial’ one, one which presents no clear will of a god or saviour, and simultaneously presents a scientific system that disavows common perception, that refutes common perception of the world. Here the moderns are presumably the post-Enlightenment thinkers, which include Schelling, Burke and others who have theorised not the real directly, but apprehensions of the real couched in phenomenology. Despite the 'correlationism' that these thinkers may be subject to, they have certainly felt the exposure of this glacial world that became manifest in their modern world. This ‘glacial world’ of the moderns presents ample opportunity for drama, an opportunity that is almost entirely avoided in Meillassoux's stark proof, until we hit the very incongruous remark. This remark is distinctive and significant because it crystallises a notable absence from Meillassoux's theory: the absence of a link between sensation and the real: what is the experience of realism? And, if knowledge that exceeds human life or presence is possible as Meillassoux argues, how is this connected or disconnected from sense? What is even more striking about Meillassoux's remark, in addition to the departure from the overall style of Meillassoux's text, is that it echoes so closely Burke's key illustration of the experience of the sublime. In this post I'd like to articulate how it becomes possible for Meillassoux to argue for a realism that excludes mediation and attraction, and to replace these bridges with an understanding of knowledge of that which subtracts from experience. Here, I will also attempt to draw a distinction between Graham Harman's concept of allure, which is a form of attraction to hidden depths of receding objects as well as a form of articulating realism, which still retains a primacy of sensation that Meillassoux does away with. One of the hardest aspects of Meillassoux's text is the absence of any clear theories of either attraction to the real, or mediation between consciousness and the real. This is, in the first instance, not because he rejects outright a role for either of these theoretical components. Meillassoux has gone on, after the publication of After Finitude, to publish on mathematical writing, and its distinction from natural language, which certainly addresses the latter category that I am presenting here, mediation. This work is found in Meillassoux's essay 'Contingence et Absolutisation de l'Un', a paper which was presented at the Sorbonne conference on ‘Métaphysique, Ontologie, Hénologie.’

Here I merely want to show how speculative materialism necessarily goes beyond theories that incorporate negative sensation, leaving a necessary void where sensation should be: this is not an articulable sense, but a subtraction from sense, as impossible as such a thing may seem.  This subtraction from sense is most importantly achieved through transitive and / or transfinite deductions, which do not pursue depths or chains of objects, but rather performs a diagonal cut in the form of the mathematical proof.

Negative Sensation and the Psychoanalytic Real

It seems incomprehensible that there should be a theory of materialism that excludes sensation; even theories of the real, it seems, should include some kind of sensation, and usually they do: here I am thinking of the infinity that Schelling finds within and Burke's concept of the sublime, in addition to Lacan’s concept of fantasy and Harman’ concept of allure. The presumed necessity of sensation often rests on another, unspecific psychoanalytic assumption about human knowledge: that in every act, every pursuit of knowledge, something must be gained (even if, hypothetically, this knowledge is one that exceeds human life). This (still vaguely) psychoanalytic scepticism presumes that the impulse towards a philosophical realism must afford something to the subject that pursues this, i.e. that the pursuit of the real is in some ways an aspect of the pleasure principle. This is, in a way, a first objection to Meillassoux's speculative materialism that proceeds from the grounds of sensation, but is interesting because it proceeds from the grounds of negative sensation and negative reason: an intention that the subject obscures from itself. This provides an (admittedly crude) refutation that at once reintegrates speculative realism back into correlationism, but not into any simple binding of perception by phenomenology, rather into subjective or unconscious, and hence even more isolated, fulfilment. Alenka Zupančič gives the sophisticated version of this objection in her lecture at the European Graduate School entitled 'The Fantasy of Speculative Realism', avoiding the easy reintegration of the realist position into correlationism whilst also addressing the psychoanalytic understanding of the real. Zupančič claims that in Meillassoux we see a ‘complicity’ with the ‘fantasy of the great outdoors, which will save us’ and that this fantasy is a ‘screen that covers up the fact that discursive reality is itself leaking, contradictory, and entangled with the real as its irreducible other side’.

Ontology for Ontology’s Sake: Object-Oriented Philosophy as Poetic Metaphysics

When asked if the object-oriented approach has grown out of a crisis in contemporary philosophy (in an interview given in early 2012), Graham Harman responds by citing J. G. Ballard’s description of the task of the modern writer, which he paraphrases as follows:

‘The role of the imaginative writer has flipped in our time. Previously, the imaginative writer was supposed to produce fictions. However, we’re now completely surrounded by fictions - we’re surrounded by advertisements, by artificial environments... The role of the author now is to create realities, or to discover realities perhaps.’

Harman often talks about literature’s unique capacity to apprehend and manifest a reality that is not visible to less oblique methods of apprehension (‘reality itself is not an explicit proposition’ he opines in the same interview, ‘the only way to get at reality is to be able to allude, to hint, to suggest’) and it is in just such an oblique manner that this somewhat nonchalant allusion to the words of an eminent science fiction writer tell us more about the cut of object-oriented philosophy than some of its more didactic textual instantiations arguably do. From an important yet implicit alignment between the literary and philosophical task, Harman constructs a metaphor in which the proponents of post-structuralism figure as the ‘imaginative writers’ of a previous era busily engaged in the production and proliferation of fictions, while the philosopher of contemporary realism bravely steps up to mitigate this insufferable surfeit by undertaking, instead, to biographise the real. The slippage, in the final sentence, between create and discover is perhaps the most telling element of all.

Object-oriented philosophy is not shy about proclaiming its realist orientation and Harman rarely misses an opportunity to rail against the injustices of ‘correlationism’ in his texts. But is Harman’s position really as anti-correlationist as it might at first appear? This, I would suggest, comes down to the difference between creating and discovering the real. 

Rejection of Epistemology as First Philosophy

Whatever conclusion one draws about the validity of speculative materialism, Meillassoux’s strategy is exemplary in its attempt to confront Kant on epistemological terms. After all, this was the Critique of Pure Reason’s brilliant maneouvre - to transfer the dispute between dogmatic rationalism and empirical scepticism onto epistemological terrain, a context (inspired by the latter) in which Kant could then reconstruct a philosophical position capable of satisfying the demands of a new critical methodology. Consequently, the legacy of finitude is first and foremost an epistemological problem and it does no good to forget that one of the most important objectives of the first Critique was to purge philosophy of spurious metaphysical constructions that cannot furnish a proper epistemological foundation for whatever it is they claim. By engaging Kant’s legacy on its own terms and attacking it at its strongest point, speculative materialism discovers an epistemological loophole that opens onto the real. The path it locates between the for-us and the in-itself, or the phenomenal and the real, is necessarily one cleaved by knowledge.

Despite fervent declarations of anti-correlationism or of ‘reversing Kant’s Copernican Revolution’, Harman seems to deal with epistemology very little. He only ever tackles the subject briefly and indirectly, anecdotally even - alluding here and there to Stove’s Gem as a general refutation of strong varieties of idealism or rallying Socrates’ solution to Meno’s paradox against idealism’s weaker iterations, before topping it off with a reminder (native to pre-critical philosophy) that philosophical work as philosophia means love, not possession, of wisdom.

Meillassoux's Speculative Materialism

'Everything in the world is without reason, and is thereby capable of actually becoming otherwise without reason... Everything could actually collapse: from trees to stars, from stars to laws, from physical laws to logical laws; and this is not by virtue of some superior law whereby everything is destined to perish, but by virtue of the absence of any superior law capable of preserving anything, no matter what, from perishing.' (AF53)

After Finitude: An Essay on the Necessity of Contingency   

Correlationism

 

Meillassoux starts his essay with an appeal: to rehabilitate primary and secondary qualities. Primary and secondary qualities, Meillassoux tells us – and we can surely concur here – are obsolete. A secondary quality, in Meillassoux's account, is a sensation that we derive from an object, i.e. we burn when we touch fire. A primary quality is of course an attribute of an object: its colour, for instance. But of course this breaks down almost immediately, because we realise that colour, an attribute of the object that is supposed to be independent of our perception, or its effect on us, is in fact entirely dependent on our eyesight. Meillassoux, however, wants to restore the possibility of the primary quality.

In a way, this issue of primary and secondary qualities is representative of the entire philosophical consensus that Meillassoux is seeking to overturn, that which he calls correlationism.

'For what decisively discredited the distinction between primary and secondary qualities is the very idea of such a distinction: i.e. the assumption that the 'subjectivation' of sensible properties (the emphasis on their essential link to the presence of a subject) could be restricted to the object's sensible determinations, rather than extended to all its conceivable properties.' (AF2)

One of the ways in which Meillassoux will return to primary qualities is to reassert a renewed form of the Cartesian thesis that:

'[A]ll those aspects of the object that can be formulated in mathematical terms can be meaningfully conceived as properties of the object in itself.' (AF3)

The Inauguration of Finitude

‘Kant towers so far above all who precede and follow that even those who reject him or go beyond him still remain entirely dependent upon him… [The Critique of Pure Reason represents] a historical-intellectual basic position which carries and determines us today.’  

 - Heidegger, What is a Thing?

‘Modern philosophy between René Descartes and Immanuel Kant is usually retrospectively understood in terms of the two basic tendencies which we refer to as ‘empiricism’ and ‘rationalism’. […] By the time Kant wrote the Critique of Pure Reason, he was able to take the writings of David Hume as definitive for empirical thought and those of Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz as definitive for rationalism. He took the basic argument of the empiricists to be that knowledge is synthetic and a posteriori, meaning that it takes the form of an addition to what is inherent to reason, and thus follows from experience (or an encounter with what is outside ourselves). In contrast to this, he saw the rationalists to be arguing that knowledge is characteristically analytic and a priori, meaning that it is derived from what is already inherent to reason, and thus anticipates experience by constructing systems of logical deduction from basic axioms. 

     Knowledge is analytic or synthetic depending on whether its source is intrinsic or extrinsic to the faculty of reason, and a priori or a posteriori depending on whether it precedes or succeeds the contact with sensation, or with what is outside reason. It is with these pairs of concepts, the analytic/synthetic couple and the a priori/a posteriori couple, that Kant determines the structure of his own thinking in relation to that of his recent predecessors. Kant thought that both empiricist and rationalist philosophers had accepted the simple alignment of the synthetic with the a posteriori and of the analytic with the a priori. That is to say, the relation between these couples had seemed to be itself analytic, so that to speak of analytic a priori judgments would add nothing to the concept of the analytic, or in other words, an analysis of the concept ‘analytic’ would yield the concept of the 'a priori’ as already implicit within it.

     This assumption was not accepted by Kant who realigned the two pairs of concepts in a perpendicular fashion to form a grid, thus yielding four permutations. He granted the elimination of any analytic a posteriori knowledge, but clung doggedly to the possibility of knowledge that would be both synthetic and a priori. This new conception of knowledge was relevant to an object that had not previously been formulated: the conditions of experience. Kant described his revolution in philosophy as a shift from the question ‘what must the mind be like in order to know?’ to the question ‘what must objects be like in order to be known?’ The answers to this latter question would provide a body of synthetic a priori knowledge, telling us about experience without being derived from experience. It would justify the emergence of knowledge that was both new and timelessly certain, grounding the enlightenment culture of a civilisation confronting an ambiguous dependence on novelty. 

     Because a developed knowledge of the conditions of experience presupposes a relation to the outside it is synthetic and not analytic, but because it concerns the pure form of the relation as such and not the sensory material involved in the relation it is a priori and not a posteriori. It is solely concerned with the forms of appearance, or the unchanging manner in which things must be if they are to be for us. Kant calls this pure form of synthesis ‘transcendental’, and opposes it to the inconstant content of synthesis, with which the empiricists had been concerned, and which he calls ‘empirical’. Kant’s ‘object’ is thus the universal form of the relation to alterity; that which must of necessity be the same in the other in order for it to appear to us. The universal form is that which is necessary for anything to be ‘on offer’ for experience, it is the ‘exchange value’ that first allows a thing to be marketed to the enlightenment mind. Between medieval scholasticism and Kant Western reason moves from a parochial economy to a system in which, abandoning the project of repressing the traffic with alterity, one resolves instead to control the system of trade. With the overthrow of the ancien regime it became impossible to simply exclude novelty; it could only be appropriated, stamped with a constant form, and integrated into an immutable formal system.’

- Nick Land, 'Kant, Capital, and the Prohibition of Incest', Fanged Noumena
  

Click 'read more' for an introduction to the Critique of Pure Reason.

The Absence of a Movement, Para-Academic Work

'Aesthetics After Finitude' is a project that aims to question the possibility of aesthetics, and to develop a new role for aesthetics, in terms of a body of work on new realisms and new materialisms that has surfaced internationally over the last decade. This body of work is united in terms of its development of a philosophy that exceeds the confines of Kantian correlationism, a term developed by Quentin Meillassoux in After Finitude. Each of these philosophers seeks to develop a new method or mode of thought that exceeds finitude, rather than being bounded by it. Nonetheless, any evocation of unity is extremely tenuous. A shift from the dominant paradigm of Kantian correlationism might seem to bespeak a united movement with fixed tenets or convictions. Such a broad shift, however, is belied by a much more fragmented body of texts.

The term 'Speculative Realism' originated at a conference at Goldsmiths University in London in 2007. The term was purportedly coined by Ray Brassier, one of the four speakers at the conference, who sought an umbrella title under which the new realisms might be united. This term echoes Meillassoux's particular stance that he opposes to correlationism, which he calls 'speculative materialism'. This conference gave a platform for four speakers: Meillassoux, Brassier, Iain Hamilton Grant and Graham Harman. Each of these thinkers has a unique approach to realism and materialism: Brassier, for instance, has developed 'eliminative nihilism', whilst Harman, along with other philosophers like Levi Bryant, works within what he calls 'object oriented ontology'. The division between eliminative nihilism and 'OOO' is so great that – despite being gathered under the 'after finitude' umbrella, these philosophies are fundamentally incompatible.

Several key thinkers that are bound up in moves to develop a mode of thought after- or beyond- finitude emerged from a rogue philosophical institution attached to the University of Warwick, called the Cybernetic Culture Research Institute, or the CCRU. This institute was founded by Nick Land and Sadie Plant in the mid-90s and dissolved some years later; the description of the institute is as enigmatic as its research: 'CCRU retrochronically triggers itself from October 1995, where it uses Sadie Plant as a screen and Warwick University as a temporary habitat. [...] CCRU feeds on graduate students + malfunctioning academic (Nick Land) + independent researchers + [...]. At degree-0 CCRU is the name of a door in the Warwick University Philosophy Department. Here it is now officially said that CCRU "does not, has not, and will never exist".' The institute website now contains a series of articles related to occultism or hyperstition. Robin Mackay, the director of the UK arts and publishing institute Urbanomic which publishes the journal associated with speculative thought, Collapse, Ray Brassier, and Nick Land were all associated with the CCRU. The institute was also home to a series of blogs that are associated with the Iranian philosopher and novelist Reza Negarestani. This was a crucial site for the development of the experimental philosophy that would drive speculative work in the following decade. This 'site' might be said to continue virtually in the journal Collapse, which is published by Urbanomic, has been the germinal ground for much thought and writing that is associated with the after-finitude project and the speculative project more generally, even if it veers sharply from an adherence to the name 'speculative realism'.

Thus, in addition to speculative thought being a vigorously contested field, we find a second key feature of this amorphous and intensive thought practise: para-academic work. The CCRU and its members or associates existed (and largely continue to exist) on the margins of academia. This trend towards para-academic practise is strengthened on a conceptual level too: critical to much speculative thought is the possibility of subtractive and non-institutional thought, particularly that associated with Francois Laruelle, who has coined the term non-philosophy, and founded the Organisation Non-Philosophique Internationale.

Manifesto

 

Reading List 2013