Speculations, and other SR Artifacts

In support of my wager that Speculative Realism is for real, and for those who might be interested, here are a few of the new and forthcoming artifacts of SR:

"Speculations" the journal of Speculative Realism has just released it's first issue. Befitting the ideology of community this field seems to embrace, it is available in electronic form for free, or in paper form for a very reasonable price. I suspect that this journal may end up being more representative, if not of SR in general, then of the branches of SR that I most enjoy (the Object-Oriented side) than the journal Collapse - but this is pure speculation on my part. I should also note that the early issues of this journal are very important works in the development of SR. 

Contrary to what is posted at Perverse Egalitarianism, there is a strong presence of Graham Harman, at least in this issue of the Journal. I find this quite welcome, as I'm not among the haters, and from what I can tell, the object-oriented faction of SR has the most to offer me. 

Also, there are two forthcoming collections of SR works: The Speculative Turn (coming shortly), and an Anthology of Object-Oriented Philosophy (coming slightly further down the road, with, I would assume, a more interesting title than what I've attributed to it here). 

Levy Bryant's The Democracy of Objects is fully written, and awaiting the usual editorial treatment before printing. I'm among the lucky who've been allowed to review this text in advance, and it is the clearest and most direct statement of a position in SR that I've come across thus far. I suspect that as the field takes hold, others will deliver their "systems" (if we can call them that) in a likewise fashion.

Lastly, and I'm sure I've missed something relevant, Graham Harman has posted brief updates about his current book project on the work of fellow SR traveller, Quentin Meillasoux, here and here. 

Onticology: Some notes about objects

As mentioned previously, I'm reading through a draft manuscript of Levi Bryant's forthcoming

The Democracy of Objects. A little over fifty pages in, and I'm really enjoying the clarity of this text. For those of you interested in SR/OOO, there is almost too much information in the blogosphere to keep up with. To be sure, this is a good thing. If you want to follow up on these points or flesh out your own understanding, the best resource is the Speculative Realism Pathfinder. I encourage you to take a look, as this emerging field seems to be drawing people into its orbit at such a rate that it will surely take hold as more than a fad. In fact, established field have been incorporated into this broad area retroactively. Both actor-network theory and eliminative materialism are considered to fall under the umbrella of speculative realism.

At the heart of onticology, Bryant's particular version of object-oriented ontology, is a peculiar conception of objects. In some sense, the object takes the place of "substance" in classical metaphysics. I'll outline a few points about objects to give you a sense for what he thinks of them.

• Objects are not defined by their qualities (or occasions thereof, termed "events"), but by their "powers" or capacities. So, an object can be without it's qualities, but not without its powers.

• Likewise (for reasons too complicated to get into here, and to save something of the secret for those who get the book), objects are not defined by their external relations.

• Object relations come in two forms, internal or "endo-" and external or "exo-". The former comprise the structure of an object (much more will be said of this in the coming chapters me thinks), and the latter the relations objects enter into with other objects.

• Since objects have the power to created events in the world (keep in mind the notion of event mentioned above), objects apart from their qualities are called "difference engines", insofar as the production of an event makes a difference in the world. This looks like a trace of what used to be a central principle for Bryant, namely "the ontic principle", that he has since dropped: there is no difference that does not make a difference (which implied that objects were, in some sense, the difference they made in the world).

• He also introduces a very cool-sounding bit of terminology, that I'm not sure is necessary: "virtual proper being". Objects are not their qualities, yet they endure, the substantial portion (object apart from quality) is called virtual proper being. I here the word "monad" ringing somewhere in the distance here, if ever so softly. I'm looking forward to more on this concept.

• The term "quality" is dropped (though event is still maintained as synonym) in favor of "Local Manifestation". Events occur in a number of ways, always under particular conditions. So each event is a local manifestation. There is a cautionary note, however. Manifestations are not manifest to any subject. Instead they are "actualizations" in the world, witnessing subject or no.

• Since objects are at the core difference engines, whose qualities are events or manifestations, we should not say that the object "has" qualities, but rather "does" qualities.

• The picture of objects we are left with, where the core object and it's manifestations/qualities are separate but connected in some kind of endo-relation, is one of a split-object. The "core" or virtual proper being of an object is always, in some sense, withdrawn (to borrow the term from Graham Harman) behind its qualities, and thus withdrawn from other objects.

More to come as I read more from Bryant, but also from others in this field. On the suggestion of Graham Harman, I will be reading some Leibniz to better ground my understanding of classical metaphysics. That should make for a couple interesting posts!

Speculative Realism (SR) and Object-Oriented Ontology (OOO)

For those of you who know me, you'll know that I've had a spectator's interests in SR/OOO for some time. I've read Quentin Meillasoux's After Finitude, an excellent promissory text, where the central problematic of this field is defined (though a solution or alternative is only hinted at). I've also, obviously, read a small bit of Graham Harman's work in both Tool-Being and Guerilla Metaphysics. Harman's philosophy is built upon an extensive analysis of Heidegger's analysis of tools and the shift that takes place when they break down. From what I can tell, both of Harman's texts are of the highest quality, though Heideggerians are likely to get pissed off if they read him.

The other major coordinates of this emerging field are Iain Hamilton Grant, whose work I am wholly unfamiliar with (as I think there isn't all that much of it available) and Ray Brassier, whose text Nihil Unbound looks very interesting from what I have skimmed (it's something of a fundamentally nihilist scientism?). Apparently Brassier has a discussion of Badiou in there, though I didn't come across it myself. All of the main "coordinates" of this field, as I call them, are kinds of ontological realists (the position that we can know about objects as they exist independently of all traces of the human, and not a thesis about how we can know objects). I will come back to this.

There are, of course, other thinkers who've been very influential on this field either directly, in the case of Badiou on Meillasoux (the latter was a student of the former) and Latour on Harman, or indirectly in the case of Whitehead, the Ancients and Early-Moderns on everyone.

I would contend, from what I know of SR/OOO, that there is a fifth major coordinate to this field, though he is a little known philosopher - if a very well known blogger (to many hip continental leaning graduate students): Levi Bryant. He is the source of the term "Object-Oriented Ontology", and calls his own ontology "onticology". His version of OOO is what he calls a "flat ontology" in that:

there are [not] two worlds, the real natural world and the ideal mental world of meaning, but that there is only one level: reality. Onticology thus draws a transversal line across the distinction between mind and world, culture and nature. Culture is not other than reality or the real, but is an element of the real. Since onticology begins with the hypothesis, wishing to know where it will go, that there is no difference that does not make a difference, it proves impossible to exclude the human. Why? Because humans make a difference. What onticology objects to is not the thesis that humans are elements in the real, but the thesis that every relation is a human-world relation.

How badass does that sound? I'll tell you what, I've started reading the unpublished manuscript of his forthcoming The Democracy of Objects, and it is still just as intriguing.

The central problematic for all of the Speculative Realists is the problem of "correlationism" outlined by Meillasoux. He says,

by 'correlation' we mean the idea according to which we only ever have access to the correlation between thinking and being, and never either term considered apart from the other.

Perhaps the problem isn't as obvious as it would seem. Their concern is not strictly with mind/world relations. It is more general and pervasive. The problem is that all of our thinking of Being is thinking Being sutured to something of the human subject, whether is be mind, language, culture, or what have you. Further, the correlationist need not be an idealist. They don't deny the existence of a world apart from human subjectivity and all its traces. They simply think we cannot know things in themselves, and thus they turn every effort to know objects into a study of the study of objects (that is, a study of objects conditioned by human subjectivity). Shame on them!

Bryant draws on Foucault's concept of the 'episteme' to describe the bias away from ontology and toward epistemology that I often rant about. I've often said that everyone today begins with the epistemological question, in one form or another, ignoring the ontological. This is because correlationism has become a kind of "historical a priori" that defines the space in which we do philosophy. The realm in which we can disagree about anything is defined by certain things we must share in common, and take for granted. The Speculative Realists argue (convincingly) that this is a correlationist time and place.

Instead of thinking the being of objects sutured to human access, can we think the being of objects as such? These strange realists think so. I will post more about this as I read on.