Just a quick post to note that we’ve compiled a new Events page to centralize and keep track of all the events going on around the new continental materialisms and realisms. It also includes, where possible, texts and audio from the events, forming an archive of these past events. Add a comment if there’s any we’ve missed, and/or you’d like to have your own event posted up (just has to be somewhat related to speculative realism is all).

A curious parallel between two thinkers often taken to be intrinsically opposed…

“[Gabriel Tarde] assimilates the quantitative apparatus of so many social sciences to the biological senses. He imagines a progressive fusion between the technologies of statistical instruments and the very physiology of perception. A day will come, he argues, when the standardization and development of statistics will be so complete that we will begin to follow the trajectory of some data about the social world in the same way as we follow the flight of a swallow with our eyes.” (Bruno Latour, ‘Tarde’s Idea of Quantification’, 14)

“If our perceptual judgments must be laden with theory in any case, then why not have them be laden with the best theory available? Why not exchange the Neolithic legacy now in use for the conception of reality embodied in modern-era science? Intriguingly, it appears that this novel conceptual economy could be run directly on the largely unappreciated resources of our own sensory system as constituted here and now. And if my crude attempts at illustrative examples here are representative of what we can expect, the resulting expansion of our perceptual consciousness would be profound.” (Paul Churchland, Scientific Realism and the Plasticity of Mind, 35)

Proposition 1: The apolitical nature of ontology, as the discourse on being, is a norm – one that is met in some instances, though not in others.

Proposition 2: Viewing reality through a telescope, does not make that reality telescopic. Viewing reality through a political lens, does not make that reality political.

Proposition 3: Correlationists can consistently equate politics with ontology. Realists can not.

Proposition 4: If your definition of politics entails that two galaxies colliding is a political event, your definition is not meaningful or useful for politics.

Proposition 5: A meaningful definition of politics must exclude some aspects of reality. This is only a necessarily political gesture if you think only humans cut up the world.

Proposition 6: Politics as a ‘human-centered’ realm does not mean politics is a ‘human-only’ realm.

The most mystifying response I’ve seen to the discussions of SR and politics has been to see SR’s resolutely apolitical nature as conservative or nihilistic. On the contrary, the beauty of SR for politically interested people is that it forces one to do politics. Unlike every continental philosophy that proclaims itself intrinsically political, SR offers no such comfort to the armchair activist. In my perspective (and let’s be clear that I am not speaking for all of SR!), SR provides no theoretical camouflage to pretend that doing philosophy is somehow radical. Instead, to do politics, one must actually get involved, either hands-on or through writing explicitly about political situations. This is what I mean when I say that the positive political outcome of SR is to restore politics to its own relative autonomy. SR, for me, is the liberation of politics from philosophy. To do good politics, we don’t need good metaphysics, or even a metaphysics. (Though I must read Benjamin Noys’ work on this claim. Perhaps I will change my mind!)

[Note: I'm closing comments on this post, just so all the comments can be filtered into the post before. No use spreading the discussion over numerous posts.]

I have to admit that I’m always surprised at how many people disagree with my claim that reality exists independently of politics. It seems like such an obvious statement to me. Which is not to say that they can’t be related in particular cases, but that the study of ontology can be done without a regard for politics, and vice versa. And so I want to respond to what I see as the main line of refutation that people have put to me. I put this forth honestly, and would be quite happy to have someone show me the flaws in my thinking.

As I posted on Twitter a while ago, for me the argument is extremely simple:

1. a realist ontology, by definition, is independent of humans
2. politics is a human-centered realm
3. therefore, a realist ontology needs to be separate from politics

[EDIT #1: Since there seems to be some confusion about what I meant (due to my hasty use of terms, though I clarified in the comments) here's a proposed new argument, which makes the same basic point, except ideally with less confusion. Hopefully I'm not breaking any philosophy blog rules by deciding a previous argument was confused...

1) Realism, by definition, says that something exists independently of humans.

1a) Realism, by definition, gives us knowledge of this independent existence. (If it didn't, it wouldn't be a realism.)

2) Politics is a human-centered activity.

3) Therefore, realism requires that politics is not co-extensive with reality.

3a) Therefore, ontology, as the study of reality, gives us knowledge independent of politics. (Otherwise it wouldn't meet premise (1a).)]

Since (1) and (1a) are true by definition, and (3) and (3a) are the conclusions from the premises, the problem arises with premise (2). And, indeed, it is my contention in this post that those who deny politics and ontology are separate, deny it because of a ‘neutered’ definition of politics. What do I mean by that? Here are some examples:

One common response is that politics is defined as something like ‘the way of being-with amongst entities’. The argument here being that politics is not solely concerned about relations amongst human actors, but also between human and nonhuman, and between nonhuman and nonhuman actors. Clearly, the argument goes, politics infects everything – it simply is the modes of relating amongst entities.

A second common response is to say that politics is the act of deciding exclusion and inclusion. What goes into a particular category, or community, is a political decision. Philosophy, as utterly concerned with proper definitions, is highly political. But so too is the decision over ‘what a planet is’, or the decision on what the word ‘book’ means, or the mutual exclusion of rival animal packs. Science, language, and nature are thus eminently political as well. Politics, it is argued again, is everywhere.

A third common response is to say that politics is the space of the im/possible, and ontology – by showing the contigency of any formation – is the unground for political action. Or in other words, it is the undecidable ground, which makes political decisions possible in the first place. Note, though, that this claim doesn’t say that ontology is political – it merely says that it is the precondition for politics; a claim I wouldn’t disagree with in any way. It does however claim that politics is ontological, in that ‘the political’ is taken to be the space of undecidedability. And since this undecidedness is everywhere, everything is again political.

The common theme in all of these definitions is that politics, by definition, becomes co-extensive with anything and everything – hence why I say it is the neutering of politics. (We might also, playing on Laruelle’s work, call this the self-sufficiency of the political – which makes anything and everything potential material to be politicized.) If everything is politics, then it becomes an empty term.

The problem, therefore, is that these definitions are too generic, too extensive, to provide any meaningful traction on real politics. Rather than deal with the messiness of real world politics, these ontological definitions of politics have the bad tendency to permit its supporters to merely sit at the sidelines.

But despite appearances, my point in this post is not simply to note the neutering of politics I see in many definitions of politics, but to raise the more general (and much more important) question about ‘what does politics mean for us?’ My point is that if we’re not careful, everything becomes politics, and nothing gets changed. Art becomes intrinsically political. Ineffective protests become political (rather than spectacle). Writing blog posts becomes political! Politics – if it is to mean anything, and if it is to escape the nihilism and apoliticism that Nina rightly criticizes – must have a narrower definition than these neutered conceptions of the political. Moreover, again totally in agreement with Nina’s original post, these definitions of ontological politics (or political ontology) risk ignoring the ontic world, i.e. the world of actual politics. Do I have an answer to these problems? I wish! But I don’t find the alternative definitions of politics raised here to be convincing – and in many cases, they risk being hindrances.

[EDIT #2: At the risk of insulting all the great comments, I'm afraid I won't be able to participate fully in the discussion, though I will try to answer as many as possible. I just don't have the time to get pulled into an interesting, though diversionary, debate right now. My apologies, though I hope that doesn't stifle the debate in any way. As I tried to make clear in this post, I'm not even fully clear what precise position I take, though the debate has been useful for me to clarify my own intuitions. As well, I do think it's an important question, and it's extremely useful to have this debate.]

Form and Formalism: Thinking Method, Transmission and Rupture

7-8 November 2009, Jan Van Eyck Academie, Maastricht, NL

Additional information here: http://versuslaboratory.janvaneyck.nl/

A two day conference/workshop focused on the problematic and philosophical horizon of the problem of form and formalism at the Jan Van Eyck Academie, Maastricht, The Netherlands:

At the center of our workshop are questions concerning: the legacy of structuralism in the concept of formalism, the intervention of (Lacanian) psychoanalysis on the limits of knowledge, truth and the real, the relation between scientific models and ontology in Deleuze, Badiou, the reinvention of Platonism and Realism in contemporary thought and the current state of the Copernican (and/or Galilean) revolution.

Is the shared concept and process of “formalism” across different fields (social and hard sciences, psychoanalysis) nothing more than an equivocation imposed by the limits of philosophical thought? Is there something of the actuality of form and formalism that calls us to the task of thinking?

Participants will include: Emmanuel Barot, Matteo Bonazzi, Gabriel Catren, Zachary Luke Fraser, Juan-Luis Gastaldi, Patrice Maniglier, Paul-Antoine Miquel, Knox Peden, Antonello Sciacchitano, Charles T. Wolfe.

Please register with the organizers by email [tzuchien.tho at gmail] so we can prepare the conference space and packets.

Real Objects or Material Subjects? A Conference on Continental Metaphysics

Keynote Speakers: Graham Harman (American University, Cairo) and Adrian Johnston (University of New Mexico)

Dates: March 27 and 28

University of Dundee, Scotland

The aim of this conference is to stage a debate between two dominant strands of contemporary continental thought, as represented by the object-oriented realism of Graham Harman, and by the transcendental materialist theory of subjectivity recently proposed by Adrian Johnston.

Along with the debate between Harman and Johnston, we hope to attract papers from both advanced graduate students and early career researchers on related topics. Suggested topics include:

realism v. materialism, the contemporary relevance of ‘critical realism’, materialist theories of subjectivity, object oriented ontologies, the place of the political in the realism/materialism debate, the persistence of dialectical materialism, recent continental appropriations of eliminative materialism, realism and materialism in contemporary Anglophone philosophy, continental naturalism, the role of the physical sciences in contemporary philosophical materialism, the persistence of religious themes in recent materialist philosophy, the continued importance (or lack thereof) of thinking the ontological in conjunction with the political.

Abstracts of no more than 400 words should be submitted to m.burns@dundee.ac.uk by January 15th, 2010.

Do not hesitate to contact the organizers with any questions.

Nina has a really nice piece up over at Infinite Thought, critiquing what she sees as the ‘race to the bottom’ of contemporary philosophy and its focus on meaningless nature – and in particular, the potentially apolitical nature of much recent speculative realism. These are valid concerns, though I (unsurprisingly!) disagree with them. As I see it, the specifically political beauty in speculative realism is that it resolutely denies that politics can be read off from ontology, or that politics is derivative of philosophy. Here we need to take Badiou at his word (and not at his actions) when he says that philosophy merely elaborates upon the truths found in other fields. Of course, he then goes onto to produce a political vision that is suspiciously close to his ontology, but the principle is correct nevertheless. Which is to say that philosophy and politics are born of two different questions: ‘what is it?’ and ‘what to do?’ The latter, political, question need never concern itself with the former question. At best, it must ask ‘how does it work?’, but this is a pragmatic question which never needs to speculate about metaphysical realities.

Contra Nina’s claim then, something like actor-network theory can be used to great political success, without ever having to concern itself with ontology. As Alex Williams put it to me recently, we might see actor-network theory as “good politics, bad metaphysics”.

But Nina’s post points to a greater problem with modern political thought – one not limited to speculative realism, but in fact infesting much of continental philosophy. Namely, the tendency to try and read politics off of theoretical systems. We see this in the knee-jerk reactions against states, institutions, building alliances, mobilizing movements, etc. There is a tendency to see “true” political action as only occuring in some spontaneous action, or in the consequences of an event, or in the refusal to build long-lasting institutions, or in the purely social (non-state) sphere. The result of this self-imposed limit on what political action is, I would argue, has been the weakening of the left. The right, on the other hand, has been happy to let the left wallow in self-doubt and theoretical aporias, while they gladly build new institutions, mobilize alliances (even incoherent ones), and refuse to wait for an event to show them the way. The positive political outcome of speculative realism, then, is to refuse the move of deriving politics from philosophy – and to restore politics to its own relative autonomy.

[UPDATE:] Further comments and debate from Ben Woodard, John, Benjamin Noys, and Reid Kotlas.

Nottingham Trent University – Philosophy Seminar Series

The Philosophy Teaching and Research Group, based in the School of Arts and Humanities, will be running a series of reading based seminars this year on the theme of Speculative Realism.  Associated with the work of Quentin Meillassoux, Graham Harman, Ray Brassier and Iain Hamilton Grant, Speculative Realism is quickly becoming a new thought-style in contemporary philosophy as well as being increasingly influential in a range of other disciplines in the humanities and the social sciences.

The first session, will discuss a classic paper that is often cited as one of the forerunners of this new philosophical dispensation; Wilfred Sellars’ 1963 paper ‘Philosophy and the Scientific Image of Man’.  In subsequent weeks we will go on to discuss Ray Brassier’s book Nihil Unbound and Quentin Meillassoux’s recent and highly acclaimed work After Finitude –  a book where, according to Simon Critchley, ‘the rigour, clarity and passion of the argument can be breathtaking’.

These seminars should appeal to all those who want to keep abreast of conceptual innovations in contemporary philosophy.

The first seminar will take place on Wednesday Oct 28th, 1-2 pm, in ICAn 215.  All are welcome.

For further information please contact Patrick O’Connor at patrick.oconnor@ntu.ac.uk.

Nathan Brown has kindly sent over his excellent piece from the Militant Dysphoria event as well, which you can download as a PDF here. And for those in London, Zizek will be making two appearances soon (that I know of):

• ‘Apocalyptic Times‘ – November 24, 2:30-4:00 – Clore Lecture Theatre (B01), Clore Management Centre, Torrington Sq., Birkbeck College
• ‘First as Tragedy, Second as Farce‘ – November 25, 1:00-2:00 – Old Theatre, Old Building, London School of Economics