correlationism

A Decade Plus of Engaging With Speculative Realism

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Raven’s Nest by Preston Singletary

When I first started this site back in 2015 it was my intention to only write about geopolitics on it as a way of getting non-academic work out there as well as serving as a kind of online resume to support my journey out of academia and into the policy world. Not too long after this pivot, however, I got a job with the government and not too long after that began regularly publishing non-academic work on foreign policy anyway. This led to me branching out what I examined here. Probably the biggest topic for me of the late 2010s was my growing fascination with the thinkers downstream of the 2007 conference at Goldsmith’s College that brought together the thinkers Graham Harman, Ian Hamilton Grant, Ray Brassier, and Quentin Meillassoux in order to combat the ultra-idealist and anti-material domination of continental philosophy by who they presciently dubbed ‘the correlationists’, or those who believe reality and all interpretation of such is downstream from human thought. The German Idealist and Postmodern schools would obviously serve as the best examples of correlationism and also the main reason (both the conference attendees and myself would contend) so much of contemporary philosophy had spun out into self-indulgence, narcissism, anti-science delusion, and obfuscatory hedging.

I was not at this conference and nor was I even aware of this trend until the team, having made their core shared point, went their separate ways. Yet, as a graduate student in the UK from 2008-2014 I was constantly subjected to correlationism and resented it from day one. To believe in the centrality of human thought, even as a human, for engaging with the natural world always struck me as the pinnacle of hubris. A reborn young earth creationism but for the trendy academic set. Being mostly rooted in materialist, Taoist, or Ibn Khaldun-influenced thought at that time (as I still am), I did not need to refute the trendy postmodern drivel on its own terms, however. I only became interested in arguments against it from inside the continental tradition once I became aware of their existence. As such, I have never needed speculative realism myself, but am fascinated by it anyway. It is a way to engage with a cluster of philosophy I otherwise wouldn’t and so my 2015-present relationship with it has served a useful purpose in my own development.

Back in the early days of this site I ended up reading all the main works except one, and, having just finally gotten around to Brassier’s Nihil Unbound at this much later date, I think its time to loosely and informally collate my thoughts on the overall experience. I would be open to doing a longer and much more professional write up later if the desire strikes, but for now a simple collection of observations will suffice as I am extremely busy with other things this month.

Quentin Meillassoux’s After Finitude should probably be read before anything else. I did not do this, but I feel I would have benefited from starting there. I find the book far too euphoric and optimistic, bordering even on scientism with its attitude towards math (a form of language if a more precise one), but it is foundational and begins the key distinction of how fossils of extinct animals and our engagement with them undermines correlationism.

I have heard people mock speculative realism by dismissing it as the “fossils disprove Kant” trend. But the funny thing about reductionist arguments is that if they are true they should be embraced. Fossils do in fact disprove Kant.

Graham Harman is the author I have read the most of, as he is quite prolific and also I find his fixation on withdrawn objects a fascinating thought experiment with actual real world implications (he is quite popular with artists and architects, including my own father who I introduced to his work when he was doing his MFA). Harman however tilts a bit too Platonic for me, and in my experience Platonists, despite their origin, always tend to tilt towards the singular rather than a plurality, but Harman’s thought to me naturally works with polycentrism where there can be no ultimate singular monad but rather a plethora of interactions based around varying poles. Object Oriented Ontology is his best book.

Ian Hamilton Grant’s thinking is to me the most opaque and hard to get around. I think this is because he is committed to salvaging idealism from within the speculative turn. It just really doesn’t work for me.

Ray Brassier is both the most quotable and the most sloggish to read. I know he considers Nihil Unbound to be a flawed work and wants to do something else, but I think his core conclusion in it was fundamentally correct. While most of the book is a literature review, the final chapter is a real banger and it ends with a bold and accurate statement:

“Extinction is real yet not empirical, since it is not of the order of experience. It is transcendental yet not ideal, since it coincides with the external objectification of thought unfolding at a specific historical juncture when the resources of intelligibility, and hence the lexicon of ideality, are being renegotiated. In this regard it is precisely the extinction of meaning that clears the way for the intelligibility of extinction. Senselessness and purposelessness are not merely privative; they represent a gain in intelligibility. The cancellation of sense, purpose, and possibility marks the point at which the ‘horror’ concomitant with the impossibility of either being or not-being becomes intelligible. Thus, everything is dead already, this is not only because extinction disables those possibilities which were taken to be constructive of life and existence, but also because the will to know is driven by the traumatic reality of extinction, and strives to become equal to the trauma of the in-itself whose trace it bears.”

A lack of universal meaning is the objectively correct position. Rather than be feared it should be embraced to continue the project of the enlightenment and more objectively see reality among us. Realist that I am (in the political sense) I can only endorse this point. Speculation freed from moralism adds to what philosophy can examine, not detracts.

Perhaps most interesting to me are the spin-off thinkers. Not as foundational as the above, they have inspired others who arguably go much further in directions I am interested in. I have reviewed the works of some of these people here. See Matt Rosen’s Speculative Annihilationism for a further deep dive into the utility of extinction-thought and Levi Bryant for taking Harman’s OOO into a (what I think of superior) new direction of interactive and replaceable component parts rather than eternal Platonic essence.

Probably the best overall summary of this school of thought and its differences and overlaps can be found in Leon Niemoczynski’s Speculative Realism: An Epitome. It might be a good idea to read that early on when exploring these topics too.

So, has speculative realism outlived its usefulness as both a category and a cohesive movement? Despite what it might seem, I would argue not. Correlationism seems to dominate the humanities even now, albeit in weakened and unpopular form as part of a dying Boomer-Millennial Hipster establishment. Presentism and escapist fantasy seems to rule the culture, making pondering extinction and realism necessary in all their forms. Time is fleeting and resources finite. The fact that so many of SR’s pioneers have gone in so many different directions just proved they opened up new vistas to explore. If obsolescence is what they have met it is only because they made their point against postmodern navel-gazing so effectively that one can simply move on. A service well rendered.

And thus postmodernism and German idealism do not just have to ponder the extinction of species, but also the coming extension of their own school of thought, too.

One final thought occurs to me…I often use art from Pacific Northwest indigenous people when I talk about subjects like this. There was no conscious choice behind it save that its one of my favorite types of artwork and it seems to just jive with philosophical subjects…but I now think I know why it came up subconsciously. Art from communities like the Haida, Tlingit, and others has an intrinsic layering to it. There are creatures within creatures in the stylized patterns. It resembles Harman’s ideas on how objects contain each other in mergers while still being ‘withdrawn’ enough to retain distinction even so. In the native art of Alaska, British Columbia, and Washington State we see a great visual depiction of the symbolic and both physically real and and situationally divergent without compromising its embeddedness in physical context. Perhaps most tellingly, it is traditional to allow outdoor forms of this art like totem poles to decay naturally rather than maintain them, as meeting their end is considered a natural path for art just as it is for living beings.

A Postmortem on the Postmodern

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Satoshi Kon’s Paranoia Agent is still the best send up to postmodern correlationism ever made.

Sure, everyone hates postmodernism now. But that wasn’t always the case. From the 80s until just a few years ago, the ultimate experiment in German Idealist philosophy merging with French pretension and Anglo-Protestant moralism was regarded as not only serious, but became the dominant intellectual framework in numerous parts of the world’s academic establishments. This percolated down via midwit linguistic turns to indirectly influence media discourse. It became fashionable to state that the world could not exist outside of human perception and that relativity ruled over all. It made one seem worldly.

The key word here is “seem”.

Those rooted in materialism, from actual Marxism to speculative realism and everything in between, we stood strong against this. But our internally diverse camp was the outlier. The unfashionable. The heretics. This could be heard in universities themselves, with postmodernists dismissing ideas for being old, rather than on their merits or lack thereof, as if longevity was a net negative. An ironic position for anyone young enough to have missed the Summer of 68, considering the specifically Boomer roots of postmodernism, but I digress.

Postmodernism, despite its many pretensions to radicalism, was anything but. It was the left wing of neoliberalism. Its cultural posturing against the liberal hegemony was, like their view of culture itself, entirely performative and superficial. They, like the CIA-backed modern art projects of the Cold War, were effectively an anti-establishment coded pro-establishment movement. A quest to give the illusion of radicalism to something that would never challenge financial or political power and would always, ultimately, serve as cover for the actual lack of choice on offer. A grand show to defang and disarm actual radicalism by betting, correctly, that many reformers were just as dumb and easily distracted by culture war as the conservatives they criticized. 

It claimed to break old meta-narratives and to question archaic values, but in practice it was always a new form of Protestantism: strident, moralist, and, ironically, obsessed with building the very monoculture it claimed to be combatting. So-called punks demanded censorship to protect the feelings of the aggrieved, diversity impact statements became humiliation rituals to enforce group loyalty, all while diversity of thought was cast out in favor of a missionary project. Christian slave morality reborn under a rubric of cutting edge social justice. A post-structuralist inquisition charged with rooting out heresy.

Postmodernism did its job. It destroyed the capacity of recovery for an already structurally crippled opposition be it the left, scholarship, protest movements, journalism, the antiwar movement, and it did so under the guise of bringing about a bold new future. It did bring a future, but  for Silicon Valley Neofeudalists. The Man could hardly have asked for a better ally. This was entirely predictable to those of us who were not postmodernists, but missed by its true believers so eager to call us unfashionable old timers. Neoliberalism believes that the human race is made up of autonomous individual units as its most important component, as does postmodernism. But this claim has never, ever been true. It can only be believed by ignoring all of archeology, anthropology, and history. The community has always ruled, and communities are divergent based not on ‘social construction’, which comes as an after the fact justification rather than a primary mover, but by geography, ecology, and historical circumstance. Things no individual, and often even no group, have control over.

If more scholars had been open to ignoring anthropocentrism and studying humanity more like we do other animals, they would have skipped this awkward phase of correlationism (the goofball belief that human consciousness is the ultimate arbiter of reality) and instead treated us like the very real biological species that we are. As John Gray stated: 

“In denying that the natural world exists independently of our beliefs about it, postmodernists are implicitly rejecting any limit on human ambitions. By making human beliefs the final arbiter of reality, they are in effect claiming that nothing exists unless it appears in human consciousness.”

This is anti-nature and anti-reality. It is, ironically, a resurrection of the moralism and protagonist syndrome-fueled pathos of the Abrahamic religions. The world is nothing but a playground for our moral journey, the correlationists claimed. It is positively evangelical.

It should be obvious this is a weird and contradictory position for a relativist to take. And this brings me to my key point: Postmodernism got almost everything wrong, from politics to education to how power works, but the thing it is most criticized for now that it is no longer popular- its cultural relativism- was actually the one thing it got right.

Or perhaps more accurately, would have gotten right had they been consistent about it. 

Once you accept that humanity’s strength is adaptability, and this is what has fueled the species’ expansion, it becomes obvious that it is because we are adapting to new places as much if not more than adapting them to us. Ecology and geography rule the day. Those things are not universal. Migrating peoples, be they conquerors or refugees, are more likely to be assimilated by a new home than to make the new home a perfect copy of the old, even as they change it. The impact of physical reality is absolute and real, but the ways in which people adapt to its differing variables is divergent and will remain so going forward. Culture, as the outgrowth of this adaptation, is by necessity relativistic. They are all moving and changing, yes, but along different paths. Sometimes some merge with others or split from others, but the process is Taoistic, of eb and flow, not one of linear progress. Physical reality, which exists regardless of our opinions about it, is not one Platonic unified whole but rather a sea of churning probabilistic chaos which is in a cultural sense polycentric. It has truth, but that truth contains no universal moral values.

Postmodernism, ironically, claimed to uphold this but in actuality hated it. Seeking to suppress any heresy from its quest to serve the neoliberal drive of the autonomous global individual, it came to advocate hostility towards any non-liberal order or view that would make those trained by the professional managerial class’ values ‘feel unsafe’. It ended up rejecting the only thing it ever was right about- moral relativism. All while doubling down on solipsism as a world view. 

Meanwhile, the equally stupid backlash to the recession of the postmodern era, that of the (in denial) postmodern right has also got everything backwards, possibly in an even more terrible way. To the right (in Abrahamic cultures anyway) morality is absolute and unwavering, but real life is relativistic. The assumption is that the real world can be bent around morality. Similar in practice to the postmodern left’s obsession with culture forming, this version does not even admit the fungibility of values. In other words they will try to shape a real world that exists independently of human thought around non-material concepts that exist only in their mind.

Spoiler alert: It will fail, just as it has all the previous times it has been tried. For every push of the needle towards something they want, there will be an equal or greater pushback building continuously in reaction. A society may fall to theocracy only to see its people leave religion in droves (like Iran or post-reformation Europe) or racial or imperial chauvinism only to see its neighbors bandwagon against a drive to supremacy, leaving it contained (Spain, the Axis). 

This is because for all the yearning for an unreal ideal that marks the greatest flaw of humanity, there will always be a yearning to escape other people’s ideals. The problem is ultimately self-correcting.

So if there can be some primary takeaways from the intellectual dark age of the past few decades I see it as this: relativism only works with culture, and to be consistent and useful it must have limits, specifically geographic limits but also an understanding that cultures can and often should change themselves- but in doing so they will not merge with others but rather add to the medley of an ever-expanding natural selection. Relativism should be a partner, and not a foe, to the sciences, and it should never fall into the correlationist trap of claiming variable perceptions can shape material reality on their own. After all if there is one thing, aside from correlationist fantasies themselves that truly seems to unite all forms of idealist thinking, it is that of being useful idiots to whatever fad Silicon Valley and financial elites are dreaming up at the moment. And it is the rule of the nerds that must end, regardless of if they are fashionable nerds or not.

So postmodernism joins the ranks of all the other idealist philosophies it claimed to be breaking from: its obsession with critiquing power ignored that the actual root of power is material. It is force and it is logistics deployed to defend or increase one’s control over material factors. People and eras may have preferences one way or the other as to the purpose to which it is used but It is ultimately an amoral process with no universal model nor basis in the ideal. So in the end what really matters is not ideas, but hard physical reality. Realism wins again.

Which is good, because the last place one ever wants to be trapped is inside the mind of middling Oberlin professor with a writing style designed to obfuscate rather than elucidate.