matt rosen

A Decade Plus of Engaging With Speculative Realism

/ geotrickster / 1 Comment
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.

Black Mahakala: Macro-History as Annihilationism

/ geotrickster / 8 Comments

mahakala

I just finished reading Speculative Annihilationism by Matt Rosen, the newest entry of note in the growing canon of speculative realist philosophy. I have posted on this subject before, in particular about my working side quest of integrating Object-Oriented Ontology and adjacent thought into geopolitics. But Speculative Annihilationism (let’s use SA from here on out) is something that works with macro-level history in general at least as well.

A short summary of Rosen’s argument is that materialist archeology shows the way to handle the snuffing of anthropocentrism in philosophy across the board. So much of what we study at the archeological level is already extinct. Australopithecus, the dinosaurs, civilizations whose genetic descendants may still live but whose cultures, languages, and cities do not. The extinct lack the ability to engage with correlationism and phenomenology, yet their existence is undeniable if there is enough evidence for the archeology of their past to even happen. Therefore, we are forced to reckon with extinction, no matter our feelings about it. To quote the author:

‘SA’s dark perversion is this: deterritorialization always has the upper hand over reterritorialization. At the core of every assemblage-materiality is an unavoidable fragility, a tendency towards discontinuity, disparity, and extinction, a becoming-nothing at the core of every becoming-something-this is what it means for a species to be a species-towards-extinction. Cataclysm, annihilation, and extinction are the rules; assemblage, coming-together, and being-something are the strange, uncanny, and interruptive exceptions.’

Rosen’s argument has many facets and subtleties that someone like me who views metaphysics are largely back burner stuff to policy and scientific questions is inadequate to fully explain. Suffice to say that it is worth reading in its entirety and also a powerful case that extinction, entropy, and the like is the ultimate reality. If one takes casual time as a measuring stick we are all already dead in a sense, since death is the inevitable end process of life. So too is it for species and the self, all of which are in fact reducible to breaking down physical processes whose intangibles we construct outside of science as the humanities. Whereas much of currently existing speculative realism is constructive, hearkening to process theory and seeing a culmination of material events, SA brings us back to decay as the norm and construction as the outlier. Extinction, in the end, for everything. In truly and unambiguously material terms.

I believe this is incredibly useful as a philosophical and linguistic tool for deep history, particularly for the materialist. If we view all states, nations, cultures, cities, religions, and artforms as dead on arrival-or more practically always living on borrowed time-with extinction the only given, we are liberated from the curse of teleology and trying to make sense of every societies place in history and better able to appreciate it on its own terms. Terms that do not need to be those of the purely subjective and idealistic such as found in postmodern schools of thought. It also levels the playing field between long-dead states and currently living ones for the purposes of study. They are subject to the same overall experience of unexpected rise (most attempted state formations fail after all) and predictable decline and fall so it is just as enlightening to study civilizations across the world that lie in different ecologies and time periods no matter where they are. A wide knowledge base across the board gives you a vaster repertoire of case studies and minutia even if you know how it all turns out.

It is also worth noting that SA, much as it does on the individual level, provides a great counter-example to the hubris of presentism. Something all too common in current dominant cultures, as well, no doubt, as future ones. I often speak of my favorite historiographer, Ibn Khaldun. One thing about his evolution of thought that is often overlooked is that he grew up in North Africa in the late Middle Ages. North Africa’s heydey of global relevance had already come and gone. The Sahara was already growing and the crop yields shrinking, even then. In such a setting there were as many ruins as there were currently occupied cities and buildings. The leftovers of numerous cultures dotted the countryside and signs of a glorious past leered mockingly through the dust of time at the less prosperous present. It is easy to see how Khaldun was molded by this experience to help him come up with a cyclic theory of state formation and state death. One I think is still among the most accurate macro-historical thesis of all time. In his works is implicitly a shared assumption with SA-that construction is more the outlier, and degeneration the more common norm. Entropy is ever present and can only accelerate due to time unless a very unlikely event interrupts it. State formation is so fascinating and impressive precisely because it is so rare compared to state degeneration, be it dramatic degeneration or slow motion.

Unlike many other speculative realist philosophers, who betray their continental roots by more often being Eurocentric to the extreme, Rosen draws some direct comparisons to Hindu thought in his conclusion. This is long something I have advocated. Though I am neither Hindu nor Buddhist, certain branches of these religions philosophies overlap with many trends in speculative realism. Over the past few years-my most intense time brushing up on that philosophy-I have also been re-engaging with reading about these religions as well.

The figure that best shows the overlap of Speculative Annihilationism in particular with these thoughts is Mahakala. In Hinduism, Mahakala is Shiva’s most wrathful form, the ultimate destroyer, and consort of Kali. In Vajrayana Buddhism, he is the ultimate meditative figure for contemplating the void and the eminent entropy of all through time. Whether taken as a literal god or a symbolic figure of a process, Mahakalan History (I’m now coining this term) is applying the concepts of SA to macro-history. Especially, in my case anyway, to the macro history of states and civilizations. The end point is taken as an unavoidable extinction, but the process of getting there, of engaging, in Rosen’s terms, with ‘the putrifying other’ is always enlightening. Beneath the facade is the degenerating process, past, present, future, other and self. We are, after all, along for the same ride they once were.