RELATED TERMS: New Materialism; Object-Oriented Ontology; Postanthropocentrism; Posthumanism; Poststructuralism
The term speculative realism was coined by Graham Harman, Quentin Meillassoux, Ray Brassier and Iain Hamilton Grant as a title for a conference held at Goldsmiths, University of London in 2007.
According to Avanessian and Malik (2016) speculative realists positioned themselves in distinction to both poststructuralism and analytic philosophy, the two dominant critical and theoretical doctrines in the arts and humanities, in the case of the former, and in philosophy, in the case of the latter, in the early 2000s.
Both of these established paradigms, speculative realists argue, restrict what can be claimed philosophically and theoretically to the finitude of language, history, thought and subjectivity. In so doing, poststructuralism and ordinary language philosophy repudiate the claim that there can be knowledge of the real as such other than in terms of how it appears in cognition and how it is discussed and described in discourse.
Both poststructuralism and analytic philosophy, speculative realists suggest, practice social, cultural, psycho-symbolic or pragmatic variants of the anthropic principle, as it is called in physics, or remain within the strictures of Immanuel Kant’s noumenal-phenomenal distinction, which maintains that the world as humans know it is mediated by their intrinsic conditions of knowledge, with the consequence that what is outside of human knowledge cannot be known ‘in itself ’.
In contrast, speculative realists argue that philosophy can apprehend the real as such in its independence from the conditions of its being thought.
Speculative Realism, Political Theory and Political Philosophy
According to Inna Viriasova (2018: 104), the shared premise of new materialism, object-oriented ontology and the field of the post-humanist from the perspective of political theory and political philosophy is an affirmation of the political agency of non-human entities, whether considered as beings or things, which traditionally have been excluded from the considerations of political philosophers.
This new materialism endeavours to accomplish simultaneously two inter-related tasks: to acknowledge the non-political reality and agency of entities that exceed the human-centred world; yet to draw this non-political real back into the fold of politics, by suggesting that the non-human agency of such entities does indeed have a political character and therefore needs to be accounted for in political terms.
From this perspective, people, animals, technologies, things, natural phenomena, and so on, are recognised as active participants in political processes that affect the distribution and management of spaces, interactions and relations, constituting a post- or perhaps non-human politics. Viriasova suggests that this view can lead to the politicisation of the whole of reality.
In contrast, she suggests, Quentin Meillassoux’s speculative realism resists this totalisation of the political, the view that there is no reality beyond humanity that is unpolitical. Meillassoux, she suggests, affirms a reality that exists independently of human thought and the human world, which demands recognition of the limits of the political, one which, in Meillassoux’s terms, is ‘non-correlationist’.
References
Avanessian, A. and Malik, S. (eds) (2016) Genealogies of speculation: materialism and subjectivity since structuralism. London, UK: Bloomsbury Academic.
Viriasova, I. (2018). At the limits of the political: affect, life, things. New York, NY: Rowman and Littlefield.
Meillassoux, Q. (2008). After Finitude: An Essay on the Necessity of Contingency. London: Continuum.
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