Paul Ennis has a terrific post up asking us to imagine the following:
Let us engage in a thought experiment. Imagine in twenty years time someone has written the magnum opus in speculative realism. It is called something like ‘Being and Being’. That would not be a bad title. I’d buy that book. Either that or its the worst book title in the world. The point is that ‘Being and Being’ is such an important book that people don’t care about the title. Like how we still read things called ‘The Phenomenology of Spirit’ or ‘The Critique of Pure Reason’.
Then imagine that a disciple in another country had written a similar book influenced by ‘Being and Being’ called ‘Non-Being and Non-Being.’ The writer of the latter complains that the author of ‘Being and Being’ has erased the human from the picture.
This is truly problematic because we are entering an utterly bleak stage in history with lots of technological debasement, ecological catastrophe and so on. What madness is this book ‘Being and Being’ with its endless discussions of objects interacting with one another.
More and more I feel that this is the question people want answered with regard to speculative realism.
What I cannot understand is why people think speculative realism is out to debase the subject. Or why it is an anti-humanism. ‘Being and Being’ would be a book populated with humans and other objects. The human would be treated as an especially interesting object among others. In fact maybe ‘Being and Being’ contains its own existential analytic dedicated to this object which is so complex that we spend an awful lot of time dealing with it. Maybe it loves the subject-object object so much it lavishes 200 pages to a description of how consciousness is an emergent property popping up inside the physical structure of a human body etc. This would be a beautifully apt convergence with the insights of neuroscience.
I’m kicking myself for not thinking of this title first! Setting that aside, I think an additional point worth making is that today we simply cannot talk about the human without talking about objects. As Latour tirelessly argues, the great sin of modernity was to try and produce a schism between the world of nature entirely independent of humans and the world of the cultural entirely independent of nature. The problem is that the world in which we live is a world in which we’re constantly enmeshed in imbroglios with objects of all sorts. To understand ourselves is, in part, to understand these imbroglios with objects. Yet what do we in fact find in so much cultural and critical theory? We find a bracketing of objects so as to get at that which is specifically human– norms, cultural significations, ethics, politics, and so on. Technology studies, media studies, material history, science studies, and all the rest get shunted to the side, treated as rarefied sub-disciplines that the high cultural theorist is free to ignore or investigate as they see fit.
In my view, the most vital questions we seek to answer are hopelessly distorted so long as we ignore this dimension of our “amonst-ness” with objects. Nor can these objects be treated as simple “vehicles” of cultural significations or human intentions as in the case of Baudrilliard. Rather, they must be approached in all their uncanniness, their strangeness, as both the most familiar of the familiar and that which exceeds anything like human familiarity and comfort.
Larval Subjects . 
August 23, 2009 at 9:11 pm
There a tenor to “humanism” that Michael Austin underscored in a comment on Paul’s post: it is a prejudice, like “racism” or “classism.” This is similar to the point that Latour makes and which you underscore above. We can continue to have “humans,” in all their complexity and wonder, but perhaps the era of “humanism” is in need of reform, or end.
August 23, 2009 at 9:12 pm
‘The current work of Bruno Latour and Isabelle Stengers provides valuable material and examples of conceptual work with practical and ethical applications. Latour’s ‘polital ecology’ and Stenger’s ‘cosmopolitiques’ are complementary and raise fundamental ethical and political questions. ‘Who or what do you take into account?’ ‘At what price are you ready to live the good life together?’ Latour sometimes refers to this approach as a ‘relationism’ or ‘the truth of relations.’ (The Primacy of Semiosis: an ontology of relations, UTO, 06).
“How what one does interests others, how it ‘counts’ for other, is not opposed to, but rather an element in the way others become interested in what one does. Who is interested, how can one interest others, at what price and according to what methods and constraints? These are not secondary questions relating to the ‘diffusion’ of knowledge. They are ingredients of its identity, of the manner whereb it exists for others and situates them.” (Isabelle Stengers, Cosmopolitiques. Tome 1. La guerre des Sciences. Paris: La Decouverte. 1996.
Unfortunately the translation of Cosmopolitiques was dropped by Continuum. It should be relaunched.
I recently stumbled across the French website Intercession:
http://intercession.over-blog.org/
It has vids on/with many people that would interest readers of larval subjects (e.g. Stengers, Whitehead and just about everyone else. Some are in English like the Rorty, Haraway, Stengers vid.
August 24, 2009 at 12:55 am
It’s an interesting dilemma when looked at from outside philosophy. The scientific disciplines that study non-humans enjoy higher status than those that study humans. Empirical psychology gains its limited prestige by treating its subjects as particular kinds of objects, amenable to similar investigative techniques that are applied to non-human species and to inanimate objects. The sense of uncanniness is left resolutely behind, much as physicians often find themselves thinking about their patients as “the gall bladder” or “the sinus infection.”
When I was working toward my doctorate in psychology, the only lecture I ever heard on psychoanalytic theory was presented by Richard Rorty, who at the time was on the English faculty at my university. The people in my department didn’t really know what to make of it. We shared no common language. He was talking about interpretive contexts and paradigms; we wanted to hear about data.
August 24, 2009 at 11:34 am
Very good points, both Paul and Levi.
Yet, I would ask you: is underscoring the ‘non anti-humanism’ of SR necessary as a countermeasure against prejudices and misunderstandings from people outside of it, or is it a first attempt at laying down some canonic version of it for its own participants? Take care, I am just being provocative here: I just wonder if this is merely a stage in the clarification of a new philosophical current or is the possible beginning of a division (as imagined in Paul’s future).
Moreover, the ‘question of humanism’ calls for a political question, as it seems inevitable that a restructuring of the notion of human and–especially–of ‘self’ will need a political counterpart. Could this political interest exacerbate a possible division in the SR ranks (possibly between thinkers interested in a political formulation and thinkers who are not?)?
August 24, 2009 at 12:20 pm
”Could this political interest exacerbate a possible division in the SR ranks (possibly between thinkers interested in a political formulation and thinkers who are not?)?”
This is more or less something that affects all philosophical currents/movements/whatever SR is. I’ve tried to push the issue a little just to see who pushes back but it seems to me that quite a lot of SR are happy to avoid the political sinking sand that a lot of continental philosophy is currently mired in.
Personally I’m all for people engaging in philosophy as politics but I cannot stand people who want to make all philosophy all political all the time. If SR managed to carve out a non-political space for metaphysics that would be an immense achievement in my eyes. This does not mean that SR would also have a separate political dimension but neither requires the other. I’d like to see some autonomy *within* philosophical movements.
August 24, 2009 at 12:23 pm
To put it another way a truly ground breaking philosophy today would not be a default Marxist one but one with liberal/conservative/anarchist/apolitical/green/right-left/ tendencies.
August 24, 2009 at 5:46 pm
[…] Setting that aside, I think an additional point worth making is that today we simply cannot talk abo…bracketing of objects so as to get at that which is specifically human– norms, cultural significations, ethics, politics, and so on. […]