Michael Austin of Complete Lies has cleaned up the Speculative Realism entry, substantially improving it. I’m a bit irritated not to see my name or Ian Bogost’s under the Object-Oriented Ontology entry, but I suppose it would be unreasonable for me to expect inclusion there before The Democracy of Objects is released. Given the important role that blogging has played in the SR movement, however, I do think more needs to be written for that section. Speculative Heresy has been devoted largely to the Speculative Materialist, Neo-Vitalist, and Eliminative Materialist variants of SR. If SR has truly been the first philosophical movement that’s unfolded on the internet, it is important to reflect the vitality and breadth of this net presence and also avoid hierarchializing works published in journals and presses over research and theoretical elaborations that have been written in other mediums. The day is quickly approaching where the book and article are going to be significantly called into question or undergo a profound transformation in how they are produced and circulated. SR has been at the forefront of these shifts. The entry should also include links to these blogs. SR has been, perhaps, the first philosophical movement to take new media seriously, given the claims that certain variants of SR make on behalf of objects, it is important not to treat one set of objects as being more real than others. One of the most attractive features of the SR movement is the manner in which it has been a “grass roots” movement that has circumvented traditional power structures presided over by the academy. That could, of course, mean that it is a movement dominated by a bunch of cranks– certainly few of us are at marquis institutions –but I prefer to think of it more as a contemporary, digital version of the French Salons or the Greek Agora. These reservations aside, great work Austin!
September 7, 2009
Speculative Realism Wiki
Posted by larvalsubjects under Blogging, Object-Oriented Philosophy, Speculative Realism[32] Comments
Larval Subjects . 
September 7, 2009 at 10:04 pm
“I’m a bit irritated not to see my name or Ian Bogost’s under the Object-Oriented Ontology entry”
The beauty of Wikipedia is that you can go right in and edit the article if you don’t feel it’s complete.
Given how much you post on SR and OOO, I don’t think publishing cred is really necessary to establish that it’s relevant to mention your name in the article.
September 7, 2009 at 10:27 pm
I didn’t include either you or Ian simply because I know little of either of your work and what differences and similarities there are between your onticology and OOP or OOO or Ian’s video game studies, etc, etc.
As for adding to the Internet section, I completely agree but don’t feel quite right about adding them myself because of the possibility of showing favouritism, plus it is frowned upon to write about oneself on Wikipedia. If anyone else would like to add to either of these (or anything else on there for that matter) they are more than welcome.
September 7, 2009 at 10:59 pm
“If anyone else would like to add to either of these… they are more than welcome.”
Done
September 7, 2009 at 11:02 pm
I didn’t add Ian’s site because I didn’t quite know how to describe it in relation to OOO/SR. Any suggestions?
September 7, 2009 at 11:14 pm
He describes his work as “applied speculative realism”, no? Also, it looks like the LinkBot has reverted your work, this is likely due to either your status as a new user, or you made a typo in the links causing them not to fit the wiki standards.
September 7, 2009 at 11:20 pm
I’ll leave it to the community to decide whether or not I’m enough a part of the SR/OOO movement to be wikified with them. But I certainly feel a great affinity here, and I’m committed to this work, and there are traces of it in my published books/articles (especially Unit Operations), and I intend to continue that work very aggressively.
“Applied speculative realism” is one of the phrases I’ve been using, yes. Also “Pragmatic SR,” although I’m not sure how I feel about that one.
September 8, 2009 at 12:40 am
The links are fine, as far as I can tell. The GET returns 200 rather than a redirect (although the some of the gravatar content hands back 302s).
It would be nice if the LinkBot substantiated its actions a little.
I didn’t bother undoing the change, since it probably wouldn’t do any good. But the links are still in the history if someone else would like to try.
September 8, 2009 at 12:41 am
Hi all,
I’m an avid follower of the whole S.R. scene.
I just added the following line to the Object-Oriented Philosophy section of the S.R. Wikipedia article:
“In addition to Harman, contemporary object-oriented philosophers and thinkers include Levi Bryant and Ian Bogost.”
mike
September 8, 2009 at 12:43 am
Perhaps it would be a good idea to list all of the prominent blogs in the Internet Presence section? I would be willing to set that up.
-m
September 8, 2009 at 8:46 am
“Brassier then defends a rabid anti-correlationist philosophy since Thought is conjoined not with Being, but with Non-Being.”
Rabid? Really? Doesn’t quite ring true. In fact he seems one of the most sober writers associated with SR. His strong polemical sections are just that: strongly worded and polemical. Not rabid though. But perhaps the point is that the philosophy itself is rabid? That doesn’t seem to make much sense either though.
Also, for those not acquainted with Brassier or SR the thought of engaging with a ‘transcendental nihilist’ is probably enough to be going all with, without having to deal with a rabid one.
September 8, 2009 at 6:49 pm
Yes, I was a bit concerned by the Brassier section too. Perhaps ‘trenchant’ would be slightly better adjective than ‘rabid’? I mean, I’ve heard that he tends to foam at the mouth at times when delivering papers, but Rory is surely correct that his criticisms are sober and rigorous rather than ‘rabid’ (!).
As far as I’m aware, Brassier does not refer to his work as ‘transcendental nihilism’ (nor as ‘eliminative materialism’ – though I notice that’s been changed to ‘methodological naturalism’, which is surely more accurate), but as Rory says, perhaps it gives a not altogether misleading idea of what he’s up to.
However, I’m not sure of that ascribing to him the views that “the universe is founded on the nothing”, that “reality is conditioned by its own extinction”, and that “Thought is conjoined not with Being, but with Non-Being” are not misleading. Perhaps someone a little better informed about Brassier’s work could revise this? (I’d do it myself but presently do not have a copy of Nihil Unbound handy, and would need to look at it again first.)
Also, is it not a little premature to talk about ‘factions within SR’? This makes it sound as if there was a unified movement that subsequently splintered into factions. However, surely the fact is that four philosophers with very different projects (albeit with some overlap in terms of critical targets) got together to give papers at a conference and share their ideas. They always had very different (and by no means compatible) projects, and nothing in this respect has changed but for the fact that people have since started to discuss their ideas online under the ‘Speculative Realism’ meme. Is there any real warrant for talking about ‘factions’ in such a case? Perhaps ‘Strands within SR’ or ‘Differences within SR’ or something like that would be more appropriate for that subheading?
Lastly, I’m not very familiar with Iain Hamilton Grant’s work, but does he really refer to it as ‘neo-vitalism’? And who are the ‘other thinkers’ who have ’emerged within this group’? Is there any such ‘group’ to speak of?
Anyhow, I’ll just throw that out there to see what people think. If there’s any consensus about this, perhaps such amendments can be made?
September 8, 2009 at 7:28 pm
Wayne,
I have already changed “rabid” to “radical” which is really what I meant all along.
As far as I know, Ray has no name for his work. The term “Transcendental Nihilism” is a term that I have coined for his project, which I think is the most accurate way to describe his work (I discuss this in my most recent blog entry, and may have an article appearing on this topic and will continue to use the term unless Ray says otherwise).
I have read Nihil Unbound and several of his published essays (and sections from his dissertation, though not all of it yet) and feel that the description is accurate. What he likes about Badiou for example is the priority given to non-being. Again, I don’t think what you quote is inaccurate, though I will be the first person to say that it certainly needs to be added to or fleshed out.
As for the “factions,” I don’t think it’s premature to discuss them. SR is a very loose heading for many different types of realism, all of which should be included in the SR entry. Those four are only preliminary types of realism to emerge that identify with the critique of correlationism (as I have said before, at least two more groups could easily be added to the list). I think it was Graham who said that the factions emerged when the first conference ended. His lectures this summer, and his contribution to The Speculative Turn clearly show that there are significant differences between the four original members. As more work is published in the near future, you will see quite clearly that these are actually factions or schools and not just individuals.
This brings me to your next point. No, Iain doesn’t use the term Neo-Vitalism, but I think that soon this will be the designation for this school of thought. Someone has graciously added both myself and Ben to the list of vitalists, both of us having books in the works on vitalism, as well as a secret project I’m not at liberty to discuss, but will further cement the name vitalism within this group of thinkers.
September 8, 2009 at 8:53 pm
Well, all right Michael, since you’re clearly privy to information regarding the future while I’m limited to observing what has taken place up to now, how could I possibly object? But perhaps in light of this remarkable prescience of yours, maybe you ought to change ‘Factions within Speculative Realism’ to ‘Future Factions within Speculative Realism’ and change ‘Other thinkers have emerged within this group …” to “Other thinkers will soon emerge to form a group …”?
Regarding Brassier, you say that the bits I quoted are not inaccurate. Perhaps you’re right, but if so I’d be grateful if you could point me to any passages that could accurately be glossed in the way you have here (e.g. “reality is conditioned by its own extinction”, “Thought is conjoined not with Being, but with Non-Being”).
As for there being “significant differences between the four original members”, far from being something that I deny this is in fact something I emphasized in my first post. My recommendation was not that the entry be amended in such a way that these differences are sidelined or neglected but rather that the subtitle ‘Faction within Speculative Realism’ be changed to something like ‘Differences within Speculative Realism’.
As a matter of fact, since as far as I’m aware to date only one of “the four original members” (were they a band, with each now going solo?) has ever used the “speculative realist” moniker to describe his own work (i.e. Harman), and given that they are all working on very different, distinct and largely incompatible philosophical projects, I’m not sure that the term “Speculative Realism” really denotes anything at all (other than the title of a workshop which has gone on to assume ‘hyperstitional’ reality on the internet, perhaps). If it is understood only as (as you put it) “a very loose heading for many different types of realism”, I guess that’s fine. However, what I don’t quite understand is how many these different types of realism can be said to have subsequently splintered into “factions” when all that they ever had in common in the first place was a certain antipathy for philosophical idealism that they each trace back to Kant.
But hey, like I say, I’m unable to divine the future, and if you’re confident that such trends are indeed emerging and are about to consolidate themselves into unified philosophical groups and factions, you go right on ahead and fill out as many Wikipedia entries as you like with your prognostications.
September 8, 2009 at 8:56 pm
Sorry: “how many these different types of realism” should have been “how these many different types of realism”
September 8, 2009 at 11:27 pm
For better or worse, I suspect the term “speculative realism” is here to stay. Moreover, I think it’s a good moniker for a movement of thought that is strongly opposed to anthropocentrism and that advocates different forms of epistemological and ontological realism. Speculative realism should be thought of as a genus with a variety of different species. In defense of Michael’s sortings, I do think there are different trends or factions within this genus. It would be a mistake to suppose that the work of Harman, Grant, Brassier, and Meillassoux exhaust SR. Since the conference a couple years ago, there has been an explosion of work done in this area. A good deal of that work has been done right here in the blogosphere. Within the next year or so there is going to be a tsunami of SR books published, many by folks right here in our corner of the blogosphere. These will not be books about Harman, Grant, Brassier, and Meillassoux, but will be original ontologies both responding to the thought of the first four and making their own contributions. This work has indeed spiraled off in various directions, some of which are neo-vitalistic, others which are speculative materialist in flavor, others that are object-oriented in flavor, and yet others advocating variants of transcendental nihilism. Michael is a part of this and isn’t simply “divining the future”, but is publishing work that contributes to the creation of that future.
September 9, 2009 at 12:14 am
“Within the next year or so there is going to be a tsunami of SR books published”
Well, okay, great! This is news to me, but I’ll look forward to them. Could you provide some of the titles so I can look out for them? Better still, why not put them down on the Wikipedia page with publication details as ‘forthcoming’ so others can do likewise?
It just seemed to me a little odd to talk about ‘factions’ within a philosophical movement that is itself admitted on all sides to be no more than a loose heading for many different approaches on the basis of what a number of people are saying on their blogs about what they hope to write about in the future.
However, since according to you the world is about to be flooded with a tsunami of books written by self-proclaimed Speculative Realists, so long as these forthcoming publications can be listed on the Wikipedia page, I see no major problem with that (even though it would perhaps seem more appropriate to wait until they have actually been published and received a fair amount of critical appraisal or made some kind of impact before they’re deemed suitable to list on Wikipedia – which, after all, is not meant to be some kind of free advertising board.)
September 9, 2009 at 12:23 am
Wayne,
I’m not sure why you are being so hostile here. I’m not divining the future, I simply know that a lot of people, myself included, are working on projects in the forms of essays and/or books within or related to SR. These aren’t secrets that I’m privy to to the exclusion of everyone else (with one exception, as details on this particular project have yet to be finalized). I mean, besides the original four SR guys, I can think of more than half a dozen books alone off the top of my head that are being worked on by myself and people I know related to SR in some way. What unites all of these projects however is a shared allegiance in anti-correlationism. As Graham has said, the term speculative realism will likely one day simply mean all forms of non-idealist, non-correlationist thought. The fact is, those four people described in depth on the wikipage started something when they appeared at that first conference, and yes it has largely been online thus far, but so what? It is a name that people identify with, a brand that allows people to designate what they are doing, and thus far, that page is a summary of what has gone on thus far in regards to that name. Of course none of them are “speculative realists,” but no one was a “German idealist” either, Kant, Fichte, Schelling, and Hegel all had very different systems of thought, but what they shared in common allows us to use a general term to imply these similarities for the sake of ease. In this same way, SR is designation to imply those thinkers who have responded positively to the critique of correlationism, and by highlighting the differences, I (as well as many others, I’m not the only one who thinks these factions exist) have attempted to highlight the different systems of thought possible while accepting this common ground. As for Brassier, on the first point (that reality is grounded on the nothing) I can refer you to the chapters on Badiou and Laruelle in Nihil Unbound, where the punchline is the combination of Badiou’s “being is nothing” and Laruelle’s “being nothing” (148). What Brassier critiques Badiou for, that is, retaining the Parmenidean conjoined twins of Being and Thought (115-117), he finds the opposite in Laruelle’s concept of unilateralization (148-149). This connects with the chapters on Lyotard and Freud, where he outlines the idea that life in marked by the impending solar catastrophe (223-226) and uses this to deny correlationism (showing that there will exist a time when thought will not exist to think its own demise [229]. Finally, drawing on Freud’s myth of the first organisms (234-238), he claims that
“The organism cannot live the death that gives rise to the difference between life and death. The death-drive is the trace of this scission: a scission that will never be successfully bound (invested) because it remains the unbindable excess that makes binding possible. It is as the bearer of this scission and this excess that physical death cannot be located either at the origin or end of life. Decontraction is not a negentropic starting point to which one could return, or an entropic terminus towards which one could hasten. Its reality is that of the ‘being-nothing’ whose anterior posteriority expresses the identity of entropic indifference and negentropic difference, an identity which is given to thought as the objective reality that already determines it. This determination occurs through philosophy’s binding of the trauma of extinction, which persists as an un-conscious and un-bound disturbance of phenomenal consciousness, fuelling the will to know.” (238)
September 9, 2009 at 12:59 am
James,
I currently have two books in the works, one with OHP and another with zer0. In addition to that, there is, of course, the edited collection that I’m putting together with Nick Srnicek and Graham Harman. This collection includes contributions by the original four, as well as a host of other thinkers such as Alain Badiou, Zizek, Johnston, Peter Hallward, John Protevi, Gabriel Catren, Laruelle, Nathan Brown, Manuel DeLanda, Martin Hagglund, Bruno Latour, Nick Srnicek, myself, Isabelle Stengers, Alberto Toscano, and Reze Negerastani. Michael Austin who wrote the wiki is also working on a book, as is, I believe, Ben Woodard, Nathan Brown, and Taylor Atkins. From what I understand, Reid Kotlas is also working on a book. It’s likely that there are other things going on that I don’t know about. Whether or not these books will stand up to critical appraisal is another question altogether, but there are a tremendous number of things going on right here, right now. However, having read much of the work of these emerging thinkers, I suspect a good deal of it will be of great interest. All of us have been working fairly close together. Continental philosophy, being what it is, has a tendency to look for master figures, but there is a lot going on right now that is not restricted to the original four. It is perfectly appropriate for Michael to talk about these different factions. We’re all publishing articles in this vein, presenting papers, and duking it out (in a friendly and productive fashion) amongst one another.
September 9, 2009 at 2:47 am
Levi,
I’m not sure that two books yet to be written, one edited collection and a few graduate students who may possibly be writing books counts as “a tsunami of SR books” flooding the world “in the next year or so”, but it’d be churlish of me to press the issue. I do think it’s great that so many young philosophers have ambitions to publish original works in philosophy, and think I’ve said all I have to say regarding my doubts about SR and its supposed factions.
Michael,
Wayne and I thank you kindly for your reply. I think you might be overstating your case just a tiny little bit in claiming that “the term speculative realism will likely one day simply mean all forms of non-idealist, non-correlationist thought”, but thanks for the page references to Brassier’s book. I’ll consider your glosses again when I’m able to get hold of the book.
Have fun speculating.
September 9, 2009 at 2:52 am
Yes, it would be churlish. A bit like questioning whether or not these different orientations exist or whether or not these debates are taking place or like denigrating the work of others by emphasizing their academic status or referring to them as young or like ignoring and treating as unserious the massive and central role that blogs have played in promoting SR. It’s a good thing no one is doing that.
September 9, 2009 at 3:08 am
And I thought the videogame fan trolls were squirrely.
September 9, 2009 at 4:04 am
Ian, haha. What is going on in this thread?? A lot of weird criticisms to make. I suppose only philosophers could find so much wrong with the meanings of ‘rabid’, ‘tsunami’, and ‘factions’.
September 9, 2009 at 4:09 am
And for anyone interested, the Webster dictionary definition of ‘faction’ is:
“party spirit especially when marked by dissension”
That seems to be an exact definition of the SR movement.
September 9, 2009 at 8:07 am
[Pointed here because I’m a bit of a Wikipedia-nerd.]
Part of the problem with this whole endeavor is that Wikipedia explicitly positions itself as a tertiary-source summary of secondary sources. If someone’s writing about logical positivism, say, the ideal Wikipedia article isn’t a novel take on logical positivism directly citing Carnap and Ayer and whatnot; rather, it’d be an accurate summary of the existing secondary literature on logical positivism. Find some survey articles, books, etc., on the subject, and summarize what they say. Don’t make your own decisions about who is an important logical positivist, but just summarize who is generally seen as important in the field by the existing sources (which should be cited as support).
Insofar as people are trying to write a novel summary of SR and publish it on Wikipedia, as opposed to summarizing existing overviews of SR that appear in what Wikipedia classes as “reliable sources”, it might not really be the place for it. If nobody’s ever written a survey article on Subject X, Wikipedia prefers not to be the place to publish the subject’s first survey article, because survey articles, too, are original research, which Wikipedia considers outside its scope of competence. For example, when deciding who is notable enough to include in an overview, Wikipedia would want to cite an existing secondary survey or book (and not the person’s own) as evidence that somebody is notable. If Scholarly Book Y claims that Ian Bogost is an important figure in speculative realism, then that’s good. But if it’s just Some Guy Editing Wikipedia who claims it, without citation, that isn’t sufficient.
September 9, 2009 at 11:22 am
isn’t it a little pre-mature for a ton of graduate students to be writing books already?
just a thought.
September 9, 2009 at 12:29 pm
Geez, I don’t know if they are trolls or SR proto-minotaurs!
September 9, 2009 at 1:08 pm
Your browser is displaying the secondary source.
September 9, 2009 at 1:25 pm
Asher, I don’t know what that means.
September 9, 2009 at 1:35 pm
I was being glib about Mark J Nelson’s mention of secondary sources. If logical positivism were a movement that took place to some large extent on the internet, a blog thread discussing who was an important logical positivist might be the only valid secondary source you would find on the subject.
Not that Mark’s points aren’t well-taken. At this phase in it’s toddlerhood, Wikipedia needs to anchor itself to material sources.
September 9, 2009 at 5:48 pm
Yeah, it’s basically a defensive move. “Why should we believe your encyclopedia, which can be edited by any idiot on the internet?” gets answered with “We cited all our sources, so you’re free to look them up and make up your own mind”.
September 9, 2009 at 10:14 pm
Levi, forgive me if you were already aware of this, but James Williams gave a fascinating talk at the ‘Symptom in Theory’ conference yesterday at Cardiff Uni on SR, OOP and the relevance of blogs to their dissemination. You were of course mentioned, as was Graham and Ian. The wider theme of the talk was the libidinal economy of theory and one got the sense that Williams may be developing his thoughts for a paper so keep an eye out!
September 9, 2009 at 10:38 pm
Thanks for the heads up Tom! Williams told me that he was working on SR a while back, but I didn’t realize he was this far along. Hopefully the tenor of the paper was kind or congenial. I’m somewhat surprised to hear him talking about a Lacanian category like the symptom.