I came across this interesting interview with Brassier by way of Graham’s blog. I was particularly interested in this portion of the interview:
Bram – You were the driving force behind the Speculative Realism conference (London 2007), which brought together you, Graham Harman, Iain Hamilton Grant, and Quentin Meillassoux. The name ‘speculative realism’ was quickly picked up to designate a supposedly new wave in philosophy, but you quickly became more critical of it. Why is that?
Ray – The term ‘speculative realism’ was only ever a useful umbrella term, chosen precisely because it was vague enough to encompass a variety of fundamentally heterogeneous philosophical research programmes. But people have started to pick up on it as though it was the name for a new philosophical doctrine or movement, like ‘logical positivism’, ‘existentialism’, ‘structuralism’, or ‘deconstruction’. In this context, the vagueness which was initially useful is beginning to generate more confusion than clarity. There is no ‘speculative realist’ doctrine common to the four of us: the only thing that unites us is antipathy to what Quentin Meillassoux calls ‘correlationism’—the doctrine, especially prevalent among ‘Continental’ philosophers, that humans and world cannot be conceived in isolation from one other—a ‘correlationist’ is any philosopher who insists that the human-world correlate is philosophy’s sole legitimate concern. Anti-correlationism is by no means a negligible unifying factor—but our alternatives to correlationism are fundamentally divergent and even incompatible in several regards.
Read the rest here. I completely agree with Ray’s remarks here. A lot of confusion has been caused surrounding SR insofar as people have cast about looking for a shared philosophy among these divergent thinkers when really they’re only united by their rejection of the primacy of the human-world correlate. The situation is similar with object-oriented ontology. Clearly I am sympathetic to the work of both Harman and Bogost (as well as the thought of Latour and Whitehead), but it would be a mistake to assume that all of us share the same ontology. While we are more or less united in the thesis that being is composed of objects, we diverge quite a bit as to just what constitutes an object. These differences, I think, will become more clear once The Democracy of Objects is completed– I’ve been feverishly working away at it, and I’m very much looking forward to hearing what Harman has to say. In particular, I retain the category of potentiality whereas Harman does not, and also think that we can say a lot more about the internal structure of objects than Harman allows. However, I’m never sure if these differences between Graham and myself are more a matter of terminology and styles of thought or are fundamental ontological disputes. These differences provide a productive opportunity for a lot of friendly debate and discussion. Returning to the interview, Brassier’s remarks on scientific reductivism are particularly interesting, vindicating, I believe, certainly claims I’ve recently made about his thought.
January 2, 2010 at 1:04 am
[…] 2, 2010 WITH A FEW THOUGHTS on the Ieven/Brassier interview. Posted by doctorzamalek Filed in Uncategorized Leave a […]
January 2, 2010 at 3:32 am
In fact, I would even say it’s incumbent on us to find differentiations in our thought, so as to cast a wider net for OOO. If we all agreed so precisely that our thinking lined up like road trains on the Outback, what use would that be?
January 2, 2010 at 1:29 pm
It’s nice to have you back. If you do need to take a break from the blog to write your book, give us a few short blips to know you’re alive, won’t you?
January 2, 2010 at 2:26 pm
I think it’s interesting to see all the SR ‘founders’ distance themselves from the term ‘speculative realism’ that now seems to have a life of its own, and will continue to create associations that none of the philosophers could have anticipated. Such is the internet, and such is the reality of the name itself.
Frankly I think everyone who has a stake has done more than enough to properly distance themselves from the term. Further attention will only give life to it. k-punk’s posts on trolling and grey vampirism are instructive here.
I like ‘democracy of objects’ or, perhaps an ‘object democracy’ when you’re talking about a particular network or set of objects.
Any name will have unanticipated associations, and the medium of the internet will give it a kind of viral structure completely out of any individual’s control. I guess the best thing to do is concentrate on the coherence of your own work as you understand it, with input from the charitable critics. Looking forward to it.
January 3, 2010 at 6:22 am
Why isn’t it o.k. that it denotes a set of different philosophical accounts which have a few concerns in common instead of a coherent research program?
“German idealism” is of the same nature just like “analytic philosophy” or even “rationalism” and “empirism”. There is no way to give Hegel, Kant, Fichte or Wittgenstein and Russel for that matter control over broad categorizations which function in the way of distinguishing them from other categorizations of this kind. And no, this has nothing to do with the internet.
January 3, 2010 at 7:52 am
One thing that has always puzzled me in the discussions I’ve seen of correlationism is that the contention that the world cannot thought of as independent from the human mind is treated as being equivalent to the contention that the human mind cannot be thought of as independent of the world – but that only the former is explicitly criticised (e.g. via ancestral phenomena).
I can see why Brassier needs the latter to be judged invalid, in order for neuropsychology to get its special status. (A thought of a differential equation, a forgotten wallet or a tree frog is primarily just a thought – the thing it is of is only of incidental interest.) Of course, strictly speaking neuroscience is reducible to librarianship, since all neuroscientists read books.
January 3, 2010 at 8:01 am
[…] January 3, 2010 in Brassier, Harman, Hegel, Iain Hamilton Grant, Meillassoux, Schelling, Speculative Realism, transcendental materialism | Tags: Iain Grant, ray brassier, Speculative Realism From the recent interview which has been making the rounds: […]
January 3, 2010 at 7:30 pm
Why isn’t it o.k. that it denotes a set of different philosophical accounts which have a few concerns in common instead of a coherent research program?
This seems right to me. I didn’t mean to imply that it isn’t okay.
Brassier’s statement that the term has “done its work” seems on the mark. My statement that you quoted above was only meant to imply that, in my opinion, the people who seem to want to put a distance between their philosophies and the term “speculative realism” had done enough to do so.
I would contend that the never-forgetting searchability of the internet is something of a game-changer when it comes to our unfolding conceptions of recent history. Perhaps there has always been an urge to name trends and then declare them dead. But the names seem to take on more of a life of their own online. They require less rigorous justification for their existence when there isn’t anyone controlling the publication process (we could do a Latourian analysis of that). I would also be the first to admit that this ‘insight’ is a bit vulgar, but it nags at me still. :)
January 3, 2010 at 9:31 pm
robin2´s comment reminds me of Feyerabend´s insight that the identity theory of mind backfires: if thought is identical to brain processes, brain processes are identical to thoughts, which amounts to pure idealism. It is quite interesting to see how speculative realism reproduces many motives from the heydays of eliminative materialism in analytical philosophy, though from the horizon of continental philosophy. This is clearest in Brassier, whereas Harman seems more clsoe to phenomenology and less akin to the analytical materialists.
January 5, 2010 at 12:47 am
@robin2: My take on it is that Brassier sees a non-symmetry, in that he claims to give examples of physical things that are completely uncorrelated with human phenomenology, like supernovae that took place billions of years before humans even existed; but there are no similar examples of human phenomenal experience that’s completely uncorrelated with the physical world, since all actual humans have physical bodies and brains and such.
Not sure that’s a knock-down argument, but it at least seems easier to have bits of “world” that are nowhere near a human, than to find a human that’s nowhere near a world.
January 6, 2010 at 8:13 pm
Thank you (and good luck with your book). Since the “definition” of SR stated here — and it seems right to me — is somewhat apophatic and maybe centrifugal, I am still left with — perhaps — a question. In what may be the central statement, in this arena, of “correlationism,” Meillassoux gives some definitions and examples. While I think he under-represents the strongest correlationist arguments, that is not my point here. What worries me is that he seems to think that the SR/C dyad is exhaustive of ontological models. So he says, “…every philosophy which disavows naive realism has become a variant of correlationism” (5). I have cut – obviously – much, so this may be a caricature of his position — but my object here is to wonder if this dyad is exhaustive. If not, is the central definitive negation of SR fully definitive?
January 13, 2010 at 9:35 am
auni
Have you read Brassier’s book? Not to be harsh, but the criticism you raised of eliminative materialist philosophy, that it ends in neurological idealism is precisely the criticism that Brassier makes on the Churchlands in the first chapter.