The problem with correlationism is not that it drew attention to the relationship between thought and being, humans and the world, but that in doing so it had a tendency to reduce other beings to what they are for us. Correlationism’s question always seems to be “what are things for us?”, “how do the beings of the world reflect us?” Thus, in Kant, you get the analysis of how beings are structured by our categories and forms of intuition (time/space). Things are transformed into “phenomena”, where “phenomenon” signifies being as it is structured by us. The phenomenologists draw attention to how beings are organized around our meanings and projects and how they are given in and through these meanings and projects. Again, beings are transformed into phenomena. The semioticians and partisans of the linguistic turn perpetually show how things signify and express our meanings. For example, when Zizek analyzes German, French, and English toilets, he shows how each embodies and represents the dominant ideology of these peoples.
Within correlationism, the beings of the world are treated as screens upon which we project ourselves. These are strange projections because we don’t experience them as issuing from us, but as being properties of the entity itself. The critical and philosophical task thus becomes one of recovering these meanings, of showing how they structure our relationships to entities, of showing how they issue from us, of showing how they are constructed by us. I hasten to add that these are valuable projects that should not be abandoned. The point is not to abandon these modes of analysis, but to broaden the modes of analysis open to us.
If realism has any critical significance, then perhaps it lies in asking what entities contribute as the entities that they are independent of any meanings we might attribute to them. What do entities do– not what do they mean –and above all, how do they affect us and our social relations? How do they modify, by virtue of what they are, our ways of doing, acting, and relating to one another in the world? Zizek wants to ask how toilets express a particular ideology, but we can also ask the question of how toilets and waste management change the lives of a people. What is the difference between a society that has toilets and a society that uses outhouses, latrines, etc. What problems emerge as a result of this way of handling waste? How does our relationship to diseases such as cholera change? What is the significance, for social relations, of not having periodic epidemics of cholera? We are looking here at what the things contribute and do and how they change our lives. What is discerned here is a different form of power; one that isn’t based on belief or ideology, but on built features of environments. As a consequence, different strategies of politics emerge through thinking how these powers might be engaged with to render other forms of life possible. Correlationism renders this invisible.
Larval Subjects . 
October 29, 2014 at 2:44 am
Omg. I often get what blogs I’m reading mixed up as to which one said what, but is not this the THIRD time your post in a row is saying what I am currently writing about? Paper haps we read the same blogs and so respond likewise, but our responses — though of a certain difference between us as to our projects, and I think u r more well read than I — are nearly the same. See my post tonite, I you will — if you dare!! Lol.
October 29, 2014 at 2:46 am
I think your last phrase could read: correlationalism renders The invisible in relief.
October 31, 2014 at 3:41 am
What they mean (for us) can be what they do (to us). Thus when you type, “Zizek wants to ask how toilets express a particular ideology, but we can also ask the question of how toilets and waste management change the lives of a people”, I do not see how he’s not doing that when examining how with the French, shit swiftly, “revolutionarily”, is “done” away with, precisely, through a waste management system that must make that possible. There must be a waste management system that conditions the possibility to have a so-called quick-and-easy, “revolutionary”, disposal. Read: highly advanced toilets with higher water-pressure for the removal of paper and feces, public infrastructure spending to accommodate quick removal of whatever’s in the commode, i.e., big, well-treated, pipes and pumps, waste treatment facilities that require higher capital investment, which means of course, higher taxes, or a better tax system such that the State (local, regional, national) can afford these expenditures; even accouterment instruments like bidets which can provide additional cleansing so that not as much paper is necessary. This is all building up, and tied into, to the ideology of a people as you say.
There’s almost an obscenity in the level of the detail to which what you’re calling his ‘correlationist’ sensibility can well, be put to work, but unlike so much of the correlationist criticism (which is legitimate), Zizek’s work of ideology critique via Hegel runs up and encounters a Really-Real independent of subjectivist projection, synthesizing apperception, or subjective phenomena, “for us”. No doubt, this real is reflexively bound back to us in the dialectic, but I’ve never encountered that as a problem that the move to realism so-called, solves or needs to solve.
October 31, 2014 at 4:15 am
Bryan,
Nothing I’ve written here suggests we should abandon forms of analysis like Zizek engages in. I merely point out that it’s limited. I disagree with your thesis that Zizek’s analysis does this, but this is probably my fault because I don’t sketch out such an analysis in this post. Braudel’s history of capitalism might give you a picture approaching what I have in mind. I do agree that many of these things are wrapped up in ideology, just not all. At any rate, the point is not to limit forms of analyses, but to broaden them
October 31, 2014 at 4:18 am
Rather than thinking of French, German, and English plumbing make, it might be helpful to think of the absence of any plumbing in a society and the difference this makes.