And A Speculative Realist New Year! A Series Of Thoughts

In the following series of posts I hope to talk a little about speculative realism and offer a few thoughts on places where it crosses paths with my interests. After this post I will consider two topics other topics. First, “Weird Aristotleanism”, concerning Graham Harman’s and perhaps Ray Brassier’s similarities to Aristotle, a thought I have been trying to articulate for a good while now – since for Aristotle and many pre-modern thinkers the mind is conformed to the object, not the object (con)formed by the mind. Maybe in this post there will be some dabbling into the murky waters of neuroscience with regard to Aristotle’s thoughts on habit (more on that in a second) and Alberto Toscano’s paper at the Eclectic Criticism conference. Most vitally I think, thirdly, how Philip Goodchild’s work Theology of Money has already thought through much of the proposed work of a anti-humanist alien capital centred xenoeconomics in ‘Xenoeconomics and The Theology of Money’.

What does the year ahead hold for speculative realism? What is intriguing about it as a philosophical thematic is that so much of the discussion, and good quality discussion (I could link many, many more), has occured online. As Robin Mackay has observed, though speculative realism’s central organ Collapse is emphatically a real paper publication, it could not survive without the internet in terms of both promotion and discussion. Although I am not much inclined to sing the praises of academic blogging, there is a conversation going on, a community emerging and something like a philosophical civil society forming. Sure some of the posts might be just a collection of jumbled thoughts, but often they are excellent provocations to thought, the modern equivalent of the genre of philosophical letter. Graham Harman is particularly enthused with these developments and rightly so, as combined with the more serious and lengthy work done by open access journals (including the forth-coming and exciting New Metaphysics book series), the papers simply floating around and publishing concepts such as re.press, we have a new way of doing academic philosophy emerging within the shell of the old. But one has to enquire: is there something percular to speculative realism that makes it quite uniquely internet worthy? I guess the most simple explanation is that those excited about it are very much internet savvy and this is an end to it. So, I think the next year will see not ongoing online discussions, as well as more formal academic attention (secondary literature? just how reactive are publishing houses?) as the mainstream journals begin to talk about speculative realism, but also perhaps the use of the improved online way in which speculative realism is discussed (ie one which is beyond the Theory wars), and the way the main authors interact with this, being copied by other philosophical thematics and perhaps even other discourses.

Inevitably others are likely also to enter the debate. At some point Žižek is going to get stuck into this, and I wondering on what side he will come in the debate, which seems natural considering he too has written on neuroscience at length (in The Parallax View) and his general interests in moments such as German idealism and in particular, Schelling (in The Invisible Remainder). And of course, the elephant in the room is the intervention of analytical philosophy, potentially diving, like Žižek, across from the philosophy of mind. I am told by the introduction to Nihil Unbound that the Warwick Department of Philosophy, where the Pli journal is published, and Ray Brassier wrote his doctrinal thesis was a place where the continental/analytic boundary failed – indeed, Brassier has written on Quine and Laruelle in his paper for Pli ‘ Behold the non-rabbit: Kant, Quine, Laruelle’. But what would be more interesting, perhaps, is someone who considers themselves to be self-consciously in the analytic tradition and partisan about its importance (ie someone like Hans-Johann Glock who wrote What Is Analytical Philosophy? this year, good review at Notre Dame Philosophical Reviews as ever), give his views. This would be much more interesting than one type of critique that will probably occur: the post-metaphysical Derrida/Levinas et al types offering their views. T-minus not much time till Simon Critchley or Tezza Eagleton stick their oar in and maybe, just maybe, a few literary theory types get involved. I predict though, and this is the only prediction I will emphatically make, that before 2009 is out we may well see a polemic, aggressive but very bad review, which will probably emerge from the likes of MC Grayling or the Comment Is Free crowd. This said, a contra-speculative realism review by a gleeful side-of-bus-writing humanist might be slightly interesting.

And inevitably, we are soon going to see theologians begin thinking more about speculative realism, or at least reading its major works, which will create a very odd situation indeed. Here in Nottingham, already, myself, Michael (who is now at Dundee) and Anthony have been considering the output of speculative realist philosophers and awaited each issue of Collapse with excitement for a year and a half now, although I think that it would be fair to say that although inclined towards questions regarding religion and theology all three of us would be unlikely to take the label of theologian (or speculative realist for that matter). To my knowledge, Anthony wrote the first critique of Meillasoux/Brassier from the perspective of his on going invariant vitalism project, although I understand that he isn’t particular happy with it these days. Mike is writing something on Meillasoux’s philosophy of religion and his Future God concept which might turn up somewhere at some point. This post-graduate enthusiasm for all things speculative and realist in part encouraged John Milbank to take an interest in what they were doing, having already considered Quentin Meillassoux’s Après la finitude at some length in his essay in the Belief and Metaphysics conference volume entitled ‘Only Theology Saves Metaphysics: On The Modalities of Terror’. If there are going to be theologians thinking about speculative realism outside people already aware of it largely from the internet or directly from it’s work, they are going to be theologians introduced to it’s themes by Milbank.

As has already been noted, the yearly Theology and Postmodernism reading group/class with Milbank took up Ray Brassier’s Nihil Unbound: Enlightenment and Extinction and Alberto Toscano’s The Theatre of Production: Philosophy and Individuation Between Kant and Deleuze (as well as William Desmond’s God and the Between) with Meilliasoux in the background. Intially there was going to be a panel on Speculative Realism and God at The Grandeur of Reason conference in Rome, featuring Iain Hamilton Grant, Meillassoux and François Laruelle, with Milbank responding, but this fell through for a variety of reasons. This was particularly unfortunate, as Meillassoux had even been provided with a Radical Orthodoxy reading list and it would have been vastly intruging to see a dialogue actually working in the opposite way from the normal unidirectional ‘theologian critiquing a philosopher who genuinely doesn’t give a damn about this critique’ – how many contemporary Deleuze inspired philosophers are at all concerned, for example, with Radical Orthodoxy’s lambasting of the univocity of being? The paper Milbank did give in Rome was an extended response to the fruits of this reading group, using Félix Ravaisson’s Of Habit (convinently recently translated) to sketch the outlines of a fresh kind of metaphysical Aristoteleanism which in his view outflanks speculative realism. The paper was somewhat of a hyper-blast of argument that I can’t recall especially well, but the basic contention was that as Ravaisson had proposed habit as central to human beings and developed a contemporary metaphysics thereof, which could be dialogued in someway with the modification of the Aristotlean tradition in Christianity – Aristotle, as course,  in contemporary virtue ethics, proposes what might be called an ethics of habit, the habit of forming a good character. Again my memory is hazy, but I think the idea here was to counter Meillasoux’s absolute contingency with an idea of ‘habits of matter’ and Brassier’s idea of most materialism concludes in idealism (hence the decline of materialism in the name of matter) by offering a both/and solution of some kind of oscillation. This talk of habit via Aristotle intergrates into Milbank’s larger project of attempting to recover teleology in general. First and intially in ethics, see the chapter on virtue ethics, ‘Difference of Virtue, Virtue of Difference’ in Theology and Social Theory. Then in metaphysics, see his endorsement of Robert Spaemann’s Happiness and Benevolence as being a work where a virtue ethics spills into metaphysics and traditional teleology of nature. And, of course, in theology: Henri de Lubac’s ressourcement of Aquinas’ in Surnaturel where a natural desire for the supernatural is recovered in order to deny the concept of “pure nature” that is independent from its supernatural end, the idea of ‘pure nature’ being the cause of a plague of dualisms (natural/supernatural, grace/nature et al), the forcing the transcendent from the immanent (to touch at no point, the supernatural as just a superfluous ‘add on’ to an self-sufficient nature) and the ushering in a purely secular sphere of thought and attendent disciplines. After all, surely the whole of Milbank’s project is an attempt to do away with any discourse that claims a space of ‘pure nature’ without reference to its supernatural ends. Yet there is a conceptual problem here: all the discourses that attempt to create a space of ‘pure nature’ (sociology, economics, natural science et al) without reference to the divine and the discourse of theology seem to have done a particularly bad job of it, because, as in Theology and Social Theory, they are all premised upon theological foundations. As there has been, at least in thought, no thinking of pure nature anyway,  how can there have been detrimental results? Even thoughts not about the divine end, thoughts attempting to fashion thought of pure nature, turn out to be secretly concerned with theology. Incidentally, it was this emphasis on teleology that oddly combined the concerns of his paper with those of Stanley Hauerwas’ on the same panel, who are both clearly influenced by Macintyre in this regard. I digress – what at its core Milbank’s interest in speculative realism?

When Ray Brassier came to visit Nottingham and in discussion with Dustin McWherter at Rome a few thoughts on the matter were proffered. Obviously, one element is a polemic one – that Speculative Realism is another continental philosophy of radical immanence that Radical Orthodoxy should respond to, critique and perhaps show how they are secretly after that old time transcendence deep down (which seemed to be some of the point of his paper in Rome). But the other is given by Milbank’s response to Brassier. For him, Brassier had cleared the way for theologians to begin again discussing metaphysics in a very direct manner, and begin suggesting that Christian metaphysics offers a better account, and not spend endless time messing around in hermeneutics (he used Gadamer as an example), Derrida inspired philosophy and phenomenology (Brassier is very, very harsh on phenomenology as we all know). This was similar to his response to Dustin in Rome, where he said something along the lines of it being good now we can get down to the work of competing metaphysics, the age of non-metaphysics now absolutely concluded. Indeed, this is the thrust of his aforementioned essay in the Belief and Metaphysics volume: Meillassoux’s Après la finitude’s identification of the correlationist character of post-Kantian philosophy clears the way for a return to metaphysics, which includes a return in Milbank’s view to theology, the only metaphysics for him. I quote:

Perhaps, in consequence, the overwhelming mood of twentieth-century philosophy was neither atheism nor religiosity but rather agnosticism. Indeed one could claim that it was just this agnosticism that distinguished it from nineteenth-century philosophy. This was exhibited in two ways: the one philosophical, the other religious in tone. Philosophically it was shown by what Quentin Meillassoux calls ‘correlationism’. For this perspective, the non-speculative idealist view that our thought is indeed about a world external to us is balanced by an equal stress that the only world we know is the world as it is known to us. (Of course there are many exceptions to this, but as a generalization it holds good.) The over-all tone of twentieth-century philosophy was Kantian in the sense that epistemology not ontology dominated, but an epistemology of a quasi-realist bent. Dogmatism about how the world is in itself was largely eschewed, but likewise eschewed was any hypostasization of human thinking-processes themselves.

Philosophical agnosticism names then the correlationist move where one cannot have a substantial metaphysics, which finds a parallel in religious agnosticism (and an antipathy towards how things actually are) which tends towards a (plural) fideism. Here Milbank is almost certainly thinking of Meillasoux’s statement that “We are trying to grasp the sense of the following paradox: the more thought arms itself against dogmatism, the more defenseless it becomes before fanaticism. Even as it forces metaphysical dogmatism to retreat, sceptico-fideism reinforces religious obscurantism” – that correlationism allows the sneaking of religion back in through the back door, in the form of something like Wittgenstein’s mystical unsaid, Heidegger’s Being waffle, to which we might add the phenomenological turn to religion and every manifestation of Derridology and almost all brands of postmodern emergent Christianity.

So, Milbank concludes the first section, the opinion that the lack of metaphysical speculation ends in the terror of fideism:

So one is left after all with a confirmation of the anti-metaphysical agnostic character of twentieth-century thought. But for the reasons we have seen, should not this idiom be questioned in the face of religious and neo-liberal violence – both the terror of pure faith and the terror of pure reason, whose collusional purity agnosticism helps to promote and preserve? Should not both its correlationism and its encouragement of plural fideism be called into question?

So, rather than the perhaps more familiar move where the end of metaphysics ushers in the return of the religious in some manner, this opened the door to the fanatics who can assert without reference to the ways things actually are, which can never be confirmed, since metaphysics is off limits.  What is interesting here is that for Radical Orthodoxy metaphysics is then the theological and philosophical equivilent of playing with fire: get it wrong, make a seemingly innocuous technical mistake that one thinks seems orthodox and end up paying for it (severely) for hundred of years (Scotus et al), yet avoid it all together and one gets equally terrible consequences. So, Radical Orthodoxy feels more able to talk to Speculative Realism as both can talk about metaphysics, both are on that similar playing field – which is absolutely weird, given that Speculative Realism is the polar opposite in stressing the odd and supremely counter-intuitive immanence – a Platonism in reverse of hyperchaos (etc.) against the supreme neoplatonic recovery. One can also detect a subterranian connection between a philosophy which stresses anti-anthropomorphism and a theology which has a similar stress with regard the lack of power of the human as such and the faltering knowledge of God obtainable (as well as the classic opposition to anthropomorphism as idolatry in theology), although one could rightly respond that no religion could ever be that unanthropomorphic, and Radical Orthodoxy does attempt very strongly to defend the human from the kind of scientific reduction the Churchland’s might give it.

Whatever the year holds for Speculative Realism it will interesting to note how this consideration by Radical Orthodoxy plays out in theological circles (or if theologians independently respond to it, of course), as Milbank’s Rome paper will be doubtless published in a forthcoming conference volume. Will it cause a huge spike in interest, as there was a ripple in Badiou uptake among theologians? After Milbank had given his paper, a certain Radical Orthodoxy mainstay said to me “now I am going to have to buy a heck of a lot of books”. So if nothing else, the (xeno)economics of speculative realism may be sustained!