The early drama surrounding the philosophical movement called Speculative Realism, inaugurated in 2007 at the eponymous conference at Goldsmiths, London, revolved around its leading claim to overthrow the very basis for both poststructuralism, whose various strands had by then become the prevailing critical and theoretical doctrines in the arts and humanities, and also analytic philosophy’s self-imposed modesty in limiting itself to problems circumscribed by language and empiricism. For all of their mutual and historical antagonism, each of these established paradigms limit philosophical and theoretical claims to the finitude of language, history, thought and subjectivity – with significant anthropocentric assumptions guiding their respective research programmes (multifarious though these may otherwise be). These paradigms propose that the social and cognitive conditions of thought restrict and shape what can be thought and repudiate the claim that there can be knowledge of the real as such other than in terms of its cognition and discourses.1 In this, they propose social, cultural, psychosymbolic or pragmatic variants of what in physics is called the anthropic principle and, in philosophy, of Immanuel Kant’s argument that the world as humans know it is mediated by their intrinsic conditions of knowledge, with the consequence that what is outside of human knowledge can not be known ‘in itself’.2 By contrast, speculative realism (SR) reconstructed a broadly metaphysical set of claims, emphasizing among other things (though not always consistently among all the stances captured under the term) that knowledge of the real as such could be attained without anthropological bias, that the Enlightenment project is sustainable despite the rigorous and often devastating criticism it has received, that philosophy offers a route out of the anthropocentric construction of how objects interrelate between themselves or, in apparent contradiction, that rational thought itself is but a byproduct of larger processes in which the human merely takes its part but not as their primary condition. In short, that philosophy could apprehend the real as such in its independence from the conditions of its being thought.
While this is a necessarily over-simplistic picture of the complexities and divergences within any of the designated movements, it nonetheless captures the basic demands and provocation of SR: the repudiation if not condemnation of now-dominant poststructuralist and analytic-philosophical stances and constraints. The institutional and theoretical realignments and abreactions to these realist provocations against poststructuralist conventions constituted the drama already mentioned, the terms of which are worth quickly rehearsing here in order to give a broad outline of the debates and contentions addressed by this volume as a whole and the individual chapters. Those sympathetic to SR’s claims have seen in it a route to break out of the deadlocks, incapacities and dead ends of the fatal self-regard that poststructuralism had become. On the one hand, it proposed a way of revalidating the truth claims and objectivity of science, technology, calculation and instrumentality, all of which continue to be challenged if not repudiated by poststructuralist doctrines as part and parcel of its insistence on the social construction and unfixity of all meaning, knowledge and practice. This latter repudiation of instrumental rationality was itself a theoretically organized countermanding of the remorseless, industrially organized horrors of mid-twentieth-century totalitarian regimes, the exploitative and subjugating regime of industrial capitalism in the nineteenth century, and the conformism of the bureaucratic state capitalism of the post-Second World War period. On the other hand, though not wholly distinct to the concerns just mentioned, some strands of SR propose a political counterclaim to the by-then evident incapacities and debilitating contradictions of poststructuralism as an intellectual and anarcholeftist political project that has, despite its claims and stances, become a conventional academic doctrine in the arts, humanities and some social sciences.
This doctrinal incapacity and historical self-nonrecognition of poststructuralism has particularly telling ramifications for its often-rehearsed claims to have political traction. Despite the vigour and constant invention of this broad school of academic and cultural theory, by the mid- to late 1990s poststructuralism seemed to present a less and less effective practical or political challenge to the consolidation of neoliberal activism and reorganization over that same period (and since). This ineffectivity and institutional dis-traction, if it can be put this way, is not just at the level of the admittedly broad and ill-defined field of ‘politics’ or ‘society’ but reaches to the very specific domain of the higher education sector and cultural institutions in which poststructuralism is primarily transmitted in Western Europe and particularly the United States. These institutions are now integral to the economic and social organization of those regions in which poststructuralism has been fully established and central to the institutional formation of the arts and humanities by the early 2000s. Yet, despite its impressive analyses and criticisms of neoliberal social, political and technoscientific reconstruction over the period, it has been almost wholly powerless in countermanding these transformations of its own sociopolitical conditions – if, that is, it has not rather been actively incompetent by indirectly abetting those transformations.3 (Analytic philosophy finds itself quite far away from direct engagement with these concerns in its content – though of course not as an institutional-sociological discipline – so the paradoxes and limitations identified here are less pressing for it.) That domestication of poststructuralism is attributable to some degree to its continued and indefatigable fetishization of the movements of 1968, which has left those who advocate for it somewhat unable to contend substantially with the social conditions and politics in place half a century later. And while this immobility in part explains poststructuralism’s current limitation as a continually transformative political programme, its failure is also attributable – and perhaps more so – to the drawing down of political ambitions it has warranted and cultivated. Cultural leftism’s embrace in the 1990s of postmodernism, identity politics, and the turn to ethics (via the human rights settlements) as its primary organizing determinants of a social justice agenda that militated against standardization not only ruled out any appeal to the ‘grand narratives’ of modernity as the basis for leftism but, more actively, sought to delegitimize any such universalizing criteria.4 The incapacitation of overarching narratives of emancipation or justice coupled with the sensitivity to singular, irreproducible and even untransmittable political claims and social demands so carefully identified by poststructuralist doctrine has resulted in social, cultural and political demands being formulated primarily in terms of subjectively organized claims that caution against extending beyond themselves for fear of imposing a microimperialism. Concomitant to this reduction of political horizon is the requirement that all political ambitions do not amount to more than their ad hominem or socially constructed formation and limitation, and that praxes that continue to propose that knowledge is not ethnoculturally specific but universal and objective – such as science in both its theoretical and practical branches – are to be treated as a suspicious modernist anachronism. In an uncomfortable but also revealing twist of political logics, this latter relativization of science and its truth claims as being culturally if not even subjectively specific have more recently been adopted by religious and populist right-wing political forces (especially in the United States) to countermand rationally constituted and evidence-based policy demands.5
Given these benighted conditions, and in direct contrast to poststructuralist conventions, SR vindicated the reconstruction of a ‘grand narrative’ politics. This big-picture project of a rationally organized long-term project – a vindicated Enlightenment of sorts, captured under the term ‘Left Accelerationism’ – has sought to advantageously mobilize the knowledge and operational developments made by technosciences alongside other complex and complexifying social and material factors.6 This politically directed offshoot of SR takes these complex social factors as objective forces that allow the attainment of emancipation by their construction of social bonds and semantics that, contrasted to poststructuralist premises, do not presume or suppose unfixity against reason. Other fronts of SR, gathered in their distinct ‘object-oriented’ and neomaterialist variants, put emphasis on how a noncognitive semantics and social relationality is constituted equally between things of all kinds rather than premised on the centrality of the human actor or, more particularly, recognized forms of conceptual and cognitive apprehension.7 Here, human modalities of apprehension and relationality are only one among others that, for all of their particularly and dominance for us, have no particular privilege among other modalities. This proposal is highly attractive in the face of the increasing pressure of material, technical and natural processes at the microlevel of personal and even subindividual engagement, the mesolevel of networked social processes, and the macrolevel of the globality of climate change, each of which leads to the weakening of traditional-modern anthropic determinations of these processes, if not the outright subordination or even elimination of the human as a factor or determinant of how things are with one another, and also of what they mean to one another.
Despite their common critique of anthropocentric conditions of knowledge or relationality, these variants of SR are somewhat inchoate with one another and its fragile unity fell apart not long after the launch conference. Yet, with regard to the pivotal role of conceptual apprehension as a condition for their respective claims to realism, it remains the case that these reworkings of the task of ‘critical’ thinking continue to look to move past and transform the limitations of poststructuralism, if not to countermand and repudiate its primary determinations. However, the prevailing sense of ‘critique’ after Kant is the mitigation of cognitive and rational overreach into speculative claims; and, with poststructuralism and postwar Frankfurt School critical theory, it is generalized to mean forms of thought antagonistic to and disidentified from dominant ideology and power. It’s not at all obvious to then suppose that the terms ‘critique’ or ‘critical’ are then the right ones for the task set by speculative realism. For object-oriented approaches in particular, it’s moreover not apparent that the move they advance takes place in the dimension of thought at all insofar as such conceptual cognition remains, to date, anthropically specific. This affirmation of nonanthropic relationality is itself in marked contrast to the advocacy of a postcritical – that is speculative – conceptual thought as the condition for apprehending the real typical of the neorationalist strand of SR exemplified by Brassier and Meillassoux. Nonetheless, these various strands of SR are united not only by their common historical adversary. As identified by many of the individual chapters of this volume, the one positive, cogent organizing feature that continues to permit the legitimate use of SR as a coherent term is their subscription to Quentin Meillassoux’s diagnosis of what he has influentially called correlationism. For Meillassoux, correlation is:
any philosophy that maintains the impossibility of acceding, through thought, to a being independent of thought … [Consequently,] we never have access to any intended thing … that is not always-already correlated to an ‘act of thinking’ … Correlationism posits that thought can never escape from itself so as to accede to a world not yet affected by our subjective modes of apprehension.8
In holding that the real is an effect of the conditions of its apprehension and social-semantic construction, poststructuralism is but an instance of correlationism and it is this general theoretical-conceptual condition and its ensuing limitations that (despite serious disagreements among them) current and future variants of SR look to surpass to gain access to the real beyond thought.
The trenchant attacks on poststructuralism by SR are and will continue to be met by countercriticisms of SR itself. While some of this could be straightforward reactive hostility and suspicion between obviously adversarial stances, more salient criticisms of SR can focus on how the demotion of anthropic determinations by object-oriented approaches leads to the abjuring of judgement and semantically organized social practice – including politics – as necessary premises for the purposive transformation of the conditions of which it speaks.9 Equality of objects and the concomitant subordination or elimination of subjecthood as a condition of praxis risks undermining the very possibility of constructing an active, directed and transformative demand, and might even mitigate against it for fear of reinstating an anthropocentric overreach (a kind of macroimperialism over objects). Worse yet, the theoretical equivalence of social and natural objects quickly leads to the naturalization of social and technical organization thereby contributing to the reinstatement of political-ideological forces as simply neutral systemic elements of objecthood out of reach of semantic and volitional determination. On the other hand, variants of SR vindicating Enlightenment precepts, albeit highly revised ones, stand accused of resuscitating the very blindness to the violent ethnocentric power hierarchies and sociologies that claimed reason and its universalism as their legitimating term.10 The primary referents here are the putatively ‘civilizing’ missions of Western European colonialism since the early nineteenth century, and also the subordination of all subject- and social-identifiers that were deemed not to have rational capacities in part or as a whole. Specifically, poststructuralist criticism – especially in its postcolonial, feminist and queer theory formations – has done important, trenchant work in undoing the fixed, ethnocentric standard of reason as a term – if not the term – of legitimacy. Coupled to the advocacy of postmodern multifarious self-legitimating ‘small narratives’ against the ‘grand narratives’ of Western modernity, these antifoundationalist advances have importantly undermined the standardizing modern (and, for that matter, ancient) conventions of reason and universalism as criteria for political and theoretical praxes. Such criticism has correctly learnt from and contributed to the shattering of sociohistorical power away from the white European men, and in terms other than those overtly and subtly set by that constituency, who not only wielded and maintained their state and civil power by appeal to reason but also formulated its modern doctrines.11
These criticisms are reinforced by the insights of mid-twentieth-century Frankfurt School critical theory on the cogent deployment of rationalism by European powers since the eighteenth century to legitimize colonialism as a ‘civilizing mission’ and also, later, by totalitarian states to formulate and prosecute their genocidal persecutions within Europe.12 In addition, along a similar axis, this critical stance contends that the rationalism of capitalist liberal democracies reinforces standardized forms of subjectivity and indoctrination through their emphasis on consumption and, more recently, social individualism.13 In broad terms, the Frankfurt School distinguishes between an ‘instrumental reason’ (a model of ends-directed rationality) conducive to these and other pernicious and oppressive effects and another mode of reason without ends that leads to cognitive and social emancipation (formulated by Kant as the work of reflective and aesthetic judgements, both of which are then distinct to the ends-directed judgements of the understanding). In no less stylized terms, for poststructuralism reason as such is ineliminably a social and power effect which cannot be distinguished from the violent and oppressive historicopolitical forms of domination that have legitimized themselves precisely through claims to their own rationally constituted universalism (although for Michel Foucault, following Nietzsche in this regard, power is also a positive term of transformation).14 Poststructuralism’s theoretical and ideological work has effectively contributed and protected – if it has not in fact transformed – the very terms by which sociocultural recognition takes place in favour of its multiplicity. And on the basis of these countervailing recognitions of historically and newly subordinated sociopolitical constituencies and forms, vindicating a rationalist project can be at best regarded as a regression from the theoretical and political advances made in the past forty years, if not just an obdurate naivety.
The apparently antagonistic if not directly incompatible theoretical, social and historical premises and identifications of poststructuralism and SR (on both of its main fronts) pivot primarily on the terms and constraints of the construction of meaning, action and systemic traction. These antagonisms are, as noted, not only those of their respective political demands, but extend to the basis of their respective constitutions and how they are to be attained. Yet, given that most sides of this dispute broadly espouse leftist emancipatory claims, some pragmatic political reconciliation or alliances between poststructuralist developments and those in SR could be envisaged. For example, as certain strands of neomaterialism have already proposed, poststructuralism’s emphasis on the unfixity and sociosubjective malleability of meaning and the experience of the Other as (de)structuring condition for all of these primary terms can be expanded to all material as well as ideological systems in which the human subject is not the defining condition.15 Or, some recuperation of the rational determination of social organization that does not return to instrumental rationality, or which multiplies and localizes rationalities such that sociohistorically specific universalisms are incapacitated, could reconcile the interests of neorationalism to those of postcolonialism and the affirmation of singularities.16 Similarly, Foucault’s affirmation of power as a means of resubjectivization countering socially repressive power – a stance vigorously attacked by Marxists and anarcholeftists at the time – may be a model for the revived interest in ‘alienation’ as a positive condition for emancipation via social complexification asserted by Left Accelerationism.17
If anything, however, the incompatibilities are much starker and more contentious with regard to the respective theoretical formulations and commitments of SR and poststructuralism than are their respective political ambitions. While the just-proposed schematic research programmes may be attractive in the name of broad politically organized alliances, the theoretical and conceptual bases remain mostly at odds: if the subject or ‘sentience’ is, in however complex a sense the term to be elaborated, the referent and locus for the construction of meaning and the operations of the social, then the more expansive notion of the sociality of objects between themselves – and at wildly divergent scales – remains constitutively unavailable. Equally, however capacious the grand narrative of a rationally constituted universalism may be, it must assign legitimacy-granting authority to itself alone and thereby denounce whatever legitimacy the small narratives that sociohistorical particulars (such as cultures or religions) determine for themselves if they do not accord with that universalism. Such a requirement appears at once authoritarian, sovereign, and clearly unable to accommodate a radical alterity – all of which are severely condemned in poststructuralism and surpassed by it.
The standoff between poststructuralism and SR seems, in short, intractable. It is this impasse that Genealogies of Speculation looks to overcome by unlocking their historically simplifying and theoretically stultifying opposition. The proposition of this volume is not only that substantial claims and effective traction on current social and cognitive horizons can be better realized by resetting the terms of debate between poststructuralism and SR. It is also that such a resetting enables the realization of more expansive and more trenchant political and theoretical ambitions on both sides of the current dispute. For example, the ostensibly desubjectified realism and engagement with complex sociotechnical systems of cognition claimed by SR makes a demand on poststructuralism: that social counternormative theory recover its diagnostic capacities and gain leverage on sociocultural conditions that in fact now domesticate and welcome poststructuralism’s standard claims to undermine and disrupt conventions and authority with singular eventualities and exteriorities. Equally, and on the other hand, the sophisticated accounts of the complexity and interdependence of sociopolitical multiplicities obtained by poststructuralism demand greater nuance and social precision from SR in its conceptualizations of sociotechnical and cognitive constitution, attention to which would take it beyond its own internecine quarrels and avant-gardist postures, both of which have to date waylaid its expansive development and gaining of sociohistorical traction.
But these demands are again mainly politically organized prescriptions for reconciliation; and, as remarked above, the pressing requirement if these expanded ambitions are to be realized is, rather, for the respective theoretical premises to be recast. To that end, Genealogies of Speculation provides two main supports: first, to provide the more nuanced and responsible debate required to move past the often-reductive arguments on current speculative thought advanced by both sides that have led ineluctably to the impasses and oppositions elaborated above. While the vigour of these provocations, debates and stances has served to rapidly draw attention to the important claims and divergences involved (especially in the unmoderated and affectively dense space of social media and the blogosphere where, it must be acknowledged, much of the dispute outlined here has been most emphatically formulated), this dramatic eruption of a substantial theoretical dispute has, however, also stalled if it has not prevented the thorough and rigorous examination of the proximities, continuities and channels available between poststructuralism and SR. This is the work that Genealogies of Speculation looks to present in a synoptic and inaugural manner. The contributing chapters each in their own way venture that substantial cross-contaminations and redeterminations across the stated theoretical divide can be established. That said, while common and convergent concerns thereby appear on both sides of what could be called the correlationist divide, the discussions presented here mostly establish that the incompatibilities across them do present substantial problems that importantly prohibit the construction of direct reconciliation or integration across it. These clarifications and elaborations therefore serve to specify the programmes that need to be constructed, as well as their constraints.
To be more exact, and as the second main support for the theoretical recasting called for here, Genealogies of Speculation acts as reminder that the various programmes gathered under the headings of poststructuralism themselves advance variants of materialism that proponents of SR broadly deny it. As each of the individual contributions to this volume make clear, materialism is hardly a minor or neglected concern in antifoundationalist thought but is rather one of its primary thematic and methodological interests. The specific and various determinations of materialism presented in the individual chapters are outlined below but, in general terms, the broad issue that emerges from this volume as a whole is not so much whether it is SR or poststructuralism that can claim to be materialist theories as such but rather what materialism is, how it is to be constructed, and the varying ramifications of these diverse theorizations. It is on this point that – to highlight the full title of this volume – the fundamental question around which all of the above discussion revolves is made explicit: does materialism incorporate or repudiate the subject as a structuring condition of its theorization? And: what are the terms of articulation or presentation of such materialisms? And even: what is the matter of materialism? Though the individual chapters may not each formulate the questions this directly, they nonetheless each provide a response to it.
Notable in this regard is Meillassoux’s contribution to this volume, which is the first publication to advance his philosophy beyond the terms of After Finitude in 2006 (published in English two years later). As already remarked, it is Meillassoux’s term correlationism that more or less unifies the otherwise discrepant philosophies gathered under the term SR by identifying the condition upon which the thereby common adversary operates. Meillassoux’s chapter in this volume disambiguates his own formulation of speculative materialism from that of his erstwhile colleagues in SR, remarking that even as each stance in the original SR conference (among others) establishes the conditions for a realism that does not presume human subjectivity or thought as its basis, some such theories – notably the object-oriented variants associated with Graham Harman and the naturalized reason associated with Iain Hamilton Grant – nonetheless posit subject-like attributes outside of any form of organic consciousness as the condition for their noncorrelationism, a general condition that Meillassoux here designates as ‘subjectalism’.18 While Meillassoux grants that these philosophies may be speculative and even realisms, they are for him not at all materialisms – the latter term being reserved for the knowledge of what is outside of all subjectivity and its proxies.
Following this schema, the SR theory Meillassoux criticizes has more in common with antifoundationalist poststructuralism than it does with his own speculative materialism. Like Meillassoux, Ray Brassier too argues that philosophical materialism must converge with scientific and mathematical knowledge of the real. Unlike Brassier, however, Meillassoux’s Cartesian commitments mean that for him scientific descriptions only have validity if they are mathematically formulated. Nonetheless, for both, the elimination of the biases inherent in subjective and sociohistorical knowledge requires that any such scientistic materialism is premised entirely upon conceptual-cognitive determinations of the real. Brassier therefore stipulates rather than eradicates conceptual and therefore anthropic cognition as the basis for the materialism that is the noncorrelational knowledge of the real.19 For object-oriented variants of SR – whose premise is that realism proscribes the human (never mind rational thought or maybe even ‘sentience’) as a prerequisite for what the relation to the real can be – conceptual thought cannot make any claim to realism, as the nonsubjective relation of objects to one another, precisely because it is a thinking.20 Moreover, that rational thought is the basis for materialism is, in the view of object-oriented SR, the very much worse error of mistaking an idealism for realism, allowing an equivalence to be drawn up between such neorationalist arguments and poststructuralism.21 Moreover, the neorationalisms that propound a nonfoundational account of reason itself, in the wake of the account of post-Kantian philosophy proposed by Robert Brandom and Richard Rorty before him, only confirm that the conceptually constituted determinations of the real share more with the antifoundationalism of poststructuralism than they might be prepared to admit.
Genealogies of Speculation proposes a change in methodological perspective to the terms of these disputes. What the accusations and counteraccusations between the various allegiances to realism, materialism and antifoundationalism indicate is that these terms, among others, are in fact shifting with regard to what they indicate, and are now at best ambivalent or contingent upon the theoretical schema in which they are deployed. Their mutating semantic and theoretical determinations override their lexical stability. And this schematic instability is wholly to the advantage of the ambitions of this book, for it proposes that the adversarial stances based upon standard theoretical determinations can be surpassed in favour of new theoretical configurations advocated for here. One such reconfiguration is apparent in Meillassoux’s chapter itself, which marks a significant step forward in his philosophy since his paradigmatic definition of correlationism in After Finitude: contrary to demands that realism requires the dispensing of linguistically organized knowledge claims because these are both primarily anthropically constituted and also, qua language, specific to a culture or discipline, Meillassoux proposes instead that what is real of an extant being can only be known because of the unique properties of mathematical sign systems. While Meillassoux’s essay overall seeks to establish the conditions and requirements of what he affirms by the term materialism, its second part is directly preoccupied with an extended discussion of written signs: a topic extensively studied in the structuralism that provided the basis for poststructuralism’s antifoundationalism. While having language as the primary referent in a discussion of materialism may surprise readers expecting that materialism should refer to that which is removed from what is characteristically anthropic, symbolic and subjectively constituted, Meillassoux’s argument makes it clear that what he calls speculative materialism cannot be occasioned without the specifics of mathematical scripts. Similarly, several other contributions to this volume investigate how materialist and realist claims are established not only as a referent of language that is outside of language itself, but also within and as language itself – which is, typically, a focus not only of structuralist and poststructuralist theory but also of analytic philosophy – leading in each case to qualified departures from Meillassoux’s argument.
The reorganization of the theoretical space in which realism, materialism and antifoundationalism are established weighs no less on each of the substantive terms in the title Genealogies of Speculation and the latent dilemma it presents. If speculative thought or speculation more generally is directed to that which is not (yet) determined by or within that which speculates – in this context, (cognitive) apprehension that is turned towards that which is outside of it, most formidably in the future – attention to the genealogies that give the account of how and why the current conditions, structures and claims have come to be what they are would seem to mitigate against speculatively organized transformation. But as the preceding comments should make apparent, the overall claim of this volume is that as much as the recent ‘speculative turn’ does not make quite as severe a break from its immediate precursor as is typically portrayed – that is, while speculation is itself somewhat genealogically constituted – the conceptual and lexical rearrangement that speculative thought imposes in order to make the claim outside of the cognitive basis for speculation also reorganizes the conditions and schema by which such speculative endeavours are undertaken. It is the outside or the future that recursively rearranges the past, retrieving it otherwise than how it has shaped the present in order to open up another future than the one that has been given by the past.
In the immediate case of this book, the speculative turn itself requires poststructuralism’s antifoundationalist to be apprehended as being not only materialist – exactly how is the contention of the contributing chapters – but also as incipiently speculative, thus presenting a speculative past for SR that is different from the one that, on the basis of its genealogical determinations, sets up the schematic discrepancies and adversarial stances highlighted above. The first section of this volume is therefore dedicated to the resetting of a speculative past for SR by demonstrating the (perhaps subordinate or obscured) commitments to materialism within poststructuralism. And further before that too: the first chapter by Steven Shaviro, which instructively lays out the leading theses of the four protagonists at the Goldsmiths conference, proposes that the early/mid-twentieth-century philosopher Alfred North Whitehead also proleptically established a distinct speculative realism that tests the current iterations. This test is at the core of Whitehead’s later philosophy: whether the bifurcation of nature is overcome. That bifurcation is, Whitehead proposes, the division between the nature apprehended in awareness and the nature that is the cause of awareness, a division that is more about the generic qualities of both human and nonhuman entities than about the correlational circle. On this basis Shaviro suggests that SR’s core contention – whether things in themselves can be apprehended as such without their compliance to the conditions of their apprehension – be displaced and expanded from an epistemological and mainly anthropically organized discussion to one of ontology and nature.
How SR transforms not only what nature is understood to be but, more directly, what nature is returns as a theme throughout the book. Adrian Johnston’s chapter addresses precisely this issue in relation to the constitution of the human subject itself, directly introducing materialism and subjectivity as the two optics through which this volume examines – or tests – SR. Johnston’s attentive reading of Jacques Lacan’s writings on the helplessness of the human neonate demonstrates that Lacan supposes not only the familiar symbolic and linguistic-structuralist account of psychosymbolic genesis but also an overlooked material-biological basis for it. The psychogenesis of the subject thereby intertwines the symbolic register with biology. Lacan thus emerges on Johnston’s account as a realist and materialist, and even a speculative materialist, in his insistence on the continued disruption of organicity to the symbolic construction of the psychoanalytical subject. Johnston’s materialist basis for psychoanalysis enables that praxis to directly engage evolutionary theory on its own terms. Specifically, Johnston shows that the supposed antinaturalism or anorganicity of the psychoanalytical subject is a key feature of natural processes such as evolution and the organic organization of the human brain. The materialism core to psychoanalytic subjectivity yet often disavowed in its theorization is, Johnston contends, incorporated into nonsubjective processes of material organization. With that, Johnston sets the terms for a transformative incorporation of the psychoanalytical subject within SR, challenging its prevailing emphasis on desubjectified processes and relations.
Such a precursion and test of extant SR substantiates the demands of Shaviro’s essay. And they converge with Levi R. Bryant’s demonstration that the staunch antirealism of Niklas Luhmann’s systems theory paradoxically provides crucial tools for SR. The paradox is that, as Bryant demonstrates, Luhmann’s rigorous construction of a self-referential systematicity is on the one hand cogent enough to act as an encompassing paradigm for several otherwise incoherent antirealisms, implying that it should be inert as any kind of precursor or contributor to SR. Yet, on the other hand, Luhmann’s entire antirealism is based on a simple realist assumption: that there are identifiable systems, meaning that the real is sectioned off from itself. Just as Johnston shows how Lacanian efforts to construct a systemic and immanent symbolic account of psychogenesis flounder in Lacan’s own endorsement of an asystemic material base that is transcendent to that psychosymbolic construction, so Bryant shows that Luhmann’s necessary distinction between systems and their environments in fact commits him to incorporate externalities and material conditions for the construction of systems to which the systemic account should be inured. Bryant therefore proposes that the highly self-enclosed antirealism of systems theory cannot exempt itself from an astructural realism. This mode of speculation defies the precepts of systems theory, recursively proposing that it is a productive resource for SR rather than inert to it – presenting a test for how the relations between interiority and exteriority (and between interiority and interiority for that matter) are to be cogently constructed.
Gilles Deleuze’s ‘transcendental empiricism’ provides the basis for Sjoerd van Tuinen’s examination of the systematicity and asystematicity of thought, of how the externalities of systemic thought direct and shape it, bringing these concerns into direct relation to Meillassoux’s philosophy. Van Tuinen argues that Deleuze presents a model for speculative materialism that does not rely wholly on rationalist imperatives as it does for Meillassoux. Rather, Deleuze takes up the tradition of empiricism that is able to attend to and render comprehensible the actuality of becomings, leading to a radical overhaul of the Principle of Sufficient Reason, which posits that everything has an intelligible reason or cause. Van Tuinen shows that counter to Meillassoux’s philosophy of speculative materialism, which abandons this principle, Deleuze’s theorization of the real as the duality of a virtual-actual couplet upholds it. The result is that the latter philosophy is itself a speculative materialism that not only upholds philosophical responsibilities of providing rational explanations, in a way that Meillassoux’s does not, but is also directly immersed and constructive for practice rather than constrained to the theoreticism that Meillasoux also lapses into, according to van Tuinen.
Van Tuinen’s chapter in some ways sets up an explicit test for Meillassoux’s speculative philosophy. And while Meillassoux’s own chapter in this volume directly addresses how he positions Deleuze’s philosophy as a whole, what is striking is that this characterization is made on the basis of one of several new developments in his thinking since After Finitude. Just as the definition of ‘correlationism’ in the earlier book has proven to be paradigmatic for philosophical and theoretical debates in the early years after its publication, so the wide-ranging elaborations and innovations of Meillassoux’s expanded conceptual system in this major contribution should again change the terms of discussion on the conceptualization and stakes of realism, materialism and speculation. Specifically, Meillassoux establishes that his own speculative materialism has to be sharply demarcated and distanced from what he here calls subjectalism, which is the ‘absolutiz[ation of] the correlation of thought and the world through the choice of various traits, all of which are present in human subjectivity’.22 While subjectalism in part characterizes the philosophies of several of his erstwhile colleagues in SR broadly speaking, what is more broadly significant in this development is that subjectalism is not limited to the cognitive-conceptual dimension as correlationism is. Any subjective element ‘not only of the subject in a limited sense, as consciousness, reason, freedom’, as Meillassoux puts it, ‘but of the subject in all its modalities – will, sensation, preconscious life’ and so on can provide the basis of subjectalism, whether or not cognitive capacities are invoked.23 Meillassoux establishes that subjectalism characterizes many systems of thought that may claim to depart from conceptual cognition and the human as their condition for apprehending the real as such but which do so by metaphorizing subjective traits to the absolute-real that is, rather, alien to any subjectalism. Thus escalating the demands on speculative materialism, Meillassoux in this chapter advances the programme of speculative materialism set out in After Finitude by establishing the mathematical sign as the condition for a speculative materialism. This real is then rationally known, Meillassoux contends, not only in the dimension of the absolute condition of what can be, which is the ontology established in the earlier book, but now also of what is qua fact. Here, the sign undergoes a radical recasting, as precise and inventive as the deduction of absolute contingency in After Finitude. Specifically, Meillassoux proposes that the mathematical sign devoid of meaning, the pure sign, is itself absolutely contingent and rescinds subjectalism, an empirical and semiotic manifestation of the general ontological truth of what can be but one that is rationally and formally manipulated in mathematics. With that, the somewhat Cartesian task of speculative materialism to mathematically apprehend the absolute-real as what it is (in addition to the philosophy of how it can be, which is the ontological task accomplished in After Finitude) can be met.
What is striking and apparently paradoxical in Meillassoux’s argument is that speculative materialism is inaugurated not by removing or renouncing human capacities of conceptual-cognition but instead, and to the contrary, by rational thought alone via philosophy (the account of what can be) and mathematics (the account of what is). Furthermore, it is not just thought that permits the apprehension of the absolute-real qua fact but the semiotics of a pure sign that in its absolute contingency is wholly removed from any historical, semantic, or subjective interest, expression or motivation. Meillassoux’s speculative materialism is then close to the also nonsubjective determination of language and signs proffered by structuralism (to return to an undercurrent of both Johnston’s and Bryant’s chapters). It is moreover confirmed as a rationalism, but one that not only offers no reasons (van Tuinen) but also proceeds by way of the sign without reason, the sign deprived of meaning; a language of speculation.
Meillassoux’s extended essay acts then as a pivotal point in this volume. As well as extending his own formulation of speculative materialism (now categorically and doctrinally distinct from speculative realism), the chapter also draws attention to the sign-system of language and mathematical scientific formalization as prerequisites for that task. Here, the claims of the preceding chapters gain extra traction: does Meillassoux entrench the ‘bifurcation of nature’, which Shaviro proposes as the leading test for speculative thought? Or is the apprehension of nature by nature itself an instance of subjectalism? Equally, does Meillassoux’s even more emphatic repudiation of any trace of subjecthood in his criticism of subjectalism vindicate Johnston’s demand for a comprehensive materialist theory of the subject and its formation? Does the pure sign unshackled from structural semantic mobilization, which Meillassoux contends is the condition for mathematics as the privileged discourse of speculative materialism, accord with the asystemic real that Bryant uncovers in Luhmann’s otherwise highly correlationist systems theory? Is it an externality to systemic meaning-making yet also the condition for knowledge of the real? And does the knowledge of facts in their absolute contingency, provided by mathematical discourse according to Meillassoux, not contend with the empiricism and praxis that is for van Tuinen the advantage of Deleuze’s formulation of speculative materialism? The contention leading this volume is that while these and other questions certainly need further elaboration in the future, the disputes that are thereby occasioned and conclusions arrived at will in each case require a revisiting and further complexification of the now obviously tenuous division of schools of thought according to the correlationist divide.
The subsequent essays take up aspects of these questions via language and science respectively, while also maintaining the focus on speculative, realist and materialist contentions in poststructuralist thinking. In particular, the chapters in the ‘Languages of Speculation’ section directly respond to Meillassoux’s contribution. Imbricated with Meillassoux’s ontological claims on language via the pure sign of mathematics but distinct to them, Armen Avanessian’s chapter draws particular focus on the ontological and praxical-transformative dimension of language itself. Language, Avanessian argues, does not only tell of ontologies outside of the linguistic subject. As poststructuralism and some analytic philosophy recognized, language is itself a medium and generator of relationality and therefore ontologically generative, speculative and determined otherwise than by the expressive and intentional capacities of the speaking subject. Somewhat counterintuitively – though also confirming core insights of German Romanticism, structuralist linguistics after Ferdinand de Saussure and C. S. Peirce’s semiotics – language is both real and realist with regard to relationality. This last proposition recalls Bryant’s proposal on Luhmannian systems as realist despite their ostensible antirealism. What it also does is argue against an object-oriented approach that seeks to establish a general ontological relationality aside from or before language (as a distinctively human capacity). And it furthermore proposes that ordinary language’s recursivity – language addresses, refers to and modifies language itself – therefore shapes and transfigures not only language itself but also the ontology of what is. Avanessian thereby challenges Meillassoux’s specification of the ontologically committed sign to mathematics and to the sign devoid of meaning alone, arguing instead that all language and meaning is certainly realist and maybe itself materialist, but is any case a fabricating poiesis.
Arne De Boever’s chapter takes up the counterintuitive proposition that language is itself a realism: not only is language the thinking of thought beyond itself but also how thought does this. However, for De Boever, it is not just language per se that presents the real in itself in and as language but specifically literature. Contrasting what he identifies as a recent genre of literary-speculative realism against the more traditional genre of representationalist, biopolitical and humanist realism, which is dedicated to truthful accounts of the world and life outside of literature, De Boever advocates for the former as a ‘deathly, linguistic approach to literature’. This does not commit De Boever’s analysis to the knowledge of the realm of death that Meillassoux proposes mathematics allows.24 Rather, reading the dissolute conclusion of Michel Houllebecq’s The Map and the Territory as a referentless demonstration of the real of language itself liberated from subjective expression – a demonstration of a materialist literature – De Boever argues that Meillassoux’s own claims on how literature might present materialism as he, Meillassoux, conceives it remain too beholden to conventional genres of realism. That is – and to return from a very different angle to the contentions made by Avanessian – De Boever proposes that Meillassoux underestimates the capacities and instantiation of a speculative realism, if not a speculative materialism, in ordinary (albeit literary) language.
The distinction between ordinary and formal languages is the organizing axis of Suhail Malik’s chapter. Beginning with what he calls the predicament of the languages of reason – according to which the intrinsic though distinct contingencies of ordinary language and formal languages render them inadequate to the universalities and invariances that rational deductions draw up – Malik initially contends that the rationalism underpinning Meillassoux’s speculative materialism is, according to Meillassoux’s own categories, itself a realism rather than a materialism. But while van Tuinen argues that Meillassoux’s commitment to rationalism undermines the latter’s claims to a fully fledged materialism, Malik diverges from this conclusion in proposing that it is the prerequisite of Meillassoux’s realism that leads to an only-formal determination of the absolute-real as necessarily contingent. Furthermore, it leads to a determination of reason itself as an unreason. Both results prevent establishing rational speculative thought as the comprehensively explanatory materialism that Meillassoux endorses as an adequate and sufficient philosophical basis for modern science. Returning to the genealogical identifications of the first section of this volume, Malik proposes that a precursor for such realism, despite its common repudiation by SR, is Jacques Derrida’s deconstruction of structuralism, and in particular structuralism’s endeavour to establish its own scientificity. However, because deconstruction never rescinds the finitude of thought and language, Malik maintains that the divergence between it and speculative materialism must be upheld. Yet a comparative analysis of the nonmetaphysical sign that each theorization respectively proposes leads Malik to contend that the ‘obverse contiguity’ of deconstruction and speculative materialism resolves the predicament of the languages of reason and, no less, provides the basis for establishing the scientificity of a comprehensive speculative materialism.
Highlighting what the realism and materialism of the sign and language have to be as constitutive conditions of modern science and rationalism, Malik’s essay acts as a bridge to the final section of the book, ‘Science’, whose principal concern is how SR can contribute to science as the praxis that has had a leading claim to materialism, that is, to rationally apprehend the real outside of thought. As already noted, this claim is of course highly contested, not least by poststructuralism and some strands of SR, but Nathan Coombs’s chapter helpfully addresses Ray Brassier’s endorsement of scientific naturalism as the leading paradigm of comprehensive explanatory realism in modernity. Drawing attention to a fundamental theoretical schism in SR between Brassier’s epistemological rationalism and Harman’s quasiphenomenological networked ontology, Coombs exposes a similar disparity in the trajectory of Louis Althusser’s theoretical stances and commitments. Althusser’s early allegiances to the mid-twentieth-century French school of rationalist epistemology and history of science led to an antisubjectivist ‘scientistic’ theory of Marxism and its revolutionary praxis. However, while the insights from rationalist epistemological theory on how discontinuities in structures of thought are occasioned (quite distinctively from the ‘paradigm shifts’ proposed by Thomas Kuhn) have evident appeal to a Marxism looking to find theorization of revolutionary transformation, Althusser’s consequent ‘theoreticism’ and repudiation of empirical analysis of the actuality of social conditions ends up disabling the very politics it looks to ground. But, as Coombs goes on to show, Althusser’s later self-criticism of what he called his ‘speculative-rationalist’ deviation has important lessons for how today’s SR conceives its relation to science. Specifically, with regard to Brassier’s project, following Wilfrid Sellars, to endorse science as the paragon of a naturalist-rationalist epistemological endeavour that exceeds conventionalized knowledge of the real is, Coombs contends, liable to perpetuate the same antiempiricism that the early Althusser later recanted. More exactly, it risks formulating a general theoretical account of science that pays little heed to its practice and the distinctions between the various sciences. Coombs proposes that a richer account of scientific ingress into the real-object is to be had in the critical realism propounded by Roy Bhaskar, which bridges Althusser’s and Sellars’s approaches but also builds its epistemological claims on the basis of scientific practice and plurality without, however, resorting to empiricism. Coombs’s genealogy is not then only the story of a likely historical lineage resulting in Brassier’s version of speculative realism; like several other of the genealogies proposed in this volume, it also makes specific demands and puts specific pressures on what has preceded the extant formulations of SR in order to reconfigure its future.
Like Coombs, Dorothea Olkowski identifies the influence of mid-twentieth-century French rationalism – Jean Cavaillès in particular – in Meillassoux’s speculative realism, resulting in abstractions and formalisms in his account of the real that have little to do with the realities of scientific practice and discovery. While in some ways reiterating Coombs’s criticism of Brassier’s reliance on Sellarsian rationalism for his account of scientific epistemology, Olkowski’s contentions stem from what she characterizes as a broader linguistic turn in philosophy to models derived from languages of logic and formal computation models in the philosophies of language and mind, and of mathematical or logical formalism in particular. The neo-Cartesianism of Meillassoux’s ‘pure sign’ of mathematics would bear out this characterization, suggesting a concomitance with the otherwise distinct criticisms of Meillassoux with regard to his rationalist repudiation of empiricism (van Tuinen), to the formalism of his ontological determination (Malik), to his linguistic idealism (Avanessian) and, mutatis mutandis, with Bryant’s argument regarding Luhmann’s systematicity and Johnston’s on psychosymbolically constitituted Lacanianism (even though the latter are, paradoxically, paradigmatically correlationist). Olkowski proposes that in order to break out of the formalist account of science it is necessary to configure science not according to (neo)Cartesian assumptions – which, she contends, science has anyway discarded in its practice – but by inserting the consciousness of the observer into the account of the scientific system. Olkowski cites Fotini Markopolou’s criticism that the standard configuration of observation, in which observation takes place outside of the physical system under investigation, thereby segmenting the unity of the universe, cannot apply when that system is the universe itself, as is the case of cosmology. The scientist describes the system with a view from the inside and, in this, it is Maurice Merleau-Ponty’s phenomenology of the flesh that provides for Olkowski the corresponding philosophical account of how science constructs knowledge. Merleau-Ponty’s challenge to both empiricist and rationalist determinations of scientific knowledge is made with regard to quantum mechanics, which proscribes any neutral frame of reference and implicitly if not explicitly formulates its theses (as relativity theory also does) on the basis of partial but overlapping views of the included observer. The incarnated ‘I think’ of the scientist is then ineliminable in the scientific account, entailing the inclusion of her or his consciousness within the account of the scientific result. While this might seem to epitomize the correlationist claim, Merleau-Ponty’s materialist because antiformalist (meaning antinominalist) account of physics conceptualizes reality otherwise than by a dichotomy between the in-itself and representation, and so proposes a phenomenological materialism beyond the terms of the correlation.
If Olkowski endorses the inclusion of the noncorrelational subject in the account of science – reiterating from a quite different angle Johnston’s demand with regard to the knower as well as the known subject – Myra J. Hird and Kathlees Yusoff present a fourth, and final, paradigm for apprehending the scientific endeavour than those put forward by Malik, Coombs and Olkowski. Hird and Yusoff propose that the scientific endeavour has to be apprehended not just as a descriptive-epistemological task but also as constructive and transformative. Technoscience as it is presented in this chapter is determined by an empirically organized object-oriented analysis of the anthropogenetic transformation of objects and their ontology. Specifically, as the waste and material surplus of contemporary consumption, the objects Hird and Yusoff attend to are more or less ubiquitous with timescales far exceeding those of individual human subjects via their biographies, and thereby inaugurate local, global and geological risks with radically unknown outcomes. The environmental and futural demands made by these objects are themselves to be understood only by their scientific determination. Though sociotechnically produced, the empirical and sociohistorical perdurance of such active – because polluting – objects requires a revision of relationality in which they can no longer be subordinate to intraanthropic consideration: the ethical other no longer has a human face and – to recover a theme from object-oriented strands of SR – relationality may bypass the human actor altogether. Furthermore, Hird and Yusoff propose that it is poststructuralist feminist theory, which stresses the importance of co-constituted material-discursive practices (as several of the contributors to this volume also endorse), that will enable the reconstitution of our epistemologies and ethics according to the already transformed ontologies. This theoretical-geneaological necessity is then imperative for constructing not only the future of the theories adequate to what materialism is and, because of practical exigencies, now needs to be; it is also an imperative to construct the future of the material conditions themselves.
Hird and Yusoff’s fundamental displacement of anthropic subjecthood from the centre of the socioscientific framework of waste environments returns the thematics of this volume back to the concerns of the inaugural chapters: how is the bifuraction of nature to which Shaviro draws attention constituted in the conditions of deeptime waste? What are the determining constraints of the here literalized-materialized environment on the construction of semantic-constituting systems as their real that Bryant exposes in Luhmann’s theory? And, following Johnston, what does the resultant anorganicity of the environment itself mean for the future of organic life? These questions, fabricated across the span of Genealogies of Speculation, could readily be multiplied. But doing so is, precisely, not to close a circle for either this volume or for SR. Attending to the still-viable prospects and lessons of poststructuralism, all chapters take leave from a doctrinal consolidation of SR – even Meillassoux’s own text formulates important revisions of his earlier formulations to establish clearly stated disagreements with the broad category of SR and, more particularly, several of his copresenters at the 2007 conference. For us, this is not a sign that SR is to be discarded, but rather that it inaugurates a multidirectional wealth of research, even and especially for the theoretical and historical doctrines that correctly see in it an adversary to their established commitments.
Notes
1.For a summary of these positions and their sources, see Steven Shaviro, ‘Foreign Territory: The Promises and Perils of Speculative Realism’, in this volume; see also Christoph Cox, Jenny Jaskey and Suhail Malik, ‘Editors’ Introduction’, in Christoph Cox, Jenny Jaskey and Suhail Malik (eds), Realism Materialism Art (Center for Curatorial Studies, Bard/Sternberg: Annandale-on-Hudson/Berlin, 2015), pp. 16–25.
2.Immanuel Kant, Critique of Pure Reason, trans. Werner S. Pluhar (Indianapolis: Hackett, 1996 [original German publication: 1781/87]). On the anthropic principle see John D. Barrow and Frank J. Tipler, The Anthropological Cosmological Principle (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1988).
3.For the logic of the apparently accidental – but in fact fortuitous – role of critique in abetting the transformation of capitalism by providing it with the resources to justify itself newly, especially since the 1990s, see Luc Boltanski and Ève Chiapello, The New Spirit of Capitalism, trans. Gregory Elliot (London: Verso, 2007). On the political incompetence of the humanities through the neoliberal restructuring of universities, see Armen Avanessian, Ethics of Knowledge – Poetics of Existence, trans. Nils F. Schott (Berlin: Sternberg, 2016).
4.The highly influential account of postmodernity as the delegitimization of grand narratives by small narratives is presented by Jean-François Lyotard, The Postmodern Condition: A Report on Knowledge, trans. Geoffrey Bennington and Brian Massumi (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1984)
5.For a striking diagnosis and criticism of the philosophical and theoretical legitimacy provided by poststructuralism (among other doctrines) for faith-based claims and repudiations of rational-scientific determinations of the real, see Quentin Meillassoux, After Finitude: An Essay on the Necessity of Contingency, trans. Ray Brassier (London: Continuum, 2008), chapter two.
6.See Robin Mackay and Armen Avanessian (eds), #accelerate: The Accelerationist Reader (Falmouth: Urbanomic, 2014). In particular: Alex Williams and Nick Srnicek, ‘#Accelerate: Manifesto for an Accelerationist Politics’, ibid., pp. 347–62; and Ray Brassier, ‘On Prometheanism and its Critics’, ibid., pp. 467–88.
7.See Graham Harman, The Quadruple Object (Alresford: Zero Books, 2011) for a synoptic account of Harman’s philosophical system; for a broader account of his object-oriented claims, see Harman, Bells and Whistles (Alresford: Zero Books, 2013). See also Levi R. Bryant, The Democracy of Objects (Ann Arbor: Open Humanities Press, 2011); Ian Bogost, Alien Phenomenology, Or, What It’s Like to be a Thing (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2012), and Timothy Morton, Hyperobjects: Philosophy and Ecology After the End of the World (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2013). For neomaterialist claims to deprioritize anthropic conditions for knowledge or relationality broadly sympathetic to overtly object-oriented philosophies but distinct to them, see among others: Bruno Latour, Reassembling the Social: An Introduction to Actor-Network-Theory (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2007); Jane Bennett, Vibrant Matter: A Political Ecology of Things (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2010); Manuel de Landa, Deleuze: History and Science (New York and Dresden: Atropos Press, 2010); and Diana Coole and Samantha Frost (eds), New Materialisms: Ontology, Agency, and Politics (Durham: Duke University Press, 2010).
8.Quentin Meillassoux, ‘Iteration, Reiteration, Repetition: A Speculative Analysis of the Sign Devoid of Meaning’, trans. Robin Mackay and Moritz Gansen, this volume, p. 117–97.
9.For this and the next claim, see Ray Brassier and Suhail Malik, ‘Reason is Inconsolable and Non-Conciliatory: Ray Brassier in Conversation with Suhail Malik’, in Cox et al. (eds), Realism Materialism Art, pp. 219–20. See also Peter Wolfendale, Object Oriented Philosophy: The Noumenon’s New Clothes (Falmouth: Urbanomic, 2014), chapter six.
10.This is a contention of strands of anticolonial and postcolonial theory. For a particularly striking historical example, see Ngugi Wa Thiong’O, Decolonising the Mind: The Politics of Language in African Literature (Portsmouth, NH: Heinemann, 1986). The claim has also been prevalent in French poststructuralist feminism countering the bourgeoise patriarchy sociologically associated with the normative stipulations of rational discourse in European modernity; see for example Catherine Clément and Hélène Cixous, Newly Born Woman, trans. Betsy Wing (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1986) and Luce Irigaray, This Sex Which Is Not One, trans. Catherine Porter (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1985).
11.See for example Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak, A Critique of Postcolonial Reason (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1999); Dipesh Chakrabarty, Provincializing Europe – New Edition (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2007); Aihwa Ong, Neoliberalism as Exception (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2006). Jonathan Israel contends that sociohistorical emancipatory claims have been formulated and warranted by those previously denied them through the extension or seizing of the Enlightenment’s own distinctively philosophical project of materialist and universalist rationalism. See Democratic Enlightenment: Philosophy, Revolution, and Human Rights, 1750–1790 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2013). A related argument, proposing that the democratic precept of the Haitian slave revolt of 1791–1804 informed the modern rationalism of Hegel’s philosophy, is proposed by Susan Buck Morss, Hegel, Haiti, and Universal History (Pittsburgh: University of Pittsburgh Press, 2009). On the deployment of ‘universalism’ as a strategic anticolonialist term in the policy coding of post-Second World War human rights regimes, see Lydia H. Liu, ‘Shadows of Universalism: The Untold Story of Human Rights around 1948’, Critical Inquiry 40(4) (Summer 2014): 385–417.
12.Max Horkheimer and Theodor Adorno, Dialectic of Enlightenment, trans. Edmund Jephcott (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2007 [original German publication: 1947]).
13.Herbert Marcuse, One-Dimensional Man: Studies in the Ideology of Advanced Industrial Society (Boston: Beacon, 1991 [original publication: 1964]). For a more recent diagnosis along these lines, see Axel Honneth, Pathologies of Reason, trans. James D. Ingram et al. (New York: Columbia University Press, 2009).
14.See Michel Foucault, The History of Sexuality: An Introduction, trans. Robert Hurley (London, Penguin, 1998), p. 101: ‘discourse transmits and produces power; it reinforces it, but also undermines and exposes it, renders it fragile and makes it possible to thwart it’.
15.See Donna Haraway, When Species Meet (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2007); Karen Barad, Meeting the Universe Halfway: Quantum Physics and the Entanglement of Matter and Meaning (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2007); and Karen Barad, ‘Posthuman Performativity: Toward an Understanding of How Matter Comes to Matter’, Signs: Journal of Women in Culture and Society 28(3), Spring 2003, pp. 801–31.
16.See Reza Negarestani, ‘Where is the Concept? (Localization, Ramification, Navigation)’, in Robin Mackay (ed.), When Site Lost the Plot (Falmouth: Urbanomic, 2015), pp. 225–51; Fernando Zalamea, ‘Peirce and Latin American “razonabilidad”: Forerunners of Transmodernity’, European Journal of Pragmatism and American Philosophy 1(1), 2009, p. 2. Available from http://lnx.journalofpragmatism.eu/wp-content/uploads/2009/11/09-zalamea.pdf [accessed 12 March 2015].
17.See Mackay and Avanessian (eds), #accelerate, in particular: Williams and Srnicek, ‘Manifesto’, p. 362, and Reza Negarestani, ‘The Labor of the Inhuman’, ibid., pp. 425–66.
18.Meillassoux, ‘Iteration’, pp. 121ff.
19.Brassier and Malik, ‘Reason’, pp. 221–4.
20.In Timothy Morton’s pithy formulation, ‘sentience is out of phase with objects, at least if you have a nervous system’. See ‘Here Comes Everything: The Promise of Object-Oriented Ontology’, Qui Parle 19(2) (Spring/Summer 2011): 176.
21.Graham Harman, ‘I am also of the opinion that materialism must be destroyed’, Environment and Planning D: Society and Space 28(5) (2010): 772–90.
22.‘Iteration’, p. 122.
23.Ibid., p. 132.
24.Ibid., pp. 157–8.