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Panel Discussion DOCUMENT UFD004 Amanda Beech Mikko Canini Mark Fisher Iain Hamilton Grant Robin Mackay The Real Thing: Panel Discussion In this panel discussion held as part of The Real Thing at Tate Britain in 2010, participants explore the aesthetic, political, and philosophical questions raised by Speculative Realism URBANOMIC / DOCUMENTS ROBIN MACKAY: Perhaps the best way to sum up the The crucial point is that this would make nonsense of core concern of speculative realism is in a question: any scientific statement of the aforementioned sort, URBANOMIC.COM How can human thought access a reality that would because it simply doesn’t make sense to say ‘this star exist before, after, or without the human? Upon burnt out two million years ago—for us’. This is what which another question immediately arises: Why Meillassoux has dubbed the ‘correlationist’ problem, would we assume that thought can indeed do so? then. It seems to present us with an acute conflict The various figures within speculative realist thought between the powers of thought, as the Humanities have different answers to these questions, and in- understands them, bounded by the finite frame of deed different reasons for asking them. This is the the human, and what would seem to be the cognitive first thing to emphasise: SR is not really a unified achievements of the scientific world-image, the very doctrine; it’s more of a set of shared problematics. material basis of modern human civilization.1 Two of the authors who have been associated with Iain Hamilton Grant’s book Philosophies of Nature the term, Quentin Meillassoux and Ray Brassier, take after Schelling2 begins with a different question: as their starting point the status of scientific knowl- Why should thought itself be excluded from a nat- edge: How is it that we are able to make statements uralizing principle: thought is produced, thought is about, for example, stars that are billions of years synthesized, and therefore philosophy has to think older than our planet? What is it that we’re talking its own production. about when we talk about phenomena that existed before they could have been manifest to any mind? What unifies SR is not so much the starting points Because such statements only make sense if they and the traditions from which its proponents hail, as refer to some sort of real that precedes the capac- their shared refusal of this collapse into correlation- ity for its manifestation to consciousness (presum- ism. For one thing, as Graham Harman has rightly ably human). The only alternative would be a strain said, the latter simply makes philosophy a lot less of relativism holding that reality—including the re- interesting. And I think one of the driving forces be- alities indexed by such scientific statements—ulti- hind SR has been a will to make philosophy more mately consists in the fact of our linguistic or social interesting; and more interested in the world beyond agreement on a certain way of speaking, a consen- human discourse, language, and consciousness. sus among consciousnesses. 1. See the ‘dossier’ on Speculative Realism in Collapse II. 2. (London and New York: Continuum, 2008). 1 from which speculative realists are trying to find an A realist philosophy is not some kind of escape route. reversion to our default perception of a world of ‘real things’, but a necessarily Just as the philosophical realism we are talking about speculative enterprise is not a naive realism, the way in which the artists selected for this event have addressed realism is not primarily in terms of realistic depiction; there is But in any case, this real we are talking about, a divergence here between realism and representa- whether it’s addressed by quantum physics, geol- tion, and I think we can use SR to think back into art ogy, naturephilosophy, or a theory concerning the history in various ways, and to think about what is relations between objects amongst themselves, is philosophically at stake when realism becomes di- not a naive realism—naive realism is as much to be vorced from representation, indexicality, or authen- avoided as the slide into correlationism: Harman has ticity; and even antagonistic towards them. called it, instead, a ‘weird realism’. For example, the reality that contemporary physics tells us about has And as Mark also pointed out in his article, we need no correlative correspondence with our everyday to address the question of the political stakes of SR. experience of reality; and so SR, I would say, com- We’ll open the discussion by asking the panelists prises both the thought that contemporary realism what they think the wider cultural ramifications of de facto involves a speculative point of view, and the SR might be, and firstly I’d like to ask Mark about insistence that a realist philosophy is not some kind this political dimension. URBANOMIC / DOCUMENTS of reversion to our default perception of a world of MARK FISHER ‘real things’, but a necessarily speculative enterprise. : I think we’re living at a time when the URBANOMIC.COM word ‘reality’ is at a premium, right at the centre of One starting point for this Late at Tate event, The culture. But the model of reality that is pushed by Real Thing, was Mark Fisher’s recent article in mainstream entertainment media, and indeed by a Frieze in which he asked what the wider cultur- supporting political culture, neoliberal culture, which al ramifications of this move towards new kinds of is sadly still around us, is a very banal and reduced realism might be. This question is very pertinent sense of what reality is. At the centre of this model on a number of levels. Firstly just because of the of reality is what I call psychobiographical individ- fact—and we’re proving it right now—that SR has ualism—the reality TV show, the idea that we are engendered a lot of interest outside the realm of somehow seeing some unadorned reality there. academic philosophy. That’s simply a fact, people Now, as Robin’s already indicated, of course this are interested in it. Someone was telling me tonight has implications for culture and art—this very re- that geographers are particularly interested in SR duced, narcissistic, and neurotic model of reality thought: who would have thought that geographers which is not only human-centred, but centred on would be coming to speculative philosophy for new a particular ultra-banal understanding that humans tools, this is fascinating—and what’s more, ending have of themselves. And what SR has done is ex- up at an art show. Because—secondly—we find posed that model of reality as a very limited and lo- that artists are evidently intrigued by these devel- cal construction. opments and are using SR in various different ways; and this is not all one-way, since, equally, I think, art and art discourse have anticipated many of the The world disclosed by science and themes and questions of realism that are emerging the world of our own phenomenologi- in SR. Of course, if artists were just appropriating cal self-perceptions are completely at concepts from philosophy and illustrating or exem- odds with each other plifying them, that wouldn’t be particularly interest- ing. In fact, the concerns of SR are echoed, or par- alleled, in art discourse, and in the struggle against So, to take the long shot and to return to the ques- certain orthodoxies whose roots are similar to or tion about the relation between art history and phi- identical to those of the philosophical orthodoxies losophy, I would say that for me the starting point of 2 SR as philosophy is Kant. Now, Kant is the most dis- puted figure in SR. For some, he’s the figure against which the whole of SR must be defined. But for me, Kant is in many ways the first speculative realist, or rather he opens up SR even though he abjures it himself. What Kant does simply is to register, you might say, the trauma of enlightenment, which is that the world disclosed by science and the world of our own phenomenological self-perceptions are completely at odds with each other. Science simply tells us this; science explodes naive realism, the idea the world simply is just like it appears to us; which is kind of what the meat-and-potatoes British empir- icist tradition started off trying to say: the world’s just like it appears to us, forget all these abstrac- tions. Really, Kant’s starting point is the problems that British empiricism got into when it tried to main- tain that, and couldn’t do so convincingly. So, as op- we see the famous skull. And the point is, we can’t posed to that naive realism, where things are just as see the two together. The skull, in a way, stands in we experience them to be, if you don’t start from for the real; in the sense that your death is more URBANOMIC / DOCUMENTS experience, but from something else completely dif- real than you are. But what you’re seeing in science ferent, then the world turns out to be totally alien to now, and what SR is interested in, is that your own URBANOMIC.COM how we actually experience it. And Kant registers death is banal. You also now face solar catastroph- this disjunct in philosophy in a fundamental way. ism—we know it’s going to happen: you know more certainly than you know you’re going to wake up to- Now, the subsequent history of philosophy in the morrow, that the sun is going to explode.
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