GRAHAM HARMAN 1. CORRELATIONISM HE URRENT TATE OF PECULATIVE T C S S In a recent online interview, Speculations founder REALISM Paul Ennis remarks as follow: “Continental realism is the fringe of the fringe. It might be popular for Elsewhere I have told the history of Speculative now, but we can already see a sort of knuckling down Realism, and will not repeat it here.1 Though some by the antirealists…the backlash. Most of them find prefer the lower-case phrase “speculative realism,” the whole anti-correlationism thing silly and I don’t I deliberately use capital letters, since Speculative think continental realism is actually a threat to the Realism is a proper name. It originally referred to dominance of antirealism…”3 What Ennis neglects to an assembly of four philosophers for an April 2007 mention is that the continental “antirealists” would workshop in London: Ray Brassier, Iain Hamilton never even have called themselves antirealists until Grant, Quentin Meillassoux, and the author of this quite recently. The fact that we speak of continental article. So much for the history of the movement. antirealism at all is due partly to the counter-models Any discussion of Speculative Realism needs to of Speculative Realism and Manuel DeLanda, and begin by avoiding the intermittent and pointless partly to Lee Braver’s triumphalistic antirealist book debate over whether Speculative Realism “really A Thing of This World.4 The year 2002 witnessed the exists.” This question comes five years too late to be publication of my book Tool-Being and DeLanda’s meaningful, and generally takes the form of a put- Intensive Science and Virtual Philosophy, both of them down rather than a bona fide question. Speculative candid statements of realism.5 This was something Realism is now the topic of a thriving book series at new in the continental tradition. While analytic a major university press, and the subject of at least philosophy has always been attentive to the realism one forthcoming monograph.2 It is embedded in vs. anti-realism debate, in continental circles the the editorial policy of several philosophy journals. mere act of proposing such a debate was treated as It has become a terme d’art in architecture, archae- a sort of vulgar gaffe. Realism vs. anti-realism had ology, geography, the visual arts, and even history. been defined as a “pseudo-problem,” especially in It has crossed national boundaries with ease, and is the phenomenological school that set the agenda for surely the central theme of discussion in the growing nearly a century’s worth of continental philosophy. continental philosophy blogosphere. Speculative Re- It was said for example that there is no idealism alism is the topic of several postdoctoral fellowships in Husserl, since intentionality is “always already offered in the United States this year. It has been the outside itself” in aiming at intentional objects. More subject of semester-long classes at universities as recently there has been the emergence of “Derrida well as graduate theses in Paris. Though there are was a realist” claimants such as John Caputo and still tough tests ahead concerning the breadth and Michael Marder, who make their case not by chal- durability of Speculative Realism, it has long since lenging previous readings of Derrida, but simply passed the “existence” test to a far greater degree by bending the meaning of the term “realism” to than most of its critics. signify what Derrida was doing all along.6 This article is meant as a rapid geographic sur- In short, we now have a rather lively realism vs. vey of the basic intellectual differences among the antirealism debate in continental philosophy that Speculative Realists as of late 2012. This is not the simply did not exist ten years ago. The reason that place for detailed conceptual engagement with these 3 Paul Ennis interviewed by Liam Jones, Figure/Ground, authors, which I have done elsewhere and will con- November 12, 2012: http://figureground.ca/interviews/ tinue to do. Also, for reasons of space I will confine paul-ennis/ myself to the original 2007 group along with the 4 Lee Braver, A Thing of This World: A History of Continen- object-oriented ontology strand to which I belong. tal Anti-Realism (Evanston, IL: Northwestern University No slight is intended to those left unanalyzed here Press, 2007). (Steven Shaviro comes to mind, among others). 5 See Graham Harman, Tool-Being: Heidegger and the Meta- physics of Objects (Chicago: Open Court, 2002.); Manuel DeLanda, Intensive Science and Virtual Philosophy (London: Continuum, 2002). 1 For the fullest version of the story to have reached print 6 See John D. Caputo, “For Love of Things Themselves: so far, see of Graham Harman, Quentin Meillassoux: Phi- Derrida’s Hyper-realism,” 2001: http://www.jcrt.org/ar- losopy in the Making (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University chives/01.3/caputo.shtml; Michael Marder, The Event of Press, 2011), 77-80. the Thing: Derrida’s Post-Deconstructive Realism (Toronto: 2 Peter Gratton, Speculative Realism: An Introduction (Net- University of Toronto Press, 2009). work Education Press, forthcoming 2013). 22 Speculations IV Speculations: A Journal of Speculative Realism IV (2013) ISSN: 2327-803X http://speculations-journal.org debate did not exist was because continental phi- you reject a realist position, you cannot treat it as a losophy was in fact correlationist, just as Meillassoux poorly formulated cliché, as Husserl and Heidegger holds.7 In his 2002 book, DeLanda praised “[those] and most of their descendants unfortunately did. philosophers who grant reality full autonomy from Instead, you have to adopt either a correlationist the human mind, disregarding the difference be- position or an outright idealist one. The shared basis tween the observable and the unobservable, and the of Speculative Realist philosophies is a rejection anthropocentrism this distinction implies. These of all correlationist positions, and that rejection philosophers are said to have a realist ontology.”8 has had palpable impact on the landscape of con- With some rare and ineffectual exceptions (the tinental philosophy. The question is not, “What wonderful Xavier Zubíri comes to mind9), no one has Speculative Realism accomplished?” but rather, in the continental tradition was declaring realism “What will Speculative Realism still accomplish?” devoid of ironic etymological tricks prior to 2002. These And here we reach a different and more interesting earlier continental philosophers generally held that topic: the ongoing duel between various forms of realism was a pseudo-problem, since we cannot think Speculative Realism. of humans without world or world without humans, but only of a primal correlation or rapport between 2. DIFFERING FORMS OF ANTI-CORRELATIONISM the two. I had already used the term “philosophies of access” to describe this phenomenon, but Meil- During the 2007 Speculative Realism workshop lassoux’s “correlationism” is catchier and more to at Goldsmiths, I noted that the four participants the point. Correlationism is the doctrine that we could be grouped up in differing teams of two vs. can only speak of the human/world interplay, not two or three vs. one, depending on which points of human or world in their own right. of disagreement were viewed as most important.10 As Ennis mentions, there are now some who call Slavoj Žižek makes an exaggerated version of the the critique of correlationism “silly,” as I heard with same point when he describes Speculative Realism my own ears at perfectly good events in Germany as a Greimasian “semiotic square” formed from and Sweden during 2012. That is exactly the word the axes of science/anti-science and religion/an- that is being used: much like “idiosyncratic” in ti-religion. But the latter axis is possible only due the 1980’s/1990’s, “silly” is today’s term of choice to Žižek’s incorrect portrayal of me as a “religious” for continental philosophers who want to dismiss philosopher.11 In fact, all we can really be sure of without argument something that they happen to is a twofold cut that should not be described à la dislike. But Meillassoux’s critique of correlationism Žižek as science/anti-science, but as what I would makes a rather lucid metaphysical claim. It says that call epistemist/anti-epistemist. To explain the much continental philosophy is neither realist nor meaning of “epistemism,” we must briefly consider idealist, but correlationist. That is to say, it adopts Meillassoux’s April 2012 Berlin lecture.12 Despite an intermediate position in which we cannot say my disagreement with most of the content of that that the world either exists or fails to exist outside lecture, I agree completely with Meillassoux’s claim human thought. Instead, all we can talk about is that the key division places him and Brassier on the correlation of world and thought in their in- one side of the fence and me and Grant on the other. separability. This claim by Meillassoux can only In the aforementioned Berlin lecture, Meillassoux be right or wrong, not “silly.” And if Meillassoux is clarifies an ambiguity in the term “correlationism.” wrong to say that most continental philosophers are In After Finitude, the term was sometimes used to correlationists, then they must be either realists or refer solely to a skeptical position that cannot be idealists, and it is their duty to state which of these sure about what might exist outside thought, as in positions they prefer. the philosophy of Kant. But at other times, “correla- To summarize, it is impossible for continental tionism” was broadened to include outright idealism. philosophers simply to dodge the critique of cor- This ambiguity is clarified in the Berlin lecture, relationism made by Speculative Realism. Even if which draws a new distinction in terminology.