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Levi R. Bryant Politics and Speculative Realism

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Levi R. Bryant Politics and Speculative Realism LEVI R. BRYANT is striking that debates surrounding SR have been focused on questions of the social and political. In OLITICS AND PECULATIVE EALISM P S R what follows my aim is to outline just why SR has generated these controversies and discuss what it Is it our fault if the networks are simultaneously real, like nature, might have to offer to politically oriented theory narrated, like discourse, and collective, like society? — Latour1 in our current historical moment. 1. STRANGE BEDFELLOWS 2.THE BASIC SCHEMA OF CRITICAL THEORY SR AND SOCIAL AND POLITICAL THEORY Broadly speaking, a critical theory (CT) can be Since its birth in 2007, speculative realism (SR) has defined as any theory that contests the naturalness generated a great deal of controversy in journals, the of categories pertaining to human identities and theory blogosphere, and at conferences. One would social relations, revealing how they are socially search in vain for a unified “speculative realist” constructed, contingent, and historical. Arguably, the position or doctrine. The four original speculative first formulation of critical theory can be found in realists who coined the term—Ray Brassier, Gra- Lucretius’ De Rerum Natura. There Lucretius writes, ham Harman, Iain Hamilton Grant, and Quentin Meillassoux—argue for very different ontologies Whatever exists you will always find connected, and epistemologies, opposed to one another in a To these two things, or as by-products of them; number of respects. If there is anything that unites Connected meaning that the quality their positions, it is 1) a defense of some variant of Can never be subtracted from its object realism or materialism, and 2) a critique of correla- No more than weight from stone, or heat from fire, tionism. First coined by Meillassoux, correlationism Wetness from water. On the other hand, is the thesis that we can only ever speak of being as Slavery, riches, freedom, poverty, a correlate of the subject and never the world and War, peace, and so on, transitory things subject apart from one another.2 Beyond that, the Whose comings and goings do not alter substance— sort of realism (or materialism) each of these think- These, and quite properly, we call by-products.3 ers defends and how they critique correlationism diverges quite substantially. Lucretius draws a distinction between properties I will not here discuss the various speculative that belong to things themselves such as mass, and realist positions nor the many divergent variants of properties that arise from how we relate to other object-oriented ontology. Rather, in this article what things such as slavery. Unlike heat which is an interests me are the controversies that have emerged intrinsic property of fire, slavery is not an intrinsic around SR. These debates have not primarily taken property of a person, but rather people are made place in the discipline of philosophy, but have rather into slaves by other people. unfolded in disciplines outside of philosophy such While a number of people—generally those in as literary studies, media studies, the social sciences, power or who stand to benefit from a particular and variants of social and political thought inflect- way of ordering society—might try to claim that ed by neo-Marxist theory, feminism, race theory, people are naturally slaves, that sexuality is naturally and queer theory. Given that correlationism is a structured in particular ways, that certain groups rather classical and abstract epistemological issue are naturally inferior, that a particular economic in philosophy, the question arises as to just why a system is the natural form of exchange, and so on, a fairly technical issue in philosophy has generated critical theory reveals how we have constructed these such heated debate in politically oriented branches things. Two thousand years later, Marx will sum up of the humanities? Moreover, given that SR, in the the elementary gesture of critical theory when he hands of its original four founders has been a rather writes that the commodity “is nothing but the defi- apolitical set of philosophical concerns focused nite social relation between men themselves which on questions of the being of the real, the nature assumes…, for them, the fantastic relation between of materiality, and questions of epistemology, it things.”4 When purchasing a commodity, we take 1 Bruno Latour, We Have Never Been Modern, trans. Catherine 3 Lucretius, The Way Things Are: The De Rerum Natura of Titus Porter (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1993), 6. Lucretius Carus, trans. Rolfe Humphries (Bloomington: 2 Quentin Meillassoux, After Finitude: An Essay on the Indiana University Press, 1969), 33. Necessity of Contingency, trans. Ray Brassier (New York: 4 Karl Marx, Capital: Volume 1, trans. Ben Fowkes (New Continuum, 2008), 5. York: Penguin Classics, 1990), 165. Speculations: A Journal of Speculative Realism IV (2013) Levi R. Bryant 15 ISSN: 2327-803X http://speculations-journal.org our relationship to this object as 1) merely being a illustrates this point nicely in his example of the relation between a person, the seller, and the thing, two doors in “The Instance of the Letter in the and 2) treat the value as being an intrinsic feature Unconscious”5 : of the thing itself. For example, we treat the value of gold as being a real property of the thing like its ladies gentlemen color or atomic weight. What Marx reveals in his celebrated analysis of commodity fetishism is that value arises from the labor required to produce the commodity. The consequences of this are profound, for it allows Marx to demonstrate that a) exchange relations are not merely relations between a person and a thing, but open on to a broader network of social relations by virtue of the productive relations that go into producing the commodity, b) that value is not an intrinsic feature of things, but arises out of a particular system of production, c) that value arises It will be noted that the two doors in Lacan’s dia- from workers, not owners or capital, and d) that these gram are identical. Materially, physically, there is no relations under capitalism are unjust insofar as they difference between the door on the left and the one usurp workers of what is rightfully theirs because on the right. Apart from their position in time and more value is produced in production than workers space, there is nothing in the doors themselves that are compensated for in their labor. Accompanying makes them one type of door rather than another. this analysis, Marx presents a history of modes of Put differently, there is nothing in thereferent of the production showing that in the past there have signifiers <<Ladies>> and <<Gentlemen>> that makes been very different systems of production as well one door the Ladies’ room and another door the as the possibility of other modes of production. In Gentlemen’s room. It is instead the signifieritself— doing so, he thus shows that the capitalist mode of the social and cultural component—that introduces production is social and historical, undermining this difference between the doors. the thesis that it is a natural universal or that social Drawing on the Peircian concept of the sign, we relations have to be this way. can thus see how critical theories proceed in their Formally, rather than at the level of content, Marx’s distinctive form of critique. Peirce argues that signs analysis of commodity fetishism will become the are a triadic relational structure composed of a guiding schema of revolutionary social and political sign-vehicle or the sound or writing that conveys analysis for critical theory. Henceforth, the critical the sign, an interpretant or the conceptualized operation will consist in showing a fetish—in meaning behind the sign, and the referent or that Marx’s sense—at work in those social formations which the sign denotes in the world: and relations claiming to be natural and therefore ineluctably necessary. Thus, for example, where sense (interpretant) sexist, heteronormative, and racist discourses will argue that forms of social inequality are justified b because certain groups of people are intrinsically inferior to others and therefore are unsuited to various occupations and naturally need to be led, the critical theorist will show how these identities are socially constructed, historical, and have been a c and can be otherwise. Where the apologist will argue sign vehicle (representanem) referent that capitalism is the natural form of exchange and that it has existed at all times and places through- out history, the critical theorist will demonstrate In essentialist discourses such as racism, those how capitalism arose under particular historical properties that make a thing the type of thing it is, conditions and that other systems of production are found in the referent. They are held to be what and distribution are possible. The critical gesture thus consists in showing that 5 Jacques Lacan, “The Instance of the Letter in the Uncon- something we took to be a property of the things scious or Reason Since Freud,” in Écrits: The First Complete Edition in English, trans. Bruce Fink (New York: W.W. Norton themselves is instead social and cultural. Lacan & Company, 2006), 416. 16 Speculations IV Lucretius called “connected properties.” In other appears necessarily in an inverse form: they think words, the essentialist argues that things themselves that they are subjects giving the king royal treat- have these properties regardless of how we speak ment because the king is already himself, outside about them. By contrast, the critical theorist attempts the relationship to his subjects, a king; as if the to show that what we took to be a property of the determination of “being-a-king” were a “natural” referent is instead—in Saussurean language—an property of the person of a king.6 effect of the signifier (sign-vehicle) and the signi- fied (interpretant) sorting or carving up the world That framework that sees “being-a-king” as a natural in particular ways.
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