Speculative Realism and OOO for Dummies (and Their Ventriloquists)

[Arthur Staaz]

I know there have been strong connections drawn between the works of Thomas Ligotti and progeny and the philosophical movements of speculative realism and object-oriented ontology (OOO). Is there anyone out there who might be able to give us a dumbed-down explanation of these movements? My sense is that both reject the Kantian idea of noumena - that we can never know things in themselves (noumenta) only our perceptions of things (phenomena). I also understand there is wide variations of thought within these movements, so that is fine. Also, if there are some good, accessible books or articles related to these movements, I would interested in hearing about them. Thanks.

[gveranon]

Quote Originally Posted by Arthur Staaz

I know there have been strong connections drawn between the works of Thomas Ligotti and progeny and the philosophical movements of speculative realism and object-oriented ontology (OOO). Is there anyone out there who might be able to give us a dumbed-down explanation of these movements? My sense is that both reject the Kantian idea of noumena - that we can never know things in themselves (noumenta) only our perceptions of things (phenomena). I also understand there is wide variations of thought within these movements, so that is fine. Also, if there are some good, accessible books or articles related to these movements, I would interested in hearing about them. Thanks.

I wouldn't say there are strong connections between the works of Ligotti and SR or OOO. Brassier's epigraph for Nihil Unbound (2007) is a Ligotti quote, and Brassier wrote the foreward for CATHR (2011), but I don't see any real influence in either direction between the two. Ligotti's philosophy doesn't come out of SR or OOO at all, and SR and OOO appear to have developed independently of Ligotti. There is some affinity between Brassier and Ligotti in their general pessimistic/negativistic orientation, but that seems to be the extent of it. Harman has named Lovecraft as the archetypal SR literary figure, but he hasn't written about Ligotti at all, as far as I know.

Some other writers (e.g. Thacker) have started to write about SR and Ligotti together, but that hybridizing is downstream of CATHR and the SR progenitors and may best be regarded as a later development.

All the above are just my perceptions, and I'm certainly not an expert in this area.

There has been some controversy over whether Speculative Realism is a meaningful term any more, and if it ever was. Harman thinks it is a meaningful term. Here is a "brief SR/OOO tutorial" he wrote in 2010. Here is a longer article, "The Current State of Speculative Realism," from 2013.

Brassier has washed his hands of SR, and apparently has only negative things to say about Harman and OOO at this point. See his postscript, "Speculative Autopsy," to Peter Wolfendale's Object-Oriented Philosophy: The Noumenon's New Clothes (2014). Brassier's 13-page postscript is certainly worth reading if you're interested in this topic, but it is not available online. I am about a quarter of the way through Wolfendale's 400-page attempted demolition of OOO. Wolfendale appears to be well versed in various areas of philosophy, continental and analytic, and he deploys his arguments fluently and with some flair -- I am enjoying the book more than I thought I would. It has not yet convinced me that OOO is nonsense; in fact, it renews my interest in OOO! Perhaps Harman's interpretation of Heidegger could be contested, and perhaps Harman could have presented his arguments more rigorously and thoroughly, and perhaps Wolfendale has managed to affix question marks to some tenets of OOO -- these are possibilities I don't dismiss (not that my amateurish opinion matters), but I am reminded again just how brilliant and rich OOO seems to me in all its intricacies and elaborations. In the postscript, Brassier makes good points against the notion that SR really describes much of anything, but it seems to me that there still is such a thing as SR in practice, however nebulous it may be, simply because various authors continue reading each other and bouncing ideas and arguments off each other in that general area.

Well, that didn't go very far in answering your question, but some of the things I pointed to above might help.

[xylokopos]

Quote Originally Posted by Arthur Staaz

I know there have been strong connections drawn between the works of Thomas Ligotti and progeny and the philosophical movements of speculative realism and object-oriented ontology (OOO). Is there anyone out there who might be able to give us a dumbed-down explanation of these movements? My sense is that both reject the Kantian idea of noumena - that we can never know things in themselves (noumenta) only our perceptions of things (phenomena). I also understand there is wide variations of thought within these movements, so that is fine. Also, if there are some good, accessible books or articles related to these movements, I would interested in hearing about them. Thanks.

In case you are still interested in SR/OOO, and adding to the very illuminating things gveranon wrote:

Ray Brassier has indeed distanced himself from SR, as far back as 2011, when he called SR "an orgy of stupidity" perpetrated mostly by graduate students on various blogs, the internet being uniquely unsuited for serious philosophical debate and evolution in his opinion. It is possible (but not at all certain) that he was obliquely referring to the online work of Nick Land, another of the Founding Four of SR, a thinker who has gone so far beyond the pale of what could be considered academic philosophy, he is practically untouched by criticism originating from people who earn their bread teaching that stuff. I find Land's writing to be brilliantly deranged in all sorts of ways - reading Fanged Noumena is a twisted but invigorating experience - but these days he has recast himself as a guru-like figure in the Neoreactionary/Dark Enlightenment movement and is concerned with techno-utopias, HBD and (unless I completely misundersand him) immanentizing the eschaton through unbridled capitalism.

But let's get back on track.

To properly understand the psycho-philosophical impetus behind Speculative Realism, you have to consider the extremely traumatic and infuriating intellectual interaction that Philosophy students have with the work of Immanuel Kant. Kant is hated even by those who remain properly Kantian in their Epistemology and their Ethics. I don't think I can adequately summarise the issue within a forum post. In any case, SR mostly takes offense with what is called "correlationism", a perhaps unkind summation of Kant's basic epistemological stance.

Object-Oriented Philosophy on the other hand, grows out of a fertile but not really antagonistic engagement with the philosophy of Martin Heidegger. Graham Harman takes Heidegger's tool analysis and furthermore redefines 'object' to mean something way broader that is commonly understood. I recently purchased his Quadruple Object and I have read chunks of his book on Lovecraft. He is very readable and engaging. He also dislikes Kant. [I am going to have to find the time and write more about that at some point]

Lovecraft is of tremendous importance to both SR and OOO thinkers. Harman asserts that Lovecraft is more important than Joyce or Proust. Again, I will try to find time to return to this and expand, but at this point in time, it seems more than certain to me that Lovecraft will become a sort of totemic/emblematic figure for a number of philosophies with a decidedly anti-humanist, post-Kantian, anti-democratic, anti-egalitarian, pro-Singularity, techno-elitist irrationalist bent. I predict that Lovecraft will be appropriated and misappropriated in the way Nietzsche has been in the past and that the untimely character of his work will make him not a canonical writer as Joshi predicts, but a type of Borgesian heresiarch who will inspire techno-pessimists and nerdy elitists for ever and ever.

Or maybe not.

Damn. I hope some of this helps.

[MTC]

A recent text on the speculative movements written from an art scene, critical perspective:
Inside Out by Daniel Spaulding, 20 October 2015

This quote caught my attention:

"the rehabilitation of H.P. Lovecraft as an evidently major figure in the history of speculative thought ... seems straightforwardly reducible to kitsch: Carl Sagan-esque paeans to the wonder and weirdness of the cosmos."

As a counterbalance to this critical reading I'll post another text as well: a fictive account of speculative thought around the notion of a "viral aesthetics of horror": The Speculative Horror Academy by John Cunningham, 23 October 2013

[xylokopos]

I read Harman's The Quadruple Object, which is a concise and decent introduction to his object-oriented ontology. I am somewhat familiar with the two philosophers Harman mostly draws upon, Husserl and Heidegger, so it is hard to tell how digestible his work is by someone with no background knowledge of phenomenology, tool-analysis, the fourfold, etc.

Anyway, and working in broad strokes here, Harman:

a. Retains the Husserlian distinction between real and intentional objects, as well as that between eidetic features/real qualities and sensual qualities,

b. sees great value in Heidegger's tool analysis (especially the 'presence-at-hand'/'readiness-at-hand' dichotomy) and

c. rehabilitates Heidegger's later work regarding the Fourfold on the basis that it is not merely poetic obscurantism but a solid fountation for an ontology of unity and plurality, of givenness and concealment.

He then goes on to present his own version of ontology, which maps out the various relations and permutations between objects and qualities and is novel in at least two ways:

a. It widens the definition of object and
b. it accepts real object - real object interaction that is meaningful and philosophically relevant, even if it is not part of the human - world interaction.

Harman's theory feels less like a grand, speculative exercise and more like an effort to consolidate 'grains of truth' inherent in all philosophies of Human Access, that is, correlationist accounts of reality: phenomenology, naturalism, empiricism and materialism.

Near the end of the book, Harman briefly discusses how he relates to and how he deviates from the other Speculative Realists: Meillassoux, Grant and Brassier.

[Mr. Veech]

Here's a terrible paper I wrote on Meillassoux, Brassier, and Laurelle which I was going to use as my writing sample for graduate school. I can't be bothered to edit it and send it out, so I suppose some people here might enjoy it.

Correlationism and the Transition from Transcendental Idealism to Transcendental Realism | Kevin R. Lewis - Academia.edu

"I wouldn't say there are strong connections between the works of Ligotti and SR or OOO. Brassier's epigraph for Nihil Unbound (2007) is a Ligotti quote, and Brassier wrote the foreward for CATHR (2011), but I don't see any real influence in either direction between the two. Ligotti's philosophy doesn't come out of SR or OOO at all, and SR and OOO appear to have developed independently of Ligotti. There is some affinity between Brassier and Ligotti in their general pessimistic/negativistic orientation, but that seems to be the extent of it." - gveranon

This seems right to me.