Speculative Realism Is Speculative Aesthetics (Three New Books on Speculative Realism)

I open this review essay with a confession. Despite all recent argument to the contrary, I remain attached to a way of thinking that, to a person, speculative realists agree is wrong, bad, compromised, or inadequate. I confess: I think of myself as a phenomenologist. In other words, I am a crass and unrepentant correlationist. Perhaps predictably, I also tend to think that “correlationism” means something different from what its critics do. That said, my goal in this review essay is not to disagree with the speculative realist position in general, nor with the particular variants of those claims worked out in these three wonderful new books—Sparrow’s polemic, Gratton’s critical overview, or Shaviro’s new Whiteheadian position. I know I’m not going to convince anybody that they should love Merleau-Ponty instead of mistrusting him. And anyway, it would be quite imperious of me to try to dispel speculative realists’ epistemic illusions, since I really think we can’t know what we can’t know, and I really don’t think I know better than speculative realism.

More to the point, my argument here is that what is at issue in these three new books, and in speculative realism (SR) more generally, is precisely not knowledge, even if sometimes it looks like it. But just because we can’t know something, that doesn’t mean we can’t talk about it. Ultimately, if I remain unconvinced that I should give up my fascination with the much misunderstood Merleau-Ponty, I nevertheless won’t try to correct any misunderstandings about him or his phenomenologist friends. (This essay was difficult to write, primarily because my initial posture was defensive in precisely that way.) Instead, I want to try to specify why such misunderstandings might be beside the point.

To do so, I would like to turn to aesthetics, albeit in a particular way—one that resonates with Shaviro’s work (if only because his thinking on aesthetics has been so important for my own), but which also takes some distance from it. Aesthetics has been an important question for both the negative and positive aspects of speculative realism. Everybody seems to agree—and certainly Sparrow, Gratton, and Shaviro all do—that what holds SR together as a movement or impulse (if, indeed, it does hold together) is its critique of correlationism: speculative realists share the same negative impetus, to which Meillassoux gave a convenient name. We also all seem to agree on one other thing: that the speculative realists themselves disagree intensely as to what might follow from this critique. The positive claims of various SR philosophers are mutually incompossible, even bitterly opposed, and more than a few of them reject the label and the movement. I cannot offer more than a few tentative indications here, but it seems to me that the really important question is this: What are the grounds for disagreement between the speculative realists themselves?

Shaviro offers one answer to this question in his discussion of Harman. He writes that the decision between Harman’s object-oriented ontology (OOO) and Whitehead’s intensely relational ontology is primarily an aesthetic one: “Speculative philosophy has an irreducibly aesthetic dimension” (p. 43). Here I agree with him, emphatically. My thesis is that the force of speculative philosophy lies in its specifically aesthetic appeal. To put this another way, the reason I might want to encounter Harman’s OOO or Brassier’s bracing nihilism, or any of the other variants of SR, is their exhilarating aesthetic work: they allow or engender an encounter with the absolute that is beautiful or sublime—or voluptuous, fecund, terrifying, horrifying, intense, or any of the other aesthetic...