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

Steven Shaviro’s The Universe of Things ends with a pair of telling sentences. After ticking off the names of some of the most prominent thinkers of and interlocutors for the new realisms, Shaviro notes that they alone cannot constitute the work of speculative aesthetics he envisions. “Such a speculative aesthetics is still to be constructed,” he writes. “Kant, Whitehead and Deleuze only provide us with its rudiments” (p. 156). Were this the end of the book, it would place us in the familiar philosophical territory of the call to the future, which beckons us toward incipience at the same time that it marks its formlessness. But the book doesn’t end there; it goes on for another two sentences: “Indeed, since every aesthetic encounter is singular, anything like a general aesthetics is impossible. And so, rather than offer a stirring conclusion, I had better leave it at that” (p. 156; italics his). This is the true end, the final words of the book: “I had better leave it at that.”

When I first came to this moment, after several days of intensive reading, I felt a little irritation but mostly wry amusement at Shaviro’s puncturing of the inflated romantic mood of the call with a little shrug-shouldered bathos. The more I thought about it, however, the more it seemed clear that it was itself a bit of wry amusement. After all, the singularity of the encounter with the aesthetic is exactly what such a call to the future looks to preserve from the systematizing maw of general theories, very much including the one offered by The Universe of Things and the school of speculative realism with which it is engaged. This is not to suggest that we should take these concluding sentences as representing important pressure points in Shaviro’s profoundly invigorating book. I point to them, instead, because of their startling congruence with the contemporary theoretical landscape. In their wry irresolution, those telling sentences ask us to imagine a mosaic of singular responses and their potential for systematization without collapsing the former into the latter.

The same tension characterizes the profusion of new theories and methods in the humanities and social sciences. Compared with the pinnacle of poststructural critique in the late twentieth century, the theoretical landscape today is populated by a motley crew of challenges, turns, and methods that circulate alongside symptomatic reading practices.³ While bound by their oppositional stance toward past practices, these movements nonetheless emerge from distinctive originating concerns, engage a range of interlocutors, and offer widely divergent responses. They may not even share an audience. An advocate of Heather Love’s thin description⁴ may or may not be familiar with Karen Barad’s agential realism⁵; digital humanists in the maker mode might practice something that resembles Ian Bogost’s philosophical carpentry⁶ without realizing it, while Bogost and his colleagues in object oriented ontology may or may not be aware of the tangency of their polemic to Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick’s blistering critique of paranoid reading⁷ in her 2003 book Touching Feeling. And while Bruno Latour’s little essay “Why Has Critique Run Out of Steam? From Matters of Fact to Matters of Concern”⁸ has become a common touchstone, the meaning of the central term is as variegated as the movements that have arisen to replace it. The profusion of new methods marks the fecundity of our moment. At the same time, it indicates a certain jittery unease. Struck in imperative mood, these methods belie the very effects of dispersion and dissemination to which they also respond. After all, critique presumably ran out of steam on its own and not just because of Latour’s speech act. Yet even the least proscriptive of these methods, the ones most invested in crafting room for surprise and inviting in vulnerability, advocate for a new set of theoretical norms and a generalized system in which to cast them. The very profusion of named movements, then, might be understood as an intense demand for some new consensus.

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