“Was not their mistake once more bred of the life of slavery that they had been living?—a life which was always looking upon everything, except mankind, animate and inanimate—‘nature,’ as people used to call it—as one thing, and mankind as another, it was natural to people thinking in this way, that they should try to make ‘nature’ their slave, since they thought ‘nature’ was something outside them” — William Morris


Tuesday, July 28, 2015

Speculative Realism in the Humanities: My Essay in the LA Review of Books

“UNLESS YOU’VE been hiding under a rock, you know that saying things about rocks is now something humanists are allowing themselves to do with increasing frequency. After 60 or so years of talking about how you can’t talk (directly) about reality, only about how to access (or indeed how to access how to access) reality, humanities scholars are talking about rocks, and not just (human) representations of rocks either. Indeed, you might find some of them talking about rocks’ representations of humans.” --read on


5 comments:

Shoggoth Kinetics said...

Great essay! Only thing I might say is that, as an artist, I'm not sure I'm as interested in messing around with cause and effect. Perhaps occupying some more nebulous confrontation with/between appearance and reality, science and the humanities?

Mark Shulgasser said...

so you're saying that tho we consider the ding-an-sich to be unknowable and therefore effectively non-existent, the mere possibility of its existence forces us to consider what its nature might be. Stepping out on this path logic's ex contradictiones quodlibet' (out of contradiction anything may emerge) lurks everywhere, and so our primary task is to slay the myriad useless concepts that will emerge, but still keep open eyes for the miraculous that is also possible.

Anonymous said...

One of the things I get from SR is that artists just DO mess around with cause & effect; the part that's a choice is how you do it. This then becomes a model for everyone besides artists, maybe....or maybe we're all artists already.

Anonymous said...

I'm pretty sure that "unknowable" and "nonexistent (effectively or otherwise)" are not at all in the same category, and that's the main point. Therefore concepts (useless or otherwise) are also miracles.

Anonymous said...

Great review, and one that answers a lot of questions I've been pondering lately. Now I really have to finish reading Descola so I can get to Shaviro!