One of the reasons why Ive been getting
excited about the speculative realist or objected-oriented `moment’ in philosophy
is because of the issues it raises for thinking about the `geo’: earth
processes, planetary dynamics, minerality and so on.
So much of the renewal of interest in materiality
and non human agency over the last couple of decades – even, or especially
– that which has come out of geography, has focussed on living things, or
on technological objects and networks, leading to a strange silence about earth
processes (odd to me, anyway, as a relatively recent migrant from sociology to
geography….)
I think there’s a reason for this,
and it relates to Simon’s timely and understandable concern about the disabling
the political. I’d push it the other way and say that a lot of critical
thought around the nonhuman has been so insistent on *not* drifting away from fields of
immediate political relevance (things that can and ought to be contested and
done differently) that it has effectively steered clear of earth or cosmological
processes – or anything else which resists a certain immediacy of political
purchase and recuperation (and that for me includes work by Latour, most of ANT
and perhaps even non-representational geography).
But acknowledging that great chunks of reality
aren’t always already political, aren’t easily open to re-negotiation
or recuperation, doesn’t necessarily threaten critical political
projects: it might just help us think through what is rare and precious about
the political, and where our energies are best directed….and even, how to
construct a politics around our reception or inheritance of the things we cant
do differently.
So it strikes me that a lot of what the
speculative realist thinkers are doing is opening up the question about how
politics and ontology encounter each other. Their willingness to question
the idea that politics and ontology are co-extensive permits these writers to return
to issues about the earth, the sun, geological forces and so on, in ways that
critical social thinkers have been avoiding for quite a while (even Deleuze and
Guattaris geo-philosophy hasn’t had quite the uptake in geography we
might have expected…). Take a look at the other relevant journal: Collapse
- whole issues on geophilosophy, the Copernican view of the cosmos ...
Feels to me like this is a conversation
that critical geographers might just want to be a part of, in our usual less-than-docile
way ….
--nigel
Dr. Nigel Clark
Faculty of Social Sciences: Geography
The Open University
Walton Hall
From:
Stuart Elden [mailto:[log in to unmask]]
Sent: 02 August 2010 11:40
To: [log in to unmask]
Subject: Re: Speculations
I posted this as an announcement of a
project that I thought would be of interest to some people on the list - there
was a session at this year’s AAG on related issues, for instance - not to
begin a debate.
I’m not the person to defend the
work, in any case. It’s not what I do, though I do think some of the work
under this broad label is the most challenging work I’ve read in a long
time. Nonetheless, a few points in response:-
Most philosophical approaches have as
much disagreement internally as they do with other approaches. Look at the
debates within Marxism, for instance. So the lack of agreement doesn’t
seem to be fatal. There is enough agreement on a problem, and some shared
positions in response. The journal is part designed to work these agreements
and tensions through.
If you want to find out what one of the
thinkers associated thinks of Bruno Latour, you could look at Graham
Harman’s book Prince of Networks.
It’s available in print or as a free pdf here - http://www.re-press.org/content/view/63/38/
I’m not at all sure that people
working with ANT would think it was politically disabling. Certainly we get a
lot of work submitted to Society and Space
that uses ANT to think about a range of political issues.
There is some link between Roy
Bhaskar’s work and some of that done under the speculative realism name.
If you did want to take your
understanding of these issues beyond Wikipedia, perhaps the journal is not a
bad place to start.
Stuart
From:
A forum for critical and radical geographers
[mailto:[log in to unmask]] On
Behalf Of Simon P J Batterbury
Sent: 02 August 2010 03:55
To: [log in to unmask]
Subject: Re: Speculations
I
had a look at ‘speculative realism’, which itself seems to embody
many different approaches. Hard to understand if you haven’t studied
philosophy at all, but I cringed somewhat on reading this remark “All
four of the core thinkers within Speculative Realism work to overturn these
forms of philosophy which privilege the human being, favouring distinct forms
of realism against the dominant forms of idealism in much of contemporary
philosophy.” http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Speculative_realism
The four thinkers don’t actually seem to quite agree on the approach.
While
it still has ‘realism’ in the name, does SR take us down the
Latour route? His actor network theory seems particularly disabling
politically, and not very radical at all in terms of its normative stance and
assistance to political action on important matters of ethics and rights.
Humans seem to be just one actor in a network of connections. Researchers trace
them. If SR also embraces this view, how does it help?
In
order to get critical stuff done in the world – surely we are more
important than ‘other’ objects? The bike rider is more important
than her/his inner tubes, which cannot affect infrastructure policy themselves.
‘Other’ objects don’t have agency. While I can see that some
objects have particular ‘power’ – viruses, guns, SUVs, the
weather, etc and it is good to study them (technography, by Paul Richards and
his students at Wageningen, is a great approach to that) – it’s the
people that have the power to change their effects and use. Especially the
weather.
Back
to idealism, perhaps, and particularly Marx. Or even critical realism, which I
rather liked.
However
on a weekly basis, it’s what you do with your time that really matters
for me, rather than the philosophical approach you find interesting. A
different point, but I am sure this is the case for other readers too.
That’s perhaps a reactionary version of ‘critical human geography’
– or – given the cuts facing universities right now – a
pragmatic personal strategy to get as much done before many of us lose our jobs
(what is happening in the UK – more Depts under threat?) or get sucked
into other quotidian things as we age!
S
Dr. Simon Batterbury, Director,
Office for Environmental Programs,
&
Associate Professor,
Dept. of Resource Management and
Geography,
(rm L2.33,
simonpjb@ unimelb.edu.au http://www.simonbatterbury.net
From:
Stuart Elden [mailto:[log in to unmask]]
Sent: Monday, 2 August 2010 7:46
AM
Subject: Speculations Volume I now
published
The
first volume of a new online journal, Speculations, is now available.
“Speculations
is a journal dedicated to research into speculative realism and post-continental
philosophy.