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
Milton Keynes, MK7 6AA, UK

 

 

 

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

 

 

 

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

 

 

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.