The Speculative Turn – Bryant, Srnicek, Harman

It has long been commonplace within continental philosophy to focus on discourse,

text, culture, consciousness, power, or ideas as what constitutes reality. But despite /
the vaunted anti-humanism of many of the thinkers identified with these trends, what
they give us is less a critique of humanity’s place in the world, than a less sweeping
cri- tique of the self-enclosed Cartesian subject. Humanity remains at the centre of
these works, and reality appears in philosophy only as the correlate of human
thought. In this respect phenomenology, structuralism, post-structuralism,
deconstruction, and postmodernism have all been perfect exemplars of the anti-realist
trend in continental philosophy. Without deriding the significant contributions of
these philosophies, some- thing is clearly amiss in these trends. In the face of the
looming ecological catastrophe, and the increasing infiltration of technology into the
everyday world (including our own bodies), it is not clear that the anti-realist position
is equipped to face up to these developments. The danger is that the dominant anti-
realist strain of continental philos- ophy has not only reached a point of decreasing
returns, but that it now actively limits the capacities of philosophy in our time. (2-3)

By contrast with the repetitive continental focus on texts, dis- course, social practices,
and human finitude, the new breed of thinker is turning once more toward reality
itself… But all of them, in one way or another, have begun speculating once more
about the nature of reality independently of thought and of hu- manity more
generally. (3)

This activity of ‘speculation’ may be cause for concern amongst some readers, for it
might suggest a return to pre-critical philosophy, with its dogmatic belief in the
powers of pure reason. The speculative turn, however, is not an outright rejection of
these critical advances; instead, it comes from a recognition of their inherent limita-
tions. Speculation in this sense aims at something ‘beyond’ the critical and linguistic
turns. As such, it recuperates the pre-critical sense of ‘speculation’ as a concern with
the Absolute, while also taking into account the undeniable progress that is due to the
labour of critique. The works collected here are a speculative wager on the possible
returns from a renewed attention to reality itself. In the face of the ecological crisis,
the forward march of neuroscience, the increasingly splintered interpretations of
basic physics, and the ongoing breach of the divide between human and machine,
there is a growing sense that previous philosophies are incapable of confronting these
events. (3)

This general anti-realist trend has manifested itself in continental philosophy in a

number of ways, but especially through preoccupation with such issues as death and
finitude, an aversion to science, a focus on language, culture, and subjectivity to the
detriment of material factors, an anthropocentric stance towards nature, a relinquish-
ing of the search for absolutes, and an acquiescence to the specific conditions of our
historical thrownness. (4)
In his recent major work The Parallax View, Žižek has de- nounced what he sees as the
naïve materialist postulate that includes the subject as just another positive, physical
thing within the objective world. He calls it naïve because it assumes the position of an
external observer from which the entire world can be grasped—a position that
presumes in principle to encompass all of reality by reducing its own perspective to a
thing in the world. For Žižek, by contrast, ‘Materialism means that the reality I see is
never “whole”—not because a large part of it eludes me, but be- cause it contains a
stain, a blind spot, which indicates my inclusion in it’. [Slavoj Žižek, The Parallax View,
Cambridge, The MIT Press, 2006, p. 17.
] Reality, he repeatedly states, is non-All;
there is a gap, a stain, an irresolvable hole within reality itself. The very difference
between the for-itself and the in-itself is encompassed with- in the Absolute. Only by
attending to this gap can we become truly materialist. But while Žižek has signalled a
‘transcendental materialist’ turn within recent continental thinking, it is perhaps
Badiou who has raised the anti-phenomenological flag most ex- plicitly, attempting
thereby to clarify the ontological stakes of contemporary continen- tal philosophy.
This rejuvenation of ontology is particularly clear in his now famous declaration that
‘mathematics = ontology’.13 Taking mathematics to be the discourse of being—that
which speaks of being as devoid of any predication (including unity), remaining only
as a pure multiple—Badiou has constructed an elaborate ontology on the basis of set
theory. In addition, Badiou has nobly resuscitated the question of truth, which was
formerly a term of derision in much continental philosophy. (5)
[Alain Badiou, Being and Event, trans. Oliver Feltham, New York, Continuum, 2005, p.
6.]

Latour: Moreover, the effort to reduce one level of reality to another invariably leaves
residues of the reduced entity that are not ful- / ly translatable by the reduction: no
interpretation of a dream or a historical event ever gets it quite right, nor would it
even be possible to do so. (5-6)

Indeed, each of the editors of The Speculative Turn au- thors one or more philosophy
blogs,15 and in a further wondrous sign of the times, we have never met in person. As
any of the blogosphere’s participants can attest, it can be a tremendously productive
forum for debate and experimentation.16 The less formal nature of the medium
facilitates immediate reactions to research, with authors pre- senting ideas in their
initial stages of development, ideally providing a demystifying sort of transparency.
The markedly egalitarian nature of blogs (open to non-Ph.Ds in a way that faculty
positions are not) opens a space for collaboration amongst a diverse group of readers,
helping to shape ideas along unforeseen paths. The rapid rhythm of online existence
also makes a stark contrast with the long waiting-periods typical of ref- ereed journals
and mainstream publishers. Instant reaction to current events, reading / groups
quickly mobilizing around newly published works, and cross-blog dialogues on
specific issues, are common events in the online world. While some of the authors in-
cluded in the present collection have been well-known for many years, it is difficult to
believe that some of the others would already be so prominent if they had needed to
wait for their places on a course syllabus. The online world has rapidly shifted the in-
tellectual terrain, and it seems a fair bet that the experimentation has barely begun.
(6-7)

Lastly, another significant non-institutional space for the creation of these works has
been the rise of open-access publishing. The natural and social sciences are al- ready
deeply committed to the open-access model, with arXiv and the Social Science
Research Network (SSRN) among the best-known online archives of cutting-edge re-
search (with key works often appearing here before they appear in more official
publi- cations). So far, philosophy has lagged behind these fields in constructing a
forum for the dissemination of new research. But the tide seems to have turned, as a
number of open-access philosophy publishers and journals have arisen in the past few
years, in some cases having secured backing from major names in the field.17 Open-
access jour- nals and books alike are becoming more prevalent, and it is perhaps only
a matter of time before philosophy finds its homegrown equivalent of arXiv or
SSRN.18 (17)

One of the key features of the Speculative Turn is precisely that the move toward
realism is not a move toward the stuffy limitations of common sense, but quite often a
turn toward the downright bizarre. (7)