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The Universe of Things: On Speculative Realism
From the rediscovery of Alfred North Whitehead’s work to the rise of new materialist thought, including object-oriented ontology, there has been a rapid turn toward speculation in philosophy as a way of moving beyond solely human perceptions of nature and existence. Now Steven Shaviro maps this quickly emerging speculative realism, which is already dramatically influencing how we interpret reality and our place in a universe in which humans are not the measure of all things. The Universe of Things explores the common insistence of speculative realism on a noncorrelationist that things or objects exist apart from how our own human minds relate to and comprehend them. Shaviro focuses on how Whitehead both anticipates and offers challenges to prevailing speculative realist thought, moving between Whitehead’s own panpsychism, Harman’s object-oriented ontology, and the reductionist eliminativism of Quentin Meillassoux and Ray Brassier. The stakes of this recent speculative realist thought—of the effort to develop new ways of grasping the world—are enormous as it becomes clear that our inherited assumptions are no longer adequate to describe, much less understand, the reality we experience around us. As Shaviro acknowledges, speculative realist thought has its dangers, but it also, like the best speculative fiction, holds the potential to liberate us from confining views of what is outside ourselves and, he believes, to reclaim aesthetics and beauty as a principle of life itself. Bringing together a wide array of contemporary thought, and evenhandedly assessing its current debates, The Universe of Things is an invaluable guide to the evolution of speculative realism and the provocation of Alfred North Whitehead’s pathbreaking work.
192 pages, Paperback
First published October 1, 2014
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Displaying 1 - 11 of 11 reviews
May 6, 2016
I tried to understand this, but I'm afraid I just Kant.
July 27, 2016
Philosophy is permanently in the condition of renewing itself through new quests with different methodologies and different perspectives. No doubt, recent developments in philosophy produce new forms of thinking which endow one with the means to assess the reality in alternative ways. In this context, The Universe of Things: On Speculative Realism elaborates on a recent philosophical school called speculative realism, which involves unique conceptualizations despite the intellectual differences among its members.
Steven Shaviro, the author of the book, presents a successful study that specifically focuses on the four main thinkers of speculative realism –Quentin Meillassoux, Graham Harman, Ray Brassier, Iain Hamilton Grant- by returning back to Alfred North Whitehad, who is considered as the founding father of speculative realist thinking. The difficulty of a study that analyzes speculative realism is that it is a branch containing distinct standpoints of different thinkers. Even though what Shaviro does in this book seems quite difficult to be handled, he brilliantly penetrates into the depths of speculative realism without choking within the complexity of it. My fundamental purpose in this review is to clarify Shaviro's analyses with a politically critical perspective.
When one starts to read Shaviro’s book as a person who is not familiar with speculative philosophy, what would come to his mind is most likely the meaning of “speculative.” In other words, the first question is basically concerning what speculative philosophy is; more precisely what is speculative about that? The task of speculative philosophy, for Whitehead, is “the endeavor to frame a coherent, logical, necessary system of general ideas in terms of which every element of our experience can be interpreted,” which proposes a bit vague explanation. (Whitehead 3) In fact, while Whitehead emphasizes “every element of our experience,” there is a certain accent on the beyond thinking. Shaviro argues that speculation is “what Kant told us that we cannot and must not do,” (Shaviro 67) which proves that speculative philosophy positions itself against Kant. For Shaviro, “realism must be speculative,” because “we must think outside of our own thought.” What is more, we must explore the “world-without-us.” (67) This is indeed a turn to the reality itself against Kant’s conceptualization of reality, which is not independent from the mind’s constructive capacity. Speculative philosophy’s task is to speculate with respect to the nature of reality which is independent from both thought and humanity, and which entails “extrapolation” in Shaviro’s terms. (10) In brief, the ontological claim of speculative philosophy is the assertion that reality exists without human beings and their conceptualizations by organizing itself in its own way.
It is obvious that Kant, which is the thinker of correlationism in Meillassoux’s terms, is the key philosopher in speculative philosophy, which strives to save itself from the boundaries of correlationism. Shaviro justifiably argues that all sub-branches of speculative realism “must return to Kant in order to rework the terms of his settlement among conflicting philosophical claims,” (134) because all of them must challenge correlationism so as to reach a non-anthropocentric philosophy. Quentin Meillassoux argues that correlationism is fundamentally the argument that “we never grasp an object ‘in itself,’ in isolation from its relation to the subject.” (Meillassoux 5) It is the correlation between thinking and being. Speculative philosophy is therefore, in opposition to correlationism, exceeds the limitations of the human subject which refers to an understanding that reality is beyond verifiable observations. This is the basis of the rejection of anthropocentrism in speculative philosophy as Shaviro stresses: reality never circles around human beings. (Shaviro 1) We as human beings “have entered a new phase of history in which nonhumans are no longer excluded or merely decorative features of their social, psychic, and philosophical space.” (Morthon 22)
By the same token, this is the rejection of bifurcation of nature with which modern philosophy is stuck. According to Whitehead, two approaches have dominated Western philosophy: one has focused on “the nature apprehended in awareness,” and the other one has grasped the nature as “the cause of awareness.” However, he argues that this bifurcation of nature must be overcome; one should not choose one of them, because every process has the same ontological status. Put it differently, there is no hierarchy among things and processes; all of them share the same ontological status despite the differences in intensity.
In effect, Shaviro analyzes speculative realism on this ground, which rejects correlationism of Kant and the thesis of bifurcation of nature. What is striking throughout the book is the critical ground provided by Whitehead in order to point out the weaknesses of the recent speculative realist school. To introduce Whitehead philosophy, Shaviro firstly focuses on the concept of concern. Shaviro states: “When something concerns me, I cannot ignore it or walk away from it, it presses on my being and compels me to respond.” (Shaviro 14) This is also what Latour insistently draws attention by the concept of matters of concern rather than matters of fact. The interesting thing with respect to concern is its involuntary affection without being centered around human beings. It is omnipresent and always in the condition of perishing just because concern never remains as it is. It permanently circulates by infinitely reintroducing itself. It is not possible to overcome concern, which does not have any beyond; it repeats and returns to itself by perpetually renewing itself. Hence, as Shaviro emphasizes, concern is “inherent to every actual occasion.” (24)
The immanence of concern is the baseline that Shaviro criticizes Harman’s object oriented ontology (OOO) by referring to Whitehead. One should note that a large proportion of The Universe of Things targets at Harman, and Shaviro mounts his argument by specifically focusing on Harman’s philosophy. Shaviro underlines a very important difference between Whitehead and Harman. For Harman, there are some points in objects remaining, so to speak, untouched by any relationality. “Every object retains a hidden reserve of being,” which can be called substance in Harman's terminology. (30) In other words, Harman asserts that substances are withdrawn from all possible relations. Whereas Whitehead portrays a philosophy which claims that “everything is related to everything else,” Harman rejects such a notion. He argues that Whitehead’s emphasis on concern and relationality is what prevents any explanation of change, since if a thing “holds nothing in reserve beyond its current relations to all entities in the universe, if it has no currently unexpressed properties, there is no reason to see how anything new can emerge.” (Harman 82) I think that this is an important question and includes further implications for politics. If we uphold Whitehead’s argument as Shaviro did in the book, then novelty and change stuck within the boundaries of what exists as relationality. This also indicates great similarities with Deleuze’s concept of repetition. On the other hand, if Harman’s approach is taken into consideration, novelty and change penetrate from the outside of what exists as relationality. Whitehead basically leaves no space for the outside and draws a picture of immanence. This is what Harman criticizes, because it is insufficient to explain how a change occurs. To put it different, immanence of relations is what eradicates change as novelty.
However, Whitehead conceptualizes novelty by simply arguing that “every entity must perish and give way to something new,” which is also championed by Shaviro. (Shaviro 36) Personally speaking, Whitehead’s comprehension of novelty is very close to evolutionary understanding; it is, so to speak, a passive emergence. The political implications of novelty in Whitehead/Shaviro and Harman is therefore significant. What I observe in Harman is a more revolutionary philosophy instead of the evolutionary philosophy of Whitehead just because Harman conceptualizes an object with substance meaning that substances exist out of the realm of relationality and when they appear, they have the capacity to rupture the existing relations. Substance always remains unrecognizable which gives it the capability to break the order of the recognizable relations. Conceptualizing change in the midst of perishing and growing, on the other hand, always involves the risk of passivization of the actor. This is also the difference between allure and metamorphosis. (53-54) On the one hand, Whitehead holds the opinion that existing possibilities are what will engender the novel and directly bring the change. On the other hand, Harman worries that such a perspective is nothing more than the representation of “an endless repetition of the same.” (38) This is an antinomy between relations and substances and the decision among these two have vital political implications.
One of the most interesting analysis in the book made by Shaviro is about the concept of tool-being about which, I believe, important political deductions can be made. In speculative philosophy tools, like things, “have their own powers, their own innate tendencies.” (48) As Latour puts forwards, tools are actants. It is evident in speculative philosophy that vitality is not a human-centered category, rather it is attributed to all things. That a tool is vital means that it is not a passive entity that is used by human beings, but rather they actively participate in processes. Shaviro notes that “we cannot just use them. We must learn to work with them, rather than against them.” (48) The vitality of a tool displays itself mostly in its capacity to be broken. Heidegger calls it broken tool meaning that if a tool does not function as expected, “then the excess of its being is suddenly revealed to us.” (50) When a tool is broken, its equipmental efficacy vanishes, which provides an excess for the ordinary being of the tool. That a thing is broken is what also breaks the repetition of instrumentality of an object. When it is broken, it is not repetitively used for the same function anymore; it does not serve for the ordinary purpose. It reveals more than what it actually is. It exceeds its own actuality and unravels its own being in a different manner which is not functional in the ordinary sense anymore. It somehow “invites us toward another level of reality.” (53)
In this context, things by themselves are autonomous and actively shape the reality. It is difficult to think of a stone and human being as ontologically equal and Shaviro's book provides a tough philosophical challenge to us by touching upon different aspects of speculative philosophy. The interestingness of speculative philosophy, however, is also its weakness in politics. The positive side of eliminating anthropocentrism is that it provides a fresh perspective to examine the things around us without falling into the trap of human-centered philosophy. Speculative philosophy in this regard has the capacity to make objects/things autonomous components of politics. The rejection of correlationism, on the other hand, is what eliminates any political prescription for human political actors. Beyond political prescription, it does not offer any politically anchor point. One might object that speculative philosophy theoretically does not argue against political prescriptions, ethical questions or ideologically anchor points, but conceives of them in relationality, or in object-oriented path. But I think that this is the very reason of its political weakness. Even though speculative philosophy seems that it deals with the present, paradoxically it is closely intertwined with the future which is evident in Meillassoux's argument that everything is possible. Alain Badiou critically underscores this problem of speculative realism by referring to Meillassoux: “For Meillassoux the future decides, the future and perhaps the dead will make the final judgment. This is a political weakness.” (Badiou 20) I think that Badiou’s criticism is a valid criticism for all speculative realists Shaviro analyzes and also for Shaviro himself.
In fact, first three chapters of the book is a rich compilation of Whitehead's and Harman's different stances and Shaviro brilliantly explains even the most ambiguous parts of speculative philosophy in the eyes of these two important thinkers. However, the most notable contribution of Shaviro is the concept of panpsychism which is discussed in the 4th -5th and 6th chapters. Panpsychism basically means that mind is not specific to human beings, but shared by all entities. It is “the thesis that even rock have minds.” (Shaviro 85) For Whitehead, we should “recognize the commonness and ordinariness of thought.” (78) The argument is explicitly explained by Timothy Morton who argues that “there is something that my mind does that isn't that different from what a pencil does when it rests on a table.” (79) Thomas Nagel's famous article “What Is It Like to Be a Bat?” is quite instructive in this direction. For Nagel, all organisms have a subjective character of experience which cannot be known from the point of view of a human being. The fundamental concern of the article is the desire to “know what it is like for a bat to be a bat.” (Nagel 439) The experience of a bat cannot be fully understood if one is not that bat. One might experience a bat's experience as an experience of himself. In this regard, “we cannot form more than a schematic conception of what it is like.” (439) According to Nagel, “at present we are completely unequipped to think about the subjective character of experience without relying on the imagination.” (449) Turned back to the question what speculative is about realism, the answer is clear: we must speculate in order to know what it is like to be a bat.
Of course this is neither limited to bats, nor specific to living beings. One can also think about the question, for example, what is it like to be a song. The song has its own reality; it is composed and so to speak constituted, but it also wanders in the concert halls, in the bus, in our headphones, on the Internet. It shapes the reality in its own subjectivity. It does not only affect, for instance, one's psychological condition in an anthropocentric perspective, but also it is in contact with the speaker that plays the song. In other words, it has its own web of relations. The question phrase “what is it to be like x” implies a kind of state of being, which is neither Something, nor Nothing. We cannot say that to be like a song is Something in Shaviro's terms, as “it is not specifiable as a thing at all.” (Shaviro 97) But on the other hand, it is not Nothing, because the song has its own reality and subjectivity meaning that we cannot simply dismiss it. That is why, Shaviro argues, new realism does have no choice but being speculative. In sum, “we must alienate ourselves from ourselves in order to look at correlationism from a noncorrelational perspective and comprehend how the world exists apart from us.” (111)
REFERENCES:
Alain Badiou, “Interview,” in The Speculative Turn: Continental Materialism and Realism, edited by Levi Bryant, Nick Srnicek and Graham Harman, Melbourne: Re-press, 2011, 20.
Alfred North Whitehead, Process and Reality: An Essay in Cosmology, New York: The Free Press, 1978, 3.
Graham Harman, Guerilla Metaphysics: Phenomenology and the Carpentry of Things, Chicago: Open Court, 2005, 82.
Quentin Meillassoux, After Finitude: An Essay on the Necessity of Contingency, translated by Ray Brassier, New York: Continuum, 5.
Steven Shaviro, The Universe of Things: On Speculative Realism, Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2014, 67.
Thomas Nagel, “What Is It Like to Be a Bat?”, The Philosophical Review 83, no.4, (Oct., 1974), 439.
Timothy Morton, Hyperobjects: Philosophy and Ecology after the End of the World, Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2013, 22.
Steven Shaviro, the author of the book, presents a successful study that specifically focuses on the four main thinkers of speculative realism –Quentin Meillassoux, Graham Harman, Ray Brassier, Iain Hamilton Grant- by returning back to Alfred North Whitehad, who is considered as the founding father of speculative realist thinking. The difficulty of a study that analyzes speculative realism is that it is a branch containing distinct standpoints of different thinkers. Even though what Shaviro does in this book seems quite difficult to be handled, he brilliantly penetrates into the depths of speculative realism without choking within the complexity of it. My fundamental purpose in this review is to clarify Shaviro's analyses with a politically critical perspective.
When one starts to read Shaviro’s book as a person who is not familiar with speculative philosophy, what would come to his mind is most likely the meaning of “speculative.” In other words, the first question is basically concerning what speculative philosophy is; more precisely what is speculative about that? The task of speculative philosophy, for Whitehead, is “the endeavor to frame a coherent, logical, necessary system of general ideas in terms of which every element of our experience can be interpreted,” which proposes a bit vague explanation. (Whitehead 3) In fact, while Whitehead emphasizes “every element of our experience,” there is a certain accent on the beyond thinking. Shaviro argues that speculation is “what Kant told us that we cannot and must not do,” (Shaviro 67) which proves that speculative philosophy positions itself against Kant. For Shaviro, “realism must be speculative,” because “we must think outside of our own thought.” What is more, we must explore the “world-without-us.” (67) This is indeed a turn to the reality itself against Kant’s conceptualization of reality, which is not independent from the mind’s constructive capacity. Speculative philosophy’s task is to speculate with respect to the nature of reality which is independent from both thought and humanity, and which entails “extrapolation” in Shaviro’s terms. (10) In brief, the ontological claim of speculative philosophy is the assertion that reality exists without human beings and their conceptualizations by organizing itself in its own way.
It is obvious that Kant, which is the thinker of correlationism in Meillassoux’s terms, is the key philosopher in speculative philosophy, which strives to save itself from the boundaries of correlationism. Shaviro justifiably argues that all sub-branches of speculative realism “must return to Kant in order to rework the terms of his settlement among conflicting philosophical claims,” (134) because all of them must challenge correlationism so as to reach a non-anthropocentric philosophy. Quentin Meillassoux argues that correlationism is fundamentally the argument that “we never grasp an object ‘in itself,’ in isolation from its relation to the subject.” (Meillassoux 5) It is the correlation between thinking and being. Speculative philosophy is therefore, in opposition to correlationism, exceeds the limitations of the human subject which refers to an understanding that reality is beyond verifiable observations. This is the basis of the rejection of anthropocentrism in speculative philosophy as Shaviro stresses: reality never circles around human beings. (Shaviro 1) We as human beings “have entered a new phase of history in which nonhumans are no longer excluded or merely decorative features of their social, psychic, and philosophical space.” (Morthon 22)
By the same token, this is the rejection of bifurcation of nature with which modern philosophy is stuck. According to Whitehead, two approaches have dominated Western philosophy: one has focused on “the nature apprehended in awareness,” and the other one has grasped the nature as “the cause of awareness.” However, he argues that this bifurcation of nature must be overcome; one should not choose one of them, because every process has the same ontological status. Put it differently, there is no hierarchy among things and processes; all of them share the same ontological status despite the differences in intensity.
In effect, Shaviro analyzes speculative realism on this ground, which rejects correlationism of Kant and the thesis of bifurcation of nature. What is striking throughout the book is the critical ground provided by Whitehead in order to point out the weaknesses of the recent speculative realist school. To introduce Whitehead philosophy, Shaviro firstly focuses on the concept of concern. Shaviro states: “When something concerns me, I cannot ignore it or walk away from it, it presses on my being and compels me to respond.” (Shaviro 14) This is also what Latour insistently draws attention by the concept of matters of concern rather than matters of fact. The interesting thing with respect to concern is its involuntary affection without being centered around human beings. It is omnipresent and always in the condition of perishing just because concern never remains as it is. It permanently circulates by infinitely reintroducing itself. It is not possible to overcome concern, which does not have any beyond; it repeats and returns to itself by perpetually renewing itself. Hence, as Shaviro emphasizes, concern is “inherent to every actual occasion.” (24)
The immanence of concern is the baseline that Shaviro criticizes Harman’s object oriented ontology (OOO) by referring to Whitehead. One should note that a large proportion of The Universe of Things targets at Harman, and Shaviro mounts his argument by specifically focusing on Harman’s philosophy. Shaviro underlines a very important difference between Whitehead and Harman. For Harman, there are some points in objects remaining, so to speak, untouched by any relationality. “Every object retains a hidden reserve of being,” which can be called substance in Harman's terminology. (30) In other words, Harman asserts that substances are withdrawn from all possible relations. Whereas Whitehead portrays a philosophy which claims that “everything is related to everything else,” Harman rejects such a notion. He argues that Whitehead’s emphasis on concern and relationality is what prevents any explanation of change, since if a thing “holds nothing in reserve beyond its current relations to all entities in the universe, if it has no currently unexpressed properties, there is no reason to see how anything new can emerge.” (Harman 82) I think that this is an important question and includes further implications for politics. If we uphold Whitehead’s argument as Shaviro did in the book, then novelty and change stuck within the boundaries of what exists as relationality. This also indicates great similarities with Deleuze’s concept of repetition. On the other hand, if Harman’s approach is taken into consideration, novelty and change penetrate from the outside of what exists as relationality. Whitehead basically leaves no space for the outside and draws a picture of immanence. This is what Harman criticizes, because it is insufficient to explain how a change occurs. To put it different, immanence of relations is what eradicates change as novelty.
However, Whitehead conceptualizes novelty by simply arguing that “every entity must perish and give way to something new,” which is also championed by Shaviro. (Shaviro 36) Personally speaking, Whitehead’s comprehension of novelty is very close to evolutionary understanding; it is, so to speak, a passive emergence. The political implications of novelty in Whitehead/Shaviro and Harman is therefore significant. What I observe in Harman is a more revolutionary philosophy instead of the evolutionary philosophy of Whitehead just because Harman conceptualizes an object with substance meaning that substances exist out of the realm of relationality and when they appear, they have the capacity to rupture the existing relations. Substance always remains unrecognizable which gives it the capability to break the order of the recognizable relations. Conceptualizing change in the midst of perishing and growing, on the other hand, always involves the risk of passivization of the actor. This is also the difference between allure and metamorphosis. (53-54) On the one hand, Whitehead holds the opinion that existing possibilities are what will engender the novel and directly bring the change. On the other hand, Harman worries that such a perspective is nothing more than the representation of “an endless repetition of the same.” (38) This is an antinomy between relations and substances and the decision among these two have vital political implications.
One of the most interesting analysis in the book made by Shaviro is about the concept of tool-being about which, I believe, important political deductions can be made. In speculative philosophy tools, like things, “have their own powers, their own innate tendencies.” (48) As Latour puts forwards, tools are actants. It is evident in speculative philosophy that vitality is not a human-centered category, rather it is attributed to all things. That a tool is vital means that it is not a passive entity that is used by human beings, but rather they actively participate in processes. Shaviro notes that “we cannot just use them. We must learn to work with them, rather than against them.” (48) The vitality of a tool displays itself mostly in its capacity to be broken. Heidegger calls it broken tool meaning that if a tool does not function as expected, “then the excess of its being is suddenly revealed to us.” (50) When a tool is broken, its equipmental efficacy vanishes, which provides an excess for the ordinary being of the tool. That a thing is broken is what also breaks the repetition of instrumentality of an object. When it is broken, it is not repetitively used for the same function anymore; it does not serve for the ordinary purpose. It reveals more than what it actually is. It exceeds its own actuality and unravels its own being in a different manner which is not functional in the ordinary sense anymore. It somehow “invites us toward another level of reality.” (53)
In this context, things by themselves are autonomous and actively shape the reality. It is difficult to think of a stone and human being as ontologically equal and Shaviro's book provides a tough philosophical challenge to us by touching upon different aspects of speculative philosophy. The interestingness of speculative philosophy, however, is also its weakness in politics. The positive side of eliminating anthropocentrism is that it provides a fresh perspective to examine the things around us without falling into the trap of human-centered philosophy. Speculative philosophy in this regard has the capacity to make objects/things autonomous components of politics. The rejection of correlationism, on the other hand, is what eliminates any political prescription for human political actors. Beyond political prescription, it does not offer any politically anchor point. One might object that speculative philosophy theoretically does not argue against political prescriptions, ethical questions or ideologically anchor points, but conceives of them in relationality, or in object-oriented path. But I think that this is the very reason of its political weakness. Even though speculative philosophy seems that it deals with the present, paradoxically it is closely intertwined with the future which is evident in Meillassoux's argument that everything is possible. Alain Badiou critically underscores this problem of speculative realism by referring to Meillassoux: “For Meillassoux the future decides, the future and perhaps the dead will make the final judgment. This is a political weakness.” (Badiou 20) I think that Badiou’s criticism is a valid criticism for all speculative realists Shaviro analyzes and also for Shaviro himself.
In fact, first three chapters of the book is a rich compilation of Whitehead's and Harman's different stances and Shaviro brilliantly explains even the most ambiguous parts of speculative philosophy in the eyes of these two important thinkers. However, the most notable contribution of Shaviro is the concept of panpsychism which is discussed in the 4th -5th and 6th chapters. Panpsychism basically means that mind is not specific to human beings, but shared by all entities. It is “the thesis that even rock have minds.” (Shaviro 85) For Whitehead, we should “recognize the commonness and ordinariness of thought.” (78) The argument is explicitly explained by Timothy Morton who argues that “there is something that my mind does that isn't that different from what a pencil does when it rests on a table.” (79) Thomas Nagel's famous article “What Is It Like to Be a Bat?” is quite instructive in this direction. For Nagel, all organisms have a subjective character of experience which cannot be known from the point of view of a human being. The fundamental concern of the article is the desire to “know what it is like for a bat to be a bat.” (Nagel 439) The experience of a bat cannot be fully understood if one is not that bat. One might experience a bat's experience as an experience of himself. In this regard, “we cannot form more than a schematic conception of what it is like.” (439) According to Nagel, “at present we are completely unequipped to think about the subjective character of experience without relying on the imagination.” (449) Turned back to the question what speculative is about realism, the answer is clear: we must speculate in order to know what it is like to be a bat.
Of course this is neither limited to bats, nor specific to living beings. One can also think about the question, for example, what is it like to be a song. The song has its own reality; it is composed and so to speak constituted, but it also wanders in the concert halls, in the bus, in our headphones, on the Internet. It shapes the reality in its own subjectivity. It does not only affect, for instance, one's psychological condition in an anthropocentric perspective, but also it is in contact with the speaker that plays the song. In other words, it has its own web of relations. The question phrase “what is it to be like x” implies a kind of state of being, which is neither Something, nor Nothing. We cannot say that to be like a song is Something in Shaviro's terms, as “it is not specifiable as a thing at all.” (Shaviro 97) But on the other hand, it is not Nothing, because the song has its own reality and subjectivity meaning that we cannot simply dismiss it. That is why, Shaviro argues, new realism does have no choice but being speculative. In sum, “we must alienate ourselves from ourselves in order to look at correlationism from a noncorrelational perspective and comprehend how the world exists apart from us.” (111)
REFERENCES:
Alain Badiou, “Interview,” in The Speculative Turn: Continental Materialism and Realism, edited by Levi Bryant, Nick Srnicek and Graham Harman, Melbourne: Re-press, 2011, 20.
Alfred North Whitehead, Process and Reality: An Essay in Cosmology, New York: The Free Press, 1978, 3.
Graham Harman, Guerilla Metaphysics: Phenomenology and the Carpentry of Things, Chicago: Open Court, 2005, 82.
Quentin Meillassoux, After Finitude: An Essay on the Necessity of Contingency, translated by Ray Brassier, New York: Continuum, 5.
Steven Shaviro, The Universe of Things: On Speculative Realism, Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2014, 67.
Thomas Nagel, “What Is It Like to Be a Bat?”, The Philosophical Review 83, no.4, (Oct., 1974), 439.
Timothy Morton, Hyperobjects: Philosophy and Ecology after the End of the World, Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2013, 22.
November 14, 2020
Non-correlationism on the shoulders of Whitehead (and Spinoza?). A well written book of new materialism or speculative realism.
"Even though aesthetic feeling is triggered by an object, the feeling itself is independent of any intentional relation to the object. Aesthetic feelings with regard to an object cannot be correlated to that object. An aesthetic encounter takes place without recognition or possession and without phenomenological intentionality or 'aboutness'" (p.153).
"Even though aesthetic feeling is triggered by an object, the feeling itself is independent of any intentional relation to the object. Aesthetic feelings with regard to an object cannot be correlated to that object. An aesthetic encounter takes place without recognition or possession and without phenomenological intentionality or 'aboutness'" (p.153).
December 29, 2014
Shaviro is one of the more rigorous of speculative realist thinkers, and I've always particularly enjoyed his reading of Whitehead and Deleuze. This book focuses almost exclusively on Whitehead, a thinker who is under-appreciated among current American theorists. While I probably slightly favor Deleuze's becoming over Whitehead's philosophy of organism, I still see Whitehead as one of the most important philosophers of the 20th century. I'm less interested in Shaviro's engagement with object oriented ontology, if only for the selfish reason that I don't care about all of the arguments within that philosophical school. Still, Shaviro makes a powerful case for Whitehead's inclusion in realist circles.
January 13, 2024
Decent primer on Whitehead's metaphysics and survey of SR as a whole, but to my mind Shaviro is too eager to engage with Harman and OOO; every conflation between OOO and Whitehead actually just made me much less interested in reading Whitehead. And too dismissive of Meillassoux and Brassier and the likes, or I suppose the "eliminativist" position vs. panpsychism. Shaviro's elaborations of panpsychist positions if anything made me more open to eliminativism if not as an actual truth at least as a more useful and corrosive philisophical tool then just assuming rocks "experience" something. I cannot help but be rubbed wrong by anything which substitutes the great lapses and mysteries of being with something about "aesthetic experience" diffused across existence as first philosophy; perhaps more useful to pretend consciousness doesn't exist when making ontological claims than to say shit about how trees Feel lol. I am not convinced a world without sentience is necessarily static and unable to Affect. Nonetheless, short and worth a read. Much to consider..
February 1, 2018
About a year ago I had asked someone to pick up a book on speculative realism - a relatively new movement in philosophy (introduced in 2007 by Meillassoux, Harmon, Brassier, and Grant) that is particularly focused on rejecting the post-Kantian notion that the world is inaccessible from human being and thought. That is, we must go beyond Kant's notion to the world-without-us that can extend beyond his 'correlationalist' trap of the world perceived within our minds and not as an object in itself - speculative because we cannot logically act independent of our own minds. Shaviro approaches this problem and defends speculative realism utilizing Alfred North Whitehead's mostly unappreciated philosophy that the world is us and never passive or inert objects. Or in other words, there is no bifurcation of anthropomorphic minds and the world in itself.
I'm not going to go deeper into detail on this book. Frankly, when I started it I had assumed that it was written by a philosopher. As I finished the first two chapters I found myself pondering why this particular philosopher had a very fragmented and subjective style with a lack of logical grounding. It was then I discovered that Shaviro is not a philosopher but an english professor which explained a lot about this book. He works through his thesis by winding around various arguments from Whitehead and the four philosophers mentioned above with a very loose structure - more confusing and unsettling than useful as a speculative realism guide. Nevertheless, there are a few gems (especially the emphasis on an aesthetics-first philosophy and the sections on panpsychism - mind is a shared part of all things) in this book that would assist any budding philosopher to push through it and stir some ideas on how to break out of correlationalist thinking. Just be prepared for a winding subjective path to a unsatisfactory end.
Perhaps the best advice that illustrates why speculative realism is important is Shaviro's mention of the very famous philosophical article by Thomas Nagel called 'What is it like to be a Bat?' In fact I would read this first if you haven't - https://organizations.utep.edu/portal...
Three and half stars - but I dropped it to three based on my previous comments.
I'm not going to go deeper into detail on this book. Frankly, when I started it I had assumed that it was written by a philosopher. As I finished the first two chapters I found myself pondering why this particular philosopher had a very fragmented and subjective style with a lack of logical grounding. It was then I discovered that Shaviro is not a philosopher but an english professor which explained a lot about this book. He works through his thesis by winding around various arguments from Whitehead and the four philosophers mentioned above with a very loose structure - more confusing and unsettling than useful as a speculative realism guide. Nevertheless, there are a few gems (especially the emphasis on an aesthetics-first philosophy and the sections on panpsychism - mind is a shared part of all things) in this book that would assist any budding philosopher to push through it and stir some ideas on how to break out of correlationalist thinking. Just be prepared for a winding subjective path to a unsatisfactory end.
Perhaps the best advice that illustrates why speculative realism is important is Shaviro's mention of the very famous philosophical article by Thomas Nagel called 'What is it like to be a Bat?' In fact I would read this first if you haven't - https://organizations.utep.edu/portal...
Three and half stars - but I dropped it to three based on my previous comments.
February 5, 2024
Of the Speculative Realist canon, this book is a sober reflection. Many of the fundamental texts on anti-correlationism have a tendency to make broad sweeping statements about the revolutionary nature of their individual developments on the subject. Even Shaviro's previous book on aesthetics tends to come across this way. Here, instead, he develops a discursive and humbling approach to the subject, stating that now that speculative realism has made itself "known," it is time to reflect on the core issues and develop some clarifications about its history and relationships to prior philosophy.
Arguably the first 60-ish pages are a direct affront to Harmon's Object-Oriented Ontology. Perhaps this is because Shaviro sees highly similar arguments in his own work and the relationship Harmon has with aesthetics. At times this book comes off like a sibling debate. But later on, Shaviro makes his claims more clear within the history of the correlationist concern. That is, anti-correlationists are not anti-correlationist enough. Where many of the core philosophers in the speculative realist "tradition" tend to eliminate issues of phenomenology in order to return to the primacy of a materialist world, Shaviro claims this does not fully reject phenomenological access, and thus maintains its dualism. Instead, Shaviro does the unintuitive and accepts panpyschism. In doing so, phenomenology is, in fact, not dead so much as it 'smells funny' within Speculative Realism.
In total, this book was a sigh of relief for me. I had a strong suspicion that this argument needed to be made. Namely, phenomenology and ontology, while they can be discussed as analytically separately, they are not "correlated" in a dualism, but rather that they are panpsychic. As such, we can philosophically speak of one without discussing the other, however the other is necessarily involved. There remains a possible objectivity to the materiality of the world, however that objectivity would necessarily involve its own subjectivity "objectively". The problem is that there is no direct access to that subjectivity, not that it is inconsequential or that it doesn't exist. So called ancestral events have their own phenomenology, as I suggested in my review of After Finitude.
Arguably the first 60-ish pages are a direct affront to Harmon's Object-Oriented Ontology. Perhaps this is because Shaviro sees highly similar arguments in his own work and the relationship Harmon has with aesthetics. At times this book comes off like a sibling debate. But later on, Shaviro makes his claims more clear within the history of the correlationist concern. That is, anti-correlationists are not anti-correlationist enough. Where many of the core philosophers in the speculative realist "tradition" tend to eliminate issues of phenomenology in order to return to the primacy of a materialist world, Shaviro claims this does not fully reject phenomenological access, and thus maintains its dualism. Instead, Shaviro does the unintuitive and accepts panpyschism. In doing so, phenomenology is, in fact, not dead so much as it 'smells funny' within Speculative Realism.
In total, this book was a sigh of relief for me. I had a strong suspicion that this argument needed to be made. Namely, phenomenology and ontology, while they can be discussed as analytically separately, they are not "correlated" in a dualism, but rather that they are panpsychic. As such, we can philosophically speak of one without discussing the other, however the other is necessarily involved. There remains a possible objectivity to the materiality of the world, however that objectivity would necessarily involve its own subjectivity "objectively". The problem is that there is no direct access to that subjectivity, not that it is inconsequential or that it doesn't exist. So called ancestral events have their own phenomenology, as I suggested in my review of After Finitude.
December 10, 2025
Muddles Whitehead but clarifies Harman and the others.
October 13, 2015
The Universe of Things, through the philosophy of Alfred North Whitehead, engages with what the discipline of epistemology might look like after postmodern correlationism. The new discipline is known as Speculative Realism and like most epistemology in the postmodern world it is difficult to penetrate and more problematic to understand.
That being said, The Universe of Things is an interesting effort to explain the philosophy of A.N. Whitehead through the lens of Speculative Realism.
This is certainly not a book for the neophyte but it is an interesting and worthwhile effort.
Rating 4 out of 5.
Recommended for those hoping to make an end run around postmodernism and correlationism.
That being said, The Universe of Things is an interesting effort to explain the philosophy of A.N. Whitehead through the lens of Speculative Realism.
This is certainly not a book for the neophyte but it is an interesting and worthwhile effort.
Rating 4 out of 5.
Recommended for those hoping to make an end run around postmodernism and correlationism.
April 18, 2015
Shaviro responds, with usual aplomb, to developments in speculative realism and OOO. Although I rarely find myself too interested in speculative realism, Shaviro's Whiteheadian approach always convinces me, and his argument about speculative aesthetics at the end of the book duly leaves me wanting more.
July 13, 2016
I am extremely into speculative materialism and this is both a good analysis of the differing perspectives in the emerging school of thought but also a work of analysis of trends in its won right. I find myself mostly with the author and the Thacker/Brassier side of the discussion as it is, but this helped me quantify why that is.
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